The Story of a Great Monopoly
Henry Demarest Lloyd’s best-known book was Wealth against commonwealth
Henry Demarest Lloyd was a progressive reporter that worked for the Chicago Tribune, from 1872 until 1885. Lloyd is well known for his searing attacks on unbridled corporate power, and his most famous masterpieces were against the oil tycoon, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. One such piece was published in The Atlantic (Monthly) — “The Story of a Great Monopoly,” in the March 1881 issue.
John Rockefeller was the founder of the largest oil company at that time, called Standard Oil. He amassed a great fortune in the oil refining business, but later gained a lot of harsh publicity for holding a monopoly on the market.
Here is an excerpt from Lloyd’s Wealth against commonwealth
Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty. “The splendid empire of Charles V.,” says Motley, “was erected upon the grave of liberty.” Our bignesses—cities, factories, monopolies, fortunes, which are our empires, are the obesities of an age gluttonous beyond its powers of digestion. Mankind are crowding upon each other in the centres, and struggling to keep each other out of the feast set by the new sciences and the new fellowships. Our size has got beyond both our science and our conscience. The vision of the railroad stockholder is not far-sighted enough to see into the office of the General Manager; the people cannot reach across even a ward of a city to rule their rulers; Captains of Industry “do not know” whether the men in the ranks are dying from lack of food and shelter; we cannot clean our cities nor our politics; the locomotive has more man-power than all the ballot-boxes, and mill-wheels wear out the hearts of workers unable to keep up beating time to their whirl. If mankind had gone on pursuing the ideals of the fighter, the time would necessarily have come when there would have been only a few, then only one, and then none left. This is what we are witnessing in the world of livelihoods. Our ideals of livelihood are ideals of mutual deglutition. We are rapidly reaching the stage where in each province only a few are left; that is the key to our times. Beyond the deep is another deep. This era is but a passing phase in the evolution of industrial Cæsars, and these Cæsars will be of a new type—corporate Cæsars.
