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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32898 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Book Review: “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt” by T.J. Stiles

“ Alexis de Toqueville later would observe that the ‘respect, attachment, and service’ that held men together in aristocratic societies had disappeared in America; now they were bound by 'money only' "

T.J. Stiles’ Pulitzer Prize winning biography is a great story of Vanderbilt the man, but an equally engaging portrait of the seismic changes that America went through from the revolution through the nineteenth century. When Vanderbilt was born the US was an agrarian nation largely dominated by a hereditary elite transplanted from the old world. Most people worked on independent farms or ran their own stores and few had really heard of a “corporation”. The early American market was essentially crony capitalism - some important family was given a legal monopoly to handle all the passenger boats on the Hudson, for instance. Competition just wasn’t really a thing in many major industries.

Into this old money world strode Vanderbilt, a half-literate rough guy who grew up on the shipping docks, a world where disputes were regularly settled with fistfights. Stiles describes him as epitome of the “commercial man,” with a complete disregard for any human niceties if they didn’t make dollars and sense. He even made his wife pay for their (ten!) kids’ food and education out of her own purse, despite his growing wealth, and rarely saw his family at all. In fact he lived on his boat so that he could make passenger runs seven days a week, his life and business inseparable to such an extent that when his ship was destroyed in a fire, the news reported he had literally lost every article of clothing he owned.

Vanderbilt didn’t give a crap about the monopolies, they were in his way; “law, rank, the traditional social bonds -- these things meant nothing to him. Only power earned his respect”. Soon he met William Gibbons, a plantation owning aristocrat who was to play hero to the common man and the common market, because he developed a profound grudge against the (identical) old money family that commanded New York’s shipping monopoly, and decided he would dedicate his fortune to destroying them. Vanderbilt ended up being his chief in this battle, running competitor ships at rock bottom rates to force the monopolists to lower their own rates past what they could afford.

Stiles takes pains to illustrate what an unusual idea this was, for two businesses to compete with one another in a way that resulted in things being cheaper for customers. Again and again he quotes intellectuals and leading families describing how aghast they are at this ungentlemanly practice. The battle raged on with hilarious twists and turns, such as Gibbons lobbying the New Jersey government to pass a law that said he could impound any rivals ships if they impounded his own under New York monopoly law, or Vanderbilt escaping the New York police by having his men cut the ship loose from the dock as soon as the police boarded, and then explaining to them that they had lost their jurisdiction after floating into New Jersey waters.

All this culminated in the Supreme Court ruling Gibbons vs Ogden, which largely spelled the death knell of old families being simply given monopoly rights by a certain state over a major industry. For the first time raw competition was a major dynamic being introduced into the American market, seismically changing the culture and economy from sclerotic aristocratic fiefdoms into a frenzy of hustlers, producers and entrepreneurs. The elites losing their economic privilege is spelled out over a backdrop of them losing many of their political and cultural privileges as well. Martin Van Buren’s Bucktails oversaw the expansion, against the screams of the conservative aristocrat families, of the right to vote to almost all white men, and soon Andrew Jackson ushered in the “era of the common man”.

While the Jacksonians shared Vanderbilt’s hatred of an elite given special favors by the government, they differed in a general distrust of the emerging, advanced, “artificial” economic arrangements. They considered banks no different than shipping monopolies, and the practice of lending in excess of reserves to be no better than a ponzi scheme. As for the defining economic innovation of the era: “the implications were frightful. Since [corporations] ‘live forever,' fretted Massachusetts governor Marcus Morteon, their property was 'holden in perpetual succession' - unlike individuals, whose estates were divided upon death. Eventually corporations would own everything”.

T.J. Stiles describes here America on the precipice of great change, of a “real” world of builders and farmers, of the self-employed, of money linked to hard gold, into a world of abstractions, of corporations, finance, and fiat currency, of men divided into capitalists and laborers. And herein lies the beginning of the end of Vanderbilt as hero of the common man, because while he shared their love of competition, he became master of these new economic instruments.

Vanderbilt’s steamboat lines multiplied many times over and he became an incredibly rich man. After the establishment of the Oregon territory, to integrate the nation, mail and people had to be shipped down to Nicaragua, transported overland and then sail back up to California. Here Vanderbilt competed directly with government subsidized shipping lines and came to provide an essential part of the modern American infrastructure of expansion and gold rush settlements. When filibuster William Walker conquered Nicaragua, Vanderbilt out of his own pocket financed the Costa Rican effort to overthrow him.

From ships to horses to trains, of course trains. One by one Vanderbilt bought up train lines and turned them into one gigantic, interconnected system that was to form the backbone of the exploding postwar economy. Up until then, corporations were still thought of as being created for some specific public service, commissioned by the government, and given a temporary lifespan with a clear ending. It was railroads that truly pulled corporations out of this mold and established them as enterprises owned wholly by private individuals, for profit, and able to continue on forever. Railroads became the largest single industry in America by far, the first real industry (along with telegraphs) that crossed state lines and directly knit together different corners and markets of the country. Their vast, complex nature necessitated the creation of workers entirely dedicated to managing the endless staff and bureaucratic needs of the era’s new behemoths. Likewise, the rise of a mass of workers who would now work their entire life as wage laborers, rather than as independent farmers, shopkeepers or artisans, became complete as well, and with the modern battle lines of capitalists and laborers now made real, the rise of mass unionization and labor conflict soon emerged as well.

