Theodore Roosevelt, the one-time rancher, writer, and hero of San Juan Hill, loved publicity, craved it, thirsted after it, and lived for it—and he had been expecting Pierpont Morgan that Saturday morning in 1902. He had expected it all: the stock market swoon, the blaring newspaper headlines. That was the point. Take a stand. Make the monopolists writhe. When Morgan did turn up, the meeting was brief. Still incredulous at the whole affair, Morgan suggested they settle things promptly, there, as between gentlemen. “If we have done anything wrong,” he said to Roosevelt, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” “That,” Roosevelt responded, as he later gleefully recalled, “can’t be done.”1
By the time of the Northern Securities suit, Roosevelt had been president for a bare five months—since September 14, 1901, when William McKinley was struck down at the hand of an assassin. Roosevelt directed the attorney general to begin exploring antitrust action against Morgan and Northern Securities a short time later. It may still technically have been McKinley’s term, but Roosevelt had never been a placeholder for anyone. This was a man who could start a war in the space of an afternoon, and very nearly did as assistant secretary of the Navy when his boss stepped out of the building (at which point Roosevelt famously cabled Commander Dewey to prepare to attack the Spanish fleet).2 Now Roosevelt wanted war of a different kind, against the capitalist chieftains. He was determined to challenge their bid to install themselves as America’s ruling class.
He saw in their campaign for corporate monopoly an attempt to change the nation’s form of government, to convert it from a republic of the common man and woman into an elite-governed aristocracy, or maybe plutocracy was more accurate. “And of all forms of tyranny,” Roosevelt would later say, “the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.”3
At the moment when it was under heaviest fire from the corporatists, Roosevelt stood by the founders’ republicanism. He fought to preserve it for a new era. His efforts to do so were various and would change over the years. He started, as president, with stepped-up enforcement of the Sherman antitrust law. He went on to propose new corporate disclosure requirements to promote public scrutiny. In time, he would endorse even bolder and perhaps more dubious measures—direct federal control of all interstate corporations, including the power to set prices and issue stock.4 But his aim was constant: to preserve what he understood as the promise of the old republic.
For him, that promise could be summed up in a single precept: government based on the dignity of the ordinary person, and under the ordinary person’s control. “Our purpose is to increase the power of the people themselves,” he would say, “to make the people in reality the governing class.”5 He believed liberty depended on the independence of the common man and on his capacity to share in self-government. He believed concentrations of wealth and power threatened the people’s control and thus their freedom.
This is a perspective that in our day has almost entirely faded from view, sent into eclipse in no small part by Roosevelt’s defeat in 1912. Roosevelt was the nation’s last great republican. But it is a perspective worth recovering—vital to recover, in fact, as the basis of the American tradition of antitrust. And vital to understand as an alternative to the dull corporate liberalism that prevails today, the ideology fashioned by the last century’s monopolists and their intellectual fellow travelers, the bipartisan liberalism that has dominated politics for decades and enabled the rise of Big Tech. Roosevelt’s war against monopoly is a reminder of something different, of a different kind of politics that we might call to our aid in the modern fight against monopoly. And the key to understanding it is to understand the republican tradition’s distrust of concentration, of bigness.
Roosevelt shared the earlier Americans’ certainty that big concentrations of wealth and power were poisonous to a republic, absolutely deadly—because they were frequently the tools of elites, which is to say, aristocracy. Roosevelt was rehearsing a republican line when he argued that the “essence of any struggle for healthy liberty… must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.”6 Every society had its elites, of course: its wealthy, well-educated, upwardly mobile types. Machiavelli, a republican himself, called them the grandi.7 The trick to preserving a republic was not to allow them to predominate as a class, to amass power at the expense of their fellows. Or more precisely: the key was not to allow them to amass power at the expense of the common man.
