A faded passion? Estes Kefauver and the senate subcommittee on antitrust and monopoly

In this paper I examine the U.S. Senate subcommittee on antitrust and monopoly (1957-1963), chaired by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver. I assess the persistence into the postwar years of the antimonopoly critique of bigness that had animated the politics of reform in the pre–New Deal era, arguing that Richard Hofstadter correctly described antitrust as one of the “faded passions” of postwar reform. However, Kefauver’s antimonopoly crusade was significant in bridging the antimonopoly tradition rooted in the politics of the pre–New Deal era and the new antimonopoly politics of the 1970s and beyond, particularly as manifested in the “third wave” consumer movement. Tracing this connection between antimonopoly and consumer politics, I pay particular attention to the formulation and passage of the Kefauver-Harris Drug Act, the consumer safety legislation from the subcommittee, and to Kefauver’s determined but forlorn efforts in the late 1950s and early 1960s to persuade the federal government to establish a new Department of Consumers

William Jennings Bryan's 1905-6 world tour

This article is a study of the 1905-6 world tour undertaken by William Jennings Bryan and his family. Bryan was one of the major US politicians of his era. Three times a Democratic party presidential nominee (1896, 1900, 1908), he played a prominent role in the various reform crusades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was the leading figure on the populist, agrarian wing of his party. To date, however, historians have paid little attention to his extensive travels and voluminous travel writing, in large part because hostile journalists and historians – chief among them Walter Lippmann, H. L. Mencken, and Richard Hofstadter – succeeded in casting him as an archetype of American parochialism. This study makes us aware of Bryan's published and unpublished correspondence, the memoirs of his daughter Grace, newspaper reports, and cartoons to form a reassessment of Bryan, focusing primarily on his encounters with unfamiliar cultures, and with imperialism in the Philippines, British India, and the Dutch East Indies. In so doing, it places Bryan for the first time in a global and transnational frame, and mounts a broader critique of the rigidly regional and national orientation of the US historiography of populism

The anti-chain store movement and the politics of consumption

This essay examines the anti-chain store movement of the 1920s and 1930s in order to contribute to debates about the origins and nature of modern US consumer politics. It argues that this movement of independent merchants and their followers is best understood as an expression of populist antimonopolism. Opponents of the chains saw themselves as speaking for ‘the people’ and were virulently hostile to large aggregations of economic and political power. Concerned about the likely impact of chain stores on their communities, merchants lobbied their trade associations, wrote to their congressmen, and launched local grassroots campaigns. They also worked through the courts, securing anti-chain tax legislation in most states, and attracting the support of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. The essay has a comparative dimension, comparing the anti-chain crusades of the 1920s and 1930s with the protests against ‘big-box’ retail which have proliferated in the US and elsewhere since the 1980s. Reflecting on the recurrence in the age of globalization of a form of protest historians once thought dead, the essay questions the assumption—deep-rooted in US historiography—that antimonopoly ceased to be a significant feature of the US politics of reform after the New Deal. Accordingly the final part of the essay traces connections between pre-New Deal anti-chain campaigners and post-New Deal consumer activists, noting the centrality of antimonopoly to the careers of leading consumer politicians of the post-war era, Estes Kefauver and Ralph Nader. Arguing that the anti-chain store movement of the 1920s and 1930s was constitutive of the modern US politics of consumption, the study concludes by considering the implications of the persistence of the antimonopoly tradition for current and future scholarship. It suggests that the study of the politics of consumption is still in its infancy, and that given the important role antimonopoly thought has played in the US politics of reform, the temptation to dismiss out of hand as necessarily futile and reactionary anti-chain store movements past and present should be resisted

Greening the Red, White, and Blue: The Bomb, Big Business, and Consumer Resistance in Postwar America. By Thomas Jundt. Oxford University Press. 2014. xii + 306pp. $34.95.

