1. ”‘The Ideals of Public Life’: An Address to the Annual Dinner of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, November 16, 1907,” in Link, Arthur S., ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 17 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 500Google Scholar.

2. Croly, Herbert, “An Unseen Reversal,” The New Republic 1 (01 9, 1915): 7–8Google Scholar.

3. New York Times, May 31, 1914.

4. Theodore Roosevelt to Edward Prentiss Costigan, August 15, 1914, in Morison, Elting E., ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 808Google Scholar.

5. In private, Roosevelt insisted that “the course pursued by the Administration has meant the abandonment of every sane effort to secure the abatement of social and industrial evils.” In public, Roosevelt condemned the New Freedom is “merely the exceedingly old freedom which permits each man to cut his neighbor's throat.” Theodore Roosevelt to Lyman Abbott, June 29, 1914, in ibid., 768; New York Times, July 1, 1914, 1.

6. Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

7. As understood by Richberg, Donald, a prominent member of the national Progressive party organization, the strategy of Democratic party leaders was to recast their party as the country's liberal party, to “force the Republicans to accept a conservative role [,] and thereby drive Progressive Republicans into the Democratic camp.” Donald Richberg, My hero: The Indiscreet Memoirs of an Eventful but Unheroic Life (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1954), 81Google Scholar.

8. The logic of this claim has much in common with arguments developed elsewhere by Adam Przeworski and John Sprague to explain the programmatic and electoral failure of European socialist parties. Their analysis pivots on the existence of a simple electoral dilemma. Historically, the European working class never constituted a majority of the electorate. Consequently, to win elections, parties of the left were forced to dilute their programmatic agenda and mute the ideological salience of class; this, in order to secure cross-class electoral support. The result was to weaken the appeal of leftist parties to workers, which in turn encouraged abstention from the electoral process and defection to more traditional parties. This, in turn, accelerated the electoral decline of socialist parties and, more broadly, of the socialist project itself. See Przeworski, and Sprague, , Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

9. The Clayton Act also reaffirmed labor's right to organize and placed certain restrictions on the use on court injunctions in labor disputes.

10. Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York: The Free Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Lustig, R. Jeffrey, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern Political Theory, 1890–1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

11. Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

12. Ibid., 33.

13. Ibid., 347.

14. On the distinctions between Roosevelt, Wilson, and Taft, see Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, 35–40, 324–5 and, more generally, chapters 5–6. The rule of reason decisions are United States v. Standard Oil, 221 U.S. 1 and United States v. American Tobacco, 221 U.S. 106.

15. Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, 324. Emphasis added.

16. United States v. Trans-Missouri Freight Association (1897), 166 U.S. 290, 324. Were this indeed the policy intent behind the Sherman Act, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded, “I should regard calling such a law a regulation of commerce a mere pretense. It would be an attempt to reconstruct society” (United States v. Northern Securities Company [1904], 193 U.S. 197 [Justice Holmes, dissenting]).

17. United States v. American Tobacco (1908), 164 F. 700.

18. The phrase “free and unrestricted competition” occurs frequently in Justice Peckham's opinion in Trans-Missouri. It was a phrase seized on by agrarian Democrats, and, as will be discussed in detail at a later point in the article, it was language that would reappear in the initial antitrust legislation introduced by the Democrats in 1914.

19. United States v. American Tobacco (1908), 164 F. 700, 701.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., 701–2.

22. United States v. American Tobacco (1911), 221 U.S. 106, 192 (Justice Harlan, dissenting).

23. Ibid (Justice Harlan dissenting).

24. This passage is taken from the written transcript of Justice Harlan's oral dissent delivered in the Standard Oil Case, 15 May 1911. Quoted in The Commoner, May 26, 1911,3.

25. United States v. Standard Oil Company (1911), 221 U.S. 1, 92 (Justice Harlan, dissenting).

26. 221 U.S. 106, 192.

27. 221 U.S. 1, 105.

28. The Commoner, May 26, 1911, p. 6. Like Adamson, William P. Hamilton, editor of the Wall Street Journal, believed that the Supreme Court had acted unconstitutionally, violating the separation of powers and “[reading] into the Sherman act an amendment that never could have passed the Congress of the United States.” Nevertheless, Hamilton, counseled businessmen not to admonish the Court for its constitutional transgressions: “Why? Because you could never have got to pass through the Congress of the United States such a word as ‘unreasonable’ in the Sherman law, and you have got to get it into the law in order to save the business of the United States,” New York Times (05 18, 1911), 3Google Scholar.

