Interstate Commerce Commission

The Interstate Commerce Commission was established by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, marking the beginning of federal regulation of industry in the United States. It stood at the intersection of organized public pressure and expanding state capacity: farmers and other groups opposed discriminatory business practices, while federal reformers sought to supervise corporations whose monopolistic power could reach into government itself.

Origins in Agrarian Protest

The Commission emerged amid a long-running agrarian crisis that had afflicted the Midwest from the late 1860s. Founded in 1867, the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry mobilized farmers against unfair and discriminatory business practices; in 1873 and 1874, Grangers won control of eleven Midwestern state legislatures. Their organizing helped turn rural discontent into a wider political challenge to the growing trusts.

Farmers’ organizations had already pressed state governments to regulate railroads in the 1870s. Before Congress enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, nearly all of the fifty-nine petitions about trusts sent to Congress came from farming states and from organizations including the Farmers’ Union, the Farmers’ Alliance, the Farmers’ Mutual Benefit Association, and the Patrons of Animal Husbandry. Their shared grievance helped place regulation of concentrated business power on the national agenda.

Establishment and Federal Oversight

The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 created the Commission and initiated the development of federal industry regulation. The act was the first important legislative result of political movements that had gradually changed public attitudes toward the state’s role in regulating monopoly. It preceded the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which later provided a major legal basis for attacks on trusts.

The Commission’s authority was subsequently enlarged under President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1906, the Hepburn Act strengthened the Interstate Commerce Act, authorizing the Commission to inspect railways’ financial accounts and extending its oversight into new spheres. These powers made federal supervision more than a declaration of principle: they gave the agency a means of examining the operations of companies whose control of transportation could reinforce broader monopolistic influence.

Progressive Reform and Significance

The Commission formed part of a broader political response to the power of the industrial trusts. After the Populist movement declined, the Progressive movement carried forward many of its concerns. Theodore Roosevelt, who became president after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901, made the trusts a focus of his reform program; his administration also used the Sherman Act against the Northern Securities Company in 1902, affecting the interests of J.P. Morgan. His successor, William Taft, pursued trust cases still more vigorously, and in 1911 his administration broke up the Standard Oil Company.

The Commission’s creation and subsequent strengthening illustrate how organized opposition could prompt a federal role in supervising corporations. The broader reform sequence—from the 1887 act to the Hepburn Act and antitrust enforcement—sought to curb monopolistic practices without leaving the regulation of interstate business solely to the states. In the book’s account, such measures grew out of a pluralistic political system in which farmers and other groups could organize against powerful business interests, and in which the state acquired greater capacity to act on those demands.