Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
up because of modern business conditions and the accompanying tremendous
increase in the business use of vast quantities of corporate wealth. As
I have said, this was already evident to my mind when I was President,
and in communications to Congress I repeatedly stated the facts. But
when I made these communications there were still plenty of people
who did not believe that we would succeed in the suits that had
been instituted against the Standard Oil, the Tobacco, and other
corporations, and it was impossible to get the public as a whole to
realize what the situation was. Sincere zealots who believed that
all combinations could be destroyed and the old-time conditions of
unregulated competition restored, insincere politicians who knew better
but made believe that they thought whatever their constituents
wished them to think, crafty reactionaries who wished to see on the
statute-books laws which they believed unenforceable, and the almost
solid "Wall Street crowd" or representatives of "big business" who at
that time opposed with equal violence both wise and necessary and unwise
and improper regulation of business-all fought against the adoption of a
sane, effective, and far-reaching policy.
It is a vitally necessary thing to have the persons in control of big
trusts of the character of the Standard Oil Trust and Tobacco Trust
taught that they are under the law, just as it was a necessary thing to
have the Sugar Trust taught the same lesson in drastic fashion by Mr.
Henry L. Stimson when he was United States District Attorney in the
city of New York. But to attempt to meet the whole problem not by
administrative governmental action but by a succession of lawsuits is
hopeless from the standpoint of working out a permanently satisfactory
solution. Moreover, the results sought to be achieved are achieved only
in extremely insufficient and fragmentary measure by breaking up all big
corporations, whether they have behaved well or ill, into a number of
little corporations which it is perfectly certain will be largely, and
perhaps altogether, under the same control. Such action is harsh and
mischievous if the corporation is guilty of nothing except its size; and
where, as in the case of the Standard Oil, and especially the Tobacco,
trusts, the corporation has been guilty of immoral and anti-social
practices, there is need for far more drastic and thoroughgoing action
than any that has been taken, under the recent decree of the Supreme
Court. In the case of the Tobacco Trust, for instance, the settlement in
the Circuit Court, in which the representatives of the Government
seem inclined to concur, practically leaves all of the companies still
substantially under the control of the twenty-nine original defendants.
Such a result is lamentable from the standpoint of justice. The decision
of the Circuit Court, if allowed to stand, means that the Tobacco Trust
has merely been obliged to change its clothes, that none of the real
offenders have received any real punishment, while, as the New York
Times, a pro-trust paper, says, the tobacco concerns, in their new
clothes, are in positions of "ease and luxury," and "immune from
prosecution under the law."
Surely, miscarriage of justice is not too strong a term to apply to such
a result when considered in connection with what the Supreme Court said
of this Trust. That great Court in its decision used language which,
in spite of its habitual and severe self-restraint in stigmatizing
wrong-doing, yet unhesitatingly condemns the Tobacco Trust for moral
turpitude, saying that the case shows an "ever present manifestation
. . . of conscious wrong-doing" by the Trust, whose history is "replete
with the doing of acts which it was the obvious purpose of the statute
to forbid, . . . demonstrative of the existence from the beginning of a
purpose to acquire dominion and control of the tobacco trade, not by the
mere exertion of the ordinary right to contract and to trade, but by
methods devised in order to monopolize the trade by driving competitors
out of business, which were ruthlessly carried out upon the assumption
that to work upon the fears or play upon the cupidity of competitors
would make success possible." The letters from and to various officials
of the Trust, which were put in evidence, show a literally astounding
and horrifying indulgence by the Trust in wicked and depraved business
methods--such as the "endeavor to cause a strike in their [a rival
business firm's] factory," or the "shutting off the market" of an
independent tobacco firm by "taking the necessary steps to give them a
warm reception," or forcing importers into a price agreement by causing
and continuing "a demoralization of the business for such length of time
as may be deemed desirable" (I quote from the letters). A Trust guilty
of such conduct should be absolutely disbanded, and the only way to
prevent the repetition of such conduct is by strict Government
supervision, and not merely by lawsuits.
