Items of Interest June 16, 1917 Issue

Items of Interest

The United States Supreme Court has ordered to be reargued the antitrust suits against the United States Steel Corporation, the International Harvester, the United Shoe Machinery Company, and the Lehigh Valley and Reading Railroads and their affiliated coal companies. The steel corporation suit was instituted in 1911 in New Jersey, and was dismissed by the district court four years later. The corporation in its brief admitted controlling about 40 per cent of the domestic and about 90 per cent of the American export trade, but defended itself as a "good combination." The suit against the Harvester company was filed in 1912. Its dissolution was asked mainly on the ground of its size and inherent power. It was also the contention of this corporation that it is a "good" combination, but the lower court sustained the Government and ordered dissolution. The suit against the United Shoe Machinery Company was filed in 1911 and the lower court dismissed the petition. The two cases against the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the Reading Railroad charge them with monopolies in anthracite coal along their lines. Both roads are accused not only of violating the Sherman act, but also of violating the commodities clause. In both cases the Government lost virtually all contentions in the lower courts.

A million dollar paper plant, with a capacity of one hundred tons of pulp and paper a day, will be opened at Bogalusa, La., Oct. 1, where waste products of the lumber mills of the Great Southern Lumber Company will be converted into paper products. One paper plant there is already turning out thirty-five tons a day, using as its material small pieces of wood not large enough to make lumber. Of this waste material an average of six cords to the acre is produced. The lumber interests cut fifty acres of lumber each day, giving an average of three hundred cords of waste wood every twenty-four hours. Plans for milling the stumps are also being made, tests having shown pine stumps to be full of valuable products. While the cost of converting the stumps is considered prohibitive, officials of the company have declared that they would be glad to "break even" on the venture, because it would clear the land and do away with the otherwise useless stumps at the same time.

The Interstate Commerce Commission has recently issued a report of over two hundred pages on the Pere Marquette Company and the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton Railroad Company. It is clear that the former road has been greatly crippled and the latter practically wrecked by "high finance." At the conclusion of their report the commissioners say: "This sordid tale has been told without adjectives. The facts speak for themselves, and they have been given in all their nakedness, without other comment than such as would serve to tie them to other facts, also of record. ... Can the like of what has befallen these two roads be made impossible hereafter? Perhaps not entirely, so long as financial circles continue complaisant toward financial exploitations which prove successful. ... It would, in our opinion, render such exploitation more difficult if the issuance and marketing of all securities of common carriers were subject to Federal regulation."

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