Robber Barons

Captains of Industry or Robber Barons?

Mr. George Pullman was considered one of the worst robber barons of the 19th century. He manipulated his workers to do everything for him and strived for success.

George Pullman was the third of ten children born to James and Emily Pullman. His family had relocated to Albion, New York, in 1845 so his father could work on the Erie Canal. When his father died< George Pullman took over his fathers business.

Some of the stuff George Pullman did was invent. He designed the sleeping car. The sleeping car was a train car that people could sleep in on their way out of town. It was used for long distance trips and was typically used to for either two-level superliner or one-level view line train car equipment.

In 1870, Rockefeller formed the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, along with his younger brother William (1841-1922), Henry Flagler (1830-1913) and a group of other men. John Rockefeller was its president and largest shareholder.

In 1865, Rockefeller borrowed money to buy out some of his partners and take control of the refinery, which had become the largest in Cleveland. Over the next few years, he acquired new partners and expanded his business interests in the growing oil industry. Standard Oil gained a monopoly in the oil industry by buying rival refineries and developing companies for distributing and marketing its products around the globe. In 1882, these various companies were combined into the Standard Oil Trust, which would control some 90 percent of the nation’s refineries and pipelines.

Rockefeller retired from day-to-day business operations of Standard Oil in the mid-1890s. Inspired in part by fellow Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), who made a vast fortune in the steel industry then became a philanthropist and gave away the bulk of his money, Rockefeller donated more than half a billion dollars to various educational, religious and scientific causes. Among his activities, he funded the establishment of the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller

Through Carnegie Corporation of New York, the innovative philanthropic foundation he established in 1911, his fortune has since supported everything from the discovery of insulin and the dismantling of nuclear weapons, to the creation of Pell Grants and Sesame Street. Andrew Carnegie’s birthplace, Dunfermline, was Scotland's historic medieval capital. Later famous for producing fine linen, the town fell on hard times when industrialism made home-based weaving obsolete, leaving workers such as Carnegie’s father, Will, hard pressed to support their families. Will and his father-in-law Thomas Morrison, a shoemaker and political reformer, joined the popular Chartist movement, which believed conditions for workers would improve if the masses were to take over the government from the landed gentry. When the movement failed in 1848, Will Carnegie and his wife, Margaret, sold their belongings to book passage to America for themselves and their sons, 13-year-old Thomas A. Scott, superintendent of the western division of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Andrew Carnegie’s boss, initiated the future millionaire’s first investment when he alerted Carnegie to the impending sale of ten shares in the Adams Express Company. By mortgaging their house, Margaret Carnegie obtained $500 to buy the shares, and soon the first stream of dividends began rolling