Robber Barons: An Analysis

The nineteenth-century was a time period where the supply and demand for manufactured goods increased a great deal in the United States and more and more people invested in industrial pursuits. People were finding quicker and cheaper ways to build more products in a mass production. Entrepreneurs took advantage of these and learned to organize and fund a business which helped their economic situations skyrocket if they played their cards right. The people of this time who were not making as much money as quickly, felt as though the wealthy were getting paid in unfair means. Fairly soon the name “Robber Barons” came out to describe the stereotypical entrepreneur that went for larger companies and put them together to make one big company. But were these people actually “Rober Barons”? They had lots of money but were they breaking the law? In the book Taking Sides by Larry Madaras there are two people to argue this question. Howard Zinn believes that these big shot entrepreneurs were in deed “Robber Barons” because they exhilarated monopolies and used government officials to keep laws in agreement to it all. John S. Gordon argues …show more content…
They were wrong; it was illegal majority of the time. Three thousand Irish and ten thousand Chinese did the construction on the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. It took them four years to build and for the entirety of those four years, the people were only getting paid about one dollar a day. The railroads were both built longer in order to take up extra time, thus, getting extra money from subsidies from the extra towns they went through. While this wasn’t illegal it was very unnecessary and selfish. These type of business owners believed “a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable.” (Page