ABSTRACT
The Northern Securities Company was a holding company, established by the banker J.P. Morgan in 1893 to control railroad stock, but it was regarded by some, and especially by President Theodore Roosevelt, as an anti-competitive monopoly, or trust, that effectively restricted free commerce. Having appointed Oliver Wendell Holmes to the Supreme Court in 1902, Roosevelt had assumed that Holmes would support his attempt to break up the Northern Securities Company using the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. As Holmes' dissent made clear, however, he felt unable to support the President's trust-busting agenda in this case, and stated it as his view that the Sherman Act did not prevent the formation of corporations such as Northern Securities. Holmes believed that the act, invoked as it was in this case, was being used to alter, rather than safeguard, commercial practice, and that this was going beyond what the Constitution permitted.
