CONTENTS
I. INDUSTRIAL AMERICA AT THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR
II. THE FIRST GREAT AMERICAN TRUST
III. THE EPIC OF STEEL
IV. THE TELEPHONE: AMERICA'S MOST POETICAL ACHIEVEMENT
V. THE DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC UTILITIES
VI. MAKING THE WORLD'S AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY
VII. THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE AUTOMOBILE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
THE AGE OF BIG BUSINESS
CHAPTER I. INDUSTRIAL AMERICA AT THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR
A comprehensive survey of the United States, at the end of the Civil
War, would reveal a state of society which bears little resemblance to
that of today. Almost all those commonplace fundamentals of existence,
the things that contribute to our bodily comfort while they vex us with
economic and political problems, had not yet made their appearance.
The America of Civil War days was a country without transcontinental
railroads, without telephones, without European cables, or wireless
stations, or automobiles, or electric lights, or sky-scrapers, or
million-dollar hotels, or trolley cars, or a thousand other contrivances
that today supply the conveniences and comforts of what we call our
American civilization. The cities of that period, with their unsewered
and unpaved streets, their dingy, flickering gaslights, their ambling
horse-cars, and their hideous slums, seemed appropriate settings for
the unformed social life and the rough-and-ready political methods of
American democracy. The railroads, with their fragile iron rails, their
little wheezy locomotives, their wooden bridges, their unheated coaches,
and their kerosene lamps, fairly typified the prevailing frontier
business and economic organization. But only by talking with the
business leaders of that time could we have understood the changes that
have taken place in fifty years. For the most part we speak a business
language which our fathers and grandfathers would not have comprehended.
The word "trust" had not become a part of their vocabulary; "restraint
of trade" was a phrase which only the antiquarian lawyer could
have interpreted; "interlocking directorates," "holding companies,"
"subsidiaries," "underwriting syndicates," and "community of
interest"--all this jargon of modern business would have signified
nothing to our immediate ancestors. Our nation of 1865 was a nation of
farmers, city artisans, and industrious, independent business men, and
small-scale manufacturers. Millionaires, though they were not unknown,
did not swarm all over the land. Luxury, though it had made great
progress in the latter years of the war, had not become the American
standard of well-being. The industrial story of the United States in
the last fifty years is the story of the most amazing economic
transformation that the world has ever known; a change which is fitly
typified in the evolution of the independent oil driller of western
Pennsylvania into the Standard Oil Company, and of the ancient open
air forge on the banks of the Allegheny into the United States Steel
Corporation.
