| Reading Guide for Week 14 | |
|
(We will read primary source documents in class this week, as the basis for more questions on your response sheets.) Last week we examined two further dimensions of amplifying mechanization and industrialization in the United States across the nineteenth century: the patenting of technological innovation, and consequences for white male employment and entrepreneurship. And we went to the Wylie House Museum, built in 1835, and approximately restored to reflect American life for a comfortable white family in the mid nineteeth century. That experience hopefully gave you some concrete sense of material life in that era, and the shifting balance between making things and purchasing things — and the effects of that shifting balance on economic life from a producer standpoint and a consumer standpoint. This week our focus will be on the emergence and rapid rise of a new economic entity in American life: corporations, as granted legal charters by the government. From the seventeenth into the nineteenth century, corporations were originally term-bound institutions designed to provide special public purposes, in exchange for monopoly privileges. From the mid 19th century forward, however, corporations were redefined without term bounds, without public purposes, and (in theory) without monopoly privileges, and instead as an economic institution that could, as one feature among several, last beyond the typical duration of a family proprietorship or a business partnership. Corporations would be redesigned toward an aim of economic stability. However, the accumulation of monopoly power and the corruption of legislatures and courts by corporations quickly turned into destabilizing forces, leaving the environment, communities, workers, and consumers all unprotected in the late nineteenth century: the First Gilded Age. (You are now in the Second Gilded Age.) |