The Knight Sugar Decision of 1895 and The Modernization of American Corporation Law, 1869–1903

No conviction has been more a part of the standard interpretation of American history in the twentieth century than the belief that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of late-nineteenth-century decisions bearing on government-business relations, reflected the conservative reaction that seemed to mark the depression of the 1890s. But Professor McCurdy demonstrates that in its 1895 decision in the case of United States v. E. C. Knight Company, which drew a distinction between manufacturing and trade in defining interstate commerce, the Court was not trying to shield a vast, monopolistic aggregation of wealth (Henry O. Havemeyer's “Sugar Trust”) from the will of the people that it be broken up under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The decision, in fact, was not the beginning of a conservative reaction, but the last effort in a thirty-year attempt to maintain a role for state jurisdiction over the behavior of chartered enterprises.