The History of the Standard Oil Company/Volume 2/Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
CUTTING TO KILL
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 the world, as he had already organised oil refining and oil transporting. Mr. Rockefeller was driven to this new task of organisation not only by his own curious intellect; he was driven to it by that thing so abhorrent to his mind—competition. If, as he claimed, the oil business belonged to him, and if, as he had announced, he was prepared to refine all the oil that men would consume, it followed as a corollary that the markets of the world belonged to him. In spite of his bold pretensions and his perfect organisation, a few obstinate oil refiners still lived and persisted in doing business. They were a fly in his ointment—a stick in his wonderful wheel. He must get them out; otherwise the Great Purpose would be unrealised. And so, while engaged in organising the world's markets, he incidentally carried on a campaign against those who dared intrude there.
When Mr. Rockefeller began to gather the oil markets into his hands he had a task whose field was literally the world, for already, in 1871, the year before he first appeared as an important factor in the oil trade, refined oil was going into every civilised country of the globe. Of the five and a half million barrels of crude oil produced that year, the world used five millions, over three and a half of which went to foreign lands. This was the market which had been built up in the first ten years of business by the men who had developed the oil territory and invented the processes of refining and transporting, and this was the market, still further developed, of course, that Mr. Rockefeller inherited when he succeeded in corralling the refining and transporting of oil. It was this market he proceeded to organise.
The process of organisation seems to have been natural and highly intelligent. The entire country was buying refined oil for illumination. Many refiners had their own agents out looking for markets; others sold to wholesale dealers, or jobbers, who placed trade with local dealers, usually grocers. Mr.
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IN 1880
from a photograph by Sarony
Carley and Company, of Louisville, Kentucky, had charge of. These companies in turn divided their territory into sections, and put the subdivisions in the charge of local agents. These local agents had stations where oil was received and stored, and from which they and their salesmen carried on their campaigns. This system, inaugurated in the seventies, has been developed until now the Standard Oil Company of each state has its own marketing department, whose territory is divided and watched over in the above fashion. The entire oil-buying territory of the country is thus covered by local agents reporting to division headquarters. These report in turn to the head of the state marketing department, and his reports go to the general marketing headquarters in New York.
To those who know anything of the way in which Mr. Rockefeller does business, it will go without saying that this marketing department was conducted from the start with the greatest efficiency and economy. Its aim was to make every local station as nearly perfect in its service as it could be. The buyer must receive his oil promptly, in good condition, and of the grade he desired. If a customer complained, the case received prompt attention and the cause was found and corrected. He did not only receive oil; he could have proper lamps and wicks and burners, and directions about using them.
The local stations from which the dealer is served to-day are models of their kind, and one can easily believe they have always been so. Oil, even refined, is a difficult thing to handle without much disagreeable odour and stain, but the local stations of the Standard Oil Company, like its refineries, are kept orderly and clean by a rigid system of inspection. Every two or three months an inspector goes through each station and reports to headquarters on a multitude of details—whether barrels are properly bunged, filled, stencilled, painted, glued; whether tank wagons, buckets, faucets, pipes, are leaking; whether the glue trough is clean, the ground around the tanks dry, the locks in good condition; the horses properly cared for; the weeds cut in the yard. The time the agent gets around in the morning and the time he takes for lunch are reported. The prices he pays for feed for his horses, for coal, for repairs, are noted. In fact, the condition of every local station, at any given period, can be accurately known at marketing headquarters, if desired. All of this tends, of course, to the greatest economy and efficiency in the local agents.
But the Standard Oil agents were not sent into a territory back in the seventies simply to sell all the oil they could by efficient service and aggressive pushing; they were sent there to sell all the oil that was bought. "The coal-oil business belongs to us," was Mr. Rockefeller's motto, and from the beginning of his campaign in the markets his agents accepted and acted on that principle. If a dealer bought but a barrel of oil a year, it must be from Mr. Rockefeller. This ambition made it necessary that the agents have accurate knowledge of all outside transactions in oil, however small, made in their field. How was this possible? The South Improvement scheme provided perfectly for this, for it bound the railroad to send daily to the principal office of the company reports of all oil shipped, the name of shipper, the quantity and kind of oil, the name of consignee, with the destination and the cost of freight.[1] Having such knowledge as this, an agent could immediately locate each shipment of the independent refiner, and take the proper steps to secure the trade. But the South Improvement scheme never went into operation. It remained only as a beautiful ideal, to be worked out as time and opportunity permitted. The exact process by which this was done it is impossible to trace. The work was delicate and involved operations of which it was wise for the operator to say nothing. It is only certain that little by little a secret bureau for securing information was built up until it is a fact that information concerning the business of his competitors, almost as full as that which Mr. Rockefeller hoped to get when he signed the South Improvement Company contracts, is his to-day. Probably the best way to get an idea of how Mr. Rockefeller built up this department, as well as others of his marketing bureau, is to examine it as it stands to-day. First, then, as to the methods of securing information which are in operation.
