Granger Cases (1877)

AuthorHarry N. Scheiber
Pages1224-1225

Page 1224

Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113

Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Co. v. Iowa, 94 U.S. 155

Peik v. Chicago & Northwestern Railway Co., 94 U.S. 164

Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad Co. v. Ackley, 94 U.S. 179

Winona and St. Peter Railroad Co. v. Blake, 94 U.S. 180

Stone v. Wisconsin, 94 U.S. 181

The Granger Cases, decided on March 1, 1877, included Munn v. Illinois, in which state regulation of grain warehouse and elevator rates and practices was challenged, and five railroad cases in which the companies attacked the validity of state legislatures' imposition of fixed maximum rates. In these decisions, the Supreme Court upheld the state regulations. Conservative, pro-business voices?and Justice STEPHEN J. FIELD, in vigorous dissent in Munn?regarded the decisions as a catastrophic surrender of DUE PROCESS values in law and a mortal blow to entrepreneurial liberty. They left legislatures, Field contended, with an unfettered power over private PROPERTY RIGHTS of business firms. To the Court's majority, speaking through Chief Justice MORRISON R. WAITE, however, the issue of state regulation's legitimacy must turn on the difference in nature between business that was purely private and business that was AFFECTED WITH A PUBLIC INTEREST, hence peculiarly subject to regulation.

Laws for the regulation of railroads and grain warehouses, enacted in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota during the period 1871?1874, were at issue in the 1877 decisions. Until recent years, historians and students of constitutional law have tended to accept the view that the Grange and other farm organizations provided the political muscle in the midwestern reform movements that produced those laws. Indeed, it was customary to regard the legislation as radical, antibusiness, and anti-private property in intent and content. Recent research (particularly the work of historian George L. Miller) has shown, however, that there was no general antagonism between agrarian and business interests in the debates over the regulatory laws. Instead, reform was sought by coalitions, in a pattern of intrastate sectionalism; farmers lined up with commercial interests in some sections that favored regulation, and similar interests joined against regulation in other sections. The division of views depended much more upon calculations of local advantage and disadvantage from regulation than upon political ideology, "agrarian" or otherwise, or even upon...

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