During the decades of rapid industrialization that closed the 19th century, it was Americans alone among the peoples of the industrial West who believed deeply enough in the principle of competition to try to protect it by statute. No other country produced anything comparable to our antitrust movement, and it is only very recently that respectful attention has begun to be paid abroad to the methods of big business control embodied in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and its supplementary laws. Yet both the antitrust enterprise itself and the American faith in competition have undergone ironic transformations during the 20th century. Fifty or sixty years ago, hostility to big business combinations and the desire to protect or restore competition were among the central themes in American liberal thought. Today the American liberal has largely lost interest in this side of his tradition and has embraced the modern world of organization. Now it is the self-styled conservative who bewails the decline of the entrepreneur and the rugged competitive spirit. If, like the liberal, he fails to show much of the old American suspicion of big business, it is only because he is obsessed with his opposition to the growth of governmental powers. However, while the liberal and the conservative, each for his own reasons, largely accept the present business structure, the antitrust enterprise has in recent decades flourished as it never did in the pristine days of the antitrust movement. At the very time when its function seems to have lost compelling public interest, it has become firmly institutionalized. What is more, it has become for the first time a force of real consequence in influencing business behavior.

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In America competition was always more than a theory: it was a way of life and a creed. From its colonial beginnings through most of the 19th century, ours was overwhelmingly a nation of farmers and small-town entrepreneurs—ambitious, mobile, optimistic, speculative, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian, and competitive. Americans came to take it for granted that property would be widely diffused, that economic and political power would be decentralized. The fury with which they could be mobilized against any institution that even appeared to violate these expectations by posing a threat of monopoly was manifest in the irrational assault on the Bank of the United States during Jackson's Presidency. Their most respected thinkers habitually assured Americans that the order of society they enjoyed was God-ordained or natural, and they probably thought it would last forever.

Then, with extraordinary rapidity as historical time is reckoned, that order was overwhelmed by the giant corporation. In the last three decades of the 19th century a whole new economic order came into being. This transformation happened so fast that the mind could not easily absorb it. An entire people could hardly be expected to cease overnight to dream the dream of the small entrepreneur. In 1900 the problem of big business and the threat of monopoly were still so new that it was hard to get one's bearings. Bigness had come with such a rush that its momentum seemed irresistible. No one knew when or how it could be stopped.

Not surprisingly, the men of the first antitrust generation made frightening projections into the future. A nation that had gone so fast from competitive small enterprise to corporate giantism might readily develop with equal speed from corporate giantism to a system of monopolistic tyranny. Hence, discussions of big business in the last decades of the 19th century and the opening decade of the 20th were full of anxious forecasts. Most of them were plausible enough at the time, but hardly any of them have been realized.

On this point, Theodore Roosevelt was both shrewder and less anxious than most of his contemporaries. With the exception of railroad regulation, Roosevelt was not profoundly interested in the economic issues that agitated the American public during his Presidency; indeed, he was quite candid in confessing his reluctance to tackle them head-on. When in difficulties, as in 1907, he was disposed to trust to the judgment and the political and financial leadership of the conservatives in the Senate or the economic powers in Wall Street. But the trust problem, he realized, was something that must be dealt with on the political level; public concern about it was too urgent to be ignored. He understood how important it was to assure the public that the government of the United States had the will and the power to assert its authority over large corporations. Accordingly, his antitrust prosecutions, although few, were in some cases appropriately spectacular. When he assessed the significance of the Northern Securities Case in 1904, he did not say that it would open the way to a general assault on bigness, but rather that it was important for showing that “the most powerful men in this country were held to accountability before the law.” His fundamental solution for the problem—that bigness must be accepted as a part of the modern industrial and social order, and that its behavior should be subjected to administrative control under full publicity—comes somewhat closer than the views of most of his political contemporaries to anticipating the future course of antitrust procedure.

Woodrow Wilson spoke more feelingly for the village democracy, which seems to have been at the center of popular antitrust feeling; but by the same token he illustrated more clearly than Roosevelt its intellectual difficulties. Speaking in the campaign of 1912, he asserted that he too was not against size as such. He was all for bigness as an inevitable and natural growth, whenever it was the outcome of superior efficiency. But he was against “the trusts,” which had grown out of illicit competition. Wilson was never very successful, however, in explaining why a business that had grown large through legitimate methods might not become just as menacing to competition as one that had grown large through illicit competition. His statement, “I am for big business and I am against the trusts,” seems hardly more than an attempt to evade the argument that there is a self-liquidating threat inherent in competition.

