The Shirt-Sleeve Millionaires

5 months or so ago I developed an economic history bug. Through hours and hours of time spent in the library, I've come across a lot of great material covering a broad range of developments within the 18th and 19th centuries. Since this blog is all about the pursuit of the good, I wanted the first post to include one of the passages that I've found to be particularly striking and inspirational to me from this research. 

Most people to some degree have heard of the heroic stories of men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan. These "Prime Movers" were forces to be reckoned with, and everyone benefitted (and continues to benefit) from their products enormously. These characters are merely the tip of the iceberg though. There weren't just a few titans; there were innumerable self-made men throughout the 18th and 19th century who amassed tremendous fortunes. For many of them, you won't find libraries or universities with their namesake, but they deserve ample recognition and praise, for they are, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, among the "men who walked down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision." Today I'd like to recognize and praise the Pittsburgh shirt-sleeve millionaires.

From Herbert N. Casson's The Romance of Steel (1907): 

"Pittsburgh has about one hundred shirt-sleeve millionaires and a very few silk-hat ones. Without a single exception, the steel kings and coal barons of to-day were the barefooted boys of yesterday. In this respect no other city is as genuinely republican, as thoroughly American, as Pittsburgh. Its motto might be "from rags to riches"; and its name should be spelled--Pitt$burgh. It is a region where even yet "all men are born free and equal"--where the ladder of opportunity has rungs that reach to the bottom. It is a land of money; but more, it is a land where the average man has received a squarer deal in the game of life than he would have got anywhere else--where prizes are not bequeathed from strong fathers to feeble sons, but carried off by the "fittest" in each contest.

Pittsburghers have no pedigree. They want none. They are themselves a generation of ancestors. The few aristocratic landowning families are being bought out by the iron and steel men. No "gentlemen" emigrated to Western Pennsylvania. From first to last it was settled by plain, ordinary people, who had nothing to help them except their own efforts. Among the earlier iron kings not one had a college education. Christopher Zug and Curtis G. Hussey--two stately figures--were the sons of poor farmers. Thomas M. Howe and Joshua Rhodes were grocery-boys. Aaron French and John J. Torley were child workers in iron-mills. There is not one conspicuous exception to this rule. The greater greatness of Greater Pittsburgh is in the fact that it has been created by the rank and file of the human race. It is the extroardinary achievement of ordinary men."