Papers presented by Victoria Woeste since 2019
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"The Capper-Volstead Act at 100: Farmers, Monopolies, and Corporate Power in America, 1922-2022"
Victoria Woeste, Indiana University Law School
Abstract:
This paper offers a retrospective on a landmark piece of legislation, the Capper-Volstead Act of 1922. Capper-Volstead put a period at the end of what can be considered the classical era of antitrust regulation and enforcement, yet it has been almost entirely overlooked by antitrust lawyers and historians concerned with the legacy of the antitrust movement. Capper-Volstead recognizes the right of farm commodity producers to organize cooperatives as corporations under state law and to control production and prices, as long as 51 percent of their members are actual farmers, without becoming liable under federal antitrust law. Since the Reagan administration, antitrust enforcement has been practically moribund (although indications are that the Biden administration is beginning a resuscitation effort). So it may come as a surprise to hear that despite the herculean efforts of agricultural processors and food corporations, Capper-Volstead has remained unamended in the century since its enactment. The ironies here abound, but I will discuss two: 1) today, “agribusiness,” broadly defined as the centralization of economic power within agriculture resulting in the control of most food commodities by approximately four distinct corporate entities, has been unable to get the government to strip antitrust immunity from producers; and 2) despite the fact that Capper-Volstead protects farmers’ cooperatives from antitrust liability, cooperatives have relatively little power in the marketplace and have proven to provide little bulwark against the corporate concentrations that dictate how food commodities are produced and how much consumers pay for what they eat.
Keywords:
2022 Mexico City
"Capitalism and Agriculture: The Fate of American Democracy"
Victoria Woeste, University of Illinois Law School
Abstract:
For centuries, Americans have accepted uncritically the Jeffersonian invention of a critical relationship between small family farms and the integrity of our political system. Even as industrialization and shifting demographics pushed family farming to the margins of the modern agricultural economy, federal farm policy continued to assume that family-owned farms were the modal unit of production and the appropriate beneficiaries of a billion-dollar system of benefits and compensation. Historians lately have begun to interrogate the roots of capitalism by examining the history of slavery. But slavery itself was in turn embedded in agrarian social and economic structures. This essay contributes to and extends that new historiographical line of inquiry by reconsidering the place of the family farm, and farm size more broadly, in the transformation of American agriculture in the twentieth century. I use the 1945 repeal of a key plank of the New Deal’s agricultural platform—the Farm Security Administration—to show how strongly Congress believed that the key to maintaining democracy was to encourage fee simple ownership. What resulted from that politically-inflected decision was the encouragement of state structures that slowly but firmly discouraged small-scale, non-ownership farming. I conclude with observations about the sustainability of the Jeffersonian assumption about farm size and democracy.