Naturally and properly the local agents of the Standard Oil Company are watchful of the condition of competition in their districts, and naturally and properly they report what they learn. "We ask our salesmen and our agents to keep their eyes open and keep us informed of the situation in their respective fields," a Standard agent told the Industrial Commission in 1898. "We ask our agents, as they visit the trade, to make reports to us of whom the different parties are buying; principally to know whether our agents are attending to their business or not. If they are letting too much business get away from them, it looks as if they were not attending to their business. They get it from what they see as they go around selling goods." But there is no such generality about this part of the agent's or salesman's business as this statement would lead one to believe. As a matter of fact it is a thoroughly scientific operation. The gentleman who made the above statement, for instance, sends his local agents a blank like the following to be made out each month:
EXHIBIT "B—R."[2]
The local agent gets the information to fill out such a report in various ways. He questions the dealers closely. He watches the railway freight stations. He interviews everybody in any way connected with the handling of oil in his territory. All of which may be proper enough. When, in the early eighties, Howard Page, of the Standard Oil Company, was in charge of the Standard shipping department in Kentucky, his agents visited the depots once a day to see what oil arrived there from independent shippers. A record of these shipments was made and reported monthly to Mr. Page. He was able to tell the Interstate Commerce Commission, in 1887, almost exactly what his rivals had been shipping by rail and by river. Mr. Page claimed that his agents had no special privileges; that anybody's agents would have been allowed to examine the incoming cars, note the consignor, contents and consignee. It did not appear in the examination, however, that anybody but Mr. Page had sent agents to do such a thing. The Waters-Pierce Oil Company, of St. Louis, once paid one of its Texas agents this unique compliment: "We are glad to know you are on such good terms with the railroad people that Mr. Clem (an agent handling independent oil) gains nothing by marking his shipments by numbers instead of names." In the same letter the writer said: "Would be glad to have you advise us when Clem's first two tanks have been emptied and returned, also the second two to which you refer as having been in the yard nine and sixteen days, that we may know how long they have been held in Dallas. The movement of tank cars enters into the cost of oil, so it is necessary to have this information that we may know what we are competing with."[3]
The superior receiving the filled blanks carefully follows them by letters of instructions and inquiries, himself keeping track of each dealer, however insignificant, in the local agent's territory, and when one out of line has been brought in, never failing to compliment his subordinate. But however diligent the agent may be in keeping his eyes open, however he may be stirred to activity by the prodding and compliments of his superiors, it is of course out of the question that he get anything like the full information the South Improvement scheme insured. What he is able to do is supplemented by a system which compares very favourably with that famous scheme and which undoubtedly was suggested by it. For many years independent refiners have declared that the details of their shipments were leaking regularly from their own employees or from clerks in freight offices. At every investigation made these declarations have been repeated and occasional proof has been offered; for instance, a Cleveland refiner, John Teagle, testified in 1888 to the Congressional Committee that one day in 1883 his bookkeeper came to him and told him that he had been approached by a brother of the secretary of the Standard Oil Company at Cleveland, who had asked him if he did not wish to make some money. The bookkeeper asked how, and after some talk he was informed that it would be by his giving information concerning the business of his firm to the Standard. The bookkeeper seems to have been a wary fellow, for he dismissed his interlocutor without arousing suspicion and then took the case to Mr. Teagle, who asked him to make some kind of an arrangement in order to find out just what information the Standard wanted. The man did this. For twenty-five dollars down and a small sum per year he was to make a transcript of Mr. Teagle's daily shipments with net price received for the same; he was to tell what the cost of manufacturing in the refinery was; the amount of gasoline and naphtha made and the net price received for them; what was done with the tar; and what percentage of different grades of oil was made; also how much oil was exported. This information was to be mailed regularly to Box 164 of the Cleveland post-office. Mr. Teagle, who at that moment was hot on the tracks of the Standard in the courts, got an affidavit from the bookkeeper. This he took with the money which the clerk had received to the secretary of the Standard Oil Company and charged him with bribery. At first the gentleman denied having any knowledge of the matter, but he finally confessed and even took back the money. Mr. Teagle then gave the whole story to the newspapers, where it of course made much noise.
Several gentlemen testified before the recent Industrial Commission to the belief that their business was under the constant espionage of the Standard Oil Company. Theodore Westgate, an oil refiner of Titusville, told the Commission that all of his shipments were watched. The inference from his testimony was that the Standard Oil Company received reports direct from the freight houses. Lewis Emery, Jr., of Bradford, a lifelong contestant of the Standard, declared that he knew his business was followed now in the same way as it was in 1872 under the South Improvement Company contract. He gave one or two instances from his own business experience to justify his statements, and he added that he could give many others if necessary. Mr. Gall, of Montreal, Canada, declared that these same methods were in operation in Canada. "When our tank-cars come in," Mr. Gall told the Commission, "the Standard Oil Company have a habit of sending their men, opening a tank-car, and taking a sample out to see what it contains." Mr. Gall declared that he knew this a long time before he was able to get proof of it. He declared that they knew the number of cars that he shipped and the place to which they went, and that it was their habit to send salesmen after every shipment. Mrs. G. C. Butts, a daughter of George Rice, an independent refiner of Marietta, Ohio, told the Ohio Senate Committee which investigated trusts in 1898 that a railroad agent of their town had notified them that he had been approached by a Standard representative who asked him for a full report of all independent shipments, to whom and where going. The agent refused, but, said Mrs. Butts: "We found out later that someone was giving them this information and that it was being given right from our own works… A party writing us from the Waters-Pierce office wrote that we had no idea of the network of detectives, generally railroad agents, that his company kept, and that everything that we or our agents said or did was reported back to the managers through a regular network of detectives who were agents of the railroads and oil company as well."
