5) Thursday, February 1. The Rise of Countervailing Powers

Story Line: The turn of the century is the age of organization. It is the age of a new middle class. It is also that of "countervailing powers," when big business, the regulatory state, the women's movement, the consumer movement, and the labor movement face one another for the first time. Review Questions for Discussion III   [Lecture 4] Outline [Lecture 6]

Readings for lecture 5 On Edison: Document Number: DJ2104241196; Document Number: DJ2105241286; Search for other documents on related topics Thomas Edison, On the Industrial Research Laboratory, 1887 Frank Norris, The Octopus, 1901 Frederick Winslow Taylor, On Scientific Management, 1911 Antonio Gramsci, Americanism and Fordism, Prison Notebooks, early 1930s Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, 1914 John Muir, Hetch Hetchy Valley, 1912

Images for lecture 5: Manhattan Skyline, 1912 Woolworth Building, "Cathedral of Commerce" New York City Elites, c.1910 Land Before Industry Prairies and Smokestacks U. S. Steel Plants Completed, Nature Transformed, 1908

Speculation made the headlines. Organization is the bigger story.

I. Big Business and the Muckrakers

• Ulysses Grant
• Frank Norris
• Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, James Fisk, Jr., The Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt
• Charles Francis Adams
• Judge Barnard of the Tweed Ring

II. The Organizational Revolution

• John D. Rockefeller
• productive efficiency
• allocative efficiency
• economies of scale, scope and speed
• center firms
• vertical integration
• horizontal combination

Landscape interlude:

• Henry James, John Hay, Frank Woolworth, Harrison Grey Fiske, Graham Taylor

III. A New Middle Class

IV. R&D

• Thomas Edison
• Pennsylvania Railroad
• General Electric, Du Pont, AT&T

V. Scientific Management

• Andrew Carnegie
• Frederick Winslow Taylor and Taylorism; soldiering; the story of Schmidt
• Henry Ford and Fordism
• Antonio Gramsci

VI. Countervailing Powers

• Walter Lippmann's Drift and Mastery (1914); William James
• John Muir, Hetch Hetchy Valley

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