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Standard Oil executives reacted, as always, by denigrating such measures as transparent harassment by their business enemies. Frank sent a letter to John saying that he was “not sure as to who the instigators are but believe Cleveland refiners have a hand in it” and conjectured that Watson was feeding off information from John Sherman. In rebutting the charges, Standard’s attorney, Samuel C. T. Dodd, offered the same legal fig leaf that the combine had exploited for years: that Ohio Standard shares had been transferred by individual stockholders, not the company itself, to its New York trustees. By now, the ruse was wearing thin.
Names: Frank Rockefeller · Samuel C. T. Dodd · Standard Oil · Standard Oil of Ohio · Cleveland · New York · John Sherman · Watson · John
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Ironically, this sortie against Standard Oil came in a conservative, industrial state where its influence was pervasive. As a rock-ribbed Republican contributor, Rockefeller felt betrayed by such ingratitude and protested to a Cleveland friend that “we have not received fair treatment from the Republican party.” Never one to mince words, Mark Hanna, the party kingpin, sent a strongly worded message to Watson, telling him that “the Standard Oil Company is officered and managed by some of the best and strongest men in the country. They are pretty much all Republicans and have been most liberal in their contributions to the party, as I personally know, Mr. Rockefeller always quietly doing his share.” Although Hanna urged him to drop the suit, Watson would not relent. While Rockefeller blandly denied knowledge of Hanna’s action, his memory was conveniently faulty, for on April 7, 1891, Hanna had written to him, “I caught our distinguished Attorney General Watson here the other day and gave him a piece of my mind.” Watson’s successor, Frank Monnett, alleged that on six occasions Watson was offered bribes to terminate the case—in one instance as much as $100,000 in cash—but Monnett never provided corroborating evidence, perhaps fearing Standard Oil reprisals against his sources.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mark Hanna · Frank S. Monnett · Standard Oil · Cleveland · Watson · Republican Party
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
Such intimidation, if it did occur, only stiffened Watson’s resistance to pressure. On March 2, 1892, he won a famous victory when the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil of Ohio was indeed controlled by trustees at 26 Broadway and had to renounce the trust agreement. The trust was also accused of trying to monopolize every phase of the petroleum business. One enterprising reporter who rushed to 26 Broadway was assured that the decision would in no way affect the trust. When a reporter showed up on Samuel Dodd’s doorstep, the Standard counsel was a model of urbanity: “The [trust] agreements were not really necessary,” he said. “They were simply made as a matter of conscience. The only effect of the decision will be to inconvenience us a little.”
Names: Samuel C. T. Dodd · Standard Oil · Standard Oil of Ohio · 26 Broadway · Watson · Ohio Supreme Court
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This insouciance was only partly studied. In responding to legal challenges, the combine had reconstituted itself many times, like some mythical, protean creature that could metamorphose into infinite shapes to elude lawmakers. For several years, Dodd and Rockefeller had studied possible responses in case the trust had to be dissolved in an antitrust suit. They had taken note of an 1889 New Jersey law that permitted corporations resident in the state to hold stock in other corporations. This revolutionary development opened the possibility of forming holding companies that could operate nationwide and provided a critical escape hatch for embattled trusts. As a result, Standard Oil calmly greeted the 1892 Ohio decision less as a mortal threat than an opportunity for a long-overdue reorganization.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel C. T. Dodd · Standard Oil · Ohio · New Jersey
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For several days, Standard executives tried to figure out how best to comply with the ruling. Their minds were focused by the knowledge that if they didn’t act, the New York attorney general was poised to file antitrust papers. On March 10, 1892, one week after the Ohio decision, Samuel Dodd announced that the trust would be dissolved. The next day, a mailing went out to all holders of Standard Oil trust certificates, summoning them to a March 21 meeting and inviting them to exchange their certificates for proportionate shares of twenty constituent companies. The distribution of power, money, and dividends within the Standard Oil empire would remain exactly the same, a deft maneuver that would be copied by other corporations harried by antitrust laws.