But while the proofs the independents have offered of their charges show that such leaks have occurred at intervals all over the country, they do not show anything like a regular system of collecting information through this channel. From the evidence one would be justified in believing that the cases were rare, occurring only when a not over-nice Standard manager got into hot competition with a rival and prevailed upon a freight agent to give him information to help in his fight. In 1903, however, the writer came into possession of a large mass of documents of unquestionable authenticity, bearing out all and more than the independents charge. They show that the Standard Oil Company receives regularly to-day, at least from the railroads and steamship lines represented in these papers, information of all oil shipped. A study of these papers shows beyond question that somebody having access to the books of the freight offices records regularly each oil shipment passing the office—the names of consignor and consignee, the addresses of each, and the quantity and kind of oil are given in each case. This record is made out usually on a sheet of blank paper, though occasionally the recorder has been indiscreet enough to use the railroad company's stationery. The reports are evidently intended not to be signed, though there are cases in the documents where the name of the sender has been signed and erased; in one case a printed head bearing the name of the freight agent had been used. The name had been cut out, but so carelessly that it was easy to identify him. These reports had evidently been sent to the office of the Standard Oil Company, where they had received a careful examination, and the information they contained had been classified. Wherever the shipment entered was from one of the distributing stations of the Standard Oil Company, a line was drawn through it, or it was checked off in some way. In every other case in the mass of reports there was written, opposite the name of the consignee, the name of a person known to be a Standard agent or salesman in the territory where the shipment had gone.
Now what is this for? Copies of letters and telegrams accompanying the reports show that as soon as a particular report had reached Standard headquarters and it was known that a carload, or even a barrel, of independent oil was on its way to a dealer, the Standard agent whose name was written after the shipment on the record had been notified. "If you can stop car going to X, authorise rebate to Z (name of dealer) of three-quarters cent per gallon," one of the telegrams reads. There is plenty of evidence to show how an agent receiving such information "stops" the oil. He persuades the dealer to countermand the order. George Rice, when before the House Committee on Manufactures in 1888, presented a number of telegrams as samples of his experience in having orders countermanded in Texas. Four of these were sent on the same day from different dealers in the same town, San Angelo. Mr. Rice investigated the cause, and, by letters from the various firms, learned that the Standard agent had been around "threatening the trade that if they bought of me they would not sell them any more," as he put it.
Mrs. Butts in her testimony in 1898 said that her firm had a customer in New Orleans to whom they had been selling from 500 to 1,000 barrels a month, and that the Standard representative made a contract with him to pay him $10,000 a year for five years to stop handling the independent oil and take Standard oil! Mrs. Butts offered as evidence of a similar transaction in Texas the following letter:
"Lockhart, Texas, November 30, 1894.
"Mr. Keenan, who is with the Waters-Pierce people at Galveston, has made us several visits and made us propositions of all kinds to get us out of the business. Among others, he offered to pay us a monthly salary if we would quit selling oil and let them have full control of the trade, and insisted that we name a figure that we would take and get out of the business, and also threatened that if we did not accept his proposition they would cut prices below what oil cost us and force us out of business. We asked him the question, should we accept his proposition, would they continue to sell oil as cheap as we were then selling it, and he stated most positively that they would advance the price at once should they succeed in destroying competition.
"J. S. Lewis and Company."
In the Ohio Investigation of 1898 John Teagle, of Cleveland, being upon his oath, said that his firm had had great difficulty in getting goods accepted because the Standard agents would persuade the dealers to cancel the orders. "They would have their local man, or some other man, call upon the trade and use their influence and talk lower prices, or make a lower retail price, or something to convince them that they'd better not take our oil, and, I suppose, to buy theirs." Mr. Teagle presented the following letter, signed by a Standard representative, explaining such a countermand:
"John Fowler, "Des Moines, Iowa, January 14, 1891.
Hampton, Iowa.
"Dear Sir:—Our Marshalltown manager, Mr. Ruth, has explained the circumstances regarding the purchase and subsequent countermand of a car of oil from our competitors. He desires to have us express to you our promise that we will stand all expense provided there should be any trouble growing out of the countermand of this car. We cheerfully promise to do this; we have the best legal advice which can be obtained in Iowa, bearing on the points in this case. An order can be countermanded either before or after the goods have been shipped, and, in fact, can be countermanded even if the goods have already arrived and are at the depot. A firm is absolutely obliged to accept a countermand. The fact that the order has been signed does not make any difference. We want you to absolutely refuse, under any circumstances, to accept the car of oil. We are standing back of you in this matter, and will protect you in every way, and would kindly ask you to keep this letter strictly confidential…
"Yours truly, E. P. Pratt."
Peter Shull, of the Independent Oil Company of Mansfield, Ohio, testified before the same committee to experiences similar to those of Mr. Teagle.
"If I put a man on the road to sell goods for me," said Mr. Shull, "and he takes orders to the amount of 200 to 300 barrels a week, before I am able to ship these goods possibly, the Standard Oil Company has gone there and compelled those people to countermand those orders under a threat that, if they don't countermand them, they will put the price of oil down to such a price that they cannot afford to handle the goods."
In support of his assertion Mr. Shull offered letters from firms he has been dealing with. The following citations show the character of them:
"Tiffin, Ohio, February 1, 1898.
"Independent Oil Company,
Mansfield, Ohio.
"Dear Sirs:—The Standard Oil Company, after your man was here, had the cheek to come in and ask how many barrels of oil we bought and so forth, then asked us to countermand the order, saying it would be for our best; we understand they have put their oil in our next door and offer it at six cents per gallon, at retail. Shall we turn tail or show them fight? If so, will you help us out any?…
"Yours truly,
"Talbott and Son."
