JUDICIARY: Milk

3 minute read
TIME

In 1938 a Federal Grand Jury found on Chicago’s doorstep not just milk-bottles, but a milk monopoly that fixed prices to farmers and customers, controlled supply and distribution, harassed and coerced independents who tried to sell milk at lower prices.

The jury found the monopoly extended from the ten big milk-distributing corporations through a dealers’ association, a farm milk-producers’ association, and milk-bottlers, down through an A. F. of L. milkwagon drivers’ union to President Herman N. Bundesen and his Chicago Board of Health, a police officer, Daniel A. Gilbert, and two men who arbitrated price disputes.

Indicted, these groups (representing 12,000 farmers from four States, 5,000 milkwagon drivers), fought the case before District Judge Charles E. Woodward in Chicago. On July 28 of this year Judge Woodward quashed the case. He saw the situation thus: that the purpose of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was to protect individualism and unrestrained competition; that in the 50-odd years since the Act’s passage, a contrary philosophy had grown up—through the Clayton, Capper-Volstead and Marketing Agreement Acts—which held that such associations as the Chicago milk groups were not illegal, and did not act in restraint of trade, since the later legislation sought collectivism and control of harmful competition. Specifically also he noted that the Secretary of Agriculture directly licenses such groups as the milk associations.

Before the Supreme Court on November 15 the Government argued the opposite: that the acts since the Sherman law merely allowed farmers and workers to organize, in order to attain their ends, but did not in any case grant them immunity from prosecution for conspiracy in restraint of trade.

This week Chief Justice Hughes stood up, spoke through his thinning thicket of milk-white whiskers a decision in favor of the Government’s view, said: “We cannot believe that Congress intended to create so great a breach in historic remedies and sanctions.” There was no dissent,* and back went the case to Chicago, where the milk monopolists will now be tried.

Left untouched was the question at keenest issue now: whether labor unions as such may be prosecuted under the Sherman Act.† The Chief Justice said the question was not presented, despite the milkwagon driver defendants. Thus President William Green of the American Federation of Labor found no clue in the Supreme Court decision to the future of his building-trade unions—now widely indicted in the Justice Department’s drive against trade restraints in the construction industry.

*Justice McReynolds was away duck-shooting.

† Last week the Third Circuit Appeals Court ruled that the Sherman Act could not be invoked against a C. I. O. union by Philadelphia’s Apex Hosiery Co., returned a triple-damage fine of $711,932.55, gave unions hope they are as yet beyond the purview of anti-trust laws.

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