The United States began the nineteenth century as an overwhelmingly Protestant country.  As the century progressed, however, a trickle of Catholics began to cross the Atlantic, swelling to a tidal wave as the potato blight sent millions of Irish to North America.  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Catholics from other nations, notably Italy, joined the flood.  But the Catholic Church in America could not just re-enroll their co-religionists from the old country.  The immigrants were just as unchurched as the revolutionary generation of 1776.  In the mid-century, the Irish “seemed a lost community, mired in poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence, criminality, and illegitimacy.”(Stern 1997)  Yet by the end of the century: “the sons of criminals were now the policemen; the daughters of illiterates had become the city’s schoolteachers; those who had been the outcasts of society now ran its political machinery,” and the educated elites had begun to complain about the “Puritanism” of the Irish.  The Italians were just as bad.  Archbishop Corrigan of New York in 1888 noted that of 80,000 Italian immigrants in the city, barely 2 percent went to church.  The Irish clergy were uncertain how to communicate their problem to the pope in Rome, for they found the Italians ignorant of religion and immured in “a depth of vice little known to us yet.” (Finke 1992 p116)  In Chicago, the clergy found the Italians of southern Italy and Sicily “unexcelled in their ignorance of religion.”  But the Irish hierarchy was not discouraged.  Under their leadership the Catholics managed an explosive growth, from 1 million adherents in 1850 to 7.3 million in 1880.  The architect of this remarkable achievement was John Hughes, born in 1797 the son of a poor farmer from County Tyrone in Ireland.

The explosion of popular religion in the nineteenth century was the work of outstanding religious entrepreneurs, men like Charles Grandisson Finney, John Hughes, and Joseph Smith.  We shall see how they did it in Chapter 6.

For ordinary people, the nineteenth century was a great age for enterprise.  They played a central role in the nursing and weaning of that central and still controversial institution of the modern era: the modern business corporation.  At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the big commercial enterprises were government-sponsored monopolies owned by the great and the good: the British and Dutch East India Companies, the Hudson’s Bay Company.  At the end of the nineteenth century, the great enterprises were Standard Oil, United States Steel, and the great railroads.  It is common to imagine that these great enterprises were developed by a cabal of robber barons, a conspiracy of pirates who preyed off honest workers and consumers and used their ill-gotten profits to buy elected politicians and keep them bought.  Maybe they were, but they were hardly hereditary economic barons inheriting father’s cozy monopoly.  Even the man who did the most to sell the idea of The Robber Barons, Matthew Josephson, admitted that almost all of the captains of industry came from humble beginnings.  Jay Cooke, financier of the Civil War, was the son of a frontier lawyer and settler in Sandusky, Ohio.  Jay Gould, the railroad manipulator, passed his childhood in “naked poverty” in Roxbury, New York.  Andrew Carnegie, the founder of Big Steel, was the son of a handloom damask weaver in Dunfermline, Scotland.  His family emigrated after being reduced to penury by the new power looms; they arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1848, dead broke.  James J. Hill, railroad baron, came from hardscrabble farmers in Ontario.  John D. Rockefeller, founder of Big Oil, was the son of an itinerant medicine man and bigamist, the eldest of five children who was forced to help his mother run the tiny family farm, the base from which his father roamed the countryside selling patent medicines.  Richard Sears was the son of a farmer and blacksmith.  When his father died he became, at age 16, the support of his family.  He was working as a railroad agent at Redwood Falls, Minnesota when a local merchant refused a shipment of watches, and he decided to buy them and resell them himself.  By the early 1890s Sears had turned his watch deal into a company with a 52-page catalog, Sears Roebuck.  Only J.P. Morgan, railroad merger and acquisition czar, was the scion of privilege, a banker who was the son of a banker.  But Morgan learned his trade from Anthony Drexel, the son of an Austrian draft-dodger.

The image that Josephson conjured up in The Robber Barons is that the great industrialists were the moral equivalent of the medieval robber barons whose strongholds sat astride the “strategic valley roads or mountain passes through which commerce flowed.”  (Josephson 1962 vi)  The great industrialists saw their opportunity and they took it, riding one day up to a ridge and discovering a strategic choke point that could be dominated and monopolized.  In fact, the so-called robber barons mostly got rich with breakthrough inventions and hard work.  Jay Cooke got to sell the bonds that financed the Civil War because he figured out how to sell them: in a massive publicity campaign advertising in all the newspapers, in feeding and watering financial reporters, and in “dunning each war contractor and military supplier.”  Carnegie prospered by building cutting-edge blast furnaces and integrated steel mills, developing his own sources of iron ore, and making his company the world’s low-cost steel producer.  Rockefeller invented the modern corporation with its committees, its pensions, and benefits; he branded his illuminating oil as “standard,” consistent in quality and not liable to explode, and developed the railroad unit-train and the pipeline for efficient overland transportation of bulk commodities.  James J. Hill was another low-cost man, consistently improving his Great Northern railroad by reducing curves and grades and improving rails and roadbeds so that he was always able to undercut the costs of the Northern Pacific between Minneapolis and the Pacific Northwest.  Except for Morgan, these were not expensively educated men.  Jay Gould had to plead with his father to be allowed to go the local village school.  Rockefeller’s education was completed at a commercial business school where he learned bookkeeping. 

The men described above were, of course, not typical.  They were the standouts, blessed with extraordinary luck that leveraged their dogged will and drive to succeed into extraordinary wealth at the head of unprecedented business enterprises.  But they began as ordinary men who went on to do extraordinary things.  Far from being robber barons, rogue princes of the land who had learned to prey upon legitimate commerce, these men accomplished a revolution from below with creative and wealth-enhancing innovations to mundane products: reducing the cost of oil by an order of magnitude; reducing the cost of steel by a factor of five; moving railroads beyond the land-grant boondoggle founded on political connections to a genuine business based on connecting markets and lowering the costs of freight forwarding. 

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill