This is a really interesting question!

I'd like to approach it from two directions, the first in a general - theoretical - way and the second by addressing the example you provided, the early 20th-century United States.

Firstly, from a theoretical perspective I think it's safe to say that companies have always held sway over governments/countries/peoples, at least since they have existed. When I read your post I immediately thought of the similarities between the early Roman gentes and companies. In early Rome, power was generally shared between the "great families" (gentes). They controlled the political mechanisms during the Monarchy and Early Republic, concentrated wealth in material goods, and dominated religious institutions. (See generally Christopher Smith's book on the gens.) What does this mean? It means that they controlled the Roman people from every vector.

This should be seen in the same way as the domination of a country by corporations as they share many attributes. In both the gentes and corporations, private individuals use the resources of their wider group to exercise an amount of control over parts of society outside of their private collective. And just like modern companies, the gentes exercised social power besides economic. Think - for instance - of a corporation like Chik-Fil-A (spelling?) in the United States that leverages its religious affiliation (evangelical Christian) alongside its economic resources to influence society.

In the same way, we see similar trends in other historical societies, notably through institutions like guilds. The history of these institutions stretches from the ancient world to more modern examples such as the guilds of Medieval Florence. The latter of these had considerable influence over life in the city and the lands under its control.

In the long run, I would say that many, perhaps most, societies have been influenced by what we would identify as companies (or their analogues). The level of influence fluctuates, but is rarely absent (I can't comment on more modern authoritarian countries, though, such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union).

To flesh out your example of the early 20th-century United States, it's worth looking at some Supreme Court decisions. The first is Marsh v. Alabama (326 U.S. 501 (1946)). In this case, a Jehovah's Witness evangelizer was handing out literature in a company town, Chickasaw, Alabama (something you picked up on and a phenomenon that was very common for a long time). This town had been built by the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation to house workers and give them the resources found in any comparable "normal" town.

Grace Marsh, the evangelist, was convicted of trespass when she refused to leave Chickasaw. The State of Alabama argued that the town was private property and thus police could enforce anti-trespassing laws. However, the US Supreme Court ruled in a 5-3 decision that Chickasaw - while ostensibly private property - was not wholly private. The Court's opinion stated that "The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it," (Marsh at 506) and that "Whether a corporation or a municipality owns or possesses the town the public in either case has an identical interest in the functioning of the community in such manner that the channels of communication remain free" (Marsh at 507).

What does this mean? It means that although the town was "private" property, because it functioned as a town it falls under the protections of the US Constitution (private organizations generally do not, which is one reason you can't sue a company like Facebook for violating the First Amendment when they delete a post). So while they company did exercise something of an economic monopoly in their particular locality, they did not have absolute power over the residents of a company town (at least after 1946, the picture is more bleak before this, and companies largely did exercise broad - government-like - authority).

A good examples beyond the company town for corporate influence over a person's life - and the government in general - can be found in another US Supreme Court decision, the infamous case of Lochner v. New York (198 U.S. 45 (1905)). Here, SCOTUS struck down a New York maximum working-hours law for bakers. Although legitimately passed by the New York legislature, SCOTUS sided with corporate interests in holding that this law violated the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment and the "freedom to contract" inherent to every man (women's working conditions could of course be regulated though, as determined in Muller v. Oregon, because "scientific" misogyny guided many of these decisions).

Lochner set a precedent by which SCOTUS would strike down state laws regulating things like minimum wage and overtime. This was the period in which corporations and corporate interests perhaps held the most sway over government and life in the United States. This only ended with the 1937 decision in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (300 U.S. 379), in the midst of the New Deal. SCOTUS held there that a Washington State minimum wage law was constitutional. The change in heart of the Court has traditionally been put down to President Roosevelt's threat to pack the court with new justices, thus breaking the domination of Laissez-Faire corporate-allied judges. However, the timeline of these threats and the actual decision in West Coast Hotel is problematic, leading at least one legal historian to argue the change came from the Court itself.

There are other aspects of American society that formed in the late 19th and early 20th century that evidence corporate power in American life, though, such as the creation of the Federal Reserve and the dominance of big banking.

I hope this response makes sense. I wanted to provide some broad historical examples outside of the US and then to add some detail to your original example.

- Josh