I Owe The Public Nothing

Quoted in the New York World in 1901, during public controversy over Morgan's consolidation of the steel industry into U.S. Steel — then the largest corporation in the world. The statement became notorious as an expression of Gilded Age plutocratic indifference to public accountability. It helped fuel the Progressive Era movement for corporate regulation and contributed to the political climate that produced the antitrust prosecutions of the early twentieth century.