Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 11: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen

At the dawn of American industry, a handful of men asked a dangerous question: what if business could lift people up instead of grinding them down? This volume of Elbert Hubbard's beloved biographical series profiles two men who answered that question with their lives and fortunes. Robert Owen, the Welsh textile magnate who revolutionized labor conditions decades before labor laws existed, proving that compassion and profit could coexist. And James Oliver, the Indiana blacksmith whose stubborn commitment to quality transformed farming and made the Oliver Plow Works a name synonymous with American ingenuity. Written in Hubbard's warm, anecdotal style that made Little Journeys a sensation, these portraits capture an era when businessmen still believed they were building something larger than themselves. For readers who wonder whether capitalism has always been simply about extraction, these stories offer a corrective: industrialists who understood that their workers' welfare was not separate from their bottom line, but fundamental to it.