"Throughout our history we don't mind that people become rich but we do mind that people become powerful. Standard Oil had the first real problem with that among public companies." Rockefeller's empire became, says Mr. Smith (no relation), "a proxy for everything that Americans feared—and what they feared was a concentration of power."

A straw poll by Fred Bateman, a professor of economics at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business, brings us to the present. He asked three classes in economics, about 100 students in all, which company they thought was the most hated in America. They almost all said Wal-Mart.

And, in its darker moments, Wal-Mart might almost half-agree. For the past two or three years it has endured spikes of public hostility provoked by labour unions that want to organise in its stores, communities that want to shut it out to safeguard local commerce, and by periodic rows over claims that Wal-Mart was using illegal immigrants as cleaners, paying its staff so little that they relied on welfare benefits, and systematically underpaying female workers. Having tried at first to stare down its critics, Wal-Mart has moved in the past year to recruit a high-powered team of lobbyists and consultants, including former advisers to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, to manage its image and interests more actively.