No abstract available

Antimonopoly in American Politics, 1945-2000

Antimonopoly, meaning the exclusive or near-exclusive control of an industry or business by one or a very few businesses, played a relatively muted role in the history of the post-1945 era, certainly compared to some earlier periods in American history. However, the subject of antimonopoly is important because it sheds light on changing attitudes toward concentrated power, corporations, and the federal government in the United States after World War II. Paradoxically, as antimonopoly declined as a grassroots force in American politics, the technical, expert-driven field of antitrust enjoyed a golden age. From the 1940s to the 1960s, antitrust operated on principles broadly in line with those that inspired its creation in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, acknowledging the special contribution small business owners made to US democratic culture. In these years, antimonopoly remained sufficiently potent as a political force to sustain the careers of national-level politicians such as congressmen Wright Patman and Estes Kefauver and to inform the opinions of Supreme Court justices such as Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. Antimonopoly and consumer politics overlapped in this period. From the mid-1960s onward, Ralph Nader repeatedly tapped antimonopoly ideas in his writings and consumer activism, skilfully exploiting popular anxieties about concentrated economic power. At the same time, as part of the United States’ rise to global hegemony, officials in the federal government’s Antitrust Division exported antitrust overseas, building it into the political, economic, and legal architecture of the post-war world. Beginning in the 1940s, conservative lawyers and economists launched a counterattack against the conception of antitrust elaborated in the progressive era. By making consumer welfare—understood in terms of low prices and market efficiency—the determining factor in antitrust cases they made a major intellectual and political contribution to the rightward thrust of US politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox, published in 1978, popularized and signalled the ascendency of this new approach. In the 1980s and 1990s antimonopoly drifted to the margin of political debate. Fear of big government now loomed larger in US politics than the spectre of monopoly or of corporate domination. In the late-twentieth century, Americans, more often than not, directed their antipathy toward concentrated power in its public, rather than its private, forms. This fundamental shift in the political landscape accounts in large part for the overall decline of antimonopoly—a venerable American political tradition—in the period 1945-2000

Middle Class Union: Organizing the "Consuming Public" in Post-World War I America

Review of the Middle Class Union: Organizing the "Consuming Public" in Post-World War I America. By Mark W. Robbins (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. viii plus 219 pp. $70.00)

A Third Term for FDR: The Election of 1940

No abstract available

To exercise or not to exercise in chronic fatigue syndrome?

The document attached has been archived with permission from the editor of the Medical Journal of Australia. An external link to the publisher’s copy is included.See page 6 of PDF for this item.Garry C Scroop, Richard B Burne

A life in progress: motion and emotion in the autobiography of Robert M. La Follette

This article is a study of a La Follette’s Autobiography, the autobiography of the leading Wisconsin progressive Robert M. La Follette, which was published serially in 1911 and, in book form, in 1913. Rather than focusing, as have other historians, on which parts of La Follette’s account are accurate and can therefore be trusted, it explains instead why and how this major autobiography was conceived and written. The article shows that the autobiography was the product of a sustained, complex, and often fraught series of collaborations among La Follette’s family, friends, and political allies, and in the process illuminates the importance of affective ties as well as political ambition and commitment in bringing the project to fruition. In the world of progressive reform, it argues, personal and political experiences were inseparable

Renal cement embolism during percutaneous vertebroplasty

Percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) is an effective treatment for lesions of the vertebral body that involves a percutaneous injection of polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA). Although PVP is considered to be minimally invasive, complications can occur during the procedure. We encountered a renal embolism of PMMA in a 57-year-old man that occurred during PVP. This rare case of PMMA leakage occurred outside of the anterior cortical fracture site of the L1 vertebral body, and multiple tubular bone cements migrated to the course of the renal vessels via the valveless collateral venous network surrounding the L1 body. Although the authors could not explain the exact cause of the renal cement embolism, we believe that physicians should be aware of the fracture pattern, anatomy of the vertebral venous system, and careful fluoroscopic monitoring to minimize the risks during the PVP