The principal figures in this great combina tion deserve a passing word of introduction. There is first its founder, its creator, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, who was born on a farm in New York State in 1839. His father, who was of Scottish extraction, moved to Ohio, and in 1855 John Davison Rockefeller went into the town of Cleveland to earn his living as a junior clerk at four dollars a week. He was clever, industrious, steady and frugal, and he went into the produce commission business with a young Englishman named M. B. Clark. In 1862 he met another Englishman, Samuel Andrews, who was a mechanical genius, and had devised improved processes in the infant oil-refining industry. They joined forces ; Andrews looked after the refining and Rocke feller attended to the pushing of the business, the buying and selling. The firm grew and extended at first by legitimate, and then by illegitimate, methods, and now Mr. Rockefeller has convinced himself in his retirement that he has been the agent of Providence, and that his business career entitles him to moralise to Sunday schools and Bible classes. " I hope you young men are all careful. I believe it is a religious duty to get all the money you can ; get it fairly, religiously, and honestly— and give away all you can." So spoke Mr. Rockefeller to his son's Bible class in New York on March 27, 1897, and it gives a com plete picture of his life. The combination of Jekyll and Hyde is well brought out in Miss Ida M. Tarbell's " History of the Standard Oil Company," the ablest investigation ever made of the American activities of this combination. Miss Tarbell says :— Mr. Rockefeller was " good." There was no more faithful Baptist in Cleveland than he. Every enterprise of that Church he had supported liberally from his youth. He gave to its poor. He visited its sick. He was simple and frugal in his habits. He never went to the theatre, never drank wine. He gave much time to the training of his children, seeking to develop in them his own habits of economy and charity. Yet he was willing to strain every nerve to obtain for himself special and unjust privileges from the railroads which were bound to ruin every man in the oil business not sharing them with him. 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.
In a character sketch of Mr. Rockefeller which she contributed to McClure's Magazine in January, 1905, Miss Tarbell tells this story :— Even in his own Church men say, "He's a good Baptist, but look out how you trade with him." " I have been in business with John D. Rockefeller for thirty-five years," one of the ablest and richest and earliest of Mr. Rockefeller's colleagues once told me in a moment of forgetfulness, " and he would do me out of a dollar today; that is," he added, with a sudden reversion to the school of cant in which he had been trained—" that is, if he could do it honestly." In this picture Mr. Wm. Rockefeller hardly counts. The next figure in the gallery of oils is that of the late Mr. Henry H. Rogers, who died a few months ago—the " Iron Man " of the Standard directorate. Writing in Chapter III. of " Frenzied Finance " in Everybody's Magazine for August, 1904, Mr. T. W. Lawson, who knew him well, thus described Mr. Rogers :— Whenever the bricks, cabbages, or aged eggs were being pre sented to " Standard Oil," always was Henry H. Rogers's towering form and defiant eye in the foreground where they flew thickest. Whenever Labour howled its anathemas at " Standard Oil " and the Rockefellers and other stout-hearted generals and captains of this band of merry moneymakers would begin to discuss conciliation and retreat, it was always Henry H. Rogers who fired at his associates his now famous
panacea for all opposition, " We'll see Standard Oil in hell before we will allow any body of men on earth to dictate how we shall conduct our business." In another passage in " Frenzied Finance " Mr. Lawson wrote of him :— Rogers is a marvellously able man, and one of the best fellows living. He is considerate, kindly, generous, helpful, and everything a man should be to his friends. But when it comes to business—his kind of business—when he turns away from his better self and goes aboard his private brig and hoists the Jolly Roger, God help you! . . . He is a relentless, ravenous creature, as pitiless as a shark, knowing no law of God or man in the execution of his purpose.
Nov that. Mr. Rogers is dead, the active figure in the Trust is Mr. John Dustin Arch bold, who was originally a bitter opponent of the Standard and its rebates. Since he joined its circle Mr. Archbold has figured in two sensa tional episodes. He was one of the defendants in the charge of conspiring to blow up a rival refinery at Buffalo, and escaped through the judge withdrawing his case from the jury. He was the writer of the famous letters to poli ticians which Mr. Randolph Hearst disclosed in the Presidential campaign of 1908.
Of the rest of these men it is necessary to say less. They were very diverse in their character. One of them, Henry M. Flagler, was the pioneer of the vast hotels which line the Florida coast and make it a winter resort for rich Americans. William T. Wardwell, the treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, was an ardent tee totaler, and more than once ran as Prohibi tionist candidate for the Presidency before his connection with Standard Oil was so notorious. Many of them were Scotch Presbyterians, but the late Mr. Daniel O'Day, the man who faced fierce obloquy as the manager of the Standard's pipe-line monopoly, was an Irish Catholic, who died a year or two ago, leaving several millions behind him. The younger generation is growing old now, and sons of both John and William Rockefeller have entered the business, carrying on the traditions of the greatest combine on earth.
We will now proceed to trace the ramifica tions of the vast organisation which these men have built up and control all over the world. The full list of the companies is so long that it is impossible and unnecessary to print all the names. But a selection of them will indicate the vastness and variety of the Rockefeller interests. They are taken from the Report of the United States Government Com missioner of Corporations on the Petroleum Industry (Part I., Table 8, p. 84), supplemented by one or two other unimpeachable sources of information. The central company of this joint-stock octopus is now the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, which holds large blocks of stock in the other companies. It has a capital of $100,000,000 of common stock and $10,000,000 of preferred stock. Among its direc tors are John D. Rockefeller, William Rocke feller, Henry M. Flagler, John Dustin Archbold, Wesley H. Tilford, Frank Q. Barstow, Charles M. Pratt, Edward T. Bedford, Walter Jennings, James A. Moffet, C. W. Harkness, John D. Rockefeller, jun., Oliver H. Payne, and A. C. Bedford. This Company controls nine com panies which are principally engaged in refining oils :— Capital. Dols.