The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by T.J. Stiles

Still more subtle, and perhaps more profound, was a broad cultural shift as big business infused American life. An institutional, bureaucratic, managed quality entered into daily existence—what scholar Alan Trachtenberg calls the “incorporation of America,” a cultural dimension of “managerial revolution” or “visible hand” that business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. identified. More and more, the national impinged upon the local, the institutional upon the individual, the industrial upon the artisanal, the mechanical upon the natural. Even time turned to a corporate beat. Time had always varied from town to town, or even by household; the young Jay Gould, for example, had helped families determine when the sun was at its height so they could set their clocks to noon. But the sun proved inconvenient for the schedules of nation-girdling railways. In 1883, writes Trachtenberg, these “distinct private universes of time” vanished when the railroads, “by joint decision, placed the country—without act of Congress, President, or the courts—under a scheme of four ‘standard time zones.’”