The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 applied common carriage rules to railways, and sapped their industrialist owners of the power to discriminately pick winners and losers. The Sherman An rust Act of 1890 addressed the anticompe ive practices of monopolists. Years later, the Mercantile National Bank of St. Louis president Festus J. Wade celebrated these laws, especially a 1912 decision based on them to break up a railroad monopoly that was choking off commerce from entering the city. “Railroad managers,” he said, “can no longer combine against an industry and crush it out of existence because of a disagreement with the head of a manufacturing establishment.”
The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 created a central banking system in which decisions over national monetary policy were made by twelve regional Federal Reserve banks, one of which was built (and still exists) in St. Louis. The McFadden Act of 1927 likewise dispersed lending activity by confining national banks to their headquartered states. This rule preserved the flow of capital within local communities, made bankers attuned to their community’s needs, and prevented New York financiers from gobbling up St. Louis banks. It also addressed the public’s concern that if large banking organizations operated in multiple regions, they would evade adequate supervision.
The Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 broke up the “Big Five” meatpacking cartel that previously had manipulated prices across the nation, giving undue preference to certain businesses and localities, and controlling non-meat production in the warehousing, wholesale, and retail industries. That move gave smaller companies like the St. Louis Independent Packing Company, of the famed “Mayrose” jingle, the opportunity to compete fairly.
The Wheeler-Rayburn Act of 1935 prohibited electricity, gas, and water utilities from speculating in unregulated businesses with ratepayers’ money and ensured that companies like Union Electric would remain locally headquartered and focused. The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 protected small retailers by prohibiting manufacturers from giving larger discounts to chain stores, and the Miller-Tydings Act of 1937 did the same by permitting manufacturers to set a minimum price at which their goods could be sold. These laws safeguarded local-area retailers like Central Hardware and Bettendorf-Rapp supermarkets, as well as neighborhood pharmacies, bakeries, restaurants, clothing stores, and grocers—including those servicing the city’s predominant minority and African-American communities (see “
Redlining From Afar”).
After World War II, Congress continued strengthening these anti-monopoly laws. The 1950 Celler-Kefauver Act, for instance, closed a loophole that allowed companies to thwart compe ion by gobbling up compe ors’ regional suppliers. At the Wholesale Grocers Association convention held in St. Louis, the law’s cosponsor, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, declared that the 1950 act would “blast out those pillboxes of monopoly . . . that threaten our free enterprise.”