In the 19th century, industrialists such as Titus Salt and George Cadbury built planned villages for their workers. Salt's Saltaire was built from 1850 near Bradford, with a huge mill, housing, a hospital, schools, a park and a library. Cadbury's Bournville, started in the 1890s outside Birmingham, provided healthy homes, gardens for growing food, and rules on diet and alcohol shaped by Quaker beliefs. Health improved in these isolated communities, with better sanitation and fresh water. The same paternalism also limited residents' freedoms, and Saltaire famously has no pub.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.