KELLOGG, FRANK BILLINGS

Frank Billings Kellogg (1856–1937) emerged out of poverty and hardship to achieve a career as U.S. Secretary of State and a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1929. Though Kellogg began his professional life as an awkward legal representative of some of the wealthiest Americans, his political and personal friendship with President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) led Kellogg to become one of the most formidable and progressive attorneys in the federal government's efforts to break-up industrial monopolies. Kellogg was the first great prosecutor of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, a federal law that prohibited an exclusive private monopoly or ownership of any single industry.

Kellogg was born in New York. He relocated to Olmsted County, Minnesota, with his family at age eight, part of the typical pioneering experience of his era, moving from the East Coast to the then mysterious West. Kellogg's father took the family to Minnesota to farm, but the endeavor was not prosperous. Kellogg worked on the family farm and managed to obtain six years of formal education, an accomplishment for children of hard-working farming families.

He determinably worked to be become a lawyer and escape the miseries of farm life. Kellogg passed the bar in 1877, and he described his success as "a life line thrown to rescue me from a desperate struggle for a livelihood."

As a young attorney, he took every case that came his way. In 1887, at age 31, Kellogg became a partner in a prestigious law firm in St. Paul, Minnesota, headed by his cousin, Cushman Kellogg Davis. There, Kellogg began a successful career. He took on railroad and iron ore litigation, connected with the exploitation of the great Mesabi mineral range in Minnesota, defending some of the titans of American business, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and the railroad builder James Hill.

During business trips to Washington, D.C., Kellogg met Theodore Roosevelt, then a member of the Civil Service Commission. They became friends, and when Roosevelt became president, Kellogg had an easy entree to the White House. His friendship with Roosevelt led to many court cases in which Kellogg, representing the federal government, fought many of the most formidable industrial figures of his day. Like Roosevelt, Kellogg was alarmed by the sudden increase in corporate mergers, the formation of huge entities that often resulted in near-total monopolies on industries in the United States.

Appointed as Special Assistant Attorney General, Kellogg began fighting the paper trust, known as the General Paper Company, and won. In 1906 he began prosecution of the Union Pacific Railroad, which was eating up its competition at an alarming rate. These government victories led to the greatest single trust case of the era, the prosecution of the Standard Oil Company for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Kellogg won a Supreme Court interpretation of his case in 1911, which forced Standard Oil to break-up into smaller, competitive companies. This victory inspired newspapers to describe Kellogg as "the trust buster." Though Kellogg was a largely uneducated, nervous, hot-tempered, outspoken, and undiplomatic man, he had become a winner in the eyes of the public through his work at keeping monopolies from dominating American big business.

In 1912, Kellogg was elected president of the American Bar Association. By this time, Kellogg had undergone a conversion in political thinking. He began his career as a Republican conservative, but by 1912 he admonished his fellow lawyers to "stand for modern economic legislation, necessary to the development of the people."

In 1916 Kellogg was elected as a Republican Senator to the U.S. Congress, representing the state of Minnesota. He was, however, defeated in his 1922 bid for re-election.

President Calvin Coolidge (1923–1929) also liked Kellogg, and saw his usefulness during a prosperous post-war period. In 1925 Coolidge named Kellogg Secretary of State. In this position, Kellogg worked to aid in the reconciliation of German reparation debts to the United States and helped arrange loans to Germany for that country's post-war recovery.

Kellogg's diplomatic successes were modest, and not truly comparable to his important success as a "trust buster" for Theodore Roosevelt, fighting the industrial monopolies of pre-World War I America. Yet, he was also a success as Secretary of State, always striving to convey the spirit of American good will in foreign affairs. In 1929 Kellogg was awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace in honor of his diplomatic success with France, creating the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 in which the signing nations renounced war "as an instrument of national policy," with the hope that it might prevent future war. Frank Billings Kellogg died in 1937.

See also: Sherman Anti-Trust Act

FURTHER READING

Armentano, Dominick T. Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990.

DuBoff, Richard B. Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1989.

Ellis, Lewis E. Frank B. Kellogg and American Foreign Relations, 1925–1929. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961.

Ferrell, Robert H. Frank B. Kellogg. New York: Cooper Square, 1983.

McChesney, Fred S., and William F. Shughart II, eds. The Causes and Consequences of Antitrust: The Public Choice Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.