ARSON AND ESPIONAGE We will now pass to a few examples of the resort to open violence for the attainment of the Trust's ends. The Tide water Pipe Line was started by Lombard, Ayres & Co., New York refiners, and others, on the publication of the Rutter circular ; and Mr. Rockefeller offered at first to buy them out —pipes, refineries, and refused finally to give the price of $15,000,000 they asked. The Standard's next move was the purchase of a certain minority of the shares in the Tide water Company. On January 17, 1883, the Standard stockholders held a hugger-mugger meeting at the Tidewater office in Titusville, without notifying the stockholders generally, voted the turning over of the control to Standard Oil interests, and took possession of the office in the name of that Company. The president of the Tidewater, however, who had been absent in New York, met this attempt by another equally determined. He carried the office by surprise, barricaded it, and kept forcible possession till a suit could be brought to declare the meeting void, which was legally accom plished. Previously to this all sorts of material obstacles had been put in the way of the Tide water pipe getting to the sea ; the railroads constantly opposed the Company's obtaining a right of way, and mysterious individuals obviously representing Standard interests constantly cropped up along the proposed route, acquiring exclusive rights over strips of land running at right angles to the pro posed right of way, some of these tiny ribbons of land being forty miles long. Finally, the Tidewater Pipe Line became a Standard Oil tentacle.
In _ the case of the United States Pipe Line— organised by the independent oil producers and not to be confused with the United Pipe Lines, which were always a Rockefeller organisation —it has been clearly shown that the Standard Oil Company's representatives have resorted to similar means of obstruction. Physical force was used on several occasions, a notable instance being that of the crossing of the Delaware River at Hancock under the Erie Railroad bridge in 1893. Erie interests as such were in no wise affected by the crossing, and the president of the Erie road, after a conference with Mr. Emery, manager of the United States Pipe Line, had informed him that there would be no objection to going under the bridge, and even sent his own engineer to Hancock to make arrangements for the exact location of the pipe. When the con
nection from both sides of the river was about to be made, however, the railroad company ran up two engines and " wrecking cars," with about seventy-five men, and placed inflammable mate rial over the ends of the pipe lines, so that on any attempt to connect they would be so heated that connection would become impossible. The spot was beleaguered by the hostile forces of the railroad and the pipe line company for three months, when the latter abandoned the route and set its pipes seventy miles back to a place called Athens, Pa. The case for the United States Government in the Missouri prosecution The obstruction came in part directly from the agents of the Standard Oil Company and partly from the railroads, but there is every reason to believe that the railroads were acting in the interests of the Standard Oil Company, as their own interests would scarcely be injured by the pipe line, and as they had (so far as the evidence shows) never opposed the construction of pipe lines by the Standard Oil Company.
I select another case from the year 1895, when the United States Pipe Line was getting in through the State of New Jersey to New York harbour. The account of it may be best given in the words of the United States Attorney General's brief in the Missouri case :— When the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad was reached at Washington, N.J., serious opposition was again encountered. The pipe line bought the fee simple title to land at a point where there was a culvert in the railroad and placed a pipe through this culvert, and put a force of men in charge. The next day two locomotives, a wrecker, and 150 men attempted by force to eject the employees of the pipe line from their position and to tear up the pipes. A hand-to-hand fight ensued, and finally an agreement was reached by which the matter was taken into Court. Mr. Emery testifies that some of the same men who opposed the passage of the pipe under the tracks of the Erie Railroad at Hancock, N.Y., some two years before, were also among the representatives of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad in the trouble at Washington, N.J. After a delay of six months the lower Court decided in favour of the right of the pipe line to cross the tracks.