Abstract

"Town-Born and City Bred: Anti-Monopoly in a Trans-Imperial Age"

Richard John, Columbia University (rrjohn@columbia.edu)

Anti-monopoly has been called the most important political impulse in U. S. history (Gary Gerstle) and the most influential U. S. social movement in the second half of the nineteenth century (Richard White). Yet surprisingly little is known about the anti-monopoly vanguard.
This paper takes the unconventional view that a social movement long identified with the South and West first took shape in the nation’s largest commercial centers. Beginning in the 1850s in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and other Atlantic seaboard commercial centers, shippers, wholesale merchants, and promoters lobbied state legislatures and the U. S. Congress to challenge the prerogatives of incumbent network providers (railroads, landline telegraph providers, and oil refiners). Atlantic seaboard anti-monopolists almost never endorsed the “soft money” fiat currency orthodoxy in the West and South. Yet they worked diligently to enact anti-monopoly legislation at the federal and state level: e.g. the National Telegraph Act of 1866; the Hepburn commission’s indictment of stock watering in New York state; the federal Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Most opposed high tariffs—a logical position for commercially minded cosmopolitans in a trans-imperial age.
Anti-monopoly became a convenient rallying cry for dissatisfied political partisans of various persuasions. This paper will document this point by considering the careers of four prominent anti-monopolists: Henry O’Rielly, Ignatius Donnelly, Simon Sterne, and Francis B. Thurber. Each had roots in a commercial metropolis; none was primarily a farmer or working man.
This paper is drawn from my forthcoming history of U. S. anti-monopoly thought and practice that is currently entitled “Bad Business: How Monopoly has Imperiled America from the War of Independence to Big Tech.”