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In a sense the Sherman Act was simply another manifestation of an enduring American suspicion of concentrated power—a stage in the perennial American quest for a way of dividing, diffusing, and checking power and preventing its exercise by a single interest, or by a consolidated group of interests at a single center. Thus, the political impulse behind the Sherman Act was clearer and more articulate than the economic theory. Men who used the vaguest language when they talked about “the trusts” and monopolies—who had not thought through the distinction between size itself and monopolistic practices, who had found no way of showing how much competition was necessary for efficiency, who could not in every case say what competitive acts they thought were fair or unfair, or who could not state a rational program that reconciled their acceptance of size with their desire for competition—were nevertheless reasonably clear about what it was that they were trying to avoid: they wanted to keep concentrated private power from destroying democratic government.

One of the glories of the competitive model had been that it purported to solve the question of market power by denying any particular location to it. The decisions of the market were beautifully impersonal, since they were only the averagings of the decisions of thousands of individuals, none of whom enjoyed any decisive power. Hence, the market mechanism met the characteristic desire for the diffusion of power and seemed to be the perfect economic counterpart of American democratic pluralism.

The most articulate expression of the Progressives' case against the political power of monopoly was made by Woodrow Wilson in 1912. It was the burden of his argument, as against T.R., that once the existence of large-scale combinations is accepted, their regulation by government becomes impossible, because the political power of business combination will be great enough to nullify all attempts at its control. Wilson played artfully on the fears and suspicions of the small entrepreneurs. Even some very powerful men, he said, knew that “there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. . . . They know that somewhere, by somebody, the development of industry is being controlled.” He pictured concentrated capital as being already in control of the government: “The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States. . . . The government of the United States at present is a foster-child of the special interests.”

This “colossal ‘community of interest’” was a thing that the laws must “pull apart, and gently, but firmly and persistently dissect.” Otherwise, under Roosevelt's plan for accepting and regulating monopolies, there would only be a union between monopoly and government: “If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.”

Scarcely less important than the other objectives of antitrust action was the psychological and moral objective, which sprang from the traditionally Puritan conviction that competition has a disciplinary value for character, quite aside from its strictly economic uses. America was thought to have been made possible by the particular type of character that was forged by competitive individualism, a type which had flourished in the United States because competitive opportunities had been so widespread that alert men could hardly fail to see them, to grasp and use them, and hence to be shaped by them. For this process to take place, it was important that business be carried on fairly—the sporting vocabulary was never far below the surface—and that newcomers be able to enter the game as entrepreneurs on reasonably open terms.

Here again one looks to Woodrow Wilson for the most articulate expression of this emphasis on the economic foundations of character, and especially to the masterful speeches of 1912 in which he expressed his concern for “the beginner,” “the man with only a little capital,” “the man on the make,” upon whose genius he thought the country had always been built. “The treasury of America,” he argued, “lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class.” Under large-scale organization it was possible, Wilson hinted, that the country would turn its back on its past, which he evoked in poignant terms:

. . . the ancient time when America lay in every hamlet, when America was to be seen in every fair valley, when America displayed her great forces on the broad prairies, ran her fine fires of enterprise up over the mountainsides and down into the bowels of the earth, and eager men were everywhere captains of industry, not employees; not looking to a distant city to find out what they might do, but looking about among their neighbors, finding credit according to their character, not according to their connections, finding credit in proportion to what was known to be in them and behind them, not in proportion to the securities they held that were approved where they were not known.

The prospect that these “fine fires of enterprise” were about to be quenched suggested that the old kind of character would be destroyed, that the old America was about to die—a reason even more imperative than mere industrial efficiency for seeking put the possibilities of antitrust action.