"Tiffin, Ohio, January 24, 1898.
"Independent Oil Company,
"Dear Sirs:… I am sorry to say that a Standard Oil man from your city followed that oil car and oil to my place, and told me that he would not let me make a dollar on that oil, and was dogging me around for two days to buy that oil, and made all kinds of threats and talked to my people of the house while I was out, and persuaded me to sell, and I was in a stew what I should do, but I yielded and I have been very sorry for it since. I thought I would hate to see the bottom knocked out of the prices, but that is why I did it—the only reason. The oil was all right. I now see the mistake, and that is of getting a carload—two carloads coming in here inside of a week is more than the other company will stand…
"Yours truly,
"H. A. Eirick."
In case the agent cannot persuade the dealer to countermand his order, more strenuous measures are applied. The letters quoted above hint at what they will be. Many letters have been presented by witnesses under oath in various investigations showing that Standard Oil agents in all parts of the country have found it necessary for the last twenty-five years to act at times as these letters threaten. One of the most aggressive of these campaigns waged at the beginning of this war of exterminating independent dealers was by the Standard marketing agent at Louisville, Kentucky—Chess, Carley and Company. This concern claimed a large section of the South as its territory. George Rice, of Marietta, Ohio, had been in this field for eight or ten years, having many regular customers. It became Chess, Carley and Company's business to secure these customers and to prevent his getting others. Mr. Rice was handicapped to begin with by railroad discrimination. He was never able to secure the rates of his big rival on any of the Southern roads. In 1888 the Interstate Commerce Commission examined his complaints against eight different Southern and Western roads, and found that no one of them treated him with "relative justice." Railroad discriminations were not sufficient to drive him out of the Southwest, however, and a war of prices was begun. According to the letters Mr. Rice himself has presented he certainly in some cases began the cutting, as he could well afford to do. For instance, Chess, Carley and Company were selling water-white oil in September, 1880, in Clarksville, Tennessee, at twenty-one cents a gallon delivered in carloads—export oil was selling in barrels in New York at that date at 105⁄8 cents a gallon. Rice's agent offered at eighteen cents. The dealer to whom he made the offer, Armstrong by name, wished to accept, but as he had been buying of Chess, Carley and Company, went first to see them about the matter. He came back "scared almost out of his boots," wrote the agent to Rice.
"Carley told him he would break him up if he bought oil of anyone else; that the Standard Company had authorised him to spend $10,000 to break up any concern that bought oil from anyone else; that he (Carley) would put all his drummers in the field to hunt up Armstrong's customers and sell his customers groceries at five per cent. below Armstrong's prices, and turn all Armstrong's trade over to Moore, Bremaker and Company, and settle with Moore, Bremaker and Company for their losses in helping to break Armstrong up, every thirty days.
"That if Armstrong sent any other oil to Clarksville, Tennessee, he (Carley) would put the price of oil so low in Clarksville as to make the party lose heavily, and that they (the Standard) would break up anyone that would sell him (Armstrong) oil, and that he (Carley) had told Stege and Reiling the same thing. Did you ever? What do you think of that?"
Very soon after this, Chess, Carley and Company took in hand a Nashville firm, Wilkinson and Company, which was
buying of Rice. "It is with great reluctance," they wrote, "that we undertake serious competition with any one, and certainly this competition will not be confined to coal-oil or any one article, and will not be limited to any one year. We always stand ready to make reasonable arrangements with any one who chooses to appear in our line of business, and it will be unlike anything we have done heretofore if we permit any one to force us into an arrangement which is not reasonable. Any loss, however great, is better to us than a record of this kind." And four days later they wrote: "If you continue to bring on the oil, it will simply force us to cut down our price, and no other course is left to us but the one we have intimated." Wilkinson and Company seem to have stuck to Rice's oil, for, sixteen months later, we find Chess, Carley and Company calling on the agent of a railroad, which already was giving the Standard discriminating rates, to help in the fight.
The screw was turned, Mr. Rice affirms, his rate being raised fifty per cent, in five days.
Rice carried on his fight for a market in the most aggressive way, and everywhere he met disastrous competition. In 1892 he published a large pamphlet of documents illustrating Standard methods, in which he included citations from some seventy letters from dealers in Texas, received by him between 1881 and 1889, showing the kind of competition his oil met there from the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, the Standard's Texas agents. A dozen sentences, from as many different towns, will show the character of them all:
"I have had wonderful competition on this car. As soon as my car arrived the Waters-Pierce oil Company, who has an agent here, slapped the price down to $1.80 per case 110."
"… Oil was selling at this point for $2.50 per case, and as soon as your car arrived it was put down to $1.50, which it is selling at to-day."
"The Waters-Pierce Oil Company reduced their prices on Brilliant oil from $2.60 to $1.50 per case and is waging a fierce war."
"Waters-Pierce Oil Company has our state by the throat and we would like to be extricated."
"I would like to handle your oil if I could be protected against the Waters-Pierce Oil Company. I am afraid if I would buy a car of oil from you this company would put the oil way below what I pay and make me lose big money. I can handle your oil in large quantities if you would protect me against them."
"The Waters-Pierce Oil Company has cut the stuffing out of coal-oil and have been ever since I got in my last car. They put the price to the merchants at $1.80 per case."
