E. C. Knight Co., United States v., 156 U.S. 1 (1895), argued 24 Oct. 1894, decided 21 Jan. 1895 by vote of 8 to 1; Fuller for the Court, Harlan in dissent. In early 1892, the American Sugar Refining Company, the corporate successor to the Sugar Trust, acquired all of the stock of its leading competitors. The company thereby secured control of almost all sugar refining in the United States, and the federal government soon filed a civil challenge under the newly enacted Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

In its first decision interpreting the act, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court's dismissal of the government's suit. Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller declared that the key question was whether a monopoly of manufacturing could be suppressed under the Sherman Act. He stressed the power of each state to protect the lives, health, property, and morals of its citizens, and noted that this power encompassed the regulation of practical monopolies within the state's borders. In Fuller's view, while the Constitution granted Congress exclusive authority to regulate activities that constituted commerce among the several states, activities not belonging to interstate or foreign commerce fell exclusively within the jurisdiction of state police power.

The Court conceded that the ability to control the manufacture of an article involved simultaneous control over the article's subsequent disposition in interstate commerce and further agreed that combinations to control manufacturing might tend to restrain interstate trade. The Court declared, however, that this was an insufficient basis for congressional regulation because these were not direct but merely indirect or incidental effects on interstate commerce. The Court insisted upon a sharp distinction between manufacturing and commerce and stated that a producer's intention to distribute its products in other states subsequent to their manufacture provided no basis for the exercise of congressional Commerce Clause power. If indirect effects on interstate commerce could justify a federal challenge to the sale of manufacturing stock and the acquisition of refineries, the Court declared, Congress would have sweeping power to regulate the details of not only manufacturing but of “every branch of human industry” (p. 14) whenever ultimate interstate distribution was contemplated. The states simultaneously would be denied any police power authority over these matters within their own borders. The Court declared that Congress had framed the Sherman Act in the light of these “well‐settled principles” (p. 16) and that the government's suit therefore exceeded the scope of the act.

Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented. He believed that the Sherman Act constitutionally could reach combinations like the one challenged in this case. Harlan declared that such dominating combinations had the object and ability to control not only manufacturing but also the price at which manufactured goods were sold in interstate commerce and therefore should be deemed to affect interstate commerce directly. Accordingly, he believed, Congress could seek to remove such combinations because they constituted unreasonable restraints of interstate trade. In Harlan's view, if Congress was not empowered to deal with such threatening interstate combinations, Americans would be left unprotected because individual states would not have sufficient power to control them effectively.

Scholars have differed concerning the origins and impact of the Court's decision. Some scholars, for example, see the decision as largely the product of a politically conservative Court majority fearful of extensions of federal government power. In recent years, an increasingly prominent alternative view has been that the majority genuinely sought to preserve substantial state regulatory authority over the in‐state operations of corporations in the ultimately unrealized expectation that the states would use those powers effectively to block monopolistic combinations.

Some maintain that the Court's decision helped pave the way for the great merger waves that began in the late 1890s, which dramatically increased the levels of economic concentration in the United States. Yet the Court strongly supported the application of the Sherman Act in a series of other major cases soon after the Knight case was decided. Doctrinally, the Court's limited conception of the scope of federal commerce authority, and particularly its direct‐indirect effects test, retained validity until the late 1930s, when it was finally rejected by the Court in favor of a much more expansive view of federal power.

See also Antitrust; Commerce Power.

Bibliography

Charles W. McCurdy , The Knight Sugar Decision of 1895 and the Modernization of American Corporation Law, 1869–1903, Business History Review 53 (1979): 304–342.

James May

UNITED STATES V. E.C. KNIGHT COMPANY

UNITED STATES V. E.C. KNIGHT COMPANY, 156 U.S. 1 (1895), the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court first applied the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and severely limited its reach. Through mergers, American Sugar Refining had acquired 98 percent of the national sugar market, and it was fixing sugar prices. The U.S. government sought an injunction. The Court held business acquisitions, refining, and manufacturing did not amount to interstate commerce, and so were not in violation of the act, protecting manufacturing trusts and monopolies from regulation. The distinction between manufacture and commerce, and this immunity from federal regulation, was overturned in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation (1937).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Taft, William H. The Anti-Trust Act and The Supreme Court. 1914. Reprint, Littleton, Colo: Rothman, 1993.

SteveSheppard

UNITED STATES V. E.C. KNIGHT COMPANY

In 1895 the Supreme Court decision in the case of United States v. E.C. Knight Company severely undermined the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. In an eight-to-one ruling, the high court determined that, although a monopoly in manufacturing, the American Sugar Company and its subsidiary, the E.C. Knight Company, had not monopolized trade. The government had prosecuted the sugar company for owning 98 percent of the nation's sugar-refining capacity, seeing this as a clear violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act's pronouncement that "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in the restraint of trade" is illegal. But according to the Supreme Court justices, the Sherman act had given Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce only; since the Knight Company's manufacturing operations were all located within Pennsylvania, the federal government had no jurisdiction.

The court's narrow interpretation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act delivered a painful blow to those who wanted government to break up or at least limit the powerful monopolies. Though the Sherman legislation provided the basis for trust-busting, its might would not be used until the first decade of the 1900s, when, after a change in political climate, Standard Oil Company and American Tobacco Company would be charged with, and (in 1911) found guilty of violating the Sherman Act. In 1913, antitrust cases were also brought against the Union and Southern Pacific Railroad merger, International Harvester Corporation, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), and the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad.

In 1914, national anti-trust legislation was strengthened by the passage of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which outlawed price fixing (the practice of pricing below cost to eliminate a competitive product). The Clayton Act also made it illegal for the same executives to manage two or more competing companies (a practice called interlocking directorates), and prohibited any corporation from owning stock in a competing corporation.

See also: American Tobacco Company, Clayton Anti-Trust Act, Sherman Anti-Trust Act, Tobacco Trust