Historian John Milton Cooper on Trust Busting

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JOHN COOPER: TR becomes president at a time when business is going through tremendous consolidation. This is the era of trust forming. It's amazing how many consolidations and how much money is involved. It had even been embarrassing that his inauguration as vice president had been the same day the U.S. Steel, the formation of U.S. Steel had been announced, the first billion-dollar business in the world. And something in it -- the symbolism of that wasn't quite right, that the business in a sense was overshadowing the government.

Theodore Roosevelt actually liked big business. He thought that the growth of big business was very healthy, that most of the businesses got there because they were efficient and the businessmen were doing their jobs right. But two things bothered him. Two things bothered him most about it. One was just that idea that they were overshadowing the government, that some of these tycoons, such as J. P. Morgan, could presume that they were sovereign equals of the U.S. government.

For example, when the first big anti-trust suit under Roosevelt was brought, which was against Morgan's railroad combine, Morgan said, "Send your man to see my man and tell him to fix it up." Roosevelt's answer to that was, "That can not be done. Nobody treats as a sovereign equal to -- of the President. No company can presume to be -- no private interest can presume to be equal to the government. The government must be superior to all of these."

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