all right this is a continuation of 1302 lectures on robber barons in the 19th century uh in the previous lecture we touched on the activities of daniel drew jim fisk jay gould and cornelius vanderbilt the erie war and also the gold ring and then also we picked up and talked about old john d rockefeller in this lecture which should be a little bit briefer than the last one we'll uh go through two more names and two more lives in the robber baron era and that man's name number one for us is andrew carnegie and the second one is jp morgan uh jp morgan and andrew carnegie are a lot like john d rockefeller in some important ways one of which is is that all three of the men make the decision that they do not care to serve in the american army during the civil war and they believe to one degree or another uh i say this maybe a little flippantly but the thing is is that they do believe that their uh their lives were more important than uh to to live that it was to die in service of the nation and as i might have said also in the last lecture that might be true considering what all three of the men do uh you they do have an impact upon the united states and arguably overall a good impact upon the united states not without blemish or anything of that nature however anyways we pick up here with the uh next man up is andrew carnegie and as many of you know andrew carnegie is going to be one of the great rags to riches stories uh in many respects he is the rags the richest of the three of these great titans of industry in the case of rockefeller who was upper middle class morgan who will be from the elites there's no way two ways about that but carnegie is not an american he's not born in the country but like many others who before him and after him will move to the united states in the 1840s or in fact 1848. andrew carnegie was born in 1835 in scotland he was the son of a textile uh weaver uh william carnegie was his father's name and william carnegie will lose his job working in the textile looms there in scotland i believe in edinburgh particularly all which is to say is is that carnegie andrew carnegie to my knowledge was never that close to his father and andrew carnegie's mother margaret wanted her son to not be like her father or her husband boy's father uh in a sense to to not be a failure and and for some that issue of not being a failure or the fear of failure will fire individuals and drive them in ways that may be healthy or may not be just depends on the person i suppose but again and again andrew karnick you could see how his father had labored and it came in a sense for naught and he chose not to be that way but as he moves to the americas or moves to the united states in 1848 he starts out at the ground floor he works as a gopher as a grunt laborer in a carbon black plant in the united states and then eventually however he's going to move up from there one of the things that car he said carnegie said as a young as a old man looking back at life said that that working as a carbon black gopher and if you've ever seen a carbon black playing along the texas coast or elsewhere you you know they are dirty and foul foul and nasty however people who worked in there their clothes would get the stench on them and they'd be covered in grease and grime in in the the contents and carnegie basically said he was nauseous every night for two weeks but he showed it enough promise and enough vigor and not just promise in the sense of a strong back and willing hands but also good intellect he was able to move up and he was able to move into the office and get out of the uh off the off the factory floor as it were and but he moves up and he is uh like i said he's got ability uh like uh rockefeller uh like morgan he just has this innate uh in a ability he doesn't go to college to speak of he doesn't go and get a degree or degrees or what have you he just does it but he is uh going to distinguish himself early on as many do and you find them all three of these big men all three of these great men uh in the oil excuse me in the railroad industry one way or the other rockefeller will buy railroads morgan will buy him through his holding companies and carnegie will work for the railroads early in his career he is actually first and foremost he is going to be a telegraph messenger on the old pennsylvania the western portion of the pennsylvania railroad he's going to be a tele to law telegrapher and what set him apart and is an indication of real genius and brilliance is is that the man was able to listen to and was able to decipher uh the dots and dashes the clicks of the telegrapher uh the telegraph machine without writing each and every letter down he could just listen to it and then he could write down the sentence listen to it write down the sentence and most men 98 of the individuals who worked as telegraphers could not do that they could they could it was not as hard to learn it and just start hey okay that's an a that's a b that's a c a period and so on but then to start actually being able to put it all together and just listen to it and then remember because once this starts you really just can't say hang on a second hang on hang on you can't just uh slow it down very easily so you you've got to be able to do it and carnegie could so he was a really a a brilliant young man in his late teens and so on early 20s and so this brilliance keeps shining through and he meets people and people start saying oh my this guy knows what he's doing oh my this kid is uh uh impressive this immigrant this uh scottish kid i like him i want to help him and that happens quite a bit in history actually where you'll see these seemingly down and out orphans and carnegie's not an orphan strictly speaking but these uh kids that seemingly have no future