19th and early 20th centuries. The machines dispensed city jobs and contracts to supporters, who in turn did political work to keep the machine politicians in office. Machines also provided "constituent services" or favors to ordinary voters, often immigrants, again in turn for their suppport at the polls. In spite of their reputation for corruption, some machines ran their cities rather effectively, and provided a path into public life for immigrant groups.
An oil-industry monopoly established by John D. Rockefeller in the late 19th century, who bought up control of rival firms or forced them out of business, including reputedly by dynamiting their facilities. The monopoly control established by the Standard Oil Trust played a major part in passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act and other legal regulatory mechanisms intended to break up monopolies.
The effective denial of the right to vote, often by making voting difficult in practice even if the right to vote existed in theory. Disfranchisement was particularly seen in the post-Reconstruction South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prevent African-Americans from voting. Methods included literacy tests (which could be arbitrarily applied), poll taxes that had to be paid in order to vote, and so forth, as well as informal intimidation. This system of disfranchisement operated in
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