# Maple Flooring Association v. United States (1925) **Decided:** June 1, 1925 · **6–3, Justice Harlan Fiske Stone** · 268 U.S. 563 The decision that legalized the open-price trade association, and with it the legal architecture of 1920s American industrial policy. Twenty-two manufacturers of maple, beech and birch flooring — about 70% of national production — pooled and circulated detailed statistics on costs, past transaction prices, stocks on hand and freight rates from a common shipping point, and met regularly to discuss them. On its face this was the arrangement condemned four years earlier in [[American Column and Lumber v. United States]]. Stone held it lawful: > "Trade associations or combinations of individuals or corporations, which... openly and fairly gather and disseminate information as to the cost of their product, the volume of production, the actual price which the product has brought in past transactions, stocks of merchandise on hand... and who... meet and discuss such information and statistics without, however, reaching or attempting to reach any agreement or any concerted action with respect to prices or production or restraining competition, do not thereby engage in unlawful restraint of commerce." Chief Justice [[William Howard Taft]], Justice Sanford, and Justice McReynolds dissented. McReynolds wrote for both this case and its same-day companion, *Cement Manufacturers Protective Association*, opening: "These causes disclose carefully developed plans to cut down normal competition in interstate trade and commerce." ## The distinction, and its instability The line Stone drew is between **information and agreement**: circulating past prices is lawful, agreeing on future prices is not. Everything turns on facts about intent that leave no documentary trace — which is why the *American Column* / *Maple Flooring* pair has generated a century of litigation without ever resolving. ## What it enabled Herbert Hoover, as Commerce Secretary and then President, built an entire theory of economic governance on this holding: trade associations sharing cost data, adopting uniform accounting, and standardizing products would "rationalize" competition without coercion. The [[FTC]]'s trade practice conferences of the late 1920s approved hundreds of such rules, many plainly anticompetitive by modern standards, while competition complaints fell 79% during Coolidge's second term. That project ended in the Depression, and its logic was carried to its conclusion in the [[National Industrial Recovery Act]] — where information sharing became mandatory code-writing and the antitrust laws were suspended outright. See [[US Antitrust and Monopoly Timeline]].