1. A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States.
2. Arthur Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, vol. 3 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 280.
3. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 331.
4. Ibid., 333.
5. Rexford Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 220, 546. From Tugwell’s point of view, one person more than any other was responsible for this revolution. In his recollections a generation later, Tugwell wrote of his colleagues in the Roosevelt administration that “they were infected with the malevolence of old justice Brandeis. The old justice had a gentle manner, too, but no harder character ever played a part in the nation’s public life” (545).
6. Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 391.
7. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life (New York: Viking, 2017), 18, 19.
8. Roosevelt was concerned about British dominance of the radio business. Roosevelt also turned over the Navy’s own radio patents to the new subsidiary and helped to convince Britain’s Marconi to sell control of its American radio unit to General Electric. Barry C. Lynn, End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 73, note 267.
9. Michael A. Janson and Christopher S. Yoo, “The Wires Go to War: The U.S. Experiment with Government Ownership of the Telephone System During World War I,” Faculty Scholarship, Paper 467, April 1, 2013.
10. Address of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, Municipal Auditorium, Portland, Oregon, September 21, 1932. Available online at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/msf/msf00530.
11. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Little, Brown, 1990), 24.
12. On Hoover’s bank bailout, see James Stuart Olson, Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 74.
13. As Olson describes the event, “Roosevelt continued to insist until finally Jones caved in” (ibid.). Roosevelt also made clear, Olson reports, that “government ownership or forced consolidation was just not in the cards” (ibid., 119). The administration did insist on salary reductions for executives and cancelled dividends (ibid., 126, 163). By 1935, the RFC had invested more than $1.3 billion in stock and capital notes in more than 6,800 banks, or almost half the total number of banks in the United States (ibid., 81).
14. By 1935, the RFC had made more than 40,000 loans to American businesses. In the first two years of the New Deal, the RFC was the “largest investor in the economy” (ibid., 60). This made it “the most ubiquitous of New Deal agencies” (ibid., 43–44).
15. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration was established to pay farmers not to plant certain products. It used funds collected in the form of a tax on processors (ibid., 85).
16. Ibid., 204.
17. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 387. “By late 1937, most antitrusters—including Brandeis, Frankfurter, Corcoran, and Cohen—were beginning to fuse the compensatory spending and antitrust philosophies. Federal spending would increase competition by putting more purchasing power in consumers’ pockets and creating new opportunities for entrepreneurial initiative. A combination of spending and antitrust activity would provide new outlets for private investment and help break the monopolies’ stranglehold on the economy” (Olson, Saving Capitalism, 192). See also Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 299–300.
18. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt, 220.
19. Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 290.
20. Franklin Roosevelt, Campaign Address, Chicago, October 14, 1936.
21. Sawyer, American Fair Trade, provides an especially good description, 99–105.
22. Smith, Work of Nations, 63.
23. Regarding Sherman, see Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy, 166.
24. Sherman, “Trusts,” 15.
25. One of the first recorded discussions of resale price maintenance was in 1852, in a U.K. commission on book pricing, which included Charles Dickens as a member. In the United States drug companies were using the practice by 1875. The first U.S. legal case on the issue took place in 1885 and involved a thread company. Andrew N. Kleit, “Efficiencies Without Economists: The Early Years of Resale Price Maintenance,” Southern Economic Journal 59, no. 4 (April 1993): 597–619. Thorelli writes that he could find “no instances” of RPM held illegal before 1890 (Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy, 48, 49). Indeed, in the most well-known case before Dr. Miles, the New York Supreme Court specifically held that “It is … lawful for the manufacturers individually to agree with their customers that those customers shall sell the particular goods manufactured by the vendor for a certain price” (John D Park & Sons Co. v. National Wholesale Druggists Association et al., 50 N.Y. 1064, in Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy, 267).
26. Sawyer, American Fair Trade, 141. See also Eleanor M. Fox, “Parallel Imports, The Intraband/Interbrand Competition Paradigm, and the Hidden Gap Between Intellectual Property Law and Antitrust,” Fordham International Law Journal 25, no. 4 (2001).
27. Dr. Miles Medical Co. v. John D. Park & Sons Co., 220 U.S. 373 (1911).
28. Wright Patman, The Robinson-Patman Act: What You Can and Cannot Do Under This Law (New York: Ronald Press, 1938), 35.
29. Jonathan Bean, Beyond the Broker State: Federal Policies Toward Small Business, 1936–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 78. Quote at 83.
30. Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 281.
31. Ibid., 384.
32. “Quantity discounts, promotional discounts, discounts to recognize the purchaser’s assumptions of tasks that would otherwise fall on the seller, discounts because of the purchaser’s stage in the distribution chain, promotional allowances, advertising allowances—all these and many more are foregone or changed by the law,” Bork wrote (ibid., 384).
