THE ARGUMENT
The second industrial revolution of the mid- to late nineteenth century produced a dazzling variety of transformative technologies, of which the most important were the electric motor and the internal combustion engine. The Motor Age saw the rise of giant corporations and powerful investment banks. In response to the second industrial economy, some Americans sought to tame and use the new concentrations of industrial might and financial power, while others feared them and wanted to break them up. America’s political institutions and policies grew increasingly misaligned.
Polity and economy were finally realigned during the cataclysm of the Great Depression and World War II by the New Deal. By the 1970s, however, the American economy faced growing foreign competition, slowing growth, and high inflation. The crises of the 1970s and 1980s inspired a Jeffersonian backlash against the Hamiltonian institutions of the New Deal: the Great Dismantling.