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Big Businesses During The Gilded Age

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From around 1870 to 1914, the U.S. went through the Gilded Age where giant corporations such as Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan & Co. sprung up. However, such big corporations hurt the average U.S. citizen by underpaying workers, being run unfairly, and allowing a small few to practically control the nation's economy. During the Progressive Era, from 1890-1920, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and other laws were implemented by President Theodore Roosevelt to put a leash on large corporations, and ultimately help the average citizen and small business owners. Big business leaders hurt the average citizen by not fairly paying workers. First of all, in the article, “The Gilded Age Statistics,” the Shmoop Editorial Team shared statistics that show that …show more content…

Competition is good for consumers. For example, if a company has to compete with another company, they will be forced to try to create a better and cheaper product than the other. If a company is a trust, and doesn’t have to compete, they will have no reason to keep their prices low, or improve the quality of their merchandise. This is because a consumer that needs a product will be forced to buy it from the monopoly even if they aren’t happy with the value or cost of it because they have no other choice. Big corporation leaders wanted to eliminate competition. In fact, Rockefeller once said “competition is a sin.” Trusts eliminate competition through rate wars, price setting, and forced consolidation. Rate wars are when one company aggressively lowers their prices, sometimes below cost, to undercut the competition and ultimately drive the competition out of business. Price setting is when a bunch of companies get together and agree not to compete with each other. Then, they all raise their prices together so consumers will be forced to pay high prices for a product. Different corporations also used different methods to force competitors to sell their businesses to them. For example, if Rockefeller wanted to buy out a competing oil refinery, he would stop providing crude oil to them from his oil rigs until they couldn't survive as a company any longer. Another example is Cornelius Vanderbilt's railroad monopoly. If Vanderbilt wanted to buy a competing railroad line, he would buy out all the land around it to block off its path, and render it useless to the current owners. That way, the owners would have no choice but to sell the railroad to him for cheap. These tactics are harmful to average citizens for more than one reason. First of all, all of these tactics eliminate

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Justin Clement APUS DBQ Big businesses controlled the economy and politics throughout 1870-1900. They were in control of the prices for certain items because they destroyed their smaller competitors until there was no competition left. They had much sway over politics and took away the people’s say. As we can see from Document A, between 1870-1899, the price for food, fuel, lighting and living decreased with the emergence of big businesses.

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One way this was established was by starting a trust and eventually running the competition out of business. By the 1890s the government was launching their own laws to find such individuals liable. The Sherman Act was introduced but for decades was not successful. This

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Even further, these robber barons would often ruthlessly eradicate competition by buying out other companies to establish monopolies through the horizontal and vertical integration of production and product.

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As the President of the United States in the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt did many things that showed his progressivism. One of the reasons that we can describe Theodore Roosevelt as being a progressive president is because of his focus to limit the power of big businesses by destroying trusts between large companies. Roosevelt believed that big business was something that needed to be regulated and believe that it was bad for the United States (Sicius 138). This was especially the case when companies began to form trusts with each other to monopolize certain industries. For example, J.P. Morgan was in the process of making a trust with other big businesses, such as the railroad industry, to drive out competition from the market.

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The economic elements of the Progressive Era revolved mainly around the trusts that had a hold of the economy, as well as the trust-busting that Roosevelt took part in at the time. Big companies started taking over the economy due to the building monopolies and Roosevelt became determined to break up the damaging trusts. For example, oil companies such as Rockefeller’s and Standard Oil had basically dominated the whole oil industry during this time by driving out smaller business and intimidating railroad industries to transport their oil. Previously mentioned companies like Rockefeller’s proposed that their trusts allowed for economic advancements such as oil management and steady jobs for men, but most trusts threatened the public interests

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This essay will generally analyze the relationship between the government and businesses, and how “Big Business” essentially took control of the Gilded Age. America’s first true big business mostly arose because of the railroads, which is fairly significant, because it essentially helped lead the development of other business barons such as, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. Pierpont Morgan who all had particularly extraordinary accomplishments in shaping our economy. Most of these men who created big businesses after the Civil War were driven by a compelling desire to become rich and influential.

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