The History of the Standard Oil Company quotes

… and yet in twelve years this region avoided by men had been transformed into a bustling trade centre, where towns elbowed each other for place, into which three great trunk railroads had built branches, and every foot of whose soil was fought for by capitalists.

It was the discovery and development of a new raw product, petroleum, which had made this change from wilderness to market-place.

This product in twelve years had not only peopled a waste place of the earth, it had revolutionised the world’s methods of illumination and added millions upon millions of dollars to the wealth of the United States.

A natural Remedy; Produced from a well in Allegheny Co., Pa., four hundred feet below the earth’s surface,” etc. On the label was the picture of an artesian well. It was from this well that Mr. Kier got his “Natural Remedy.”

Hundreds of men had seen the label before, for it went out on every one of Mr. Kier’s circulars, but this was the first to look at it with a “seeing eye.”

As quickly as the bottle of rock-oil in the Dartmouth laboratory had awakened in Mr.

It was months before Drake succeeded in getting together the tools, engine and rigging necessary to bore his well, and before he could get a driller who knew how to manipulate them, winter had come, and he had to suspend operations.

People called him crazy for sticking to the enterprise, but that had no effect on him.

As soon as spring opened he borrowed a horse and wagon and drove over a hundred miles to Tarentum, where Mr. Kier was still pumping his salt wells, and was either bottling or refining the oil which came up with the brine.

Indeed, a sort of guerilla warfare went on constantly between the farmers and the teamsters. Often the roads became impassable, so that new ones had to be broken, and not even a shot-gun could keep the driver from going where the passage was least difficult.

The teamster, in fact, carried a weapon which few farmers cared to face, his terrible “black snake,” as his long, heavy black whip was called.

The man who had once felt the cruel lash of a “black snake” around his legs did not often oppose the owner.

There was but one way to get the oil to the bank of Oil Creek or to the railroads, and that was by putting it into barrels and hauling it.

Teamsters equipped for this service seemed to fall from the sky.

The farms for a hundred miles around gave up their boys and horses and wagons to supply the need. It paid. There were times when three and even four dollars a barrel were paid for hauling five or ten miles.

From the points where they were tied up the boatmen watched the coming flood and cut themselves loose the moment after its head had passed them. As one fleet after another swung into the roaring flood the danger of collision and jams increased.

Rare indeed was the freshet when a few wrecks did not lie somewhere along the creek, and often scores lay piled high on the bank—a hopeless jam of broken boats and barrels, the whole soaked in petroleum and reeking with gas and profanity.

If the boats rode safely through to the river, there was little further danger.

… as 4,374 of the 5,560 wells drilled in the first ten years of the business (1859 to 1869) were “dry-holes,” or were abandoned as unprofitable, something of the daring it took to operate on small means, as most producers did in the beginning, is evident.

But they loved the game, and every man of them would stake his last dollar on the chance of striking oil.

With the extension of the field rapid strides had been made in tools, in rigs, in all of the various essentials of drilling a well.

If there was oil in Japan, China, Burmah, Persia, Russia, Bavaria, in the quantities the government reports said, why, there was trouble in store for Pennsylvania, the oil men argued, and for a day the market fell—it was only for a day.

Men forgot easily in the Oil Regions in the sixties.

An evil in their business which they were only beginning to grasp fully in 1871 was the unholy system of freight discrimination which the railroads were practising.

This practice had gone on until in 1871 any big producer, refiner, or buyer could bully a freight agent into a special rate. Those “on the inside,” those who had “pulls,” also secured special rates.

The result was that the open rate was enforced only on the innocent and the weak.

Serious as all these problems were, there was no discouragement or shrinking from them. The oil men had rid themselves of bunco men and burst the “oil bubbles.” They had harnessed the brokers in exchanges and made strict rules to govern them.

They tied up for trade, and the next morning woke up from their brawl to find themselves twenty miles away, floating down the Allegheny River.

Rouseville meant to be decent. She had cut them loose, and by such summary vigilance she kept herself decent.

Other towns adopted the same policy. By common consent vice was corralled largely in one town. Here a whole street was given up to dance-houses and saloons, and those who must have a “spree” were expected to go to Petroleum Centre to take it.

It was not long, too, before there was a church, a union church.

To worship God was their primal instinct; to defend a creed a later development.

In the beginning every social contrivance was wanting. There were no policemen, and each individual looked after evil-doers. There were no firemen, and every man turned out with a bucket at a fire.

They would meet their own needs. They would bring the oil refining to the region where it belonged. They would make their towns the most beautiful in the world. There was nothing too good for them, nothing they did not hope and dare.

But suddenly, at the very heyday of this confidence, a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.

The suddenness and the blackness of the assault on their business stirred to the bottom their manhood and their sense of fair play, and the whole region arose in a revolt which is scarcely paralleled in the commercial history of the United States.

But what had been done was, in their judgment, only a beginning.

Life ran swift and ruddy and joyous in these men.

They were still young, most of them under forty, and they looked forward with all the eagerness of the young who have just learned their powers, to years of struggle and development.

There was grave risk. The oil supply might not hold out. As yet there was no certain market for refined oil. But a sure result was not what drew people into the oil business in the early sixties.

Fortune was running fleet-footed across the country, and at her garment men clutched.

They loved the chase almost as they did success, and so many a man in Cleveland tried his luck in an oil refinery, as hundreds on Oil Creek were trying it in an oil lease.

… saving these little sums I soon learned that I could get as much interest for fifty dollars loaned at seven per cent.—the legal rate in the state of New York at that time for a year—as I could earn by digging potatoes for 100 days.

The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good thing to let the money be my slave and not make myself a slave to money.

” Here we have the foundation principles of a great financial career.

Old iron found its way to the junk shop. He bought his oil directly from the wells. He made his own barrels. He watched and saved and contrived. The ability with which he made the smallest bargain furnishes topics to Cleveland story-tellers to-day.

Low-voiced, soft-footed, humble, knowing every point in every man’s business, he never tired until he got his wares at the lowest possible figure.

“John always got the best of the bargain,” old men tell you in Cleveland to-day, and they wince though they laugh in telling it. “Smooth,” “a savy fellow,” is their description of him. To drive a good bargain was the joy of his life.

He watched and saved and contrived. The ability with which he made the smallest bargain furnishes topics to Cleveland story-tellers to-day. Low-voiced, soft-footed, humble, knowing every point in every man’s business, he never tired until he got his wares at the lowest possible figure.

“John always got the best of the bargain,” old men tell you in Cleveland to-day, and they wince though they laugh in telling it.

“Smooth,” “a savy fellow,” is their description of him. To drive a good bargain was the joy of his life.

“What effect were these arrangements to have upon those who did not come into the combination...?” asked the chairman.

“I do not think we ever took that question up,” answered Mr. Warden.

A second objection to making a contract with the company came from Mr. Scott of the Pennsylvania road and Mr. Potts of the Empire Transportation Company.

they would certainly be crushed if they did not accept his offer, and he pointed out in detail, and with gentleness, how beneficent the scheme really was—preventing the creek refiners from destroying Cleveland, ending competition, keeping up the price of refined oil, and eliminating speculation.

Really a wonderful contrivance for the good of the oil business.

That such was Mr. Rockefeller’s argument is proved by abundant testimony from different individuals who succumbed to the pressure. Mr.

Hewitt to take stock in the new concern. “He told me,” said Mr. Hewitt, “that it would be sufficient to take care of my family for all time, what I represented there, and asking for a reason, he made this expression, I remember: ‘

I have ways of making money that you know nothing of.

