The Double Standard of the Law
A commentary on how the courts punish labor organizers while letting corporate titans walk free.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
It is now some two or three years since the Northern Securities company was dissolved by the United States courts. It owned the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific and the Burlington railway systems and was wound up as 'in restraint of trade' and otherwise illegal. It was dissolved. But James J. Hill owned the three systems and save in the mere matter of the reading of the charters, everything was as before. No shipper or passenger got any better or any different rates than he would have got if the combine had not been dissolved. Mr. Hill put the swag in three pockets instead of one, as he preferred, but the game went on. The same day that saw Mitchell, Gompers and Morrison sentenced to prison for publishing that an enemy of union labor was an enemy of union labor, the Republic Oil company, the Standard Oil company of Indiana and the Waters-Pierce Oil company, all Rockefeller corporations, were fined $50,000 each and two of them were expelled forever from Missouri. It is heralded, as was the Northern Securities case, as a great victory over the octopus. Well, maybe it was, but it is well to remember that the Standard Oil company has some seventy-two constituent corporations and can sprout new tentacles at pleasure. And you don't notice John D. Rockefeller or Mr. Hill or any of their families or servants going to jail, do you? But Gompers, Mitchell and Morrison, just because they published the fact that a certain enemy of organized labor was an enemy of organized labor, are sent to jail. Is this right? And if it is, how about Hill, Rockefeller, Weyerhaeuser, Harriman and the rest?
“They will not meet there any of the rich men of the land who are notoriously guilty of 'restraint of trade.'”
The disparity between how the legal system treats corporate antitrust violations versus labor activism remains a central theme in American political discourse. This 1909 critique of 'trust-busting' as performance art feels strikingly familiar in an era of corporate consolidation and uneven accountability.
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