The American Socialist Party
Big businesses such as Standard Oil and Carnagie Steel basically ran their sole industries mainly due to the fact that they took out the competition. People such as Eugene V. Debs began to bring up the fact that there was an uneven balance between corporations, the government, and the regular people. Debs also commented on the fact that no one is truly “competing” with these large businesses due to this unbalance. Also, muckrakers such as Ida Tarbell, who described the corruption within the companies’ way of eliminating competition, helped to expose the truths about these big businesses which hadn’t already been seen by many. People like Debs and Tarbell helped to spark the discontent among the ordinary citizens of the United States about how these corporations were receiving “special treatment” from politicians and the government. People began questioning the free-market capitalism which was in place due to the laissez-faire philosophy. Debs started the American Socialist Party, which believed in government intervention within the markets, and many of the common citizens began to follow this idea mostly because of their disapproval of the way the markets, and more importantly how the government was running the markets. Conventions such as the one above in the picture show the mass movement of these new ideals. Although the Socialist Party never truly gained an extensive or large foothold within the federal government, this movement showed that the ordinary people within the United States were beginning to take a stand against the big businesses and the way the government was running the marketplace.