29. 62nd Cong., 1st sess., S.2374.

30. Ibid., S.2433.

31. Scott C. James, “Federal Antitrust Enforcement and the Transformation of the Sherman Act: Party Competition, Populism, and the Per Se Rule, ” paper presented at the 1995 annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Politics and History Section, March 16–18, Portland, Oregon.

32. The Commoner, June 21, 1911, p. 2.

33. 62nd Cong., 1st sess., S. 2375 (emphasis in original).

34. The Commoner, May 26, 1911, p. 1.

35. Ibid.

36. Bryan, William Jennings, “The Reason,” North American Review 194 (07 1911): 21Google Scholar, 22. Emphasis in original.

37. Ibid., 21.

38. Bryan's analysis parallels the adverse report made in 1909 by Republican Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota on behalf of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in reference to a bill to amend the antitrust law to allow reasonable restraints of trade. In that report Nelson stated: “The anti-trust act makes it a criminal offense to violate the law, and provides a punishment both by fine and imprisonment. To inject into the act the question of whether an agreement or combination is reasonable or unreasonable would render the act as a criminal or penal statute indefinite and uncertain, and hence, to that extent, utterly nugatory and void, and would practically amount to a repeal of that part of the act. … And while the same technical objection does not apply to civil prosecutions, the injection of the rule of reasonableness or unreasonableness would lead to the greatest variableness and uncertainty in the enforcement of the law. The defense of reasonable restraint would be made in every case, and there would be as many different rules of reasonableness as cases, courts, and juries. What one court or jury might deem unreasonable another court or jury might deem reasonable. A court jury in Ohio might find a given agreement or combination reasonable, while a court and jury in Wisconsin might find the same agreement and combination unreasonable. In the case of the People v. Sheldon [(1893) 139 N.Y. 264], Chief Justice Andrews remarks: ‘If agreements and combinations to prevent competition in prices are or may be hurtful to trade, the only sure remedy is to prohibit all agreements of that character. If the validity of such an agreement was made to depend up on actual proof of public prejudice or injury, it would be very difficult in any case to establish the invalidity, although the moral evidence might be very convincing.’ … To amend the antitrust act, as suggested by this bill, would be to entirely emasculate it, and for all practical purposes render it nugatory as a remedial statute. Criminal prosecutions would not lie, and civil remedies would labor under the greatest doubt and uncertainty. The act as it exists is clear, comprehensive, certain, and highly remedial. It practically covers the field of Federal jurisdiction, and is in every respect a model law. To destroy or undermine it at the present juncture, when combinations are on the increase, and appear to be as oblivious as ever of the rights of the public, would be a calamity.”

39. The Commoner, January 12, 1912, p. 2.

40. Bryan, “The Reason,” 14.

41. Ibid., 18.

42. Ibid., 17. Bryan's call for legislative repeal of the rule of reason can also be found in The Commoner, issues dated May 26, 1911, December 1, 1911, p. 1, and in an interview with Harger, C. M. for the Outlook, reprinted in The Commoner, 01 12, 1912, p. 2Google Scholar. Within the Democratic party, agreement was widespread that the restoration of the Sherman act was, in itself, an insufficient remedy to the trust problem. Indeed, agrarian Democrats had advocated their own federal license system—the crucial antitrust plank of the Democrats' 1908 platform—for corporations engaged in interstate trade. Under the Democratic licensing scheme, any corporation in control of at least twenty-five percent of the product it dealt in would be required to obtain a federal license to engage in interstate trade. The purpose of the license system, Bryan explained, was to protect the public from watered stock and to ensure that such corporations sold “to all customers in all parts of the country on the same terms, after making due allowance for cost of transportation.” More striking—because more threatening to big business—corporations controlling “more than 50 percent of the total amount of any product consumed in the United States” would be denied a license, this as a way of checking the process of corporate concentration and maintaining a minimum of competition. In The Commoner, May 26, 1911, p. 1; ibid., December 1, 1911, p. 1.

43. National Party Platform, 1840–1960, compiled by Porter, Kirk H. and Johnson, Donald Bruce (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1961)Google Scholar. The call for legislation supplemental to the Sherman Act, however, was couched in language less specific than that found in the 1908 platform's demand for the federal licensing of interstate corporations.

