CHAPTER TEN
CUTTING TO KILL
Rockefeller now plans to organise oil marketing as he had already organised oil transporting and refining—Wonderfully efficient and economical system installed—Curious practices introduced—Reports of competitors' business secured from railway agents—Competitors' clerks sometimes secured as allies—In many instances full records of all oil shipped are given Standard by railway and steamship companies—This information is used by Standard to fight competitors—Competitors driven out by underselling—Evidence from all over the country—Pretended independent oil companies started by the Standard—Standard's explanation of these practices is not satisfactory—Public drives no benefit from temporary lowering of prices—Prices made abnormally high when competition is destroyed.
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. It was to complete this ideal, to satisfy this necessity, that he undertook, late in the seventies, to organise the oil markets of
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