Excellent oped by former Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor. Robert Jackson was one of the most important - and lesser known - figures during the New Deal. I wrote several chapters on him in Goliath. nytimes.com/2021/03/29/opi…
Aside from his work on antitrust, Jackson as head of the tax bureau legal office investigated the Andrew Mellon industrial empire, and found Mellon guilty of cheating on his taxes. This was a key part of defeating the oligarchs. nytimes.com/2021/03/29/opi…
Mellon had been the Secretary of the Treasury under Hoover, and also owned a bunch of banks. When England went off the gold standard, Mellon knew early on because of his government position. He shored up his own private banks and used the global bank run to take over rival banks.
It's hard to convey the power of Mellon, leading Treasury from 1921-1932. He served under three Presidents, or as it was said, three Presidents served under him. His brother, who was his junior partner, once said that machine guns were essential for running their coal mines.
Mellon promoted Mussolini, not just in debt deals that allowed Mussolini to consolidate his power after murdering a rival, but publicly in the U.S., in 1928, as part of Hoover's reelection campaign! The 1920s were a very scary decade.
The U.S. came pretty close to fascism in 1933. 
The New Deal, with populists leading the attack on monopoly power and authoritarianism domestically and then globally, was the greatest democratic movement in world history. It's not even close. And antitrust was a core part of it.
Here's Thurman Arnold, describing what happened in the 1920s as monopolies destroyed local businesses and induced regional inequality. It's almost identical to what Amazon is doing now, tearing the nation apart. @AlecMacGillis
As local commerce disappeared and the stock market boomed, people who used to see speculation as sinful began buying common stocks, feeling rich even as their local economies disappeared.
It all collapsed. Then came FDR, who "took office in a period of the greatest intellectual, spiritual, and economic confusion that this country has ever known. There was no consensus on anything. The college-educated American citizen voted against him in every election."
"Franklin D. Roosevelt was responsible for the first sustained program of antitrust enforcement on a nationwide scale which this country has ever had." - Thurman Arnold digitalcollections.uwyo.edu/luna/servlet/d…
Europe post-war had antitrust laws modeled on the Sherman Act.
"The Sherman and Clayton Acts have become as much a part of the American way of life as the due process clause of the Constitution." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a letter to Secretary of State Cordell Hull
Today, disdain for the New Deal and the anti-monopoly approach against elites, both among Democrats and on the faux radical left, comes from the same place it did back then. Snobbery. Just a straight-forward dislike of the populist idea of democracy, that the people get to rule.
Often snobs make arguments like 'that's just capitalism' or 'technology is different now.' The reality though is this is no more coherent than ascribing events to gnomes under bridges. There is no grand scientific unspooling of events. That's just witchcraft, with tenure.
This history was a total surprise to me, because the anti-monopoly parts of the New Deal had been hidden by the academy. After the financial crisis I did a few years of research and wrote a book on it. The anti-monopoly tradition is foundational. simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/…
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