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Title: The Age of Big Business, A Chronicle of the Captains of Industry
Author: Burton J. Hendrick
THIS BOOK, VOLUME 39 IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES, ALLEN JOHNSON, EDITOR, WAS DONATED TO PROJECT GUTENBERG BY THE JAMES J. KELLY LIBRARY OF ST. GREGORY'S UNIVERSITY; THANKS TO ALEV AKMAN.
THE AGE OF BIG BUSINESS, A CHRONICLE OF THE CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY BY BURTON J. HENDRICK
NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & CO. LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1919
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