It took decades after the passage of America's landmark antitrust laws - the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act - for trustbusting to occur in earnest, and what spurred the action wasn't mere corporate bullying, not just price hikes and labor abuses.
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What tipped America over into a state where a leader (FDR) who told activists "I want to do it, now make me do it" found the political will to "do it" was the corruption that attended the extreme concentration of wealth.
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Monopoly was never merely an issue of economics - it's fundamentally an issue about POLITICS. Yes, the monopolist bleeds workers and suppliers, sucks them dry and amasses a tremendous fortune, but that's just accumulating ammunition.
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What the monopolist does with that ammunition is far more consequential: when the powerful are small in number and command vast fortunes, they can come to a consensus about how to deploy their fortunes to corrupt the political process.
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The economic harms are just a warmup, the political harms are the real deal.
Hoover was beholden to plutes, had a cabinet full of them, turned over the nation's treasury to a sociopathic monster called Andrew Mellon whose stated ambition was to own all the world's aluminum.
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