Bid rigging produced extraordinary margins: in the late 1890s the companies collected $345–420 per ton of armor (a compromise after the Russia–Bethlehem embarrassment) against production costs of perhaps $150. With that kind of money at stake, what patriot could pass up the chance to defraud his fellow citizens?

Tarbell especially romanticized—men whose lives ran “swift and ruddy and joyous . . . until a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.” But the hard fact was that with two or three exceptions, the region’s refiners were among the least efficient of all. As production technology shifted to favor

Carnegie insisted on keeping salaries low, since the partners stood to become wealthy through their shareholdings. (The exception was Bill Jones. He didn’t want stock—he claimed to be a simple man—but felt he deserved to be the highest-paid superintendent in the industry. He asked for $20,000 a year, but said he would settle for $15,000. Carnegie,

With a huge war chest and no public security holders, Rockefeller could fight a no-quarter war for as long as Scott and Potts chose to bleed. Characteristically, he kept the war very focused. As A. J. Cassatt, a later Pennsylvania president, told a House committee, “They simply insisted that they could not make any arrangement with us for the

In any case, it is especially misleading to suggest that common law provided clear guidelines for settling novel issues in the United States. When the Sherman antitrust legislation was passed in 1890, everyone agreed that it incorporated the common law, but it took twenty years of split U.S. Supreme Court decisions, usually registered in strikingly

New York farmers and grain merchants were the big losers, but the chances of Congress requiring the roads to raise rates from the west were approximately zero.* What farmers did care about, on the other hand, was rate volatility, since the perennial price wars frequently caused a violent seesawing of tariffs. The Eastern Traffic Association, the

The charade was ended in 1892 by incorporating as a New Jersey holding company and replacing the trust certificates with Standard of New Jersey stock.

By the 1890s train speeds were at least as fast as they are now, and there were a host of “express” companies that handled the shipping from a merchant’s loading bay through the rail network to the customer’s front door, through networks of local contractors managed by telegraph. In most parts of the country, people could count on thirty-day or

1880, when sales soared past the 500,000 mark and Singer suddenly found himself in replacement-parts hell. At his company’s rate of growth, the world couldn’t supply the craftsmen to keep up with his service and repair requirements. Other companies, like McCormick and the Ball Glass Co., faced up to their problems at about the same time as Singer,