Business Disunity and the Progressive Movement, 1901–1914

Histories of post-Civil War America, describing the rise of an industrialized society, stress businessmen’s common characteristics at the expense of their differences and seldom uncover any appreciable diversity in their response to broad economic and political issues. In the standard interpretations, the businessmen appear as a united force, determined to protect group interests against all assaults. The only common exception to this treatment is to point out the antagonism between small business and big business, although even here historians tend to reunite many of these businessmen in a community of interests. In some studies the assumption of a single business outlook seems to have served primarily as a convenience to the writer. When entrepreneurs act as a group, furnishing counterpoint for other themes, their unity helps to produce a sharper, more effective narrative. 1 In some other histories a homogeneous community develops naturally from the particular selection of business representatives — either a few prominent and verbal entrepreneurs or certain politicians, lawyers, and theorists — who presumably speak for the mass of less articulate businessmen. 2