"We have your quotations on oil. While they are much lower than what we pay, yet unless a carload could be engaged it would pay no firm to try and handle, as Waters-Pierce Oil Company would cut below cost on same."
"The day your oil arrived here, their agent went to all my customers and offered their Eupion oil at ten cents per gallon in barrels and $1.50 per case, and lower grades in proportion, and told them if they did not refuse to take the oil he would not sell them any more at any price, and that he was going to run me out of the business, and then they would be at his mercy."
"Now we think Waters-Pierce Oil Company have been getting too high a price for their oil. They are able and do furnish almost this entire state with oil. They cut prices to such an extent when any other oil is offered in this state that they force the parties handling the oil to abandon the trade."
"Trace and hurry up car of oil shipped by you. We learn it is possible that your oil is side-tracked on the line, that Waters-Pierce might get in their work."
"If we were to buy a car or more, the Waters-Pierce Oil Company would manage to sell a little cheaper than we could, and continue doing so until they busted me up."
"In regard to oil, we are about out now, and Waters-Pierce have put their oil up again and quote us at the old price."
"Jobbers say when they take hold of another oil they are at once boycotted by Waters-Pierce Oil Company, who not only refuse to sell them, but put oil below what they pay for it, and thus knock them out of the oil trade, unless they sell at a loss."
"If I find that I can handle your oil in Texas without being run out and losing money by this infernal corporation, the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, I want to arrange with you to handle it extensively. I received verbal notice this morning from their agent that they would make it hot for me when my oil got here."
Mr. Rice claims, in his preface to the collection of letters here quoted from, that he has hundreds of similar ones from different states in the Union, and the writer asked to examine them. The package of documents submitted in reply to this request was made up literally of hundreds of letters. They came from twelve different states, and show everywhere the same competitive method—cutting to kill. One thing very noticeable in these letters is the indignation of the dealers at the Standard methods of securing trade. They resent threats. They complain that the Standard agents "nose" about their premises, that they ask impudent questions, and that they generally make the trade disgusting and humiliating. In Mississippi, in the eighties, the indignation of the small dealers against Chess, Carley and Company was so strong that they formed associations binding themselves not to deal with them.
These same tactics have been kept up in the Southwest ever since. A letter, dated April 28, 1891, from the vice-president of the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, A. M. Finlay, to his agent at Dallas, Texas, says bluntly: "We want to make the prices at Dallas and in the neighbourhood on Brilliant and water-white oil, that will prevent Clem (an independent dealer) from doing any business." And Mr. Finlay adds: "Hope you will make it a point to be present at the next meeting of the city council, to-morrow night, and do everything possible to prevent granting a permit to build within the city limits, unless building similar to ours is constructed, for it would not be fair to us to allow someone else to put up constructions for the storage of oil, when they had compelled us to put up such an expensive building as we have."[4]
Mr. Rice is not the only independent oil dealer who has produced similar testimony. Mr. Teagle and Mr. Shull, in Ohio, have furnished considerable. "The reason we quit taking your oil is this," wrote a Kansas dealer to Scofield, Shurmer and Teagle, in 1896: "The Standard Oil Company notified us that if we continued handling your oil they would cut the oil to ten cents retail, and that we could not afford to do, and for that reason we are forced to take their oil or do business for nothing or at a loss." "The Standard agent has repeatedly told me that if I continued buying oil and gasoline from your wagon," wrote an Ohio dealer to the same firm in 1897, "they would have it retailed here for less than I could buy. I paid no attention to him, but yesterday their agent was here and asked me decidedly if I would continue buying oil and gasoline from your wagon. I told him I would do so; then he went and made arrangements with the dealers that handle their oil and gasoline to retail it for seven cents."
Mr. Shull summed up his testimony before the same committee to which Mr. Teagle gave the above, by declaring: "You take $10,000 and go into the business and I will guarantee you won't be in business ninety days. Their motto is that anybody going into the oil business in opposition to them they will make life a burden to him. That is about as near as you can get to it."
Considerable testimony of the same sort of practices was offered in the recent "hearing before the Industrial Commission," most of it general in character. The most significant special case was offered by Mr. Westgate, the treasurer of the American Oil Works, an independent refinery of Titusville, Pennsylvania.
The American Oil Works, it seems, were in 1894 shipping oil called "Sunlight" in barrels to South Bend, Washington. This was in the territory of the Standard agents at Portland, Oregon, one of whom wrote to a South Bend dealer when he heard of the intrusion: "We will state for your information that never a drop of oil has reached South Bend of better quality than what we have always shipped into that territory. They can name it 'Sunlight,' 'Moonlight,' or 'Starlight,' it makes no difference. You can rest assured if another carload of 'Sunlight' arrives at your place, it will be sold very cheap. We do not purpose to allow another carload to come into that territory unless it comes and is put on the market at one-half its actual cost. You can convey this idea to the young man who imported the carload of 'Sunlight' oil."
When John D. Archbold, of the Standard Oil Company, had his attention called to this letter by Professor Jenks, of the Industrial Commission, Mr. Archbold characterised the letter as "a foolish statement by a foolish and unwise man" and promised to investigate it. Later he presented the commission with an explanation from the superior of the agent, who declared that the writer of the letter did not have any authority to say that oil would be sold on the basis mentioned. "The letter," he continued, "was intended to be written in a jocular manner to deny a claim that he was selling oil inferior in quality to that sold by others." It is hard for the mere outsider to catch the jocularity of the letter, and it must have been much more difficult for the dealer who received it to appreciate it.
