The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

He brought in Herbert Baxter Adams, who was skeptical of the ability of competition to promote either equity or efficiency in the railroad industry, as the chief statistician of the ICC. Influenced by Herbert Baxter Adams and his own son, the social psychologist Charles Cooley, he focused the ICC on the fair distribution of transportation and its benefits. He still desired the broad opportunity and economic decentralization that had prompted his earlier beliefs, but he now saw government regulation as the best way to achieve them in a world of powerful railroad corporations. The Supreme Court would gut both his efforts and the ICC, but he had pointed the commission toward a destination it would reach two decades later.