Theodore Roosevelt was a skillful mediator. In addition to mediating labor strikes such as the 1902 Coal Strike, and the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the war between Japan and Russia in 1906, he also used his skills to deal with the question of trusts. Roosevelt did not want to eliminate corporations but he did dislike trusts and thought they should be crushed. However the way they acted was more important to Roosevelt than their size and he only tried to check their actions if they were oppressive to the public. He used the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 to attack trusts filing suits in court against entities, including beef, oil, steel, sugar, and tobacco trusts. In all he filed 44 antitrust suits.
             Theodore Roosevelt once said, "We cannot afford any longer to continue our present industrial and social system, or rather no-system of every-man-for-himself," Roosevelt proclaimed in 1918. It was impossible, he said, to combine "political democracy with industrial autocracy."(Theodore Roosevelt: (The American Presidents Series)
             As President, Roosevelt held the ideal that the Government should be the great arbiter of the conflicting economic forces in the Nation, especially between capital and labor, guaranteeing justice to each and dispensing favors to none. Roosevelt emerged spectacularly as a "trust buster" by forcing the dissolution of a great railroad combination in the Northwest. Other antitrust suits under the Sherman Act followed. In his first term in office, Roosevelt used the Justice Department to prosecute the railroad, meatpacking, and oil trusts.
             Theodore Roosevelt has been recalled as one of our most forceful Presidents. The reason for his reputation of strength rested on his ability to get things done, both domestically and abroad (Site of Theodore Roosevelt). His policies resulted in a strengthened executive branch. One of his earliest displays of Federal power came in 1902 with the Pennsylvania coal strike. Hi...