Deprived of this hope, and condemned to a litigation which was certain to be made as long, as vexatious, and as costly as lawyers could make it, the chief counsel of the United States Pipe Line, Roger Sherman, advised a bold move to bring suit against the Standard Trust under the Sherman anti-trust law. The summons was issued in July, 1897, by John Cunneen, of Buffalo. A very pretty list of wrongs it was of which the plaintiff complained: the instigation of lawsuits and the causing of injunctions without cause, and solely for the purpose of preventing the independent line from doing business; the publishing of libellous matter concerning the company and its officers in newspapers controlled by the trust; engaging bodies of men to tear up parts of pipe-line already laid; enticing away from the enterprise officers, agents and employees; chartering or purchasing any vessels carrying independent oil, solely for the purpose of interfering with the independent market; intimidating merchants by threats of underselling until they refused to buy the oil contracted for; criminal underselling solely for destroying the plaintiff's markets.

It was a serious case Mr. Sherman made out, and the evidence he collected was elaborate and detailed. But, for a sad reason, it was never to come to trial. Less than two months after the summons was issued Mr. Sherman died suddenly in New York City. The shock of his death was such that the independent companies had no heart for the suit, but allowed it to lapse.

There was nothing now but the slow course of Jersey justice for the United States Pipe Line, and for four long years it dragged itself through the courts. Twice it won, but at last, in 1899, the decisions of the lower courts were reversed and the pipe-line had to come up. Ordered out of New Jersey, the independents had to turn back to Pennsylvania. In that state there is a free pipe-line bill. Philadelphia is a shipping point. Luckily for the company, Mr. Murphy had, some time before this, and in anticipation of a defeat in New Jersey, bought on his own responsibility the land for a terminal at Marcus Hook, on the Delaware. This terminal he now sold to the company at the nominal price he had paid for it, and the United States Pipe Line was started again from Wilkesbarre to the sea. Finally, on May 2, 1901, after nine years of struggle in the face of an interference intolerable and unjust, after a quarter of a million dollars spent in litigation, in useless surveys, in laying and pulling up pipes, in loss of business, the first refined oil ever piped from the Oil Regions to the seaboard reached Philadelphia.

Mr. Emery, in telling his story of the difficulties of the United Pipe Line to the Industrial Commission in 1899, did not hesitate to attribute them to the Standard Oil Trust. John D. Archbold made a "general denial": "We have not at any time had any different relations with reference to any obstruction or effort at obstruction of their line than would attach to any competitor in a line of business engaging against another." [141] "We asked our friends on the railroad and in the New Jersey Legislature to look after our interests, of course," a Standard official told the writer in discussing this case. "That was our right." Mr. Boyle, the editor of the Derrick, took the stand before the Industrial Commission that the Standard Oil Trust's opposition to the United States Pipe Line was merely fair competition, as justifiable as offering a higher price for land which your competitor is after.

From the Standard point of view it is evident that all this is legitimate business. They do not wish the United States Pipe Line to reach New York. They say to their friends of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western, and in the Legislature of New Jersey: "These people are our competitors." Apparently neither the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western nor the New Jersey Legislature can afford to forget who are the competitors of the Standard Oil Trust. When the case becomes public and clamour is raised against such methods, the Standard disclaims all responsibility. It was the railroad who fought the pipe-line!

It was not only from without that trouble came upon these men. There were the inevitable internal struggles. They saw their stockholders diminish from discontent and timidity. One of their staunchest members withdrew because of his disbelief in the wisdom of a majority action, and twice they were robbed by death of their most valued members. In December, 1895, A. D. Wood, of Warren, died. Mr. Wood had been one of the most inspiring members in the independent work, and there was nobody left who could do what he had been doing there. In 1897 the chief counsel, Roger Sherman, died. He had conducted the enormous and vexatious litigation of the various concerns with consummate skill, and there was nobody to take his place. Mr. Emery, overwhelmed by the death of Roger Sherman and worn out by his six years of work and worry over the United States Pipe Line, fell ill and was obliged to resign. On every side it was fight and loss and despair, and yet these men hardened under it. Not only hardened, they expanded. Ten years after the unorganised uprising which brought them together in 1887 and forced from them the resolution to take care of their own product, what had they? A company of nearly 600 individual oil producers organised on a business basis, and connected by pipe-lines with some dozen individual oil refineries. For transporting this oil they had pipe-lines carrying both crude and refined from the Oil Regions to within fifty miles of the sea, and for markets they had those they had themselves worked up in the United States and Europe. They had something more. In spite of the continued hostility of the Standard they had the conviction that there was a future for their venture; but they saw clearly that to realise it they must get themselves into still more compact form — that their holdings must be put into the hands of trustees in a single company if they were to be free from the danger of the eventual dominance of the Standard. Now, in November, 1895, as we have seen, the independents had incorporated in New Jersey a marketing concern called the Pure Oil Company. After months of discussion it was decided to enlarge the capital of this company to $10,000,000, $2,000,000 in preferred and $8,000,000 in common stock, and put into this concern all their interests. There was opposition to the consolidation from some of the strongest interests concerned, but finally the idea prevailed, and in 1900 a majority of the stock of the Producers' Oil Company, the Producers' and Refiners' Company, and the United States Pipe Line was turned over to the Pure Oil Company.

