Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890)

President Benjamin Harrison signed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act into law on July 2, 1890, after the Senate passed it 51–1 on April 8 and the House approved it 242–0 on June 20. Named for Senator John Sherman of Ohio, the law was the first federal measure to outlaw monopolistic business combinations and rested on Congress's constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, unlike narrower state laws limited to intrastate activity. It authorized federal suits to dissolve trusts, imposed fines of $5,000 and up to a year in jail on those forming such combinations, and allowed injured parties to seek triple damages. The statute targeted arrangements like the Standard Oil Trust, formed on January 2, 1882, in which stockholders exchanged shares for certificates and nine trustees controlled component companies and their profits. The act's loosely worded text left "trust," "combination," "conspiracy" and "monopoly" undefined, and five years later the Supreme Court narrowed it in United States v. E. C. Knight Company, ruling that American Sugar Refining's roughly 98% share of U.S. sugar refining did not violate the law because manufacturing was not interstate commerce. How courts would treat consolidated market power remained the open question as enforcement shifted to later statutes.