The Lost World

[The following is Episode 12 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

            The workmen could not believe what they had found.  Digging in Paris, France, in 1795, they unearthed what should not have been there.  For what they had brought up, deep from the bowels of the earth, were bones – animal bones, but such as did not belong to any animal that was common to France.  For these were the remains of large elephants, and elephants, as any rational man understood, lived only in Asia, or in Africa, not in Paris, France, unless they belonged to the circus.  And yet here was evidence that in Paris’s distant past, elephants roamed the countryside freely, and made it their natural habitat.  But the workmen were about to encounter an even bigger shock.  For when the bones were inspected by Georges Cuvier, a young naturalist employed at the local natural history museum, he announced that they belonged to a species of elephant unlike any that presently existed in the world.  What the workmen had in fact discovered was a lost world, one totally unlike our own, which had existed at some remote age, and had disappeared in the distant mists of time.  It would be the first of many “lost worlds” unearthed and unleashed upon a perplexed generation, who would be forced to reexamine its most cherished beliefs about creation, about life, and about our ancient history.  The legacy of these “lost worlds”, in fact, would be to shake the modern world to its core, forcing its people to rethink their place in the universe, their destiny, and their very reason for existence.

            George Cuvier’s shocking announcement about the existence of an extinct elephant species that had formerly lived in Paris, France would be the first of many in his long, distinguished, and controversial career.  He was not afraid of controversy, or of challenging the orthodox views of the establishment.  He was, after all, working in the employ of one of the most revolutionary figures of modern times, Napoleon Bonaparte.  And Napoleon’s enthusiasm for scientific discovery was nearly as great as his enthusiasm for world conquest.  When Cuvier encountered the remains of reptiles and other species that had been unearthed in a French gypsum quarry, he would also declare that these belonged to creatures that no longer existed on the earth.  And when the army of Revolutionary France shipped to Paris from the Netherlands a pair of fossil jaws more than three feet long, which others had suggested were the jaws of a whale, Cuvier proclaimed instead that they belonged to a huge, extinct marine lizard.  But his most memorable announcement came when the fossil remains of large winged creatures, discovered in Germany, were brought to his attention.  He identified these as belonging to an ancient species of flying reptiles, which he named “Pterodactyls”. 

            The existence of fossils, and of mysterious creatures unfamiliar to the peoples who had discovered their remains, had been known long before Cuvier’s time.  In previous centuries, they were often assumed to be the remains of animals that still existed, in some unknown region of the world, but that no longer lived in the place where they were found.  But around the year 1500, some persons began to suggest that these fossils were evidences of prehistoric plants and animals that had become extinct.  Others contended that they were freaks of nature.  And those with a more religious disposition even argued that fossils had been created by the devil, to confuse the pious.  But in the 1700’s religious authority was breaking down, particularly in France, and as new fossils were being unearthed in the early eighteenth century, these were looked at in a fresh light.  In 1820, an English surgeon and amateur fossil collector named Gideon Mantell was visiting a patient in Sussex.  His wife, who had accompanied him on the trip and shared his hobby of collecting fossils, discovered what appeared to be a large tooth in a piece of sandstone.  Mantell returned to the area many times after this initial discovery, and asked the workmen employed in the local rock quarry to alert him to any unusual fossil finds.  The men discovered more teeth, along with some bones, including parts of a huge one, and Mantell concluded that these belonged to one or more very large reptiles.  Other experts, including Cuvier, disagreed with his conclusions, but Mantell was convinced that he was right.  Comparing the teeth that he had found with those of living reptiles, he found a close match with the Central American iguana.  But based upon the size of his fossilized teeth, Mantell asserted that this extinct reptile must have been over fifty feet long.  Other amateur fossil hunters also took up the art of reconstructing their finds, but many didn’t share Cuvier’s and Mantell’s talent for anatomy.  Thomas Jefferson, for example, upon finding the remains of a very large animal, declared that it belonged to a huge prehistoric lion.  Other experts later realized that what he had actually found was an extinct giant sloth, but they still credited him with the discovery, naming it Megalonyx jeffersoni.

