Ida Tarbell

“ As a matter of fact, the Standard's ability to cut off crude supplies from the outside refiners is much greater than in the days before the Interstate Commerce Bill, when it depended on its alliance with the railroads to prevent its rival getting oil. It goes without saying that this is an absurd power to allow in the hands of any manufacturer of a great necessity of life. It is exactly as if one corporation aiming at manufacturing all the flour of the country owned all but ten per cent. ”

“ If they get special privileges they must expect their competitors to struggle to get them. If they will find it more profitable to buy out a refinery than to let it live, they must expect the owner to get an extortionate price if he can. And when they complain of these practices and call them blackmail, they show thin sporting blood. They must not expect to monopolise hard dealings, if they do oil.
These are considerations of the ethical effect of such business practices on those outside and in competition. As for those within the organisation there is one obvious effect worth noting. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are practices required which corrupt every man who has a hand in them. One of the most deplorable things about it is that most of the work is done by youngsters. The freight clerk who reports the independent oil shipments for a fee of five or ten dollars a month is probably a young man, learning his first lessons in corporate morality. If he happens to sit in Mr. Rockefeller's church on Sundays, through what sort of a haze will he receive the teachings? ”

“ The notion that the business man must not appear in politics and religion save as a "stand-patter"—not even as a thinking, aggressive force—is demoralising, intellectually and morally. Ever since 1872 the organisation has appeared in politics only to oppose legislation obviously for the public good. At that time the oil industry was young, only twelve years old, and it was suffering from too rapid growth, from speculation, from rapacity of railroads, but it was struggling manfully with all these questions. ”

“ Rockefeller applied the fruitful idea of the South Improvement Company to the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, a prosperous oil refinery of Cleveland, with a capital of $1,000,000 and a daily capacity for handling 1,500 barrels of crude oil. And what have we as a result? What is the Standard Oil Company to-day? First, what is its organisation? It is no longer a trust. ”

“ There is something alarming to those who believe that commerce should be a peaceful pursuit, and who believe that the moral law holds good throughout the entire range of human relations, in knowing that so large a body of young men in this country are consciously or unconsciously growing up with the idea that business is war and that morals have nothing to do with its practice. ”

“ 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: "Well, if they won't let us alone, we'll make them pay a good price." The Standard complains that such men build simply to sell out. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All, or nearly all, of the refined oil sold by the Standard Oil Company through the Mississippi Valley and the West is manufactured at Whiting, Indiana, close to Chicago, and is shipped on Chicago rates. There are no important independent oil works at Chicago. Now at Cleveland, Ohio, there are independent refiners and jobbers contending for the market of the Mississippi Valley. See how prettily it is managed. The rates between the two Northern cities and New Orleans in the case of nearly all commodities is about two cents per hundred pounds in favour of Chicago. ”

“ They will go into banking, and we have the National City Bank and its allied institutions in New York City and Boston, as well as a long chain running over the country. No one who has followed this history can expect these holdings will be acquired on a rising market. Buy cheap and sell high is a rule of business, and when you control enough money and enough banks you can always manage that a stock you want shall be temporarily cheap. No value is destroyed for you—only for the original owner. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The oil business does not demand it. There is plenty of reserve for all of its ventures. It must go into other industries. Naturally, the interests sought will be allied to oil. They will be gas, and we have the Standard Oil crowd steadily acquiring the gas interests of the country. They will be railroads, for on transportation all industries depend, and, besides, railroads are one of the great consumers of oil products and must be kept in line as buyers. ”

“ The margin between crude and refined was made low by competition. It has rarely been as low as it would have been had there been free competition. For five years even the small independent refineries outside of the Pure Oil Company have been able to make a profit on the prices set by the Standard, and this in spite of the higher transportation they have paid on both crude and refined, and the wall of seclusion the railroads build around domestic markets. ”

“ Rockefeller has had to fight the best sentiment of the oil country and of the country at large as to what is for the public good. He and his colleagues kept a strong alliance in Washington fighting the Interstate Commerce Bill from the time the first one was introduced in 1876 until the final passage in 1887. Every measure looking to the freedom and equalisation of transportation has met his opposition, as have bills for giving greater publicity to the operations of corporations. ”

