The Robber Barons Revisited

Abstract

THERE are many reasons for revising an estimate or an impression a period. An a priori wish condone or condemn it hardly seems a legitimate one, though partisan purpose may be masked for occasion in erudition a frame-of-reference theory or assertion that every generation must write its own history. More commendable as a reason for revision is discovery or availability new sources and other material. Such availability has been peculiar importance in case business or company history and biographies business leaders. For business titans in robber baron generation there have thus resulted two successive two-volume studies John D. Rockefeller by Allan Nevins.' The occasion for second these books thirteen years after first was the fortunate discovery an immense additional body correspondence, long thought lost. At same time Ralph and Muriel Hidy, under sponsorship Business History Foundation, were chosen write, from corporate records, history Standard Oil Company New Jersey and affiliated or related corporations.2 They elected regard their narrative as a series of decisions made in response a succession prods and pressures and they abjured any systematic effort correct specific errors and misconceptions about Standard Oil and its leaders on ground that to have done so would have required a second volume as large as this one, a prospect as appalling authors as potential readers. Though introduction sometimes characterized by others as entrepreneurial decisions, introduces a variable into history this era as hard nail down as that puzzling newcomer the Protestant ethic is in all periods American history, facts here