Iguanodon (Lifesize Replica)

            Cuvier set about to explain what had happened to these ancient monsters, and considered three possibilities: 1) they had become extinct, 2) they had evolved over time into some different type of animal, more familiar to the modern world, or 3) they were still around, but had migrated to some other region.  The first two explanations were still controversial to his more religious contemporaries, because they seemed to contradict the Bible, such as Ecclesiastes 3:14 which says, “"I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be forever: Nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it. . . ."  Cuvier tended to favor the extinction idea, which even found some acceptance among believers of the Bible.  After all, they contended, it must have been some terrible catastrophe that killed off these creatures, and what greater catastrophe was known to man than the Biblical Great Flood?  And it was easy to imagine Noah shrinking from the task of dragging some of these monsters aboard the Ark.  But the idea that these animals must still be around was the least controversial to many.  Even Thomas Jefferson considered this explanation: when he dispatched Lewis and Clark to explore the wilds of North America, he fully expected them to find living specimens of at least some of his fossils.

Biblical Extinction Theory?

            Civilization in the nineteenth century was prepared to take a fresh look at the world, its origins, and its place in the universe.  Revolutions in scientific thinking, led by Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton had demonstrated, in the 1500’s and 1600’s, not only that the world was not at the center of the universe, but that the universe itself obeyed fixed, immutable laws.  The motions of the planets, the force of gravity, and other great natural phenomena which had mystified and awed mankind from the earliest times could now be explained in terms of mathematical equations and geometrical relationships.  In the 1700’s, the Age of Enlightenment introduced a new crop of thinkers and revolutionaries, such as Voltaire and Rousseau in France, Jeremy Bentham and David Hume in Great Britain, and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in America, who sought to build on these scientific advances by creating a whole new outlook based on rational thought, rather than religious faith.  Freedom of thought and expression were championed in political and cultural life, while science was relied upon as the ultimate guide in explaining the workings of nature, and even human behavior itself.  These revolutionary thinkers were impatient for change, and yearned for an understanding of things based on open-minded contemplation and careful experimentation.

            Even long before the Age of Enlightenment, people had contemplated alternative explanations for how the earth began, and how life had arisen on it, which departed from the Creation myths that were traditionally believed and accepted by the population at large.  The Greek philosopher Anaximander, who lived more than two thousand five hundred years ago, suggested that animals change over time in order to adapt to new environments, with new species arising out of old ones, and that even human beings had descended from some different type of animal.  But by the 1700’s, new perspectives, new ideas, and new discoveries came together to produce a more general challenge to orthodox views of creation.  In France, the philosopher Denis Diderot entertained his own ideas of evolution, proposing that life arose spontaneously on earth, and that new animals appeared through random mutations of existing ones.  “Who knows,” he once wrote, “if this is not the nursery of a second generation of beings, separated from this generation by an inconceivable interval of centuries and successive developments?”  The French astronomer Pierre Laplace, building upon Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation, and his ideas on how stars had been formed through gravitation, produced a model of the universe which explained how the earth and other planets came into being, by condensing out of rotating clouds of hot gases, or nebula.  It is said that Napoleon Bonaparte once listened to Laplace’s theory of creation with great interest, but was moved to ask him where God fit into it.  To this Laplace replied, “I have no need for God in my hypothesis.”  Evolutionary thinking received another spur in the eighteenth century with the birth of modern geology.  The German scientist Abraham Werner, studying rock strata, argued that the earth’s geological features had been formed by the gradual retreat of a worldwide ocean.  While his theory suggested that the earth was much older than theologians believed, it also lent support to those who argued that species had become extinct because of the Great Flood.  But Cuvier, in his studies, had realized that different strata of rocks contained entirely different fossils.  He believed, as had the ancient Egyptians, that there had been more than one great flood.  For Cuvier, however, this was not proof of evolution, only that each age saw the preponderance of different survivors.  His more religious-minded followers went further, arguing that perhaps there had been fresh acts of divine creation after every great deluge, as if God was trying a different design, to replace the one that He had just erased.  But there were challenges to Werner’s view of geologic history.  In 1795, a Scottish geologist, James Hutton, published a book called the Theory of the Earth, which explained its features in terms of continuous and gradual geologic processes, rather than catastrophic ones.  This was a fatal blow to the ideas of Cuvier and his followers, but not to evolutionary thinking.  In fact, it paved the way for a radical new explanation of why different life forms seemed to appear in successive ages of history.

