1. Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” August 31, 1910. Available online at the Obama White House Archives, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/12/06/archives-president-teddy-roosevelts-new-nationalism-speech.
2. Robert La Follette, Robert La Follette’s Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 295.
3. Walter Lippmann, Drift & Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Disease (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914; reprint Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 87.
4. Ibid., 41.
5. Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 33.
6. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909; reprint Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 192–193.
7. “Croly did not so much influence Roosevelt as read into his career an intellectual coherence which Roosevelt then adopted as his own view of things.” Christopher Lasch, “Herbert Croly’s America,” New York Review of Books, July 1, 1965.
8. Hans Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), 425.
9. La Follette, Robert La Follette’s Autobiography, 290.
10. Ibid., 292, emphasis in original.
11. Ibid., 296.
12. Ronald Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 209.
13. Thomas Frank’s The People, NO: A Brief History of Antipopulism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020) and Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) provide excellent histories of the movement and of efforts to crush it.
14. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 330–333, 340.
15. Wilson, The New Freedom, 57.
16. Ibid., 49–50.
17. The author Jack London in 1908 published a novel titled The Iron Heel, about the overthrow of the U.S. government by an oligarchy, and the imposition of political tyranny.
18. Guy Gugliotta, “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll,” New York Times, April 2, 2012.
19. One excellent exception to the confusion over the U.S. political economy of the late nineteenth century is Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
20. Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). See also Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin, 2017), 673, 748.
21. Mark Twain and Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (New York: Modern Library, 2006). On “The Revised Catechism,” see Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966). On Jay Gould, see Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (New York: Harper, 1940).
22. For origins of the term, see Richard John, “Robber Barons Redux: Antimonopoly Reconsidered,” Enterprise & Society 13, no. 1 (2012): 1–38.
23. Naomi Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1.
24. Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy, 94. Thorelli added that Standard Oil’s “relations with the railroads provide an excellent example of the monopoly-fostering effect of freight discrimination” (ibid., 91).
25. The text reads: “That messages received from any individual, company, or corporation, or from any telegraph lines connecting with this line at either of its termini, shall be impartially transmitted in the order of their reception, excepting that the dispatches of the government shall have priority.” Statutes at Large, Treaties and Proclamations of the United States of America, from December 5, 1859, to March 8, 1863, vol. 12 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1863), 42.
26. Saule Omarova, “The Merchants of Wall Street: Banking, Commerce, and Commodities,” Minnesota Law Review 98 (2013).
27. Arthur T. Hadley, Railroad Transportation—Its History and Its Laws (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885).
28. Ibid., 21.
29. Ibid., 121.
30. Ibid., 120.
31. An 1886 report by Senator Cullum’s committee detailed “an elaborate system of secret special rates, rebates, drawbacks, and concessions, to foster monopoly, to enrich favored shippers, and to prevent free competition in many lines of trade in which the item of transportation is an important factor.” The report went on to characterize the resulting “unjust discrimination between persons, places, commodities” as the “paramount evil” posed by the railroad monopolies, and held that, in the words of Hans Thorelli, the railroad “discriminations were a source of grave danger to the very existence of competitive enterprise in other industries.” In the event, the act required that all charges be “reasonable and just”; banned discriminations between localities, classes of freight, and connecting lines; said that short hauls could not cost more than long hauls; required railroads to print and post all rates; and required that railroads give at least ten days’ notice before any change in rate (Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy, 90, 153, 154).
32. The vote to approve the ICA was 219–41 in the House and 43-15 in the Senate. Scott James, Presidents, Parties, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 117. See also David K. Zucker, “The Origin and Development of the Interstate Commerce Commission and Its Impact on the Origination of Independent Regulatory Commissions in the American Legal System: A Historical Perspective,” Master’s thesis, 2016, Harvard Extension School.
33. Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 92, 132.
34. Sherman, “Trusts,” 15.
35. Ibid., 8.
36. Ibid., 6.
37. Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy, 214.
38. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 3. See also Lynn, Cornered, 162, 163.
39. Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy, 306.
40. Ibid., 308.
41. Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, 2.
42. Ibid., 16. For a nuanced view of Morgan’s role in building AT&T, see Richard John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 312.
43. La Follette, Robert La Follette’s Autobiography, 290. As detailed in a report of the congressional subcommittee in 1912, “The acts of this inner group … strike at the very vitals of potential competition in every industry that is under their protection, a condition which if permitted to continue, will render impossible all attempts to restore normal competitive conditions in the industrial world” (Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, 49).
44. Moody is quoted in Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, 17. The Morgan and Rockefeller groups even invested jointly in certain ventures, such as the New Haven system railroad (ibid., 141).
45. Ibid., 49.
46. Ibid., 50.
47. Ibid., 56.
48. Ibid., 139.
49. Gerald Berk, Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1.
50. John, Network Nation.
51. Berk, Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900–1932, 44. In a 1921 letter to Harold Laski, Brandeis wrote that the challenge was to develop “vision, wisdom and ingenuity enough to adjust our institutions to the wee size of man and thus render possible his growth and development” (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval, vol. 3 of The Age of Roosevelt [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960], 220).
52. In 1910 Congress had reinforced these rules with the Mann-Elkins Act, which banned many forms of vertical integration. One of the main advances of the Wilson administration was to begin to develop ways to use antitrust laws to achieve these ends, rather than the sorts of top-down regulatory approaches we see in the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Public Utility Commissions.
