...The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons. Josephson, the son of a Jewish banker, grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University, where he was inspired in the classroom by Charles Beard, America’s foremost progressive historian—and a man sympathetic to socialism. “Beard was nothing less than a spellbinder,” Josephson recalled, and Beard’s lectures helped guide him on a path to radical politics.
...Josephson began research for his book in 1932, the nadir of the Great Depression. Businessmen were a handy scapegoat for that crisis, and Josephson embraced a Marxist view that the Great Depression was perhaps the last phase in the fall of capitalism and the triumph of communism. In a written interview for Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, Josephson said he enjoyed watching “the breakdown of our cult of business success and optimism.” He added, “The freedom of the U.S.S.R. from our cycles of insanity is the strongest argument in the world for the reconstruction of our society in a new form that is as highly centralized as Russia’s. . . .”
When propaganda is the goal, accuracy is the victim. The Robber Barons is riddled with factual errors. On page 14 alone, Josephson makes at least a dozen errors in his account of Vanderbilt and the steamships. Here is one sentence with three errors:
At the time of the "shipping subsidy" scandals, aired in the Senate in 1858, it was seen that Vanderbilt and E. K. Collins of the Pacific Mail Steamship Line were the chief plunderers, sometimes conciliating, sometimes blackmailing each other.
First, E. K. Collins was never the head of the Pacific Mail Steamship Line; in fact, he had no connection with it at all. Second, Vanderbilt and William H. Aspinwall, the actual head of the Pacific Mail Steamship Line, were never “blackmailing each other.” Third, the Pacific Mail Steamship Line, not Vanderbilt, was the “chief plunderer.” Vanderbilt had no subsidy, and the Pacific Line did. In fact, Vanderbilt, through his low prices, exposed the federal subsidy as a scandal.