Robber Baron

The Robber Baron image of leading American businessmen was a hostile stereotype created by anti-capitalist writers in the Progressive Era (1890-1920s) who denounced big business was bad because it supposedly hurt workers, consumers and democracy.

The "robber" theme meant the businessmen seized the wealth created by the workers--the assumption was that capital did not create wealth, only manual labor.

The "baron" theme suggested they were anti-democratic aristocrats who rejected the core values of American republicanism.

Business History scholars beginning in the 1920s and led by Professor Alan Nevins at Columbia University and later Alfred D. Chandler at Harvard, refuted the false "Robber Baron" image. The image occasionally appears in textbooks and, more often, in history lectures or editorials written from a leftist perspective. The image is distinctly American--European and Asians rarely displayed it.