As Vanderbilt went from being hero of the common man to villain, his arc paralleled the seismic changes of the broader era. When elites of old were dividing the economy into their personal fiefdoms, his competition was hailed as populist and radical, finally bringing down prices and proving that ordinary folk could take a stab at the market and make something of themselves. However, as he and the tycoons become more and more powerful, till their market dominance allowed them incredible sway over the economy, the free market came to be seen as the conservative tool of the new elites, and populist forces demanded regulation. Did the end result end up replicating the old order of the aristocrats? Well, I’ll let you be the judge. I’ll close by quoting at length:

It was clear that the forces he helped to put in motion were remaking the economic, political, social, and cultural landscape of the United States. There was the transparently obvious: the dramatically improved transportation facilities that allowed Americans to fill in the continent, the creation of enormous wealth in new business enterprises; and the railroads’ economic integration of the nation, bringing distant farms, ranches, mines, workshops, and factories into a single market, one that both lowered prices and dislocated communities (The new availability of western foodstuffs, for example, uprooted New England farmers.) And there was the less obvious, such as the emergence of a new political matrix in which Americans struggled to balance the wealth, productivity and mobility wrought by the railroads and other industries with their anxiety over the concentration of vast economic power into the hands of a few gigantic corporations...

Still more subtle, and perhaps more profound, was a broad cultural shift as big business infused American life. An institutional, bureaucratic, managed quality entered into daily existence - what scholar Alan Trachtenberg calls the “incorporation of America,” a cultural dimension of “managerial revolution” or “visible hand” that business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. identified. More and more the national imposed upon the local, the institution upon the individual, the industrial upon the artisanal, the mechanical upon the natural. Even time turned to a corporate beat. Time had always varied from town to town, even by household; the young Jay Gould, for example, had helped families determine when the sun was at its height so they could set their clocks to noon. But the sun proved inconvenient for the schedules of nation-girdling railways. In 1883, writes Trachtenberg, these “distinct private universes of time” vanished when the railroads, “by joint decision, placed the country - without act of Congress, President or the Courts - under a scheme of four “standard time zones”...

At the forefront stood Cornelius Vanderbilt, child of the eighteenth century, master of the nineteenth, maker of the centuries to come.

I enjoyed this, wish it got more interaction. I'll say that in response to:

Did the end result end up replicating the old order of the aristocrats?

Absolutely not! In my opinion we got a worse system in many ways. Yes there is mobility for the few people who can hack it, but overall our leaders are worse. Instead of having a small political and intellectual elite who are trained from birth to lead, and have severe social consequences for screwing up, we instead have a class of politicians that can vie for power with little real consequence to themselves if they make mistakes.

There's no sense of noblesse oblige from the rich anymore either. In fact it's the opposite - many rich people in America take a sort of "fuck you, I've got mine" attitude where instead of giving back, they try to turn and kick the ladder down. With a bloodline based aristocracy this behavior was minimized because there was no way for the peasantry to meaningfully try and climb the ladder.

Unlike @2rafa, I'm not necessarily saying we need a return to the aristocratic days. I do however think we should take a hard look at the cons of our current arrangement and see if there are ways to engender or enforce a sense of societal responsibility in the modern rich, especially billionaires and others with absurd amounts of wealth.

Much appreciated.

I have a lot of trouble evaluating whether the pre-capitalist leadership was genuinely better. I think the question for me kind of is: even if they were better at leadership, would that outweigh the economic growth we got under the new order? Competition leading to lower prices and maximizing consumer surplus and growth seems to have really not been a component of the old system at all. A lot of aristocrats did decide to go into business eventually as they lost their other privileges, but it seems like they really didn't make that transition till they were forced into it by new entrepreneurs. Would the industrial revolution still have happened if no one shattered that stasis? Capitalists might be selfish "I've got mine" types but they did produce benefits for the overall society - an excerpt about the Gilded Age, likely the height of the capitalist dominion:

The giant corporation would bring Americans of all stripes into its orbit with remarkable speed. A professional and managerial middle class began to emerge as the educated and skilled went to work as engineers, lawyers, technical experts, clerks, and middle managers for large companies. The ranks of permanent wage workers swelled, both within railroads and in the industries that fed their needs or expanded with the new markets they opened up. Labor prospered during the postwar boom, enjoying a 40 percent growth in average real income from 1865 through late 1873

Noblesse didn’t oblige them to anything. They treated commoners like they were ten levels of shit below friendly human contact. They’d steal from them every day of the week and kill them for a slight. And when this degenerate elite was finally replaced, economic and, ironically, military performance instantly improved ten-fold. The leadership they provided, if any, was of very low quality. They didn’t produce anything. The people were starving. In what ways were they giving back?

During some time periods nobles were terrible yes, especially right before the revolutions. Before that though they contributed to art, religious theory and knowledge. The Renaissance and the enlightenment both directly came from noble classes pursuing knowledge, and at least in the case of Alexander vin Humboldt and Darwin, they claimed that giving back and helping society were a strong motivation.

From a consequentialist point of view even if they didn’t care they drastically improved the lives of peasants over the long run.

Anachronistic justification. They didn’t think their station in life was justified by scientific, philosophic or artistic accomplishments. When they dabbled in those things, it was more often as patrons than practitioners.

Not nobles: erasmus, spinoza, leonardo, luther, shakespeare.

How are nobles responsible for the renaissance and the enlightenment?

Maybe I’m just romanticizing the past, fuckduck. I’m simply deeply disappointed in the political class of today.

Indeed Dag, that would be my guess. Alhough I can’t entirely exclude the hypothesis that the french education system did such a great propaganda job on me that rolling back the revolution seems inconceivable. Clearly peasants now are better off, but it's hard to disentangle that from technological progress. That leaves us with concurrent societies and, all else being equal, imo societies with entrenched blood-based 'sword aristocracy' didn't do well against more liberal competitors (best example being india).

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