’”

The Standard had a greater capacity than the entire Oil Creek Regions, greater than the combined New York refiners. The transaction by which it acquired this power was so stealthy that not even the best informed newspaper men of Cleveland knew what went on.

It had all been accomplished in accordance with one of Mr. Rockefeller’s chief business principles—“Silence is golden.”

While Mr. Rockefeller was working out the “good of the oil business” in Cleveland, his associates were busy at other points. Charles Lockhart in Pittsburg and W. G. Warden in Philadelphia were particularly active, though neither of them accomplished any such sweeping benefaction as Mr.

First: the charter under which the South Improvement Company was organised. Second: the articles of association. Third: the officers’ names. Fourth: the contracts with the railroads which signed them. Fifth: the general plan of management.

Until we know these things, the oil men declared, we can no more negotiate with you than we could sit down to negotiate with a burglar as to his privileges in our house.

The Producers’ Union did not get the information they asked from the company at that time, but it was not long before they had it, and much more.

As its president told the Congressional Investigating Committee, when he was under examination, “this charter was a sort of clothes-horse to hang a scheme upon.”

As a matter of fact it was a clothes-horse big enough to hang the earth upon.

It granted powers practically unlimited. There really was no exaggeration in the summary of its powers made and scattered broadcast by the irate oil men in their “History of the Rise and Fall of the South Improvement Company”:[20]

It was robbery, cried the newspapers all over the land.

“Under the thin guise of assisting in the development of oil-refining in Pittsburg and Cleveland,” said the New York Tribune, “this corporation has simply laid its hand upon the throat of the oil traffic with a demand to ‘stand and deliver.’”

And if this could be done in the oil business, what was to prevent its being done in any other industry? Why should not a company be formed to control wheat or beef or iron or steel, as well as oil?

And if this could be done in the oil business, what was to prevent its being done in any other industry?

Why should not a company be formed to control wheat or beef or iron or steel, as well as oil?

If the railroads would do this for one company, why not for another? The South Improvement Company, men agreed, was a menace to the free trade of the country. If the oil men yielded now, all industries must suffer from their weakness.

On March 30 the committee of oil men sent to Washington to be present during the Congressional Investigation, now about to begin, spent an hour with President Grant. They wired home that on their departure he said: “

Gentlemen, I have noticed the progress of monopolies, and have long been convinced that the national government would have to interfere and protect the people against them.

” The President and the members of Congress of both parties continued to show interest in the investigation, and there was little or no dissent from the final judgment of the committee, given early in May, that the South Improvement Company was the “most gigantic …

In three months before and during the Oil War the Standard had absorbed twenty plants. It was generally charged by the Cleveland refiners that Mr. Rockefeller had used the South Improvement scheme to persuade or compel his rivals to sell to him.

“Why,” cried the oil men, “the Standard Oil Company has done already in Cleveland what the South Improvement Company set out to do for the whole country, and it has done it by the same means.”

By the time the blockade was raised, another unhappy conviction was fixed on the Oil Regions—the Standard Oil Company meant to carry out the plans of the exploded South Improvement Company. The promoters of the scheme were partly responsible for the report.

But he was no ordinary man. He had the powerful imagination to see what might be done with the oil business if it could be centered in his hands—the intelligence to analyse the problem into its elements and to find the key to control.

He had the essential element of all great achievement, a steadfastness to a purpose once conceived which nothing can crush.

The Oil Regions might rage, call him a conspirator, and all those who sold him oil, traitors; the railroads might withdraw their contracts and the Legislature annul his charter; undisturbed and unresting he kept at his great purpose.

that any combination which favoured one firm or one locality at the expense of another was unjust and illegal. This belief long held by many of the oil men had been crystallised by the uprising into a common sentiment.

It had become the moral code of the region.

Mr. Rockefeller’s point of view was different. He believed that the “good of all” was in a combination which would control the business as the South Improvement Company proposed to control it. Such a combination would end at once all the abuses the business suffered.

Moreover, Mr. Rockefeller probably believed that, in spite of the agreements, if he did not get rebates somebody else would; that they were for the wariest, the shrewdest, the most persistent.

If somebody was to get rebates, why not he?

This point of view was no uncommon one. Many men held it and felt a sort of scorn, as practical men always do for theorists, when it was contended that the shipper was as wrong in taking rates as the railroads in granting them.

He was willing to array himself against the combined better sentiment of a whole industry, to oppose a popular movement aimed at righting an injustice, so revolting to one’s sense of fair play as that of railroad discriminations.

Religious emotion and sentiments of charity, propriety and self-denial seem to have taken the place in him of notions of justice and regard for the rights of others.

Unhampered, then, by any ethical consideration, undismayed by the clamour of the Oil Regions, believing firmly as ever that relief for the disorders in the oil business lay in combining and controlling the entire refining interest, this man of vast patience and foresight took up …

Rockefeller and several of his colleagues in the South Improvement scheme suddenly, in May, 1873, appeared on the streets of Titusville. The men who had fought him so desperately now stared in amazement at the smiling, unruffled countenance with which he greeted them.

Did not the man know when he was beaten?

Did he not realise the opinion the Oil Regions held of him? His placid demeanour in the very teeth of their violence was disconcerting.

Well, right in the middle of it John Rockefeller stopped rocking and took down his hands and looked at me.

You never saw such eyes.

He took me all in, saw just how much fight he could expect from me, and I knew it, and then up went his hands and back and forth went his chair.”

Well, right in the middle of it John Rockefeller stopped rocking and took down his hands and looked at me. You never saw such eyes.

He took me all in, saw just how much fight he could expect from me, and I knew it, and then up went his hands and back and forth went his chair.

”

J. Vandergrift, was vice-president. The news aroused much resentment in the Oil Regions. The region was no longer solid in its free-trade sentiment, no longer undividedly true to its vow that the rebate system as applied to the oil trade must end.

There was an enemy at home.

The hard words which for months men had heaped on the distant heads of Cleveland and Pittsburg refiners, they began to pour out, more discreetly to be sure, on the heads of their neighbours. It boded ill for the interior peace of the Oil Regions.

And yet even at fifty cents a barrel such a well would have paid the owner $1,800 a year. The simple fact was that the profits which men in trades all over the country were glad enough to get, the oil producer despised.

The one great thing which the Oil Regions did not understand in 1872 was economy.

As a matter of fact the oil-producing business was going through a stage in its natural development similar to oil refining.

The whole body of oil men became a vigilance committee intent on keeping one another loyal to the pledge.

Men who appeared at church on Sunday in silk hats, carrying gold-headed canes—there were such in the Oil Region in 1872—now stole out at night to remote localities to hunt down rumours of drilling wells.

If they found them true, their dignity did not prevent their cutting the tools loose or carrying off a band wheel.

… awkward derricks, staring cheap shanties, big tanks with miles and miles of pipe running hither and thither, the oil-soaked ground, blackened and ruined trees, terrible roads—all of the common features of the oil farm to which activity gave meaning and dignity—now became hideous in inactivity.

Oil seemed a curse to many a man in those days as he stood by his silent wells and wondered what was to become of his business, of his family, in this clash of interests.

While the producers were inaugurating these movements, Captain Hasson and a committee were busy making out the plan of the permanent association which was to control the business of oil-producing and prevent its becoming the slave of the refining interest.

“How,” asked the producer, “can you do this?” “We expect, by means of our combination, to get a rebate of seventy-five cents a barrel,” was the answer. “But the railroads have signed an agreement to give no rebates,” objected the producers.

