Having survived the many hardships of the 19th century -
including a wrenching Civil War at mid-century and, in the last decade,
economic depression and labor unrest in both city and countryside - Americans
breathed a sigh of relief in the new century. For the most part, the first 10
years of the 20th century were a time of prosperity. The Cake Walk was the
fashionable dance, prepared foods such as dressed beef and tinned ham were
making their appearance in markets, and, three years into the new century,
Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company. As the decade progressed, the
automobile began to reach a mass audience, as did electricity, radio, and the
telephone - all of them inventions and discoveries that would simultaneously
shrink distance and transform society. Yet even as the American people gazed in
wonder at the various technological achievements they associated with the rise
of Big Business, they found themselves uneasy at what scholar Alan Trachtenberg
has characterized as the rapid "Incorporation of America." Indeed,
the ascendancy of large corporations to economic, political, and even cultural
dominance would be one of the defining themes of the century itself.
Corporations were vigorously swallowing up not only their smaller competitors
but each other as well. Between 1897 and 1904, the so-called Great Merger
Movement created companies of almost undreamed of size and scale. In the early
1890s, for example, it was rare for a corporation to be worth more than ten
million dollars. A decade later, almost 200 corporations were capitalized at
that value. The top one percent of companies employed more than a quarter of
all workers in the country. If Americans hadn't known it before, they knew it
now: This was the age of Big Business.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the symbol of power for the age
was not an industrialist, but the financier J. P. Morgan. Huge financial
resources were needed to fund huge companies, and often those in charge of the
banks became rulers over the new empires. Morgan had twice been instrumental in
national efforts to recover from or avert financial panics, first in 1893 and
again in 1907. Moreover, "the House of Morgan," as the banking firm
of J. P. Morgan and Company was known, played a crucial role in the
reorganization of the nation's railroads. Morgan himself became the effective
head of the most gargantuan of the new "trusts" - U.S. Steel
Corporation, which controlled more than 60 percent of all American production
of that critical metal.
Faced with this concentration of power, Americans grew
increasingly ambivalent about the cost of the prosperity and efficiency that
big corporations promised.
(National Geographic: ‘The 20th Century’)