44. The Commoner, July 12, 1912, p. 1.

45. The Commoner, September 27, 1912, p. 6.

46. Ibid. Roosevelt, for his part, played on the public's perception of the Democratic party as a party of antiquarian ideas and ideals, the party of the economic and cultural hinterland. Roosevelt charged that the antitrust program of the Democratic party was unfit for the conditions of modern industrial America, branding Bryan's form of radical progressivism “a form of sincere rural toryism.” Well-meaning but misguided, Bryanite agrarianism sought “… (by the Sherman law method) to bolster up an individualism already proved to be both futile and mischievous; to remedy by more individualism the concentration that was the inevitable result of the already existing individualism. They [see] the evil done by the big combinations, and [seek] to remedy it by destroying them and restoring the country to the economic conditions of the middle of the nineteenth century.” Roosevelt, Theodore, Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913)Google Scholar, excerpted in Carl Resek, ed., The Progressives (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.), 183.

47. Wilson's, acceptance speech before the Baltimore convention is reprinted in full in The Commoner, 08 16, 1912Google Scholar.

48. Brandeis, Louis D., “Trusts, Efficiency, and the New Party,” Collier's Weekly 49 (09 1912): 14Google Scholar. See also, Brandeis, Louis D., “Shall We Abandon the Policy of Competition,” Case and Comment 18 (02 1912): 435Google Scholar.

49. A satisfying discussion of Brandeis's “theory of regulated competition” is found in Berk, Gerald, “Neither Markets nor Administration: Brandeis and the Antitrust Reforms of 1914,” Studies in American Political Development 8 (1994): 24–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. The Commoner, August 16, 1912, pp. 2–3.

51. Mowry, George E., Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), 183–206Google Scholar, 257, 263, 280. Wilson made overt appeals to La Follette supporters throughout the campaign, both to reopen the wounds between Roosevelt and La Follette and to minimize the distance between himself and the Wisconsin senator. An example is the following:

“Then there arose a sturdy little giant in Wisconsin who is now such an indomitable, unconquerable champion of progressive ideas all along the line. I mean Senator La Follette Men who seek expediency rather than pursue principle took him up for a little while and pretended to follow him, and then rejected him, not because he was not the genuine champion of their principles, but because they apparently saw their interest lie in another direction. I do not believe there are many chapters of personal history in the records of parties in this country more difficult to reconcile with principles of honor than that. I feel myself close kin to these men who have been fighting the battle of progressive democracy, for no matter what label they bear we are of one principle.

“I remember hearing a story not long ago. I have told it a number of times but perhaps you will bear with me if I tell it again because it interprets my feeling. A very deaf old lady was approached by her son, who wanted to introduce a stranger to her, and he said, ‘Mama, this is Mr. Stickpin.’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said; ‘what did you say the name was?’ ‘Mr. Stickpin.’ ‘I don't catch it,’ she said. ‘Mr. Stickpin.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘its no use; it sounds exactly like Stickpin.’ Now, when I talk of men like La Follette's way of thinking in politics I feel like saying: ‘I beg you pardon, what did you say you were?’ ‘A Republican.’ ‘A what?’ ‘A Republican.’ ‘No use; it sounds to me just like Democrat.’ I can't tell the difference.… Wilson, Woodrow, “The Vision of the Democratic Party,” in Davidson, John Wells, ed., A Crossroads of Freedom: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Woodrow Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 260–1Google Scholar.

52. Doan, Edward N., The La Folleltes and the Wisconsin Idea (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1947), 72–3Google Scholar.

53. Louis D. Brandeis to Robert Marion La Follette, November 6, 1912, in Urofsky, Melvyn I. and Levy, David W., eds., The Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, vol. 2 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972), 710Google Scholar.

54. Louis D. Brandeis to Woodrow Wilson, September 30, 1912, ibid., 686–94.

55. Wilson, Woodrow, “Labor Day Speech,” address delivered in Braun's Park, Buffalo, New York, 09 2, 1914, in Davidson, John Wells, ed., A Crossroads of Freedom: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Woodrow Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 83Google Scholar.

56. Woodrow Wilson, “The Vision of the Democratic Party,” ibid., 264–5.

57. Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography, excerpted in Resek, ed., The Progressives, 192.

