Capital City: New York City and the Men behind America's Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900. By Thomas Kessner. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. xx, 396 pp. $27.00, ISBN 0-684-81351-3.)

Abstract

In the decades following the Civil War, New York City became a mecca for business tycoons. Andrew Carnegie moved there from Pittsburgh to direct the finances of his steel company. John D. Rockefeller relocated the headquarters of Cleveland-based Standard Oil to 26 Broadway. The tobacco titan James Buchanan Duke brought his business from Durham, North Carolina, to Gotham in search of greater market share. J. P. Morgan, who was born in Connecticut, started his own private bank in New York in 1861 and spent the rest of his life centered there, becoming to some “the very typification of capitalism” (p. 208). Since the publication of Matthew Joseph-son's The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901 (1934), journalists and historians have used the lives of these men to tell the story of New York City's spectacular growth. Most recently, Sven Beckert's The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (1993) described the formation of an elite class of businessmen who not only directed the city's economic future but also shared a cultural identity that included dinners at Delmonico's and visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.