Check out the Men Who Built America mini-series on History2. It's a look at the rise of our industrialized nation, and men who became extremely wealthy from it. Guys like Vanderbuilt, Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnagie. It portrays how a lot of what they did was driven by personal vendetta's and rivalries between each other. It's like they viewed the US as a civ building computer game, and their primary goal was to conquer the board. And to get a bigger profit than their rivals. If that meant your workers needed to work 12 hour days 6 days a week in a steel mill, so be it. Rockefeller had a fortune that would equate to 600 billion dollars today! [video=youtube;gR7oHh-fXUw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR7oHh-fXUw[/video]
my wife really likes that show, and I've seen a couple (the Edison one isn't that far off from the "truth"). But she said there's a vaguely soap-opera-ish feel to them---everything's dramatized, whether to keep a story going or to keep you in suspense if you don't know what was happening next (Did Carnegie get his bridge built before going bankrupt?!?!!!). These guys took enormous personal risks, and you read about them because they were for the most part successful. You don't hear about the tons of other guys who went bankrupt and committed suicide or died penniless.
It's a pretty good show. To me, it shows the dire need for unions in those days as people were being taken such advantage of.
Many of them smoked cigars, drank scotch, and wove tall tales at the JIC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jekyll_Island_Club
