robber barons

Cultural  

1. A term applied to certain leading American businessmen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller. The term suggests that they acquired their wealth by means more often foul than fair.

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Example Sentences

The new national-security initiative moves him closer to replicating the work of his bank’s namesake, the Morgans, who helped bring together robber barons and Gilded Age financiers to backstop America’s industrial revolution and stave off financial crises.

From The Wall Street Journal

This was the age of the original “robber barons,” like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, whose great fortunes and “crass unscrupulousness became part of the mystique of the new phenomenon of Wall Street,” Michael Hiltzik writes in “Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of America.”

From The Wall Street Journal

“You tend to have people in the top ranks of American society get involved in these things—usually not knowingly, but their name’s on the marquee,” says Edward J. Renehan Jr., who wrote a biography of Jay Gould and other books on that era’s robber barons.

From The Wall Street Journal

Props to the robber barons of yesteryear — at least they had style.

From Salon

But the actual turn of the century saw the rise of the Progressive Era during which the robber barons turned to philanthropy, funding medical research, libraries, museums and universities; unions and the women’s suffrage movement triumphed; and President Theodore Roosevelt enacted his Square Deal, breaking up trusts, avoiding tariffs, protecting consumers and establishing the national parks.

From Los Angeles Times