London wrote during a period of rapid, uneven economic recovery. Between 1900 and 1910, the nation’s population jumped from 67 million to 92 million, with much of the gain coming in cities, where the rate of growth was three times faster than that in rural areas. Both average per capita wealth and average personal income increased, as did the unevenness of their distribution: in a period of strong economic expansion, the average real income of laborers fell. Investors, even those with modest capital to invest, were the winners, as both expansion and consolidation of industries pushed profits up – especially in railways, iron and steel, copper, meat-packing, milling, tobacco, and petroleum. By 1910, the men in charge of the nation’s largest business firms possessed enormous political as well as economic power. “We have no word to express government by moneyed corporations,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., noted in 1869. Forty years later, the nation was still looking for words to describe its new political economy, which was dominated, Henry James observed, by the “new remorseless monopolies.” Meanwhile, the poor were becoming poorer and more hopeless – “oxlike, limp, and lead-eyed,” as the poet Vachel Lindsay put it. Some skilled laborers prospered, but others suffered, especially the new immigrants from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe. In the North and the South, black Americans continued to be victimized by inferior schools, poor housing, and segregation that was vigilantly enforced in schools, churches, unions, and workplaces, as well as society at large.