Names: Samuel C. T. Dodd · Standard Oil · New York · Ohio
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As the holder of 256,854 of 972,500 outstanding shares of the Standard Oil trust, John D. Rockefeller chaired the March 21 meeting. Even though 300 people were jammed into a room designed to hold only 200, the stage-managed event was brief and businesslike; the unanimous vote to dissolve the trust was a foregone conclusion. Though designated one of eight liquidating trustees, Rockefeller had just recuperated from the breakdown in his health and wanted to transfer the burden of reorganization to his colleagues. He was spared a terrible ordeal, since the liquidation proved highly contentious. Small shareholders balked at trading in trust certificates for fractional shares that paid no dividends and could not be redeemed in any secondary market. In the eyes of Standard’s detractors, the exchange dragged on for a suspiciously long time.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil
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Aided by changes in New Jersey’s incorporation law, Standard Oil of New Jersey took on a unique status in the transformed company. Renamed Standard Oil (New Jersey), it bought in whole or in part huge blocks of stock in the other Standard companies and thus legally held stock in properties from coast to coast, functioning as both an operating and holding company. Standard of New York also attained new status in a reorganization that initiated the seven-year period of the so-called Standard Oil Interests.
Names: Standard Oil · Standard Oil of New Jersey · Standard Oil of New York · New Jersey · Standard Oil Interests
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The 1892 overhaul was mostly shadow play, a charade to appease the courts. The executive committee at 26 Broadway was formally dissolved, but the members lost only their titles and were soon converted, by the nicest legal cunning, into the presidents of twenty affiliated companies. In Standard parlance, these men were now the “gentlemen upstairs” or the “gentlemen in Room 1400.” Nobody had to switch seats at the lunch table, and Rockefeller and his coterie ruled as absolutely as before. Seventeen individual stockholders—almost all Standard Oil executives or family members—controlled a majority of stock in the twenty companies and elected their directors. This legal legerdemain again frustrated lawmakers who felt that the combine was so vast, slippery, and elusive that it could never be tamed or held accountable.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · 26 Broadway
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Standard Oil executives saw the major threat to the company in 1892 as the aging of their leadership. The organization was still piloted by the same sturdy souls who had steered it since the 1870s and were now beginning to die off or retire. The alarm bells must have sounded when Rockefeller sought retirement, a decision postponed temporarily by the economic crisis of 1893. The panic showed him functioning less as a Standard Oil executive than as a sovereign power, endowed with resources rivaling those of government. He continued, however, to operate in the shadows, a spectral figure whose presence was mostly felt, not seen.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil
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The depression heralded by the June 1893 stock-market crash was one of such excruciating length, such grinding and unrelieved misery, that economic historians labeled it the Great Depression until that title was usurped in the 1930s. During the troubled summer of 1893, the Erie and Northern Pacific railroads failed, followed by many others bloated with debt and riddled with fraud. Mass unemployment across the nation sharpened class tensions. During the sanguinary clash a year earlier at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel mill, Henry Clay Frick had ordered Pinkerton detectives to fire at workers—a step that drew a rousing congratulatory telegram from John D. Such corporate truculence provoked calls by the new Populist Party for a graduated income tax, government ownership of railroad and telegraph companies, and tougher safeguards for trade unions. Rockefeller stood high on the list of bogeymen regularly berated by Populists, and legend has it that he began to sleep with a revolver by his bed. As the country grew more polarized, many people wondered whether America had paid too dear a price for the industrialization that had so quickly propelled it from an agrarian society to a world economic power.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry Clay Frick · United States · Great Depression · Pennsylvania · Erie · Pinkerton detectives · Northern Pacific · Homestead · Populist Party · Populists
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By early 1894, the slump had toppled six hundred shaky banks, and an almost palpable threat of insurrection hovered in the air, prompting financial writer Alexander Dana Noyes to observe that “there were periods when industrial unrest seemed to assume the proportions of anarchy.” In the spring of 1894, General Jacob Coxey of Ohio led his bedraggled Army of the Commonwealth of Christ in a doomed march on Washington to entreat Congress for legislative relief. Two months later, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company struck to reverse massive layoffs and wage cuts, triggering a sympathy strike by the American Railway Union under Eugene V. Debs. When President Cleveland sent troops to Chicago, Debs was jailed, and seven strikers were gunned down. All the pent-up frustrations produced by the accelerated change of the late nineteenth century were vented in spontaneous, often violent dissent.