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There are two salient differences between the problem of bigness as it was perceived in the Progressive era and as it is perceived now: first, it is no longer a new problem; and second, the economy has performed in a way hardly dreamed of before World War II. In 1964 we are as remote in time from the passage of the Sherman Act as the men of 1864 were from the first term of George Washington. The public has had almost three-quarters of a century of experience in living with big business, and analysts of the big business problem no longer make the frightening projections of its future dangers that were made with entire plausibility sixty or seventy years ago. At the same time, the public is hardly unaware that a great rise in mass standards of living has occurred during the period in which the economy has been dominated by the big corporation. Whatever else may be said against bigness, the conception of monopolistic industry as a kind of gigantic, swelling leech on the body of an increasingly deprived and impoverished society has largely disappeared.

About the change in public attitudes from those prevailing sixty years ago we can only make an educated guess. Today we can check our impressions of the public mind against opinion polls; for the earlier era we have impressions alone. But anyone who reads widely in the political literature of the period 1890-1914 can hardly believe that public concern today over big business has anything like the sense of urgency it had then. In 1951 the Institute of Social Research of the University of Michigan published the results of an illuminating survey, Big Business as the People See It. Its findings show some residues of the old popular suspicion of bigness, but the noteworthy thing is public acceptance. Americans have always had to balance their love of bigness and efficiency against their fear of power and their regard for individualism and competition. The survey indicates that this ambivalence has been largely resolved in favor of big business organization.

A quarter of the population, as represented in the Institute's national sample, showed some concern over big business and were aware that it had an important effect on their lives. But a substantial majority reacted favorably to big business. Asked to characterize its social effects, the respondents answered as follows:

Plainly, big business was no longer a scare-word to the public at large. Questioned on particulars, respondents spoke with especial favor of the productive powers of big business and its ability to give jobs and keep prices down. The most critical responses about big business dealt mainly with its effect on “the little man” and the destruction of competition. Very little concern was expressed about the power of big business over its workers (it is commonly regarded as a good employer), and surprisingly little about its influence on government. In addition, stronger feeling was shown against labor unions than against big business.

To what can we attribute this public acceptance of big business? Not much, I believe, to the efforts big businessmen have made to cultivate a favorable “image” for the large corporation. As the fate of the postwar campaign to sell “free enterprise” suggests, such efforts—when they represent nothing more than an attempt to make the public take seriously the blather with which business sometimes comforts itself—can miscarry badly. What has really made bigness palatable is the remarkable performance of the economy since the beginning of World War II. Something too must be credited to the emergence of countervailing bigness in government and labor, whose effects on public attitudes emerge clearly from the Michigan survey. Moreover, anyone who is aware of the historical circumstances under which hostility to big business flourished must be aware that big business has not lived up to the horrifying billing that it got in the age of the muckrakers. It is not merely that no business today treats competitors as they were treated in the early days of the National Cash Register Company or Standard Oil. What is important is that a whole range of fears, expressed in the Progressive generation and based largely upon preoccupation with an unknown future, has vanished. We now live in that future, and although it has fears of its own—nightmarish beyond anything anticipated in the days of Bryan and Wilson—they are of a wholly different origin. Probably the worst of the Populist-Progressive nightmares was the notion—expressed in the Pujo Committee's inquiry, in Brandeis's Other People's Money, in Wilson's speeches, and in Jack London's The Iron Heel—of the formation, under the auspices of the investment bankers, of a giant syndicate, a combination of the combinations, which would rule the country with a tyrannical grip. The self-financing character of the great corporations, the survival of competition in investment banking, and the failure of investment banking to remain a power of the first order after the crash of 1929, have set this spectre to rest.

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If no sinister central syndicate had to be feared, it did at least seem reasonable at the turn of the century to anticipate a steady, growing concentration of industry that would eventually deprive the country of every advantage of competition. And here, insofar as the antitrust enterprise was directed against size itself or against concentration, it was beaten before it ever got started; American industry was already highly concentrated in 1904, when T.R. was boasting about the lessons of the Northern Securities Case. But insofar as the Progressives were worried about what the economists later came to call “workable competition” in industry, they might well have been reassured as time went on. The investigations of such economists as M. A. Adelman, G. Warren Nutter, and George J. Stigler have cast considerable doubt on the idea that either the scope of monopoly or the degree of concentration has, in fact, grown since the beginning of the century. “The extent of concentration,” Adelman concluded in an important study, “shows no tendency to grow, and it may possibly be declining. Any tendency either way, if it does exist, must be at the pace of a glacial drift.”

