ABSTRACT
On September 30, 1940, the Department of Justice filed a massive antitrust case against twenty-two major oil companies, 379 of their subsidiaries and affiliates, and the American Petroleum Institute (which Clarence Darrow had described in 1934 as "the switch board for the controlling companies"). 1 The Department articulated the rationale for filing this comprehensive structural case, which came to be known as the Mother Hubbard case, as follows:
This proceeding is being instituted under the Department's policy of taking up in a single investigation or proceeding all of the restraints which affect the distribution of a product from the raw material to the consumer. Only in this way can economic results be achieved. Piecemeal prosecutions against segments of an industry are both costly and inconclusive. They do not raise the fundamental issues which the Court should decide, and therefore do not clarify the law. They allow restraints of trade to flourish in one segment of the industry while they are being prosecuted in another.
In the past 10 years, the Department has been flooded with complaints from independents and consumers against various practices in the oil industry. These complaints have resulted in a series of piecemeal prosecutions in all of which the Government has been successful. Yet in spite of the success of these prosecutions, the complaints continue, prices are still inflexible, independent enterprise is still under a handicap, because the cases applied only to segments rather than to the entire structure of the industry.
For this reason the present action is brought. It will eventually present to the Supreme Court of the United States for final decision all of the issues with respect to the reasonableness of the present vast combinations in the production, transportation, refining, and distribution of petroleum products. 2
The complaint as originally drafted asked that the twenty-two principal defendants be ordered to divest their transportation and marketing facilities. With the outbreak of war in Europe and the United States' imminent involvement in the conflict, however, the Attorney General agreed to delete the request for structural relief from the complaint. 3 Like so many other cases of great pitch and moment, the Mother Hubbard case eventually was settled by a pusilanimous consent decree. 4