Here we come to the heart of Roosevelt’s and the American republican tradition’s objection to bigness: elite, aristocratic concentrations threatened the power of the common man and woman. And the American republic, uniquely in history, set the common person at the heart of self-government. “Here we are not ruled over by others, as is the case in Europe,” Roosevelt told an audience of cowboys in the Dakota Territory in 1886, “we rule ourselves.”8
This was American gospel, or had been before the advent of the monopolists.9 Liberty depended on the common person’s power to share in self-rule. It’s why Roosevelt would say the struggle for liberty was “the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests.”10 It’s why he would say the success of the republic depended on “the average man and woman”: “just in proportion as the average man and woman are honest, capable of sound judgment and high ideals, active in public affairs… just so far, and no farther, we may count our civilization a success.”11 It is why he was opposed to monopoly and to great concentrations of power.
The republican tradition that Roosevelt and the early Americans inherited linked liberty to participation in self-government. It said that to be free depended on being able to share in self-rule, to have a say in society and politics.12 It was not, in this respect, libertarian. It held that liberty was something more than the right to be left alone. This piece of the American heritage ran all the way back across the centuries to ancient Rome, a fact of which Roosevelt was very much aware: the example of the Roman republic—and its demise—was one he mulled for years.13
The Romans were great enthusiasts for liberty and, at one time in their history, dedicated practitioners of it. Even after the rise of the Caesars, the republic lived on in popular imagination and in political propaganda as a symbol of what it meant to be Roman.14 Which was, in a word, to be free. The Roman citizen’s boast par excellence, the thing that made him—and it was always a “him”—Roman indeed was his status as a free man, his ability to govern himself.15
The Romans had a firm idea about what that freedom amounted to. To their minds, to be free meant to be able to direct one’s own destiny, to be the master of one’s own fate, at no other man’s mercy or command. No kowtowing, no begging for permission. Independent. Able to look any other man in the eye as an equal in worth, if not in wealth. In short, to be free was to be the exact opposite of those wretched slaves the Romans were always making of other people as they raged about the Mediterranean in their endless wars of aggrandizement.16
And here was the nub of it, the lodestar of the republican view. No man could be certain of his independence unless he had a say in the government of his nation. If some aristocrat, on a whim, could clap you into irons, or commandeer your land or cattle, then you weren’t independent. And the only sure way to stop that happening was for you, you personally, to have some measure of control over who ran things. Because maybe the grandi were friendly today, very accommodating and liberal, but tomorrow—who could say? No, a man was only free if he had a voice in common affairs, if he was part of a free state. The Romans insisted those things went together, and had to: individual freedom and the freedom of the state—meaning the nation, the community of which you were a part. That was the whole idea of a republic. It was a state run by citizens who looked after their own interests, not a state run by an elite looking only after theirs.17
But conveniently for them, the Romans thought the citizen class was a rather elite group itself. Yes, citizens were in charge, but only the barest few persons qualified as citizens. The Romans, like most in antiquity, believed every person, every being, had its place—and those places did not change or move. They were what they were by nature. The slave was born to be a slave, the free man was born to rule. The cosmos was as a hierarchy, a pyramid, a beautiful, immovable ladder of status. And lest anyone be confused, the tippy-top rung was vanishingly small. The Romans may have waxed poetic about the liberty of a citizen, but they reserved citizenship for a tiny class of educated, freeholding males they believed were fitted by nature to be free, and thus to share in self-rule. Women, common laborers, slaves—none of these persons could possibly enjoy the status of citizen, because none were equipped by nature with the gifts and aptitudes self-rule required. The lesser was to serve the greater and be subordinate. That was the way of the world, the great order of being inscribed on the fabric of the universe itself.18 Roman liberty, in short, remained an elite-driven affair.
While Theodore Roosevelt and the early Americans admired Roman republicanism, it was not their sole model of republican government. They inherited a Christian strand of republicanism, too, one that came to them by way of James Harrington and the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries (Roosevelt would write an entire biography on one of these, Oliver Cromwell), but whose origins stretched back to the New Testament writings of Paul the Apostle, the man who was, in the words of historian Larry Siedentop, perhaps “the greatest revolutionary in human history.”19 What was revolutionary about Paul in a political sense was his insistence on the dignity of ordinary people and ordinary life.
