Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson appears as the culmination of the Progressive movement’s campaign against monopoly: a president who translated public criticism of concentrated corporate power into federal legislation and new regulatory institutions. His reforms illustrate the book’s central contrast between markets dominated by powerful interests and inclusive markets sustained by political institutions capable of checking them.

Rise of the Progressive Campaign

The political movement that helped bring Wilson to power grew from an earlier agrarian revolt against the power of large businesses. The National Grange organized farmers beginning in 1867, and the agrarian crisis of the following decades helped produce the People’s Party in 1892. Although the Populists later declined after aligning themselves with unsuccessful Democratic campaigns, their opposition to trusts did not disappear. It carried into the more heterogeneous Progressive movement, which took up the problem of corporate influence and the role of government in regulating monopoly.

The reform drive had already begun before Wilson’s presidency. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 established the Interstate Commerce Commission and opened the way to federal regulation of industry; the Sherman Antitrust Act followed in 1890. Theodore Roosevelt used the Sherman Act against the Northern Securities Company in 1902, and his administration pursued other major corporations. William Taft continued the campaign, overseeing the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil. By the time Wilson entered the White House, antitrust was not a new concern but a political struggle with an established legislative and administrative history.

Wilson and the Trusts

The book identifies Wilson’s 1912 election as the high point of Progressive reform. In his 1913 book The New Freedom, Wilson warned that persistent monopoly would ultimately control government, and rejected the expectation that monopolists would restrain themselves. His argument placed the danger not only in the prices or market position of individual corporations, but in their capacity to convert economic concentration into political control.

Wilson’s administration sought to strengthen the government’s ability to respond. In 1914 he worked to pass the Clayton Antitrust Act, which reinforced the Sherman Act, and created the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the new law. The two measures joined a stronger legal basis for action with an agency charged with carrying it out. They extended the campaign beyond condemnation of monopoly as an abstract danger: the federal government was given institutional means to challenge it.

Wilson’s reform program also reached the financial sector. An investigation by the Pujo Committee, led by Louisiana congressman Arsene Pujo, examined what the book describes as the “money trust”—the spread of monopoly into finance. In 1913 Wilson created the Federal Reserve Board, which would regulate monopolistic activity in that sector. The response to concentrated power therefore encompassed both industrial corporations and financial interests, rather than treating monopoly as a problem confined to manufacturing or transport.

Reform, Media, and Public Pressure

Wilson’s measures belonged to a wider reform environment in which public criticism helped make corporate power politically visible. The book credits investigative journalists, later known as muckrakers, with exposing the excesses of business magnates and corruption in public life. Ida Tarbell’s 1904 History of the Standard Oil Company helped turn opinion against John D. Rockefeller’s business interests; Louis Brandeis examined financial scandals in Other People’s Money and How Bankers Use It and influenced the Pujo Committee. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’s magazine published David Graham Phillips’s “The Treason of the Senate” in 1906, galvanizing support for direct election of senators, achieved through the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913.

This account does not present presidential action as self-contained. Farmers organized against discriminatory business practices; reform movements carried those demands into politics; journalists publicized corporate and financial power; and federal officials acted within a political system that permitted opposition to organize. Wilson’s administration was a pivotal part of that sequence, not its sole source. The account’s emphasis on free media also clarifies a key institutional contrast: powerful firms could resent investigative reporting, but in the United States they could not simply silence it.

Significance in the Book’s Argument

Wilson’s reforms illustrate the difference between the existence of markets and the existence of inclusive markets. Markets alone do not guarantee broad economic opportunity: a few firms can dominate, charge excessive prices, prevent new competitors from entering, and obstruct more efficient rivals or technologies. When economic power is reinforced by political influence, market competition can narrow into privilege. The Clayton Act, the Federal Trade Commission, and financial regulation represented efforts to prevent that drift.

The book frames this response as part of a virtuous circle between inclusive political and economic institutions. Broad political participation can generate countervailing pressure against monopoly, while inclusive markets provide a foundation on which inclusive political institutions can flourish. The U.S. trust-busting campaigns are contrasted with Mexico, where the book says no political body effectively constrained Carlos Slim’s monopoly. Wilson’s significance, in this comparison, lies not in having ended the possibility of monopoly, but in helping demonstrate how political institutions and public scrutiny could be used to contest concentrated power.