FTC: A brief history

摘要

The FTC's unexpected role as top cybercop developed nearly a century after its creation in 1915 during the Woodrow Wilson administration, a few years after Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle shocked the country with its expose of unsanitary and unsafe conditions in the meatpacking industry. A product of Progressive Era reforms, the FTC was charged with exposing fraud and deceptive business practices and challenging anticompetitive business mergers. The New Deal of the 1930s gave the FTC much greater prominence, as President Franklin Roosevelt personally laid the cornerstone for the FTC headquarters in 1937. Typical FTC actions for that era concerned overpriced mattresses, poorly made perfumes and badly manufactured underwear.