Clayton Antitrust Act

Clayton Antitrust Act

law enacted in 1914 by the United States Congress to clarify and strengthen the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890). The vague language of the latter had provided large corporations with numerous loopholes, enabling them to engage in certain restrictive business arrangements that, though not illegal per se, resulted in concentrations that had an adverse effect on competition. Thus, despite the trust-busting activities of the administrations of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft under the Sherman Act, it appeared to a congressional committee in 1913 that big business had continued to grow bigger and that the control of money and credit in the country was such that a few men had the power to plunge the nation into a financial panic. When President Woodrow Wilson asked for a drastic revision of existing antitrust legislation, Congress responded by passing the Clayton measure

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