“As if the railroads ever kept an agreement,” answered the worldly-wise refiners.

“Somebody will get the rebates. It is the way the railroads do business. If it is to be anybody, we propose it shall be our combination.”

Now it was clear enough to the men approached that the great body of their association would never go into any scheme based on rebates, and they said so. The refiners saw no disadvantage in that fact.

“We don’t want all the producers. We only want the big ones. The small producer under our arrangement must die, as the small refiner must.”

The proposition never got beyond the conference chamber. It was too cynical. Several conferences of the same nature took place later between representatives of the two interests, but nothing came of them.

With every day they became more impatient of the bonds the agency had set for them, and the leaders soon realised that some immediate tangible results must be given the mass of oil men, or there was danger of a stampede.

A strong feature of the genius of John D. Rockefeller has always been his recognition of the critical moment for action in complicated situations.

He saw it now, and his representatives again came to the creek seeking an alliance. Their arguments, as they found their way from the private meetings into the press and the street, ran something like this: “Our combination is the only big buyer.

What could the producers reply? In spite of their heroic measures, they had not been able to curtail their output.

It seemed as if Nature, outraged that her generosity should be so manipulated as to benefit only the few, had opened her veins to flood the earth with oil, so that all men might know that here was a light cheap enough for the poorest of them.

Her lavish outpouring now swept away all of the artificial restraints the producers and refiners had been trying to build.

In this discussion of the Rutter circular Mr. Rockefeller’s name scarcely appeared. It was known that he had been admitted to the conferences at which the tariff was arranged. This was taken as a matter of course.

There was nothing which concerned the oil business which John Rockefeller was not on the inside of.

Mr. Blanchard later stated that the “crude equivalent” scheme was suggested by certain Western refiners. The tremendous advantage Cleveland secured by the new arrangement, practically 300 miles of free transportation, seemed to prove, too, that Mr. Rockefeller had not been inactive during the conference.

With all these reflections fresh in mind, Mr. Rockefeller again bent over a map of the refining interests of the United States.

Here was the world he sighed to conquer.

If we may suppose him to have begun his campaign as a great general with whom he has many traits in common—the First Napoleon—used to begin his, by studding a map with red-headed pegs marking the points he must capture, Mr.

“This unselfish language soothed all alarm into quiet slumbering.

It resembles the gentle fanning of the vampire’s wings, and it had the same end in view—the undisturbed abstraction of the victim’s blood.

”

It was a very brief interview. He said there was no hope for us at all. He remarked this—I cannot give the exact quotation—‘There is no hope for us,’ and probably he said, ‘There is no hope for any of us’; but he says,

‘The weakest must go first.’ And we went.

”

Tack’s firm sold or leased. Those who felt the hard times and had any hope of weathering them resisted at first. With many of them the resistance was due simply to their love for their business and their unwillingness to share its control with outsiders.

The thing which a man has begun, cared for, led to a healthy life, from which he has begun to gather fruit, which he knows he can make greater and richer, he loves as he does his life.

It is one of the fruits of his life. He is jealous of it—wishes the honour of it, will not divide it with another. He can suffer heavily his own mistakes, learn from them, correct them.

To Mr. Rockefeller this feeling was a weak sentiment.

To place love of independent work above love of profits was as incomprehensible to him as a refusal to accept a rebate because it was wrong!

Where persuasion failed then, it was necessary, in his judgment, that pressure be applied—simply a pressure sufficient to demonstrate to these blind or recalcitrant individuals the impossibility of their long being able to do business independently. It was a pressure varied according to locality.

The system of “predatory competition” was no invention of the Standard Oil Company. It had prevailed in the oil business from the start. Indeed, it was one of the evils Mr. Rockefeller claimed his combination would cure, but until now it had been used spasmodically.

Mr. Rockefeller never did anything spasmodically.

He applied underselling for destroying his rivals’ market with the same deliberation and persistency that characterised all his efforts, and in the long run he always won. There were other forms of pressure. Sometimes the independents found it impossible to get oil;

All down the creek the little refineries which for years had faced every difficulty with stout hearts collapsed.

“Sold out,” “dismantled,” “shut down,” is the melancholy record of the industry during these four years.

At the end practically nothing was left in the Oil Regions but the Acme of Titusville and the Imperial of Oil City, both of them now under Standard management.

One refiner who had, according to popular report, received $200,000 for his business, speculated the entire sum away in less than a year. Others tried new enterprises, but men of forty learn new trades with difficulty, and failure followed many of them.

The scars left in the Oil Regions by the Standard Combination of 1875–1879 are too deep and ugly for men and women of this generation to forget them.

In Pittsburg the same thing was happening. At the beginning of the work of absorption—1874—there were between twenty-two and thirty refineries in the town.[51] As we have seen, Lockhart and Frew sold to the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland some time in 1874.

That would invite competition. They were told that all accounts were to be kept secret. Fictitious names were to be used in corresponding, and a special box at the post-office was employed for these fictitious characters.

In fact, smugglers and house-breakers never surrounded their operations with more mystery.

But make his operations as thickly as he might in secrecy, the effect of Mr. Rockefeller’s steady and united attack on the refining business was daily becoming more apparent.

Rockefeller at about the time he pronounced his ultimatum on the Empire. “They swooped upon the railways,” says Colonel Potts, “with a demand for a vast increase in their rebate.

They threatened, they pleaded, it has been said they purchased—however that may be, they conquered.

Minor officials intrusted with the vast power of according secret rates conceded all they were asked to do, even to concealing from their superiors for months the real nature of their illegal agreements.”

Soon after this interview, so rumour says, Mr. Vanderbilt sold the Standard stock he had acquired as a result of the deals made through the South Improvement Company.

“I think they are smarter fellows than I am, a good deal,” he told the commission, somewhat ruefully.

“And if you come in contact with them I guess you will come to the same conclusion.”

Indeed, he had long used his freedom to sell at any price he wished for the sake of driving a competitor out of the market with calculation and infinite patience.

Other refiners burst into the market and undersold for a day; but when Mr. Rockefeller began to undersell, he kept it up day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, until there was literally nothing left of his competitor.

A former official of the Empire Transportation Company, who in 1877 took an active part in the war his company was waging against the Standard, once told the writer that in every town, North or South, East or West, in which they already had a …

Practically not a barrel of oil could get to a railroad without his consent. He had set out to be simply the only oil refiner in the country, but to achieve that purpose he had been obliged to make himself an oil transporter.

In such unforeseen paths do great ambitions lead men!

The first effect of the downfall of the Empire was a new railroad pool.

Intent on stopping every outlet of oil not under their control the Standard people bought the Columbia Conduit. By the end of the year the entire pipe-line system of the Oil Regions was in Mr. Rockefeller’s hands. He was the only oil gatherer.

Practically not a barrel of oil could get to a railroad without his consent.

He had set out to be simply the only oil refiner in the country, but to achieve that purpose he had been obliged to make himself an oil transporter. In such unforeseen paths do great ambitions lead men!

But though fine sentiments and generous words find frequent exodus from the lips of the Standard managers, they are never seconded by generous deeds.

They crushed her business and her spirit as remorselessly as they would have killed a dog.

” These are bitter words written when Colonel Potts was still smarting from his defeat. They were written, too, without reflection that Mrs.

She would have profited by the high prices of refined oil which Mr. Rockefeller was taking all this trouble to secure. She might have grown a formidable competitor even, and disturbed the steadiness of the working of the great machine.

Colonel Potts forgot that if the Great Purpose was realised nobody must do business except under Mr. Rockefeller’s control.

