Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company Essay by Master Researcher

This paper will focus on the breakup of the Standard Oil company in 1911, and will briefly discuss some of the reasons why this dissolution came about. This paper argues that the company's clandestine, and often dubious business practices began to take their toll on public opinion which was becoming increasingly hostile to the Standard. It was not only the practices of a single company that faced such hostile opposition, although it was the largest and most successful of the developing trusts at the end of the nineteenth century. It was also that Standard Oil was the industrial flagship of a wider trust-busting movement. The paper will conclude by discussing the inefficacy of the dissolution, which ironically caused the company's stocks to rise.