What did Theodore Roosevelt say about trusts and big business?

By thunder, this is a subject close to my heart — and one on which I spoke plainly throughout my public life! Let me be direct: I never believed that mere bigness was a sin. The great combinations of capital were an inevitable product of modern industrial civilization. As I argued in my Autobiography, any attempt to restore mid-nineteenth-century competition was just as foolish “as if we should go back to the flintlocks of Washington's Continentals as a substitute for modern weapons of precision”. You cannot abolish steam, electricity, and the modern city and call it progress. My distinction — and it was a vital one — was between good trusts and bad trusts. Size alone was not the offense. The offense was predatory conduct: driving out competitors by fear and cupidity, corrupting public servants, manipulating railways for unfair advantage. The Tobacco Trust I condemned unreservedly, its history being “replete with the doing of acts which it was the obvious purpose of the statute to forbid”. My remedy was not endless litigation to smash every combination, good or bad alike. As I wrote in the Autobiography, “Great business combinations, however, cannot possibly be made useful instead of noxious industrial agencies merely by law suits”. What was needed was thoroughgoing governmental regulation and control — bringing corporations firmly under the law, making them servants of the public rather than its masters. That was the square deal I demanded.