In New York City the new tariff and pooling arrangements caused the greatest uneasiness, for here was the largest group of prosperous independent refiners.

Before six o’clock that day oil reached $3.11¼. Nobody thought of stopping because it was supper time. The exchange was open until nearly midnight, prices booming on to $3.17½.

It seemed like old times in the Oil Region—the good old flush times when people made a fortune one day and threw it away the next!

Of course refined oil went up steadily with crude. Refined reached 21⅜ cents in New York the day of this boom at Oil City. The day following the rise was one of the most exciting the oil exchange had ever seen.

If it has taught us anything, it is that our present law-makers, as a body, are ignorant, corrupt and unprincipled; that the majority of them are, directly or indirectly, under the control of the very monopolies against whose acts we have been seeking relief....

There has been invented by the Standard Oil Company no argument or assertion, however false or ridiculous, which has not found a man in the Pennsylvania Legislature mean enough to become its champion.

”

All over the Bradford field men saw their oil running on the ground, though they offered to sell it at ruinous prices, and though they might have thousands of barrels of tankage leased to the United Lines.

Yet they did not riot; conscious that their own reckless drilling had brought on the trouble, they cursed the Standard, and put down more wells!

But in the spring of 1878 Mr.

Crowds gathered about the offices of the Standard threatening and jeering.

Mysterious things, cross-bones and death-heads, were found plentifully sprinkled on the buildings owned by the Standard interests.

More than once the slumber of the oil towns was disturbed by marching bodies of men. It was certain that a species of Kuklux had hold of the Bradford region, and that a very little spark was needed to touch off the United Pipe Lines.

The delay did not in any way discourage the producers, and when Mr. Rockefeller became convinced of this he tried conciliation. “Come, let us reason together,” has always been a favourite proposition of Mr. Rockefeller.

He would rather persuade than coerce, rather silence than fight.

He had been making peace overtures ever since the suits began. The first had been in the fall of 1878, soon after they were instituted, when he sent the following letter to Captain Vandergrift:

I reply with sorrow and humiliation—I fear not.

All this high-flown talk is buncombe of the worst kind.

The producers are willing to meet in a mass-meeting held out of doors where it costs nothing even for rent of a hall, and pass any kind of a resolution that is offered.

… able, cold-blooded men—men to whom anything was right that they could get, men knowing exactly what they wanted, men who loved the game they played because of the reward at the goal, and, above all, men who knew how to hold their tongues and wait.

“To Mr. Rockefeller,” they say in the Oil Regions, “a day is as a year and a year as a day. He can wait, but he never gives up.”

Mr.

Now, what was this loose and easily discouraged organisation opposing?

A compact body of a few able, cold-blooded men—men to whom anything was right that they could get, men knowing exactly what they wanted, men who loved the game they played because of the reward at the goal, and, above all, men who knew how to hold their tongues and wait.

“To Mr. Rockefeller,” they say in the Oil Regions, “a day is as a year and a year as a day. He can wait, but he never gives up.” Mr.

He still rehearsed the series of dramatic attacks and sieges which had wiped out independent effort. He taught his children that the cause had been sold, and he stigmatised the men who had gone over to the Standard as traitors.

Scores of boys and girls grew up in the Oil Regions in those days with the same feeling of terrified curiosity toward those who had “sold to the Standard” that they had toward those who had “been in jail.”

The Oil Regions as a whole was at heart as irreconcilable in 1880 as it had been after the South Improvement Company fight, and now it had added to its sense of outrage the humiliation of defeat.

this one went his independent way, but with closed lips; that one shook the dust of the Oil Regions from his feet and went out to seek “God’s country,” asking only that he should never again hear the word “oil.”

The newspapers bowed to the victor.

A sudden hush came over the region, the hush of defeat, of cowardice, of hopelessness. Only the “poor producer” grumbled. “You can’t satisfy the producer,” Mr. Rockefeller often has had occasion to remark benignantly and pitifully. The producer alone was not “convinced.”

that one shook the dust of the Oil Regions from his feet and went out to seek “God’s country,” asking only that he should never again hear the word “oil.” The newspapers bowed to the victor.

A sudden hush came over the region, the hush of defeat, of cowardice, of hopelessness.

Only the “poor producer” grumbled. “You can’t satisfy the producer,” Mr. Rockefeller often has had occasion to remark benignantly and pitifully. The producer alone was not “convinced.” He still rehearsed the series of dramatic attacks and sieges which had wiped out independent effort.

The oil went up to the top of the mountain without difficulty, and on June 4, the seventh day after Mr. Benson opened the valve at Station One, oil flowed into the big receiving tank beyond Williamsport.

A new era had come in the oil business. Oil could be pumped over the mountains.

It was only a matter of time when the Tidewater would pump to New York.

would he be able to control the new carrier? A man of lesser intellect might not have foreseen the inevitableness of the new situation; a man of lesser courage would not have sprung to meet it.

Mr. Rockefeller, however, is like all great generals: he never fails to foresee where the battle is to be fought; he never fails to get the choice of positions.

He wasted no time now in deciding what should be done. He proposed not merely to control future long-distance oil transportation; he proposed to own it outright.

How it came to be unearthed by the Standard or what they paid for it, the writer does not know. However, as H. H. Rogers aptly told the Industrial Commission in 1899, when he was asked if a considerable sum was not given for it:

“I should suppose every good thing had to be paid for; I should say a man owning a charter of that kind would sell it at the best price he could get.”

Repeated efforts have been made by parties in their interest to secure the control of the Tidewater Pipe Company, and if they could succeed, the monopoly thereby secured would add many million dollars a year to their profit.”

Mr. Keene’s putting of the case was undoubtedly correct, but pious horror of commercial brigandage, coming from “Jim” Keene, was useful only to give joy to a cynical world, unencumbered by the possession of stock in either concern.

The Keene sensation was followed by a second, an affidavit from John D.

The contract was made for fifteen years, but since its expiration it has been lived up to honourably by both parties without other than a verbal understanding.

For, note this: Mr. Rockefeller always keeps his word. Indeed, in studying his career, one is frequently reminded of Tom Sawyer’s great resolution—never to sully piracy by dishonesty!

The Tidewater has prospered within the boundary Mr. Rockefeller drew for it, as those who have accepted submissively his boundaries have never failed to do. Mr. Rockefeller is right when he says, as he does so often, that all who come with him prosper.

The pipe-line probably never ran the whole amount. More or less refined oil—naphtha, benzine, and other petroleum products—would necessarily go by rail. Large sums were paid monthly by the National Transit, however, to the railroad.

Mr. Rockefeller seems to have been paying the Pennsylvania Railroad this money not to compete with him as an oil carrier.

It would be difficult to find in our variegated commercial history a more beautiful example of the beneficence of combination—to those in the deal!

Large sums were paid monthly by the National Transit, however, to the railroad. Mr. Rockefeller seems to have been paying the Pennsylvania Railroad this money not to compete with him as an oil carrier.

It would be difficult to find in our variegated commercial history a more beautiful example of the beneficence of combination—to those in the deal!

With the removal of danger of any competition by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the transportation department of the Standard Oil Trust seems to have been as nearly a perfect machine, both in efficiency and in its monopolistic power, as ever has been devised.

There the few independent refiners who had escaped strangulation were free to barter as they could. But the right to make all the oil in the world, which Mr. Rockefeller claimed, carried with it the right to sell all the oil the world consumed.

The independent was therefore a poacher in the market and must be driven out.

