Under the leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt,

who had overthrown the Hawaiian monarchy, the

.” When Americans intervened in the Middle East, they did it with a conviction in their own superiority.

As Americans had explored and settled the West before the Civil War, a sense of “Manifest Destiny” had become a key component of popular culture. The idea that it was obvious, inevitable, and perhaps even God’s will that the United States should expand across the continent helped generate popular support for projects like the Mexican-American War and the ongoing Indian wars of the nineteenth century.

Two of the most famous politicians of this era were someone who seemed to be a Populist, William Jennings Bryan, and an actual Socialist, Eugene V. Debs. Bryan (1860–1925) had a famous career as an accomplished orator,

“Wall Street owns the country,” the Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease told dispossessed farmers around 1890. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”

in 1890 the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned one fourth of the nation’s assets and the top 10 percent owned over 70 percent.

Companies rose and fell, and many investors suffered losses, as manufacturers struggled to maintain supremacy in their particular industries. Achieving economies of scale was dangerous: while additional production increased profits, the high fixed costs of building and operating expensive factories dictated that even modest losses from selling underpriced goods were preferable to not selling goods at all.

The bigger the production run, the bigger the profits. New industrial companies that could raise the capital to take advantage of scale economies hungered for markets to keep their high-volume production facilities operating. Retailers and advertisers helped create the massive markets needed for mass production, and corporate bureaucracies facilitated the management of giant new firms. A new class of professional managers operated between the worlds of workers and owners and ensured the efficient operation and administration of mass production and mass distribution.

The precision of interchangeable steel parts, the harnessing of electricity after the victory of Nikola Tesla’s alternating current over Thomas Edison’s direct current, the innovations of machine tools, and the mass markets wrought by the railroads offered new avenues for efficiency.

Inventions like sewing machines streamlined production and the Bell telephone and typewriters allowed more efficient communication, allowing new administrative frameworks to sustain the weight of vast, national corporations. National credit facilitated by the consolidation of banking in financial centers like New York eased uncertainties surrounding rapid movement of capital between investors, manufacturers, and retailers. Plummeting transportation and communication costs opened new national media, which manufacturers and their advertising agencies used to nationalize consumer products.

Although the Civil War was about slavery and not about states’ rights, as many revisionists have claimed, it is nonetheless true that the war and its aftermath catalyzed a widespread increase in federal power at the expense of state and local control. The Lincoln administration’s Pacific Railway Act created a new transcontinental rail industry. Its elimination of state banking in favor of a system of national banks consolidated credit in eastern financial centers, primarily in New York City.

In this chapter we will focus on the changing American economy in the period between the end or Reconstruction in 1876 and the First World War,