Principles, personalities, or trade? Explaining Taft’s 1911 prosecution of U.S. Steel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In 1911, the Taft Administration undertook one of the most consequential antitrust prosecutions, charging U.S. Steel with violating the Sherman Act. Some accept Taft’s claim that he was bound to act by legal principles. Others view these prosecutions as a pre-emptive attack on Theodore Roosevelt, sparked by rivalries within the Republican Party. Neither account is persuasive. The Republicans did split, but the resulting cleavage does not align with either of these arguments. These prosecutions sprang from a struggle over trade policy. Taft tried to liberalize trade twice. With his second failure, Taft abandoned those efforts. He joined the protectionist Stand-Pat wing, turning to antitrust policy to defend the protectionists’ interests. The trade-based interpretation resolves several inconsistencies in the traditional narratives, and yields a clearer description of the resulting cleavage. Taft shifted antitrust policy for tactical reasons, not because of legal principles, nor a personal rivalry with Roosevelt.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".