Match the following words from the article with their definitions

a. dedication outstanding

b. eminent give away without feeling sorry

c. appreciate value high

d. have no inkling single-mindedness

e. sacrifice disappointment

f. refine attract each other

g. escalate have no idea

h. gravitate become worse

i. letdown purify

2. Explain the meaning of the following phrase.

“My parents didn’t have nickels to rub together”.

Decide whether the following statements are true or false.

1. The study took five years, analyzed 120 people in six fields, and was directed by the University of Chicago.

a. true b. false

2. The results of the study seem to prove that high achievement in various fields results from

a. great teachers or coaches at a crucial phase of development

b. unusual natural talents or gifts present at birth

3. The study also shows that extremely successful people.

a. shared much the same background and phases of development

b. cannot be categorized one way or another

4. The article ends with Bloom's conviction that

a. "genius will win out," regardless of outside forces

b. the human potential for success is enormous and largely untapped

4. Using phrases or sentences, outline the "three distinct stages of develop­ment" of the high achiever.

Comment on the title and summarize the article.

For discussion

- This study and its published results are several years old. Does this invalidate the findings, in your opinion? Why or why not?

- Assuming that Bloom's conclusions are valid, what meaning does this study have for you? For children growing up in families everywhere?

■ 4.7 F. Blessed Barons

Rapacious? Sure. But 19th century titans Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan set the stage for the empire builders of the 20th

By RON CHERNOW

Staring out from their photographs, they are the archetypal tycoons: one a steely-eyed Scot with a spade-shaped white beard; another a craggy, Ichabod Crane look-alike; the third a fat cat in striped pants with a watch chain strung across an ample paunch.

Today they have the look of fossilized reactionaries, but these turn-of-the-century titans were men who lived in boom­ing, anarchic times and thrived on them. The Gilded Age was a turbulent period of unfettered capitalism and unfathomable wealth for them and their peers—an environment free of income tax, meddling regula­tors and other curbs on the ani­mal spirits of freewheeling en­trepreneurs. Yet these febrile decades, forever decried as the era of the robber barons, forged the tremendous engine of economic growth that pro­pelled the country from rural isolationism in the 19th century to world industrial leadership in the 20th.

Three men—Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J. Pierpont Morgan—per­sonified this sweeping turn-of-the-century transformation. Imbued with all the greed, guile and enterprise of the age, they exhibited a bullish faith in America's future de­spite the depressions, strikes and financial panics that punctu­ated these tumul­tuous years. In their different ways, each dealt a mortal blow to the small-scale economy of the ear­ly republic, foster­ing vast industries that forever altered the size and scope of the nation's business.

In crafting the first major multinational corpora­tion, Standard Oil, Rockefeller (1839-1937) provided a sneak preview of the 20th century. At his zenith, he refined, distrib­uted and marketed nearly 90% of America's oil. The unlikely offspring of a raffish snake-oil salesman and a strict Baptist mother, Rockefeller grew up in several rustic hamlets in upstate New York and Ohio. He began his career as an assistant book­keeper in a Cleveland, Ohio, commodity-brokerage house in 1855 and invested in his first re­finery during the Civil War.

When he co-founded Stan­dard in 1870, the oil fields of western Pennsylvania—the heart of the new industry-were in a chaotic state as gluts dragged down prices below production costs. Rockefeller then began to employ the tac­tics that made him a legend. Imposing his own granite dis­cipline on the industry, he bought up rivals, modernized plants and organized the oil industry on an enduring basis.

Never the curmudgeon of myth, Rockefeller had a droll, genial personality that masked supreme cunning and formida­ble self-control. It is certainly true that he was not the least bit squeamish about tough tac­tics. He colluded with railroads to gain preferential freight rates, secretly owned rivals, bribed state legislators and en­gaged in industrial espionage. From Cleveland, he rolled up one refining center after an­other until his control was ab­solute. He was still in his 30s, the boy wonder of American business. At the same time, he was a devout Baptist with a ministerial air, who professed to have no less a business ex­pert than the Lord on his side.

Rockefeller believed in a new economic order that he dubbed "cooperation." Presi­dent Theodore Roosevelt and his trustbusters had another word for it—monopoly—and the Lord proved no help to Rocke­feller against T.R. Rockefeller's tough tactics forced America to define the limits of corporate behavior. Since Rockefeller managed to figure out every conceivable anticompetitive practice, the authors of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 simply had to study his career to draw up a reform agenda.

In the end, Rockefeller amassed a fortune that beg­gared description. When his net worth peaked at $900 mil­lion in 1913, it was equivalent to more than 2% of the gross national product; such a share today would be worth $190 billion, or nearly three times as much as Bill Gates' wealth.

Carnegie (1835-1919), the son of a master weaver in Dunfermline, Scotland, saw his boyhood paradise torn asunder when his father's skills were rendered obsolete by the pow­er loom. The Carnegies had to emigrate to the foul Pittsburgh, Pa., slums when Andrew was 12. Quick-witted, shrewd and resilient, he survived a Dickensian adolescence that included working as a bobbin boy in a textile mill.

