Interstate Commerce Commission

The Interstate Commerce Commission is presented in Harry S. Truman’s account not through a history of its creation or routine operations, but as the public representative caught between government oversight and the powerful legal interests surrounding railroad receiverships. Truman’s criticism made the commission a test of whether public authority could withstand private influence in the reorganization of failing railroads.

The Commission as Public Representative

In a Senate speech on railroad receiverships and reorganizations, Truman described the Interstate Commerce Commission as representing the public and having lawyers of its own. Its place in his argument was institutional: it was the body expected to stand for public interests while railroads and their financial and legal representatives pursued their own aims. The passage does not detail the commission’s broader powers or structure; it emphasizes the difficulty of making public representation effective amid the unequal resources brought to bear on regulatory questions.

Railroad Lawyers and Regulatory Influence

Truman focused on attorneys who, he argued, could emerge from receiverships with substantial fees and then become highly paid counsel to reorganized railroad companies. He portrayed their work as extending beyond private representation: they would seek to navigate the commission and influence how laws passed by Congress were interpreted, including how courts understood those laws. The commission thus appears at the point where private legal expertise met public regulation, and where the outcomes of railroad reorganization could be shaped through both administrative dealings and court interpretation.

To make the imbalance concrete, Truman named prominent law firms in New York and Chicago and described episodes involving the receivership process: attorneys taking their families on free trips to California in a bankrupt railroad’s private cars, and a federal receivership judge having a private car at his disposal on the Milwaukee & St. Paul. These examples formed part of his wider indictment of the entanglement of legal privilege and corporate power. They were not presented as a specific account of misconduct by the commission itself, but as evidence of the environment in which its public mandate operated.

Truman’s Critique of the Public Interest

Truman’s central claim was that the commission’s lawyers were poorly matched against the experienced counsel representing railroads, insurance companies, and Wall Street bankers. His comparison cast the regulator’s ordinary government lawyer as badly outmatched by private attorneys able to meet commissioners, dine with them, and discuss matters still pending. In this depiction, the issue was not simply the existence of regulation, but whether public representation could compete with concentrated wealth and privileged access.

He connected that imbalance to what he called avarice and wild greed, arguing that the country honored wealth more readily than public service. The Interstate Commerce Commission therefore served as a focal point in his broader Senate argument: its formal role as representative of the public did not, in his account, guarantee that the public could prevail when corporate power and legal influence converged.