But corporations are people too
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field had sustained the railroad’s position while presiding over the circuit court, and the Supreme Court, in turn, sustained Field in Santa Clara without, however, actually hearing arguments about the legal status of corporations. So one of the most consequential judicial decisions in the nation’s history was made without legal argument.
The expansion of corporate rights and privileges generated considerable distrust and resistance in the 19th century — not only because the logic seemed so tenuous and the solution to safeguarding corporate property so extreme. Distrust also arose then — as it does among the Wall Street protesters and millions of other Americans now — because people thought the game was stacked.Continue Reading
The connections between insiders — judges, the politicians making the laws and the corporate owners and officials – were too tight.
Field, for example, was one of the most reliable judicial friends of the Southern Pacific, and a recipient of numerous railroad “favors.” Field’s fellow California Democrat, the anti-monopolist Sen. Stephen Mallory White, called him “one of the most dishonest characters that has ever discharged the function of a judicial office.”
But even the most dishonest had a sense of propriety. Field reacted angrily when Collis Huntington, president of the Southern Pacific and one of the Big Four who ran the railroad, seemed to dictate a Supreme Court decision that he desired. In Gilded Age parlance, Huntington and Field were “friends” — and friends did not tell friends what to do.
Normally, Huntington knew this. Conkling, whom Huntington cited as the most high-minded man in the Senate, proved of great help in the Santa Clara cases and other matters. But Huntington was discreet in asking Leland Stanford, another of the Big Four, to “arrange something out of which he [Conkling] could make some money [something handsome]. You will have to be very careful how you do it, as he is very sensitive, but of course, like the rest of us, has to eat and drink.”
We remember the Gilded Age as a period of corruption, and it was. But it also was a period of reform. This era produced powerful anti-monopolism — a strong reaction to corporate power, economic inequality and corruption. The Populists were one manifestation, but their core strength was in wings of the two major parties.
The anti-monopolists had their faults — for example, their devotion to sustaining white manhood. But their insistence not only on corporate regulation but in recognizing the power and problematic legal status of corporations was among their great strengths.
We, too, live in an age of considerable corruption and corporate power. Perhaps, we too should not just protest — but also re-examine fundamental issues of the nature and status of corporations.
Richard White, the Margaret Byrne professor of American history at Stanford University, is the author of “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.”
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