His first breakthrough came when he landed a job as secretary and telegrapher to

Tom Scott, a powerful overlord of the Pennsylvania Railroad. At 23 Carnegie headed Pennsy's Pittsburgh division and began to rake in a small fortune from outside invest­ments ranging from oil to iron bridges. When he was 33, the rich young man privately lec­tured himself that his contin­ued pursuit of wealth "must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery." Yet he couldn't abandon the money chase. "Put all your eggs into one basket," Carnegie once ad­vised, "and then watch that basket." For him that basket brimmed with steel. Fiercely competitive, obsessed with innovation and efficiency - he would unhesitatingly scrap a relatively new plant to erect a more mod­ern one—Carnegie imported the Bessemer forced-air steel process to America. Such innovation per­mitted him to reduce the price of rails—the product that ini­tially drove the industry—from $160 a ton in 1875 to $17 by 1900. His steel furnished the sinews of America's burgeon­ing towns and factories.

A prolific writer and autodidact who authored eight books and 70 magazine arti­cles, Carnegie was a voluble, if sometimes naive, adherent of the Victorian faith in man­kind's progress. His quixotic ideals often clashed, however, with the brute realities of his steel mills, where men toiled 12-hour days, seven days a week. If Carnegie fancied himself the friend of the workingman, he had to face the ul­timate comeuppance in 1892 when his associate Henry Clay Frick brutally suppressed striking workers in Home­stead, Pa., in the bloodiest clash in U.S. labor history.

After selling his empire to J.P. Morgan in 1901 to form the centerpiece of the new behe­moth, U.S. Steel, Carnegie de­voted himself to good deeds. A prodigious philanthropist, he created 2,800 free libraries worldwide. "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," he de­clared bluntly. Like Rocke­feller, Carnegie endowed large corporate foundations with elastic charters that took on an autonomous existence. At his death he had disbursed almost his entire $350 million fortune.

If Rockefeller and Car­negie built the industrial age, then Morgan (1837-1913) fi­nanced it. The most imposing personage ever to bestride Wall Street—his nickname was Jupiter—Morgan had a thun­derclap voice, a ferocious glare and a grotesquely disfigured red nose that, he once ruefully joked, had become "part of the American business structure." Where Rockefeller and Car­negie endured hardscrabble boyhoods, Morgan came from a well-to-do Hartford, Conn., family, and his appetite for bosomy women, enormous yachts (his 300-ft. Corsair lent him a piratical image) and ex­quisite art was legendary.

After studying in Switzer­land and Germany, the cosmopolitan young Morgan arrived on Wall Street in 1857, serving as agent for his father Junius Spencer Mor­gan, who had taken over a London merchant bank. Though Pierpont participated in refinancing the Civil War debt in the 1870s, he acquired true imperial status in under­writing America's railroads.

Morgan issued stocks and bonds for railroads (think of them as you would software companies today), brokered deals among them and domi­nated their boards. He recapi­talized so many bankrupt rail­roads—Morganized them, as wits said-that by the 1890s he controlled one-sixth of Ameri­ca's railway system.

Like Rockefeller, Morgan scorned competition as waste­ful and ran afoul of federal trustbusters who broke up his railroad holding company, Northern Securities, in the ear­ly 1900s. The apex of Morgan's power came in 1901 with the creation of U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. This was followed by International Harvester, the farm-equipment trust, and the International Mercantile Marine, the North Atlantic shipping cartel. In fact, Morgan presided over so many large-scale industrial consolida­tions that he recast the banker's role from that of handmaiden to master of industry.

Between 1836 and 1914, the U.S. lacked a central bank; Morgan stepped boldly, some­times magnificently, into that breach. When gold reserves backing the country's legal tender dipped perilously low in 1895, he masterminded a bond issue in New York and London that replenished the gold stock—one of many acts he performed that preserved America's credit abroad and evinced a new financial matu­rity that won the confidence of foreign investors.

During the 1907 Panic on Wall Street, an aging Morgan mobilized the city's bankers in his solemnly ornate library and got them to commit money to a rescue fund that ended the bank runs convulsing the city. It was the last hurrah for a self-regulated financial system: Morgan's dazzling improvisa­tion proved the urgent need for a central bank, setting the stage for the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.

Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan were not the only rob­ber barons, of course. Edward H. Harriman fought Morgan for control of the railroads. Andrew and Richard Mellon founded four major compa­nies, including Alcoa. But the scale on which Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan operated was unprecedented, paving the way for a world of global companies and capital flows. And their money built a plat­form for philanthropy that has grown every bit as much as their corporations.

Ron Chernow is the author of Titan: The Life of John D. Rock­efeller Sr. He has also written a biography of J.P. Morgan

Culture

T.R. – President Theodore Roosevelt

Vocabulary

curb – an influence which helps to control or limit sth (+on); the edge of the part of a road where people can walk; curb (v) to control or limit sth in order to prevent it from having a harmful effect

imbue sb with – (usually passive) to make someone feel an emotion very strongly

freight – goods carried by ship, train etc; freight(v); freight liner, freight train

loom - to appear as a large , unclear shape, especially in a threatening way; if a problem looms , it is likely to happen very soon: loom large – to seem important, worrying, and difficult to avoid

endow– to give a college, hospital etc a large sum of money that will provide it with an income; be endowed with – to naturally have a good feature or quality; endowment (n)

replenish – to fill sth again or put new supplies into sth

evince – to show a feeling or quality very clearly in what you say or do

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