Another typical fear expressed in Progressive writing was that the possibility of individual advancement would be frozen out, that the upward social mobility that had refreshed and inspired American development in the past would come to an end, when the business of the country was fully dominated by the large corporation. I know of no very certain information on how the American public regards the prospects for social mobility today, although our concerted scramble for educational position and advantage suggests that the middle-class public and even much of the working-class public are rather well aware that mobility still exists; and they are equally aware of the mechanisms through which it can be pursued. What can be said with greater confidence is that informed observers no longer speak so glibly of the decline of mobility or opportunity.

Indeed, there is strong evidence that the opportunity of middle- or lower-class men to rise to top positions in business has somewhat increased over what it was fifty or sixty years ago, and there is reason to believe that the increase, or at least the persistence, of occupational opportunity has impressed itself on the public mind. In fact, the modern corporation has proved to be a better medium for social mobility and opportunity than the old system of individual and family entrepreneurship, whose openness in this respect was always much exaggerated. Oddly enough, the concentration of capital and the divorce of ownership from the entrepreneurial function may prove in the long run to be more conducive to the lowering of social tensions and to political stability than diffused individual ownership. The ways of achieving occupational advancement and economic success have changed; individual entrepreneurship is a much less sure and satisfactory path than a bureaucratic career. The acquisition of specialized skills has become more important, and with it the seizure and exploitation of educational opportunities.

I do not mean to suggest that the old ideal of self-employment, or the old confidence in the entrepreneurial path to success, have been entirely abandoned in favor of the bureaucratic career. The incidence of self-employment and the proportion of the population that actually lives by the competitive ideal have shrunk very considerably in the three-quarters of a century since the Sherman Act; but most of this is attributable to the numerical decline of family farmers, who in 1890 still comprised nearly half the population and today comprise about a tenth. The farmers, with their contemporary dependence on subsidies and governmentally administered prices, can hardly be looked upon any more as vigorous exponents of the competitive way of life. But the dream of self-employment that dominated the agrarian-entrepreneurial society of the 19th century is still alive. It has been estimated that about 20 to 30 per cent of the American working force has been at some time or another self-employed. The growth of small business over the past dozen years or so has roughly kept pace with the growth of the adult population, and the aspirations of small business have been institutionalized in Senate and House committees as well as in some antitrust activities.

Although small business holds its place as a segment of the economy itself, its role as a sector of society committed to the entrepreneurial ideal has declined. Small business can no longer be idealized for its independence and hardihood, or its devotion to competitive principles. It, too, looks to government intervention for sustenance, whether in the form of resale price maintenance, anti-chainstore legislation, or the Small Business Administration. Small business, which used to be, as one writer has put it, “a symbol of opportunity, enterprise, innovation, and achievement” and of “an independent way of life,” has been driven largely into the marginal areas of economic life, where it often tries to maintain itself by waging its own assaults upon the competitive principle. Various segments of small business, in their pressure for support for the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 and the Miller-Tydings Amendment of 1937, have shown how quickly they can be rallied against competition, when it impinges upon their own interests. Vigorous advocates of the Sherman and Clayton Acts where big business is affected, they turn their backs on competitive virility when it suits their purposes. If there is anything rarer than a small businessman who will question the merits of competition, it is one who can understand and abide competition when it really afflicts him.

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Not only can the small businessman not purport, in the eyes of any well-informed observer, to be a vigorous and consistent exemplar of the competitive ideal; he can no longer be idealized by progressive-minded men from other walks of life, as he could, say, in the era when Woodrow Wilson waxed rhapsodic about the new men out of “unknown homes” who had really made America. In the United States and elsewhere, liberal intellectuals now cock a suspicious eye at him, if not as a potential stronghold of support for fascist movements, at least as the backbone of the reactionary wing of the Republican party. An occasional big business leader may stand out for his enlightenment and urbanity, but the small businessman more often than not proves to be a refractory anti-union employer, a parochial and archaic opponent of liberal ideas, a supporter of vigilante groups and of right-wing cranks. As a figure in our economic society, the small businessman still plays a part of some considerable importance, but as a partner in the American liberal coalition, he has all but disappeared, and with him has gone much of the pristine anti-bigness feeling of the Progressive tradition.

