Great Fortunes from Railroads

A furious, meticulously researched expose of the men who built American oligarchy. Gustavus Myers documents how Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and their ilk transformed the railroad into an engine of legalized theft, swindling public lands, bribing legislators, and bankrupting rivals with abandon. The book uncovers the grotesque mathematics of Gilded Age wealth: how a handful of men converted public infrastructure into private empires, using government as their instrument and the working class as their fuel. Myers does not merely chronicle; he indicts. He shows how the law was bent into a pretzel to serve the already-powerful, how 'robber baron' was never hyperbole but accurate description. Published in an era when the wounds were still fresh, this is history written with righteous anger by someone who watched America get sold to the highest bidders.