The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Age of Big Business, by Burton J. Hendrick

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Title: The Age of Big Business
Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series

Author: Burton J. Hendrick

Editor: Allen Johnson

Posting Date: January 15, 2009 [EBook #3037]
Release Date: January, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AGE OF BIG BUSINESS ***

Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's
University, and Alev Akman

THE AGE OF BIG BUSINESS, A CHRONICLE OF THE CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY

By Burton J. Hendrick

New Haven: Yale University Press

Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.

London: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press

1919

CONTENTS

I. INDUSTRIAL AMERICA AT THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR
II. THE FIRST GREAT AMERICAN TRUST
III. THE EPIC OF STEEL
IV. THE TELEPHONE: AMERICA'S MOST POETICAL ACHIEVEMENT
V. THE DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC UTILITIES
VI. MAKING THE WORLD'S AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY
VII. THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE AUTOMOBILE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

THE AGE OF BIG BUSINESS

CHAPTER I. INDUSTRIAL AMERICA AT THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR

A comprehensive survey of the United States, at the end of the Civil
War, would reveal a state of society which bears little resemblance to
that of today. Almost all those commonplace fundamentals of existence,
the things that contribute to our bodily comfort while they vex us with
economic and political problems, had not yet made their appearance.
The America of Civil War days was a country without transcontinental
railroads, without telephones, without European cables, or wireless
stations, or automobiles, or electric lights, or sky-scrapers, or
million-dollar hotels, or trolley cars, or a thousand other contrivances
that today supply the conveniences and comforts of what we call our
American civilization. The cities of that period, with their unsewered
and unpaved streets, their dingy, flickering gaslights, their ambling
horse-cars, and their hideous slums, seemed appropriate settings for
the unformed social life and the rough-and-ready political methods of
American demo