Laura Phillips Sawyer received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. Before joining the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at HBS, she held the Harvard-Newcomen Fellowship in business history. She also held a postdoc at Brown University's Political Theory Project. Her work has appeared in Business History Review,Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and Capital Gains (eds. Kim Phillips-Fein and Richard John). Her book, American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the "New Competition," 1880-1940, recently came out with Cambridge University Press (2018). Currently, she is writing two historiographical essays: one on 20th century American business culture and another on American Antitrust Policy. She is also completing an essay on the role of state corporation law in early competition policy. Next, she plans to write an article-length study of transatlantic competition policy during the interwar era.
American Fair Trade explores the contested political and legal meanings of the term fair trade from the late nineteenth century through the New Deal era. This history of American capitalism argues that business associations partnered with regulators to create codes of fair competition that reshaped both public and private regulatory power.
Rather than viewing the history of American capitalism as the unassailable ascent of large-scale corporations and free competition, American Fair Trade argues that trade associations of independent proprietors lobbied and litigated to reshape competition policy to their benefit. At the turn of the twentieth century, this widespread fair trade movement borrowed from progressive law and economics, demonstrating a persistent concern with market fairness – not only fair prices for consumers but also fair competition among businesses. Proponents of fair trade collaborated with regulators to create codes of fair competition and influenced the administrative state’s public-private approach to market regulation. New Deal partnerships in planning borrowed from those efforts to manage competitive markets, yet ultimately discredited the fair trade model by mandating economy-wide trade rules that sharply reduced competition. Laura Phillips Sawyer analyses how these efforts to reconcile the American tradition of a well-regulated society with the legacy of Gilded Age laissez-faire capitalism produced the modern American regulatory state.
In the decades before World War II, U.S. antitrust law was anything but settled. Considerable pressure for antitrust revision came from the states. A perhaps unlikely leader, Edna Gleason, organized California's retail pharmacists and coordinated trade networks to monitor and enforce Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) contracts, a system of price-fixing, then known as “fair trade.” Progressive jurists, including Louis Brandeis and institutional economist E.R.A. Seligman, supported RPM as a protection to independent proprietors. The breakdown of legal and economic consensus regarding what constituted “unfair competition” allowed businesspeople to act as intermediaries between heterodox economic thought and contested antitrust law, ultimately tailoring federal policy to accommodate state regulations.
Workingmen's Wages, the Company Store System, and the Godcharles v. Wigeman Decision
In 1886, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited employers from paying wages in company store scrip and mandated monthly wage payments. The court held that the legislature could not pre-scribe mandatory wage contracts for legally competent workingmen. The decision quashed over two decades of efforts to end the “truck system.” Although legislators had agreed that wage payments redeemable only in company store goods appeared antithetical to the free labor wage system, two obstacles complicated legislative action. Any law meant to enhance laborers’ rights could neither favor one class over another nor infringe any workingman’s ability to make voluntary contracts. These distinctions, however, were not as rigid and laissez faire-oriented as depicted by conventional history. Labor reformers argued that principles of equity must supplement these categories of class legislation and contract freedom. Ultimately, the court refused to extend principles of equity over workingmen’s labor contracts. Instead labor reformers were encouraged to pursue reforms by extending state police powers. This essay explores how legal doctrine both shaped and limited the meanings of liberty in late nineteenth century America.
