Trade Associations, State Building, and the Sherman Act: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1912–25

From its founding in 1912 through the interwar years, the Chamber’s history shows a persistent preoccupation with progressive economics and policy making. Rather than flouting the new ideas of institutional economics, which favored federal regulators overseeing data collection and dissemination among businesses so as to stabilize prices and facilitate interfirm cooperation instead of so-called cutthroat competition, many members of the Chamber embraced these progressive prescriptions for public-private regulation. This essay explains how a subset of USCC members fostered industry-wide “codes of fair competition” by participating in experimental studies like those undertaken at the Harvard Bureau of Business Research and by supporting new collaborative efforts with government agencies, including the Department of Commerce and the Federal Trade Commission. Both the private and public initiatives at industry rationalization challenged existing ideas of antitrust law, which had favored either corporate consolidation or free market competition. The codes, instead, popularized a third way, an alternative vision for American capitalism that partnered private trade associations with government agencies. The codes of fair competition discussed at the Chamber and other trade association meetings, supported by academic literature on systematized trade practices and promulgated by FTC trade practice conferences through the 1920s, eventually became a lynchpin in the New Deal competition policy. Ultimately, a new understanding of fair competition redefined American government by pushing administrative agencies into their modern role as intermediaries in determining the lawful parameters of trade practices.