Farmers 

 and the v 

 Anii-Trust 

 Iiaiirs 



By ROBERT H. JACKSON, 



Assistant Attorney General 



of the United States* 



V^^\. HE antitrust law is an American 

 ^*~y^ invention. Those interests 

 ^_/ which try to discredit all dis- 

 tasteful legislation by labeling it as "an 

 alien influence" can not so characterize 

 our laws against monopoly. If any 

 trace of foreign influence can be found it 

 is the influence of the English common 

 law which had expressed abhorrence of 

 monopoly and a policy to restrain it. 



The antitrust laws perhaps more than 

 any other public policy owe their exist- 

 ence to the insistence of the farmers. 

 They first came into State legislation in 

 the agricultural States as a result of farm 

 support. They took their place in the na- 

 tional statute books in 1890 supported 

 largely by the influence of the farm pro- 

 test movement. They constituted a part 

 of what was known as the "Granger 

 Laws" and came to enactment as the re- 

 sult of the granger movement or "Popu- 

 list" uprising which caused more jitters 

 among conservatives of that day than the 

 New Deal does today. 



The philosophy of the antitrust laws 

 was simple American philosophy. It was 

 their doctrine that competition, left free 



The Goose and the Golden Egg 



* Exccrptj from iddrcss before annual meeting, 

 A.F.B.F. Chicago, Dec. 13, 1937. 



of restraint, would be a sufficient regu- 

 lator to assure fair prices and good ser- 

 vice to the public. They were based on 

 the theory that the government owed the 

 duty of policing the economic system to 

 see that no one interfered with its func- 

 tioning as a system of free enterprize. 

 They were intended to prevent the neces- 

 sity ever arising for government control 

 of prices or for government regulation 

 of business life. They were not designed 

 to get the government into business but 

 they were designed to keep the govern- 

 ment out of business. 



In the 47 years that have passed since 

 enactment of the Sherman Antitrust Law 

 we have accumulated a great deal of ex- 

 perience with these laws. It was five 

 years before the first test case reached the 

 Supreme Court, and the industry in- 

 volved was the sugar industry. The com- 

 bination in question had acquired control 

 of 98 per cent of the sugar refining busi- 

 ness of the United States but the Supreme 

 Court held that this had no influence 

 upon interstate commerce. This sugar 

 decision sweetened the path of the mo- 

 nopolists. During the very formative pe- 

 riod of great industrial combinations it 

 rendered the law a dead letter. So con- 



II 



was 

 380 



;t in 

 rices. 



Either we must get rid of monopoly 

 pegged prices or we must find con- 

 trols which will peg other prices in 

 relation to them/' 



servative a person as President Taft has 

 said of the sugar decision: "The effect 

 of the decision in the Knight case upon 

 the popular mind, and indeed upon Con- 

 gress as well, was to discourage hope 

 that the statute could be used to accom- 

 plish its manifest purpose and curb the 

 great industrial trusts. * * * So strong 

 was the impression made by the Knight 

 case that both Mr. Olney and Mr. Cleve- 

 land concluded that the evil must be con- 

 trolled through State legislation and not 

 through a national statute, and they said 

 so in their communications to Congress." 



It was not until the administration of 

 Theodore Roosevelt that a vigorous effort 

 to enforce the antitrust laws was made. 

 Court decisions rendered them rather in- 

 effectual. The International Harvester 

 Company and the United States Steel 

 Company were exonerated although they 

 controlled very large parts of their re- 

 spective industries, but the court laid 

 down the doctrine that great size and 

 great concentration of economic power 

 were no offense under the law. This 

 would have been strange doctrine to the 

 grangers of 1890. 



Under the administration of President 

 Wilson, recognizing that the enforcement 

 through the courts had not been satis- 

 factory. Congress created the Federal 

 Trade Commission, and passed the Clay- 

 ton Act. By a series of interpretations, 

 which it is not necessary here to detail, 

 these laws were deprived of much of 

 their effectiveness. 



The farmers seemed to have felt that 



(Continued on page 11) 



JANUARY. 1938 



m 