58. Seltzer, Alan L., “Woodrow Wilson as ‘Corporate-Liberal’: Toward a Reconsideration of Left Revisionist Historiography,” Western Political Quarterly 30 (06 1977): 197CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. Porter and Johnson, National Party Platforms, p. 178; Roosevelt, Theodore, “The Taft-Wilson Trust Programme,” The Outlook, 09 21, 1912, 105–7Google Scholar.

60. Roosevelt, “The Taft-Wilson Trust Program,” 105

61. New York Times, January 21, 1914, 14.

62. Emphasis added. The Bill, Henry, including comments, can be found in The Commoner, 11 24, 1911, p. 3Google Scholar.

63. The Independent, January 19, 1914, p. 90.

64. New York Times, January 23, 1914, pp. 1–2; Henry D. Clayton, “Trust Legislation,” The Commoner, March 1914, pp. 6–7. The first bill, the definitions bill, sought to clarify the meaning of prohibitions against restraint of trade and monopolizing behavior contained in the Sherman Act. It also made guilt personal, holding individual directors, officers, and agents criminally liable for corporate violations of the antitrust laws. The second bill, the trade relations bill, prohibited specific forms of unfair competition involving injurious price discrimination, exclusive and tying contracts, and the arbitrary refusal of mine owners to sell their output to responsible parties. It also extended the statute of limitations on the Sherman Act from three to five years, and provided new remedies for private parties seeking damages for violation of the antitrust laws. Specifically, individuals acquired the right to bring suit in equity against combinations in restraint of trade under the Sherman Act; they also would be allowed to use the finding of the court in cases brought by the government under the antitrust laws as conclusive evidence as to facts and issues of law in private damage suits. The trade relations bill would also provide injunctive relief to individuals “threatened or injured” by an unlawful combination. The third bill made unlawful per se holding companies, stock holding in competitive companies, and interlocking directorates. More sweeping, the presence of common directors on two or more corporations was to constitute conclusive evidence of the absence of competition between them, and if they had ever been “natural competitors,” due to the nature of the business or the location of operations, this condition would constitute an unreasonable restraint of trade. Both the trade relations and holding company bills specified stiff criminal penalties for the violation of their provisions. The fourth bill, the trade commission bill, created an administrative body with strong powers of surveillance. The commission was empowered to compel from all corporations, witnesses, testimony, the production of regular reports, and complete access to all manner of records, accounts, minutes, books, and papers; all information obtained became a matter of public record. Also, the commission, on complaint, or on its own initiative, was to investigate violations of the antitrust laws, with its findings to be submitted to the attorney general for prosecution. Finally, the commission would aid the courts as Master in Chancery, drawing up and overseeing dissolution decrees. The fifth bill, to be introduced at a later date, empowered the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate the issuance of new securities by the railroads.

65. Emphasis added. The provisions of the Sherman law definitions bill are reprinted in full in the New York Times, January 23, 1914, p. 3.

66. Clayton, “Trust Legislation,” 6.

67. Statement of Henry R. Seager, “Hearings before the Senate Committee on Inter-state Commerce on Bills Relating to Trust Legislation,” 63rd Congress, 2nd session, p. 1246. (emphasis added); New York Times, January 24, 1914, p. 8.

68. Statement of E. C. Morton, lawyer, Columbus, Ohio, Hearings before the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce on Bills Relating to Trust Legislation, p. 1233.

69. Testimony of Herbert Knox Smith, Hearings before the House Judiciary Committee on Trust Legislation, February 6, 1914, 63rd Congress, 2nd session, p. 424. Smith was Commissioner of Corporations in the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt. According to William Draper Lewis, dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school, the language contained in clause 4, section 1 of the definitions bill, would do “what the Sherman Act avoided, it [would prevent] the formation of a partnership between two men who are in the same business, although their combined business may not represent one-thousandth of the industry.” Ibid., 395.

70. Collier's Weekly, April 4, 1914, p. 16. See also Collier's Weekly, March 14, 1914, p. 12.

71. Collier's Weekly, April 4, 1914, p. 16.

72. March 14, 1914, p. 12.

73. It was this type of political flexibility on Newlands's part that led one scholar of the Federal Trade Commission Act to refer to the senator from Nevada as “the plastic Senator Newlands,” that is, as lacking in a principled position on the solution to the trust question. That Newlands was “always anxious to please” is as much as anything testimony to his commitment to working within the confines of the Democratic party and its coalitional constraints. See Kolko, Triumph of Conservatism, 266.

