The Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890, had a paradoxical impact on market competition in the United States. The law was passed in response to antimonopoly activists who hoped to curb the power of the “trusts” and other large concentrations of economic power that had emerged by the 1880s. In practice, however, the provisions of the Sherman Act placed new limitations on smaller firms. Throughout American history, smaller firms had used trade associations and proprietary networks to build market share and compete with larger firms, but legal interpretations of the new antitrust law now treated those techniques as unfair restraints on trade. There was no ready solution to this dilemma, however, because easing antitrust restrictions threatened to empower the same industrial behemoths that the law was meant to control.

In American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the “New Competition,” 1890–1940, Laura Phillips Sawyer provides a sweeping account of how a succession of policy makers, policy advocates, and jurists struggled over the ensuing half century to resolve this paradox. In a narrative that combines approaches from business history, institutional history, policy history, and legal history, Sawyer shows the ways in which the long quest for “fair trade” shaped the American political economy and laid the foundations of the modern American regulatory state.

Sawyer examines the development of competition policy through six chapters. After describing the development of proprietary capitalism, the emergence of big business, and the creation of the Sherman Act in Chapter 1, Sawyer tells in Chapter 2 how business leaders and jurists sought to reconcile traditional practices within the new legal framework. Chapter 3 recounts efforts to rebrand traditional business practices as the “new competition,” focusing on the activism of Louis Brandeis and the American Fair Trade League, leading to the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The central actors in Chapter 4 are Herbert Hoover and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC), and Sawyer focuses on their embrace of business–government cooperation in what historian Ellis Hawley called the “Associative State.”^{Footnote 1} While Brandeis, Hoover, the FTC, and the USCC managed to stretch the limits of federal action under a conservative Supreme Court (although the Court became somewhat less conservative after Brandeis was confirmed as a justice in 1916), their efforts did not solve the fair trade dilemma. When the Great Depression hit, and American businesses faced an even more acute need to protect themselves against falling prices, fair trade advocates sought state-level reforms. In Chapter 5, Sawyer tells the story of the fair trade movement in California, led by activist-businesswoman Edna Gleason. The reforms enacted in California provided a model for the National Industrial Recovery Act and other federal legislation enacted during the New Deal, which Sawyer describes in Chapter 6.

Throughout the book, Sawyer displays a thorough and judicious reading of an impressive body of secondary literature across several disciplines. However, there are points where her arguments would perhaps be better served by a more direct engagement in historiographical disputes. For instance, Sawyer offers a largely sympathetic treatment of Louis Brandeis, who is perhaps the central figure in her narrative. This portrayal of Brandeis will be familiar to readers of Gerald Berk’s work, but it might be confusing to readers who are more familiar with Thomas McCraw’s more critical treatment.^{Footnote 2} While the existence of these conflicting assessments is briefly acknowledged, a more extended engagement with Brandeis’s past and present critics would aid readers and further buttress Sawyer’s own conclusions (109).

While other scholars have explored parts of this story, Sawyer’s major accomplishment is in bringing those parts together into a single coherent thread linking the Long Depression of the late 1800s with the Great Depression of the 1930s. In this sense, American Fair Trade joins a growing movement of scholarship that seeks to decenter the Progressive Era and New Deal. Sawyer achieves this mainly through her sustained focus on the development of institutions and organizations. As such, this book can be seen as a belated fulfillment of Louis Galambos’s prophecy that “with the organizational synthesis should come new attempts at periodization. Historians in this field will doubtless abandon the progressive categories of Populism, Progressivism, the New Deal, and After.”^{Footnote 3} While Sawyer’s meticulously fine-grained narrative will likely be challenging for students and nonspecialists, scholars interested in the history of business, political economy, capitalism, policy, and administrative law will find much that is useful and stimulating in these pages.