Broken Trusts: The Texas Attorney General Versus the Oil Industry, 1889-1909

Nineteenth-century editorial cartoons often pictured government and industry hand-in-hand. Yet as early as 1889 Texas had enacted an antitrust law to curb the power of monopolies. For most of the first twenty-five years following the enactment of the Sherman Antitrust Act, federal enforcement efforts were extremely limited. Texas was one of several states whose attorneys general prosecuted antitrust violations with vigor. Political ambition was a factor in these decisions, but there was also a genuine belief in the goals of antitrust policy. In Broken Trusts, Jonathan W. Singer offers the definitive study of the formative period of antitrust enforcement in Texas. His analysis of the use of antitrust law in this time of transition from an agricultural to an industrial society provides insights into the litigation process and the changing roles of state government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This volume will be valuable to those interested in the effects of the Sherman Antitrust Act, as well as to those concerned with the evolution and influence of the Texas attorney general’s office.