Standard Oil Trust formed
Impact
Template copied across steel, sugar, whiskey, tobacco
What happened
Rockefeller's lawyers invented a new corporate structure: the trust. Nine trustees controlled shares across more than forty companies. The mechanism let Standard Oil dominate roughly 90 percent of US refining while technically operating as 'separate' entities across state lines.
Context
The trust was the private-sector answer to state-level antitrust laws. States could not reach the parent trust because it had no state. It took federal action, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 finally enforced in 1911, to break Standard Oil up.
Era
03 · The Robber Barons
The Gilded Age compressed power into individuals. Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller, Morgan — they controlled rail, oil, steel, and the wire services that reported on themselves. The word of one man moved continents.
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