The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

494 chapter 47with Pittsburgh daily by telegraph, approving the steps taken. Later he neverwould admit that he had had a hand in Homestead.These are serious ethical failures, and good reasons to think less of Huntingtonand Pullman and Carnegie. Novak says of the robber barons that“they sinned gravely” and of Carnegie that “he certainly was a moral coward.”15 But such sins, failures, cowardices are not peculiar to capitalism. Theyare human and political, and can be found everywhere in any era. The specificallyeconomic actions of the robber barons were not robbery, not at all.That businesspeople buy low and sell high in a particularly alert and advantageousway does not make them bad, unless any trading is bad, unless whenyou yourself shop prudently you are bad, unless any tall poppy needs to becut down, unless we wish to run our ethical lives on the sin of envy.The clerisy is sure of its ground, but hasn’t much considered that it maybe mistaken. The late Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers (1953and six later editions) enticed me among many others to major in economics.Though we long disagreed about Marxism, I honor Bob, who in his lastyears decided that capitalism was the best of those systems that have beentried from time to time. But in his 1953 chapter on his hero Veblen he givesa “head-spinning example” of why the robber barons were bad that does notstand up very well to scrutiny. 16 William Rockefeller—John D.’s youngerbrother—and Henry Rogers bought Anaconda Copper in 1899 for $39 million,which they did not have in their bank accounts. They quickly coveredthe $39 million check by getting a loan from a banker friend, and then soldthe company to the stock market for $75 million, and paid back the banker.Result? A $36 million profit in a trice without risking a dime of their ownmoney.Bad? Not so obviously as Heilbroner thinks. The Anaconda deal outragedthe muckrakers, and Heilbroner joins in the general condemnation.“This free-for-all involved staggering dishonesty,” he claims. Where exactlythe dishonesty lies is not so clear. It appears that the deal came to be notoriousas an instance of bad barons chiefly because Samuel Untermyer,a lawyer for Rockefeller and Rogers at the time of the deal who felt he hadnot himself received enough out of it, became counsel to a House committeein 1912–1913 investigating the money trust. 17What exactly is the beef? Rockefeller and Rogers had noticed that Anacondawas undervalued—that its old owners were willing to sell it for lessthan the stock market, they reckoned, would value it at. There is no evidence