            By the early 1800’s, the idea of evolution was “in the air”, but nobody had been able to make a case compelling enough to win the general approval of scientists and intellectuals, and capture the popular imagination as well.  What was needed was a mechanism: something that explained how new and different kinds of plants and animals could appear on the earth.  A bold attempt at creating such a mechanism was made by one of Cuvier’s own employees at the French natural history museum, the Chevalier de Lamarck.  Lamarck argued that simple organisms were being created all the time by some natural life force, interacting with physical matter on the earth.  And then, these organisms evolved and changed by passing on, to future generations, beneficial characteristics that they had developed during their lifetimes.  Lamarck pointed to the giraffe as a prime example, contending that generations of stretching their necks to reach foliage in tall trees had resulted in long necks being a permanent feature of their descendants.  But Lamarck’s hypothesis was easily refuted by critics.  If one were to cut off the tail of a mouse, for example, all of the mouse’s descendants would still have tails.  What, then, did account for the giraffe’s long neck, or the elephant’s snout, or the ability of birds to fly?  A new, more compelling explanation would come from a British naturalist.

            Born in England in 1809 to a prosperous family, Charles Darwin initially aspired to follow in his father’s footsteps, as a physician.  But while in medical school, he realized that the practice of medicine sickened him: he couldn’t stomach dissection, detested surgery, and cringed at the sight of blood.  He transferred to Cambridge, to prepare for an alternate career as an Anglican minister, where he found himself drawn to the study of natural history.  At the recommendation of his professors, he embarked on a voyage that would change his life, and radically impact his society’s views about the origins of life on earth.  During his five-year voyage, on the Beagle, Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, and was impressed by what he saw.  For in spite of the fact that there were only a few basic types of plants and animals on these islands, he observed that each type took on a wide variety of forms, as if each variety had branched out from a common ancestor.  And yet, in spite of this evidence for some type of evolutionary process, Darwin still could not explain how it happened.  For years after his return from the voyage, he reflected upon his observations, and searched for an explanation.  The breakthrough came in 1838, after he read an essay by Thomas Malthus, an Anglican clergyman, on population growth.  Malthus’s essay painted a very gloomy picture of human society, which had been influenced by his observations on poverty and destitution in the cities.  Malthus argued that as human population growth outstripped the food supply, which it inevitably did, only the fittest could survive, and the others would be left to die of starvation or squalor.  Darwin applied this idea to his observations on the Galapagos Islands.  He realized that within any species there is always variation among its individual members, and that those who were best adapted to the environment would tend to live long enough to reproduce.  Just as there are a wide variety of domestic dogs and cats, created through careful selective breeding, there is a type of “natural selection” in the wild that encourages the development of specific characteristics which make a species better suited to its environment.  What Darwin had come upon was a practical mechanism that would explain not only how species change over time, but also how new species might evolve out of existing ones.  He would wait for nearly two decades before sharing his ideas in a landmark book, On the Origin of Species, in 1859, but upon its publication, the idea of evolution would take a far-reaching and permanent hold on civilization.

Darwin's Galapagos Finches: A Case Study in Evolutionary Adaptation

            The book became an instant sensation, in Europe and America - what we would call today a “runaway bestseller”.  Even liberal members of the clergy, who had been coming around to the idea that the earth was much older than the Old Testament would lead its readers to believe, and that its account of creation did not necessarily have to be taken literally, gave Darwin’s book a sympathetic reading.  But while the book did not create the firestorm of controversy, at least back then, that many of us today might have expected, it also did not, as many might believe, claim to prove the theory of evolution.  Instead, it merely gave a practical and believable account of how evolution could have happened, and for the more scientifically minded of Darwin’s age, this was good enough.  In the new age of rationalism, science, and technological progress, here was emerging an alternative story of the earth’s creation, of the origin of life, and of the emergence of humanity, that fit right in, with its natural laws, impersonal forces, and logical relationships.  And over the following decades, those mysterious monsters preserved in the fossil record, giant winged lizards, sea serpents, woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and dinosaurs, took a comfortable place in the popular imagination, as denizens who lived in a land before time. 

