Who "ruled the air" in 1910? (and who rules it now?)

A century ago, the insurgent phone company of the time -- American Telephone and Telegraph -- found itself swimming in a sea of public worry. Consumers and independent providers feared (rightly as it turned out) that the corporation would prevail in its ultimate goal, the acquisition of almost all of the nation's phone lines. And so AT&T launched the Progressive Era equivalent of Verizon's current "Rule the Air" campaign.

In terms of policy objectives, the historian Roland Marchand thought that AT&T's crusade worked. When the Federal Communications Commission launched its first probe into the company's aggressive practices in the mid-1930s, AT&T emerged "virtually unscathed" from the ordeal. "When observers asked why investigations of the telephone monopoly had elicited almost no public support during the perilous mid-1930s, corporate analysts almost unanimously gave credit to AT&T's thirty-year campaign of coordinated institutional advertising and public relations," his study concluded.