History.

The years 1920-1930 were years of great growth and development for corporations. The corporation was, of course, not new; it had been used since the Middle Ages in Europe and since colonial days in America. But Americans had always distrusted the corporation, regarding it as a prelude to monopoly. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 was an expression of their doubts, but aside from the Standard Oil case in 1911 and perhaps the Northern Securities case in 1904, the act had little impact after the end of the Theodore Roosevelt "trust busting" era, at least until the days of the New Deal. The formation of U.S. Steel by J. P. Morgan in 1901 had raised controversy, but by the time the case reached the courts in 1920 the judiciary had adopted the "rule of reason," holding that the matter of size or market share per se...