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

Authors

Laura Phillips Sawyer, University of Georgia School of LawFollow

in Capital Gains: Business and Politics in the 20th Century 25-42 (Richard J. John & Kim Phillips-Fein eds., 2017).

Abstract

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC), and "organization of organizations," was conceived in 1912 in coordination with administrators at the Department of Commerce and Labor to promote the collection of commercially valuable trade information. A critical though often neglected, aspect of administrative state building has been the information-gathering and dissemination practices spearheaded by the Department of Commerce and later the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in conjunction with the USCC. Rather than a strictly adversarial relationship, in the early twentieth century business-government relations created mutually constitutive administrative capacities in both private trade associations and public administrative agencies.

Repository Citation

Laura Phillips Sawyer, Trade Association, State Building, and the Sherman Act: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1912-25 (2017),
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/1359