Presidential Biographies | Theodore Roosevelt Administrations - Roosevelt and the Judiciary

Roosevelt and the Judiciary

Roosevelt named three Supreme Court justices. In 1902 he picked Oliver Wendell Holmes to sit on the supreme tribunal. At the time of his appointment Holmes was chief justice of Massachusetts. A highly literate, progressive justice, he would serve on the Court for 30 years. In 1903 Roosevelt chose William Rufus Day, of Ohio, and in 1906 he named William Henry Moody of Massachusetts. Both Day and Moody, like Roosevelt, believed in strict enforcement of antitrust legislation.

Although President Roosevelt enforced the Sherman Antitrust Act more vigorously than any of his predecessors, he did not believe that bigness, per se, violated antitrust legislation. Only corporations that seemed to have no regard for the public's welfare deserved to be prosecuted in the nation's courts. The Northern Securities Company, the Standard Oil Company, and the American Tobacco Company, Roosevelt believed, were three such...