Millionaire's Club Dbq Analysis

In the period after the Civil War, named the "Gilded Age" by author Mark Twain, big business blossomed, and a strong desire for free trade and the concept of self-interest flourished. Adam Smith, in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, introduced the policies of free enterprise and laissez-faire, or minimal government intervention in the economy. While the government often upheld this policy during the period of 1865 to 1900, it also violated it at times.
"Economically, it will ever remain true, that the government is best which governs least," declared American economist Amasa Walker in The Science of Wealth: A Manual of Political Economy (Doc A). This belief is supported by Social Darwinism, or the idea
Rockefeller, the oil baron; J.P. Morgan, the bankers' banker; captains of industry or robber barons? There has been much debate over the answer of that question. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that these men helped create large trusts and monopolies in their respective businesses. The "Millionaire's Club", or the Senate, is portrayed as being ruled by large trusts in a cartoon by Joseph Keppler, exemplifying the popular belief that the government was just as corrupt as the trusts, and looked out for their interests (Doc M). To control these trusts and others, the largely unsuccessful Sherman Anti-Trust Act was signed into law in 1890. The Act declared illegal every contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of interstate and foreign trade and authorized the federal government to institute proceedings against trusts, yet federal authorities were prevented from using the act for some years due to Supreme Court rulings. Ohio Senator John Sherman, for whom the bill was named, proclaimed in his speech to the Senate that the bill does not interfere with lawful trade, only unlawful combinations (Doc N). "The power to regulate commerce is the power to prescribe the rule by which commerce shall be governed, and is a power independent of the power to suppress monopoly," professed Chief Justice M. W. Fuller, speaking for the Supreme Court in the case of United States v. E. C. Knight Company (Doc P). President Grover Cleveland agreed with the Act as well, stating in his Second Inaugural Message in 1893 that the existence of trusts that limit production and fix prices goes against the "fair field" and the government should alleviate people from their interference (Doc