472 Chapter 17 An Industrial Giant Emerges
supply a hard scientific substitute for Smith’s “invisi-
ble hand” as an explanation of why free competition
advanced the common good.
Yale professor William Graham Sumner some-
times used the survival-of-the-fittest analogy in teach-
ing undergraduates. “Professor,” one student asked
Sumner, “don’t you believe in any government aid to
industries?” “No!” Sumner replied, “It’s root, hog,
or die.” The student persisted: “Suppose some pro-
fessor of political science came along and took your
job away from you. Wouldn’t you be sore?” “Any
other professor is welcome to try,” Sumner answered
promptly. “If he gets my job, it is my fault. My busi-
ness is to teach the subject so well that no one can
take the job away from me.” Sumner’s argument
described what came to be known as social
Darwinism, the belief that the activities of people,
that is, their business and social relationships, were
governed by the Darwinian principle that “the fittest”
will always “survive” if allowed to exercise their
capacities without restriction.
But the fact that Americans disliked powerful gov-
ernments in general and strict regulation of the econ-
omy in particular had never meant that they objected
to all government activity in the economic sphere.
Banking laws, tariffs, internal-improvement legisla-
tion, and the granting of public land to railroads are
only the most obvious of the economic regulations
enforced in the nineteenth century by both the federal
government and the states. Americans saw no contra-
diction between government activities of this type and
the free enterprise philosophy, for such laws were
intended to release human energy and thus increase
the area in which freedom could operate. Tariffs stim-
ulated industry and created new jobs, railroad grants
opened up new regions for development, and so on.
The growth of huge industrial and financial orga-
nizations and the increasing complexity of economic
relations frightened people yet made them at the
same time greedy for more of the goods and services
the new society was turning out. To many, the great
new corporations and trusts resembled Frankenstein’s
monster—marvelous and powerful but a grave threat
to society.
To some extent public fear of the industrial giants
reflected concern about monopoly—much as some
people today worry that Walmart may drive other
retailers out of business. If Standard Oil dominated
oil refining, it might raise prices inordinately at vast
cost to consumers. Charles Francis Adams Jr.,
expressed this feeling in the 1870s: “In the minds of
the great majority, and not without reason, the idea of
any industrial combination is closely connected with
that of monopoly, and monopoly with extortion.”In his classic autobiography The Education of Henry Adams, Adams said that he was staggered by the immense machines on
display at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, such as this electricity-generating dynamo. The power of religious
faith and works of art and literature had yielded to mechanical power. His world was a thing of the past.