            But amidst the euphoria over this new, scientific explanation of life’s origins, which demonstrated to so many the victory of the rational, enlightened mind over myth and superstition, a nagging, uncomfortable question began to emerge.  If human beings were not created by God, and in fact if they were the product of impersonal laws and forces, then did they actually have a purpose for being here?  Science had removed the earth from the center of the universe, and man from the center of the creation story.  What was left?  And was there even a need to believe in God at all?  After all, the events that made up the history of the universe, and of the earth, were beginning to look like the workings of a great mechanism, like a clock, with every part moving in accordance with the physical laws that controlled it.  Was God nothing more than the “watchmaker”, building it, winding it up, and then standing back and letting it run on its own?  Did God occasionally intervene, setting things right when certain events didn’t unfold according to his liking?  And was his presence necessary to build this great mechanism in the first place?  If not, it seemed that if God existed at all, He might be nothing more than a passive observer, who played no significant role in the events of the universe whatsoever.

            The traditional creation story, the drama that gave humanity a central role in the universe, along with a purpose, was under siege, and great thinkers of the day tried to fill the void.  To restore meaning into a lifeless, mechanistic existence, they challenged the ultimate reality of that existence itself.  The German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the visible world, the world of time and space, which followed immutable laws of cause and effect, was merely phenomenon, created in large part by the minds that perceived it, and that beyond this apparent reality was something more real, something which transcended physical laws.  Other philosophers, building upon Kant’s insights, suggested that the forces of evolution were actually manifestations of a universal will, or mind, and that human beings, with their unique capabilities of intelligence, represented the culmination of this process, through which the will or universal mind could turn back upon itself with enlightened reflection.  But setting the human mind at the pinnacle of evolution, while seeming to restore a special place for mankind in the history of the world, also generated new controversies.  In the emerging science of psychology, Sigmund Freud, one of its greatest pioneers, demonstrated that the mind is a house divided, and is driven by powerful unconscious drives and desires, which often seem to set it against itself, crippling it with neuroses or compelling it to perform destructive acts.  Freud suggested that civilization - that supposed crowning achievement of human thought - actually exacerbated this internal conflict.  Primal desires: rage, sexual lust, and fear existed side by side with rational thought, and often overpowered or paralyzed it, and even directed it to anti-social ends.  Guilt brought on by internal conflict of basic desires with social conventions and morals was often the catalyst for these internal struggles.  If the human mind was the final product of evolution, then far from transcending what had come before it, the mind only seemed to perpetuate the conflicts, strivings, and struggles that had made evolution possible.

Sigmund Freud

            Nevertheless, evolution became the cornerstone of new worldviews in the nineteenth century.  Philosophers such as G. W. F. Hegel and Herbert Spencer saw the growth of civilization itself as a sort of evolutionary process, and attempted to extract a blueprint based upon it for the destiny of humanity.  At the same time, many scientists recognized, and even embraced, the harsh realities that lay beneath natural selection and survival of the fittest.  As Darwin himself observed, behind the beauty and complexity of nature existed a desperate and often brutal struggle for existence, which entailed competition, the threat of starvation, and the predation of stronger creatures upon weaker ones.  Biologists such as Ernst Haeckl saw these same processes reflected in business competition, the rivalry between nations, and even the relative success of the different races of mankind.  For Haeckl, a German, the white race represented the pinnacle of evolution in the human plane.  He, along with other scientists, attempted to give racial and ethnic prejudice, along with national chauvinism, a scientific pedigree.  In an age of industrialism and nationalism, they lent an air of legitimacy to the predatory and exploitative practices of business capitalists, and to the growing militarism of European nations, such as Germany, as expressions of “social Darwinism”.  And out of views such as these emerged a pernicious new blueprint for the advancement of civilization: eugenics, or selective breeding of human beings to produce a superior stock.  Eugenics would take many different forms in the decades that followed, with some being particularly hideous, and would even influence social policies in the United States in the early twentieth century.  A policy of sexual segregation was imposed upon certain classes of “dysgenic” people, and at one time thirty-five U.S. states had programs of compulsory sterilization targeted to genetically suspect groups such as the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, habitual criminals, and persons who suffered from epilepsy.  American immigration policy also fell under the influence of eugenics for a time, as laws were passed to limit the influx of persons who were not of “Nordic” ancestry.

