In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, the American economy had been wracked by a series of economic depressions. By the dawn of the twentieth century, business was booming. In most American industries, business owners were learning the lesson of the day: Bigger is better. When the United States Steel Corporation was incorporated at a value of $1 billion in 1901, it became the world's largest corporation. Other companies followed the lead of U.S. Steel in buying up or merging with competitors to give themselves the advantage of size. Many of the companies in existence at the beginning of the twenty-first century were founded in the 1900s, including the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company (1901), the Quaker Oats Company (1901), the J. C. Penney Company (1902), the Pepsi-Cola Company (1902), Texaco (1903), the Ford Motor Company (1903), the Harley-Davidson Motor Company (1907), the Hershey Chocolate Company (1908), and the General Motors...