Photo by Simon Fairhurst on Unsplash, deep sound of original paper by the authors: Zhao
Core points:
In the process of building the United States, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P · Morgan and others came on stage in succession.
The business giants who built the railway, oil, steel and power empire have also gained nothing. Competing influence.
US President Roosevelt’s antitrust lawsuit only played a superficial role, and the predators still earned It’s full of pots.
April 14, 1865, five days after the end of the American Civil War, the 16th President Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln) became this The last of the 600,000 victims of bloody disputes.
Abraham Lincoln
The United States at the time was still in a state of ruin after the Civil War. The wounds brought about by the war have yet to be healed, and most people have not realized that a new era is opening, and the United States has gradually entered an era of rapid progress.
A group of unprecedented business leaders are about to emerge.
Cornelius Vanderbilt (Cornelius Vanderbilt), John Rockefeller (John Davison Rockefeller), Andrew Carnegie (Andrew Carnegie), J·P·Morgan (John Pierpoint Morgan) and more people who dare to dare to bring the power of technology and capital to the extreme, will use their insight and innovation Force and imagination, in the half century after the 1860s, established one business empire that has stood up to the present, and shared a wave of ups and downs of modern capitalism Rhapsody.
Vanderbilt’s railway empire
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Before the outbreak of the 1775 War of Independence, the land in which the United States was located was only a British colony. With a brief history of less than a hundred years of rapid translation, the United States finally emerged as a leader who is no longer a political figure – Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Vanderbilt is a man who succeeded by his own will. He was originally a poor man at the Port of New York, but he later created a business empire and became the first in the American capitalist Rhapsody. protagonist.
In 1825, Vanderbilt was only sixteen years old. He bought a small ferry for a hundred dollars borrowed. Thanks to diligence and courage to compete, his business has changed from a ferry to a fleet. Vanderbilt quickly became synonymous with “shipping” and people gave him the nickname “Captain”.
Forty years after 1825, Vanderbilt built the world’s largest shipping empire. Before the peak of his power, the American Civil War (American Civil War) , he took all his nets and began to build A railway that traverses the entire continental United States. Vanderbilt knows that the completion of this railway will transform the entire US transportation industry, directly reducing the travel time across the country by several months.
His massive investment in the railroads paid off. At the end of the Civil War, Vanderbilt became the richest man in the United States – the net worth reached $68 million, equivalent to the current $75 billion.
But the war was cruel after all, and Vanderbilt’s son George died unfortunately in the Civil War. The son’s early death has deeply afflicted Vanderbilt, and he almost indulged in the pain of losing his son every day.
The business community does not consider the warmth of the people, the competitors see Vanderbilt indulging in the grief of weakness, no longer regard him as a fearful opponent. Some of them even challenged Vanderbilt, claiming that “this old guy should be abdicated.”
Forty years of ups and downs, Vanderbilt can never easily retreat.
And, along with the age, there is also the strength of Vanderbilt – for example, he owns the only railway bridge in New York at the then Albany Bridge. The bridge is an important gateway to New York. In order to strike a blow to competitors, Vanderbilt ordered the closure of the railway bridge and cut off New York’s links with other cities in the United States.
The practice of blocking the bridge suddenly made millions of pounds of goods undeliverable to other parts of the United States, and also caused Vanderbilt’s competitors to suffer heavy losses.
The competitors had to frantically sell the shares at hand in exchange for funds for turnover. The Wall Street, which followed closely, quickly got news and action, and the shares of the railway company fell in a cliff-like manner.
Among the many railway companies, the stock price loss of the New York Central Railway Company is very heavy, and the stock price is as low as $20.
Because New York’s Central Rail Company is one of Vanderbilt’s strongest rivals, Vanderbilt quickly ate the stocks that were sold wildly on the market – within a few days, he took control of the New York Central Railway Company. It has established its dominance in the US railway industry.
In those days, the railroad allowed the US industrial economy to move forward at an unprecedented rate, while Vanderbilt had 40% of the US railroad line and became the undisputed king of the railway industry.
In order to demonstrate status, Vanderbilt also assembled thousands of workers and built the Grand Central Depot in two years, which can connect Harlem, Hudson and Three railways such as the Central District.
