The corporation has grown in size and influence since the Civil War.  Changes in corporation law since then, permitting corporations to own stocks of other corporations, have made possible the pyramiding of ownership and power in anonymous bodies that stand like great giants in a world of personally helpless men and women, whether they are workers or owners.  How great the concentration of power has become was recently (1939-1940) illumined by the Temporary National Economic Committee of the United States Congress.

Before the war there were thirty corporations in the United States with assets of more than a billion dollars each.  These giant economic units are each richer than many an American state or sovereign foreign nation.

[Description of concentration compared to states and in assets and production.]

The point is clear: in size, labor employed, and production the larger corporations dominate certain large areas of American economic life.  In the glass industry, for instance, the parent company, through the control of patents, regulates production and allocates markets, decides who can or cannot go into the glass-producing business, determines the type of bottle or glass that can be produced and the quantity that can be placed on the market, and fixes the prices.  Independent producers find the going hard, and by a series of litigations for patent infringement, the smaller independent companies were either forced into bankruptcy or compelled to sell out or join the larger company.

(Tannenbaum, The True Society. Pages 110-112)

The president of the company can vote its stock in the operating companies and thus select the officers and directors of these concerns.  The American telephone system, with all its complicated connections, is controlled by this one corporation.  If this [AT&T] is an unusual example in magnitude and wealth, it is nevertheless illustrative of a drift in the Amercian economy.

This tendency has continued since the war.  Since 1940 some 1,800 independent firms, with [combined] assets of over four billion dollars, have been bought by, or merged with, lorger corporations.  The great corporations came out of the war with such large amounts of liquid capital that they could have purchased a very large proportion of the smaller manufacturing corparations in the United States. [Footnote - Federal Trade Commission: Report on Present Trend of Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office; 1947) pp. 6-9]

(Tannenbaum, page 113.)