John Pierpont Morgan

John Pierpont Morgan was a leading financier and industrial organizer whose role in creating U.S. Steel made him a prominent figure in the rise of corporate concentration in the United States. His story illustrates a central tension in the book: economic institutions can foster growth while distributing wealth and power unevenly, but political institutions can give those harmed by concentration the means to organize and demand a response.

Financier and Industrial Organizer

In 1901, Morgan and Andrew Carnegie founded the U.S. Steel Company, the first corporation with a capitalized value of more than $1 billion and, at the time, by far the world’s largest steel corporation. Morgan was also identified as the founder of the modern banking conglomerate J.P. Morgan, which, after mergers over subsequent decades, eventually became JPMorgan Chase. These two roles placed him at the intersection of banking and large-scale industrial organization.

U.S. Steel’s creation formed part of a wider movement toward consolidation. In the 1890s, trusts emerged across nearly every sector of the economy, and many controlled more than 70 percent of their respective markets. Morgan’s industrial partnership with Carnegie was therefore not presented as an isolated undertaking, but as one example of the scale and concentration that were reshaping American business.

Concentration and Its Discontents

The expansion of trusts coincided with a reversal in the competitive character of parts of the United States. The northern and midwestern economy had historically been relatively competitive and more egalitarian than the South, but in this period competition gave way to monopoly and wealth inequality rapidly increased. Morgan’s corporate prominence belonged to that transformation, even as the book does not attribute the shift to him alone.

The passage places the new corporate power alongside the political power of those who opposed it. People harmed by monopolistic practices, as well as those who objected to the trusts’ domination of their industries, organized first in the Populist movement and then in the Progressive movement. Morgan’s importance in the narrative thus lies not only in the corporation he helped establish, but also in the wider contest over who could shape markets and whose interests government would protect.

Federal Regulation and Political Conflict

President Theodore Roosevelt proposed a federal agency empowered to investigate large corporations, and by 1902 he had used the Sherman Act to break up the Northern Securities Company, a move affecting Morgan’s interests. Subsequent suits targeted DuPont, the American Tobacco Company, and Standard Oil. The episode shows Morgan not simply as a builder of vast corporate enterprises but as a financier whose interests could be directly challenged by federal action.

Roosevelt also strengthened the Interstate Commerce Act through the Hepburn Act of 1906, giving the Interstate Commerce Commission greater authority, including the power to inspect railway financial accounts. His successor, William Taft, pursued trusts even more vigorously; the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 marked the high point of that campaign. In this account, Morgan’s career helps make visible the conflict between concentrated corporate influence and a political system in which organized opposition could press the federal government to regulate it.