In this respect, the Swift Case only states what the Shreveport Case was later to declare more explicitly; and the same may be said of an ensuing series of cases in which combinations of employees engaged in such intrastate activities as manufacturing, mining, building construction, and the distribution of poultry were subjected to the penalties of the Sherman Act because of the effect or intended effect of their activities on interstate commerce.[429]
STOCKYARDS AND GRAIN FUTURES ACTS
In 1921 Congress passed the Packers and Stockyards Act[430] whereby the business of commission men and livestock dealers in the chief stockyards of the country was brought under national supervision; and the year following it passed the Grain Futures Act[431] whereby exchanges dealing in grain futures were subjected to control. The decisions of the Court sustaining these measures both built directly upon the Swift Case.
In Stafford v. Wallace,[432] which involved the former act, Chief Justice Taft, speaking for the Court, said: "The object to be secured by the act is the free and unburdened flow of livestock from the ranges and farms of the West and Southwest through the great stockyards and slaughtering centers on the borders of that region, and thence in the form of meat products to the consuming cities of the country in the Middle West and East, or, still as livestock, to the feeding places and fattening farms in the Middle West or East for further preparation for the market."[433] The stockyards, therefore, were "not a place of rest or final destination." They were "but a throat through which the current flows," and the sales there were not merely local transactions. "They do not stop the flow;—but, on the contrary" are "indispensable to its continuity."[434]
In Chicago Board of Trade v. Olsen,[435] involving the Grain Futures Act, the same course of reasoning was repeated. Speaking of the Swift Case, Chief Justice Taft remarked: "That case was a milestone in the interpretation of the commerce clause of the Constitution. It recognized the great changes and development in the business of this vast country and drew again the dividing line between interstate and intrastate commerce where the Constitution intended it to be. It refused to permit local incidents of a great interstate movement, which taken alone were intrastate, to characterize the movement as such."[436] Of special significance, however, is the part of the opinion which was devoted to showing the relation between future sales and cash sales, and hence the effect of the former upon the interstate grain trade. The test, said the Chief Justice, was furnished by the question of price. "The question of price dominates trade between the States. Sales of an article which affect the country-wide price of the article directly affect the country-wide commerce in it."[437] Thus a practice which demonstrably affects prices would also affect interstate trade "directly," and so, even though local in itself, would fall within the regulatory power of Congress. In the following passage, indeed, Chief Justice Taft whittles down, in both cases, the "direct-indirect" formula to the vanishing point: "Whatever amounts to more or less constant practice, and threatens to obstruct or unduly to burden the freedom of interstate commerce is within the regulatory power of Congress under the commerce clause, and it is primarily for Congress to consider and decide the fact of the danger and meet it. This court will certainly not substitute its judgment for that of Congress in such a matter unless the relation of the subject to interstate commerce and its effect upon it are clearly nonexistent."[438] And it was in reliance on the doctrine of these cases that Congress first set to work to combat the Depression in 1933 and the years immediately following. But in fact, much of its legislation at this time marked a wide advance upon the measures just passed in review. They did not stop with regulating traffic among the States and the instrumentalities thereof; they also essayed to govern production and industrial relations in the field of production. Confronted with this revolutionary claim to power on Congress' part, the Court again deemed itself called upon to define a limit to the commerce power that would save to the States their historical sphere, and especially their customary monopoly of legislative power in relation to industry and labor management.
THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
Not all antidepression legislation, however, was of this revolutionary type. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934[439] and the Public Utility Company Act ("Wheeler-Rayburn Act") of 1935[440] were not. The former creates the Securities and Exchange Commission, and authorizes it to lay down regulations designed to keep dealing in securities honest and above-board and closes the channels of interstate commerce and the mails to dealers refusing to register under the act. The latter requires, by sections 4 (a) and 5, the companies which are governed by it to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission and to inform it concerning their business, organization and financial structure, all on pain of being prohibited use of the facilities of interstate commerce and the mails; while by section 11, the so-called "death sentence" clause, the same act closes after a certain date the channels of interstate communication to certain types of public utility companies whose operations, Congress found, were calculated chiefly to exploit the investing and consuming public. All these provisions have been sustained,[441] Gibbons v. Ogden, furnishing the Court its principal reliance.[442]
Congressional Regulation of Production and Industrial Relations
ANTIDEPRESSION LEGISLATION