our cultural albatross, the axiom being that when something is
big it is automatically better. Why we’ve been saddled with love of
bigness as a people perhaps comes down to the matter of geography, the vastness and richness that the landscape o=ered for the
taking from the moment of European settlement. Size was our
birthright, our conditioning, the justification for our exception-alism, bigness our manifest destiny, and for a long time, whole
centuries, it worked. The free land and timber and animals to
be hunted down and coal and oil and ore to be dug out of the
ground made us very wealthy very fast, taught us that growth-mania was the norm, the shape of progress, the American way.
Thus, we prefer our
Big Macs and our Whoppers, our food portions
supersized, our big cars
and sprawling cities,
our enormous football
players (growing bigger
every year, the average
o=ensive lineman now
topping three hundred
pounds), our big breasts
and big penises and big
houses (up from an average of 1,200 square
feet in 1950 to 2,216
square feet today), our
big armies with big
reach, and, though we
complain about it incessantly, big government
that spends big money running up big debt (more now than at any
other period in our history). That we allow corporations to grow to
outrageous size is just another symptom of the disease. Bigness
worship permeates every layer of the culture; it is racked into our
brains with every turn of the advertising screw; it is a totalizing force.
prices in any direction regardless of supply or demand. The ur-trust that by 1904 controlled 91 percent of U.S. oil production,
Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, was found by the Justice
Department to have secured its position via “discriminatory
practices in favor of the combination by railroad companies; restraint and monopolization by control of pipe lines . . . ; contracts
with competitors in restraint of trade; . . . espionage of the business of competitors, the operation of bogus independent companies” — the stratagems as expectable as they were ugly.
The threat that behemoths like Standard Oil posed to the re-
public, wrote Brandeis, was their concentration of economic power
and decision mak-
ing to the extent that
they were e=ectively a
state within the state,
operating under their
own laws. Many of the
trusts were shattered,
in a long struggle that
Brandeis pioneered.
It was his advocacy
that helped push into
e=ective action the an-
titrust mechanisms in
government (the Sher-
man Antitrust Act of
1890, the Clayton An-
titrust Act of 1914, the
Federal Trade Com-
mission), which led to
the breakup of Stan-
dard Oil and many of its sister monopolies by 1911. “American
development can come on the lines on which we seek it, and the
ideals which we have can be attained, only if side by side with po-
litical democracy comes industrial democracy,” Brandeis wrote.
“It is the relatively small man who pre-eminently needs the aid
and solicitous care of industry and government. We have, gentle-
men, to bear all the time that democratic view in mind.”
But we have not. Today we find ourselves in an unprece-
dented age of corporate gigantism. This situation is character-
ized not by the outright monopolies that worried Brandeis, but
by the rise of oligopolies, a few very obese firms, the Big Three
or Big Six, dominating their sectors while being insulated from
failure by the hand of government. Republican and Democratic
administrations alike for the last thirty years, spellbound by so-
called laissez-faire ideology, abandoned their antitrust duties and
watched as the total value of mergers and acquisitions rose to
an unprecedented $20 trillion—abetting, in other words, the
When Louis Brandeis Wrote The Curse of Bigness
in 1934, he had been a lawyer for many years and, famously,
a Supreme Court justice, and much of his work in the courts
was busting up bigness. He was particularly concerned about
the corporate monopolies that a<icted American life at the turn
of the twentieth century. The Curse of Bigness was not a big book,
because the arguments were pretty obvious. The great robber
baron trusts — in oil, rubber, steel, tobacco, sugar, and railroads
(and let’s not forget the Writing Paper Trust, the Woolen Trust,
the Upper Leather Trust, the Paper Bag Trust) — had rigged bids,
defrauded patentees, crushed labor movements, and could sway
