Throughout the history of the United States, there have been various challenges between groups for dominance of state politics. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, large business owners (corporations) and industrial workers competed for power. This historical period was very revealing that workers were not treated fairly and that business tycoons were simply focused on making money. These business magnates continued to control nearly every aspect of business and consequently influenced and shaped American life and government decisions. The great businessmen of the late 19th century consisted of major business magnates such as railroad barons Vanderbilt, Tom Scott, James Hill, and Jay Gould, oil baron Rockefeller, and financial baron J.P. Morgan; everyone believed that competition was ruinous and demoralizing and destroyed order. Such was the belief that competition destroyed order that companies sought to control every aspect of business. The era of big business began when business visionaries began to merge companies and create powerful corporations. These companies have grown greatly, to the point where they have dominated a significantly large percentage of a particular market. The meaning of this is: the few most capable companies dictate the prices of certain items in a market! The most capable organizations were John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, Andrew Carnegie's Carnegie Steel, Cornelius Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroad System, and JP Morgan. banking house. These partnerships dominated significant portions of their market's assets: by 1879, for example, Rockefeller had 90% of the nation's oil refinery assets in his pocket! Horizontal integration... half the paper... they conflicted when it came to asking for what each wanted. Big entrepreneurs wanted to become stronger capitalists, not to make money, but to make more money. Industrial workers, who had become victims of these "capitalists", wanted better working conditions and sought strength in numbers, not in the few. As a result, politicians invented the Sherman Antitrust Act, which sought to break up monopolies, but the influence of big business took its lead and redirected it to future industrial workers' unions; the result is a tug of war between workers and entrepreneurs, in a certain sense between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The influence of Republican and Democratic politicians by big business pushed a stronger foreign interventionist agenda, and thus strengthened US business elites, who in return weakened more poor people, causing riots..