“Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things,” he once conjectured, “fail because we lack concentration, the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?” Rockefeller made it a rule to speak rarely, if ever, in meetings—letting his staff and competitors do the talking. “A man of words and not deeds is like a garden full of weeds,” went one of his credos. Another was summed up in a curious nursery rhyme he kept on his desk:
A wise old owl lived in an oak
The more he listened the less he spoke
The less he spoke the more he heard
Why aren’t we all like that old bird?
One Standard Oil staff member said of his dour boss, “He is the most unemotional man I have ever known.” An industry competitor commented, “I guess he’s 140 years old, for he must have been 100 years old when he was born.” But behind his expressionless veneer, the titan wrestled with anxiety: “I am eating celery which I understand to be very good for nervous difficulty,” he once wrote to his mother. A fitness fanatic, Rockefeller kept in his office an unusual rubber-and-wood exercise machine that he used daily to unwind.
He had good reason to be anxious. First, there was the mystery of the earth’s hidden resources—the extent of their abundance was beyond even Rockefeller’s control. As early as the 1920s—a decade that saw tremendous growth in U.S. oil production—geologists were predicting that U.S. petroleum supplies were about to run out. “The question at the heart of the oil struggle has always been: how much does the earth have to offer?” Yergin told me. “Skepticism over crude supplies is a recurrent malady of the business—it is in the first decade of the twenty-first century, just as it was in 1920 and after World War II and again in the 1970s.”
Rockefeller also had a deeper, ethical angst to contend with: he famously used cutthroat tactics to increase his control over domestic and international markets. He undercut prices so drastically that competitors had to shut down or sell out to Standard Oil. He commandeered the market for the barrels used to distribute oil so his competitors would have no way of packaging their product for customers. He negotiated an alliance with the railroads that transported oil between refineries and markets to get special, clandestine rates far below those afforded his competitors. He reportedly planted spies within competitors’ backroom negotiations to get advance warning on any new deals in the making.
Rockefeller expressed no outward remorse over crushing smaller companies in his pursuit of control. Instead, he celebrated it: “The American Beauty rose,” he famously reasoned in 1905, “can be produced in all its splendor only by sacrificing the early buds that grow up around it.” He described his tactics not as predatory but rather as an act of public service—eliminating what he considered to be the waste and inefficiency endemic to free markets, and ensuring reliable flows of oil and profits that were insulated from excessive volatility, overproduction, and periods of scarcity. Rockefeller believed that he had a divine duty to impose order on the chaos of the oil markets, and “that the Almighty had buried the oil in the earth for a purpose,” wrote Ron Chernow in his Rockefeller biography, Titan. The executive was known to have calmed his employees’ anxieties about market volatility with the assurance “The Lord will provide.”
For all his ruthlessness and eccentricity, Rockefeller was arguably good for America in the way that oil itself was good for America—both brought tremendous power and versatility to the American economy. Never before had a commodity been so widely distributed, so reliable, so profitable, and so meticulously managed. Rockefeller’s methods of vertical integration, price stabilization, efficiency, and economies of scale to this day inform the business strategies of the world’s most successful companies.
“What makes him problematic—and why he continues to inspire such ambivalent reactions—is that his good side was every bit as good as his bad side was bad,” wrote Chernow. Rockefeller also contributed roughly $550 million (the equivalent of about $12 billion today) in charitable donations to support education, medical research, and other philanthropic causes. “Seldom has history produced such a contradictory figure.”
The media and the public of his day were primarily concerned with Rockefeller’s bad side. While the federal government took its time in cracking the whip on Standard Oil’s more abusive tactics, the media flew into an investigative frenzy in the early 1900s. Leading the pack were journalists known as muckrakers—watchdogs who sought to expose behind-the-scenes misconduct within government and industry. Ida Tarbell, the daughter of a Pennsylvania wildcatter, spent more than six years bird-dogging Standard Oil, gaining the trust of its executives, plumbing its accounting books, and for the first time publicly exposing its inner workings. Her articles were published in a series of cover features in McClure’s Magazine from 1902 to 1904 and were then compiled into a tell-all bestseller, The History of the Standard Oil Company.
What is most noteworthy about Tarbell’s writings, beyond their shrewd analysis and detailed evidence of business corruption, are the more intimate passages in which the author paints a portrait of Rockefeller himself—a man she described as “the victim of a money-passion which blinds him to every other consideration in life”:
To know every detail of the oil trade, to be able to reach at any moment its remotest point, to control even its weakest factor—this was John D. Rockefeller’s ideal of doing business. It seemed to be an intellectual necessity for him to be able to direct the course of any particular gallon of oil from the moment it gushed from the earth until it went into the lamp of a housewife. There must be nothing—nothing in his great machine he did not know to be working right.
Tarbell saw Rockefeller—his greed, obsession with order, and chokehold on the competition—as the embodiment of all that was wrong with America, whereas independent wildcatters (like her father) embodied all that was right. “Life ran swift and ruddy and joyous in these men,” she wrote adoringly. “There was nothing too good for them, nothing they did not hope and dare.” It was a blatantly biased judgment, but nevertheless it voiced the opinion of many Americans: while Rockefeller represented caution and distrust, the wildcatter represented boldness and hope.
Yet Rockefeller and the wildcatters also shared strong commonalities. Above all, they shared the insatiable lust for more—the feeling that the industry must stop at nothing to find ever more distant, deeper, greater pockets of reserves. William Mellon, the Gulf Oil executive who invested in Spindletop, explained the common thread this way: “For a great many…the oil business was more like an epic card game, in which the excitement was worth more than great stacks of chips. None of us was disposed to stop, take his money out of the wells, and go home. Each well, whether successful or unsuccessful, provided stimulus to drill another.”
BUSTED
The wildcatters and Standard Oil were on a collision course, and the battle between them would be fought in the halls of Congress and the Supreme Court. This struggle would transform the diverse, chaotic oil business into the modern contours we know today as Chevron, Exxon, and other industry leaders. Howls of protest from independent oil companies against Standard Oil grew louder as the behemoth grew in might. The independents argued that Standard was blocking competition and controlling prices with cutthroat tactics that forced them to sell out. President Theodore Roosevelt allied himself with these independent companies, publicly denouncing Rockefeller and his colleagues as morally corrupt: “The methods by which the Standard Oil people…have achieved great fortunes,” he argued, “can only be justified by the advocacy of a system of morality which can also justify every form of…violence, corruption and fraud, from murder to bribery and ballot-box stuffing in politics.”
Roosevelt’s administration launched an investigation into Standard Oil’s business practices on the grounds that it was violating the Sherman Antitrust Act—a federal statute outlawing corporate monopolies or trusts. A trust is a megacompany that aggregates an array of smaller companies, controlling them under a single leadership. The law, still in force today, forbids such conglomerates