74. This can be seen in the following statement, made on the floor of the Senate on May 16, 1911, immediately following the Standard Oil decision: “Now, Mr. president, I must admit that, so far as my own party in the Senate is concerned, the views which I entertain upon this subject have not made the headway I could wish. The Democratic party believes in keeping power as near as possible in the hands of the people in the various localities, in the states, and intrusting to the National Government only those powers which are necessary for the national defense and for national purposes and in carefully scrutinizing the granted powers with a view to preventing any enlargement of national jurisdiction within the boundaries of the states. So the traditions and the principles of the Democratic party have rather militated against the views which I have entertained, though I have absolute confidence of their correctness and am confident that these views will some time be incorporated in the laws of our country.“ Quoted in Darling, Arthur B., ed., The Public Papers of Francis G. Newlands, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: W. F. Roberts Company, Inc., 1931), 410Google Scholar.

75. In a letter to his close friend Hulbert, Mary Ellen, Wilson, confided: “Editorially, the papers which are friendly to me (and some which are not) represent me, in the most foolish way, as master of the situation here, bending Congress to my indomitable individual will. That is, of course silly. Congress is made up of thinking men who want the party to succeed as much as I do, and who wish to serve the country effectively and intelligently. They…accept my guidance because they see that I am attempting only to mediate their own thoughts and purposes. I do not know how to wield a big stick, but I do know how to put my mind at the service of others for the accomplishment of a common purpose. They are using me; I am not driving them”; 09 21, 1913, in Link, , ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 28Google Scholar, 311. Likewise, at a news conference in November 1913, Wilson commented on his upcoming trust program: “You know, my trust program is largely fiction…I haven't had a tariff program. I haven't had a currency program. I have conferred with these men who handle these things, and asked the questions, and then have gotten back what they sent to me—the bets of our common counsel. That is what I am trying to do in this case [the trust question].” November 3, 1913, ibid., 487.

76. Illustrative of this antagonism to the regulatory commission idea is the letter to Wilson from William C. Adamson of Georgia, chairman of the House Interstate Commerce Committee, the committee in charge of the Interstate Trade Commission Bill. In the letter, Adamson was furious at the efforts of progressives to persuade the president to reject his committee's information-gathering commission bill, the Covington Bill, and embrace the Stevens regulatory commission bill. See, Adamson to Wilson, April 23, 1914, ibid., vol. 29, p. 496.

77. An economic region embracing Illinois, Iowa, California, and Oregon, and portions of Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, and Nevada. See the map provided in Sanders, , “Industrial Concentration,” Studies in American Political Development 1 (1986): 147Google Scholar.

78. Ibid., 180.

79. My source for distributing states by traditional regional designation is Allen, Howard W. and Clubb, Jerome, “Progressive Reform and the Political System,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 65 (07 1974), table 2, p. 135Google Scholar. The breakdown of states by region used in this analysis is: Northeast: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont; Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia; West: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming. These regional categories combine categories used by Allen and Clubb in standard fashion; Northeast: New England + Mid-Atlantic; Midwest: East North Central + West North Central; South: south + Border; West: Mountain + Pacific.

80. Trade area boundaries employed in Sanders's analysis of the FTC and Clayton Acts are final 1921 Federal Reserve Branch Bank Territories, taken from the Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, 1921 (Washington, D.C., 1922), 693–99. Value added in manufacturing was taken from the 1919 Census of Manufacturing, state-county tables. For a more extensive discussion of the methodology used, see Sanders, Industrial Concentration, pp. 146–51; and, in particular, Bensel, Richard Franklin, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880–1980, (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) 415–50Google Scholar. Data for coding districts and states by trading area status were graciously provided by Elizabeth Sanders.

81. For convenience of presentation, third-party votes have been excluded from the Senate analysis. As a result, Democratic and Republican vote totals do not equal the vote totals of the Senate as a whole. Only one senator did not belong to one of the two major parties, Miles Poindexter of Washington. Poindexter had been a progressive Republican, but openly affiliated with the Progressive party in the 63rd Congress.

