When Congress passed the Sherman Act in 1890, John Sherman told the Senate, “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.” The act intended to keep concentrated private power from becoming a sovereign authority unto itself. It lasted five years before the Supreme Court took it apart. In United States v. E.C. Knight (1895), the Court held that manufacturing was not commerce and therefore lay beyond the reach of federal antitrust law. The case concerned the American Sugar Refining Company, which by acquisition controlled more than 90 percent of the nation’s sugar refining capacity. The Court drew its commerce line precisely where the largest industrial concentration in the country sat, and the trust walked free.

The judicial track was not the only one to fail. The Sherman Act could also be enforced by the executive branch through Justice Department prosecution, and for brief periods it was. Theodore Roosevelt’s suit against the Northern Securities Company railroad combination, decided in 1904, showed that the statute had teeth when an administration chose to use it. But that was the problem. Antitrust enforcement under the executive ran on presidential will, which ran on presidential politics, which ran, in substantial part, on the financial support of the same concentrated interests the act was meant to discipline. Enforcement appeared and vanished in four-year cycles. The regulated held effective influence over the regulator, because the regulator stood for election and the regulated paid for campaigns.

By the second decade of the 20th century, Congress had watched this pattern for 20 years, and the Pujo Committee documented its predictable result. The committee’s 1912 and 1913 investigation into what it called the Money Trust traced how a small group of New York financial houses, primarily J.P. Morgan, controlled the allocation of credit across the entire economy through interlocking directorates, voting trusts, and other affiliations between entities. Louis Brandeis turned the committee’s findings into argument in Other People’s Money (1914), showing that concentration in finance was not a series of separate abuses but a system.

What that system meant for antitrust was plain. The two instruments the country had for disciplining concentrated power had each been captured before effective enforcement could begin: the courts by the elite composition of the federal bench, the executive by the electoral dependence of the president on the industries he was supposed to regulate.

The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 was Congress’s answer, and that answer was structural. The usual way of describing the independent agency, then and now, emphasizes expertise: a specialized body, staffed by people who understand the industries they oversee, freed from the distractions of ordinary politics to regulate with competence. Expertise was part of the case, but it was not the heart. The heart was that enforcement that runs through the president runs through the official most exposed to capture by concentrated economic power, and Congress had two decades of evidence proving the point. The Justice Department already possessed antitrust authority. Congress built a second institution precisely because authority lodged in the executive alone had proven vulnerable to undermining by the regulated.