100 years ago: US Supreme Court upholds breakup of Standard Oil

On May 15, 1911, the US Supreme Court unanimously upheld, with modifications, a circuit court decision ordering the breakup of Standard Oil as a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act’s prohibition against monopolies that restrain interstate trade.

The ruling was one of the major landmarks of progressivism, whose leading proponents—including former president Theodore Roosevelt—argued that if the extremes of capitalism could be softened through reform, the threat of socialism could be lessened. The reformers trained their fire on the enormous corporations, then called trusts, which had come to dominate every sector of the economy. The aim was not to expropriate the “captains of industry,” but to alter their methods through political reform...

The court’s order breaking Standard Oil up into 34 parts actually doubled Rockefeller’s wealth through increased stock values in the inheritor corporations. These included firms that would come to be called Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Amoco.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/twih-m09.shtml#100

We don't just go around splitting up people just because they get so big that they take over and kill off competitors, do we?

"The court’s order breaking Standard Oil up into 34 parts actually doubled Rockefeller’s wealth"

breaking the monopoly from what i see didn't do much to end SO control of the industry in the us...

(or the decision used as precedent) was from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood">1886.

Antitrust should not really be linked to corporate personhood. The Bell System was split up in 1984.