Cronyism and Corporatism

Patrick Newman traces the birth of the American corporatist state across eight decades, from the collapse of the Jacksonian Democrats in 1849 to th

Lenin wrote that the capitalists would provide the rope by which they would hang themselves. That certainly seems to be the case with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which received strong financial help from the center of crony capitalism itself: Wall Street.

By the close of the 1920s, business elites led by Wall Street had secured government enforcement of their cartels across banking, industry, transportation, and health.

The Beef Trust, the pure-food coalition, and the American Medical Association: three campaigns waged in the name of public health.

Barred from rate associations after 1897, the railroads formed communities of interest by buying their competitors’ stock—cartels in a disguised form.

Patrick Newman traces the Federal Trade Commission’s cartelizing arc: “advance advice,” uniform cost accounting, a brief Wilson reversal, Harding-Coolidge recapture, and Hoover’s subsidies and patent restrictions.

After the merger wave of 1898 and 1899, big business wanted relief from antitrust suits and protection from price-cutting.

Patrick Newman covers Jekyll Island, the National Citizens’ League organized as a front to manufacture grass-roots support, and the pivot once Congress refused the Aldrich plan.

Patrick Newman traces the National Banking System from Salmon P. Chase’s wartime bond sales and initially hostile relations with New York financiers through the pyramid of bankers’ balances that concentrated reserves on Wall Street.

Beginning with the Morrill Tariff of 1861, Patrick Newman documents protection sought and monopoly repeatedly denied. Market competition kept defeating attempts to corner markets.