Paul’s writing announced an audacious new claim, very nearly unfathomable in antiquity. He said that the one almighty and sovereign God of the universe had intervened in world affairs for the purpose of saving, delivering, rescuing every man and woman. No matter their station, no matter their class. Every individual. Now, “save” meant many things, but not least of all it meant claimed by God and energized to become an agent of his divine purposes.20 “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” Paul asked one of his audiences.21 The Holy Spirit was received by women as well as men, slaves as well as free persons, poor as well as rich, high-status Roman citizens and low-class social nonentities alike. This God was no respecter of persons. “Not many of you were wise by human standards,” Paul emphasized in the same letter, “not many were influential; not many were of noble birth”—but all had received the power of God.22
In fact, Paul seemed to go out of his way to thumb his nose at the socially pretentious ruling elite of the Roman milieu. “God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise,” he preached. “And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful.”23
Choosing the weak, shaming the strong—Paul’s gospel shattered the ancient world’s studied and elaborate social superstructure. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” he claimed.24 This was not to say those previous categories ceased to exist. It was to say they ceased to matter for one’s worth, one’s dignity.25 And the political implications were massive.
Paul’s teaching suggested that all those hopelessly common people the Roman patricians despised could be citizens too—that they were elected by God himself, instruments of the divine. And under pressure of this radical claim, this whole new point of view, the Roman notion of liberty began to shift. If the ordinary laborer could claim a stake in the republic; if his life, or hers, the life of sweat and soil and child-rearing, had significance, well—that would yield a republic of an altogether different kind. That would give you a commonwealth organized around the common person. That would mean the common life, ordinary life, would become the republic’s chief end and goal, not glory or conquest or war. That would be a place where laborers were recognized as fit to govern, where labor itself was honored and the homely virtues of working life enshrined as the civic virtues of the nation.26
And that is largely what a group of English revolutionaries claimed in the seventeenth century, more than a thousand years after the fall of what remained of Rome, when they dusted off the old Roman theories of liberty to explain why a republic was the only government fit for free persons, a republic now redefined as the preserve of the common man. James Harrington, John Milton, Algernon Sydney—not household names in today’s America, but significant nonetheless, because it was through their writing and practice that this reformed republicanism entered the American bloodstream.27
Indeed, this style of republicanism lived in the American mind from the republic’s beginning, and shaped the American experience. You could hear it in the cadences of the American founders. There was Thomas Jefferson praising the working farmer, out in the field with his oxen and plow, the sort of man the Roman aristocrat wouldn’t have given the time of day. “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” Jefferson said. “They are the most vigorous, the most independant [sic], the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to it’s [sic] liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.”28 At Jefferson’s hand, the ordinary laborer had become the model citizen.
Then there is James Madison and his famous constitutional design, drawn up after an extended survey of ancient Roman republicanism and a thorough rereading of its English reformers.29 The key to Madison’s grand new system was the division of governmental powers into different “departments”: legislative, executive, and judicial. And why? So that the people might exert control of government for themselves, and not be ruled over by any one elite or class, now rendered as “factions.”
And thus did the republican suspicion of bigness, of monopoly, of concentrated power, and of elitism become part of American constitutional law—and American culture. This was the republicanism Theodore Roosevelt inherited, the tradition that told him monopoly was a thing to be feared and strictly controlled. This was the tradition that enshrined the inviolable liberty of the common man.
The question for Roosevelt was how to preserve this tradition against the revisionist campaign of the corporatists. The corporate barons argued concentration was natural and inevitable—more than that, it was salubrious, it was progress, it was the future. The economy could be organized by a well-informed few; there was no danger in economic aristocracy.