            But it was in the United States that religion would finally take a stand against evolution.  Although the Catholic Church had been an early opponent, throughout the world, of the science and practice of eugenics, in America, evolutionary thinking would face its most conspicuous opposition from a different religious circle.  In its earliest days, America had been a predominantly liberal Protestant country, and took pride in its enlightened views on religious toleration, the separation of church and state, and an open and conciliatory attitude toward scientific thought.  Ironically, in these first generations, Catholics were feared, because many Protestants believed that if their numbers grew to a significant share of the population, then the laws and policies of the United States would gradually come to be dominated by conservative religious views, which might be dogmatic, intolerant, and hostile to progress.  And yet, in the following generations, among America’s Protestant denominations, a new movement had been emerging that began to play a prominent role in religion by the early twentieth century.  This was fundamentalism, which had grown as a reaction to what was seen as a liberal bias in Protestant churches, a bias which itself seemed to have been created in part by evolutionary thinking.  For many liberal theologians saw the Bible as an evolutionary document, with its earliest chapters dominated by a primitive, mythological view of the world, but maturing with the later writings of the prophets, and reaching its pinnacle of inspirational wisdom with the gospels and New Testament epistles.  This view justified, in the opinion of these theologians, a more critical interpretation of the creation account, and the story of the first generations of mankind.  In the eyes of their more orthodox critics, on the other hand, they were all too ready to abandon the belief that the world had been literally created in seven days, that the earth was only a few thousand years old, and that all species of living things had been fashioned by God, and had remained generally the same ever since.  Fundamentalists contended that the Bible, in its entirety, represented the inspired word of God, and that any view which justified believing only part of the Bible, or reinterpreting it in ways that undermined its accounts of miracles and divine acts, was a form of heresy, because there was no latitude for compromise in matters of faith.

The Roaring '20s

            The opposition of American fundamentalists to evolutionary thinking erupted into open conflict, and a public crusade, in the 1920’s.  Compulsory high school education in this country was becoming a common thing at that time, and religiously conservative parents were angered to see that their children were being taught evolution in the classroom, which to them was nothing less than a form of indoctrination into views hostile to faith.  And in the minds of these Christians, the poisonous effect of Darwin’s influence could already be seen everywhere.  This was, after all, the “Roaring Twenties”, when it seemed that the entire nation was caught up in a tidal wave of greed, vice, moral laxity, and lawlessness.  People of all walks of life were investing their own money, and borrowed money, into the booming stock market, on the hope of finding an easy path to wealth and a life of luxury.  And in this, the “Jazz Age”, young men and women publicly flouted the moral codes that had been so revered by their religious parents.  “Speak-easy’s” flourished, where thirsty patrons happily ignored the national Prohibition against alcohol, and these in turn contributed to the rise of an organized crime empire in the United States, run by flamboyant “gangsters”, such as Al Capone.  For fundamentalists the connection was clear: as the beliefs and traditions that inspired faith in the moral principles of Christianity were undermined by science – and in particular the science that questioned God’s central role in the creation of the earth, and of humanity – an inevitable consequence was a general crumbling of the ethical foundation that supported civilization.  For any who doubted them, they could point to other things that clearly had a connection with Darwinism, like the eugenics movement, the ruthless business practices of industrialists, who often defended their tactics in Darwinist terms, and the militarism of foreign nations, such as Germany, where the influence of Ernst Haeckl and others had inspired its leaders to view international politics as an evolutionary struggle for dominance.

            The focal point for America’s anti-evolution crusade became the teaching of Darwinism in public schools.  After several unsuccessful attempts to have it banned in particular states, the movement scored its first success in Tennessee, where the teaching of human evolution was made a misdemeanor, subject to a penalty of up to $500.  Nobody, including its supporters, really expected anyone to be convicted under the law.  It was a symbolic gesture, warning those who were trying to undermine the basic tenets of Christianity that here was a state where such things would not be tolerated, at least as far as children were concerned.  But for those who believed that this was a return to superstition, a backward step in the progress of civilization, the Tennessee law represented a throwing down of the gauntlet.  They rose to the challenge, encouraging a young teacher named John Scopes to defy the law, and the conflict that ensued would be called by many the trial of the century.  The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan: champion of progressive political causes, electrifying public speaker, three-time U.S. presidential candidate, renowned pacifist, and avowed enemy of any science that linked mankind to a brute ancestor.  Leading the defense was America’s most famous trial lawyer, Clarence Darrow, who had risen to national prominence as the champion of the underprivileged, and of those who dared to challenge the power of big business over the common laborer.  The irony of this great contest was that both of it principal combatants, Bryant and Darrow, had gained fame as crusaders against exploitation of the weak by the strong.  But while they had found common cause in many things, when it came to matters of religion, they were sharply divided.  For William Jennings Bryan, science was just another tool of the elite, used to justify their oppression of the less fortunate.  But for Clarence Darrow, religious lawmaking represented one of the most pernicious assaults against individual freedom, which always created more harm than good, just as Prohibition, inspired by high-minded temperance agitators, had contributed to the rise of organized crime.

