Antitrust Legislation Quotes
Macdarland’s role was the equivalent of the Mayor of Washington DC. As an ally and apologist for McKinley, he felt that the President was doing the best he could to deal with the monopolies who were then keeping competitive capitalism from functioning properly. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt thought McKinley weak and vacillating especially on the “trusts”, and when he assumed the Presidency, he accomplished much more. TR however did not discover the Trust problem. As this quotation shows, there was general political awareness amongst the politicians of the day of the Trust/Monopoly problem in America. It was Roosevelt who did something about it to the distress of many of his own party leaders who had previously intimidated McKinley into inaction.
Actually, both political parties had a range of opinion on the issue of control of the trusts, monopolies and large corporations. Roosevelt and his liberal wing of the Republic opinion were for regulating corporations and strengthening and enforcing the anti-trust laws. However, many of his party refused to admit that there were any abuses and/or if there were, the effect of Federal regulation and anti-trust enforcement would be worse that then problems caused by the trusts. At the same time, the Democrats had Bryan’s wing that wanted to break up the trusts and large corporations, and that is why Roosevelt had so much public support—enough to pass the legislation and make the President’s initiatives very popular. Roosevelt a shrewd campaigner attacked the Democrats knowing full well that many agreed with him, and ignored the conservative wing of his own party who were the ones who actively opposed his corporate reform effort.
