The United States entered the nineteenth century as a quiet land of family farms, villages, and a few small cities clustered along the Atlantic seaboard. By the end of the century, it was on the way to becoming the mightiest industrial power in the world, with teeming cities, humming factories, and great agricultural complexes in a nation stretching from sea to sea. The Titans is the story of the men who made possible this enormous transformation.

It took intelligence, imagination, and determination to make a mark on those brawling times, but if a man was shrewd and persistent enough - and had more than a little luck - his reward could be money in quantities undreamed of by previous generations.

In the decades after the Civil War, the names to contend with in American life were those of Armour, Duke, Guggenheim, Hill, Rockefeller, and other masters of finance and industry. More influential than the nation’s elected leaders, they formed an aristocracy of wealth in a land that had taken pride in the equal rights of all its citizens. Business, as historian Allan Nevins has observed, became the field “to which the majority of Americans looked for distinction, authority, and self-expression. A whole generation pushed into it partly for money, partly for the satisfaction of successful competitive effort, partly for eminence and power.”

The ten captains of industry in this book shared, even as young men, an ability to size up a situation and shape their actions accordingly. Carnegie was seventeen when he sent out orders to untangle a railroad wreck in his employer’s absence. Ford was not yet twenty when he abandoned the idea of becoming a watchmaker “because I figured out that watches were not universal necessities, and therefore people generally would not buy them . . . I wanted to make something in quantity.” McCormick was twenty-one when he designed the reaper that brought him fame. Vanderbilt’s farsighted decision that steam was the coming thing was reached when he was twenty-two.

Few of them ever lost the capacity for instant decision. Sixty-three-year-old J. P. Morgan, when solicited for a donation to Harvard University’s new medical school, glanced for a moment at the plans unrolled on his office table. Then he stabbed down three times with his finger: “I will build that, and that, and that. Good morning, gentlemen.” One minute to spend $1 million.

Like other aristocrats, the captains of industry often abused their privileges. Their blunt and forceful methods of doing business raised storms of protest from those who were exploited in the process. Historians and journalists - and eventually legislators - of the late nineteenth century indicted many of America’s industrial titans as “robber barons.” Following generations, while still condemning the most ruthless of these men, have reached a new appreciation of their role in building industrial America and thereby bringing security, hope, and prosperity to its people.