In the 1890's Americans were getting concerned about capitalism being destroyed by businesses and corporations, so the Congress passed one of the first major regulations protecting capitalism: the Sherman Anti-trust Act. Sherman was a Republican and his bill passed both Senate and House with only one dissenting vote, 293 to 1. Later more anti-trust legislation measures had to be passed as some corporations and businesses continually created new ways and methods to destroy the essence of capitalism, competition. Then other regulations were passed to protect our food, and a raft of other products all hated by conservatives as taking away business freedoms to sell unhealthy, dangerous shoddy products to the public. The battle to outwit the regulations continues to this day.
That's a charming piece of propaganda, but it's total bullshit. The American public was not concerned about getting every cheaper products in greater abundance. the Sherman act was designed to persecute companies there would doing to good a job of providing consumers with better products at a lower price. All suits based on the Sherman act were instigate by envious sour grapes competitors who couldn't match the quality or price of companies like Standard Oil or Alcoa.
The industries accused of "monopolization" by Senator John Sherman and his colleagues were expanding production four times faster than the economy as a whole, on average (some as much as ten times faster) for the decade prior to the 1890 Sherman act. They were also dropping their prices faster than the price level was dropping during this ten-year period of price deflation. The "trusts" were subjected to political attack precisely because they had been making products cheaper and cheaper, much to the dismay of their less efficient bu politically-connected rivals. Antitrust was a protectionist racket from the very beginning.
As Dominick Armentano demonstrated in his book,
Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure, Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company caused the price of refined petroleum to fall from over 30 cents/gallon in 1869 to 5.9 cents in 1897 while creating myriad new products and stimulating innovation in the entire industry. For this, Rockefeller was prosecuted and forced to break up his company despite the fact that he had more than 300 competitors when he supposedly "monopolized" the oil industry.
In his book,
Antitrust and Monopoly, Dominick Armentano carefully examined fifty-five of the most famous antitrust cases in U.S. history and concluded that in every single case the accused forms were dropping prices, expanding production, innovating, creating new products, and generally
benefiting consumers. It was not consumers who were being harmed, but the less-efficient, sour-grape competitors of these companies. For example, the American Tobacco Company was found guilty of "monopolization" in 1911 even the the price of cigarettes (per thousand) had declined from $2.77 in 1895 to $2.20 in 1907, all despite a 40 percent increase in raw material costs to the company.