Names: Cleveland · Chicago · Jacob Coxey · Eugene V. Debs · Alexander Dana Noyes · Ohio · Washington · Army · Commonwealth of Christ · Pullman Palace Car Company · American Railway Union · Debs
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To the dismay of critics, Standard Oil and other trusts fared quite well during the prolonged downturn. Demand for illuminating oil and lubricants—now necessities of life—remained healthy, leading Standard Oil to prosper amid the general austerity. Meanwhile, a new source of future profits beckoned in the middle distance. In the early 1880s, Gottlieb Daimler strapped light gasoline engines onto bicycles, tricycles, and other vehicles, experiments that culminated in the motorcar, while another German inventor, Karl Benz, patented a three-wheeled automobile with a single-cylinder engine in 1886. In 1892, the Duryea brothers were tinkering with their first automobile. Recognizing a fantastic market in the offing, Standard Oil sent a representative to attend the test of a new gasoline engine for a streetcar motor. The next year, Henry Ford tested a two-cylinder auto that sped along at thirty miles an hour, resuscitating fears that existing oil supplies might fall short of needs—an anxiety somewhat assuaged by oil discoveries in Los Angeles and elsewhere in California in the 1890s. So remarkable was this West Coast boom that it soon furnished more oil than the old Pennsylvania and Ohio fields that had formed the basis of Rockefeller’s wealth. The advent of the automobile was a godsend for Standard Oil, for the more lightbulbs shone across America, the more kerosene was relegated to remote rural areas without access to electric power.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · United States · Karl Benz · Gottlieb Daimler · Henry Ford · Ohio · Pennsylvania · California · Los Angeles · West Coast · Duryea
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Standard Oil again benefited from hard times to extend its powerful reach. For several years, the trust had watched the exploits of Pittsburgh’s Mellon family with apprehension, and Archbold was under strict orders from Rockefeller to grab any of their oil properties that came on the market. As the Mellons emerged as a worrisome threat in the export market, Rockefeller feared they might strike an alliance with the French Rothschilds. In August 1895, having borrowed heavily against Pittsburgh real estate to build their budding oil empire, the Mellons were forced to sell their Crescent Pipe Line Company and other properties to Standard—a huge windfall that yielded 14,000 acres and 135 producing wells. It now seemed that Standard Oil owned the entire industry, lock, stock, and barrel. When the Geodetic Association announced plans to measure the earth, the World opined that the information would “enable the Standard Oil Trust and other trusts to learn the exact size of their property.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · Standard Oil · Rothschild family · Pittsburgh · World · Mellon · Mellons · Crescent Pipe Line Company · Geodetic Association
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Soon thereafter, to everyone’s amazement, the independents, after so many hapless drubbings, rallied one last time and made a successful run at the trust. Through a new company, the Producers’ and Refiners’ Oil Company, a thousand well owners agreed to supply crude oil to fifteen independent refineries, linked by a new network of local pipelines. In the fall of 1892, that perennial Standard scourge, Lewis Emery, Jr., had organized United States Pipe Line, which now promised to give the rebels a vital pipeline to the seaboard. To lay the pipe, Emery’s men had to ward off savage harassment from the railroads; locomotives would roar by and douse them with scalding steam, boiling water, and glowing coals. Despite these obstructive tactics, independent oil began to flow in 1893. Shifting tactics, the trust then engineered a steep decline in kerosene prices—no mean trick in a period of rising crude prices. Squeezed by dwindling profit margins, three large independent refineries finally submitted to the trust’s suzerainty, but the Producers’ and Refiners’ Oil Company miraculously survived. In 1895, emboldened by a new sense of Rockefeller’s vulnerability, thirty independent refiners coalesced into the Pure Oil Company—the first enduring domestic competitor of Standard Oil. To preserve their autonomy, they sequestered half their voting stock in the hands of five men eternally sworn to keep it free of Standard influence. Thus, several years before federal trustbusters mobilized to smash the Rockefeller monopoly, serious competition had already taken root in the marketplace.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Lewis Emery, Jr. · Standard Oil · Pure Oil Company · Refiners’ Oil Company · United States Pipe Line