Clarence Darrow and Williams Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial

            The trial, which lasted for eight days, was one of the most bizarre in American history.  It was a “show trial” in every sense of the word, covered by more than two hundred reporters from the United States and Europe, many of whom sat in a special section reserved for them in the courthouse; it was broadcast live over the radio, and filmed for newsreels that were sent out to theaters daily.  John Scopes, the alleged defendant, had never actually been arrested, and spent most of his time before the hearing giving interviews and making public speaking appearances.  And the climax of the court proceedings came when Clarence Darrow invited his opposing attorney, William Jennings Bryan, to take the stand as an expert witness, to defend the anti-evolution statute.  Darrow held the literal interpretation of the Bible up to ridicule, challenging Bryan to defend, among other things, Old Testament accounts of Eve, the first woman, being created from one of Adam’s ribs, and of the prophet Jonah spending three days and three nights inside the belly of a fish.  It made for an entertaining spectacle, and cast the fundamentalists in an embarrassing light, but in the end it did not lead to victory for Darrow and his allies.  Darrow had actually wanted Scopes to be found guilty, so that he could take the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court and challenge the constitutionality of the law.  But when the case was heard there, the Court overturned the guilty plea on a technicality, enabling it to keep the law intact.  And after the so-called “Scopes Monkey trial” did not lead to a repeal of the anti-evolution law, other states and school districts felt emboldened to pass their own versions of it.

            Although the religious opponents of evolution ultimately failed to ban its teaching in public schools, fundamentalism, as a challenge to the scientific world view, did not pass away.  Because while the proponents of science claimed that they had freed the world of dogma, superstition, and ignorance, what they never succeeded in doing was to give civilization a new destiny and purpose for mankind.  Religion, and myth, offered to every individual a reason for existence, a purpose, and an ultimate goal.  A clockwork universe offered none of these, replacing the design of a beneficent Creator with a lifeless, mechanical machine.  And while evolution seemed to restore the idea of progress to life, and perhaps even an ultimate end, it at times seemed to be an amoral end, achieved through the brute processes of competition, predation, and exploitation.  As many persons looked upon the new age of modernity, they saw confusion, a lack of moral bearings, and the products of scientific invention applied to blatantly immoral ends.  The gains bestowed upon civilization by the light of reason seemed to be more than offset by the horrors of an impersonal technology, turning human beings into factors of production, and giving the few who enjoyed real power awesome and terrifying means of repressing their subjects, and destroying their enemies.  Religious fundamentalism, rather than fading away, has remained with us to this day, and its influence is even more pervasive now than it was a hundred years ago.  It exists as a significant presence among all faiths, Christians, Moslems, and Jews alike, and has become a political force, and in some countries a military force, that has exerted itself in ways that have transformed the international landscape.  We react to the behavior of fundamentalists in other nations and cultures with horror and condescension, while having to acknowledge and contend with their powerful influence in our own.

            During its brief history, America has tried to reconcile two great forces that have defined it as a culture, and shaped it as a society.  On the one hand, there is that persistent strain of religious fundamentalism, obstinately resisting the more secular strains of civilization.  On the other hand, there has been that great example of Darwinian evolution in modern history, the capitalist, the captain of industry.  And in the 1800’s, giants would emerge who would forever link the United States with the awesome power of industrial might and “big business”, and demonstrate the unlimited rewards that come from ingenuity and personal initiative.  These “robber barons”, as they would later be called, would come to display both the glory, and the tragedy, of modern capitalism.