Talking Politics

Gary Gerstle talks about the journalist who brought down a business empire, when Ida Tarbell went after the power of John D Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Corporation at the start of the twentieth century. Could anyone do the same to Facebook or Amazon today?Talking Points: America’s foundational myth is about rebelling against monopolies: a monopoly of power in the hands of the King. How does an anti-monopolistic society get dominated by monopolies?Industrialization and the free economic environment after the Civil War created different conditions. The Supreme Court interpreted the 14th amendment to mean that corporations are individuals and therefore protected by the Bill of Rights.Resistance to monopolies reached a peak during the first Gilded Age.Some of the resistance was political, but some of it was journalistic.Journalists known as ‘muckrakers’ sought to expose the practices that produced extraordinary power.The reports of journalist Ida Tarbell ultimately led to the breakup of S