“ This control can be kept in the domestic markets so long as the Standard can keep under competition as successfully as it has in the past. It can be kept in the foreign market as long as American oils can be made and sold in quantity cheaper than foreign oils. Until a decade ago the foreign market of American oils was not seriously threatened. Since 1895, however, Russia, whose annual output of petroleum had been for a number of years about equal in volume to the American output, learned to make a fairly decent product; more dangerous, she had learned to market. ”

“ Rockefeller's most successful manoeuvres in doing business from the day he scared his twenty Cleveland competitors until they sold to him at half price. You can also sell high, if you have a reputation of a great financier, and control of money and banks. Amalgamated Copper is an excellent example. The names of certain Standard Oil officials would float the most worthless property on earth a few years ago. ”

“ Flour is shipped from Chicago to Atlanta at 34 cents, and from Cleveland at 321⁄2; lumber at 32 and 281⁄2; but Cleveland refiners actually pay 48 cents to Atlanta, while the Standard only pays 45 from Whiting.
There is a curious rule in the Boston and Maine Railroad in regard to petroleum shipments. On all commodities except petroleum, what is known as the Boston rate applies, but oil does not get this. For instance, the Boston rate applies to Salem, Massachusetts, on all traffic except petroleum, and that pays four cents more per 100 pounds to Salem than to Boston. ”

“ Rockefeller formed could enough capital have been obtained to develop the business falls utterly in face of fact. Look at the enormous amounts of capital, a large amount of it speculative, to be sure, which the oil men claim went into their business in the first ten years. It was estimated that Philadelphia alone put over $168,000,000 into the development of the Oil Regions, and New York $134,000,000, in their first decade of the business. ”

“ These privileges are, of course, subject to the laws of the state or country in which the company operates. If it is contrary to the laws of a state for a foreign corporation to hold real estate in its boundaries, a company must be chartered in the state. Its stock, of course, is sold to the New Jersey corporation, so that it amounts to the same thing as far as the ability to do business is concerned. ”

“ If all the country had suffered from these raids on competition, had been the limiting of the business opportunity of a few hundred men and a constant higher price for refined oil, the case would be serious enough, but there is a more serious side to it. The ethical cost of all this is the deep concern. We are a commercial people. ”

“ Its capital was $10,000,000. In June, 1899, this capital of $10,000,000 was increased to one of $110,000,000, and into this new organisation was dumped the entire Standard aggregation. The old trust certificates outstanding and the assignments of legal title which had succeeded them were called in, and for them were given common stock of the new Standard Oil Company. The amount of this stock which had been issued, in January, 1904, when the last report was made, was $97,448,800. Its market value at that date was $643,162,080. How it is divided is of course a matter of private concern. ”

“ 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 rules, receives, we shall have gone a long way toward making commerce a fit pursuit for our young men. ”

“ Rockefeller's capital to develop the Bradford oil fields, build the first seaboard pipe-line, open West Virginia, Texas, or Kansas. The oil business would no more have suffered for lack of capital without the Standard combination than the iron or wheat or railroad or cotton business. ”

“ The railroads argued that they had advanced the rate on barrelled oil because of a decision of the Commission itself—a case of very evident discrimination in favour of barrels. The Commission, however, argued that each case brought before it must stand on its own merits, so different were conditions and practices, and in December, 1892, it gave its decision. ”

“ The figures, unsatisfactory as they are, are ample proof, however, that there was plenty of money in the early days to carry on the oil business. Indeed, there has always been plenty of money for oil investment. ”

“ FEW men in either the political or industrial life of this country can point to an achievement carried out in more exact accord with its first conception than John D. Rockefeller, for both in purpose and methods the Standard Oil Company is and always has been a form of the South Improvement Company, by which Mr. ”

“ An independent refiner of Titusville, Pennsylvania, T. B. Westgate, told the Industrial Commission in 1898 that his concern was barred from shipping their products to nearly all New England and Canadian points by the refusal of the roads to give the same advantages in tariff which other freight was allowed. Mr. ”

“ Dodd, who objected to making the transfer on the ground that it cut the share into a "multitude of almost infinitesimal fractions of corporate shares." They were obviating this difficulty, Mr. Dodd said, by purchasing certificates calling for one or a few shares and uniting them until sufficient were had by one party to call for the issue of full corporate shares. Mr. ”