The Urge to Merge
Trusts are taboo. Bur the merger in big business is with
us in gigantic corporations. What is back of all this?
HOULD ‘Theodore Roosevelt, William
Jennings Bryan, Senator John Sherman,
and others of the noted enemies of business
monopoly, return suddenly to the land of
the living and see the way good old Uncle
Sam is failing to enforce the carefully pre-
pared Anti-Trust Law (enacted July 2, 1890) they
would probably die again of heart failure.
The manufacturer of any consequence who has not
had at least one merger proposed to him in recent
years probably does not exist. We are living in an
era of “distribution mergers’ today, in contrast to
the “ production’ merger period that began in 1888
in a time of prosperity and ended abruptly with the
panic of 1893, only to be renewed again during the
first years of this century.
In this first period the ‘‘trust” was created.
Control of voting securities of numbers of competing
firms were obtained and their business merged for
International Newsreel
by Lyndon L. Skinner
“economies of production.” Politicians waved ‘‘the
big stick” and decried the growth of the great
moneyed powers that ground down the poor laborer,
so they thought. It was during the second breath
of their period of mergers (1897 to 1903) that the
United States Steel Corporation was created, and
Standard Oil was split into a half dozen pieces to
prevent it from becoming too large. Today, one of
those pieces, Standard Oil Company of Indiana,
is larger than the whole organization was before the
split. If the trusts that were formed during that
period were large, the mergers of today are colossal.
As has been stated, the early mergers were for
“economies of production”; that is, to reduce the
unit cost of manufacture, to effect savings in cross
freights, in selling expense, and to bring about
A remarkably beautiful photograph of the skyline of New York City. Here is the center for America’s largest business mergers
MARCH, 1929
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