![]() As these industrialists and financiers amassed millions, the cracks in society split open. Others branded them robber barons who used their power and riches to snuff out competition, exploit workers, and undermine democracy by bribing corrupt politicians. Some saw these men as captains of industry who were making Americans wealthier and lauded their philanthropy. Morgan embodied the popular image of the 19th-century capitalist: a cane-carrying banker with a white handlebar mustache who dressed in a tuxedo and top hat. Morgan, the financier who used his wealth and connections to create industrial Goliaths like US Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. No one embodied these Gilded Age tycoons more than J. ![]() Men who in the decades that followed would only increase their stranglehold on American industry. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil company was busy building a monopoly on oil refining, and the railroad king Cornelius Vanderbilt. Most employees worked punishing hours in dire conditions for abysmal pay while the men they worked for amassed almost unimaginable fortunes. The United States of 1877 was a nation divided. ![]()
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