Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America

by Michael Hiltzik

Overview

“Engrossing… [Hiltzik is] an able narrator, with an eye for telling detail.”—New York Times Book Review

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Michael Hiltzik, the epic tale of the clash for supremacy between America’s railroad titans.

In 1869, when the final spike was driven into the Transcontinental Railroad, few were prepared for its seismic aftershocks. Once a hodgepodge of short, squabbling lines, America’s railways soon exploded into a titanic industry helmed by a pageant of speculators, crooks, and visionaries. The vicious competition between empire builders such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and E. H. Harriman sparked stock market frenzies, panics, and crashes; provoked strikes that upended the relationship between management and labor; transformed the nation’s geography; and culminated in a ferocious two-man battle that shook the nation’s financial markets to their foundations and produced dramatic, lasting changes in the interplay of business and government.
 
Spanning four decades and featuring some of the most iconic figures of the Gilded Age, Iron Empires reveals how the robber barons drove the country into the twentieth century—and almost sent it off the rails.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544770317
Publisher:	HMH Books
Publication date:	08/11/2020
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	78,858
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author who has covered business, technology, and public policy for the Los Angeles Times for three decades. Currently the Times’s business columnist, he lives in Southern California with his wife and two children.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Agents of Transformation ix

Part I The Age of Scoundrels

1 Uncle Daniel and the Commodore 3

2 Chapters of Erie 22

3 Pierpont Morgan's Grand Tour 39

4 The King of Frauds 55

5 The Northern Pacific Panic 68

6 Jay Gould Returns 92

7 Year of Upheaval 107

Part II Morgan and Harriman

8 The Rise of Ned Harriman 131

9 The First Skirmish 146

10 A Community of Interests 159

11 Savior of the Union pacific 181

12 The Reconstruction 194

13 "A Pig-Headed Affair" 212

14 The Empire Builder 234

15 The Quest for the Burlington 256

Part III The Ghost Dance

16 Peacock Alley 283

12 Lions Guarding the Way 296

18 "A Good-Sized Panic" 310

19 Exhaustion 322

20 The Trustbuster 332

21 "Malefactors of Great Wealth" 343

Epilogue: The End of an Epoch 365

Acknowledgments 373

Notes 375

Bibliography 403

List of Illustration Credits 410

Index 412

Editorial Reviews

03/23/2020

Business reporter Hiltzik (Big Science) examines the rise and fall of the American railroad industry in this colorful, wide-ranging account. Through judicious use of primary and secondary sources, Hiltzik chronicles the industry’s profound impacts on labor relations, monopoly law, and the stock market in post–Civil War America. The complex history is made accessible through the stories of surveyors, engineers, and laborers, as well as “the business leaders whose individual personalities, ambitions, determination, and morals commanded the others’ fates.” Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Edward Harriman, and J. Pierpoint Morgan come into sharp focus as Hiltzik documents their efforts to transform isolated, short routes to random locations into an integrated transportation network for both passengers and freight. The narrative also features labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, a railway painter and fireman charged with conspiracy for his role in the 1894 Pullman strike, and Grover Cleveland’s attorney general, Richard Olney, who was on a railroad’s payroll even as he headed the Department of Justice. Hiltzik writes with verve, providing meaningful insights into the shocking inequalities of the Gilded Age. Business history buffs will be enthralled by this character-driven account. Sandra Dijkstra, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Engrossing… [Hiltzik is] an able narrator, with an eye for telling detail.”—New York Times Book Review

"An accomplished journalist with a knack for storytelling, Mr Hiltzik delves into dense financial details to present an engaging read about the beginnings of America Inc." —The Economist
 
“Hiltzik examines the rise and fall of the American railroad industry in this colorful, wide-ranging account… Hiltzik writes with verve, providing meaningful insights into the shocking inequalities of the Gilded Age. Business history buffs will be enthralled by this character-driven account.”—Publishers Weekly 

