American Ambivalence to Big Business 471covered an entire block and employed 2,000 persons.
John Wanamaker in Philadelphia and Marshall Field
in Chicago headed similar establishments by the
1880s, and there were others. These department
stores advertised heavily, stressing low prices, efficient
service, and money-back guarantees. High volume
made for large profits. Here is how one of Field’s
biographers described his methods:
His was a one-price store, with the price plainly
marked on the merchandise. Goods were not mis-
represented, and a reputation for quality merchan-
dise and for fair and honest dealing was built up....
Courtesy toward customers was an unfailing rule.Rural Free Delivery Mailat
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American Ambivalence to Big Business
The expansion of industry and its concentration in
fewer and fewer hands changed the way many people
felt about the role of government in economic and
social affairs. On the one hand, they professed to believe
WatchtheVideostrongly in a government policy of noninterference, or
laissez-faire. “‘Things regulate themselves’... means,
of course, that God regulates them by his general laws,”
Professor Francis Bowen of Harvard wrote in his
American Political Economy(1870).
Certain intellectual currents encouraged this
type of thinking. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of
Specieswas published in 1859, and by the 1870s his
theory of evolution was beginning to influence opin-
ion in the United States. That nature had ordained a
kind of inevitable progress, governed by the natural
selection of those individual organisms best adapted
to survive in a particular environment, seemed emi-
nently reasonable to most Americans, for it fitted
well with their own experiences. “Let the buyer
beware; that covers the whole business,” the sugar
magnate Henry O. Havemeyer explained to an inves-
tigating committee. “You cannot wet-nurse people
from the time they are born until the time they die.
They have to wade and get stuck, and that is the way
men are educated.”
This reasoning was similar to that of the classical
economists and was thus at least as old as Adam
Smith’sWealth of Nations(1776). But it appeared toThe Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina was built by George Vanderbilt, grandson of “The Commodore.” Over 1,000 laborers
worked on the mansion. With 250 rooms and 175,000 square feet, the Biltmore is the largest privately built home in the United States.
Critics found the mansion ostentatious and offensive.