Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 52, number 3, spring, 1969

              RAILROADS, ELEVATORS, AND GRAIN DEALERS:
The Genesis of Antimonopolism in Milwaukee
By Dale E. Treleven
D
URING THE EARLY 1870's agitation mounted in Wisconsin for governmental regulation of railroad corporations. Railroad companies charged the rates they pleased for hauling freight, and they frequently estab¬ lished tariff schedules that discriminated against individual shippers located in a parti¬ cular community or area of the state. The handsome profits were earned primarily by two railroad corporations—the Milwaukee and St. Paul and the Chicago and North Western—whose combined track mileage com¬ prised two-thirds of the state's railroad net¬ work. By late-1873 rate policies and other abuses had become so unbearable that it was a foregone conclusion that the 1874 legisla¬ ture would enact a regulatory law.
In the winter of 1874 the legislators re¬ sponded by passing yet another midwestern "Granger law," so heralded because the Grange was deemed responsible for coalescing the efforts of disgruntled farmers to secure railroad regulation. In his classic study of midwestern farmers, historian Solon Buck dealt exclusively with the role of farmers in pressing for regulatory legislation during the 1870's. In large part because of Buck's monograph, the story of farmers working through Granges to secure railroad laws in Wisconsin  and  other  midwestern  states  has
remained a standard tale in most history text¬ books.^
Antirailroad agitation by distraught farm¬ ers beginning in 1873 cannot be denied, but their activities in Wisconsin represented a positive response to an antimonopoly crusade begun by Milwaukee businessmen as early as 1870. While there is evidence to show that some businessmen opposed state regulation of railroads, a deeper probe demonstrates that other businessmen supported legislative re¬ striction of monopolies that threatened their own enterprises. Although proclaiming the value of individual initiative and enterprise, these merchants nevertheless supported gov¬ ernmental regulation when they believed their own economic interests were threatened. Caught in a sticky web that threatened them with financial ruin, grain commission mer¬ chants in particular came to support legisla¬ tive regulation as the only means available to shatter a powerful monopoly over the Mil¬ waukee grain trade.^
^ Solon J. Buck, The Granger Movement (Cam¬ bridge, 1913), 179-205.
^ Only in the last decade and a half have historians begun to assess the businessman's role in the move¬ ment for regulation of railroads and grain elevators. See George H. Miller, "Origins of the Iowa Granger
205