Comment by harimau777
3 years ago
This isn't necessarily an exact comparison, but looking at the list of 1934 robber barons on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
I only recognized a three of them: J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Three more I recognized universities named after them: James Duke (Duke University), Andrew Mellon (Carnegie Mellon University), Cornelius Vanderbilt (Vanderbilt University).
To the degree that I have a positive opinion of Rockefeller and Carnegie, it's because of their philanthropy rather than their industrialism or politics.
> To the degree that I have a positive opinion of Rockefeller and Carnegie, it's because of their philanthropy rather than their industrialism or politics.
I've a friend who's grandparents, in Vietnam, were quite ruthless and accumulated sizable wealth. Now, they sponsor Buddhist monks in an effort to avoid being reincarnated as cockroaches. I suspect analogous motivations for people like Rockefeller, Carnegie, or modern equivalents like Gates and Zuckerberg (even if simply a secular motivation to rehabilitate their poor reputations).
Parton just seems to be a genuinely kind human being.