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Despite this setback, Rockefeller was not hurting in the 1890s. There was now a self-perpetuating quality to his wealth. Whether he was gardening, eating, or just lying in bed, his prolific savings quietly grew around the clock. He was receiving about $3 million yearly in Standard Oil dividends (more than $50 million in 1996 dollars) and redirecting that into a vast portfolio of outside investments that made him a one-man holding company. With $24 million now invested outside the oil and gas business, he held sizable stakes in 16 railroad companies, 9 real-estate firms, 6 steel companies, 6 steamship companies, 9 banks and financial houses, and even 2 orange groves.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil
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The oil trust’s resilience during the depression of the 1890s, its tested immunity from market fluctuations, cheered Rockefeller, who attributed this to Standard’s large cash reserves and conservative dividend policy. The panic seemed to offer irrefutable proof to Rockefeller that cooperation was superior to the vagaries of cutthroat competition. It certainly allowed him the luxury of a benevolent paternalism at a time of labor strife in other industries. “We held things together so steady that our fortunate laboring men got their pay, though in other concerns many of them were compelled to go, and without bread,” he later told William O. Inglis. “It was a matter of congratulation with us that we could look into the happy faces of our workmen in these perilous times and hand them the wages they had earned.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William O. Inglis · Standard Oil
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Since the early 1880s, Standard Oil had been self-financing, very liquid at all times, and free from the thrall of Wall Street bankers. As a result, no other industrial corporation was so fearless or independent. It was one of Rockefeller’s proudest boasts that unlike other trusts, he had not needed a J. P. Morgan to forge his combine. Standard Oil anticipated a major feature of the twentieth-century economy: the tendency of sophisticated, cash-rich corporations to outgrow their traditional bankers and become financial-service giants in their own rights. As journalist John Moody perceptively wrote, “The Standard Oil Trust was really a bank of the most gigantic character—a bank within an industry, financing this industry against all competition and continually lending vast sums of money to needy borrowers on high class collateral, just as the other great banks were doing.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · J. P. Morgan · Standard Oil · John Moody · Wall Street
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It was Standard Oil of New York that functioned as the main banker for the affiliated companies, governing what was arguably the most stupendous cash flow ever produced in American industry. To maximize its leverage over Wall Street, it scattered its gigantic balances among many banks; a single Standard Oil entity, the National Transit Company, sometimes kept as much as $40 million on deposit. Standard Oil of New York also made large loans to banks, brokerage houses, railroads, and steel companies. So rich in cash, Standard Oil wielded a make-or-break power over Wall Street houses, which defied it at their peril. Standard directors often took out prodigious loans from the trust. On the eve of the 1893 panic, John D. had a $1.36 million loan outstanding while brother William owed $865,000.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Standard Oil of New York · National Transit Company · Wall Street · Uncle William
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As president of New York Standard, William Rockefeller parlayed his position into one of exceptional prominence on Wall Street. For John, the street might be a sinful haunt, but it had its own sulfurous charms for William. In 1884, while they both served as directors of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, William had met James Stillman, the youngest director of National City Bank. In an inspired move, Stillman recruited William as a director. By the time Stillman became the bank’s president in 1891, National City had been so enriched by the Standard Oil bounty that it was nicknamed the Oil Bank.
