Leveling the playing field between workers and employers seemed to many people to be the logical outcome of a war for democracy against oligarchy. After all, what difference did it make if oligarchs owned plantations or factories? In public, leading Republican Benjamin F. Wade, a senator from Ohio, mused, “Property is not equally divided, and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” But businessmen recoiled in horror from what they interpreted as a war on property, and their spokesmen, including the editor of the New York Times, hammered home the idea that any hardworking man
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