Monopoly is not just a board game people play for fun, monopolies became powerful and affected the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Monopolies are the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service. Basically, monopolies are firms that have a lot of market power. They greatly controlled industries and played a role in the government, such as helping president President Benjamin Harrison.
Monopolies dominated their own industries and were huge for the industrial period in the United States. One man named J.D Rockefeller used monopolies to build a huge market in whale oil with Samuel Andrews in 1862. The whale oil industry soon died out and Rockefeller went into the business of standard oil where he began to make
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An act called The Sherman Antitrust Act which got passed by Congress in 1890. The Sherman Antitrust Act authorized the Federal Government to dissolve the monopolies and give out penalties for people found guilty of trying to make monopolies. For more than a decade the Sherman Antitrust Act was rarely used against industrial monopolies and not successful. The reason why it wasn’t very successful is that the companies would find loopholes and say the act was very understandable. President William McKinley launched the trust-busting era in 1898 which started really pushing to stop monopolies. President Theodore Roosevelt then laid the groundwork for Roosevelt's attacks on monopolies and finally resulted in the success of the Act. In 1911 the Court found Standard Oil Company in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act because of its excessive restrictions on trade and it's eliminating competitors by buying them out directly and driving them out of business. The Supreme Court established a standard termed the rule of reason that said monopoly themselves are not bad and don’t go against the Sherman Antitrust Act. but the use of certain tactics to keep power is