The Anti-Trust Law cannot meet the whole situation, nor can any
modification of the principle of the Anti-Trust Law avail to meet
the whole situation. The fact is that many of the men who have called
themselves Progressives, and who certainly believe that they are
Progressives, represent in reality in this matter not progress at
all but a kind of sincere rural toryism. These men believe that it is
possible by strengthening the Anti-Trust Law to restore business to
the competitive conditions of the middle of the last century. Any such
effort is foredoomed to end in failure, and, if successful, would
be mischievous to the last degree. Business cannot be successfully
conducted in accordance with the practices and theories of sixty years
ago unless we abolish steam, electricity, big cities, and, in short, not
only all modern business and modern industrial conditions, but all the
modern conditions of our civilization. The effort to restore competition
as it was sixty years ago, and to trust for justice solely to this
proposed restoration of competition, is just as foolish as if we should
go back to the flintlocks of Washington's Continentals as a
substitute for modern weapons of precision. The effort to prohibit all
combinations, good or bad, is bound to fail, and ought to fail; when
made, it merely means that some of the worst combinations are not
checked and that honest business is checked. Our purpose should be, not
to strangle business as an incident of strangling combinations, but to
regulate big corporations in thoroughgoing and effective fashion, so as
to help legitimate business as an incident to thoroughly and completely
safeguarding the interests of the people as a whole. Against all such
increase of Government regulation the argument is raised that it
would amount to a form of Socialism. This argument is familiar; it is
precisely the same as that which was raised against the creation of
the Inter-State Commerce Commission, and of all the different utilities
commissions in the different States, as I myself saw, thirty years
ago, when I was a legislator at Albany, and these questions came up
in connection with our State Government. Nor can action be effectively
taken by any one State. Congress alone has power under the Constitution
effectively and thoroughly and at all points to deal with inter-State
commerce, and where Congress, as it should do, provides laws that
will give the Nation full jurisdiction over the whole field, then that
jurisdiction becomes, of necessity, exclusive--although until Congress
does act affirmatively and thoroughly it is idle to expect that the
States will or ought to rest content with non-action on the part of both
Federal and State authorities. This statement, by the way, applies also
to the question of "usurpation" by any one branch of our Government
of the rights of another branch. It is contended that in these recent
decisions the Supreme Court legislated; so it did; and it had to;
because Congress had signally failed to do its duty by legislating.
For the Supreme Court to nullify an act of the Legislature as
unconstitutional except on the clearest grounds is usurpation; to
interpret such an act in an obviously wrong sense is usurpation; but
where the legislative body persistently leaves open a field which it
is absolutely imperative, from the public standpoint, to fill, then no
possible blame attaches to the official or officials who step in because
they have to, and who then do the needed work in the interest of the
people. The blame in such cases lies with the body which has been
derelict, and not with the body which reluctantly makes good the
dereliction.
A quarter of a century ago, Senator Cushman K. Davis, a statesman who
amply deserved the title of statesman, a man of the highest courage, of
the sternest adherence to the principles laid down by an exacting sense
of duty, an unflinching believer in democracy, who was as little to be
cowed by a mob as by a plutocrat, and moreover a man who possessed the
priceless gift of imagination, a gift as important to a statesman as to
a historian, in an address delivered at the annual commencement of
the University of Michigan on July 1, 1886, spoke as follows of
corporations:
"Feudalism, with its domains, its untaxed lords, their retainers,
its exemptions and privileges, made war upon the aspiring spirit of
humanity, and fell with all its grandeurs. Its spirit walks the earth
and haunts the institutions of to-day, in the great corporations, with
the control of the National highways, their occupation of great domains,
their power to tax, their cynical contempt for the law, their sorcery
to debase most gifted men to the capacity of splendid slaves, their
pollution of the ermine of the judge and the robe of the Senator, their
aggregation in one man of wealth so enormous as to make Croesus seem a
pauper, their picked, paid, and skilled retainers who are summoned by
the message of electricity and appear upon the wings of steam. If we
look into the origin of feudalism and of the modern corporations--those
Dromios of history--we find that the former originated in a strict
paternalism, which is scouted by modern economists, and that the latter
has grown from an unrestrained freedom of action, aggression, and
development, which they commend as the very ideal of political wisdom.
_Laissez-faire_, says the professor, when it often means bind and gag
that the strongest may work his will. It is a plea for the survival of
the fittest--for the strongest male to take possession of the herd by
a process of extermination. If we examine this battle cry of political
polemics, we find that it is based upon the conception of the divine
right of property, and the preoccupation by older or more favored or
more alert or richer men or nations, of territory, of the forces of
nature, of machinery, of all the functions of what we call civilization.
Some of these men, who are really great, follow these conceptions to
their conclusions with dauntless intrepidity."
When Senator Davis spoke, few men of great power had the sympathy and
the vision necessary to perceive the menace contained in the growth of
corporations; and the men who did see the evil were struggling blindly
to get rid of it, not by frankly meeting the new situation with new
methods, but by insisting upon the entirely futile effort to abolish
what modern conditions had rendered absolutely inevitable. Senator Davis
was under no such illusion. He realized keenly that it was absolutely
impossible to go back to an outworn social status, and that we must
abandon definitely the _laissez-faire_ theory of political economy, and
fearlessly champion a system of increased Governmental control,
paying no heed to the cries of the worthy people who denounce this as