Analyze how Woodrow Wilson, through legislation, effectively constructed a number of stabilizing ...

All students will immediately note the Federal Reserve Act, which strengthened the ties between big banks and the federal government. Better students, however, will point out that this involved little government control of the banking system, thus leaving financiers such as J. P. Morgan and others largely untouched by the tentacles of Progressive reform. The same students should also relate that, in its treatment of trusts, the Wilson Administration actually deferred to Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 program of New Nationalism through the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission (1914). While the Commission had power to investigate alleged corporate wrongdoing, it could only regulate unfair methods of competition. Thus, in the final analysis, good students will conclude that regulation prevailed over sheer trust busting, and corporate power and monopoly went largely untouched. Government actions served to stabilize the economic system rather than drastically change it.