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

Ours is a history in which New York robber barons used the promise of belonging to splinter the poor into factions and manipulate them into fighting among themselves during the Gilded Age.

From Los Angeles Times

This was the age of robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil was a business “trust” comprising dozens of companies in numerous vertically linked industries.

From Barron's

This was the age of robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil was a business “trust” comprising dozens of companies in numerous vertically linked industries.

From Barron's

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