To increasing numbers of Americans, a dangerous inequality formed the rotten fruit of a system that had escaped their control. Larger and larger firms dominated the economy by the 1890s, wielding a power that seemed to match those of the governments that often enabled and abetted them. The economy produced the “dangerous classes,” the very rich and the very poor. The country seemed European in an inequality that the eradication of slavery had supposedly eliminated. By the standard markers of health and well-being, life had grown worse, not better, for most Americans.
