The term "trustbuster" is often associated with former President Theodore Roosevelt.
Trustbuster is Associated with who
During Roosevelt's time as president from 1901 to 1909, he was known for making sure big companies followed the rules and for questioning the power of large corporations, especially ones that were organized as trusts.
Back then, trusts were big groups of businesses that controlled a lot of the market and sometimes did things to stop other businesses from competing with them. These trusts were thought to be a problem because they could hurt competition, consumers, and smaller businesses. Roosevelt thought that big companies had too much control over the economy, stopped businesses from competing and hurt the American people.
To fix these problems, Roosevelt took legal actions against big companies that were hurting competition. His government started many important cases against big companies to make sure they were following the competition rules. One of the famous cases was against the Northern Securities Company, which was a big railroad company. The situation caused the company to close down in the end.
"The Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt
Despite his caution, Roosevelt managed to do enough in his first three years in office to build a platform for election in his own right. In 1902 he resurrected the nearly defunct Sherman Antitrust Act by bringing a lawsuit that led to the breakup of a huge railroad conglomerate, the Northern Securities Company. Roosevelt pursued this policy of “trust-busting” by initiating suits against 43 other major corporations during the next seven years. Early in his term, he also sought the creation of an agency that would have the power to investigate businesses engaged in interstate commerce (though without regulatory powers); the Bureau of Corporations was formally established in 1903.
In 1902 Roosevelt intervened in the anthracite coal strike when it threatened to cut off heating fuel for homes, schools, and hospitals. The president publicly asked representatives of capital and labour to meet in the White House and accept his mediation. He also talked about calling in the army to run the mines, and he got Wall Street investment houses to threaten to withhold credit to the coal companies and dump their stocks. The combination of tactics worked to end the strike and gain a modest pay hike for the miners. This was the first time that a president had publicly intervened in a labour dispute at least implicitly on the side of workers. Roosevelt characterized his actions as striving toward a “Square Deal” between capital and labour, and those words became his campaign slogan in the 1904 election."