Independent oil dealers of the present day complain bitterly of a rather novel way employed by the Standard for bringing into line dealers whose prejudices against buying from them are too strong to be overcome by the above methods. This is through what are called "bogus" oil companies. The obdurate dealer is approached by the agent of a new independent concern, call it the ABC Oil Company, for illustration. The agent seeks trade on the ground that he represents an independent concern and that he can sell at lower prices than the firm from which the dealer is buying. Gradually he works his way into the independent's trade. As a matter of fact, the new company is merely a Standard jobbing house which makes no oil, and which conceals its real identity under a misleading name. The mass of reports from railroad freight offices quoted from in this article corroborate this claim of the independents. The ABC Oil Company is mentioned again and again as shipping oil, and in the audited reports it is always checked off in the same fashion as the known Standard companies, and none of its shipments is referred to Standard agents. Independents all over the country tell of loss of markets through underselling by these "bogus" companies. The lower price which a supposedly independent concern gives to a dealer who will not, under any condition, buy of the Standard, need not demoralise the Standard trade in the vicinity if the concession is made with caution. After the trade is secure, that is, after the genuine independent is ousted, the masquerading concern always finds itself obliged to advance prices. When the true identity of such a company becomes known its usefulness naturally is impaired, and it withdraws from the field and a new one takes its place.
There is never a dealer in oil too small to have applied the above methods of competition. In recent years they have frequently been applied even to oil peddlers. In a good many towns of the country oil is sold from door to door by men whose whole stock in trade is their peddling wagons. Many of these oil peddlers build up a good trade. As a rule they sell Standard oil. Let one take independent oil, however, and the case is at once reported. His customers are located and at once approached by a Standard tank wagon man, who frequently, it is said, not only sells at a lower price than they have been paying, but even goes so far as to clean and fill the lamps! In these raids on peddlers of independent oil, refined oil has been sold in different cities at the doors of consumers at less than crude oil was bringing at the wells, and several cents per gallon less than it was selling to wholesale dealers in refined. It is claimed by independents that at the present time the "bogus" companies generally manage this matter of driving out peddlers, thus saving the Standard the unpopularity of the act and the dissatisfaction of the rise in price which, of course, follows as soon as the trade is secured.
The general explanation of these competitive methods which the Standard officials have offered, is that they originate with "over-zealous" employees and are disapproved of promptly if brought to the attention of the heads of the house. The cases seem rather too universal for such an explanation to be entirely satisfactory. Certainly the system of collecting information concerning competitive business is not practised by the exceptional "over-zealous" employee, but is a recognised department of the Standard Oil Company's business. In the mass of documents from which the reports of oil shipments referred to above were drawn, are certain papers showing that the system is nearly enough universal to call for elaborate and expensive bookkeeping at the headquarters of each Standard marketing division. For instance, on the next page is a fragment illustrating the page of a book kept at such a headquarters.
What does this show? Simply that every day the reports received from railroad freight agents are entered in records kept for the purpose; that there is on file at the Standard Oil headquarters a detailed list of the daily shipments which each independent refiner sends out, even to the initials and number on the car in which the shipment goes. From this remarkable record the same set of documents shows that at least two sets of reports are made up. One is a report of the annual volume of business being done by each particular independent refiner or wholesale jobber, the other of the business of each individual local dealer, so far as the detectives of the Standard have been able to locate it. For instance, among the documents is the report on a well-known oil jobbing house in one of the big cities of the country—reproduced on the next page.
The figures, dates, consignees and destination on the above are fictitious. The names of shippers were copied from the original in possession of the writer.
A comparison of this report with the firm's own accounts shows that the Standard came within a small per cent. of an accurate estimate of the X Y Z's business.
The above is similar to the form compiled by the Standard Oil Company.
the dealer the agent may have picked up. Often there is an explanation of why the man does not buy Standard oil—not infrequently this explanation reads: "Is opposed to monopolies." It is impossible to say from documentary evidence how long such a card catalogue has been kept by the Standard; that it has been a practice for at least twenty-five years the following quotation from a letter written in 1903 by a prominent Standard official in the Southwest to one of his agents shows: "Where competition exists," says the official, "it has been our custom to keep a record of each merchant's daily
The names, figures, and locations on the above form are fictitious. The remarks are copied from cards in possession of the writer.
purchase of bulk oil; and I know of one town at least in the Southern Texas Division where that record has been kept, whether there was competition or not, for the past fifteen years."[5]
The inference from this system of "keeping the eyes open" is that the Standard Oil Company knows practically where every barrel shipped by every independent dealer goes; and where every barrel bought by every corner-grocer from Maine to California comes from. The documents from which the writer draws the inference do not, to be sure, cover the entire country, but they do cover in detail many different states, and enough is known of the Standard's competitive methods in states outside this territory to justify one in believing that the system of gathering information is in use everywhere. That it is a perfect system is improbable. Bribery is not as dangerous business in this country as it deserves to be—of course nothing but a bribe would induce a clerk to give up such information as these daily reports contain but, happily, such is the force of tradition that even those who have practised it for a long time shrink from discovery. It is one of those political and business practices which are only respectable when concealed. Naturally, then, the above system of gathering information must be handled with care, and can never have the same perfection as that Mr. Rockefeller expected when he signed the South Improvement Company charter.