Still, the conviction that American democracy will survive only if small business enterprise survives to sustain the American character has not disappeared. It has been inherited from the Progressives of yesterday by the conservatives of today. It is a conviction that flourishes less among the young than among the old, who are often troubled that they cannot persuade their juniors of its importance. “For the development of self-reliance,” say two authors of a manual for small business operation, “for making men as well as money, small business excels.”

During the 1940's and 1950's there was evidence of a widespread uneasy conviction that years of war, depression, and bureaucratic expansion had finally drained away the old regard for entrepreneurship among the young, and that the spirit which animated the old competitive ideal had finally succumbed to the world of the large corporation. The signs and portents are numerous, but a memorable article of 1949 in Fortune may be taken as a landmark. Surveying “The Class of '49,” Fortune's editors pointed out that it was perhaps the most significant college graduating class in our history. It was one of the largest, most mature (with a high proportion of veterans), and responsible; but its distinguishing feature was its aversion to risk, its passion for security. “The class of '49,” the editors reported, “wants to work for somebody else—preferably somebody big. No longer is small business the promised land. As for the idea of going into business for oneself, the idea is so seldom expressed as to seem an anachronism.” Only in the Southwest, which seems socially and intellectually to lag behind the rest of the country, was there any sign of significant exceptions to this generalization. The generation who had been impressionable children during the Depression and who had come of age in the shadow of the war rendered a firm verdict in favor of security, service, and the good life (measured in modest income expectations) rather than risk, self-assertion, and the big prizes. The emergent young man, the editors reported, “is not afraid of bigness; where his father of the twenties, fearful of anonymity, was repelled by hugeness in an organization, he is attracted.”

This was the response of a generation raised in an economy of giant corporations, educated very often in universities with thousands of students, disciplined by army life, and accustomed to the imperatives of organization, mass, and efficiency. No doubt they often saw in big businesses the promise of laboratories and market research to which the atmosphere of the universities had already accustomed them. Because of its army experiences, the class of 1949 may have been unusually security-minded, but there is no reason to doubt that its acceptance of large organization represented a secular trend. Not long after the Fortune piece appeared, the Youth Research Institute Survey put to 4,660 high school and college seniors, recent college graduates, and veterans the question: “Do you feel that you will be able to achieve all of your economic desires by working for someone else?” 61.1 per cent said yes, 20.4 per cent no, and 18.5 per cent were uncertain. In his essay, “The Found Generation,” an analysis of the expressed life ideals of the class of 1955, David Riesman reported not only a bland acceptance of the large corporation as a place in which to do one's life work, but also a depressing complacency about the terms and rewards of the corporate life. The class of 1949 had at least been aware of making a somewhat difficult choice in which their individuality might be at stake. The class of 1955 took the bureaucratic career for granted.

It is this acceptance of the bureaucratic career that, more than anything else, tells us why there is no longer an antitrust movement. It is far more revealing than the law cases or the books on the control of monopoly. And it is also a perfect illustration of how the problems of yesterday are not solved but outgrown. Only a few people today are concerned about how to make the large corporations more competitive, but millions are concerned about how they are going to live inside the corporate framework. The existence and the workings of the corporations are largely accepted, and in the main they are assumed to be fundamentally benign. What is questioned, when anything is questioned, are matters of personal style: what can be salvaged, in the way of either individualism or individuality, in an age in which the big corporation has become a way of life? This concern marks the transition from an age in which The Curse of Bigness and Other People's Money set the tone of the prevailing anxieties, to an age in which everyone reads The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man.

