"Frances Willard, Anti-Monopoly, and the Liquor Machine in Victorian America"

Historical writing on anti-monopoly thought in the United States has been re-invigorated by the recent publication of two books by prominent journalists: Barry Lynn’s Liberty from All Masters and Matt Stoller’s Goliath. Each regard anti-monopoly as more-or-less synonymous with what might call the “anti-bigness” critique, a critique long associated with the Democratic party. In 2013, BHC regular Kenneth Lipartito published an essay on the “antimonopoly tradition” that reached a broadly similar conclusion. My paper reconstructs a related, yet quite distinct, anti-monopoly vision: the moral critique of the “liquor trust” that was developed with great sophistication by the late-nineteenth-century women’s rights reformer Francis Willard. Willard was no Democrat—yet in a series of essays that she published in the Union Signal, she articulated a critique of what she called the “liquor trust.” Willard’s critique emphasized the close relationship between whiskey distillers and the federal government— a byproduct of reliance of the U. S. treasury on a tax on distilled liquor. This critique can also be followed by consulting the publications of the Prohibition party—including its detailed party platforms—as well as a classic monograph on the late nineteenth-century Anti-Saloon League by former BHC president Austin Kerr. The recent publication by political scientist Lawrence Shrad Mark of Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition puts events in the United States in a global perspective. My paper contributes to this literature—making it part of the “transnational turn” in business history. It is drawn from my forthcoming history of anti-monopoly thought in the United States from the 1760s to the 1950s that is tentatively entitled “Bad Business: How Monopoly Imperiled America from the Boston Tea Party to Big Tech.”