Names: William Rockefeller · James Stillman · Standard Oil · National City Bank · Standard Oil of New York · Chicago · National City · Milwaukee · St. Paul Railroad · Oil Bank · Wall Street · Uncle William · John
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When the 1893 panic struck, John D. was just emerging from the seclusion occasioned by his medical problems. He raced back to New York from Cleveland to orchestrate a massive salvage operation. In the course of the panic, he provided almost $6 million to fifty-eight individuals and firms who were turned down by banks and desperately needed his intervention. To bail out these borrowers, Rockefeller had to borrow almost $4 million, and nearly $3 million of that came from Standard of New York. This was a tricky balancing act, since he was borrowing on the collateral of securities then collapsing in value. In October 1893, the Standard Oil treasurer, William T. Wardwell, having decided that Rockefeller had reached the permissible limit, did the unthinkable: He shut down the lending window on the company founder. A stupefied George Rogers relayed this verdict to his boss: “He has refused to give me any more money, because he had no assurance of getting it back when he wanted.” After frantic negotiations, Wardwell boosted Rockefeller’s credit line to $2.8 million in exchange for a lien on his quarterly dividend of $775,000 from Standard Oil stock. Some of Rockefeller’s letters reflect tragicomic confusion as he struggled to collect loans from debtors in order to pay off his own debt to Standard Oil. In early September, he wrote to Cettie from New York that he had settled his debts, with $550,000 to spare. “We are steadily emerging from the panic, but I hope never to go through with another such experience.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Standard Oil · Standard Oil of New York · George D. Rogers · Cleveland · New York · William T. Wardwell
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When it came to old friends, his generosity could be dazzling. When Captain Vandergrift telegraphed from Pittsburgh that a trust company he directed stood in mortal peril, Rockefeller telegraphed promptly, “How much do you want?” “One million dollars,” came the response to which Rockefeller replied, “Check for one million is on the way.” But he was so inundated with pleas that many more people were spurned than saved, generating unavoidable bitterness. Frederick T. Gates referred to these painful quandaries in an October 1893 letter: “I have today on my desk urgent imperative appeals to save old friends [of Mr. Rockefeller’s] amounting to many hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have incurred the enmity of many important business enterprises because I have had to decline to assist them in the last few days.” More than one person who was refused later accused Rockefeller of having ruined him.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Jacob J. Vandergrift · Frederick T. Gates · Pittsburgh
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During the panic, Rockefeller awakened to the public responsibilities attending great wealth. Having long been reflexively hostile to government, he now found himself cooperating with Washington to calm the jitters in financial markets. In 1894, the U.S. Treasury, alarmed by the outflow of gold that legally backed the gold standard, turned to J. P. Morgan for a rescue operation. After telling John G. Carlisle, the Treasury secretary, that this was impossible, Morgan conferred hastily with Stillman—a measure of Stillman’s new stature on Wall Street. “He was greatly upset and overcharged,” recalled Stillman, “nearly wept, put his head in his hands and cried: ‘They expect the impossible!’ So I calmed him down and told him to give me an hour and by that time I cabled for ten millions from Europe for the Standard Oil and ten more from other resources.” When Stillman walked into Morgan’s office to report the $20 million, Morgan grew giddy and triumphant. “He took the pose of savior of his country and assumed all the credit,” Stillman observed archly, crediting the real success to himself and Standard Oil. “But then you see, he is a poet; Morgan is a poet.” Rockefeller never claimed credit for his action and preferred no publicity.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · James Stillman · J. P. Morgan · Standard Oil · Europe · Washington · U.S. Treasury · Treasury · John G. Carlisle · Wall Street
