10: Industrializing Society

Black America has escaped popular memory perhaps due both to its smaller production run and inability to create lasting dramatic storylines. Wild West shows helped establish the classic settler colonial drama of “cowboys versus Indians”, but Black America presented something somewhat different — plantations without White antagonists, racial uplift without a whisper of who was keeping the race down to begin with.

It may sound strange to our ears, but Vail, a full-throated capitalist, rejected the idea of "competition." He judged monopoly, when held in the right hands, to be the superior arrangement. "Competition," Vail had written, "means strife, industrial warfare; it means contention; it oftentimes means taking advantage of or resorting to any means that the conscience of the contestants ... will permit." His reasoning was moralistic: <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=7moAAAAAYAAJ&amp;lpg=PA309&amp;ots=SiUiPogpAq&amp;dq=%E2%80%9CThe%20vicious%20acts%20associated%20with%20aggressive%20competition%20are%20responsible%20for%20much%2C%20if%20not%20all%2C%20of%20the%20present%20antagonism%20in%20the%20pu" target="_blank">Competition was giving American business a bad name</a>. "The vicious acts associated with aggressive competition are responsible for much, if not all, of the present antagonism in the public mind to business, particularly to large business."

Adam Smith, whose vision of capitalism is sacrosanct in the United States, believed that individual selfish motives could produce collective goods for humanity, by the operation of the "invisible hand." But Vail didn't buy it: "In the long run ... the public as a whole has never benefited by destructive competition." Smith's key to efficient markets was Vail's cause of waste. "All costs of aggressive, uncontrolled competition are eventually borne, directly or indirectly, by the public," Vail wrote in one of the Bell telephone system's annual reports. In his heterodox vision of capitalism, shared by men like John Rockfeller, the right corporate titans—monopolists in each industry—could, and should, be trusted to do what was best for the nation. But Vail also ascribed to monopoly value beyond mere efficiency. With the security of monopoly, he believed, the dark side of human nature would shrink, and natural virtue might emerge. He saw a future, free of capitalism's form of Darwinian struggle, in which scientifically organized corporations, run by good men in close cooperation with the government, would serve the public best