82. Net support scores report the percentage point difference between those supporting and those opposing a given piece of legislation. Positive scores indicate a plurality supporting a given measure, negative scores indicate a plurality opposing the measure. To illustrate, on the vote to recommit the Clayton 59 percent of all periphery Republicans voted for recommittal, while 0 percent voted against recommittal, for a net support score of +59 percentage points. Similarly, 10 percent of all periphery Democrats voted for recommittal, while 64 percent voted against recommittal, for a net support core of –54 percentage points.

On a separate point, the tables presented in this section are constructed to be sensitive to levels of nonvoting. Sanders excludes nonvoters from her analysis. This is problematic because on some votes, nonvoting is dramatically high and skewed in a partisan fashion. For that reason I have concluded that nonvoters should not be excluded from the analysis. However, I would note parenthetically that when nonvoters are excluded, my results indicate an even greater degree of party difference. Take the example of the Senate vote to recommit the Clayton Bill: When non-voters are removed from the analysis, net support for recommittal among Democratic core state representatives increases to –67 percentage points and to –72 percentage points among periphery Democrats. Likewise, net support to recommit the Clayton Bill among core state Republicans increases to +60 percentage points and to +100 percentage points among periphery Republicans.

83. Party differences are larger still on the final vote of passage on the Clayton Bill.

84. For convenience of presentation, third-party votes are excluded from the House analysis. For this reason, Democratic and Republican vote totals do not equal the vote totals of the House as a whole.

85. Again, when nonvoters are excluded from the analysis, net support in the House to pass the Clayton Bill among core state Democrats increases to +97 percentage points and to + 100 percentage points among periphery Democrats. Among core state Republicans net support increases to –57 percentage points and to –45 percentage points among periphery Republicans.

86. There was no recorded vote on the FTCA in the House.

87. Although it is not clear exactly why Republican abstentions were so high, it is very possible that with the elections only two months away, Republicans thought they could gain political capital by washing their hands of the FTC and Clayton Acts. Not being implicated in the final legislation, Republicans could blame more effectively Democratic trust legislation for the depressed state of the economy.

88. See for example the remarks of Republican representatives Mondell, Frank W. of Wyoming and Nelson, John M. of Wisconsin. Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1914, 51, pt. 16: 16326–7Google Scholar.

89. Mueller, John E., War, Presidents and Public Opinion (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1983)Google Scholar; Kernell, Samuel, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership, second ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1993)Google Scholar, chapter 6.

90. At the theoretical level, the political economy approach does expect unified party behavior as a result of logrolling arrangements between constituent groups. However, this logic plays no part in the explanation Sanders develops for the FTCA. Moreover, I find no evidence to suggest that issue swapping among coalition groups played a significant role in shaping the behavior of agrarian Democrats on the antitrust question. Nor does such an argument account for the willingness of agrarian Republicans to cross party lines en masse in support of the original Clayton Bill.

91. The index is a measure of change in the level of net support between the two versions of the Clayton Bill. It is constructed by the following formula: CHANGE = CB_c1, – CB_a, where CB_c1 captures net support for the final Clayton Bill and CB₀ refers net support for the original Clayton Bill. To illustrate, net support among periphery Republican representatives for the original Clayton Bill was + 16 percentage points. It dropped to –26 for the final version. According to the formula: CHANGE = (−26) − (+16), or a decline in net support equivalent to –42 percentage points.

92. This reaction is significant because of Sanders's claim that the movement for an independent regulatory commission was greatest in these “diverse” trading areas.

93. Diverse-area Republicans supported the agrarian Clayton Bill (CB_a) 19 to 11, with 8 not voting. On the corporate-liberal Clayton Bill (CB_c1), they were in opposition 11 to 14, 9 not voting. Diverse-area Democrats supported CB_a 37 to 0, with 4 not voting; they sup-ported CB_c1 28 to 0, with 12 not voting. Core Republicans opposed CB_a 6 to 29, with 16 not voting; they opposed CB_cl as well 6 to 22 with 23 not voting. Finally, core Democrats supported CB_a 65 to 1, with 23 not voting; they supported CB_cl as well, 60 to 0, with 25 not voting.

94. Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1914, 51, pt. 16; 16326–7.

