Wednesday · November 11, 2026
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19141776 Club

Wilson signs the Federal Trade Commission into existence

A new agency gets civil power to police unfair competition, two and a half years after a freshman Oklahoma congressman first proposed it.

Three years after the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil, Washington still had no standing body to police how companies competed day to day. On September 26, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Trade Commission Act, weeks after the Senate passed it 43-5 and the House approved it without even a recorded tally. The law created an independent commission empowered to challenge "unfair methods of competition" and absorb the old Bureau of Corporations. It would not open its doors for another six months…

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More from September 26
1983

A Soviet screen shows five U.S. missiles inbound; the duty officer calls it a glitch

Stanislav Petrov had no proof the alarm was false, only a hunch that a real attack would look different.
1918

2,711 guns open fire before dawn as America's biggest offensive begins

The barrage alone cost about a million dollars a minute, before a single soldier crossed the wire.
1789

Washington names Jefferson to head a department that does not yet exist in practice

The Virginia planter fresh off five years in Paris becomes the nation's first Secretary of State.
17771776 Club
Washington, outmaneuvered after Brandywine and Paoli, cannot stop the British from taking the rebel capital.
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Read the full September 26 edition →Everything that happened on September 26 →
More from Gilded Age & Progressive Era
1906

San Francisco orders Japanese and Korean pupils into the city's "Oriental School"

Tokyo's newspapers call it an insult to national honor, and Washington takes notice.
1901

Roosevelt makes it official: the Executive Mansion is now the White House

An executive order settles a name the public had already used for ninety years.
1898

Spain's flag comes down in San Juan; the United States takes Puerto Rico

Four centuries of Spanish rule end quietly, ten weeks after the armistice that ended the war.
1879

Edison's thread-filament bulb glows for thirteen and a half hours before it dies

A length of carbonized cotton thread, sealed in glass, outlasts every filament Edison had tried before it.
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