Chapter 6

“The general shift toward government regulation under the banner of Progressive reform gave force and direction to specific dissatisfactions with the telephone market" (p. 209)

In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, social transformations merged with technological advances to create mass-readership newspapers, which aided the emergence of mass political parties. Late in the century, the appearance of opinion magazines nurtured policy-oriented interest groups that gave voice to the middle-class Progressive reform movement. As telephone technology soon began to compete with the telegraph, and the Bell Company became an equal to Western Union, an increasing role of the government in terms of antitrust and other regulation became increasingly significant