Ideologically, Roosevelt was committed to a conservative view of the trusts. Personally, he felt a certain ambivalence. He saw “grave dangers” in unrestricted combination, yet he could not deny that the economy functioned better now that the trusts were, in effect, running it. The price of kerosene, for example, had been declining for thirty years, courtesy of Standard Oil. America was no longer a patchwork of small self-sufficient communities.
