Transcript
Introduction
His life span, a period of breathtaking changes. From the days of George Washington to those of John D. Rockefeller, he began his career in a rural agricultural, essentially colonial society in which a term businessman was unknown. He ended it in a corporate industrial economy. Neither the admirers nor the critics of his later years, had witnessed his role during the tumultuous era of the early Republic and the Antebellum period. They could not see that Vanderbilt had spent most of his career as a radical force. From his beginnings as a teenage boatman before the war of 1812, he had led the rise of competition as a virtue in American culture. He had disrupted the remnants of the 18th-century patricians, shaken the conservative merchant elite and destroyed monopolies at every step.
His infuriated opponents had not shared his enthusiasm for competition. Rather, the wealthy establishment in that young and limited economy saw his attacks as destructive. In 1859, one had written that he has always proved himself the enemy of every American maritime enterprise, and the New York Times condemned Vanderbilt for pursuing competition for competition's sake. Those on the other end of the spectrum had celebrated the way he had expanded transportation/fares and punished opponents who relied on government monopolies or subsidies. To Jacksonian Democrats who champion laissez-faire as an egalitarian creed, he had epitomized the entrepreneur as champion of the people, the businessman as a revolutionary.