to be the Magna Carta of small businesses. In fact, it was framed with small, independent retail businesses, not small manufacturing in mind. Both acts grew out of the anti-chain-store movement of the 1920s and 1930s and were aimed at preserving small, independent retail businesses against the rise of retail chain stores. Initially there was a call to amend the antitrust laws to allow manufacturers to fix minimum retail prices and reduce or eliminate the chain stores advantages. By the early 1930s states were beginning to impose taxes on chain stores. Though chain-store critics had called the situation a crisis for years, it took the real crisis of the Great Depression to get national anti-chain-store legislation. The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 required manufacturers to justify discounts to chain stores in an attempt to limit or eliminate such discounts. The 1937 Miller-Tydings, or Fair Trade, Act allowed manufacturers to specify the minimum retail price of a product in order to protect small retailers from the price competition of the chain store (p. 42).
The framework Bean adopts to explain this and subsequent small business legislation is crisis, ideology, and political entrepreneurship. As mentioned already, many Americans had an ideological predisposition toward small business, considering it the backbone of democracy. In times of real crises political changes at the federal level could be initiated. The Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War constituted such crisis periods when action on a small-business agenda could be pushed forward. The third element of this triad was political or ideological entrepreneurship.
Other theories have been proposed to explain the growth of government in the twentieth-century United States. The Progressive explanation argues that politicians expanded government to provide for the disenfranchised population. As Bean notes, however, the Progressive interpretation failed to explain why corporate executives had so much influence on the formulation and administration of Progressive legislation (p. 6). The broker-state model maintains that policymakers brokered between competing interest groups seeking government assistance. Bean identifies corporate-liberal, pluralist, neopluralist, public choice, and neo-Marxist versions of the broker-state model. He contends that the broker-state model of the welfare-regulatory states growth in the twentieth century tends to ignore the role played by policy entrepreneurs and that this role is especially important in the development of small-business legislation.
Bean makes a convincing case that, at best, support from small businesses for federal intervention was narrow rather than widespread. However, policy entrepreneurs such as Wright Patman, Joseph Robinson, John Miller, and Millard Tydings listened to pleas from some individuals and specialized small-business interest groups and responded to them. Neither bill had the kind of impact its supporters anticipated. The Robinson-Patman bill turned out to be ambiguous, and it accelerated franchising as a means of avoiding its reach. The FTCs enforcement also took some of the teeth out of the bill. The Miller-Tydings bill did not include a nonsigner clause until the McGuire Act of 1952 and received lackluster state enforcement. Fair trade continued to fall into disuse in many industries, and in 1975 Congress repealed the Miller-Tydings Act.
The Second World War brought a new crisis and a new opportunity for the promotion of small businesses. This time, however, small manufacturing firms were the objects of solicitude. Critics argued that the federal governments contracts for war materials production favored big businesses, as did labor shortages and price controls. The 1942 Smaller War Plants Corporation Act (SWPC) was to correct this imbalance. Though the SWPC brought about few changes, surveys showed that small manufacturers enjoyed wartime prosperity and few of them complained. Unable to develop a small business constituency, the SWPC expired in 1946.
A new crisis, the Korean War, allowed po