… IS USED BY STANDARD TO FIGHT COMPETITORS—COMPETITORS DRIVEN OUT BY UNDERSELLING—EVIDENCE FROM ALL OVER THE COUNTRY—PRETENDED INDEPENDENT OIL COMPANIES STARTED BY THE STANDARD—STANDARD’S EXPLANATION OF THESE PRACTICES IS NOT SATISFACTORY—PUBLIC DERIVES NO BENEFIT FROM TEMPORARY LOWERING OF PRICES—PRICES MADE ABNORMALLY HIGH WHEN COMPETITION IS DESTROYED.

To know every detail of the oil trade, to be able to reach at any moment its remotest point, to control even its weakest factor—this was John D. Rockefeller’s ideal of doing business.

It seemed to be an intellectual necessity for him to be able to direct the course of any particular gallon of oil from the moment it gushed from the earth until it went into the lamp of a housewife.

In spite of his bold pretensions and his perfect organisation, a few obstinate oil refiners still lived and persisted in doing business.

They were a fly in his ointment—a stick in his wonderful wheel.

He must get them out; otherwise the Great Purpose would be unrealised. And so, while engaged in organising the world’s markets, he incidentally carried on a campaign against those who dared intrude there.

they were sent there to sell all the oil that was bought. “The coal-oil business belongs to us,” was Mr. Rockefeller’s motto, and from the beginning of his campaign in the markets his agents accepted and acted on that principle.

If a dealer bought but a barrel of oil a year, it must be from Mr. Rockefeller.

This ambition made it necessary that the agents have accurate knowledge of all outside transactions in oil, however small, made in their field. How was this possible?

“The Waters-Pierce Oil Company reduced their prices on Brilliant oil from $2.60 to $1.50 per case and is waging a fierce war.”

“Waters-Pierce Oil Company has our state by the throat and we would like to be extricated.”

“I would like to handle your oil if I could be protected against the Waters-Pierce Oil Company.

Mr. Shull summed up his testimony before the same committee to which Mr. Teagle gave the above, by declaring: “

You take $10,000 and go into the business and I will guarantee you won’t be in business ninety days.

Their motto is that anybody going into the oil business in opposition to them they will make life a burden to him. That is about as near as you can get to it.”

“We will state for your information that never a drop of oil has reached South Bend of better quality than what we have always shipped into that territory.

They can name it ‘Sunlight,’ ‘Moonlight,’ or ‘Starlight,’ it makes no difference.

You can rest assured if another carload of ‘Sunlight’ arrives at your place, it will be sold very cheap.

“The letter,” he continued, “was intended to be written in a jocular manner to deny a claim that he was selling oil inferior in quality to that sold by others.”

It is hard for the mere outsider to catch the jocularity of the letter, and it must have been much more difficult for the dealer who received it to appreciate it.

Independent oil dealers of the present day complain bitterly of a rather novel way employed by the Standard for bringing into line dealers whose prejudices against buying from them are too strong to be overcome by the above methods.

… as it deserves to be—of course nothing but a bribe would induce a clerk to give up such information as these daily reports contain—but, happily, such is the force of tradition that even those who have practised it for a long time shrink from discovery.

It is one of those political and business practices which are only respectable when concealed.

Naturally, then, the above system of gathering information must be handled with care, and can never have the same perfection as that Mr. Rockefeller expected when he signed the South Improvement Company charter.

Mr. Archbold told the commission that he personally believed it was not advisable to sell below cost for the sake of freezing out a smaller rival, save in “greatly aggravated cases,” though he admitted the Standard sometimes did it.

The trouble is that, accepting Mr. Rockefeller’s foundation principle that the oil business belongs to him, any competition is “an aggravated case.”

All that is reassuring in the situation has come from the obstinate stand of individuals—the refiners who insisted on doing an independent business, on the theory that “this is a free country”;

They told of grocers driven out of business by an attempt to stand by a refiner. They told endless tales, probably all exaggerated, perhaps some of them false, yet all of them believed, because of such facts as have been rehearsed above.

There came to be a popular conviction that the “Standard would do anything.”

It was a condition which promised endless annoyance to Mr. Rockefeller and his colleagues. It meant popular mistrust, petty hostilities, misinterpretations, contempt, abuse. There were plenty of people even willing to deny Mr. Rockefeller ability.

Rockefeller and his colleagues. It meant popular mistrust, petty hostilities, misinterpretations, contempt, abuse. There were plenty of people even willing to deny Mr. Rockefeller ability. That the Standard was in a venture was enough in those people’s minds to damn it.

Anything the Standard wanted was wrong, anything they contested was right.

A verdict for them demonstrated the corruption of the judge and jury; against them their righteousness. Mr. Rockefeller, indeed, was each year having more reason to realise monopoly building had its trials as wells as its profits.

It does not “make any difference in the case,” he declared. “The plaintiffs were not doing business in 1875, when the contract was entered into, and, of course, it was not made to injure them in particular.

If a man rides a dangerous horse into a crowd of people, or discharges loaded firearms among them, he might, with the same propriety, select the man he injures and say he had no intention of wounding him.

And yet the law holds him to have intended the probable consequences of his unlawful act as fully as if purposely directed against the innocent victim, and punishes him accordingly.

It is probably a good description.

Certainly it is evident from what follows that the receiver was much “fussed up” ethically.

Anxious to keep up the income of his road, Mr. Pease finally consented to the arrangement the Standard demanded. But he was worried lest his immoral arrangement be dragged into court, and wrote to his counsel, Edward S.

“

The idea is justly abhorrent to all fair minds. No such dangerous power can be tolerated.

Except in the modes of using them, every citizen has the same right to demand the service of railroads on equal terms that they have to the use of a public highway or the government mails.

In a business as large as ours, conducted by so many agents, some things are likely to be done which we cannot approve. We correct them as soon as they come to our knowledge.

The public hears of the wrong—it never hears of the correction.

” In the Digest of Evidence made by the Industrial Commission in its report published in 1900 (page 158), it is stated that the money collected was refunded before suit was brought.

He asked them where they expected to get oil, and they replied that they would get it from the Atlas Refining Company, an independent concern in Buffalo, which had its own pipe-line.

“You will wake up some morning and find it is in the Standard,” replied Mr. Everest.

Apparently Mr. Everest’s threat had little influence on the men, for they pushed the building of the works in Buffalo as rapidly as possible.

The run of oil was found to be a failure. It was not a pleasant augury, but oil refiners are more or less hardened to explosions and no one seems to have thought much of the accident.

Nobody was injured; nothing was burned, nothing but 175 barrels of oil spoiled; that, in an oil refinery, is getting off easy.

On the 23d of June Miller made the transfer of property advised by the Everests, talked over things with Truesdale, and a week later left the Buffalo Works suddenly on receipt of a telegram, and joined H. B.

The men did, however, go to Boston, where they registered as “H. B. Everest and friend,” and where several times, at least, Everest introduced Miller under an assumed name.

They junketed about for some days on what Everest tried, with indifferent success, to persuade Miller was a pleasure excursion!

While they were amusing themselves, Everest hired Miller at $1,500 a year to “do any fair job we put him at, either at Rochester or some other place.”

… hard for a rival to do business will lead men like the Everests, but it shows to what lengths a hostile public will go in interpreting the acts of men whom it has come to believe are lawless and relentless in pursuing their own ends.

The public, particularly the oil public, has always been willing to believe the worst of the Standard Oil Company.

It read into the Buffalo case deliberate arson, and charged not only the Everests, but the three co-directors, with the overt acts. They refused to recognise that no evidence of the connection of Mr. Rogers, Mr. Archbold and Mr.

