On April 29, 1938, Franklin Roosevelt put aside pressing foreign policy concerns to present an antimonopoly message. Roosevelt declared that activist antitrust enforcement was essential in order to defend American liberal democracy and free enterprise from becoming a “fascist-collective” system on the European “model.” The dramatic foreign imagery and conspiratorial overtones contrasted sharply with the monopoly problem that Roosevelt defined in technical terms such as patents and cartels. A remedy of vigorous enforcement and investigation seemed tame when compared with the Progressive trust-busting ideology that Louis Brandeis had popularized to combat the “curse of bigness.” Contemporary and later observers sharing the Brandeisian perspective concluded that the message resulted primarily in the disappointing investigation of the Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) and Thurman Arnold's flamboyant but narrowly bureaucratic antitrust campaign. Given the context of economic foreign policy and New Deal liberalism's evolving business–government relations, however, Roosevelt's antimonopoly message reconstituted antitrust policy, imposing accountability on the expansion of American managerial capitalism in peace and war.

Placing the New Dealers' bureaucratic struggles within the context of national security and liberal trade politics, this chapter argues that Arnold built better that either he or the historians imagined. Section I examines Robert Jackson's proposals for an antitrust study committee which located patent, cartel, and corporate finance issues within the context of domestic and international economic policies before the recession of 1937 diminished New Dealers' reform hopes. Section II traces how Roosevelt's approval of Jackson's study committee affected the Antimonopoly Message of 1938.