Word: roosevelts
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There in brief was the divide between the new President who had a whip in his hand and the veteran financier who could barely imagine that whips could be wielded by anyone in Washington. After Morgan departed, Roosevelt confided to Knox his bemusement at the financier's manner. Morgan, T.R. said, had acted as though the President of the U.S. was just "a big rival operator...
...Roosevelt directed Knox to continue to pursue his suit. All the same, Roosevelt remained open to more cooperative dealings with Morgan. For all his tough talk, Roosevelt really was willing to cut deals. But he wanted the business world on notice that the days of freewheeling combination were over. And Morgan had reason to play ball with Roosevelt. Northern Securities was only one of the many trusts he had assembled. General Electric, Western Union, International Harvester, Aetna Insurance--he controlled them all. Just a year earlier, he had put together what was then the world's largest corporation, U.S. Steel...
...Though Roosevelt's Justice Department went on to bring 44 more antitrust suits in the course of his presidency, he never attacked any other of Morgan's interests. He even used Morgan as a mediator to help settle a Pennsylvania miners' strike that threatened to create a winter scarcity of coal for heating. And when he ran for President in 1904, Roosevelt was not above accepting campaign contributions from the very businesses he was pressuring, though he was so careful not to show them any favor in his second term that Henry C. Frick, one of Rockefeller's lieutenants...
...suit against Northern Securities eventually landed at the Supreme Court, and Roosevelt won a narrow but crucial victory that opened the way for more aggressive use of the Sherman Antitrust Act in other cases. He also established a Department of Commerce and Labor, which included a Bureau of Corporations to monitor the budding monopolies. Roosevelt endlessly reassured Big Business that he intended merely to keep an eye on its conduct. But he let it be known that he meant business too. Only "the corporation that shrinks from the light" would have anything to fear from government, he once said. Then...
Presidents come and go, but monuments are always with us. There's a reason Theodore Roosevelt is the only 20th century President whose face is carved into Mount Rushmore, the only one who could hold his own with Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson. Roosevelt not only remade America, but he also charmed the pants off everybody while he did it. And just short of a century after he left the White House, in 1909, the collective memory of his strength and intellect and charisma still lingers. How many times over the years since have Americans settled their affections on some thoughtful...