obtained only through publicity, which is the one sure remedy we can
now invoke before it can be determined what further remedies are needed.
Corporations should be subject to proper governmental supervision, and
full and accurate information as to their operations should be made
public at regular intervals. The nation should assume powers of
supervision and regulation over all corporations doing an interstate
business. This is especially true where the corporation derives a
portion of its wealth from the existence of some monopolistic element
or tendency in its business. The Federal Government should regulate
the activities of corporations doing an interstate business, just as it
regulates the activities of national banks, and, through the Interstate
Commerce Commission, the operations of the railroads.

Roosevelt was destined, however, not to achieve the full measure of
national control of corporations that he desired. The elements opposed
to his view were too powerful. There was a fortuitous involuntary
partnership though it was not admitted and was even violently denied
between the advocates of "Let us alone!" and of "Smash the trusts!"
against the champion of the middle way. In his "Autobiography" Roosevelt
has described this situation:

"One of the main troubles was the fact that the men who saw the evils
and who tried to remedy them attempted to work in two wholly different
ways, and the great majority of them in a way that offered little
promise of real betterment. They tried (by the Sherman law method)
to bolster up an individualism already proved to be both futile and
mischievous; to remedy by more individualism the concentration that was
the inevitable result of the already existing individualism. They
saw the evil done by the big combinations, and sought to remedy it by
destroying them and restoring the country to the economic conditions of
the middle of the nineteenth century. This was a hopeless effort, and
those who went into it, although they regarded themselves as radical
progressives, really represented a form of sincere rural toryism. They
confounded monopolies with big business combinations, and in the effort
to prohibit both alike, instead of where possible prohibiting one and
drastically controlling the other, they succeeded merely in preventing
any effective control of either.

"On the other hand, a few men recognized that corporations and
combinations had become indispensable in the business wo