The purpose of the combination was frankly stated to be the maintenance of the independence of the company. This was to be effected in the following way: the holders of 16,000 shares of stock — more than a majority — vested the voting power of these shares in fifteen persons for twenty years, and it was agreed that one-half of all shares thereafter subscribed should be transferred to those same trustees. Shares can be sold and transferred, but this transfer does not give the purchaser any right other than provided in the trust agreement. Any trustee may be summarily removed by three-fifths of the trustees, together with three-fifths of the shareholders in trust. It certainly looks as if the Pure Oil Company has devised an organisation which will effectually preserve its independence so long as its shareholders desire that independence. Mr. Archbold, in describing this voting trust of the Pure Oil Company to the Industrial Commission, called it "iniquitous." It is difficult to understand just how it is iniquitous, unless it is because of its success so far in keeping the Standard out of its councils. It is not a secret arrangement. It aims at no monopoly, at no restraint of trade. It claims only to be a device for protecting its obvious right to handle its own product. Of course, if we admit that the oil business belongs to the Standard, as Mr. Rockefeller claims, then the Pure Oil Company is certainly in the wrong!

As it stands to-day, the independents have a good showing for their fight. They have fully 900 stockholders, most of them producers. They handle a daily production of 8,000 barrels of crude oil; operate 1,500 miles of crude pipe-line and 400 miles of refined; are allied with some fourteen refineries, in some of which all the by-products of oil, as well as naphtha and illuminating oils, are produced; own one tank-steamer, the Pennoil, with a capacity of 42,000 fifty-gallon barrels, and charter several others; own oil barges on the Rhine, the Elbe and the Baltic; have fully equipped stations in Europe at Hamburg, Mannheim, Riesa, Stettin and Dusseldorf, in Germany; Rotterdam and Amsterdam, Holland; London and Manchester, England; and, in the United States, New York and Philadelphia. With conservative and loyal management, there seems to be no reason that the Pure Oil Company should not become a permanent independent factor in the oil business. Such a thing is worth the best efforts of the men who have made it. Their courageous and persistent struggle no doubt seems to most of them as of purely personal and local meaning. All they asked was to get a fair share of the profits in their business. They knew they did not get it, and they believed it was because there was not fair play on the part of the railroads and the Standard Oil Company. Aroused, they each fought for the particular thing which would give them relief. They only combined because driven to. They have become a strong organisation almost solely because of the persistent opposition of the Standard Oil Trust. The Standard's efforts to break up the Producers' Protective Association by buying out the biggest producers precipitated a co-operative company for handling oil. Its efforts to drive out the independent refineries by the manipulation of the railroads drove the producers and refiners to combine. The heavy charges for handling oil by the Standard pipe-line and by the railways drove these independents to build a seaboard pipe-line for both refined and crude, and to demonstrate that refined as well as crude could be pumped to the sea in pipes. The buying out of their foreign agents forced them to develop their own market in Europe. The secret buying in of their stock, and the combined effort to force the Standard directors on them, compelled them into their present close trust organisation. It looks very much as if in trying to make way with several small scattered bodies Mr. Rockefeller had made one strong, united one.

But while the experience of the Pure Oil Company demonstrates that it is possible to-day to build up an independent oil business if men have the requisite patience and fighting quality, it by no means follows that the success of the Pure Oil Company has restored competition in the oil business or that by its success the public is getting any marked reduction in the price of oil. That the control of that price within limits is now and has been almost constantly since 1876 in the hands of the Standard Oil Company is demonstrated, the writer believes, by the figures and diagrams of the next chapter.

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