This is on point, I'm Megna Chakrabardi and welcome to part four of our special week-long

series, More than Money, the cost of monopolies in America.

Today's episode is really the genesis for the entire series because we're going to talk

about two of the most important people in the world of antitrust in the past 50 years.

Before we get to that, a quick recap of where we've been.

Episode one explored the hidden ways corporate consolidation is changing industries and

communities. We looked particularly at the beef industry.

Then we turned our attention to the tech sector and how giants like Microsoft and Amazon

may behave in ways that some antitrust activists call non-traditional monopolies.

In episode three, we went back in time to the last great American effort to rein in

monopoly power, the trust-busting progressive era, which brings us to today's episode

and Jack Beatty, on point news analysts. Hello there, Jack. Hello, Megna.

Okay, so first of all, why don't you pick up where we left off yesterday? What did antitrust

look like between 1911 through FDR and World War II?

Well, first let's go to 1911 and the Supreme Court decision breaking up

standard oil, the great monopoly into, well, very profitable shards as it turns out, some of them were.

That decision, it had a striking effect on John D. Rockefeller. He lost all his hair including

his eyebrows under the strain of the litigation and he retired to a life of benefaction

and philanthropy. He had earlier given a preview of that by

founding the University of Chicago, marked that place, will return. What then happened was a period of

what some have called a period of neglect, basically a period of laissez-faire in which, as Calvin

Coolidge said, the business of America is business and antitrust decayed completely. It went

...