The Grand Central Station covers an area of 22 acres and was the largest urban building in New York at the time and the largest railway station in the country. Surrounded by all the buildings of New York at the time, this mega-building is a symbol of power in the Vanderbilt Railway Empire.
By building the Grand Central Station, Vanderbilt swore to himself the dominance of the railway sector.
But as a person who is already at the top of his success, he still has more ambitions.
In the 1860s, Chicago was the fastest growing economy in the United States, and the railroad connecting Chicago and New York was the busiest and most valuable route in the world. However, this railway does not belong to Vanderbilt but toAll owned by Erie Railways.
In order to make his railway empire map more complete, Vanderbilt targeted the Erie Railway Company.
In 1867, Vanderbilt began to buy a lot of shares in the Yili Railway Company – this was exactly the same as his usual acquisition of shares in the New York Central Railway Company. It was also his usual trading method. Today, this operation is called As a “hostile takeover.”
But Vanderbilt’s ambitions were defeated by the two unnamed pawns at the time—the two middle-levels of Erie Railroad, J. Gould and Jim Fiske, realized that Vanderbilt’s acquisition plan It will be a rare opportunity for them to get rich.
The then Erie Railway Company had a seemingly unbelievable rule that “allows the board to print new stocks without having to let shareholders know.”
As the middle manager of the Erie Railway Company, Jay Gould and Jim Fiske clearly have the right to print new stocks. So they started using their printing presses in the basement of the Erie Railway to print new stocks and then sold them to Vanderbilt in the open market.
Vanderbilt is not short of funds on hand, and will find a stock of Yili Railway Company to buy. However, as new stocks are continuously printed, the more shares he buys, the more they need to buy more to gain majority control of the Yili Railway.
Before things finally came to a close, Jay Gould and Jim Fisker took a total of millions of dollars from Vanderbilt. This incident was later called the “stock irrigation” event.
rockefeller’s oil legend
After being frustrated in the “stock irrigation” incident, Vanderbilt did not suffer.
He realized that the US railway has been built too much, and the future of the industry is not to build new lines, but to transport new goods. If a new cargo can be found and his train can always be filled, he can control the entire railway industry, and the veteran Vanderbilt quickly finds a new direction.
In the mid-1960s, oil was changing the lives of Americans.
Crude oil can be refined into keroseneAdding reliable kerosene products, but also setting the norm for the industry, so his standard oil company was born.
As the company name indicates, Rockefeller’s kerosene products are very “standard” – uniform specifications, high safety, and soon started the brand, orders such as snow flakes, the funds are no longer a problem. After the expansion of capacity, Rockefeller’s request to meet Vanderbilt’s 60-day train compartment was a breeze.
After that, Standard Oil Company became the largest refining kerosene producer in the United States. But for Rockefeller, this was not enough. He then began to acquire competitors in the kerosene industry and negotiated with other railway companies to reduce the cost of transportation to save costs.
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company Plant
In the end, Rockefeller controlled 90% of the kerosene supply in North America, and his standard oil company became the first monopoly in the United States. When the Ohio oil merchant became “the most powerful man in the United States,” he was just 33 years old.
The rise of Rockefeller has awakened the railway king Vanderbilt. He realized that the only way to fight against Rockefeller was to unite the major railway companies. Therefore, he did not hesitate to establish an alliance with his own competitor Tom Scott in the railway industry. He wanted to let Rockefeller take the lead in this way and re-report the cost of transporting oil from the railway company to the original price.
The Rockefeller who learned the news also saw Vanderbilt’s move as a declaration of war against him.
Based on many years of experience, Rockefeller knows that kerosene is transported inside the refinery through large pipelines. He turned to think that since the pipeline can transport oil for a short distance, as long as a large enough pipeline system can be built, he can completely get rid of the railway company’s key points.
The Rockefeller, who looked at the situation, asked the workers to work day and night, and the workers drove around the American countryside, laying more than one mile a day.The oil pipeline in the middle half.
When the pipeline was completed, it was more than 4,000 miles in length, spanning two states, Ohio and Pennsylvania. This pipeline allows thousands of the world’s most profitable oil wells to connect directly to Rockefeller’s refinery, and Rockefeller is truly free from dependence on the railway company.
