The Men Who Built America is Television Worth Watching

The best television last Tuesday was not the Presidential debate.  Mind you that was good theater, but it was not the best.  If you really wanted to enjoy excellent television, you had to go to the History Channel’s new series, The Men Who Built America.  This series features the lives of America’s titans: Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford.  I highly recommend it. 

Which period of American history do you like best?  The history of our nation is generally divided into the Age of Exploration, the Colonial Era, the Federalist Period, the Age of Jackson, the Westward Expansion, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Prohibition and the Cold War.  Most of us have a period in which our favorite history, fiction, movies and television dramas occur.  My Dad was mad for all things Western; Mom loved reading about the common men and immigrants who became the understated heroes of the Industrial Revolution.  I have never liked the Colonial Era, thought I preferred the Westward Expansion, and then discovered my favorite time of all.  I can’t get enough of the part of the Reconstruction called the Gilded Age.

It all started when my favorite college professor, Dr. Robert Larson, assigned a book by Matthew Josephson, The Politicos, to be read for our final exam.  Actually, Dr. Larson had a diabolical twist to this assignment.  He always assigned two books.  On the test, the last question was always a critique of one of the books.  The minute Dr. Larson’s students got the test they all flipped to the back page.  You could tell from the sighs or groans which students had won or lost the lottery of which book to read.  Since I have been the school geek from early on, I always read both.  Dr. Larson was so fine a professor (interesting, challenging, honest) that I took as many classes from him as I could.  I soon learned that he was a great enthusiast for the Populist movement. 

Given his love of Populists, I am sure that Dr. Larson was a bit disappointed with my reaction to The Politicos.  Granted, the gritty world of the, “robber barons” and their Gilded Age is not for the feint hearted, but I discovered a grudging admiration for these men.  Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie et.al. were, indeed, the men who built America.  With the exception of J. P. Morgan, who came from a comfortable upper middle class, the rest of the men were born poor and powerless.  They had uneven and limited education.  How did they become the wealthiest men in our history?  They did it the old fashioned way, they worked for it.  To a man, they were motivated workaholics.  They were smart and personally disciplined.  They generally played by the rules, but were ruthless in enforcing their own will.  And before we get too judgmental, it is important to remember that you can not judge the actions of the past by the morals of the present.  These men thought they were building a nation and providing employment, goods and services for larger numbers of Americans than ever before.  They were.  Not all births are easy, and America’s emergence as the economic leader of the world was neither more nor less messy than the usual. 

I have read biographies of three of these gentlemen and I was waiting for the first historical error to fall into my eager hands.  It did not.  This series is both a credit to the men who built the nation, and to the nation that reined them in. 

Study history and keep the faith.