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10. Political scientists and historians have long recognized that rate discrimination was the paramount force behind popular agitation for regulation. On this account, discrimination pits town against country, section against section, big shippers against small, and all against the railroads. Everyone wanted rate advantages; no one wanted their competitors to have them. If the debate over railroad regulation has persisted, it is over who among this Farmers of interestss got what, where, and why? See, for example, Benson, Lee, Merchants, Farmers, and Railroads: Railroad Regulation and New York Politics, 1850–1887 (Cambridge, Mass., 1955);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Richard H. K. Vietor, “Businessmen and the Political Economy: The Railroad Rate Controversy of 1905,” Journal of American History 64 (June 1977): 47–66; Elizabeth Sanders, “Farmers, Railroads, and the State: A Political Economy Perspective,” paper delivered at the 86th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1990; Thomas W. Gilligan, William J. Marshall, and Barry R. Weingast, “Regulation and the Theory of Legislative Choice: The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887,” Journal of Law and Economics 33 (April 1989): 35–62. This debate, however, is flawed on several counts. First, it overestimates the effect of the economic division of labor (whether class, section, or sector) upon policy preferences. During such a volatile period of economic history as the late nineteenth century, however, the division of labor itself was up for grabs. Hence, interests were, at best, ambiguous. Second, it fails to see how claims to rate parity were rooted not merely in particularistic interests, but in a broader normative conception of regional market development. Finally, the obsession with the question of whose interests were served has blinded scholars to Congress's cooperative initiative. As a result, it has also made unintelligible a regulatory architecture that would, in principle, serve several interests if the parties involved altered their dispositions. For a more detailed account of this argument, see Berk, Gerald, “Constituting Corporations and Markets: Railroads in Gilded Age Politics,” Studies in American Political Development 4 (1990): 130–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865–1916 (Baltimore, forthcoming), chap. 1.

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12. ICD48, 31.

13. ICD48, 243.

14. U.S. Congress, Interstate Commerce Debate in 49th Cong, on the Bill to Establish a Board of Commissioners on Interstate Commerce, and to Regulate Such Commerce, etc., Compiled by Painter, V. H. (Washington, D.C., 1887), 27–28. Hereafter cited as ICD49.Google Scholar

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16. 1CD48, 26–28; and Wilson, ICD48, 32. Admittedly, in order for regionalism to have been effective in practice, the railroads would have had to rethink operating strategy as well. Nevertheless, traffic management in service of regional trade was not beyond highly efficient management. See, for example, the case of the Chicago Great Western Railway in Berk, Alternative Tracks, chap. 5.

17. It was these railroad leaders that Kolko sampled in his path-breaking study, where he concluded that management was the dominant force behind regulation. The trouble with Kolko, however, is not merely, as his critics have said, that he ignored counter-evidence. More important, Kolko failed to see that there was a wide variety of ways for railroads to stabilize competition (e.g., pools, regulated competition, mergers, intercorporate share holding), and that if railroads chose commission regulation they would have to make significant concessions to the regionalists. See Kolko, Gabriel, Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 (Princeton, 1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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26. Cooley, “State Regulation,” 210 (emphasis added).

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30. Ibid., 35 (emphasis added).

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36. Stone v. Wisconsin, 94 US 184–85.

37. ICC v. Alabama Midland Railway, 69 Fed Rep 176.

38. Ibid.

39. ICC, Annual Report, 1897 (Washington, D.C., 1897), 42.Google Scholar

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44. ICC, Annual Report, 1898 (Washington, D.C., 1898), 16;Google ScholarICC, Annual Report, 1899 (Washington, D.C., 1899), 6;Google ScholarICC, Annual Report, 1902 (Washington, D.C., 1902), 7. See also Chief Commissioner Knapp in Kolko, Railroads and Regulations, 87.Google Scholar

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49. ICC, Annual Report, 1901 (Washington, D.C., 1901), 26–27.Google Scholar

50. Martin, Enterprise Denied.

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57. 20 ICC 267, 334; 31 ICC 358–9.

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