The Vanishing American Corporation

CHAPTER 2HOW THE CORPORATION CONQUERED AMERICA

THE CORPORATE ECONOMY we know today can seem like an eternal feature of the landscape, an economic mountain range that has always been there. Yet the modern corporation emerged in a relatively brief period around the turn of the 20th century.

Consider the birth years of some of America’s industry-leading corporations: AT&T (1885), Eastman Kodak (1888), General Electric (1892), Sears Roebuck (1893), US Steel (1901), General Motors (1908), and IBM (1911). The roughly two decades surrounding the turn of the century were a remarkable period: Dozens of business empires that spanned the globe for a century were born. It was like a Cambrian explosion in which a vast diversity of new species appeared in ...