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Stillman’s behavior during the panic had a deleterious effect on his relationship with Rockefeller, who had given him $5 million amid multiple demands. Rockefeller believed that the crafty Stillman had not only held his money longer than necessary but employed it to buy stocks at bargain prices instead of using it to shore up his bank. Under any circumstance, Rockefeller would have been critical of an alliance between Standard Oil and a Wall Street bank, but after the 1893 panic his disenchantment with Stillman gave him extra misgivings about William’s policy of placing large balances in his bank. One of Rockefeller’s financial advisers, Henry E. Cooper, indignantly told him, “You ought to get after him hard!” “No, Mr. Cooper, we will do nothing,” said Rockefeller evenly. “But we shall not forget it!”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · James Stillman · Standard Oil · Henry E. Cooper · Cooper · Wall Street · Uncle William
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In November 1887, as he listened to Rockefeller testify before the new Interstate Commerce Commission, Henry Demarest Lloyd saw the witness as the prince of darkness, evil incarnate. Afterward, he furiously scribbled notes that he headed “Fanatic Standard Oil,” and had this to say about Rockefeller:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Standard Oil · Interstate Commerce Commission
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He is … a depredator … not a worshipper of liberty … a Czar of plutocracy, a worshipper of his own Money Power over mankind. He will never sacrifice any of his plans for the restraints of law or patriotism or philanthropy.… His greed, rapacity, flow as a Universal solvent wherever they can, melting down into gold for him, private enterprise, public morals, judicial honor, legislative faith, gifts of nature. He will stop when he is stopped—not before. Not a tiger but a lynx … a make-up like that of the “gentleman pirate” of romance, think cold ruthless.
Names: Money Power
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Convinced that Standard Oil was the archetypal trust, Lloyd embarked on a book-length study two years later, and by the time Wealth Against Commonwealth appeared in 1894, he was sure that the public was ripe for his revelations. As he wrote on the eve of publication, “the sky seems full of signs that the time for the appearance of such information has come.”
Names: Henry Demarest Lloyd · Standard Oil · Wealth Against Commonwealth
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Known as “the Millionaire Socialist,” the natty Lloyd had longish hair, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a flowing mustache, which gave him a vaguely artistic air. Among his friends he included Clarence Darrow, Jane Addams, Eugene Debs, and Booker T. Washington. He was toasted by many literary figures, and Robert Louis Stevenson called him a “very capable, clever fellow,” asserting that “he writes the most workmanlike article of any man known to me in America.” A foppish reformer, Lloyd attended trade-union meetings wearing pince-nez on a gold chain, a gray top hat, and glossily polished boots. When he supported anarchists blamed for the Haymarket Square riot in Chicago in 1886, his outraged father-in-law, a co-owner of the Chicago Tribune, disinherited him and placed his estate in trust for Lloyd’s children. To maintain his existence as a dapper millionaire and literary troubadour for radical causes, Lloyd relied on his wife’s income.
Names: Henry Demarest Lloyd · Booker T. Washington · Chicago · United States · Robert Louis Stevenson · Chicago Tribune · Millionaire Socialist · Clarence Darrow · Jane Addams · Eugene Debs · Haymarket Square
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Lloyd’s politics became more radical over time. With a messianic outlook, he had promiscuous sympathy for every crusade. Starting out as a free-market liberal, he then turned to socialism, trade unions, worker cooperatives, and utopian communities. He once referred to himself as “a socialist-anarchist-communist-individualist-collectivist-cooperative-aristocratic-democrat”—and that was just for starters. Scarcely a cause in the Progressive panoply—from attacking tariffs to favoring municipal ownership of utilities to combating sweatshops—escaped his wide-ranging vision. Like Karl Marx, he believed in the inevitable collapse of capitalism, which he thought corrupt and predatory. Also like Marx, he imagined that competition led to monopoly—a welcome step since it was “a necessary and indubitable step toward national and international cooperation.”
