these were strengthened by a process of positive
feedback, based on the virtuous circle.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, all white males,
though
not women or blacks, could vote in the United
States. Economic institutions became more inclusive—for
example, with the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862
(
this page
), which made frontier land available to potential
settlers rather than allocating these lands to political elites.
But just as in Britain, challenges to inclusive institutions
were never entirely absent. The end of the U.S. Civil War
initiated a rapid spurt of economic growth in the North. As
railways, industry, and commerce expanded, a few people
made vast fortunes. Emboldened by their economic
success, these men
and their companies became
increasingly unscrupulous. They were called the Robber
Barons because of their hard-nosed business practices
aimed at consolidating monopolies and preventing any
potential competitor from entering the market or doing
business on an equal footing. One of the most notorious of
these was Cornelius Vanderbilt,
who famously remarked,
“What do I care about the Law? Hain’t I got the power?”
Another was John D. Rockefeller, who started the
Standard Oil Company in 1870. He quickly eliminated
rivals in Cleveland and attempted to monopolize the
transportation and retailing of oil and oil products. By 1882
he had created a massive monopoly—in the language of
the day, a trust. By 1890 Standard Oil controlled 88 percent
of the refined oil flows in the United States, and Rockefeller
became the world’s first billionaire in 1916. Contemporary
cartoons depict Standard Oil as an octopus wrapping itself
around not just the oil industry but also Capitol Hill.
Almost as infamous
was John Pierpont Morgan, the
founder of the modern banking conglomerate J.P. Morgan,
which later, after many mergers over decades, eventually
became JPMorgan Chase. Along with Andrew Carnegie,
Morgan founded the U.S. Steel Company in 1901, the first
corporation with a capitalized value of more than $1 billion
and by far the largest steel corporation in the world. In the
1890s, large trusts began to emerge in nearly every sector
of the economy, and many of them controlled more than 70
percent of the market in their sector. These included
several household names,
such as Du Pont, Eastman
Kodak, and International Harvester. Historically the United
States, at least the northern and midwestern United States,
had relatively competitive markets and had been more
egalitarian than other parts of the country, particularly the
South.
But during this period, competition gave way to
monopoly, and wealth inequality rapidly increased.
The pluralistic U.S. political system already empowered
a broad segment of society that could stand up against
such encroachments. Those who were the victims of the
monopolistic practices of the Robber Barons, or who
objected to their unscrupulous
domination of their
industries, began to organize against them. They formed
the Populist and then subsequently the Progressive
movements.
The Populist movement emerged out of a long-running
agrarian crisis, which afflicted the Midwest from the late
1860s onward. The National Grange of the Order of
Patrons
of Husbandry, known as the Grangers, was
founded in 1867 and began to mobilize farmers against
unfair and discriminatory business practices. In 1873 and
1874, the Grangers won control of eleven midwestern state
legislatures, and rural discontent culminated in the
formation of the People’s Party in 1892, which got 8.5
percent of the popular vote in the 1892 presidential
election. In the next two elections,
the Populists fell in
behind the two unsuccessful Democratic campaigns by
William Jennings Bryan, who made many of their issues his
own. Grass-roots opposition to the spread of the trusts had
now organized to try to counteract the influence that
Rockefeller and other Robber Barons were exerting over
national politics.
These political movements slowly began to have an
impact
on political attitudes and then on legislation,
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