Word: roosevelted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that was fine to men like Rockefeller. "The day of combination is here to stay," he once said. "Individualism is gone. Never to return." He hadn't reckoned on Roosevelt. Five months into his presidency, T.R. took Wall Street by surprise. He launched an antitrust suit that demanded the breakup of Northern Securities, a holding company organized to consolidate three railroads in the Pacific Northwest. By targeting that company, Roosevelt had also chosen to move against the man who epitomized the empire of money, New York financier J. Pierpont Morgan...
...happens, Roosevelt's outlook was not entirely different. He didn't dispute the benefits of large-scale capitalism, and he thought of huge enterprises as an inevitable development of the industrial age. He understood the idea of economies of scale. Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette and William Jennings Bryan, the perennial standard bearer for the common man, might have wanted to dismantle everything bigger than a hardware store. What Roosevelt wanted was simply to regulate the big outfits. For starters, he wanted to compel them to open their books. Quarterly reporting in the corporate world was still a novelty...
...business affairs, Morgan was a man accustomed to handling things personally. One of his biggest objections to the way Roosevelt had sprung the Northern Securities suit was that the President had not quietly tipped him in advance. Large sums of borrowed money were at stake, and the abrupt attack by the Justice Department had rattled the markets. In Morgan style, he went personally to Washington to meet with Roosevelt and Attorney General Philander Knox...
...Roosevelt left a recollection of the meeting, which remains a classic moment in the history of dealings between business and government. In that account, Morgan asks Roosevelt why he had not quietly allowed Morgan to take care of the problem without resorting to the courts...
...Roosevelt: "That can't be done...