Chapter 9. Fighting Over Railroad Regulation

Cronyism: Rise of the Corporatist State, 1849–1929

Tags: Interventionism, Bureaucracy and Regulation, Cronyism and Corporatism

09/16/2026 Patrick Newman

Barred from rate associations after 1897, the railroads formed communities of interest by buying their competitors’ stock—cartels in a disguised form. Patrick Newman details the reversal of the 1910s, when the ICC shifted to delivering cronyism to shippers and unions and regulation caught the lines in a cost-price squeeze, followed by wartime federalization under McAdoo and the 1920s overhaul that finally secured pools and minimum rates.

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