Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [74]
In 1884, Congress entered the picture; it passed a law establishing a Bureau of Animal Industry under the Commissioner of Agriculture; the head of the bureau was to be a veterinarian. No railroad company or boat line was to accept or transport “any live stock affected with any contagious, infectious, or communicable disease, and especially ... pleuro-pneumonia.”35 Quality control had become, more and more, a problem that spilled across state lines. No one state had the power to protect itself from infection. This simple fact eventually led to an enormous flow of power to Washington, D.C.
Curbing Economic Power
The flow of authority to the center was egregiously true of regulation whose point was curbing economic power—another theme that grew stronger in the latter part of the century. This had been a theme in the struggles over bank regulation, and over various issues in corporation law as well. The terms of the debate changed radically in the industrial age, when more and more people left the countryside to work as land-less wage earners in big factories or mines; they were joined in the cities and in the mining and factory towns by hordes of new immigrants from abroad. Big business grew bigger; big fish swallowed little fish; and the result was the formation of huge agglomerations—the hated monopolies or “trusts.” John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company was the great exemplar, but there were trusts in cotton oil, sugar, and many other products; and the small merchant and farmer was as terrified and angry as the industrial worker, if not more so.
In the 1880s, there was a burst of legislative activity against these dreaded aggregations. The constitution of Washington State (1889) shouted out bravely that “monopolies and trusts shall never be allowed in this state”; and, more specifically, corporations were not to combine to fix prices or limit output (article 12, sections 18, 22). A Michigan statute of 1889 declared “illegal and void” any agreement or “combination” either to “limit, control, or ... restrict” production of any “article or commodity,” or to jack up its price, or in general to “prevent or restrict free competition in ... production or sale.” Any such agreement was a “criminal conspiracy.”36 The North Carolina law “to prohibit trusts,” passed in the same year, made it a crime for any “merchant, broker, manufacturer or dealer in raw materials” to sell goods (raw or processed) “for less than actual cost for the purpose of breaking down competitors.”37
What, if anything, these state laws accomplished is hard to say. They hardly laid a finger on the trusts. Some laws were poorly drawn; most were poorly enforced; and, most significant of all, the tentacles of the great trusts twisted and curled across the country, ignoring state boundaries—no North Carolina or Michigan by itself had the power to control them. Only a federal statute could do the trick. The center of attention shifted to Washington, D.C.
The famous Sherman Antitrust Law, passed in 1890, was what came out of the agitation; it laid the foundation stone of a whole branch of law (antitrust law). Senator James K. Jones of Arkansas sounded the main theme in debate: federal intervention was an absolute necessity. The miracles of steam and electricity had “well-nigh abolished time and distance”; the genie was out of the bottle, and the states were helpless to control it. The trusts were “commercial monsters,” “sharks” that were fattening on the spoils they extracted from the public. If the “iron hand of the law” was not laid on them, and “heavily,” the