In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918-1938Shaffer offers an entirely different interpretation of the period. In the years preceding World War I, American industries had experienced intense and troublesome competition. During the war years, however, much of the American business system was brought under the control of the War Industries Board, a governmental agency that was under the effective control of business leaders. This board had the power to direct production, pricing, allocation of resources and finished products, and other basic decisions within the business sector. Such wartime experiences with government regulation of practices that were normally left to the informal disciplines of the marketplace inspired many business leaders to look for an effective way to restrain and regularize the intensely competitive trade practices prevailing within their industries. |
Contents
| 21 | |
Trade Associations and Codes of Ethics | 51 |
Political Alternatives | 77 |
Under the Blue Eagle and Beyond | 105 |
The Steel Industry | 123 |
The NaturalResource Industries | 145 |
Retailing and Textiles | 182 |
In Retrospect | 207 |
Notes | 215 |
| 251 | |
| 271 | |
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Page 17 - ... the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance) — competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.