Names: Henry Demarest Lloyd · Karl Marx · Progressive
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Lloyd returned to Standard Oil—the subject of his 1881 story in the Atlantic Monthly—for several reasons. Dismayed by the failure of the Sherman law to curb monopolies, he ridiculed it as “The Anti-Trades Union Law,” a mere ruse perpetrated by “a world-wide concert of action of a money power, crazy with greed, and fanatical to the hilt, to re-enslave the working people.” He could also now draw upon a wide body of material churned up by government investigations against Standard Oil. Drawing on a small army of Rockefeller haters, including George Rice, Lewis Emery, and Roger Sherman, he gathered court records and trial transcripts, which he stuffed into pigeonholes at his home in Winnetka, outside Chicago. When one acquaintance visited him there, Lloyd told him, “I will prove that John D. Rockefeller is the most selfish usurper that ever lived.” With Dostoyevskian passion, he filled notebooks with flaming diatribes against the American plutocracy, describing the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts as members of a “cruel, selfish, carnivorous, short-sighted herd.” The lists of sensational titles he compiled for his Standard Oil book—including Slime in Genesis, Fountains of Pitch, and Barbarians of Business—said as much about his overheated imagination as they did about the trust. In fact, Lloyd spouted so much fustian that it made it easy for businessmen to dismiss him despite his often accurate insights.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry Demarest Lloyd · George Rice · Lewis Emery, Jr. · Standard Oil · Rockefeller family · Chicago · Roger Sherman · Sherman · Union · Atlantic Monthly · Vanderbilts · Winnetka · Barbarians of Business
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Wealth Against Commonwealth had no kind words to spare for Standard Oil. Lloyd marshaled every wispy allegation made against the trust and printed it as gospel truth. Where Ida Tarbell later portrayed Rockefeller and his cohorts as superb if immoral businessmen, Lloyd presented them as brazen criminals who owed everything to diabolical deeds. Later on, speaking privately of the “criminal character” of the Standard Oil executives, he insisted that they “ought to be in the penitentiary.” Like his Atlantic Monthly piece, his book was chockablock with errors and egregious misrepresentations—for instance, he described the Rothschilds as Standard Oil’s agents abroad. Accusing Rockefeller of rigging artificial shortages to drive up kerosene prices, Lloyd failed to see that the trust maintained its dominance by keeping prices low and selectively engaging in predatory pricing. He ennobled any businessman, however greedy or inept, who opposed Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Standard Oil · Rothschild family · Wealth Against Commonwealth · Atlantic Monthly
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Yet for all its weaknesses, the book had a profound and lasting impact and ranks as a classic of muckraking literature. Lloyd was a superb stylist whose mellifluous prose captivated readers. Every paragraph was a call to arms. Whatever the holes in his argument, he gave a clear, intelligent shape to a complex story, especially when it came to the importance of railroad rebates in the rise of Standard Oil. When he argued that the South Improvement Company never died but became Rockefeller’s master blueprint, he laid down a line of argument followed by Ida Tarbell. What also gave the book its force was Lloyd’s political message: “Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.” As the trusts’ power rippled through society, he said, it corrupted every corner of American life. The noble experiment of American democracy was being undermined by businessmen who had grown more powerful than the state and controlled its elected representatives. “Our system, so fair in its theory and so fertile in its happiness and prosperity in its first century, is now, following the fate of systems, becoming artificial, technical, corrupt.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Standard Oil · South Improvement Company
EPUB paragraph 34 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
In Wealth Against Commonwealth, Lloyd omitted all names, even though Rockefeller, Flagler, and others were all too recognizable. Standard Oil was never mentioned and was usually referred to as the “oil combination” or some other euphemism. This technique protected Lloyd from libel prosecution, though he fell back upon a highfalutin explanation for it. “It seems of the highest importance that the book should retain its character of an illustration of the motives and results of our commercial civilization, not an attack on a particular corporation or body of men.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry M. Flagler · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Standard Oil · Wealth Against Commonwealth
Source: Ron Chernow, Titan. Names and relationships retain the full atlas’s extraction limits. Map points are references; historical sites and regions can be approximate. Open the full interactive atlas.