Excerpt from Reports of the Industrial Commission, 1901, Vol. 11
The subject-matter under consideration had engrossed the attention of the agricultural, milling, and some of the manufacturing and commercial interests of the country for a number of years prior to the assembling of the Fifty-second Congress, but until that Congress no serious attempt had been made to enact general legislation the avowed purpose of which was to suppress such dealings. The continuous decline in the value of farm products generally, and especially of some of the leading staples, such as wheat, corn, and cotton, during practically the entire period of about 20 years, commencing in the early seventies, had caused great disaster in many quarters, and had given rise to a belief, pretty generally prevailing among the producers of the country, that one of the prime causes of this general depression in the prices of their products was what is com mouly known as dealing in Options and futures on the boards of trade of Chicago, New York, and New Orleans, and some other cities where such dealings were carried on to a lesser extent.
It was claimed that, regardless of the law of supply and demand, the prices of all the products of the farm which were dealt in on these boards of trade were fixed absolutely by manipulations in the interest of the speculators and to the detriment of the producers, and that such lowering of the prices of those products had a necessary tendency to depress the prices of all other products of the farm. This line of argument carried one step farther logically led to the conclusion that this same cause was the predominant one in lowering the price of land during the same period.
It was further contended that this practice of fictitious dealing in agricultural products had ruined the market for actual products of the soil by diverting large sums of money from the channels of legitimate trade and business to the baser uses of purely gaming transactions, and it was asserted with much vigor and emphasis that such practices were undermining the morality of the country, were making gamblers out of the men of business, were the fruitful causes of a large majority of the failures in business, embezzlements, and other large financial crimes, and were a serious menace to the State.
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