The Wealthy Also Have a Dream

The Good Olde Days

Shedding the shackles and scourge of oppression is never easy.
Just ask the wealthy.

Never have so few had so much taken from them under the guise of helping so many inferior and ungrateful peons. Why, they’ve been down so long, they don’t know which way is up.

But, you say, aren’t they rich? How hard can being rich be, and might their sense of oppression be all in their heads?

The answers to these questions are yes, harder than you think and of course it’s all in their heads. That doesn’t make their oppression all right or even a little right—or them all wrong or even a little wrong.

Charles Dickens didn’t know the half of it when he wrote in 1859, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” He could have also added, “And you ain’t seen nothing yet.” The decades just ahead would be recognized for both the unfathomable accumulation of wealth by the very, very, very few and the unspeakable poverty experienced by the many, many, many millions of workers. 

There was a time—and you may find this hard to believe—when the wealthy controlled everything. Captains of Industry, sometimes irreverently referred to as Robber Barons, had it all—money, power, Congress and presidents in their back pockets—not to mention the hatred of almost every American worker. This hatred was more telling than you might imagine as any CEO will tell you: if the workers don’t like you, you must be doing something right.

If there was any one thing moving the country forward after the Civil War, it was the railroad. On a list of 30 or so Robber Barons in the late 1800s, probably half of them were in the railroad business. And the other ones were riding the rails in private cars that made the Taj Mahal look like a doublewide on a West Virginia mountaintop.

During this period, the nation experienced an economic growth spurt unlike anything mankind had ever witnessed. These powerbrokers moved mountains, diverted rivers and leveled forests to create industries where before none existed. All this was accomplished at minimal expense and maximum profit on the backs of cheap labor—black, white, male, female, old and young, and a lot of immigrant workers—pretty much anyone with two arms, two legs and stomachs that could be satisfied with never being satisfied.

The powerful men employing these diverse groups of hapless human resources generated conflict amongst them via racist policies, the introduction of controversial social issues, and a selective offering of special treatment. This practice of pitting one group against another has remained the cornerstone business practice for over a century, and succeeded in diverting attention from the activities of those at the top.

Five million immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1880s and another five million in the 1890s. In 1880, 75,000 Chinese railroad workers were in California alone. This influx of cheap labor guaranteed wages would remain low and living conditions would rarely rise above the standard of despicable. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, slums in Chicago were three times more densely packed than Calcutta—then as now, the generally accepted standard of shameful.

As the Carnegies and Rockefellers of the world pulled in $40 and $50 million a year, children earned about 10 cents an hour and their dads a few pennies more—at a time when $40 million was really worth $40 million or $800 million in today’s money. And two bucks a day really was worth two bucks; and a day was a really long time. These workers often lived in company housing and shopped at company stores, so the barons, adding insult to injury, usually got their two bucks back at the end of the day.

Forget about fringe benefits. In 1889, 22,000 railroad workers were killed or injured on the job, and one can only assume those who didn’t die were released to fend for themselves. But life expectancy in those days was only 48 for whites and 34 for blacks, so it wasn’t like those workers were going to live for long anyway.

Yes, it was a good time, a very good time to be a Capitalist Robber Baron and a bad time to be a Capitalist worker. But change was in the air, and the tables were about to turn on the wealthy, setting the stage for a revolution that would knock them to their knees.