Sherman, John
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
John (1823-1900), an American statesman. He was born at Lancaster, Ohio, and died in Washington, D. C. He was admitted to the bar in 1844 when only twenty-one years of age. He entered public life as a Whig. He was elected to the national House of Representatives in 1855 and served until 1861, when he was elected United States senator. In 1877 he was appointed secretary of the treasury by President Hayes. In 1880 he was one of the leading three candidates for the Republican nomination for president. Later he was again elected to the Senate. On McKinley's elevation to the presidency he appointed Sherman secretary of state . He served in this position only a short time, being obliged to resign in 1898 on account of failing health. Sherman from the first took a prominent part in the deliberations of Congress. He earnestly advocated a vigorous prosecution of the Civil War and supported all measures looking to that end. He was especially prominent in connection with the financial legislation of that trying time and did much later towards the reestablishment of the national credit and the resumption of specie payments. His name has been connected with an act for the purchase of silver although it was a compromise measure and did not embody his views fully. Under the Sherman Act (1890) the secretary of the treasury was authorized to purchase silver to the amount of 4,500,000 ounces a month, issuing treasury notes in payment therefor. Owing to the increased production of silver to which the law acted as a spur, this legislation in the end proved disastrous. Its repeal and the adoption of a gold standard of national currency is believed by many to have averted financial disaster and a depreciated currency. More recently when the Sherman law is spoken of the Sherman anti-trust act is meant. This law remained on the statute books until a number of years after Sherman's death without being appealed to. It was not until Roosevelt became president and began his crusade against predatory wealth that the country came to realize how effective an instrument it could be made to curb and to punish the unlawful operations of trusts and combines.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's, writing in 1910, noted that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 sat unused until Theodore Roosevelt's administration discovered "how effective an instrument it could be made"; the following year the Supreme Court used it to break Standard Oil into 34 companies, and the act is still the backbone of American competition law. It underlay the dissolution of AT&T in 1982, the Microsoft case of the late 1990s, and the federal monopoly suits against Google and other technology firms brought from 2020 onward. Sherman himself is now remembered chiefly for the antitrust act, exactly as Aiton's predicted, while the 1890 Silver Purchase Act it also bears his name on was repealed in 1893 and the gold standard it prefigured was abandoned in the 1930s. Modern historians are harsher about his brief term as McKinley's secretary of state, treating him as an aged figurehead sidelined during the run-up to war with Spain rather than simply a man in "failing health."
Written for this edition, 2026.