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American Political Economy

The Rise of US Hegemony 1900-1970

• POST CIVIL WAR
- America grew from a dominant agrarian nation into the world’s leading industrial power
- Production was increasingly shifting to large mills and factories
- Enormous amounts of money were being made, but it was increasingly concentrated in fewer hands
- A new society dominated by large manufacturing concerns and industrial wage earners
- New generation of economic ideology which was called “laissez faire”, referring to the non-intervention of government in economic life
- SOCIAL DARWINISM � the idea of the “survival of the fittest”, those that prosper economically were the fit, while the socially and economic weak were left to die
- America’s economic growth came with a price --growing inequalities between a tiny group of super rich industrialists and a mass of increasingly degraded and impoverished workers. Social Darwinism provided a moral justification for harsh working conditions and growing economic inequality
- GOSPEL OF WEALTH � the notion that many successful businessman and their massive accumulation of wealth was a social benefit for all. The advocates linked wealth with responsibility, arguing that those with great material positions had equally great obligations to society.

Gospel of Wealth vs. American Dream

AGE OF REFORM

• The beginnings of the economic reform in the last decades of the 19th century came not from those in power or the offices of the elite, but from the bottom � the victims of the new industrial order.
- They were those people and small business owners being exploited by the railroads and the trusts
TRUSTS � is a business entity formed with intent to monopolize and gain advantage in a certain industry by restraining trade or fixing prices
Ex: Standard Oil trust, US Steel, American Tobacco Company

• In the age of the reform, Presidents , such as Theodore Roosevelt would base some of their domestic policies on “trust-busting”. This then led to the...