Nervy Crooks, Wet Businessmen, Generous Airline Executives, & the Battle for the Public Interest

This panel investigates political, intellectual, and legal controversies that erupted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States over businesses and business practices deemed hostile to the public interest.
Susanna Blumenthal explores rising concern in the late nineteenth century over the hyperbolic claims and fraudulent practices deployed by finance capitalists to ostensibly dupe their customers. Exploring legal commentary as well as humor and muckraker writings, Blumenthal highlights the intellectual conundrums raised by calls to use criminal laws to protect the public from such shady behavior. At stake, she shows, were essential ethical questions about the state’s responsibility to protect the vulnerable as well as the propriety of allowing clever businessmen to use their alleged mental superiority to close deals.
Kyle G. Volk turns the spotlight on businessmen who traded in alcohol in the late nineteenth century. Temperance activists deemed their businesses hostile to the public interest and targeted them for eradication with prohibitory laws. In response, liquor dealers and their allies pioneered a dissenting politics that lofted “personal liberty” as a public good deserving protection from overbearing reformers and governments. In the process, Volk contends, wet businessmen popularized and transformed the concept of “personal liberty,” making it a leading way that Americans debated the rising power of the modern American state.
Joanna Grisinger examines airlines’ practice of wining and dining politicos and administrators charged with regulating the industry in the name of the public interest, and demonstrates how criticism of such practices led not to stricter checks on airline behavior but, paradoxically, to the end of the economic regulation of the airline industry.
Taken together, these papers illustrate the push-pull relationship between business and law aimed at protecting the public interest.