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An Age of Creative Destruction
'Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you." Thus Cornelius Vanderbilt writing to business partners who had exploited his absence to gain control of one of his companies. He was as good as his word.
The nature of both ruin and success is the subject of "American Colossus," H.W. Brands's account of, as the subtitle has it, "The Triumph of Capitalism" during the period 1865-1900. Mr. Brands paints a vivid portrait of both this understudied age and those industrialists still introduced by high-school teachers as "robber barons"—Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. Together these men of the 19th century laid the foundations that would allow the use of innovations that we think of as modern, such as trains and automobiles, on a massive scale in the 20th century.
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