Last year
Harold L. Ickes and Robert Houghwout Jackson handed U. S. Business the
Administration's Christmas greetings in the form of a pair of diatribes
about “economic oligarchy” and “the 60 families.” Implication was
that they would be followed by a similarly vehement message from the
President to Congress, suggesting revision of U. S. anti-trust laws.
Anxiously awaited by Business ever since, the business monopoly message
from the nation's greatest governmental monopolist finally appeared
last week. A detailed request for Congressional investigation of the
whole subject of monopoly as a preliminary to future legislation to
curtail it, it was chiefly noteworthy for a tone as mild as Messrs.
Ickes & Jackson had been bitter. Simple Truths. Read to Congress the day after Governor La Follette's
launching of a new party in Madison, Wis. , the
President's message opened with some strikingly similar themes: “Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the
liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of
a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private
power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State
itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an
individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power. “The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its
business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute
goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power
without equal in history is growing.” Statistics. To prove his point
that current concentration of economic power is unexampled, the
President quoted familiar statistics from reports to the Bureau of
Internal Revenue: 1> .1% of U. S. corporations own 52% of all
corporate assets, get 50% of all corporate income, less than 5% of U. S. corporations
own 87% of the assets and less than 4% of manufacturing corporations get 84% of their net profits; 2> even in 1929 .3%
of the population got 78% of the dividends and 3> in 1936, 33% of all
inheritances went to 4% of all heirs. Taking this as premise No. 1, the
President proposed as premise No. 2 that the concentration was due to
monopolistic trends in U. S. business. His conclusion was that “a
thorough study of the concentration of economic power in American
industry and the effect of that concentration upon the decline of
competition” should be undertaken by the Federal Trade Commission,
Department of Justice and Securities & Exchange Commission, for whom he
recommended appropriating $500,000. In addition, the President requested
$200,000 more to enable the Department of Justice—whose
Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold was last week telling a New York audience about his plan
to publicize antimonopoly prosecutions—to enforce existing anti-trust
laws.