Payne nor the Standard Oil Company had done aught but keep quiet, convinced a large part of the country that the suspicion under which they rested was less damaging than the truth would be.

In the minds of great numbers this silence was a confession of guilt.

The Payne case certainly aggravated greatly the popular feeling that the Standard Oil Company was using the legislative bodies of the country in its own interest.

… his den, hidden from everybody but the remarkable body of directors and heads of departments which he had “acquired” as he wiped up one refinery and one pipe-line after another, to the humblest clerk in the office of the most remote marketing agency, everybody worked.

There was not a lazy bone in the organisation, nor an incompetent hand, nor a stupid head.

It was a machine where everybody was kept on his mettle by an extraordinary system of competition, where success met immediate recognition, where opportunity was wide as the world’s craving for a good light to cheer its hours of darkness.

The machine was pervaded and stimulated by the consciousness of its own power and prosperity.

It was a great thing to belong to an organisation which always got what it wanted, and which was making money as no business in the country had ever made it.

What more, indeed, could Mr. Rockefeller ask than to be let alone? And why not let him alone? He had the ability to keep together the wide-spread interests he had acquired—not only to keep them together, but to unify and develop them;

It was a great thing to belong to an organisation which always got what it wanted, and which was making money as no business in the country had ever made it.

What more, indeed, could Mr. Rockefeller ask than to be let alone? And why not let him alone?

He had the ability to keep together the wide-spread interests he had acquired—not only to keep them together, but to unify and develop them; why not let him alone?

We have been and are being wronged, they repeated. We have a right to do an independent business. Interference to drive us out is conspiracy. Let Mr. Rockefeller succeed in the oil business and he will attack other industries; he will have imitators.

In fifty years a handful of men will own the country.

Mr. Rockefeller handled his critics with a skill bordering on genius. He ignored them. To see them, to answer them, called attention to them. He was too busy to answer them. “We do not talk much—we saw wood.”

We have a right to do an independent business. Interference to drive us out is conspiracy. Let Mr. Rockefeller succeed in the oil business and he will attack other industries; he will have imitators. In fifty years a handful of men will own the country.

Mr. Rockefeller handled his critics with a skill bordering on genius. He ignored them.

To see them, to answer them, called attention to them. He was too busy to answer them. “We do not talk much—we saw wood.” This attitude of serene indifference is supremely wise.

Mr. Rockefeller handled his critics with a skill bordering on genius. He ignored them. To see them, to answer them, called attention to them. He was too busy to answer them. “

We do not talk much—we saw wood.

” This attitude of serene indifference is supremely wise. It belittles the critic and it gives the outsider who watches the game a feeling that a serenity so high must come from an impregnable position.

Mr. Rockefeller handled his critics with a skill bordering on genius. He ignored them. To see them, to answer them, called attention to them. He was too busy to answer them. “We do not talk much—we saw wood.”

This attitude of serene indifference is supremely wise. It belittles the critic and it gives the outsider who watches the game a feeling that a serenity so high must come from an impregnable position.

There is no question but many a mouth opened to testify against the Standard Oil Company has been closed by Mr. Rockefeller’s policy of silence.

Rockefeller, five years after it occurred, dared make an affidavit that it had never occurred![120]

Men who entered into running arrangements with Mr. Rockefeller were cautioned “not to tell their wives,” and correspondence between them and the Standard Oil Company was carried on under assumed names!

Whenever the subject of the relations between the various companies came up in a lawsuit or an investigation, a candid and straightforward answer was always avoided by both Mr. Rockefeller and the men known to be associated with him in some way.

There seems to have been no hesitation about including the Standard Oil Trust. “This is the original trust,” wrote the committee. “Its success has been the incentive to the formation of all other trusts or combinations.

It is the type of a system which has spread like a disease through the commercial system of this country.

”

In no case where he has appeared on the stand can his skill as a witness be studied to better advantage. With a wealth of polite phrases—“You are very good,” “I beg with all respect”—Mr. Rockefeller bowed himself to the will of the committee.

With an air of eager frankness he told them nothing he did not wish them to know.

The committee had a desire to begin at the beginning. It evidently had heard that a short-lived organisation, called the South Improvement Company, had given Mr.

Taking up, point by point, the conditions of which the oil producers complained, not one of them could be fixed on the trust. It had made no agreements, signed no contracts, kept no books. It had no legal existence.

It was a force powerful as gravitation and as intangible. You could argue its existence from its effects, but you could never prove it.

You could no more grasp it than you could an eel. Certainly the Committee on Manufactures was justified in confining its report to pointing out the fact that the Standard Oil Trust agreement was a shrewd and slippery device for evading responsibility.

that I had no personal feeling against the Standard Oil Company, but I meant to enforce the law against it as I would against any other company which I believed to be violating the law.”

“I admire your courage,” said Mr. Buchanan, “but I would not do it.”

On May 8, 1890, Mr.

As if to clinch his threat and argument, Hanna wrote: “

You have been in politics long enough to know that no man in public office owes the public anything.

”

But such is not one of the usual or general results of a monopoly; and it is the policy of the law to regard, not what may, but what usually happens.

Experience shows that it is not wise to trust human cupidity where it has the opportunity to aggrandise itself at the expense of others.

The claim of having cheapened the price to the consumer is the usual pretext on which monopolies of this kind are defended.”[131]

and it is the policy of the law to regard, not what may, but what usually happens. Experience shows that it is not wise to trust human cupidity where it has the opportunity to aggrandise itself at the expense of others.

The claim of having cheapened the price to the consumer is the usual pretext on which monopolies of this kind are defended.

”[131]

Mr. Dodd was right; things were going on as they did before; dividends were issued exactly as before. Nor was there any indication of an intention on the part of the liquidating trustees to change this state of things.

If the monopolistic power of the Standard Oil Trust was to be broken, it was evidently not to be by any order of dissolution by the courts.

Something more powerful than the courts was at work, however.

Material prosperity is usually benumbing in its effects. There always has been a factor in the great game playing in the Oil Regions, however, which not even Mr. Rockefeller could match.

Nature has been in the oil game, and she has taken pains to prevent the only situation which would have enabled Mr. Rockefeller to reconcile the oil producers.

Again and again when it seemed as if the limits of oil production were set, and when Mr.

They, too, wanted a right of way, the same as Mr. Emery wanted. They bought strips of land across his route, they bought up mortgages on farms where rights had already been acquired, and, mortgage in hand, compelled farmers to give them rights.

It was an incessant harassing by men who never used the rights acquired—who did not want them save to hinder the independent project.

This sort of hindrance by the Standard was certain, whatever route was taken, and Mr. Emery went ahead undismayed, and in September, 1892, organised his company—the United States Pipe Line Company—with a capital of $600,000.

Many of the articles have been republished in various papers in this country and Europe, and it is the desire of Mr. Boyle that this retraction shall be as freely and fully printed and published as were the original articles reflecting on Mr. Emery.

It is a satisfaction to the writer to be able to help gratify Mr. Boyle’s laudable desire to have this document well circulated!

Although the greater part of the Oil Regions never took Mr.

it was a cause they were defending—the right of men to work in their own way without unlawful interference. The honour not only of themselves but of the Oil Regions was at stake. They were struggling for great principles.

They were demonstrating that pluck, patience, and energy and brains can conquer any combination that ability and unscrupulousness can devise.

“Do not give in,” pleaded Mr. Lee. “Hold on, and we will go to the producers, lay your plight before them, and raise money to keep up the fight.”

