The History of the Standard Oil CompanyTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
History
The History of the Standard Oil Company
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Petroleum industry and trade -- United States -- History; Standard Oil Company -- History
The demand for interstate commerce legislation was renewed at once by
the Union, and in December E. G. Patterson, the head of the committee
having the matter in hand, prepared the first draft of an act which was
put in formal shape by George B. Hibbard, of Buffalo, counsel employed
by the Union for this purpose. Mr. Hibbard also prepared a memorandum of
the law on the subject. The bill prepared by Mr. Patterson and Mr.
Hibbard was introduced into the House of Representatives in May, 1878,
by Lewis F. Watson, whose home was in Warren County, Pennsylvania. It
was called into committee and came out as the Regan bill and as such was
passed at the end of the year by the House, but only to be smothered
later in the Senate. At the same time that the effort was going in
Washington for relief the Legislature of Pennsylvania was being besieged
again for a free pipe-line bill and an anti-discrimination bill. Both of
these projects failed, and the committee having them in charge said
bitterly in its report to the Union: “How well we have succeeded at
Harrisburg you all know. It would be in vain for your committee to
describe the efforts of the Council in this direction. It has been
simply a history of failure and disgrace. If it has taught us anything,
it is that our present law-makers, as a body, are ignorant, corrupt and
unprincipled; that the majority of them are, directly or indirectly,
under the control of the very monopolies against whose acts we have been
seeking relief.... There has been invented by the Standard Oil Company
no argument or assertion, however false or ridiculous, which has not
found a man in the Pennsylvania Legislature mean enough to become its
champion.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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