Abstract
Aside from Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Co. (1895), the most widely cited cases that the Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company was involved in were challenges to railroad rate regulation: Stone v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Co. (1886) and Reagan v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Co. (1894). The movement to regulate railroad rates has been the subject of numerous studies, which have attempted to explain both the politics behind the legislation and its effects.1 The origin and evolution of federal regulation through the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) has received much of this attention. As the first federal regulatory agency, the ICC provides the starting point for many stories about the growth of the federal government. The state regulations that preceded the Interstate Commerce Act are often considered merely as precursors to federal regulation.2
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Notes
Charles Francis Adams, Railroads: Their Origins and Problems (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878); William Z. Ripley, Railroads; Rates and Regulation (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912); Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Albro Martin, Enterprise Denied: The Origins of the Decline of American Railroads, 1897–1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971); George Miller, Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971); Solon Justus Buck, The Granger Movement: A Study of Agriculture, Its Organization and Its Political and Social Manifestations, 1870–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963); Thomas Gilligan, William J. Marshall, and Barry R. Weingast, “Regulation and the Theory of Legislative Choice: The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887,” Journal of Law and Economics 32, no. 1 (April 1989): 35–61; Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, “The Enduring Nineteenth Century Battle for Economic Regulation: The Interstate Commerce Act Revisited,” Journal of Law and Economics 36, no. 2 (October 1993): 837–860; Mark T. Kanazawa and Roger G. Noll, “The Origins of State Railroad Regulation: The Illinois Constitution of 1870,” in The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy ed. Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
An exception to the rule is the work of William Childs on the Texas Railroad Commission, The Texas Railroad Commission: Understanding Regulation in America to the Mid-Twentieth Century (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005).
Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113 (1877); and Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railroad Co. v. Illinois, 118 U.S. 557 (1886).
Jonathan R. T. Hughes, The Governmental Habit Redux: Governmental Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 13.
William G. Thomas, Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law and Power in the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 170.
William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Hugh Rockoff, “Prodigals and Projectors: An Economic History of Usury Laws in the United States from Colonial Times to 1900,” NBER Working Paper No. W9742 (June 2003); and Franklin W. Ryan, Usury and Usury Laws (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1924).
Simon J. McLean, “State Regulation of Railways in the United States,” The Economic Journal 10, no. 39 (September 1900): 349–369.
Ibid.
Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, A New Economic View of American History, Second Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 436–438.
McLean, “State Regulation of Railways in the United States,” 356; and Miller, Railroads and the Granger Laws, 95–96.
Harrison Standish Smalley, “Railroad Rate Control and Its Legal Aspects: A Study of the Effect of Judicial Decisions Upon Public Regulation of Railroad Rates,” Publications of the American Economic Association, Third Series 7, no. 2 (May 1906): 12.
Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul v. Minnesota, 134 U.S. 418 (1890).
Stone v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Co., 116 U.S. 307 (1885).
Alan D. Adams, “Reasonable Rates,” Journal of Political Economy 12, no. 1 (December 1903): 79–97, 83; Harrison Standish Smalley, “Railroad Rate Control in Its Legal Aspects: A Study of the Effect of Judicial Decisions Upon Public Regulation of Railroad Rates,” Publications of the American Economic Association 3 Series 7, no. 2 (May 1906): 4–147, 27.
E. L. Russell, “The Supreme Court and Interstate Commerce,” The Central Law Journal, April 11, 1890, 303.
Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway Co. v. Illinois, 118 U.S. 557 (1886).
Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway v. Minnesota, 134 U.S. 418 (1890).
Ibid., 458.
Ibid.
Ari Hogenboom and Olive Hogenboom, A History of the ICC: From Panacea to Palliative (New York: Norton, 1976), 11; and Gerald Nash, “The Reformer Reformed: John H. Reagan and Railroad Regulation,” Business History Review 29, no. 2 (June 1955): 189–196.
Farmer’ president, Rosewell G. Rolston, had obtained a similar ruling in 1887; see Rolston v. Missouri Fund Commissioners, 120 U.S. 390 (1887).
Reagan v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Co., 154 U.S. 362, 412 (1894).
Francis Swayze, “The Regulation of Railway Rates Under The Fourteenth Amendment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 26, no. 3 (May 1912): 389–424, 398.
Stephen Siegel, “Understanding the Lochner Era: Lessons From the Railroad Rate Controversy,” Virginia Law Review 70, no. 2 (March 1984): 187–263.
William H. Dunbar, “State Regulation of Prices and Rates,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 9, no. 1 (April 1895): 305–332, 327–328; see also Smalley, “Railroad Rate Control,” 41.
See Frank Haigh Dixon, “Railroad Control in Nebraska,” Political Science Quarterly 13, no. 4 (December 1898): 617–647 for a description of the case and the events leading up to it.
James W. Ely, The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 96.
Mary Porter, “That Commerce Shall Be Free: A New Look at the Old Laissez-faire Court,” Supreme Court Review (1976): 135–159, 143.
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© 2009 Bradley A. Hansen
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Hansen, B.A. (2009). Railroad Regulation. In: Institutions, Entrepreneurs, and American Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230619135_6
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