At that time, the kerosene produced by John Rockefeller accounted for 40% of the freight volume of American rail transport, and his establishment of pipelines and the cessation of rail transport directly led to market panic in railway investment, and investors have sold railroad companies. Stock. After the panic, one-third of the 360 domestic railway companies in the United States declared bankruptcy.
From the results, this market collapse is a rather bad one in the history of the United States for more than 100 years. Because of the lack of knowing how to deal with such a complete collapse, the stock exchange was even closed for ten days.
The so-called “others fear my greed”, just as many big companies in the United States struggled for survival, Rockefeller saw hidden opportunities in the market. When the opponents collapsed one after another, Rockefeller acquired the oil company on the verge of bankruptcy at almost zero cost, which created the largest corporate empire in the United States, monopolizing the market share of kerosene by about 98%.
At this point, Rockefeller replaced Vanderbilt as the richest person in the United States. His net worth exceeds $150 million, which translates to about $225 billion today.
Carnegie’s Steel Behemoth
A rainy day, Tom Scott was buried on the outskirts of Philadelphia. When he died, he was a stumble man, suffering failure and humiliation.
As mentioned above, the railway king Vanderbilt has established an alliance with his biggest rival, Tom Scott, to ask Rockefeller to increase the cost of kerosene transportation. But Rockefeller built the oil pipeline to get rid of his dependence on the railroad company and caused many railroad companies to fall sharply, including Scott’s stock.
In Andrew Carnegie’s view, Tom Scott’s trip was caused by Rockefeller.
Ande Carnegie
Scott has a good fortune to Carnegie – Carnegie is only a child when he starts to follow Scott. It can be said that without Tom Scott, Carnegie is nothing.
The death of the instructor Scott caused a heavy blow to Carnegie, and he also came up with the idea of defeating Rockefeller in the commercial field.
To defeat Rockefeller is not Carnegie’s arrogance, he already has initial capital. In the past few years, Scott had proposed an idea to build a bridge across the Mississippi River, the St. Louis Bridge, and Carnegie made this vision a reality.
According to the plan, the length of the St. Louis Bridge is more than a mile, which is unprecedented. In the United States at the time, one of every four bridges was built to fail, and no one built such a large bridge. The difficulty facing Carnegie can be imagined.
In fact, the failure rate of building bridges is so high because at that time, the steel production cycle was very long and it was difficult to meet the raw material requirements for bridge construction, so almost no one would choose to build bridges with hard steel. The bridge structure is not stable. In order to build the bridge, Carnegie went to many steelmaking workshops and met many chemists. He wanted to clarify one question: how to mass produce steel.
“Bitter people, the day is not lost”, British inventor Henry Bessemer invented a device that shortened the time to forge a rail from 2 weeks to 15 minutes. Carnegie clearly recognized the value of this new technology and used it to build the St. Louis Bridge across the Mississippi River. The success of the bridge also made Carnegie famous.
St. Louis Bridge across the Mississippi River
The construction of the St. Louis Bridge allowed Carnegie to see the future of the steel industry. He began investing in areas where few American entrepreneurs are willing to invest – the unusually large steel factories. Carnegie firmly believes that steel will be essential in the future economic growth of the United States for many years to come.
With the new factory, Carnegie was able to provide the steel needed by people all over the country, which also made him a big profit. More importantly, Carnegie is very clever to discover that the US railway has been overbuilt, so the main use of steel in the future is no longer railway, but urban architecture.
It is no exaggeration to say that modern America was built with Carnegie’s steel. The booming skyscrapers in American cities have made Andrew Carnegie one of the richest people in the United States.
But John Rockefeller’s personal wealth is seven times greater than that of Carnegie, which means that Carnegie’s goal of achieving more than Rockefeller’s personal wealth is still a long way to go.
To get more than Rockefeller, a direct way is to increase the profits of the steel factory. To this end, Carnegie recruited Henry Frick, the character of his own, to chair his own Homestead steel mill – which may also be a wise decision, through intimidation and threats, Frick from suppliers There was a more favorable price there, and it also cut off a lot of unnecessary expenses, while also ensuring an increase in production.
In addition to producing raw materials, another major cost of steel mills is labor. Carnegie knows that to maintain high profit margins, costs must be kept to a minimum, and one way to reduce labor costs is to lower wages and increase working hours. This “dirty work” naturally fell to the head of Henry Frick. Frick has a personality trait, that is, he never cares about how others see his own way. He only cares about one thing – making money.
