THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY
Although it sometimes happens that governments oppose each other openly in the struggle for oil, as in the case of Poland, Rumania, the Caucasus, and Turkey, they prefer, in general, to hide behind trusts.
There exist in the United States numerous oil concerns whose power is far from negligible, such as the Sinclair Oil Company, with a capital of 500 million dollars, and the Texas and the Doheny interests, which together represent another 500 million dollars. But all these independent producers must bow before the unchallenged supremacy of the Standard Oil.
The Standard Oil, a purely American concern, preceded the Royal Dutch—a Dutch company with considerable British, and recently a little French, capital[9]—by twenty years.
As a matter of fact, there is no longer to-day one Standard Oil, but forty companies, all bearing this name followed by that of a town or State:
The Standard Oil of New Jersey,
The Standard Oil of Pennsylvania,
The Standard Oil of Kansas,
The Standard Oil of Ohio.
The first is the most important. All are federated under one great administrative body.
The Chairman of the Board of Directors of Standard Oil Companies is at the present time Mr. Bedford, formerly Chairman of the Standard Oil of New Jersey, where his place has been taken by Walter Teagle. This great Council is the real brain of the Standard, from which emanates the general policy of this federation of companies, as powerful as the Government of the United States—more powerful sometimes.
Its history, like that of all American trusts, has something of the marvellous. At the beginning of a great undertaking there is always a great man: the founder of the Standard was John Rockefeller, a small dealer in oil, who, in 1865, conceived the idea of forming a federation of all American oil-dealers.