At first Roosevelt refused to yield an inch to bigness. Between 1902 and 1906, Roosevelt as president filed a bevy of antitrust suits against high-profile targets, beginning with J. P. Morgan’s Northern Securities. Even as those suits progressed, however, he harbored grave doubts that antitrust prosecutions alone would suffice to rein in the monopolists. Antitrust prosecutions took time, often years, and were always backwards-looking—they focused on what offending corporations had done in the past, not how they might be regulated to address the menace they posed to free government going forward. In 1903, Roosevelt tested a somewhat different approach. He convinced Congress that year to adopt new transparency measures, including creating a Bureau of Corporations within the Commerce Department invested with authority to investigate potential monopolies (and other corporate misfeasance) and issue reports to the president.30
As his presidency progressed, Roosevelt came to believe the barons were half right. Corporate consolidation was perhaps inevitable, however unfortunate. But he resisted the notion that corporate monopolies should be allowed to manage the economy, or the new corporate class left free to pile up wealth and influence unchecked. He proposed an alternative path, one he believed to be in keeping with the republican tradition. The giant corporations should be subordinated to the power of the people through the regulation of the federal government. The American people “must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being,” he declared, and he proposed to do it with federal power.31
As his presidency came to a close in early 1909, Roosevelt settled on an ambitious program of executive regulation. He proposed to require all corporations doing business in interstate commerce, which was all the biggest ones, to be licensed by the federal government and directly subject to federal oversight. On this scheme, no corporation could issue stock without federal approval, and the secretary of commerce would have authority to call in existing stock and issue new shares.32 After he left office, Roosevelt added several more features to this program. He proposed to give the Commerce Department, or a new trade commission, the authority to unilaterally designate any corporation a monopoly, without first undertaking antitrust prosecution. The corporation could appeal the government’s designation to a court, but the usual process would be reversed: the government could declare a monopoly first, and judicial process to review that decision would follow after. And on Roosevelt’s plan, once the government had named a corporation a monopoly, it could invoke a range of new powers to regulate the corporation’s business practices, methods of competition, and internal workings—including the setting of prices.33
This was Roosevelt’s mature solution to the problem of corporate monopolies. It amounted to an effort to convert the major corporations into public utilities. One historian has called it “public-service capitalism.”34 Roosevelt had come to regard corporate concentrations as unavoidable, but he had not come to accept them. He wanted to curb their power by subjecting them to federal control, and in so doing head off a corporate aristocracy. In this manner, he hoped to secure to the common person, “the majority” of the nation, to “the farmers, and especially to the workers as the new rising class… the wealth commensurate with their weight in the body politic.…”35 Roosevelt would advocate this program in his attempt to regain the White House as a Progressive in 1912.
He failed. As president, he could not persuade his own party to join his defense of the old republicanism. The Republican-controlled Congress never fully supported his antitrust suits, and it rejected his new regulatory program just as he left the White House. Out of office, he fared little better. Party brokers blocked his bid to win back the Republican nomination for president from William Howard Taft in 1912. So he ran as a third-party candidate on his plan of corporate regulation, but lost to Woodrow Wilson in a three-way race. And in truth, Roosevelt had by then probably conceded too much. His regulatory program tacitly accepted corporate bigness and attempted to neutralize its threat with bigger government, a path that posed dangers of its own. Roosevelt, however, never abandoned the germ of the founders’ republicanism, the right of the common man to rule. And he never gave up trying to break the power of the corporate class.
His defeat in 1912 marked a watershed. Though far from politically conclusive—Roosevelt and Taft together outpolled Wilson, who in two presidential elections could never muster a popular majority—it was nevertheless seminal. For Wilson was not only uninterested in the founders’ republicanism, he was hostile to it. He accepted the heart of the corporate barons’ economic arguments, that monopoly was inevitable, normal, even necessary, and he went a step further: he articulated a new ideology of freedom to justify a corporatized society and the rule of the elite. Wilson was the nation’s first prominent corporate liberal. And his victory in 1912 set the stage for all that was to follow, right up to the emergence of the globalizing, monopolizing Big Tech.