95. Collier's Weekly, February 28, 1914, p. 12.

96. To illustrate, in 1914 Senator Albert Baird Cummins of Iowa warned that the presidential patronage had “become a menace to the free action of the Congress.” The senator singled out the expansion of the federal state in recent years to explain the growth of presidential power. “It has not only added and added again to the number of officers and employees, but has in geometrical ratio added to their importance and influence in the lives of the people. With the exception of minor employees,” Cummins added, “the President selects all these aides, and every member of Congress, for reasons which need not be named, is highly concerned in the selections that are made.” In a similar vein, Senator Robert Marion La Follette of Wisconsin wrote: “It was never intended that the President should have recourse to that…subtle but potent method which, under the spoils system, the Executive may use upon members of the House and Senate through the control of patronage in their districts and states.… No threat is necessary. No word regarding appointments need be spoken. The recalcitrant legislator will have no difficulty in construing the ominous silence which enshrouds the whole subject of patronage when he attempts to discuss recommendations for appointments which he has filed in due course. He will be sorely tempted to yield to the Executive on legislation for he is harried early and late by the party demand from his state or district for the change in political tenure expected to follow a change in administration.” See Cummins, Albert B., “The President's Influence a Menace,” The Independent, 06 1, 1914, pp. 350–1Google Scholar; and La Follette, Robert M., “Presidential Appointments,” La Follette's Magazine 7 (01 1915), 3Google Scholar.

97. Democrats in the midterm elections of 1914 ran almost exclusively on the achievements of Wilson's first two years, that is, on the legislative fulfillment of his New Freedom promises, With this in mind, one Progressive era weekly, with the off-year elections fast approaching, observed wryly: “To-day the House does the President's will as obediently and with as little discussion as though a majority of its members were his nominees.” “The explanation is simple,” the periodical wrote, offering a simple electoral rule of thumb: “The President stands for success. Everybody in Congress wants votes. It is believed the President can command votes.Hence the deference to him”; Saturday Evening Post, August 1, 1914, p. 22.

98. New York Times, May 31, 1914.

99. Rublee assisted Brandeis in his preparation for the congressional hearings on the Ballinger-Pinochet affair. More recently, Rublee had been a part of Theodore Roosevelt's original “brain trust” in the months leading up to the Republican convention of 1912. In collaboration with Herbert Croly and Judge Learned Hand, Rublee helped “lay out the lines of the [Roosevelt] campaign for the Republican nomination.” See, George Rublee, “Reminiscences,” Columbia University Oral History Project, microfilm: 92–3.

100. Wilson met with intense opposition to the Stevens plan both from key House Democrats and by his Attorney General James C. McReynolds. William C. Adamson, chairman of the Committee on Interstate Commerce, in charge of the trade commission bill in the House, was livid when informed that Rublee and Stevens had solicited the president's support for the Stevens Bill. In an angry note to Wilson, Adamson flatly rejected any further consideration of the Stevens Bill. The chairman made it clear to the president that his committee had conducted a full set of hearings, “considered all the phases and suggestions mentioned in the letter,” and was satisfied that the Covington Bill—backed by the full committee, minus Stevens and the progressive Republican Lafferty of Oregon—was the correct approach to the problem. See Adamson, William C. to Wilson, Woodrow, 04 23, 1914, in Link, , ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 29, p. 496Google Scholar.

101. Davis, Joseph E., “Informal Remarks,” New York State Bar Association, Antitrust Law Symposium (Chicago: Commerce Clearing House, Inc., 1955), 104Google Scholar. Davies, a Wisconsin Democrat, also had managed Wilson's campaign in the Midwest in 1912. A progressive Democrat, Davies freely admitted that, barring Wilson's nomination at Baltimore, he would have thrown his support behind Roosevelt, adding that there were “a great many more of my age, particularly in the West, regardless of politics, who felt the same way about it.”

102. Rublee, “Reminiscences,” 109–10.

103. Urofsky, Melvyn I., Louis D. Brandeis and the Progressive Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981), 83Google Scholar; Untermyer, Samuel, “Completing the Anti-Trust Programme,” North American Review 199 (04 1914): 528–39Google Scholar; Harper's Weekly, June 6, 1914, p. 4; The Outlook, June 20, 1914, p. 375; Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1914, 51, pt. 9: 8837.

104. Woodrow Wilson to Hollis, Henry F., 06 2, 1914, in Link, , ed., Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 30Google Scholar, 134.