They soon had it. First, with a body of railroad men armed with picks and bars, who invaded the camp.

“I told the boys,” said Mr. Emery in describing the incident to the Industrial Commission in 1899, “to take the men by the shoulders and the seat of the pants, and take them out and lay them down carefully, which they did.”

The next day two wrecking-cars, with 250 men, came down the road and charged the camp, but again they were routed. The matter was taken by mutual agreement into court, and while Mr.

Its friends could not believe it, nor did they until they found, the morning it was to be presented, that the Senator having it in charge had disappeared, taking with him the bill and everything concerning it.

Four days later the Legislature adjourned, and the precious Senator, when next heard from, was in the far West!

TRUNK AND LOCAL PIPE LINES OF THE PURE OIL COMPANY. There are two lines from Oil City to Marcus Hook, near Philadelphia, one for crude and one for refined oil.

It is not a secret arrangement. It aims at no monopoly, at no restraint of trade. It claims only to be a device for protecting its obvious right to handle its own product.

Of course, if we admit that the oil business belongs to the Standard, as Mr. Rockefeller claims, then the Pure Oil Company is certainly in the wrong!

As it stands to-day, the independents have a good showing for their fight. They have fully 900 stockholders, most of them producers. They handle a daily production of 8,000 barrels of crude oil; operate 1,500 miles of crude pipe-line and 400 miles of refined;

They knew they did not get it, and they believed it was because there was not fair play on the part of the railroads and the Standard Oil Company. Aroused, they each fought for the particular thing which would give them relief.

They only combined because driven to.

They have become a strong organisation almost solely because of the persistent opposition of the Standard Oil Trust. The Standard’s efforts to break up the Producers’ Protective Association by buying out the biggest producers precipitated a co-operative company for handling oil.

The buying out of their foreign agents forced them to develop their own market in Europe. The secret buying in of their stock, and the combined effort to force the Standard directors on them, compelled them into their present close trust organisation.

It looks very much as if in trying to make way with several small scattered bodies Mr. Rockefeller had made one strong, united one.

But while the experience of the Pure Oil Company demonstrates that it is possible to-day to build up an independent oil business if men have the requisite patience and fighting quality, it by no means follows that the success of the Pure Oil Company has …

What was its object? J. J. Vandergrift, one of the directors of the Standard Oil Company at that time, questioned once under oath as to what they meant to do, said: “

Simply to hold up the price of oil—to get all we can for it.

” Nobody pretended anything else at the time. “The refiners and shippers who are in the association intend there shall be no competition.” “It is a struggle for a margin.”

to fifty per cent., and even more, on every gallon of oil they put out. They had the same extravagant notion of what they should make as the oil producers of those early days had.

No oil producer thought in the sixties that he was succeeding if his wells did not pay for themselves in six months!

And as their new industry slowly but surely came under the laws of trade, increased its production, was subjected to severe competition, as they saw themselves, in order to sustain their business, forced to practise economies and to accept smaller profits, they loudly complained.

And as their new industry slowly but surely came under the laws of trade, increased its production, was subjected to severe competition, as they saw themselves, in order to sustain their business, forced to practise economies and to accept smaller profits, they loudly complained.

There was never a set of men who found it harder to accept the limitations of economic laws than the oil producers of Pennsylvania.

The oil refiners showed the same dislike of the harness, and in 1871, as we have seen, Mr. Rockefeller and a few of his friends combined to throw it off.

Rockefeller has not been able to keep, but from 1879 to the present day there has not been a time when he has not controlled over eighty per cent. of the oil manufacturing of the country. To-day he controls about eighty-three per cent.

Now it is generally conceded that the man or men who control over seventy per cent. of a commodity control its price—within limits, very strict limits, too, such is the force of economic laws.

In the case of the Standard Oil Company the control is so complete that the price of oil, both crude and refined, is actually issued from its headquarters.

The embargo which followed has already been described in Chapter VII of this narrative.

It was as straight a hold-up as our commercial history offers, rich as it is in that sort of operations.

From October to February refined oil was held at a price purely arbitrary. It was the first fruits of the Great Scheme.

Benjamin Brewster once said to a Federal Investigating Committee, which had asked if the Standard could not fix the price of oil as it wished: “At the moment many things may be done, but the reaction is like a relapse of typhoid fever.

The Standard Oil Company can never afford to sell goods dear. The people would go to dipping tallow candles in the old-fashioned way if we got the price too high.

” The after-effects of the first great raids, then, were salutary. The Standard learned the limitations set on monopolies by certain great economic laws.

The market was 9.20. Further investigation, however, showed that at headquarters the figure given out privately was 8.70 cents. The disadvantage of the outsider in disposing of his goods is obvious.

The Standard makes the official market, and undersells it.

The situation seems to be the same in practice as that described by Mr. Welch, in 1880, though now the fiction of a committee of brokers has been done away with.

As a rule, the appearance of the oil has led to a sharp contest or “Oil War,” at which, not infrequently, both sides have sold at a loss.

The Standard, being able to stand a loss indefinitely, usually won out.

An interesting local “Oil War,” which occurred in 1896 and 1897 in New York and Philadelphia, figured in the reports of the Industrial Commission, and illustrates very well the usual influence on Standard prices of the incoming of competition.

that it cost the oil producer just as much now as it did twenty years ago to get his oil taken away from the wells and to transport it to New York. And Mr. Rogers answered, with delightful candour:

“We are not in business for our health, but are out for the dollars.”

John D. Archbold was asked at the same time if it were not true that, by virtue of its great power, the Standard Oil Company was enabled to secure prices that, on the whole, were above those under competition, and Mr. Archbold said:

Rockefeller, is more cautious in his admissions. On the witness-stand in 1888 he was forced to admit, after some skilful evasion, that the control the Standard Oil Company had of prices was such that they could raise or lower them at will.

“But,” added Mr. Rockefeller, “we would not do it.”

The whole colloquy between the examiner and Mr. Rockefeller is interesting:

Something besides illegal advantages has gone into the making of the Standard Oil Trust. Had it possessed only the qualities which the general public has always attributed to it, its overthrow would have come before this.

But this huge bulk, blackened by commercial sin, has always been strong in all great business qualities—in energy, in intelligence, in dauntlessness.

It has always been rich in youth as well as greed, in brains as well as unscrupulousness.

Rockefeller’s supervision. The Oil Regions, which were notoriously extravagant in their business methods, resented this care and called it meanness, but the Oil Regions were wrong and Mr. Rockefeller was right.

Take care of the bungs and the barrels will take care of themselves, is as good a policy in a refinery as the old saw it paraphrases is in financiering.

There were other features of this revolutionary management which caused deep resentment in the oil world.

With Mr. Rockefeller’s genius for detail, there went a sense of the big and vital factors in the oil business, and a daring in laying hold of them which was very like military genius.

He saw strategic points like a Napoleon, and he swooped on them with the suddenness of a Napoleon.

This master ability has been fully illustrated already in this work. Mr. Rockefeller’s capture of the Cleveland refineries in 1872 was as dazzling an achievement as it was a hateful one.

His principle concerning men was laid down early.

“We want only the big ones, those who have already proved they can do a big business. As for the others, unfortunately they will have to die.”

The scheme had no provision for mediocrity—nor for those who could not stomach his methods.

His principle concerning men was laid down early. “We want only the big ones, those who have already proved they can do a big business. As for the others, unfortunately they will have to die.”

The scheme had no provision for mediocrity—nor for those who could not stomach his methods.

The men who in 1882 formed the Standard alliance were all from the foremost rank in the petroleum trade, men who without question would be among those at the top to-day if there had never been a Standard Oil Company.

