The Sherman Act Passed the Senate 51 to 1. Monopoly Was Once Common Ground

In the spring of 1890, the United States Senate took a vote that would be nearly impossible to imagine in any recent Congress. The bill in question took aim at some of the richest and best-connected businesses in the nation, the great trusts in oil, sugar, whiskey, cottonseed oil and more. The roll was called on April 8, and when it was done, 51 senators had voted yes and a single senator had voted no. In June, the House passed the same bill without a recorded vote against it. President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, signed it on July 2. The Sherman Antitrust Act, named for Senator John Sherman of Ohio, was short enough to fit on a single page, and it remains the foundation of American competition law. That a body so divided by tariffs, currency and the bitter memory of Reconstruction could agree on anything this sweeping tells you something about the country in 1890. It also suggests what is possible now.

In short: The Sherman Act passed nearly unanimously in 1890 because hostility to the trusts was shared by farmers, small businessmen and workers across both parties. The law was then weakened by the courts and even turned against unions before Congress corrected course. The argument here: anti-monopoly politics has deep bipartisan roots, and progressives can rebuild that coalition if they speak to the same people it once united.

A country that hated the trusts

To understand the vote, start with the word. A trust, in the 1880s, was a legal device. Shareholders of competing companies handed their stock to a board of trustees in exchange for certificates, and the trustees ran all the companies together as one. The Standard Oil Trust, organized in 1882, was the model. Others followed in sugar refining, lead, linseed oil, whiskey distilling and more.

The effect was to replace competition with coordination. Prices for what the trusts sold could rise; prices they paid to suppliers could fall. And because railroads were also consolidating and offering secret rebates to their biggest customers, a farmer in Kansas or a small refiner in Pennsylvania could find that the same handful of interests controlled what he bought, what he sold and what it cost to get his goods to market.

The farmers organized first. The Grange had spread across the rural Midwest in the 1870s, pushing states to regulate railroad rates. In the 1880s, Farmers' Alliances in the South and the Plains grew into a mass movement with hundreds of thousands of members, and their platforms called for regulating or breaking the trusts. Labor organizations, including the Knights of Labor, shared the anger. Small merchants who could not compete with a combination's prices joined them.

None of this was confined to one party. The Democrats, strong in the agrarian South, had a long tradition of suspicion toward concentrated economic power. The Republicans, the party of Lincoln and of business, also had a free-labour tradition that prized the independent producer. In 1888, both parties' platforms condemned the trusts. By 1890, voting against an anti-trust bill was not a position a senator wanted to defend back home.

What the law actually says

The act's language is broad, almost biblical in its plainness. The first section declares illegal every contract, combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade among the states or with foreign nations. The second makes it a crime to monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or conspire to monopolize, any part of that trade. Violators could be fined and imprisoned; injured parties could sue for triple damages.

Sherman himself argued in the Senate that a nation unwilling to accept a king in its government should not accept one over the production and sale of the necessities of life. The idea that economic power could become a form of private government, answerable to no voter, runs through the debate.

The bill that passed was not quite the one Sherman first introduced. The Senate Judiciary Committee, led by George Edmunds of Vermont, rewrote it, and senators argued over whether Congress had power to reach manufacturing at all, or only interstate commerce. The final language leaned on the commerce clause, and left a great deal for courts to fill in. That vagueness was part of why it passed so easily. Senators could agree on the principle that monopoly was dangerous without agreeing on precisely where the line fell.

It is worth noticing what else happened in that Congress, because the same legislators did not agree on much else. The McKinley Tariff, a high tariff that Democrats hated, passed the same year on a largely party-line vote. So did the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, a contested compromise over currency. Antitrust stood apart. It was the issue on which the two parties' voters overlapped.

How the courts emptied it out

A law that passes 51 to 1 can still be hollowed out, and the Sherman Act nearly was.

In 1895, in United States v. E.C. Knight Co., the Supreme Court considered the government's case against the sugar trust, which by then controlled most of the nation's sugar refining. The Court ruled that manufacturing was not commerce, so a monopoly over refining was beyond the act's reach. It was a startling reading of a statute meant to stop exactly this sort of thing, and it slowed enforcement for years.

Meanwhile, the law found another target. Federal courts began using the Sherman Act against unions, treating strikes and boycotts as conspiracies in restraint of trade. In the Danbury Hatters case, Loewe v. Lawlor, decided in 1908, the Supreme Court held that a hatters' union's nationwide boycott fell under the act, and individual union members were later held liable for damages. A law passed partly with the votes of senators who wanted to protect working people had become a weapon against them.

That twist is the part of the history most worth remembering. Laws do not enforce themselves. The coalition that passes a statute has to stay together long enough to make sure it is applied as intended, and to fix it when it is not.

The coalition comes back

It did. Theodore Roosevelt's Justice Department brought the Northern Securities case against a railroad combination and won at the Supreme Court in 1904. The government sued Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company, and in 1911 the Court ordered both broken up, though it also announced that only "unreasonable" restraints of trade were banned, a standard that left judges with a great deal of room.

In 1912, a three-way presidential race turned partly on how to handle big business. Roosevelt, running on the Progressive ticket, argued for regulating large corporations through a strong federal commission. Woodrow Wilson, influenced by the lawyer Louis Brandeis, argued for restoring competition by breaking up concentrations of power. Both men assumed that the government had to act. The argument was over method.

