Reformers Take on Industry: the Progressive Era
Throughout the rapid U.S. industrialization, or development of industry, during the nineteenth century, the government had maintained a laissez-faire, or hands-off, attitude toward the economy, allowing the big corporations to do more or less as they pleased. The top leaders of the nation's industries became so powerful most people felt they controlled the nation's economy and even the state and federal governments. To those who viewed them as crooked manipulators, the top industrial leaders were known as robber barons. To others, who credited them for the nation's prosperity and technological advances, they were the captains of industry. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, these industrialists had succeeded in creating huge monopolies (the exclusive right to produce a particular product), often by destroying their competition. Economic power was solidly in the hands of trusts—a few large corporations and business firms joined together to reduce competition and control prices. These trusts had formed through the merging of competing companies. Between 1898 and 1904, 5,300 individual companies had combined into just 318 trusts. (For more information on trusts, see Chapter 7.) Most of these large corporations were in the habit of giving gifts, usually of company stock, to key politicians in Washington, D.C., and in state governments.
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