The History of the Standard Oil Company PDF
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The History of the Standard Oil Company More Belt Revivals Poor White by Sherwood Anderson Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic Stories from Ohio by William Dean Howells The History of the Standard Oil Company Ida Tarbell Introduction copyright © 2018, Elizabeth Catte All rights reserved. This introduction or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. First Belt Publishing Edition 2018 ISBN: 9781948742153 Belt Publishing 2306 West 17th Street, Suite 4, Cleveland, Ohio 44113 www.beltpublishing.com Book design by Meredith Pangrace Cover by David Wilson contents Publisher’s Note Introduction by Elizabeth Catte Author’s Preface I. The Birth of an Industry II. The Rise of the Standard Oil Company III. The Oil War of 1872 IV. “An Unholy Alliance” V. Laying the Foundations of a Trust VI. Strengthening the Foundations VII. The Crisis of 1878 VIII. The Compromise of 1880 IX. The Fight for the Seaboard Pipeline X. Cutting to Kill XI. The War on the Rebate XII. The Buffalo Case XIII. The Standard Oil Company and Politics XIV. The Breaking Up of the Trust XV. A Modern War for Independence XVI. The Price of Oil XVII. The Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company XVIII. Conclusion Publisher’s Note To make the text more accessible to contemporary readers, this edition has been abridged from its original version, the appendices and illustrations excised, and certain spellings modernized. A free digitized version of the complete text can be found at Internet Archive (www.archive.org). introduction How Ida Tarbell came to write The History of the Standard Oil Company—her landmark 1904 muckraking exposé that directly contributed to the dismemberment of a corporate behemoth and the public downfall of an industry titan—is a fraught subject. In one version of the investigation’s origin story, the account preferred by John D. Rockefeller sympathists, Tarbell was the vengeful daughter of a dying oil producer cast down in the world by Standard Oil, whose formative years in the derrick-studded towns of the Pennsylvania oil fields primed her for a reckoning. Her father’s tragedies doomed her objectivity, compromised her methods, and compelled her to render a portrait of Rockefeller that his biographer Ron Chernow characterized as “evil incarnate.” To many of Tarbell’s biographers, however, the choice to investigate Standard Oil was more practical. Samuel McClure, Tarbell’s employer and owner of McClure’s Magazine, believed that monopolies were the “red-hot” subject of the time. Tarbell had earned her reputation, and McClure’s Magazine readers, from biographies of powerful, almost unknowable men. A similar treatment of Rockefeller would play to Tarbell’s skills and her working knowledge of the oil industry, while simultaneously capitalizing on the nation’s antitrust fervor. The truth of her motives, perhaps, lies somewhere in between. Tarbell, a tidy list-maker and careful researcher, set to the task before her with dispassion and coolness. She did not see herself as a crusader; her aim was only to “give a notion of the process by which a particular industry passed from the control of the many to that of the few.” Nevertheless, she was “always informed by indignation that throbbed just below the surface,” Chernow wrote. Tarbell saw firsthand the emergence of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, and her family did indeed suffer from its insatiable appetite. She was born in 1857 in pastoral Hatch Hollow, Pennsylvania, and her father soon moved the family to Cherry Run during the great oil rush, where one estimate counted at least twenty-five oil wells per acre of land. A traveler wrote of their new home, “No one lives amid this sea of oil but those who are making money … Men think of oil, talk of oil, dream of oil; the smell and taste of oil predominate all they eat and drink; they breathe an atmosphere of oil-gas and the clamor of ‘ile, ile, ile’ rings in one’s ears from daylight until midnight.” Franklin Tarbell, Ida’s father, attached his fortunes to the oil business—first as a carpenter constructing storage barrels, then as an oil producer with partnership in a small company. Franklin’s successes allowed the Tarbells to relocate to Titusville in 1870, away from the muck of the oil camps, where business took place not through drills and derricks but the magic of rail as the region’s precious cargo went forth to fuel the coming of the new century. The railroad, once a blessing, soon became a curse for men like Franklin Tarbell. In 1871, the owners of the Erie, Central, and Pennsylvania railroads struck a deal with Rockefeller, who had established Standard Oil the year prior, to skyrocket oil freight prices and bully small producers into joining his joint venture, the South Improvement Company, which offered members steep transportation discounts and rebates. Franklin, along with most Titusville producers, refused to join. Their organized actions, which included protests and violent unrest, got results. The Southern Improvement Company ceased operations in 1872, but its defeat was only a fleeting setback in the development of Rockefeller’s oil empire. By the end of the decade, Standard Oil controlled over ninety percent of oil production in the United States. Tarbell later wrote of coming of age during the oil wars that “In that fine fight, there was born in me a hatred of privilege.” Rockefeller and those who formed the upper echelons of his empire presented themselves as canny businessmen who unapologetically exploited legal loopholes and the vagueness of regulation for the mutual benefit of both consumers and producers. It was well-known, for example, that operating as a trust allowed Rockefeller to proceed with the normally forbidden practice of uniting his companies across state lines. To call these companies “his” might actually be misleading; they were often formed from the remnants of small businesses unable to compete with Standard Oil’s growing monopoly. Rockefeller and his associates would admit to ruthlessness, but never dishonesty. Staying one-step ahead of the law required a healthy respect for it, they argued. The passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 proved only a minor inconvenience for Rockefeller. The law was ambiguous, leaving interpretation in the hands of pro-business courts, and the government lost the majority of its first cases. In some respects, the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act may have accelerated the growth of monopolies as business leaders observed lax enforcement. The majority of trusts, for example, were formed in the decade after the passage of the act. But all that was little concern to Tarbell in the moment. A curious obsession with the French Revolution had tempted her to Paris in 1890. After an unenjoyable stint as a teacher in Ohio led her to try her hand as an assistant editor for Chautauquan magazine back home, Tarbell set off to France. In Paris, she met future associate Samuel McClure, a hyperactive editor eager to start a publication that could tap into the public’s enthusiasm for sensational, scandal-filled journalism and redirect it to more enlightened topics. Tarbell’s work for McClure’s Magazine made her famous. She perfected her brand of investigative journalism by first writing character studies of great change-makers: her serialized profiles of Napoleon and Lincoln marry historical fact and gentle speculation. One reporter called McClure’s circle the “most stimulating, yes intoxicating, editorial atmosphere then existent in America—or anywhere else!” Rockefeller and Standard Oil, though, would prove to be far more controversial subjects. Her father tried to warn her off the assignment—“Don’t do it Ida—they will ruin the magazine,” he wrote to her—but at the start she didn’t believe her investigation would uncover anything more nefarious that a common tale of greedy businessmen. Villains, to be sure, but doubtful criminals. Nor did she believe the story would attract wide readership. Who would want to read about the day-to-day operations of a large corporation? Tarbell was wrong on both counts. Standard Oil’s business practices were more ruthless than she had ever thought possible, and in her telling they became a page-turning tale of coercion, deception, and hubris. The key ingredient for Tarbell’s success came from her unprecedented access to primary source material. Tarbell described her novel approach to a research assistant she hoped to hire: “…the work we have in mind is a narrative history of the Standard Oil Company. I am to do it, and I shall go about it as I would any piece of historical work in which I had to draw almost entirely from original sources. It is in no sense a piece of economic work, nor is it intended to be
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