Wilson won, and in 1914 Congress passed two laws. The Federal Trade Commission Act created a new agency to police unfair methods of competition. The Clayton Act banned specific practices, including certain mergers that lessened competition, and it declared that the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce. Samuel Gompers, the head of the American Federation of Labor, hailed the labor provisions as a charter for working people. Courts again narrowed them, and it took the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, sponsored by a Republican senator from Nebraska and a Republican congressman from New York, to finally restrict the use of federal court injunctions against strikes.

Look at those names for a moment. George Norris was a progressive Republican from the Plains. Fiorello La Guardia was a Republican from East Harlem who would go on to be mayor of New York. A farm-state senator and an urban congressman, both of the party that is now associated with business, wrote the law that took federal judges out of the strikebreaking business. The anti-monopoly coalition was never the property of a single party.

The case for concentration, taken seriously

There is a serious argument on the other side, and it deserves a hearing.

Large firms can do things small ones cannot. Standard Oil, for all its tactics, did drive down the price of kerosene by refining at a scale no small competitor could match. Modern defenders of bigness point to supply chains that deliver goods cheaply, to research only giant firms can fund, and to the risk that government will break up companies for political reasons rather than economic ones. For several decades after the 1970s, an influential school of thought argued that antitrust should care only about whether consumers paid more, and courts largely adopted that view.

The answer, in our view, is not that size is always bad. It is that size achieved by excluding rivals, rather than by beating them, is different in kind. The farmers of 1890 were not angry that Standard Oil was efficient. They were angry that railroads gave secret rebates to the biggest shippers, that combinations divided markets instead of competing for them, and that the people who grew the food had no one to sell to but a single buyer. Those are questions about fair dealing, not efficiency, and the voters of both parties understood them that way.

There is also a democratic argument that the price-only view leaves out. When a few firms dominate an industry, they gain power over legislatures, regulators and the information citizens rely on. Sherman's warning about private kings was a warning about self-government, not only about prices.

Why it matters in 2026

The world of the trusts can sound remote. It is closer than it looks. Four meatpacking companies handle a large majority of the nation's beef processing, and cattle ranchers in the Plains, the descendants of the Alliance farmers in more ways than one, have spent years asking Congress for help. A handful of firms dominate seeds, fertilizer, pharmacy benefit management and hospital systems in many regions. Big Tech platforms sit as gatekeepers between businesses and their customers.

And, as in 1890, the anger crosses party lines. Republican senators from farm states have joined Democrats on bills about meatpacking and cattle markets. State attorneys general from both parties have sued tech giants. Polling regularly finds that large majorities of voters, Democrats and Republicans alike, distrust big corporations and want stronger enforcement.

What is missing is the coalition that turns shared anger into law and then keeps it enforced. That is a political task, not a legal one. It means talking to the rancher and the warehouse worker in the same breath, as the Alliance organizers once talked to the farmer and the Knight of Labor. It means resisting the temptation to make antitrust a culture-war cudgel aimed at companies whose politics one dislikes. And it means remembering, as the Danbury Hatters learned, that a law written to protect working people can be turned against them if no one is watching.

The lone no and the long yes

The lone senator who voted no in 1890 is a trivia answer now. The 51 who voted yes are mostly forgotten too. What lasted was the principle they agreed on: that no private interest should be allowed to become a government unto itself over the things people need to live.

Progressives sometimes speak about economic power as if their side discovered the problem. It did not. Farmers in Kansas, merchants in Ohio, Republican senators from New England and Democratic senators from the South found it together. Reclaiming that history is not only good scholarship. It is a way of inviting people who do not call themselves progressives to see a fight they already believe in.

The railroad law that came first

The Sherman Act did not arrive out of nowhere. Three years earlier, in 1887, Congress had passed the Interstate Commerce Act, aimed at the railroads that farmers blamed for so much of their misery. It required that rates be reasonable and just, banned some forms of rate discrimination, and created the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first modern federal regulatory agency. Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, signed it, with plenty of Republican votes behind it.

The commission was weak at first, and courts soon trimmed its authority. But the railroad law established a pattern that the antitrust fight would repeat: a broad, cross-party public demand, a statute written in general terms, a long struggle over enforcement, and a series of corrections as judges and companies found the gaps. The farmers who had pushed for railroad regulation came back three years later and pushed for something broader. They had learned that a single law was a beginning.

There is a reason to dwell on that sequence. Movements tend to treat the passage of a law as the finish line, and then are surprised when the other side keeps working. The coalition of 1887 and 1890 understood, eventually, that the fight over economic power is never settled in one vote. It returns in every generation, under new names, against new combinations.

What you can do

• Learn who is fighting concentration now. The corporate power topic page collects reporting on mergers, meatpacking, pharmacy middlemen, and the agencies charged with enforcement.
• Tell your lawmakers that enforcement needs funding. Through our representatives lookup, find your members' phone numbers and contact forms, and check their recent votes before you call. The antitrust agencies are small next to the companies they police.
• Point skeptics to the record. Our page on bills both parties passed together is a handy answer to the claim that Congress cannot agree on anything.
• Find local groups working on farm and small-business issues. Our organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause in every state, including groups that work with family farmers and independent businesses.
• Have the conversation outside your usual circle. Ask a farmer, a small retailer or a nurse at a consolidated hospital system what it is like to deal with a buyer or seller who has no competition. You may find you agree on more than either of you expected.