In the older Eastern states, attempts to remedy these and other evils by creating some kind of a state railroad commission date back to the fifties of the last century.  Massachusetts developed in the seventies a commission of “the advisory type” which investigated and made public the conditions, leaving to public opinion the correction of the evils.  A number of the Western states, notably Illinois and Iowa, developed in the seventies commissions of “the strong type,” with power to fix rates and to enforce their rulings.  The commission principle, strongly opposed at first by the railroads, was upheld by the courts and became established public policy.  By 1915 every state and the District of Columbia had a state commission.  In Wisconsin and in New York, in 1907, in New Jersey, in 1911, and in many other states since, the “railroad” commissions were replaced by “public utilities” or “public service” commissions, having control not only over the railroads but over street railway, gas, electric light, telephone, and some other corporations.  The state commissions have found their chief field in the regulation of local utilities, and they fall far short of a solution of the railroad problem.  Altho they from the first did much to make the accounts of the railroads intelligible, something to make the local rates reasonable and subject to rule, and much to educate public sentiment, on the whole their results have been disappointing.  It was difficult to get commissioners at once strong, able, and honest; the public did not know its own mind well enough to support the commissions properly; and the courts decided that state commissions could regulate only the traffic originating and ending within the state.

Sec. 16. #Passage of the Interstate Commerce Act.# Public hostility to private railroad management was greatest in the regions where the most rapid building of roads occurred from 1866 to 1873.  One center of grievances was in “the granger states’ of Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota; another center was in the oil regions of Ohio and Pennsylvania.  The Eastern states were not without their troubles, for the report of the Hepburn Committee of the New York legislature in 1879 showed that discrimination between shippers prevailed to an almost incredible degree in every portion of New York state.  When the courts, in 1886, decided that the greater portion of the railroad rates could not be treated by state commissions, national control was loudly demanded.  Scores of bills were presented to Congress between 1870 and 1886, and, despite much opposition, the Interstate Commerce Act was passed in 1887.

The act laid down some general rules:  that rates should be just and reasonable; that railroads should not pool, or agree to divide, their earnings to avoid competition; that they should, under similar conditions, and, unless expressly excused, fix rates in accordance with the long- and short-haul principle (to charge no more for a shorter distance than for a longer one on the same line and in the same direction, the shorter being included within the longer).  The act provided for a commission of five men, to be appointed by the President, which might require uniform accounts from the railroads, and which should enforce the provisions of the act.