Hendrick, in
_The Chronicles of America_ Series. Copyright, 1919, by the Yale University
Press. By permission of the author and of the publishers.]

In many manufacturing lines, American genius for organization and large
scale production has developed mammoth industries. In nearly all the
tendency to combination and concentration has exercised a predominating
influence. In the early years of the twentieth century the public realized,
for the first time, that one corporation, the American Sugar Refining
Company, controlled ninety-eight per cent of the business of refining
sugar. Six large interests--Armour, Swift, Morris, the National Packing
Company, Cudahy, and Schwarzschild and Sulzberger--had so concentrated the
packing business that, by 1905, they slaughtered practically all the cattle
shipped to Western centers and furnished most of the beef consumed in the
large cities east of Pittsburgh. The "Tobacco Trust" had largely
monopolized both the wholesale and retail trade in this article of luxury
and had also made extensive inroads into the English market. The textile
industry had not only transformed great centers of New England into an
American Lancashire, but the Southern States, recovering from the
demoralization of the Civil War, had begun to spin their own cotton and to
send the finished product to all parts of the world. American shoe
manufacturers had developed their art to a point where "American shoes" had
acquired a distinctive standing in practically every European country.

It is hardly necessary to describe in detail each of these industries. In
their broad outlines they merely repeat the story of steel, of oil, of
agricultural machinery; they are the product of the same methods, the same
initiative. There is one branch of American manufacture, however, that
merits more detailed attention. If we scan the manufacturing statistics of
1917, one amazing fact stares us in the face. There are only three American
industries whose product has attained the billion mark; one of these is
steel, the other food products, while the third is an industry that was
practically unknown in the United States fifteen years ago. Superlatives
come naturally to mind in discussing American progress, but hardly any
extravagant phrases could do justice to the development of American
automobiles. In 1902 the United States produced 3700 motor vehicles; in
1916 we made 1,500,000. The man who now makes a personal profit of not far
f