but you'll see that they've got this uh ability and some man or a preacher or a family or whatever will come along and help them out happened alexander hamilton for example but anyways uh he is going to work on the pin railroad he's going to work out west and because of his his ability to work and and to organize he gets hired and is going to be the subordinate chief subordinate to really you call him a secretary almost a clerk but he's the chief clerk chief secretary to the western uh governor the western director of the pin railroad and one day while his uh his boss carnegie's boss was out of the office will you find carnegie having to step in and start rearranging a whole spaghetti mess of rail traffic what you'd had was is that on the western lines you had this big bottleneck and you had this accident which basically bound up the railroad and it couldn't run so when you have these accidents you've got to untangle the knot as it were i mean and i say you use the word not but and i use also the expression spaghetti but if you want to think of a train and all those trains coming into these hubs and these switches and such you have to start moving them in order to get them bypassed around the accident site just kind of like you bypass traffic around an accident hopefully early enough uh say on 610 in houston or lbj or mopac or wherever point is this though is is that he the carnegie as a young man he's in his 20s now had absolutely no authority to go out and start countermanding orders from his particular boss yet that's exactly what carnegie does and he starts giving these orders and he starts forging the name of his boss he forges it there's no two ways about it this is completely illegal i say illegal and make it sound dramatic but it was completely unethical to forge your boss's name the boss was out of the office and of course you have no cell phone so you can't pick it up and say oh boss say hey hey get in here we got problems but carnegie untangled the mess he straightened it up and he himself said had i got it wrong had it all gone sideways i would have been in trouble i would have been fired but yet it went just fine fine excuse me it worked out just like it was supposed to just like he had planned it to in a sense the next day carnegie saw his boss boss knew what had happened carnegie went on to remark later in life he said i couldn't hardly look at the man but it also is fair to say is that that director on the western division of the penn railroad did not countermand any of the orders in fact later on it was heard to say did you see or did you hear about what that scottish kid that i've got working for me did and it was a mark of pride well anyways overall though by the time you get to 1859 by the 1859 so carnegie's all of about let's see 59 so he's all of about 26 20 24 years old basically you find carnegie starting to make cars sleeper cars particularly kind of like pullman cars again there's lots of money to be made in railroads and carnegie is trying to figure out a way to do it and he also is going to be continuing to work for the penn railroad so he's really deep into the railroading industry and in 1863 of his uh of his portfolio in 1863 he had to file income taxes in 1863 carnegie's not yet 30 years old he's already making 48 000 a year of which i think it was 46 000 came from his efforts as a a uh making the sleeper cars for the railroading industry he's doing quite well and that's my point uh just kind of this vunderkind is a in german as they said this uh one this brilliant kid but he's doing quite well in fact actually what's interesting about carnegie is when you talk about him and his concept and his thoughts on life he basically goes and says you know what uh he would say to you if you're getting ready to get into life and most of you are by watching this you're just starting out in college probably yet soon you're going to be and soon in four years or five years and it won't take long but you'll graduate from a m or you'll graduate from sam houston state or somewhere else then you'll move on and then you're going to start to make money hopefully or you'll want to make money hopefully but what i mean by that is is that he would tell you put your eggs in one basket don't be a jack of all trades he carnegie did not like the idea that you needed to cross uh you know cross train and do this and be a little bit of all things he wouldn't like a person like me who's got an interest in music as you can see behind me i'm not good at all of that i can't sing but i do like to hum i teach and i teach decently well i suppose also i do a little fence building and i do a little of this and i do a little of that i would be in a sense someone be politely say oh he's a renaissance man i like to read books as you can see but maybe what you could call a jack of all trades but the rest of that statement is a jack of all trades master of none and so carnegie would not agree with what i've done he would say that you're wasting time and wasting uh your efforts put your eggs in one basket focus specialize and then he would also say this too because if you've been told don't put your eggs in one basket so you don't get caught short he would say like this watch your basket very closely so you don't get it overturned and out go the eggs and they crack on the ground so anyways he put his emphasis in the railroading industry early on but then he starts to to change up and he starts to change and he looks at what the railroading industry needs and that's going to lead him to where he really makes his money he does well as a railroader he does extraordinarily well as a steel magnet that man is going to be known when we talk about carnegie he's known for really two things the libraries that bear his name and of course