Monopolies and the People

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, America watched in alarm as a handful of men accumulated power unprecedented in the nation's history. Railroads, steel, oil, and sugar, entire industries fell under the control of trusts that set prices, crushed competitors, and bent politicians to their will. Charles Whiting Baker wrote this book for readers who sensed something was deeply wrong with the economy but wanted to understand why, not merely rage at it. Baker approaches the monopoly question with a reformer 's passion and a journalist's precision. He defines his terms, traces the legal and economic mechanisms by which monopolies form, and honestly confronts the remedies being debated in courtrooms, legislatures, and newspapers. He gives space to defenders of corporate consolidation and critics alike, seeking not to inflame but to clarify. The result is a work that captures a pivotal American anxiety, one that would soon find expression in the Sherman Antitrust Act and the progressive movement itself. For readers interested in the roots of American economic policy, the Gilded Age, or the eternal tension between corporate power and democratic self-governance, this book offers a window into how an educated person of the 1890s made sense of concentrated wealth.