By Faith Gonia
Picture this: in a fierce financial battle with your grandparents, you look down and see just five dollars remaining on your side of the table. Forehead dripping in sweat, you hand over your last paper bill and declare that you have nothing left—all of the assets and cash that you tirelessly worked for have been stripped away from you, while Grandma owns nearly every piece of property a player could buy. After hours of exhausting upkeep, you lost everything.
Defeated, you cannot help but wonder: who invented this twisted game?
Unfortunately, you cannot blame Parker Bros, or Hasbro. The true creators of American monopolies actually lived hundreds of years ago. Let’s dive into a brief history of monopolies in the United States. Please forgive me—the lack of fake money and metal tokens in this article might make you board.
The term, “monopoly,” stems from the Greek language; “mono” meaning “one,” and “polein” meaning “sell.” In a monopolized industry, one seller dominates the entire market, leaving others unable to even compete.
Provided that the success of Colonial America relied heavily on their ability to maintain an economy, British sponsors funded various colonial companies as they developed across the ocean. In their efforts to expand the “New World,” such sponsors truly sparked the first monopolies in the history of the United States. Holding an immense advantage with British funding, colonial companies with a financial head start immediately surpassed all other competitors. As a result, they kept prices of their products high.
However, most American monopolies began long after the country’s founding. In the Gilded Age, the United States experienced a surge in industrial growth. Leaders of this new shift were known by one of two titles: captains of industry, or robber barons. While each of these titles has an inferable positive or negative connotation, they essentially spearheaded the same economic era.
One key figure of the time was John D. Rockefeller, co-chair of Standard Oil Company in the early twentieth century. As the company gained more and more power, individuals and corporations across the nation spoke out against the relentless control of the all-powerful company. Eventually, in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the former had violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890—an act designed to dissolve trusts which possessed an unfair monopoly of an industry. Thus, Standard Oil Co. broke up into 34 separate companies as opposed to the conglomerate singular one.
In the following decades, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act protected the American economic system from falling victim to monopolies. While, evidently, the nation still houses numerous monopolized industries, the public continues to speak out against injustice as they did with Rockefeller.