ABSTRACT
Around the bare bone stories of the rise of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of Ohio and Sam Walton’s Wal-Mart as recounted in Chapter Two, there are other, larger narratives that have become part of the American legacy. These narratives blur distinctions between the actions of the leaders of Standard Oil and Wal-Mart and their firms and changes in the larger social, political, and economic context in which they operated. They are, for the most part, narratives of judgment and blame that have served political and economic debate as well as historical scholarship. Because the larger, more inclusive narratives are part of evolving American public understanding of economic and corporate power, these narratives have also shaped the scholarship of the economists and other social scientists who have articulated the issues that such power presents in a democratic society. These larger narratives and the role they have played in shaping social and political history, economic history, and American literature are the subject of this chapter.
