Brain Trust

Examples of Brain Trust in the following topics:

• Relief Measures

  • Wagner, and Hugo Black, and inspired by his "Brain Trust" of academic advisers.

• The New Dealers

  • Together they formed Roosevelt's Brain Trust or a body of advisers.
  • Berle, Jr., constituted the original Brain Trust.

• Launching the New Deal

  • . - formed Roosevelt's "Brain Trust" and greatly contributed to FDR's initial response to the Great Depression.
  • The initiative helped to rebuild trust in the U.S. banking system.

• The Election of 1932

  • His team of advisers, known as the Brain Trust, suggested he did not go beyond such general points as aid for farmers, public development of electric power, a balanced budget, or business regulations.

• Neglected Americans and the New Deal

  • Many of them belonged to would be known as the Black Cabinet - a group of black experts and professionals who, analogically to Roosevelt's white advisers who formed his Brain Trust, gathered to advise the president on matters relevant to black communities. 

• Hoover's Efforts at Recovery

  • In fact, economist Rexford Tugwell, a member of FDR’s policy team known as the "Brain Trust," later remarked that although no one would say so at the time, "practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started."

• Anti-Trust Laws

  • Wilson sought to encourage competition and curb trusts by using the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the Clayton Antitrust Act.
  • In addition to the Underwood tariff, which seemed to finally resolve the political debate over tariff rates, and the creation of the Federal Reserve, Wilson also supported anti-trust legislation.
  • Wilson deviated from his presidential predecessors, who relied on lawsuits to break trusts and monopolies, by founding a new trustbusting approach through encouraging competition through the Federal Trade Commission.
  • Rather than the piecemeal success of Roosevelt and Taft in targeting certain trusts and monopolies in lengthy lawsuits, the Clayton Antitrust Act effectively defined unfair business practices and created a common code of sanctioned business activity.
  • Wilson uses tariff, currency and anti-trust laws to prime the pump and get the economy working in a 1913 political cartoon.

• From Competition to Consolidation

  • Rockefeller organized his Standard Oil of Ohio as a common-law trust .
  • Trustees were given corporate stock certificates of various companies; by combining numerous corporations into the trust, the trustees could effectively manage and control an entire industry.
  • Within a decade, the Cotton Trust, Lead Trust, Sugar Trust, and Whiskey Trust, along with oil, telephone, steel, and tobacco trusts, had become, or were in the process of becoming, monopolies.

• Robber Barons and the Captains of Industry

  • He was the founder of the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry and was the first great U.S. business trust.
  • Rockefeller organized his Standard Oil of Ohio as a common-law trust.
  • Trustees were given corporate stock certificates of various companies; by combining numerous corporations into the trust, the trustees could effectively manage and control an entire industry.
  • Within a decade, the Cotton Trust, Lead Trust, Sugar Trust, and Whiskey Trust, along with oil, telephone, steel, and tobacco trusts, had become, or were in the process of becoming, monopolies.

• The Square Deal

  • Trusts and monopolies became the primary target of Square Deal legislation.
  • Trusts increasingly became a central issue, with fears that large corporations would impose monopolistic prices to defraud consumers and drive small, independent companies out.
  • By 1904, 318 trusts including those in railroads, local transit, and banking industry controlled two-fifths of the nation's industrial output.
  • One of Roosevelt's first notable acts as president was to deliver a 20,000-word address to Congress asking it to curb the power of large corporations (called "trusts").
  • For his aggressive use of United States antitrust law, he became known as the "trust-buster".