On the Fact that Historians Always Seem to Conflate the Crony-Capitalistic and Vote-Buying Political Entrepreneurs Such as Collins, Gould, Fulton, and Villard with the Market Entrepreneurs Such as Hill, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Schwab and Attempt to Suggest that They Were All Evil

  This is one of the most flagrant examples of laziness and bias in all of academia. The fact of the matter is that the latter group of men, while surely not perfect, created hundreds of thousands of jobs and brought down the cost of living for pretty much every American AND they did it without government assistance (in the form of forced monopolies, subsidies, etc.). I mean, I understand that these court historians (folks such as Schlesinger and Kearns-Goodwin) truly and sincerely believe that all of America's heroes have been politicians (it's how they're wired) but you've got to be at least a little bit fair.