the gospel of wealth which is in that same philanthropic idea of the of the libraries but he's really going to be known for steel and steel production because if you think about it and you're going to be building railroads and you're going to be building railroads all over the united states on a national scale trans-continental scale or you're talking about on a more local scale that we've all investigated you're going to need a lot of steel whether it's in the form of ribbon rail or you're talking about steel for bridges steel for cars there's just as the economy modernizes and comes out of the antiquity period or pre-modern time period in a sense you're going to need more and more steel and steel products then going further still almost made to say going further steel but going further along as you get into the late 19th and early 20th century think about the growth of cities which will come to them probably in the next lecture but think about the growth of cities and what that means one of the things you see with these cities is these cities are going to go up up and up and you cannot go high with a city you can't get tall with a city at least in any meaningful way i mean you you can build tall structures churches are examples of that in the from pre-modern times but if you want to get many many tall structures meaning it's 10 15 stories high territory especially north of 10 stories you can't build it out of wood you because there's just too much weight and becomes too rickety and wobbly and so forth you need to do stone which takes a lot of effort and is a time consuming and that sort of thing there secondly but more likely you're going to go to steel buildings so as the the cities grow up literally in a vertical sense there's got to be a production of steel to be able to pred to supply the need and carnegie does it carnegie and that's where his greatest contribution is is after the civil war you start seeing him getting into the steel industry in these with union iron works in the later u.s steel 1865 is really when it starts to go up and on from there one of the things that carnegie was noted for in his uh his life as far as a uh a steel magnet was is that like rockefeller he valued efficiency but his efficiency wasn't just that he wanted to know what the how much money he was losing if he knew the money how much money he was losing he could figure out how much he made that was it's kind of counterintuitive but that was his uh his uh his policy or his thinking on it but not only that carnegie also as far as steel is concerned carnegie was a man who pushed the envelope he wasn't satisfied to do it like they'd done for the last 10 years he wasn't satisfied to make steel like they've done for the last 30 years and carnegie was a in veteran he was invitedly interested in innovation you'll see this with men of prominence you'll see this of the great men and fars industries and so forth and so on uh the willingness to push the envelope to get more efficient to get faster work harder in some respects but certainly get more efficient and what you see with carnegie and i referenced this in an earlier lecture of the new south about birmingham alabama having a outpost or a suburb called bessemer alabama if you that's a reference to the bessemer process and the best room process is really what's going to take cast iron and iron products and bring it into steel as we understand it more and more today with a steel that is what the same strong at the same time but also resilient in the sense that like if you're talking about what i do uh in the summertime building fence uh my in my strange enjoyment is is that you can take a welding rod here a basically a welder and you can heat that steel up and you can melt it with that electrical current and then you can put that i'll call it those electrodes in there and you can burn them in and you stack up and you basically weld it all together you can't really do that very easily with cast iron so you can do it but you got to do it a lot differently but steel is not just uh very malleable in the sense that you can heat and weld though that comes into the right of the 20th century with lincoln the thing is is that steel is also flexible too it's not brittle uh nothing like say cast iron you drop that cast iron skillet don't be surprised if it cracks you pick up a cast iron block from an engine you certainly better have that thing that heavy thing strapped up properly otherwise it might fall and shatter into a thousand million pieces so you're talking about steel and you're talking about bessemer process which is going to force air through molten iron uh multi and basically that reaction causes a chemical reaction within the in this iron to turn it to steel and gives it that uh uh not elasticity but that flexibility uh and so on that makes it far superior to just regular ranked pig iron so but the reason i bring this up is not only did he see that and he pursued it but in his process whether it's the bessemer process or the forges and foundries that are part of his steel making empire what you'll see him do is is that he carnegie is going to even a year or two after putting in a new forge uh in a steel plant he will be willing to rip out that all that relatively new forge and put in an even more efficient one because it made better product and it was more efficient in the sense it also could make him more money in addition to that even after uh say for safety's sake uh considering how hot that could be to be in a steel plant a steel making plant a heat you know you're going to have to cover this you're going to have to cover those forges the thing is is that originally a lot of those forges were made i was gonna be those sheds as it were were made of wood and so what carnegie does