Word: oils
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...John D. Rockefeller, the sinister master of old Standard Oil, has long since been replaced in the public mind by John D. Rockefeller, the gentle oldster who gave away more money than any man who ever lived. For that astonishing handspring in public opinion, John Rockefeller could thank in large measure the late famed Ivy Ledbetter Lee, his longtime pressagent...
...high school and a short turn in a commercial college. Four years later with $1,000 he had saved and another $1,000 given him by his father, he struck out for himself, forming his own commission house with a partner named Maurice B. Clark. That summer the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa., but young Rockefeller was still engrossed in produce. Thanks largely to his prodigious capacity for work, his infinite capacity for detail, the firm did a $450,000 business the first year. Like most of the men who were to rule...
Between 1865, the year after he married Laura Spelman, a Cleveland schoolteacher, and 1872, he evolved and put into prompt practice the basic principle on which Standard Oil achieved its power- buy out competitors at pistol point or destroy them if they refuse to sell. Monopoly of oil was his objective almost from the start. The pistol he used was the secret rebate, the notorious device by which a shipper got a refund on his railroad freight, enabling him to undersell competitors. Rockefeller carried this one step further by bludgeoning the railroads into giving him not only a rebate...
...same persistence was demonstrated in price cuttings. In the end, of course, Standard Oil became such a stench in the public's nostrils that it was ordered dissolved into its 34 component parts in 1911, about 15 years after Mr. Rockefeller retired from active direction at 57, his health broken, his nerves shattered, his skull entirely bald. Even if Standard Oil had not felt the ax of the trustbusters, the near-monopoly would probably have been curbed in time by the independent oil companies, then riding to power on the automobile. For the vast fortune with which Mr. Rockefeller...
Incredibly wrinkled, wasted to less than 100 lb., old Mr. Rockefeller was alert to the end. His hearing was unimpaired, his sight good, most of his teeth sound. He liked to chat on the latest in finance or politics, kept in touch with oil business almost daily. About the only thing he refused to discuss was Rockefeller Center. He thought his son's Manhattan pile was close to sheer folly...