33. The Roosevelt administration made clear it agreed in the July 1938 “Report to the President on the Economic Conditions of the South” (Washington, DC: National Emergency Council, 1938). “The public utilities in the South are almost completely controlled by outside interests. All the major railroad systems are owned and controlled elsewhere. Most of the great electric holding company systems, whose operating companies furnish the light, heat, and power for southern homes and industries, are directed, managed, and owned by outside interests. Likewise, the transmission and distribution of natural gas, one of the South’s great assets, is almost completely in the hands of remote financial institutions.” This ownership structure, the report concluded, “makes it possible for residents elsewhere to influence greatly the manner in which the South is developed and to subordinate that development to other interests outside the South.”
34. Ernest G. Shinner, The Forgotten Man (Chicago: Patterson Publishing, 1933), 110, 149. On Shinner’s business of selling meat, see “Champion of Small Business: How E. G. Shinner, Meat Store Wizard, Fights the Big Chains—and Beats Them,” Kiplinger Magazine, February 1949.
35. As a Federal Reserve history of the act puts it, “Before the act, a Fed member bank was a single corporation operating out of a single building in a narrow range of activities. After the act, a Fed member could be a complex corporation with multiple legal layers operating from multiple locations; these organizations became larger and more complex as decades passed.” McFadden Act of 1927, Federal Reserve History, November 22, 2013. Available online at www.federalreservehistory.org/Events/DetailView/11.
36. Louis K. Liggett v. Lee, 288 U.S. 517 (1933).
37. Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). By 1951 every state other than Texas, Missouri, and Vermont had passed such laws. See “Fair Trade Laws, Address by James Mead, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Before the New York State Pharmaceutical Association,” June 11, 1951.
38. Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 77th Congress, Second Session, Appendix, Volume 88, Part 9, April 21, 1942, to July 24, 1942, p. A1644.
39. Patman, The Robinson-Patman Act, 35.
40. United States v. Von’s Grocery Company, 233 F. Supp. 976 (S.D. Cal. 1964).
41. Brian Feldman, “The Real Reason Middle America Should Be Angry,” Washington Monthly, March 2016.
42. Phillip Longman, “Bloom and Bust: Regional Inequality Is out of Control,” Washington Monthly, November 2015.
43. Chrysler had two plants in St. Louis, and Ford one big plant. GM built all its Corvettes in St. Louis.
44. In 1980, there were 637 community banks in Missouri, but by 2014 the number had fallen to 262. State of Missouri, “Thirty-Fourth Biennial Report,” Division of Finance, July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2014.
45. Feldman, “The Real Reason Middle America Should Be Angry.”
46. “McDonnell Douglas F-15 Streak Eagle,” National Museum of the United States Air Force. Available online at https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/197972/mcdonnell-douglas-f-15-streak-eagle/.
47. Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (New York: Little, Brown, 1937), 152.
48. Ibid.
49. Regarding Sherman, see Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy, 166.
50. Tony Freyer, Antitrust and Global Capitalism, 1930–2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 247.
51. Ibid., 162. See also John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
52. Lynn, End of the Line, 87.
53. Baltzan, “The Old-School Answer to Global Trade.”
54. Lynn, End of the Line, 61–62.
55. Alfred D. Chandler, Inventing the Electronic Century (New York: The Free Press, 2001). AT&T’s informal 1952 agreement to license the technologies was later buttressed by an official consent decree with the Eisenhower administration, in 1956.
56. Lynn, “Built to Break: The International System of Bottlenecks in the New Era of Monopoly,” Challenge Magazine 55, no. 2 (March/April 2012): 87–107.
57. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 137.
58. Wilson, The New Freedom, 54.
59. Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth, 114; Postel, Equality: An American Dilemma, 308–309; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 254–258.
60. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 633, 703.
61. Brian Feldman, “The Decline of Black Business: And What It Means for American Democracy,” Washington Monthly, March 2017.
62. In his autobiography, Mason wrote, “Pharmacists represented an economically independent class of black businessmen who might have been thought difficult for the white establishment to control. In many cases, the black-owned pharmacy was itself a nexus in black communities” (ibid.). On Daniel Speed (ibid.) on Selma march, see Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 144, 149.
63. The suit claimed that the hospitals, which provided more than 75 percent of the city’s private hospital beds, discriminated against black physicians. The settlement slowly helped integrate black citizens into the medical profession (Feldman, Decline of Black Business).
64. Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall, American Revolutionary (New York: Crown, 1998), 321.
65. Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 114.
66. Greenwood was nicknamed Black Wall Street. The riot, which began after black citizens protested the arrest of a teenager for allegedly assaulting a white elevator operator, resulted in the destruction of 1,256 homes and 191 businesses, many burned by gasoline bombs tossed from airplanes. Most reliable estimates put the death toll above 100. Some 10,000 black citizens were left homeless. Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001).
67. William Kovacic, “Antitrust in the O’Connor-Rehnquist Era: A View from Inside the Supreme Court,” Antitrust 20, no. 3 (Summer 2006); William E. Kovacic, “Reagan’s Judicial Appointees and Antitrust in the 1990s,” Fordham Law Review 60, no. 1 (1991); Victor Kramer, “The Road to City of Berkeley: The Antitrust Positions of Justice Thurgood Marshall,” Antitrust Bulletin 32, no. 335 (1987).
68. United States v. Topco Associates, Inc., argued November 16, 1971, decided March 29, 1972.
69. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 29.