53. Berk, Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900–1932, 61–62.
54. A 1961 study of 107 judgments estimated that this policy had resulted in the compulsory licensing of 40,000 to 50,000 patents between 1941 and 1959. In all, the policy forced the sharing of perhaps more than 100,000 technological “source codes.” Generally, the licenses were free to any U.S. corporation, but the patent holder was allowed to charge foreign firms small fees. See Barry Lynn, “Estates of Mind,” Washington Monthly (July/August 2013).
55. One of the key innovations during the Wilson administration, in order to buttress the 160-acre American farm, was the regulation of agricultural markets both to prevent consolidation and to stabilize market prices. Actions included the Cotton Futures Acts of 1914 and 1916, the Grain Standards Act of 1916, the Wheat Price Guarantee Act of 1919, the Futures Trading Act of 1921, and the Grain Futures Act of 1922. It also included preparing the ground for the passage of the Packers and Stockyards Act in 1922, which gave the Department of Agriculture immense rulemaking authority over farm markets.
56. Wilson, The New Freedom, 132.
57. Croly, The Promise of American Life, 188.
58. As Brandeis put it later, in a dissent to a 1932 Supreme Court case, “There must be power in the states and the nation to remold, through experimentation, our economic practices and institutions to meet changing social and economic needs … To stay experimentation in things social and economic is a grave responsibility. Denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences to the nation.” New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262 (1932).
59. Woodrow Wilson, “Letter to Majority Leader Underwood of the House of Representatives,” October 17, 1914, in “Antitrust Legislation,” Public Service Regulation and Federal Trade Reporter, November 1, 1914, p. 1.
60. Regarding Sherman, see Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy, 180.
61. Ibid., 450, 451. See also Rudolph Peritz, Competition Policy in America: History, Rhetoric, Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 33. See also Daniel Ernst, Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 175; Edward Berman, Labor and the Sherman Act (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930).
62. Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925).
63. One pathway was an 1833 book by Thomas Hamilton, an aristocratic former soldier who was generally appalled by American ways. Hamilton’s coverage of the “workies” movement in New York was especially influential. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1833; reprint New York: Augustus Kelley, 1968), 306. See also Lewis S. Feuer, “The North American Origin of Marx’s Socialism,” Western Political Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1963): 53–67, accessed February 29, 2020, doi:10.2307/445958.
64. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky & Konecky, 1971), 193. And, further, that the per-day wages should remain the same, meaning employees earned far more per hour worked (ibid., 265).
65. Commonwealth v. Hunt, 1842 (Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, 340).
66. Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy, 147–148.
67. Kendrick Clements, The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 145.
68. John R. Brake, “A Perspective on Federal Involvement in Agricultural Credit Programs,” South Dakota Law Review 19 (1975).
69. Berk, Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900–1932, 60. See also Laura Phillips Sawyer, American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the “New Competition,” 1890–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 194–195.
70. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 424.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 324. Roosevelt, after winning the 1904 election, “immediately began to distance himself from his many African American admirers” (ibid., 331).
73. Ibid., 404.
74. On “backward race,” see ibid., 331. On “altogether inferior,” see Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), 53.
75. Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Biography of a Race, 1868–1919, 331.
76. Ibid., 510; Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 279.
77. Dick Lehr, “The Racist Legacy of Woodrow Wilson,” The Atlantic, November 27, 2015.
78. Charles Postel, Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019); Omar H. Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Timothy Thomas Fortune, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (originally published 1884) (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1970).
79. Martin Luther King Jr., “Our God Is Marching On,” Speech in Montgomery, Alabama, March 25, 1965. Available online at the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University.
80. The suffering of poor whites, before and after the Civil War, has been well documented. See Merritt, Masterless Men, 327; and Stephen V. Ash, “Poor Whites in the Occupied South, 1861–1865,” Journal of Southern History 57, no. 1 (February 1991): 39–62. That middle-class and poor white men in both the South and the North planned to organize a new political economy just for themselves was amply evident by July 4, 1875, when Frederick Douglass, in a speech in Washington, asked ruefully, “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?” (Blight, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, 557).
81. As David Levering Lewis wrote in his biography of Du Bois, after Wilson took power in 1913, “The reality in the United States, however, was first the gradual and then the accelerated expulsion and exclusion of African-Americans from the unions” (Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Biography of a Race, 1868–1919, 419). As Du Bois himself put it in 1912, “So long as labor fights for humanity, its mission is divine; but when it fights for a clique of Americans, Irish or German monopolists who have cornered or are trying to corner the market in a certain type of service … while other competent workmen starve, they deserve themselves the starvation which they plan for their darker and poorer fellows.” See Paul Moreno, Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 92.
82. Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants out of America (New York: Scribner, 2019), 208–209.
83. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Awake America,” The Crisis 14, no. 5 (September 1917). Available online through the Blackbird Archive, vol. 16, no. 2 (Fall 2017).
84. Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
85. As Richard Rothstein wrote in Color of Law, “Racial segregation in housing was not merely a project of southerners in the former slaveholding Confederacy. It was a nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders.” Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), xii. See also Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); and Alexis Madrigal, “The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood,” The Atlantic, May 22, 2014.
86. Nikole Hannah Jones, “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One,” New York Times, August 16, 2019.