Richard John

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

2022 Mexico City

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: Historical writing on anti-monopoly thought in the United States has been re-invigorated by the recent publication of two books by prominent journalists: Barry Lynn’s Liberty from All Masters and Matt Stoller’s Goliath. Each regard anti-monopoly as more-or-less synonymous with what might call the “anti-bigness” critique, a critique long associated with the Democratic party. In 2013, BHC regular Kenneth Lipartito published an essay on the “antimonopoly tradition” that reached a broadly similar conclusion. My paper reconstructs a related, yet quite distinct, anti-monopoly vision: the moral critique of the “liquor trust” that was developed with great sophistication by the late-nineteenth-century women’s rights reformer Francis Willard. Willard was no Democrat—yet in a series of essays that she published in the Union Signal, she articulated a critique of what she called the “liquor trust.” Willard’s critique emphasized the close relationship between whiskey distillers and the federal government— a byproduct of reliance of the U. S. treasury on a tax on distilled liquor. This critique can also be followed by consulting the publications of the Prohibition party—including its detailed party platforms—as well as a classic monograph on the late nineteenth-century Anti-Saloon League by former BHC president Austin Kerr. The recent publication by political scientist Lawrence Shrad Mark of Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition puts events in the United States in a global perspective. My paper contributes to this literature—making it part of the “transnational turn” in business history. It is drawn from my forthcoming history of anti-monopoly thought in the United States from the 1760s to the 1950s that is tentatively entitled “Bad Business: How Monopoly Imperiled America from the Boston Tea Party to Big Tech.”

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

Abstract: Social theorists have for over half a century posited that the United States evolved at some point in the mid-twentieth century from an industrial to a post-industrial stage. Perhaps the most influential theorist of “post-industrial society” was the sociologist Daniel Bell. Bell famously posited in Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) that in recent decades the United States had shifted from an industrial society (in which economic activity had been organized around games against fabricated nature) into a post-industrial society (in which economic activity took the form of games between people). This much is well known. What is less well known (and which was first documented by Howard Brick in his monograph by Bell) is that Bell had in the 1940s written a 250-page manuscript on the “monopoly state” in which he prefigured several of the arguments that he would later advance in Post-Industrial Society. Bell’s manuscript grew out of his editorship at New Leader—a socialist newspaper in which he wrote extensively on anti-monopoly themes during the Second World War (abetted in part by U. S. government officials eager to fight corruption). Among the many intriguing features of this manuscript is its historical analysis of the evolution of anti-monopoly thought. My paper uses Bell’s manuscript (and his New Leader editorials) as a springboard to consider the shifting meaning of anti-monopoly in 20th century U. S social thought; it is derived from my forthcoming book on U. S. anti-monopoly thought and practice, tentatively entitled “Exclusive: How Monopoly Imperiled America from the Boston Tea Party to Big Tech.”

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: Historical writing on government-business relations in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century has never entirely freed itself from the Manichean business-versus-the-people duality that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., popularized in his three-volume history of the “Age of Roosevelt” (1958-1960). Schlesinger’s trilogy was so artfully written, and so intuitively plausible to the rising generation of historians—many of whom shared his fervent admiration for Franklin Roosevelt and his “New Deal”—that its limitations have often been overlooked. My paper proposes a different approach to government-business relations in this period. By honing in on the five-year tenure of Thurman Arnold as head of the antitrust division in the U. S. justice department (1938-1943), it challenges three common assumptions. First, it elongates the “Age of Roosevelt” beyond 1937, Schlesinger’s cut-off. Much that was most distinctive in Roosevelt’s long presidency did not emerge until after Schlesinger abandoned the topic. Second, it shows how, one prominent “New Dealer” vigorously championed “free enterprise”—a concept often linked with Roosevelt’s opponents. And, third, it reconstructs the public career of a public intellectual-turned-litigator that did much to establish the foundation for the post-Second World War antitrust establishment. Arnold’s tenure in the U. S. Justice Department has received less attention than its significance warrants. In part, this is because he fits so uneasily into the “Age of Roosevelt” framework that would be refined by historians influenced by Schlesinger’s synthesis, among them Ellis Hawley and Alan Brinkley. And in part it is because his extraordinarily rich collection of personal papers housed in a relatively remote archive in Laramie. Wyoming. This paper, based on this archive, shows how Arnold’s distinctive vision of the U. S. political economy—which was at once pro-business, pro-regulation, and pro-consumer—provides a new window on the U. S. political economy in the opening years of the “American Century”

2026 London

Abstract: 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.”