"By 1880, Rockefeller's Ohio-based company controlled over 90 percent of the nation's oil, owned 4000 miles of pipelines, and employed over 100,000 people.

As Rockefeller's oil empire got larger and larger, eating alive hundreds of smaller operations, ruthlessly driving up prices, destroying his competitors, and throwing workers out of a job, public outrage grew."

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As President Grover Cleveland " the only Democrat elected during that period " proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:

"As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.

Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."
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There was a broad consensus across American society that those "Robber Barons" were feathering their own nests at the expense of the American public, hurting both working class people and small businesses.

The Supreme Court endorsed breaking up Standard Oil in 1911, and even broke up the Associated Press in 1944."

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Much more at the Link about Today's New Gilded Age of the Musks, Leonards, and Thiels.

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