Responses to Industrialization -US industrailisation
The amazing growth of industrial output and corporations made the American economy the world's largest in the late nineteenth century. But this growth was not without its problems and its critics. Workers struggled to earn enough money to provide for their families and to gain some influence over corporations' policies. Americans worried that some corporations, such as U.S. Steel and Standard Oil, had become monopolies. Because they had almost no competitors, Americans feared, these companies could dictate prices for their products.
In 1890, the U.S. Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which prohibited combinations and business practices "in restraint of trade," in order to enable the government to regulate monopolistic corporations. During the administration of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) the federal government began to regulate monopolies and even sought to break up some of the largest corporations, including John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Workers would struggle for decades to gain the right to join labor unions, which would not be guaranteed until the 1930s.
Industrialization made the United States vastly wealthier and more powerful, but this enormous transformation of the American economy was not accomplished smoothly.