instead of using wood which is flammable of course and it doesn't last forever seemingly he will switch over to steel and of course these steel sheds are going to draw down any insurance costs that he has so he is a prominent prominent businessman he will supply much of the rail for the union pacific railroad in the 1870s and 80s he was going to make some massive investments there and he comes through and makes money hand over fist makes so much money in fact that he is probably the wealthiest man in all of the united states by the time he becomes a middle-aged man he's a little bit older than i am but he's doing quite fine uh he travels everywhere and uh like i said uh he has also got an interest in philanthropy you'll see andrew carnegie giving away a good portion of his uh his his wealth in the form of the building of libraries and other public venues in downtown bryan close to where well rellis you can drive through downtown on the way back to college station if you want to close to the bryan campus but in downtown bryant there is a carnegie library franklin texas has a carnegie library and many towns throughout the united states have carnegie libraries those were all built in the in the latter years and after the death of andrew carnegie in addition to that he is going to be a chief promoter and you'll see versions of this today with people like what was her name it's not betty crock uh her husband was ray kroc and he built a mcdonald's anyways his wife got a lot of money and she gave a lot of it away to uh to fund amongst other things to endow npr you see this also with uh let me think here bill and melinda gates they give a lot of a lot of their money away to help public health projects some people call it uh uh have uh take a dim view of it but i i don't really see any problem with what they've done with public health uh what's her name uh it's not nancy it's uh i want it jeff bezos his ex-wife uh it's not stacy it's not nancy mckenzie mckenzie bezos uh when they got divorced after uh the lord of amazon jeff bezos had gotten caught having an affair with some other woman she got because they were married and i don't think there was any prenuptial agreement because they weren't wealthy when they got married or at least i don't think that's how i think that's about right anyway she became the wealthiest woman in the world or at least one of the very most wealthy woman women in the world and she too is announced that she's going to give it away and in a sense uh what what that is is you're following after that carnegie gospel of wealth and have a duty to to leave in a sense leave your wealth to the people or at least leave the wealth in a way that can help and uplift but all that to say though is i tend to point out to you in these lectures is that i do point out the good and i think that's uh i mean frankly we would this building i'm sitting in right now you can see the the finished portion behind me uh but if you were to look outside i keep calling it the barno bunker the fact of the matter is this building is made of steel and i think steel has been a very good boon uh to to humanity and for particularly modern society i have no compunction about it and i i praise carnegie there however it is fair to say though is if you crossed andrew carnegie and you tried to organize and to demand higher wages shorter work hours and certainly safer work conditions they could send the goons in after you there's no two ways about that you get your head cracked may get shot so he would break he'd break a strike he wouldn't think twice about so there was a lot of violence between some of the uh in some of the riots uh hey market and so on these riots between carnegie's people and uh his workers and so he was uh he was not a fan of the labor union there was that late 19th century early 20th century labor uh labor and uh industry uh head butting it's like i said earlier with the railroads you got it with the railroads first but other industries are going to get this labor union as well so last but not least as we move on past andrew carnegie andrew carnegie's family by the way i'll say this is not in a sense not nearly as salacious in my understanding or opinion as what you get with old uh john d rockefeller but j john pierpoint purepont morgan is the last of our uh characters today morgan's uh born excuse me morgan is born in the 1830s as well and morgan like rockefeller and like carnegie basically says i'm not going to serve in the army and he purchases a substitute he pays a substitute pays the the government wage for that substitute in the army and he uh maybe saves his life but he is a young man who comes from extreme wealth he is himself a wealthy man he's going to be one of the wealthiest men in america he's going to control vast uh uh he controls a lot of money and during por morgan's lifetime he's going to be able to bail out the u.s government at times and keep it from going under during some of the greater panics that we've had in our history say the panic of 1893 1907 and so on all of which is to say is jp morgan is really a man of money and that's where i would differentiate him from rockefeller for carnegie carnegie and rockefeller do things they produce things they make things they improve morgan is more of a banker and he reminds me in this sense if you want a more modern equivalent and he would be a lot like say berkshire hathaway's warren buffett in the sense the the sage of omaha is he's been called but the ability to fish in troubled waters to know when to buy know when to sell and for the large part especially with buffett it doesn't seem like he's got uh uber uber amount of insider information but the thing is is that with morgan he comes from a family of bankers and so by the time you find morgan in in