“Lively storytelling and accessible writing makes Hiltzik’s work suitable for all types of readers interested in railroad history.”—Library Journal

“Iron Empires is a grand story well told.”—Washington Independent Review of Books  

“Unbridled ambition, greed, corruption, ‘creative destruction,’ and a bit of conscience—Michael Hiltzik’s vivid account of the railroad barons in the Gilded Age shows us the workings of unbridled capitalism at its zenith (or nadir, as the case may be). The names Morgan, Harriman, Pullman, Hill, Villard, Rockefeller will forever be associated with creating America’s first great infrastructure and making America ‘modern.’”—Gordon H. Chang, author of Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad   

"Were the railroad barons of the 19th century great entrepreneurs in the American spirit who built a remarkable network of railroads? Or were they robbers who fleeced local people and passengers alike? In this superb and comprehensive book, Hiltzik lets you decide, with the help of a few hints."—Christian Wolmar, author of the The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America

“This prodigiously researched book tells the fascinating stories of the railroad barons who did so much to build America, not only through their vision and genius, but also through their cunning and ruthlessness. Hiltzik’s brilliant narrative – of power and plutocrats – often bears uncanny parallels to what’s happening in America today.”—Steven Greenhouse, author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor

 

From the Publisher

04/01/2020

Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times journalist Hiltzik chronicles the men who controlled the colossal railroad organizations that transformed the United States during the 19th century. He describes them variously as visionaries, speculators, bankers, and manipulators. Besides their personalities, Hiltzik focuses on the themes of railroad finance and labor strife. He opens with the story of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who, despite a brush with death in an 1833 train wreck, brought his business acumen and obstinate nature to making railroads into lucrative enterprises. The author explains financier J.P. Morgan's later efforts to transform unprofitable competitive lines into a cooperative and thriving industry. Hiltzik includes Jay Cooke's financial collapse; George Pullman's miserliness to his workers; and the transgressions of Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, and Jim Fisk. He recounts the dynamic E.H. Harriman's empire building and his war over the Northern Pacific with Morgan and James J. Hill, which both caused the financial panic of 1901 and ushered in government scrutiny and regulation under President Theodore Roosevelt. VERDICT Lively storytelling and accessible writing makes Hiltzik's work suitable for all types of readers interested in railroad history.—Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA

Library Journal

2020-05-13
A vigorously told history of the transcontinental railroad barons and the commercial and transportation empires they forged.

Los Angeles Times columnist and reporter Hiltzik opens with a westward-bound Scotsman named Robert Louis Stevenson, not yet famous for his adventure tales, who took careful note of the emigrants aboard an early Union Pacific line and the contempt with which the railroad workers treated them. The great empire-builders among the railroad entrepreneurs—Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and J. Pierpont Morgan among them—“formed a continuum that for more than four decades…transformed America’s railroads from a patchwork of short lines waging constant self-destructive war with one another into a titanic enterprise that could justly be considered America’s first big business.” They also helped transform the U.S. into a continent-spanning, and then international, power. Few were models of ethical capitalism; as Hiltzik notes, Gould in particular was “a master of financial chicanery,” but at least he was an unostentatious and retiring sort, whereas others were flagrant in buying judges and politicians. The worse the capitalists became, the greater the strength of labor activism arrayed against them. However, as the author observes, “the desire to counter the policies of the tycoons was hamstrung by the absence of instruments to do so”—until the crusading labor leader Eugene V. Debs came along. No matter, for the very White House was in the railroad owners’ pockets—the attorney general in Grover Cleveland’s Cabinet, who spent years as an executive with different railroad corporations, was paid more on the side by them than in salary by the federal treasury—until Theodore Roosevelt began his vigorous work on antitrust reforms. The story will be well known to readers versed in late-19th-century American history, but the rest will benefit from Hiltzik’s clear exposition of key episodes and players.

Students of the Gilded Age and its unraveling will value this survey. (27 b/w photos; 6 maps)

Kirkus Reviews

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