Insull wanted the kind of monopoly that Rockefeller had made with Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan had made with U.S. Steel. The best he’d manage was almost this kind of monopoly because of the ways in which his product was crucially not the same as theirs. Molding the electricity business into the form du jour of American monopolists was one of the most remarkable projects, intellectually as well as fiscally, of the twentieth century.
