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David R. Farber, Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist; and Susie Pak, Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 April 2014
Extract
When business historians discarded the melodramatic mode of analysis more than a half century ago, transcending a stale debate over whether business leaders were “heroes” or “villains,” they also shifted emphatically away from finance as a topic of inquiry. A generation of muckraking accounts, culminating in Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons, had dramatized American industrialization as a story of stock market manipulation and abuse of power. These narratives featured financiers, not as full participants in the formation of the new industrial system, but as an external and almost entirely disruptive force. They attached a stigma to finance that prompted scholars, inspired by the work of Alfred Chandler, to turn elsewhere for insights about the rise of modern business. More recently, a new cohort of historians—Stephen Mihm, Julia Ott, Jonathan Levy, Louis Hyman, and Richard White, to name a few of the more prominent names—has rediscovered finance as an analytical perspective and subject of immense significance. With a more subtle and nuanced approach than their Progressive-era forebears, they have moved bankers, investors, and stockbrokers from the margins and positioned them at the very core of American capitalism.
- Type
- Review Essay
- Information
- Business History Review , Volume 88 , Issue 1: Business, Networks, and the State in India , Spring 2014 , pp. 187 - 194
- Copyright
- Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2014
References
1 For a rejection of the debate over “whether these [industrial] founding fathers were robber barons or industrial statesmen, that is, bad fellows or good fellows,” see the introduction to Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 5Google Scholar.
2 As Josephson argued in one typical teleological passage, financial manipulation “retarded” the formation of a consolidated national economy by “at least forty years after it had become a logical necessity”; Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901 (New York, 1934), 191Google Scholar.
3 There were, of course, notable exceptions, such as Richard Sylla and Lance Davis, to mention two of the most important names.
4 Mihm, Stephen, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ott, Julia C., When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors' Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levy, Jonathan, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hyman, Louis, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, 2011)Google Scholar; White, Richard, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York, 2011)Google Scholar.