17 - The Corporate Economy: Ideologies of Regulation and Antitrust, 1920–2000

Summary

At the end of World War I, the United States stood as the combatant state least bloodied, its economy not drained but stimulated by the conflict. It had become, and had become recognized, as an engine of production for the globe. Moreover, the requirements of mobilization for the war had given the federal government the opportunity, born of seeming necessity, to rationalize, or at least to organize, and thereby regulate, aspects of the economy it had not touched since the Civil War, if even then. The wartime actions seemed to consolidate a trend that had been in place since the last decade of the nineteenth century, a trend toward recognition of an integrated national economy embodied in the growth of the administrative state.

As events would turn out, the growth of America’s administrative state, if relentless in retrospect, seemed at the time a great deal less certain – even to its most ardent advocates. The development of an integrated national economy was itself a phenomenon that was only dimly perceived. The tradition of state and local regulation of economic matters was deeply ingrained. The constitutional embodiment of the country’s federal structure seemed to bar the creation of most national regulatory structures. The troubles of the integrated and continental economic empire seemed, in any case, only sporadically to call for national regulatory solutions. The very idea of national solutions seemed not just alien, but an idea with unwelcome foreign associations. Finally, the country’s limited experience with national regulation was not such that it inspired automatic confidence.