Attack on Oligopoly

Put on the market a few years ago by famed old Parker Bros. Inc. was a game called Monopoly, ingeniously designed to appeal to the baldest acquisitive instincts. It was an instantaneous success. Last week President Roosevelt, from motives as mixed as they were imperative, dusted off an older and political form of Monopoly which has been played by successive Administrations with varying degrees of enthusiasm for upward of half a century.

The late John Davison Rockefeller made the country monopoly-conscious in the kerosene days of old Standard Oil Co., the most effective private monopoly ever developed in the U. S. Roosevelt I raised trust-busting to prime issue of his time. In the roaring 1920s the subject was seldom mentioned except by such old-school Progressives as George Norris and William Borah, and even in the first four years of the New Deal trust-busting languished. Meantime the form of Big Business changed from the monopolistic trust to the domination of an industry by a group of potent corporations. Monopoly, the market of one seller, had in many cases given way to oligopoly, the market of the few.

Shrewdly President Roosevelt let others launch his attack on oligopoly, dispatching lieutenants to rostrum and microphone. Politicians suspected that all this was a build-up for a similar attack of his own. presumably to be delivered in his Jackson Day dinner speech this coming week. Opening shot was fired in a broadcast last fortnight by another Jackson, who happens to be head of the Department of Justice's anti-trust division--Assistant Attorney General Robert Houghwout J ackson. Bob Jackson, who is reputedly being groomed as the next Democratic Governor of New York State, last week followed his first attack with another delivered before the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia. Next day in Washington, Secretary of Interior Ickes stepped to a microphone with a fighting speech which looked as if it had been tempered on the same anvil as Bob Jackson's.

Jackson. Describing the philosophy of Big Business in Goethe's phrase as "Aristocratic Anarchy," describing the present Recession in the words of Sir Arthur Salter, famed British economist, as "a 'strike of capital' against political action which it fears and dislikes," Bob Jackson declared:

"It has always been my belief that this generation would do better to get the best out of its existing system rather than to urge theoretical systems. . . . The only agency with the power to condition capitalism and industrialism to survive is the Government. To this end I have supported, in general, the program of reform called the New Deal, with far more doubts about its adequacy than about its moderation."

On prices: "Prices are no longer determined by the law of supply & demand in many basic industries. There is no way on earth to regulate the economic oligarchy of autocratic, self-constituted and self- perpetuating groups. ..."

On opportunity: "Parents labor and save to provide formal educations for their children and when that education is finished there is no place for the boy or girl to go except to start at the bottom of an impossibly long ladder of a few great corporations dominated by America's 60 families."*

After citing typical corporate earnings under the "cooperative" Administration of President Hoover (1932) and "hostile" Administration of President Roosevelt (1936), Bob Jackson concluded: "The unvarnished truth is that the Government's recovery program has succeeded nowhere else so effectively as in restoring the profits of Big Business. . . . The only just criticism that can be made of the economic operations of the New Deal is that it set out a breakfast for the canary and let the cat steal it. . . ."

Ickes. In the same vein but with a savage invective that Bob Jackson cannot command Secretary Ickes hurled the next grenade. On 1929: "Out of their divinely claimed genius as managers of private enterprise the 60 families promptly led the American people into the worst peacetime catastrophe ever known. Then the disillusioned people changed the Government. The new Government bailed the

60 families out of the consequences of their own mesmeric miscalculations and their unintelligent leadership of the system of private enterprise of which they had pretended to be master managers."

On reforming Presidents: "None of them were particularly popular at the best gentlemen's clubs or at the best ladies' tea parties. As a matter of fact neither Lincoln nor Jackson was considered by the cultured classes to be a gentleman, while Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and now also Franklin D. Roosevelt have been regarded as traitors to their own class."

On good businessmen: "I am convinced that the fight [for Democracy] can be won if the American people understand that the present struggle is not between the New Deal and the average enlightened businessman but between the New Deal and the Bourbons of the 60 families who have brought the rest of the businessmen of the U. S. under the terror of their domination. . . ."

Indirectly sanctioning the attacks on oligopoly, Franklin Roosevelt at a press conference last week insisted that those under attack were only the group whom his fifth cousin called ''malefactors of great wealth." The President said that Roosevelt I had also been accused of attacking indiscriminately, that his predecessor knew English, his enemies knew English, he knew English, and all knew that "malefactors of great wealth" did not mean all men of wealth.

Significance. Two motives apparently lay behind this anti-trust drive: 1) the normal human and political desire to find a scapegoat for the present Recession and 2) a desire to reduce prices, particularly in the building industry. It is a basic New Deal tenet at the moment that prices are the key to the country's past and present business troubles. One of the favorite examples of disequilibrium is in the steel industry, which jacked prices last spring claiming that the rise was made necessary by high labor and raw material costs. The New Deal maintains that the rise in price was just twice the rise in costs.

Direct action came last week not in steel but in the building industry, not against the manufacturers but against the dealers. The Federal Trade Commission cracked down on the National Federation of Builders Supply Association with a broad order to cease & desist from a host of alleged activities tending to suppress competition. Formed in 1933, the Association has grown so powerful that it was able to prevent the Government from buying $50,000,000 worth of cement direct from cement makers, forcing the purchase to be made through local dealers.

*A reference to Ferdinand Lundberg's best-selling America's 60 Families. Says Mr. Lundberg: "The U. S. is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of its 60 richest families, buttressed by no more than 90 families of lesser wealth." This thesis is currently as useful to the New Deal as were the "200 families of France" in former Premier Blum's successful campaign to democratize the Bank of France (TIME, Feb. 8).

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