Mr. Rockefeller’s great creation has really been strong, then, in many admirable qualities. The force of the combination has been greater because of the business habits of the independent body which has opposed it.

To the Standard’s caution the Oil Regions opposed recklessness; to its economy, extravagance; to its secretiveness, almost blatant frankness; to its far-sightedness, little thought of the morrow; to its close-fistedness, a spendthrift generosity; to its selfish unscrupulousness, an almost quixotic love of fair play.

The Oil Regions had, besides, one fatal weakness—its passion for speculation. Now, Mr. Rockefeller never speculates. He deals only in those things which other people have proved sure!

to its secretiveness, almost blatant frankness; to its far-sightedness, little thought of the morrow; to its close-fistedness, a spendthrift generosity; to its selfish unscrupulousness, an almost quixotic love of fair play. The Oil Regions had, besides, one fatal weakness—its passion for speculation.

Now, Mr. Rockefeller never speculates. He deals only in those things which other people have proved sure!

It is when one examines the inside of the Standard Oil Trust that one sees how much reason there is for the opinion of those people who declare that Mr. Rockefeller can always sustain the monopoly of the oil business he has achieved.

It has all seemed futile enough with the public listening in wonder and awe to the splendid rehearsal of figures, and the unctuous logic of the Mother of Trusts, and yet one can never tell.

It was the squawking of geese that saved the Capitol.

Certain it is that many and great as are his business qualities, John D. Rockefeller has never been allowed to enjoy the fruits of his victory in that atmosphere of leisure and adulation which the victor naturally craves.

… top all the time, you see if they are not.”[161] It is not surprising that those who realise the compactness and harmony of the Standard organisation, the ability of its members, the solidity of the qualities governing its operations, are willing to forget its history.

Such is the blinding quality of success!

“It has achieved this,” they say; “no matter what helped to rear this structure, it is here, it is admirably managed. We might as well accept it. We must do business.”

These facts have been repeatedly pointed out in this narrative. But these are the American industrial qualities. They are common enough in all sorts of business. They have made our railroads, built up our great department stores, opened our mines.

The Standard Oil Company has no monopoly in business ability.

It is the thing for which American men are distinguished to-day in the world.

The ethical cost of all this is the deep concern.

We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.

As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class.

One of the most depressing features of the ethical side of the matter is that instead of such methods arousing contempt they are more or less openly admired. And this is logical.

Canonise “business success,” and men who make a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!

The history of its organisation is studied as a practical lesson in money-making. It is the most startling feature of the case to one who would like to feel that it is possible to be a commercial people and yet a race of gentlemen.

Of course such practices exclude men by all the codes from the rank of gentlemen, just as such practices would exclude men from the sporting world or athletic field.

There is no gaming table in the world where loaded dice are tolerated, no athletic field where men must not start fair.

Yet Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair. Business played in this way loses all its sportsmanlike qualities.

There is no gaming table in the world where loaded dice are tolerated, no athletic field where men must not start fair.

Yet Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair.

Business played in this way loses all its sportsmanlike qualities. It is fit only for tricksters.

Yet Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair.

Business played in this way loses all its sportsmanlike qualities. It is fit only for tricksters.

The effects on the very men who fight these methods on the ground that they are ethically wrong are deplorable. Brought into competition with the trust, badgered, foiled, spied upon, they come to feel as if anything is fair when the Standard is the opponent.

The writer has frequently heard men, whose own business was conducted with scrupulous fairness, say in cases of similar stealing that they would never condemn a man who stole from the Standard!

Of course such a state of feeling undermines the whole moral nature of a community.

The blackmailing cases of which the Standard Oil Company complain are a natural result of its own practices. Men going into an independent refining business have for years been accustomed to say:

Finally the thieving pipe was discovered, and the owner of it, after acknowledging his guilt, was brought to trial. The jury gave a verdict of Not guilty! They seemed to feel that though the guilt was acknowledged, there probably was a Standard trick concealed somewhere.

Anyway it was the Standard Oil Company and it deserved to be stolen from!

The writer has frequently heard men, whose own business was conducted with scrupulous fairness, say in cases of similar stealing that they would never condemn a man who stole from the Standard!

Matthews, the owner of the concern which the Standard was fighting, which might not have been expected from a man who had met the kind of opposition he had from the time he went into business.

The truth is, blackmail and every other business vice is the natural result of the peculiar business practices of the Standard.

If business is to be treated as warfare and not as a peaceful pursuit, as they have persisted in treating it, they cannot expect the men they are fighting to lie down and die without a struggle.

but the whole system of discrimination has been nothing but violence, and those who have profited by it cannot complain if the curing of the evils they have wrought bring hardship in turn on them.

At all events, until the transportation matter is settled, and settled right, the monopolistic trust will be with us, a leech on our pockets, a barrier to our free efforts.

As for the ethical side, there is no cure but in an increasing scorn of unfair play—an increasing sense that a thing won by breaking the rules of the game is not worth the winning.

At all events, until the transportation matter is settled, and settled right, the monopolistic trust will be with us, a leech on our pockets, a barrier to our free efforts.

As for the ethical side, there is no cure but in an increasing scorn of unfair play—an increasing sense that a thing won by breaking the rules of the game is not worth the winning.

When the business man who fights to secure special privileges, to crowd his competitor off the track by other than fair competitive methods, receives the same summary disdainful ostracism by his fellows that the doctor or lawyer who is “unprofessional,” the athlete who abuses the …

It is probable that had not the arrangement which we have been considering been entered into, a line would have been put down by the parties represented by O’Day and Scheide, but without the arrangement the patronage of Mr. Rice could have been retained.

The result of the arrangement seems to be that the railroad has lost the patronage not only of the parties represented by O’Day and Scheide, but also of Mr. Rice, and it is not to-day carrying a barrel of oil.

The Argand Oil Works and the Argand Refining Company, two corporations located at Marietta, Ohio, have made complaint that from the eighteenth day of February until the fourteenth day of October, 1885, they were shippers of oil from the Macksburg Oil Region, over the Cleveland …

D. Dale as president and W. J. Brundred as vice-president, to which corporation this contract was assigned. This company continued in the business until January, 1885. Mr. Dale, the president, states that “

We said we could not compete with the Standard Oil Company, and for that reason we sold out at a fair price.

” When asked to whom his company sold their property, Mr. Dale answered, “I don’t know what company, but my recollection is that it might have been the National Transit Company.” “It was done in their office.

Strangers may ask, Why is there no competition in pipage and storage of oil if the profits are so great?

We answer, that with rebates, drawbacks, discrimination, and conspiracies the Standard Oil Company has been able to freeze out and suppress nearly every attempt at competition.

Does not the foregoing array of figures, showing as it does the terrible shrinkage which the property of the oil producers has sustained, amounting to nearly twenty-five per cent.

A.

If I am in harmony with my wife, I presume I am at peace with her, and am working with her.

Q. You are married to her, and you have a contract with her?

A.

Well, some people live in harmony without being married.

Q. Without having a contract?

A.

Well, not going too far into detail, I would say that the relations are very pleasant.

Q. But we want the detail; we want precisely what that harmony is, what it consists of, and what produces it.

A.

Well, is it a railroad abuse, or is it an abuse to be in harmony with people?

Q. No; it is not abuse to be in harmony; there are some kinds of harmony that the law considers conspiracy.

Q.

No; it is not abuse to be in harmony; there are some kinds of harmony that the law considers conspiracy.

A. Well, I have heard so.