Institute's End

A brief announcement from an office on Manhattan's Pine Street last week wound up U. S. v. Sugar Institute, Inc. et al, most significant anti-trust case since the dissolution of old Standard Oil Co. in 1911. After spending five of its nine years in litigation, the Sugar Institute was officially closing its doors.

The Sugar Institute was founded in 1927 with a stiff "code of ethics" to stamp out various kinds of chiseling then rampant in the sugar refining industry, and incidentally to "promote the consumption of sugar." So profound was the peace that the Institute brought to its harassed industry, so remarkable the immediate rise in the profits of its members, that the Department of Justice grew suspicious that it was a combination in restraint of trade, launched anti-trust proceedings in 1931. The trial lasted six months, the briefs filled 1,500 pages, the testimony 10,000 pages. In 1934 Manhattan's Federal Judge Julian William Mack handed down a 100,000-word opinion, holding among other things that the Institute and its members, who accounted for most of the sugar refined in the U. S., were clearly out to "preserve uniformity in price structure and to maintain relatively high prices."

Admitting that "divorced from its illegalities the Institute offers certain opportunities for affecting desirable results," Judge Mack did not order dissolution, although an injunction against the price-fixing practices was issued. On appeal, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Mack findings last spring with a few minor modifications. Its pristine vitality gone, its name more a liability than an asset, the Sugar Institute meantime whittled down its activities to the gathering of innocent sugar statistics. Publicly the sugar men took their legal spanking in good grace. Privately they complain that other trade associations were, and still are, getting away with things that the Sugar Institute never even attempted.

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