#54 The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

His life spanned a period of breathtaking changes, from the days of George Washington to those of John D. Rockefeller. He began his career in a rural, agricultural, essentially colonial society in which the term businessman was unknown. He ended it. in a corporate industrial economy. Neither the admirers nor the critics of his later years had witnessed his role during the tumultuous era of the early Republic in

And the antebellum period. They could not see that Vanderbilt had spent most of his career as a radical force. From his beginnings as a teenage boatman before the war of eighteen twelve. He had led the rise of competition as a virtue in American culture. He had disrupted the remnants of the eighteenth century patricians, shaken the conservative merchant elite,

and destroyed monopolies at every step. His infuriated opponents had not shared his enthusiasm for competition. Rather, the wealthy establishment in that young and limited economy. saw his attacks as destructive.

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