| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 6.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the JGA online. About 639 words from this article are provided below; about 732 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the Journal of the Gilded Age, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the Journal of the Gilded Age, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of the Gilded Age (1.1-present).
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 6.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Stale Stereotypes and the Need for Fresh Insights: The Myth of the Robber Barons

FRANCH, JOHN. Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 374 pp. Acknowledgments, illustrations, endnotes. $46.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-252-03099-0. RENEHAN, JR., EDWARD J. Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons. New York: Basic Books, 2005. xii + 352 pp. Preface, illustrations, endnotes. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-465-06885-5.
The time has come for historians of all stripes and persuasions to put behind them the still-persistent "Robber Baron" myth. In the last quarter century the lives of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan have all been reassessed, and on balance they have received a much cleaner bill of health.¹ Carnegie always paid his workers more than other steel producers, large and small. Even the wages offered at his Homestead steel mill in 1892 just prior to the infamous strike were higher than those paid at competitive firms. Long before Bill Gates and Warren Buffet became a philanthropic team, Carnegie and Rockefeller had established endowments that created a model for good deeds. And despite the myths perpetuated by historians in various formats, including PBS documentaries, J. P. Morgan did not control hundreds of major corporations in the early twentieth century. (Morgan owned few common stocks in any enterprise because he considered most equities too risky for himself and the majority of his wealthy clients.) The Morgan partners who sat on boards of directors were essentially watchdogs looking out for the interests of bondholders and shareholders at home and abroad. Only when things went drastically wrong did J. P. Morgan get personally involved in rescuing corporations.	1
Two new books include "robber baron" in their titles. One perpetuates discredited myths; the other challenges them, but with mixed results. Robber Baron: The Life of Charles T. Yerkes by John Franch has a copyright date of 2006, but the text reads like it's straight out of Matthew Josephson's 1936 scandal-mongering business history The Robber Barons. Charles Yerkes was among the important urban transportation entrepreneurs in the late nineteenth century. He built an improved transit system for Chicago, and from 1900 to 1905 he played a minor role in the effort to improve the local transit system in London, England. However, despite Franch's evocative title, Yerkes was too much of a lightweight to rank with the likes of Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller.	2
Nearly all the books cited in Franch's endnotes are outdated. I counted just five books published after 1975. The author seems to have little knowledge of how much the landscape of business history has changed over the last quarter century. Alfred Chandler, the dean of business history, is cited once, but no other easily recognizable living business historians are referenced.² Franch cites just one article from the leading scholarly journals in economic and business history—and few articles from any recognized historical journals. I spotted fewer than twenty listings of scholarly articles overall. Even William Cronon's acclaimed Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) is completely ignored. Instead, in the initial historiographical entry on the rise of Chicago, the author cites the novelist Theodore Dreiser as a reliable secondary source.	3
Not only is the author to blame for this woeful mess, but the University of Illinois Press is culpable as well. How could the staff have compromised its editorial integrity by publishing a volume with such a stale and weak research base? Who were the outside reviewers, and what were their scholarly credentials? Two names offer endorsements on the back cover, but neither has a genuinely outstanding scholarly reputation. How many assistant professors with legitimately up-to-date scholarly monographs got rejected so that this volume could go forward into print?	. . .

There are about 732 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.