Exclusive! How Journalists Skewered Big Business in U. S. History—and Why It Mattered at Center for Life Enrichment

Thoughtful Americans have long resented special privilege and foreign domination. For much of U. S. history, one word—monopoly–symbolized both of these perils. To combat these perils, journalists —in conjunction with jurists, government officials, social scientists, and business people—have popularized an anti-monopoly vision that has shaped law, public policy, and popular culture. This illustrated lecture (with lots of cartoons) surveys the long history of journalistic representations of big business in U S. history. Why is big business so often represented as an octopus? What about “Mr. Money Bags”—the comic figure in the popular board game “Monopoly”? Anti-monopoly is often conflated with the “big is bad” ethos identified with an 1890 law known as the Sherman Act. This is misleading. The journalistic critique of big business in U. S. history is much more capacious. In 1904, for example, journalist William Randolph Hearst ran for president on a platform that was anti-trust, but pro-municipal ownership. The journalistic indictment of big business—in cartoons, fiction, and oratory, as well as the law—offers us a window on one of the most enduring political impulses in American history. In this lecture, we will not only see how, but also why, this indictment mattered in the past, and how it can help us think more constructively about plutocracy, health care, finance, digital media platforms, and the “tech-industrial complex” of the present.

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