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In March 1881, The Atlantic published "The Story of a Great Monopoly," one of the earliest pieces of progressive muckraking to run in a national, well-respected magazine--and the first exposé of the Standard Oil Trust to be taken seriously. "The issue in which the article appeared sold out seven printings, and it helped bring antitrust legislation to the forefront of national debate," notes Sage Stossel, a longtime Atlantic editor who is one of the magazine's most knowledgeable and dedicated historians.
It is no wonder that the article augured the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 -- after laying out numerous specific complaints against the biggest corporations of the day, it concludes by offering as powerful an objection against the idea of monopoly power as has ever been written:
In less than the ordinary span of a life-time, our railroads have brought upon us the worst labor disturbance, the greatest of monopolies, and the most formidable combination of money and brains that ever overshadowed a state. The time has come to face the fact that the forces of capital and industry have outgrown the forces of our government. The corporation and the trades-union have forgotten that they are the creatures of the state. Our strong men are engaged in a headlong fight for fortune, power, precedence, success. Americans as they are, they ride over the people like Juggernaut to gain their ends. The moralists have preached to them since the world began, and have failed. The common people, the nation, must take them in hand.As striking to the contemporary reader are the descriptions of chaotic labor strikes, riots, worry over food shortages, and citizens threatening to seize private property. These are elements of American history that are seldom emphasized by text books or teachers, when they are aired at all. "For a fortnight there was an American Reign of Terror," the author states, describing an 1877 labor uprising.
The people can be successful only when they are right. When monopolies succeed, the people fail; when a rich criminal escapes justice, the people are punished; when a legislature is bribed, the people are cheated. There is nobody richer than Vanderbilt except the body of citizens; no corporation more powerful than the transcontinental railroad except the corporate sovereign at Washington. The nation is the engine of the people. They must use it for their industrial life, as they used it in 1861 for their political life. The States have failed. The United States must succeed, or the people will perish.
In Philadelphia every avenue of approach to the Pennsylvania Railroad was patrolled, and the city was under a guard of six thousand armed men, with eight batteries of artillery. There were encounters between troops and voters, with loss of life, at Martinsburg, Baltimore, Pittsburg, Chicago, Reading, Buffalo, Scranton, and San Francisco. In the scene at Pittsburgh, there was every horror of revolution. Citizens and soldiers were put to flight, and the town left at the mercy of the mob. Railroad cars, depots, hotels, stores, elevators, private houses, were gutted and burned...The situation was described at this point by a leading newspaper as one of "civil war with the accompanying horrors of murder, conflagration, rapine, and pillage." These were days of greater bloodshed, more actual suffering, and wider alarm in the North than that part of the country experienced at any time during the civil war, except when Lee invaded Pennsylvania.Most of us possess an idea of the United States and its industrialization that underestimates the turmoil it caused. Among other things, a look back underscores that the turmoil due to economic change that we experience today is hardly without precedent, and is thus far relatively mild in comparison.
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