The wonderful success of the Standard Oil Company, however, was not due solely to the alliance with the railroads, although this advantage came at a strategic time when it was fighting for supremacy. Its marketing department gave it an unenviable reputation, but achieved amazing success. The department was organized to cover the country, find out everything possible about competitors, and then kill them off by price-cutting or other means. The great resources of the Company enabled it to undersell rivals, going below cost if necessary, and thus wearing out opposition. Continuity of control, also, contributed to Standard success; the narrow limits of the area in which the crude oil was produced before 1890 rendered the problem of securing a monopoly somewhat easier; the organization was extremely efficient and the constituent companies were stimulated to a high degree of productivity by encouraging the spirit of emulation; men of ability were called to its high positions; the policy of gaining the mastery over the trade in petroleum and its products was kept definitely and persistently to the front; and then there was John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller was what used to be called a "self-made" man. He began his business life in Cleveland as a clerk at an extremely modest salary. Capacity for details and for shrewd bargaining, patience, frugality, seriousness, secretiveness, caution, an instinctive sense for business openings, self-control--all these were characteristic both of the Cleveland clerk and the later oil-refiner. In the bigger field he developed a daring caution, a quick understanding of the value of new inventions, a capacity for organization, quick grasp of essentials and a resourcefulness that dominated the entire Standard combination. He built his own barrels, owned the pipe-lines, tank-cars, tank-wagons and warehouses. Consolidation, magnitude and financial returns were his aims, and in achieving these he and his associates were so successful as to make the Standard a leader in all branches of business, except the ethics of industry. Litigation has been the constant accompaniment of Standard progress. Following the Standard Oil Company, other combinations found the trust form of organization a convenient one. The cotton trust, the whiskey trust, and the sugar, cotton bagging, copper and salt trusts made the public familiar with the term. Moreover, popular suspicion and hostility became aroused, and the word "trust" began to acquire something of the unpleasant connotation which it later possessed.