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Roosevelt's Populism: The Kansas Oil War of 1905 and the Making of Corporate Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2019

Kyle Williams
Kyle Williams*
Affiliation:
Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture University of Virginia
*
*Corresponding author. Email: williams.kyle.edward@gmail.com
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Abstract

The map of the American petroleum industry shifted rapidly from the Northeast to the Southwest at the turn of the twentieth century when spectacular gushers were struck first in Texas and soon in California, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The flood of small and mid-size oil producers broke the hold that the Standard Oil Company had for decades held on the industry. Competition defeated monopoly. Or so the conventional story goes. This article offers a more complicated narrative by focusing on conflicts between Standard Oil and independent producers in the booming towns of southeast Kansas in 1904 and 1905. In those years, John D. Rockefeller's firm established a monopoly through technologies of distribution and distillation and the production of scientific knowledge and opaque classifications of commodities. Oil producers revolted. A reform movement turned to the rhetoric and policy ideas of Populism as it sought to use state power to challenge the stranglehold of the “octopus.” This article explores the previously unrecognized significance of this movement by showing how the Kansas oil war contributed to the breakup of Standard Oil by the Supreme Court in 1911 and constituted one of the bottom-up sources for the reconstruction of American capitalism.

Keywords

Populismpetroleumcorporate capitalismhistory of capitalism
Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 96 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2019

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References

Notes

1 “Soaking the Octopus,” Emporia Gazette, Apr. 11, 1905.

2 Oil Investigation, file 2809, pt. 2, “That the People May Know.—An Appeal to the People,” Feb. 4, 1905; Numerical File, 1903–14; 2761–2816, box 164; Federal Trade Commission, Bureau of Corporations, Record Group 122; National Archives. College Park, College Park, MD.

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33 “Letter to the Editor: Overcapitalization of Kansas Oil Companies,” Topeka Daily Capital, Mar. 8, 1905.

34 “A Market for The Oil,” The Sun (Chanute, KS), Feb. 14, 1902.

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53 Order to Stop Work. Oil Investigations, No. 2833. Numerical File, 1903–14; 2831–2846, box 167. National Archives.

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58 Schruben, Wea Creek to El Dorado, 91.

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61 Interview with Mr. Harry W. Jones, Independence Kansas, May 8, 1905. Oil Investigations, no. 2840, pt. 2. Numerical File, 1903–14; 2831–2846, box 167. National Archives.

62 Independence Daily Reporter (Independence, KS), Feb. 18, 1904.

63 Independence Daily Reporter, Jul. 6, 1904; Chanute Daily Tribune, Oct. 1, 1904.

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65 Standard Oil was largely forbidden from doing business in Texas, a legacy of its populist and progressive politics. Instead a number of “independent” oil producers controlled production. See Pratt, “The Petroleum Industry in Transition.”

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76 Bureau of Corp., Report: Part II, 86.

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78 United States Bureau of Standards, Circular of the Bureau of Standards No. 154: National Standard Petroleum Oil Tables (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1924), 2Google Scholar; Bureau of Corp., Report: Part I, 105–106.

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88 Chanute Tribune, Jan. 16, 1905.

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92 Bureau of Corp., Report: Part I, 146–47.

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94 Bureau of Mines, Mineral Resources of the United States, 1905, 159.

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106 Charles Harger, “Kansas’ Contest with Standard Oil,” Moody's Magazine, Mar. 1906, 427–28; “After the Trust,” Topeka State Journal, Jun. 4, 1907; “Kansas and Rockefeller,” Topeka Daily Capital, Jan. 5, 1908. Standard Oil rejected the very idea of public utility, what William Novak has called a “big, powerful, proliferating” idea at “the very center of American law and political economy between the Civil War and the New Deal.” See Novak, William J., “The Public Utility Idea and the Origins of Modern Business Regulation” in Corporations and American Democracy, eds. Lamoreaux, Naomi R. and Novak, William J (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 142, 161–71Google Scholar. See also Childs, The Texas Railroad Commission.

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109 Bureau of Corp., Report: Part I, 277–78.

110 Compare to the history of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Raechel Lutz, “Crude Conservation: Nature, Pollution, and Technology at Standard Oil's New Jersey Refineries, 1870–2000” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2018), 134–62.

111 Bureau of Corp., Report: Part I, 254–58. For descriptions of the refining process, see Williamson et al., American Petroleum, 112–14; Bureau of Corp., Report: Part I, 254–58.

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117 Edward Hoch, Message to the House and Senate, Feb. 16, 1905, p. 3; folder 1, box 9, Records of the Governor's Office, Gov. Edward W. Hoch, Correspondence File, 1905–1909, Kansas State Historical Society. Topeka Daily Capital, Feb. 16, 1905. The socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason was not impressed. It called the refinery project an example of “state capitalism.” [Appeal to Reason (Girard, KS), Mar. 11, 1905.] Independence Daily Reporter, Apr. 17, 1905.

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120 Hoch, a former Populist opponent in the legislature, was representative in this regard. Clanton, O. Gene, A Common Humanity: Kansas Populism and the Battle for Justice and Equality, 1854–1903 (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 2004), 185Google Scholar; La Forte, Leaders of Reform, 35–36.

121 They reflected, then, the social grouping of national progressives. For a recent compelling synthesis, see McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010)Google Scholar. Also Mowry, George, The California Progressives (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963), 86–104Google Scholar; Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1965), 3–37Google Scholar.

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123 Olien and Hinton, Oil and Ideology, 55. Ron Chernow called it a “re-enactment” of older events in Pennsylvania: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007), 520Google Scholar.

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126 This is a problem far more common in women's and gender history. See, e.g., an exceptional treatment here: Levenstein, Lisa, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

127 Clanton, “Populism, Progressivism, and Equality,” 567–68.

128 Eastman, “Going Against the Octopus.”

129 “Kansas Fighting the Trusts,” Public Opinion. The reference to the John Brown portrait is unclear. There was a plaque in the legislative hall at the time with John Brown's name on it. It was placed alongside the names of other famous Kansas figures. There was also, in another part of the capitol building, an image of Brown in a portrait hall administered by the Kansas Historical Society. The event could have taken place in reference to either. It is likely a journalist conflated the two objects.

130 “Let the Battle Begin,” The Commoner (Lincoln, NE), Feb. 24, 1905.

131 “Easy Victory For Refinery,” Topeka Daily Capital, Feb. 16, 1905.

132 Kansas Legislature, House Journal, 512.

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136 “Oil Trust Inquiry,” Washington Post, Mar. 6, 1905; “Standard Oil Inquiry,” Washington Post, Apr. 5, 1905.

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142 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 146–52.

143 Corporate liberalism entailed new expectations for corporations that transcended narrow dichotomy of bigness vs. smallness. Livingston, James, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2001), 54–55Google Scholar.

144 Kolko, , Main Currents in Modern American History (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 1–33Google Scholar; Kolko, , Triumph of Conservatism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008)Google Scholar; Sklar, , “Woodrow Wilson and the Political-Economy of Modern United States Liberalism,” Studies on the Left 1, no. 3 (Fall 1960)Google Scholar. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism; Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State. For an overview, see Hawley, “The Discovery and Study of a ‘Corporate Liberalism.’”

145 Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, 35–44.