A hearing room in the new custom house at Bowling Green in New York on a November day, daylight from tall windows and electric lamps, a government lawyer standing at a large wall map covered with plain coloured areas, the map soft in focus at a flat angle, pointing at it with a cane, a slim elderly man seated with his back to the camera at a long table in a dark suit and high white stiff collar, a bowler hat on the table beside him, his head turned slightly toward his lawyers so that only the edge of his cheek and ear show, at the head of the table an examiner and a stenographer writing, a lawyer half rising behind him, through the window the granite front of a nine-storey office building across a small park.
Who
John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) built Standard Oil into the world's first great oil company and was counted the richest man of his time. Born on a farm in Richford, New York, he grew up in Ohio and in 1870 founded the Standard Oil Company with his brother William, Henry Flagler and others. In 1882 all its companies were merged into a trust, one of the first big combines in the United States; by the 1890s it controlled an estimated three quarters of the American oil business. Its success rested on tight organisation, but also on secret freight rebates from the railroads that drove competitors out of the market. The journalist Ida Tarbell exposed this from 1902; Rockefeller admitted to rebates before 1880 but called them normal practice. He withdrew from active management in the mid-1890s and remained president until 1911. He became one of America's first great philanthropists, giving away 540 million dollars in all, among other things to the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1901) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1913).
The moment
In November 1908 Rockefeller testified as a witness for the defence. The United States government had been suing since 15 November 1906 to break up Standard Oil, and the referee Franklin Ferriss was taking evidence in the New York custom house. On 18 November 1908 the 69-year-old spent more than two hours there, calm and genial, describing how he had started out in 1862 with 4,000 dollars; the room was packed with reporters and spectators. From 20 November Frank B. Kellogg, the government's lawyer, cross-examined him. Kellogg worked from maps meant to show how the Standard companies divided up their sales territories. Asked whether Standard Oil of Ohio had a limited territory, Rockefeller said: "It has not." And in the last five years? "Not to my knowledge. Its field is the world." Its mission, he said, was to light the world with the cheapest and best.
The other side
The machines at stake were not in the room: refineries, pipelines, storage tanks, thousands of tank wagons. The room held maps, and the man whose company claimed the whole world as its field pleaded lapses of memory. On 15 May 1911 the Supreme Court ordered the combine dissolved within six months. Rockefeller then held 244,500 of its 983,383 shares. According to one account, he heard the news on the golf course and advised a priest who was playing with him: "Buy Standard Oil."
What the sources leave open: The exchange about the world comes from Ron Chernow, read only in an unofficial online copy, not the printed edition; it does not appear in the Morning Oregonian of 19-26 November 1908; the exact day it was spoken is uncertain. The room is not described and is typified in the picture, as are the maps, whose labels are unknown. Newspapers report many spectators; the picture shows only the inner circle. The view of 26 Broadway is a choice. The golf scene rests on Chernow alone.