So, Frick began to do everything possible to crush every sweat of the Homestead workers. He believes that in order for the factory to operate efficiently, workers must work six days a week for 12 hours a day—in such a work environment, the workers are completely exhausted.
In 1892, accidents in the factory floor continued to increase until a fatal accident finally occurred. Although he was killed, Frick still told the workers that working conditions would not improve. Such a statement is obviously subject to strong opposition from the workers, and the escalation of the conflict has eventually turned into a bloodshed.
Event outbreakAt the time, two thousand steel workers were engaged in the “private police force” of the Pinkton detective company hired by the factory. The steel workers of the nine Carnegie factories were shot dead and many others were seriously injured. Carnegie’s reputation has been devastated, and Frick has lost the seat of the factory chairman.
Carnegie, who was devastated, began to find ways to restore his reputation. At this time, he did not realize that the biggest challenge of the Carnegie Iron Empire was not from within, and a new threat was about to emerge.
J.P. Morgan’s Capital Myth
J·P·Morgan
J.P. Morgan is a banker who has gained considerable wealth by integrating underperforming industries, buying companies that have failed to operate, and re-profiting them.
J·P·Morgan is very good at mediating battles to maintain order in the entire industry. He mediates competition on terms that are acceptable to all parties, allowing him to make money and make his business more influential.
J.P. Morgan’s father is also a successful entrepreneur. He has been teaching J.P. Morgan. He should avoid taking too much risk and not investing in unproven new industries. For many years, J.P. Morgan has lived in the shadow of the legendary father. However, after witnessing the experience of Rockefeller and Carnegie starting from scratch, J.P. Morgan also wanted to be the next one. He was eager to achieve his own success – to establish an industrial company by himself.
To achieve this goal, J.P. Morgan focused his attention on Thomas Edison, an inventor of the world’s most famous inventor.
Really more advanced than DC, Edison eventually lost to his apprentice Tesla, and J.P. Morgan also lost to Tesla’s boss Westinghouse in the power competition.
At this time, in order to obtain commercial benefits, J.P. Morgan also began to use unfair competition to force Westinghouse to fight with him for a multi-million dollar lawsuit. J.P. Morgan knew that the resources needed to fight the lawsuit would directly cause Westinghouse to go bankrupt. Westinghouse had no choice but to obey the requirements of J.P. Morgan and transferred the AC patent on the handle to J.P. Morgan.
J.P. Morgan, who got the AC patent, bought more shares of Edison Electric until he managed to achieve complete control of the company, then removed Thomas Edison from the company and renamed the company “General Electric”.
Although this early history was not glorious, GE became one of the largest companies in the United States in the future, and J.P. Morgan became the undisputed leader in the industry. Through the use of a large amount of funds, J.P. Morgan has established numerous power stations throughout the United States, and for the first time, it has spread electricity to the public.
J.P. Morgan has undoubtedly sounded the alarm for the rise of power, and they see JP Morgan as a threat to deal with.
Before, Rockefeller has felt unprecedented pressure and tried every means to prevent the spread of electricity, but electricity has become mainstream. In order to maintain the profitability of standard oil companies, Rockefeller needs to find a product to replace kerosene. As a result, Rockefeller hired a team of scientists and eventually discovered that another highly volatile substance would be produced during the kerosene refining process. This material could not only be used to synthesize beeswax and petroleum jelly, but also be an excellent fuel for internal combustion engines.
Yes, this substance is the energy that is now very popular – gasoline.
Rockefeller soon became the world’s largest gasoline supplier, and he began using gasoline to power refinery machines. The advantages of efficiency and power make this engine a standard in the entire US factory. The engine was then connected to the wheel and created the so-called “four-wheelless four-wheeler”, which is today’s internal combustion engine.
After inheriting and expanding his father’s banking empire, J.P. Morgan became another person standing at the top of the US power. His influence in the country is only two other people who can compete with it, namely Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller.
In the heyday of power, the sum of the wealth values of J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie is equivalent to the presentJinlai came to Buffalo City References:Netease Open Class 4 episodes, “Who built the US