growing up or in school in the his tens and teens uh jp morgan is traveling and going to school in switzerland jp morgan news knows all of the future heads of the the great banking houses of germany of france of england he knows them all because he went to school with the vast majority of them so when you find jp morgan you find jp morgan knowing he's not only a wealthy and american and an elite american but he's going to be a an elite in the world of high finance because he knows them all i mean they all went together it's like saying i went to harvard law school and i sat next to uh this guy joe let's just make a name up here or amy not let me thank you for a second uh samuel alito and alito was in harvard law school when i was there for example and he is a supreme court justice or if you want elena kagan or whatever most of those it would be like going to harvard and saying i knew this guy and uh yeah so that and i'm i'm this man and he's that man we all knew each other back in the day so uh yeah that you see that with morgan morgan himself is actually a big man uh uh but he kind of fits the bill of the fat banker almost you really kind of see that he's a husky individual but even more particularly if you ever look at his picture of him and if you got a chance i'd do it right this moment is is that you look at him he's got a strange nose not to point out the nose any more than necessary but his nose is at times you'll see these pictures of his nose and it looks like he's got a strawberry attached on the end of it now all those pictures are pretty much going to be in black and white but you can see this puffed up nose with all these pits in it and basically what he has is what's called acne rosacea and that thing is going to swell the nose up and it's going to be extremely painful even by the day's standards and the medicine of the time period late 19th century he could have morgan could have had his nose fixed but it was his calling card and uh it was part of the aura of morgan and that he had this great temper which he did sometimes he'd lose it but more particularly he used it for effect his physical presence over odd individuals and morgan could stare a man down even the strongest men seemed to quail in his presence he commanded the room and that nose was his calling card seemingly if that nose was red it would be like a beacon of don't try me today please and uh so anyways with regard to morgan and that nose and his appearance and so on kids even had jokes in new york city and had songs about it and so there's that but uh you'll find him start uh the banking house jp morgan and son and so uh jp morgan's banking house opens in wall street in 1857 and he's basically uh this man knew where to find money knew how to make money and then one historian said about him said he fished well in troubled waters and that's true during the civil war he made money during the civil war after the civil war he made money in railroading he bought railroads he made money in wars he also was a big believer in mergers and securities so by the time you get to jp morgan around the year 1900 1902 1905 you find jp morgan a stride of all these uh northern these holding companies umbrella companies that own various railroads and various companies uh throughout the united states uh in so some respects actually when you talk about morgan uh if morgan said to a president i need to speak to you the president would pick up the phone and would call him uh some would say that's fine others would say no no the president doesn't just is not at the beck and call of a businessman uh quite famously and some a little bit more sometimes more uh dramatic than it really was but quite famously theodore roosevelt president of the united states in the early 1900s 1901-1909 theodore roosevelt is going to go after go after the uh the big businesses in what's called trust busting one of the ones he points out early on and goes after them is northern securities which was a morgan company and uh the way the story goes is that uh roosevelt who himself was a blue blood out of new york it was an old dutch family out of new york roosevelt announced just basically cold turkey and did not give any heads up or warning to rock me morgan about what was getting ready to happen the busting up of northern securities and that was unusual because normally if something was going to happen there was going to be a phone call from the president or one of the president's men de morgan's guy or morgan himself and say watch out this is coming and uh anyways the story goes is that whenever morgan had uh found out about this lawsuit that was going to break up northern securities he says to one of his men he says tell the president to call me and let's get together and roosevelt basically said i don't negotiate with i don't negotiate like that uh this won't happen and it was a sea change but up until about 1902 uh morgan called the shots and even afterwards he's going to be very influential it's not like roosevelt slays him completely and he's driven into the uh as into outer darkness but morgan is a man of money if you if you're to boil me down and say what was he he was a man of money who can he was not the wealthiest man in america but he controlled the most money in america uh and that is uh certainly uh important as well so anyways we find him oh almost forgot he also had a hand in investing and making a good amount of money in the building of the suez canal i would say that's a pretty good i should say maybe he's a little bit more than just making money but anyhow that's a good place to stop it's right at 30 minutes i said this would be shorter and it certainly is i've got that all settled up and i think we'll head into immigration and the cities in the next lectures thank you