J.P. Morgan, "Robber Baron"
Julia Moskin's restaurant review of the new Morgan Dining Room at the Morgan Library and Museum bears the facetious headline "A Power Lunch Fit for a Robber Baron."
Moskin concludes the favorable rating by recommending the lobster salad: "And a bargain at $21; you no longer have to be a robber baron to eat like one."
Moskin and the headline writer are no doubt just being cheeky - but it's quite a casual use of the knee-jerk liberal smear "robber baron" to describe the banker and financier J.P. Morgan, who not only bailed out the U.S. Treasury in 1907 but was a benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and Harvard's medical school.
Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff did the same thing in April of this year in a review of the revamped library headlined "Modernity and Light Transform a World of Robber Barons and Scholars."
Why not throw in a "captain of industry" to balance things out?
