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Standard Oil Trust Research Paper

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The story of the monopoly of oil by the Standard Oil Trust is one of the more dramatic storylines in the history of the U.S. economy. This monopoly on oil occurred at a time when the United States was in the middle of a transformation from an agricultural society to the greatest industrial economy the world has ever seen. The effects of the Standard Oil monopoly on the U.S., and the world, were immeasurable, and the lessons that can be learned from this incredible story are as applicable today as they were a hundred years ago (www.linfo.org, 2004).
John D. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Trust in 1870 in Cleveland Ohio, the oil-refining mecca of the time. The trust almost immediately began using a variety of cutthroat techniques to acquire or destroy competitors and thereby "consolidate" the oil industry. Some techniques used by Standard Oil were to temporarily undercut the prices of their competitors, creating secret deals with the railroad companies to gain a cheaper shipping rate for its oil, and acquiring a majority of the pipelines needed to transport the un-refined oil to the refinery. By 1878 Rockefeller and his company had gained control of nearly 90 percent of the oil refined in the United States. The company’s dominance of oil, …show more content…

The railroads hauled crude oil to the Standard Oil Company’s refineries in Cleveland and shipped the refined kerosene to the big cities like New York and Philadelphia. This arrangement meant that Standard Oil could undercut the prices of the small refineries that were paying full price for shipping their oil. Many of these small refineries argued that as common carriers railroads should not discriminate in their shipping charges. Standards Oil’s use of discounted was only the first step in becoming a monopoly (www.crf-usa.org,

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