ABSTRACT
The Northern Securities Company was a holding company set up by J. Pierpont Morgan and Edward H. Harriman for the joint control of certain railroad properties, as part of a treaty of peace between them after the Northern Pacific panic. In moving to smash it Franklin D. Roosevelt not only served notice that there were limits to what the government would let men do in using the mechanism of the holding company to build up economic empires; he also struck at one of the prized creations of the great Morgan himself. As the historians Louis M. Hacker and Benjamin B. Kendrick have pointed out, the revolt of the American Conscience was not an organized movement, but incoherent. The idea that won out was that the existence of sharply defined economic and social classes was to be resisted as an offense to the American democratic ideal.
