Think you know about the origins of regulatory agencies and regulatory law in the US? Think again! This article by Jane Anne Morris (DemocracyThemePark.org) was originally published in the Fall 1998 inaugural edition of By What Authority, the newsletter of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, and was reprinted in Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy.
If you’re having trouble getting to sleep, you can count sheep, or read a book about the history of regulatory agencies. It may turn out to be the same thing.
The nation’s first federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), was established in 1887. Concerned citizens, having failed to solve their difficulties in more traditional ways, sought the intervention and assistance of the federal government. Over the next three decades, these mavericks worked to defend the ICC’s existence and increase its powers to regulate the railroad corporations. …
….. From the early days of the ICC, Charles F. Adams (later President of the Union Pacific Railroad Co.) saw what was needed to solve the railroad corporations’ problems. “What is desired…” Adams wrote, “is something having a good sound, but quite harmless, which will impress the popular mind with the idea that a great deal is being done, when, in reality, very little is intended to be done.”
The public was to be pacified with laws that sounded tough but placed much discretion in the hands of regulators. …
….. Regulatory agencies are the corporations’ response to people’s calls for democracy and self-governance. Corporate officials who once hired Pinkerton’s goons to do their dirty work and protect them from an activist public can now rest assured that much of that burden has been assumed by regulatory agencies. They work as the barriers they were designed to be. MORE…