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Long-Prevailing systems of values do not usually go under without a fight. The young may be losing the concern of their elders with the virile virtues of enterprise. Certainly they are now much more disposed to ask of the economic order not whether it is raising a nation of enterprising and hardy men, but more matter-of-factly whether it is maintaining an adequate level of employment and producing a sufficient increase in the Gross National Product. Along with the new acceptance, however, there is a persistent uneasiness about the corporate life, which has its manifestations both on the Left and Right. The Left, if it can be called that, rebels in the name of non-conformity and simply opts out of the whole bourgeois world in the manner of the beatnik and the hipster. The Right, in the manner of Barry Goldwater and his enthusiasts, rebels in the name of the older individualism, which believed that economic practices should inculcate discipline and character. Though they would hate to admit it, they are both bedevilled by the same problem; each of them is trying to make its variety of non-conformism into a mass creed—which is a contradiction in terms. The beats opt out of corporate uniformity in their own uniforms and erect themselves into a stereotype. The right-wingers sing the praises of individualism in dreary, regimented choruses and applaud vigilantes who would kill every vestige of genuine dissent.

In politics, of course, it is the right-wingers who really count—it is they who have the numbers, the money, the political leverage. They can also invoke the old American pieties and can appeal to the kind of old-fashioned American who believes that federal fiscal policy is just like the family budget. Much of our conservative writing echoes with concern over the decline of the older kind of economic morale, which it identifies with small entrepreneurship. But conservatives understandably fear to make the large corporation the object of their criticism; this smacks too much of subversion. They have a safer and more congenial outlet for their animus against the organization of modern life in the form of denunciations of big government. In this way, the large corporation escapes its proper share of odium.

Historically, however, it was the giant corporation far more than governmental policy that eclipsed old-fashioned economic morality, and it is here that conservatives and liberals have all but reversed their former positions. In the main it is conservatives who are disgruntled with the style of contemporary economic life, while liberals complete the paradox by springing to its defense, and in particular to the defense of big business. Who, after all, has written in our time more full-throated rhapsodies on big business than the ex-New Dealer, David Lilienthal? Who has more consistently urged liberals to reconsider their hostility to big business than A. A. Berle, the protégé of Brandeis and associate of Franklin D. Roosevelt? And who has done more to reconcile the contemporary American liberal mind to the diminished role of competition than John Kenneth Galbraith with his alternative of countervailing power?

To be sure, liberal intellectuals have not ceased to be critical of business civilization, or of big business. The point is that big business no longer occupies, as it once did, a central place in their concerns. A variety of other problems—foreign policy, urban development, civil rights, education, and the like—have pushed it to the periphery. And where these problems are involved, liberals do not always find themselves in a simple antagonistic confrontation with big business, as they regularly did in the past. In any event, even when they do, the last thing they are interested in is the restoration of competition to solve the main social evils that they see. Even a scandal like the General Electric-Westinghouse affair, though it may confirm their view of what may be expected from businessmen, no longer excites them very much. In short, that “gale of creative destruction” about which Joseph Schumpeter wrote so eloquently when he described the progressive character of capitalist technology, has driven both the liberal and the conservative ideologies before it.

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Institutions are commonly less fragile than creeds. In the face of the collapse of antitrust sentiment among those who were once its most enthusiastic spokesmen, the antitrust enterprise, as a legal and administrative fact, has persisted and grown. During the past twenty years it has been far more alive, and far more meaningful, than it ever was before. The revival that took place in the closing days of the New Deal under Thurman Arnold was hardly an immediate or unqualified success, but antitrust operations were stepped up to new levels, and they have never since been relaxed. T.R., the so-called trustbuster, had an Antitrust Division with a staff of five lawyers. In the year 1940 alone, Arnold's greatly expanded staff prosecuted almost as many cases as had been brought during the first two decades of the Sherman Act. Today the Antitrust Division, with its 300 lawyers, is still more active than it was under Arnold, and since 1945 the courts have repeatedly handed down decisions that have made successful prosecutions easier. Hardly anyone expects any longer that the activities of the Antitrust Division will in any serious degree alter the structure of American industry, but they have now attained a measure of effectiveness that does seriously alter conduct within that structure. Business itself, while it violates the laws, has never mounted a campaign to have them modified.

In our time antitrust has ceased to be an ideology and has become a technique, interesting chiefly to a small elite of lawyers and economists rather than the public at large; it has gained in effectiveness at the very moment when it has lost general interest. Some key to the cunning ironies of history must be found in the fact that in the days when there was an antitrust movement among the public at large, there were (to speak with only slight exaggeration) no prosecutions, and that today, when there is no antitrust movement, prosecutions of real consequence finally take place.