At the height of his powers, Jay Gould was known by many names, few of them flattering. People called him the Skunk of Wall Street, the Napoleon of Finance, and Mephistopheles himself. Gould, alongside rivals such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller, was a captain of industry—or, as they would all come to be known, a robber baron.
These men were stupendously powerful, and ruthlessly devoted to the perpetuation of their own wealth and influence. They battled one another for control of America’s railways. They hoarded gold, manipulated markets, and exploited workers. They bribed journalists to win favorable coverage and, when that didn’t work, threatened the writers and editors who displeased them.
These threats carried weight. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil could crush a newspaper by pulling advertising if it didn’t like what it saw. Eventually Gould and Rockefeller bought or otherwise invested in newspapers, in an attempt to exert greater influence over how they were covered. Gould even bought a majority interest in Western Union, which gave him power to control the flow of vital information.
Even so, muckrakers such as Ida Tarbell took on Standard Oil. Cartoonists such as Thomas Nast and Joseph Keppler lampooned the unconstrained power of the industrialists and the corruption of Tammany Hall and its leader, William “Boss” Tweed. Tweed was fixated on the political cartoons that mocked him. “I don’t care so much what the newspapers write about me—my constituents can’t read,” he said. “But, damn it, they can see pictures.”
The brave few who stood up to the magnates of the Gilded Age came to mind this month, when Ann Telnaes, a Washington Post cartoonist, resigned over the paper’s refusal to publish a cartoon in which she skewered today’s titans of industry—Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post, among them. After resigning, Telnaes posted a rough sketch of the cartoon on Substack, and The Atlantic is publishing it here with her permission. It shows Bezos and other tech and media giants (along with Mickey Mouse, representing his owner) kneeling and prostrating before a colossal Donald Trump. Telnaes, in explaining her departure, wrote that there have been “instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary.”
Telnaes told me that she didn’t see her resignation as courageous, merely necessary. “When a newspaper decides to turn its head away from holding government and powerful people accountable, it threatens a free press and, by extension, democracy,” she said.
David Shipley, the newspaper’s Opinions editor, has said he spiked the cartoon because he wanted to avoid “repetition” with columns that the section had published or assigned. His reasoning was unpersuasive. There have been numerous signs that Bezos, who successfully stewarded the Post through its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” years, has shifted his position on Trump. Once a champion of journalists who refuse to be intimidated by bullies, Bezos is now behaving in a more accommodating way. Last fall, he killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris days before the election. The day after the election, he tweeted “big congratulations” to Trump, who has vowed to imprison Americans who say or write things he doesn’t like. Bezos then traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump and Elon Musk—and had Amazon pledge $1 million to Trump’s lavishly oversubscribed inauguration fund.
The cartoon I first thought of when I read about Telnaes’s resignation was Joseph Keppler’s 1889 drawing “The Bosses of the Senate,” in which bloated monopolists totter into the Senate chamber, each top-hatted and bearing the name of his own special interest: Standard Oil Trust, Sugar Trust, Copper Trust, Coal, and so on. The cartoon was more than an ephemeral jab. Alongside journalistic investigations into these same powerful interests, “The Bosses of the Senate” helped citizens see in the clearest possible terms how the powerful put themselves and their fortunes ahead of the public good.
The suppression of her cartoon has become a symbol of spinelessness—of a once-intrepid American newspaper now too afraid to lampoon the richest men on Earth for their obsequiousness. Sycophancy has a kind of momentum. Like any form of groupthink, it is part conformity, part self-preservation. The first person to grovel is undignified, but each subsequent act of cowardice allows the next person to acquiesce more easily.
Trump promises to punish people for disagreeing with him. Lately, he’s found that such threats are sufficient to bring many of his perceived enemies in line. This was certainly the case when the leaders at Disney rolled over after Trump sued ABC for alleged defamation by George Stephanopoulos, in a case that First Amendment lawyers widely believed Disney would have won. This is one way that institutions fail: not because they are forced into submission, but because people in positions of power collapse all on their own.
Like the robber barons who preceded them, Musk and Zuckerberg seem less interested in the public good than in their own personal enrichment. Musk, in particular, has built a platform designed to advance his political goals and discredit his opponents. But Bezos, too, has gone so far as to write a column in his own newspaper blaming its journalists for public distrust in them. Somehow, he managed to leave out any mention of Trump’s years-long campaign to cast them as “enemies of the people.”
Plenty of Americans can still see all of this quite clearly— those who believe in truth, and who know that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are God-given rights, not granted to us by the government, or Elon Musk, or anyone else, but rights that we are born with, and that many of our fellow Americans have died for.
Sycophancy, as we see, has momentum, but so too does courage. Ida Tarbell, in her investigation of Standard Oil, documented a pattern of bribery, fraud, and monopolistic business practices. She described a culture in which “business is war” and “morals have nothing to do with its practice.” But she also implored her fellow citizens: “What are we going to do about it? For it is our business. We, the people of the United States, and nobody else, must cure whatever is wrong in the industrial situation.”
There is much talk of the institutions that protect democracy, and how crucial they are to the American project. But those institutions work only because of the individuals who make them work. For every powerful person who capitulates, there are among us many more who see the world as Tarbell did, and as Telnaes does, and are willing to act on their principles.
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