Ironically enough it was the Standard itself that broke the reluctance of Congress. The proposal had shocked it out of its usual discretion. There never was an organization in the country which held secrecy more essential to doing business. Breaking down the walls behind which it operated was not to be tolerated. It seems to have been the peppery John Archbold who took charge of the fight against the bill, using all the political influence of the company, which was considerable at that moment.
Roosevelt soon learned something of what was going on—it is not certain how much; and when he saw his measure in danger he gave out the statement that John D. Rockefeller had wired his friends in the Senate, “We are opposed to any antitrust legislation—it must be stopped.”
The last thing in the world that John D. Rockefeller would have done was to send such a telegram to anybody. Probably Mr. Roosevelt knew that; but somebody in the Standard was passing on such a word, and Mr. Rockefeller was the responsible head of the organization. His name did the work. Congress passed the bill in a hurry. The Bureau of Corporations was speedily set up, an excellent man at its head—James Garfield. The first task assigned it by the President was an investigation of the petroleum industry.
This investigation reported in 1906 that the Standard Oil Company was receiving preferential rates from various railroads and had been for some time. One of the most spectacular business suits the country had seen up to that time followed. The Standard was found guilty by Judge Kenesaw Landis, the present arbitrator of the manners and morals of national baseball, and a punishment long known as the “Big Fine”—twenty-nine million dollars—inflicted. The country gasped at the size of the fine, but not so the Bureau of Corporations. My correspondent there contended that over eight thousand true indictments had been found, and that the maximum penalty would have amounted to over a hundred and sixty million dollars!
But even the twenty-nine million dollars, so modest in the view of the Bureau of Corporations, was not allowed to stand, for in 1908 Judge Peter Grosscup of the Circuit Court of Appeals in Illinois upset it. Roosevelt was angry. “There is too much power in the bench,” he told his friends.
But by this time the Government had under way another and a much more serious line of attack, from which Roosevelt was hoping substantial results. Back in 1890 the Congress had enacted what was known as the Sherman Antitrust Law, a law making illegal every contract and combination restraining trade and fostering monopoly. The Government was now seeking to apply this law to the Standard Oil Company. Was it not the first industry to attempt monopoly? Had it not been the model for all the brood?
Such a suit was no new idea. Independent oilmen had long talked of it, and in 1897 they had been ready to go ahead when at the last moment the lawyer to whom they had entrusted their case was taken suddenly ill and died. It must have seemed to the energetic Lewis Emery, Jr., who had been engineering the attack that the Lord himself had “gone over to the Standard.”
Ten years went by, and then in September, 1907, the United States of America began suit against the Standard Oil Company of New York et al. There were months and months of hearings. If I had been a modern newspaper woman I could have made a good killing out of that long investigation, for more than one editor asked me to analyze the testimony as it came along or give my impressions of the gentlemen who appeared on the witness stand. But I had no stomach for it; I never attended a public examination though I of course read the published testimony with care.
I knew well enough that the time would come when, if I did my duty as a historian, I must analyze the suit; but that must be after it was ended and a sufficiently practical test had been made of the decision. It would be a long time, I told myself, before I should be obliged to take up the story where I had left it.