Despite allegations and smears he was "in the pocket" of a number of corporations because of his law firm, Congressman Emanuel Celler conducted a widespread investigation of Corporate abuses of the Anti-Trust laws currently on the books. Celler's contention was that Big Business had taken wild advantage of loopholes in the anti-Trust laws over the years and the result was a stifling of competition and the massive influence some corporations were holding over the marketplace.
Why does this sound familiar?
This interview, from a broadcast of Meet The Press on May 7, 1950 features a rather cantankerous batch of press folk, asking why Celler is conducting this investigation in the first place.
Emanuel Celler: “I don’t want to set a standard where bigness in and of itself would be bad. There are certain types of bigness that must be attacked which is a legitimate area of inquiry. And those big types of business, where they become over developed so that they lose in efficiency and they stifle competition, which is the very life of trade, the competition which built up our country. Then those companies must be truncated and divorced from non-essential, non-allied activities.”
And can you imagine the howl and sheer magnitude of shrill protest if anyone was even caught entertaining that thought? If they were sharpening knives in 1950, the mind fairly reels what they would drag out in 2011.
And so it goes.