105. The history of H. R. 9300 is as follows. The drafting of the Progressive party's regulatory commission bill fell to its National Legislative Reference Bureau, chaired by William Draper Lewis, dean of the law school of the University of Pennsylvania, and under the directorship of Donald Richberg, a Chicago attorney who had been active in local progressive politics before joining the national Progressive party. A key function of the National Legislative Reference Bureau was to translate the planks of the Progressive party's 1912 platform into detailed programs, to draft bills based on these programs for introduction into Congress, and to offer assistance to the bloc of Progressive congressmen in the House of Representatives. The main purpose in drafting legislation was to publicize the Progressive party program to the nation from the floor of congress and, with any luck, to help set the terms of debate regarding antitrust policy. Lewis and Richberg were assisted in their work by such progressive notables as Jane Addams, James R. Garfield, Gifford Pinchot, Charles E. Merriam, Herbert Knox Smith, Benjamin Lindsay, and Walter Weyl. Responsibility for developing antitrust legislation fell to Lewis, Richberg and Herbert Knox Smith, Commissioner of Corporations in the Roosevelt administration, in close consultation with Roosevelt. The result of this collaboration was a set of three bills (H. R. 9299, 9300, 9301) that together would create a federal trade commission with full powers of investigation and subpoena over corporations having “annual gross receipts exceeding three million dollars from business within the United States. The commission would also be empowered to define methods of unfair competition and issue orders, on its own initiative or through the courts, compelling corporate obedience. Finally, in a measure that went beyond the scope of Democratic intentions, the third bill empowered the commission to regulate natural monopolies, defined broadly to include control over natural resources, terminal or transportation facilities, financial resources, or any vital factor of production. Both Rublee and Stevens were exposed to the Progressive party legislation during the House Interstate Commerce Committee's hearings on the Democratic antitrust bills. Rublee attended the hearings as a witness and lobbyist for Louis Brandeis. Stevens was a member of the Commerce Committee. The Progressive party legislation received a full exposition at the hands of Draper, Smith, and Richberg, all of whom testified before the Commerce Committee. Gable, John Allen, The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1978), 162–5Google Scholar; Richberg, , My Hero, 51; The Outlook, November 29, 1913, pp. 677–8Google Scholar. The testimony of Draper, , Smith, , and Richberg, can be found in: U.S., Congress, House, Interstate Commerce Committee, Hearings on Trust Legislation [02 11, 1914]. 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1914, pp. 241–301Google Scholar.

106. Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1914, 51, pt. 13: 12866. The periphery Democrat to whom Newlands directed his remarks was Senator Charles Spalding Thomas of Colorado.

107. Ibid., 12867. Another periphery Democrat, Senator James Reed of Missouri, condemned the final Democratic measure as “a betrayal of the Democratic party and of the country…” The senator claimed to see “the doctrine of the Bull Mooser—not to destroy monopolies, but to regulate them, not to carry them to the courts of justice, but to a commission.…” Reed recalled for his Democratic colleagues their platform's pledge to redeem the Sherman Act from degradation by the Supreme Court's rule of reason decisions. “The very purpose of this legislation,” he reminded his colleagues, “was to redeem that platform pledge. It was to restore the strength of the statute and to make it more drastic and all embracing.” Instead, “[t]he bill has been emasculated. It has been rendered, in my opinion, so far as trust legislation is concerned, absolutely valueless.” Ibid., pt. 16: 15862, 15821, 15819.

108. Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1914, 51, pt. 13: 12732.

109. THE NATION, June 4, 1914, p. 655.

110. Editor of the progressive Harper's Weekly, Norman Hapgood, in 1916 would become the vice-chairman and acting chairman of the Woodrow Wilson Independent League. The League, as Hapgood described it, was “an organization supplementing the [Democratic] National Committee by dealing specifically with voters who, instead of being regular Democrats, were either independents altogether or else members of the disintegrating Bull Moose party who were deciding whether they would vote for Wilson or signifying [sic] a return to their former party by voting for Mr. Hughes. It was our business, in other words, to offer as well as we could a genuine intellectual appeal, independent of party rallying cries; and there never could have been better material.… Not only had the promises of the Democratic platform been carried out but the main points of the Bull Moose platform also; as in the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission.” See, Hapgood, Norman, The Changing Years (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1930), 240–1Google Scholar.

111. Congressional Record, 64th Cong., 1st sess., 54, pt. 10: 10062.