Roosevelt Justice Department Files Antitrust Suit Against American Tobacco Trust

On July 19, 1907, the Roosevelt administration’s Department of Justice filed a major antitrust petition against the American Tobacco Company after one of its subsidiaries was indicted for price-fixing in the Southern District of New York. The suit charged sixty-five companies and twenty-nine individuals with violating sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. By this time, American Tobacco had achieved monopolistic control through a labyrinthine corporate holding structure: 86% of the cigarette market, 76% of pipe tobacco, and 84% of chewing tobacco. The company was founded and controlled by James Buchanan Duke, who had systematically acquired competitors and used predatory pricing to eliminate rivals. The filing represented Roosevelt’s expansion of trust-busting beyond railroads and food processing into consumer products, demonstrating the administration’s commitment to challenging monopolies across all sectors of the economy. In November 1908, American Tobacco was ruled guilty in a three-to-one court decision. However, that decision would not be finalized until May 29, 1911—after Roosevelt left office—when the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Edward D. White sustained the verdict and ordered dissolution. The case would ultimately result in American Tobacco being split into sixteen successor companies, though these entities continued to wield significant market power post-breakup. Roosevelt initiated forty-four antitrust suits during his presidency, but many of the largest monopolies he targeted—including American Tobacco and Standard Oil—were actually dissolved during William Howard Taft’s administration, which filed more than seventy antitrust actions. The American Tobacco case demonstrated both the ambition and limitations of Progressive Era trust-busting: while Roosevelt established the principle of aggressive antitrust enforcement, structural dissolution often proved insufficient to restore genuine market competition.