Rockefeller, steel magnates such as Andrew Carnegie, and bankers such as J. These so-called robber barons, including railroad operators such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, oilmen such as J. However, this group also came to be called the robber barons, because they often used morally questionable techniques to advance their businesses and because their extravagant lifestyles resembled those of the old European aristocracy. This time period saw the rise of wealthy industrial capitalists, sometimes called captains of industry, due to their leadership in the industrial world. “This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times,” economist Henry George wrote in his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty. The sudden appearance of the extreme wealth of industrial and financial leaders alongside the crippling squalor of the urban and rural poor shocked Americans. Industrial capitalism confronted Gilded Age Americans with unprecedented inequalities. Gilding is a decorative process where gold paint is applied to another surface like wood or metal, so the “Gilded Age” was one that looked beautiful at first glance, but whose shiny facade could be stripped away to reveal something plain or even ugly. The notion of a glittering world of wealth and technological innovation masking sweeping social inequities and corruption gave the era its most common label, the Gilded Age, a term borrowed from the title of an 1873 satirical novel by Mark Twain and Charles Warner. But it also produced millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions. Massive new companies marshaled capital on an unprecedented scale and provided enormous profits that created unheard-of fortunes. Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity that the world had ever seen. The Breakers, Vanderbilt residence, Newport, R.I., ca.1904.
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