MONOPOLY CAPITALISM, THEN AND NOW

MONOPOLY CAPITALISM, THEN AND NOW

Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The first came is response to a controversial court ruling that found that states had no jurisdiction over interstate trade, made ubiquitous by the growth of the increasingly unpopular railroads. The second, sponsored by Ohio senator John Sherman, was also intended, in part, to quell public unrest over big business. Congress needed to pacify the angry masses, Sherman argued, lest the country be vulnerable to "the socialist, the communist, the nihilist."

John Sherman - the younger brother of William Tecumseh and former Secretary of the Treasury - was not antibusiness. He favored an open market in which businesses competed fairly for consumers. But the new industry giants, he argued, "are not satisfied with . .competing with each other, and have invented a new form of combination. . .that seeks to avoid competition. . . ."

The Serman Antitrust Act of 1890 passed nearly unanimously through Congress. It declared "every contract, combination in the form of a trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states, or with foreign nations" to be illegal. Likewise, any "attempt to monopolize" a part of that trade or commerce. But Sherman Act or no Sherman Act, in the coming decade, the railroads and other big businesses advanced pretty much unchecked - at least those that survived a devastating depression in 1893.

Hill's railroad - redubbed the Great Northern Railway - was the only transcontinental to survive the depression. Not only did his road reach Seattle that year, but by drastically cutting costs - laying off more than a thousand workers and slashing the pay of those who remained - Hill's company continued to provide its investors with solid dividends.

For the workers who had relocated to the West, and had no other means of employment in the region, however, the depression in 1893 was disastrous. Of the hate mail Hill received from bitter railroad men, at least one letter quite literally hit home: "It would be a fitting climax if you should be taken by your employees and hung by the neck till dead, from one of the triumphal arches so recently erected at the expense of the very people you are now defrauding of their hard earnings." The letter was sent in care of Hill's wife.

Today, similar monopolistic capitalism is being espoused by the new Republican Congress people (neoconservatives) and many big businesses, where Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan both support monopoly capitalism, and candidates for the U.S. presidency and vice, respectively. If they, and our people, will forget the negative economic consequences of the 1890s, our country will once again repeat it. And, given our current advanced means of transportation and communication, together with the increasing power of the new Republicans, its consequences would be much worse. 
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Source: Smithsonian, October 1999, "The First Empire Builder of the Northwest," by Minna Morse, pp138-139.