The moral effect of this system on employees is even a more serious feature of the case than the injustice it works to competition. For a "consideration" railroad freight clerks give confidential information concerning freight going through their hands. It would certainly be quite as legitimate for post-office clerks to allow Mr. Rockefeller to read the private letters of his competitors, as it is that the clerks of a railroad give him data concerning their shipments. Everybody through whose hands such information passes is contaminated by the knowledge. To be a factor, though even so small a one, in such a transaction, blunts one's sense of right and fairness. The effect on the local Standard agent cannot but be demoralising. Prodded constantly by letters and telegrams from superiors to secure the countermand of independent oil, confronted by statements of the amount of sales which have gotten away from him, information he knows only too well to have been secured by underhand means, obliged to explain why he cannot get this or that trade away from a rival salesman, he sinks into habits of bullying and wheedling utterly inconsistent with self-respect. "Is there nothing you independents can do to prevent our people finding out who you sell to?" an independent dealer reports a hunted Standard agent asking him. "My life is made miserable by the pressure brought on to chase up your sales. I don't like such business. It isn't right, but what can I do?"
The system results every now and then, naturally enough, in flagrant cases of bribing employees of the independents themselves. Where the freight office does not yield the information, the rival's own office may, and certainly if it is legitimate to get it from one place it is from the other. It is not an unusual thing for independent refiners to discharge a man whom they have reason to believe gives confidential information to the Standard. An outrageous case of this, which occurred some ten years ago, is contained in an affidavit which has been recently put at the writer's disposition. It seems that in 1892 the Lewis Emery Oil Company, an independent selling concern in Philadelphia, employed a man by the name of Buckley. This man was discharged, and in September of that year he went into the employ of the leading Standard refinery of Philadelphia, a concern known as the Atlantic Refining Company. According to the affidavit made by this man Buckley, the managers of the Standard concern, some time in February, 1893, engaged him in conversation about affairs of his late employer. They said that if they could only find out the names of the persons to whom their rival sold, and for what prices, they could soon run him out of business! And they asked Buckley if he could not get the information for them. After some discussion, one of the Standard managers said: "What's the matter with the nigger?" alluding to a coloured boy in the employment of the Lewis Emery concern. Buckley told them that he would try him. "You can tell the nigger," said one of the men, "that he needn't be afraid, because if he loses his position there's a position here for him."
Buckley saw the negro and made a proposition to him. The boy agreed to furnish the information for a price. "Starting from February, 1893," says Mr. Buckley, "and lasting up to about August of the same year, this boy furnished me periodically with the daily shipments of the Lewis Emery concern, which I took and handed personally, sometimes to one and sometimes to the other manager. They took copies of them, and usually returned the originals." The negro .also brought what is known as the price-book to Buckley, and a complete copy of this was made by the Standard managers. "In short," says Mr. Buckley in his affidavit, "I obtained from the negro all the inside facts concerning the Lewis Emery Oil Company's business, and I furnished them all to the Standard managers." In return for this information the negro lad was paid various sums, amounting in all to about ninety dollars. Buckley says that they were charged upon the Standard books to "Special Expenses." The transaction was ended by the discharge of the coloured boy by the Lewis Emery concern.
The dénouement of this case is tragic enough. The concern was finally driven out of business by these and similar tactics, so Mr. Emery and his partner both affirm. The negro was never taken into the Atlantic Refinery, and Buckley soon after lost his position, as he of course richly deserved to. A man who shows himself traitorous, lying, thieving, even for the "good of the oil business," is never kept long in the employment of the Standard Oil Company. It is notorious in the Oil Regions that the people who "sell" to the Standard are never given responsible positions. They may be shifted around to do "dirty work," as the Oil Regions phrase goes, but they are pariahs in the concern. Mr. Rockefeller knows as well as any man ever did the vital necessity of honesty in an organisation, and the Buckleys and negroes who bring him secret intelligence never get anything but money and contempt for their pains.
For the general public, absorbed chiefly in the question, "How does all this affect what we are paying for oil?" the chief point of interest in the marketing contests is that, after they were over, the price of oil has always gone back with a jerk to the point where it was when the cutting began, and not infrequently it has gone higher—the public pays. Several of the letters already quoted in this chapter show the immediate recoil of the market to higher prices with the removal of competition. A table was prepared in 1892 to show the effect of competition on the price of oil in various states of the Union. The results were startling. In California, oil which sold at non-competitive points at 26½ cents a gallon, at competitive points brought 17½ cents. In Denver, Colorado, there was an "Oil War" on in the spring of 1892, and the same oil which was selling at Montrose and Garrison at twenty-five cents a gallon, in Denver sold at seven cents. This competition finally killed opposition and Denver thereafter paid twenty-five cents. The profits on this price were certainly great enough to call for competition. The same oil which was sold in Colorado in the spring of 1892 at twenty-five cents, sold in New York for exportation at 6.10 cents. Of course the freight rates to Colorado were high, the open rate was said to be nine cents a gallon, but that it cost the Standard Oil Company nine cents a gallon to get its oil there, one would have to have documentary proof to believe, and, even if it did, there was still some ten cents profit on a gallon—five dollars on a barrel. In Kansas, at this time, the difference between the price at competitive and non-competitive points was seven cents; in Indiana six cents; in South Carolina four and one-half cents.[6]
In 1897 Scofield, Shurmer and Teagle, of Cleveland, prepared a circular showing the difference between prices at competitive and non-competitive points in Ohio, and sent it out to the trade. According to this circular the public paid from 25 to 33⅓ per cent more where there was no competition. The fact that oil is cheaper where there is competition, and also that the public has to pay the cost of the expensive "Oil Wars" which have been carried on so constantly for the last twenty-five years all over the country, is coming to be recognised, especially in the Middle West of this country, by both dealers and communities. There is no question that the attempts of Standard agents to persuade or bully dealers into countermanding orders, or giving up an independent with whose oil they are satisfied, meet with much less general success than they once did. It even happens now and then that communities who have had experience with "Oil Wars" will stand by an independent dealer for months at a time, resisting even the temptation to have their lamps cleaned and filled at next to nothing.
