Big Business and the Muck-rakers, 1900-1910

The Muck-Rakers were a group of progressive journalists based around New York journals such as "McLure's Magazine" who, in the first decade of the 20th century, decided to take on the large trusts and the might of J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Unlike the anti-globalization campaigners today, they were not against big business as such, but were opposed to the form big business was taking and the impact it was having on American life and society. Their arguments had powerful and lasting effects on the legal structure of American business and on the shape of the journalistic profession. This collection opens with what has been called "the most important business book ever written" - "The History of the Standard Oil Company", by Ida M. Tarbell. Drawing on years of meticulous research, the doyenne of investigative journalism here uncovered the illegal methods used by John D. Rockefeller to monopolize the early oil industry, and these books of hers brought about the 1911 Supreme Court decision to break up the Standard Oil trust. Next in the set comes "Lawless Wealth", the story of the Tobacco Trust by Charles Edward Russell, one of the most gifted journalists of his day.
In part inspired by Tarbell, he set out to describe how the Tobacco Trust had usurped the power and authority of its shareholders. The final volume in the set is "The New Industrial Unrest" by Ray Stannard Baker, another of the most prominent and prolific of the muck-raking journalists. Of a slightly later date than the other two works in the collection, it examines labour-management relations in America and ascribes much of the blame for labour unrest going back to the beginning of the century on the abuse of power by large corporate management. These books are important social as well as economic documents of their time, and their republication should be welcomed across many disciplines.