Why was roosevelt called a trustbuster
Roosevelt corollary.
His Republican successor in the White House, William Howard Taft, initiated twice as many antitrust lawsuits in four years as Roosevelt had done in his seven and a half years in office.
What is a trust
Privately, Roosevelt raged when the Supreme Court ordered the break-up of Standard Oil, in an antitrust lawsuit begun under his administration and completed under Taft: “I do not see what good can come from dissolving the Standard Oil Company into 40 separate companies, all of which will still remain really under the same control.
What we should have is a much stricter government supervision of these great companies, but accompanying this supervision should be a recognition of the fact that great combinations have come to stay and we must do them scrupulous justice just as we exact scrupulous justice from them.”
Anger at Taft was one of the factors that motivated Roosevelt to run for president again in 1912 as the candidate of the Progressive Party.
The party’s platform reflected his view that big b