Briefly put, then, the conclusion, from a careful examination of the testimony on Standard competitive methods, is this:
The marketing department of the Standard Oil Company is organised to cover the entire country, and aims to sell all the oil sold in each of its divisions. To forestall or meet competition it has organised an elaborate secret service for locating the quantity, quality, and selling price of independent shipments. Having located an order for independent oil with a dealer, it persuades him, if possible, to countermand the order. If this is impossible, it threatens "predatory competition," that is, to sell at cost or less, until the rival is worn out. If the dealer still is obstinate, it institutes an "Oil War." In late years the cutting and the "Oil Wars" are often intrusted to so-called "bogus" companies, who retire when the real independent is put out of the way. In later years the Standard has been more cautious about beginning underselling than formerly, though if a rival offered oil at a less price than it had been getting—and generally even small refineries can contrive to sell below the non-competitive prices of the Standard—it does not hesitate to consider the lower price a declaration of war and to drop its prices and keep them down until the rival is out of the way. The price then goes back to the former figure or higher. John D. Archbold's testimony before the Industrial Commission in 1898 practically confirms the above conclusion. Mr. Archbold said that the Standard was in the habit of fighting vigorously to hold and advance its trade—even to the extent of holding prices down to cost until the rival gives way—though he declared it to be his opinion that the history of the company's transactions would show that the competitor forces the fight. Mr. Archbold told the commission that he personally believed it was not advisable to sell below cost for the sake of freezing out a smaller rival, save in "greatly aggravated cases," though he admitted the Standard sometimes did it. The trouble is that, accepting Mr. Rockefeller's foundation principle that the oil business belongs to him, any competition is "an aggravated case." All that is reassuring in the situation has come from the obstinate stand of individuals—the refiners who insisted on doing an independent business, on the theory that "this is a free country"; the grocers who resented the prying and bullying of Standard agents, and asserted their right to buy of whom they would; the rare, very rare, community that grasped the fact that oil sold below cost temporarily, meant later paying for the fight. These features of the business belong to the last decade and a half. At the period we have reached in this history—that is, the completion of the monopoly of the pipe-lines in 1884 and the end of competition in transporting oil—there seemed to the independents no escape from Mr. Rockefeller in the market.
The sureness and promptness with which he located their shipments seemed uncanny to them. The ruthlessness and persistency with which he cut and continued to cut their prices drove them to despair. The character of the competition Mr. Rockefeller carried on in the markets, particularly of the South and Middle West of this country, at this time, aggravated daily the feeble refining element, and bred contempt far and wide among people who saw the cutting, and perhaps profited temporarily by it, but who had neither the power nor the courage to interfere. The knowledge of it fed greatly the bitterness in the Oil Regions. Part of the stock in conversation of every dissatisfied oil producer or ruined refiner became tales of disastrous conflicts in markets. They told of crippled men selling independent oil from a hand cart, whose trade had been wiped out by a Standard cart which followed him day by day, practically giving away oil. They told of grocers driven out of business by an attempt to stand by a refiner. They told endless tales, probably all exaggerated, perhaps some of them false, yet all of them believed, because of such facts as have been rehearsed above. There came to be a popular conviction that the "Standard would do anything." It was a condition which promised endless annoyance to Mr. Rockefeller and his colleagues. It meant popular mistrust, petty hostilities, misinterpretations, contempt, abuse. There were plenty of people even willing to deny Mr. Rockefeller ability. That the Standard was in a venture was enough in those people's minds to damn it. Anything the Standard wanted was wrong, anything they contested was right. A verdict for them demonstrated the corruption of the judge and jury; against them their righteousness. Mr. Rockefeller, indeed, was each year having more reason to realise monopoly building had its trials as wells as its profits.
- ↑ The Eighth Section of Article Second of this contract, defining the duties of the railroads reads: "To make manifests or way-bills of all petroleum or its products transported over any portion of the railroads of the party of the second part or its connections, which manifests shall state the name of the consignor, the place of shipment, the kind and actual quantity of the article shipped, the name of the consignee, and the place of destination, with the rate and gross amount of freight and charges, and to send daily to the principal office of the party of the first part duplicates of all such manifests or way-bills."—Proceedings in Relation to Trusts, House of Representatives, 1888. Report Number 3,112, page 360.
- ↑ Record of pleadings and testimony in Standard Oil Trust quo warranto cases in the Supreme Court of Ohio, 1899, page 681.
- ↑ Trust Investigation of Ohio Senate, 1898, page 370.
- ↑ Trust Investigation of Ohio Senate, 1898, page 370.
- ↑ Trust Investigation of Ohio Senate, 1898, page 371.
- ↑ See Appendix, Number 41. Table showing prices of oil at competitive and non-competitive points in 1892.