Trust-busting
In Edmund Morris’s biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, “Theodore Rex,” Morris writes that Roosevelt’s great friend Owen Wister placed Roosevelt’s effort to break up a key railroad trust “at the top of all Roosevelt’s great and courageous strokes in the domain of domestic statesmanship.”
[I]t had excited public optimism at the very moment that public pessimism saw no end to the tyranny of wealth. [Wister]: ‘I think that to make up his mind to take this first step, to declare this war, on the captains of industry, was a stroke of genius; and I more than think - I know - that it marked the turn of a rising tide.’
Oliver Wendell Holmes’s somewhat snide dissent to the Supreme Court decision upholding the railroad trust-busting prompted Roosevelt to say: “I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that.”
What really got to Roosevelt was J.P. Morgan’s Olympian assumption that creation of an enormous railroad trust - the greatest combination in the world - was something that should have been worked through by business and government as peers. According to Morris, Morgan could think of the President only as some kind of rival operator with whom a deal could be done:
MORGAN: “If we have done anything wrong [in our charter], send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”
ROOSEVELT: “That can’t be done.”
KNOX (Attorney General): “We don’t want to fix it up, we want to stop it.”
Afterwards, Roosevelt said: “That is a most illuminating illustration of the Wall Street point of view.”
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