Public Policy Toward “The Greatest Trust in the World”

Abstract

In the first of two articles, Professors Aduddell and Cain introduce the complex relations between a dynamic meatpacking industry and a government committed, in uncertain degree, to the philosophy of antitrust. From its earliest beginnings as an industry in the 1830s, meatpacking has experienced constantly changing parameters of technology, supply, demand, and public policy. Matters reached the first of several climaxes a few years after the new and naive Federal Trade Commission was established. Admittedly the dominant factor in a highly integrated meat industry, the largest companies were diversifying into non-meat food products, giving rise to the charge that they proposed to “monopolize” the entire food industry. The outcome was a consent decree in 1920 that, in confirming the large companies in their domination of meatpacking in return for their withdrawal from non-meat foods, revealed a government with a very weak case against an industry that it had made the cynosure of 120 million Americans. True to the familiar pattern of antitrust settlements, the dynamics of technology in transportation and marketing thereupon proceeded to render the decree meaningless. The second article, bringing the subject down to recent times, will appear in the Autumn issue.