"Oil Swells: The Standard Oil Crowd in Palm Beach"
It was the biggest of big money society.
From New York Social Diary:
“Money-mad, money-mad! Sane in every other way, but money-mad.” — Senator Marcus A. Hanna’s 1904 characterization of John D. Rockefeller from The History of Standard Oil, by Ida Minerva Tarbell.
As much today as it was yesterday, Palm
Beach is an incomparable offshore social conglomerate where bluebloods,
barons and tycoons alike take refuge from the mainland’s more
accountable and less luxuriant ambiance.
And, just as the island’s secretive
private clubs bask in the allure of being as impregnable to outsiders as
they were when Old Guard cliques created them, there was, perhaps, no
more eminent or scrutinized Gilded Age social set that found refuge
within Henry Flagler’s
Florida resort empire than his own Standard Oil Company’s trustees. More
than a century later, descendants of Standard Oil’s inner circle can
still be found behind the walls of Palm Beach’s ficus hedges.
First
established in 1870, a new Standard Oil Trust was re-organized in 1882.
Separate corporations were set up in each state. Each had its own board
of directors with the stock of the various corporations controlled by
trustees who issued dividend-bearing certificates of interest to the
stockholders of Standard Oil of Ohio. The trustees controlled two-thirds
of all the available shares. By 1907, four years before the
court-ordered breakup, the largest shareholders were: John D. Rockefeller (248,000 shares), D. M. Harkness (80,000 share), Charles Pratt estate (52,000 shares), Oliver Payne (40,000 shares), Henry M. Flagler (30,000 shares), Henry H. Rogers (16,000 shares), Jabez Bostwick estate (15,000 shares), William A. Rockefeller (11,700 shares) Henry Morgan Tilford (6,000 shares), John D. Archbold (6,000 shares), and William G. Warden (5,800 shares).
The Standard crowd
During the winter of 1888, as private
Pullman cars pulled out of New York heading to St. Augustine for the
opening of Henry Flagler’s Ponce de Leon Hotel, Albany legislators and
Washington congressional committees launched investigations into the
Standard Oil Trust, eventually resulting more than a decade later in the
Supreme Court’s directive breaking up and reforming the company.
Despite pesky subpoenas and warrants,
annoying court and congressional hearings, the Standard Oil cartel’s
most prominent trustees escaped the glare from headlines and indictments
within several socially-exclusive Gibraltars — Thomasville’s
plantations, the Jekyll Island Club’s hunting preserves, St. Augustine’s
tea dances and Palm Beach’s jungle trails. Rather than being probed and
questioned about the inner sanctum of the world’s most powerful
syndicate or denounced by muckrakers, Euclid Avenue and Fifth Avenue
moguls engaged in quail hunts and golf games.
In 1890, the Chicago Tribune
wrote, “The wonder of the century is the growth of the fortunes of the
Standard Oil crowd, as they are known the Rockefellers, the Flaglers and
their associates …” The New York Times
described Standard’s elite more simply “…the most powerful, the most
resourceful and the most daring combination of capitalists the country
has ever known.”Beware
the Oilyfeller!” Standard Oil’s business practices were the subject of
unflattering editorial cartoons, much like today’s hedge funds.
In January 1903, McClure’s Magazine hit the newsstands with the latest installment of Ida Tarbell’s
“The History of the Standard Oil Company.” As one of the era’s most
influential writers, her series created the model for the type of
journalism McClure’s became
known. Based on the chronological history of Standard Oil, her
indictment of the oil industry claimed Rockefeller and his associates
regulated the price of crude and refined oil. Miss Tarbell detailed how
Standard Oil controlled the refineries’ output, manipulated the pricing,
and dictated the means of distribution. Her articles sought to prove
that Rockefeller made every effort to destroy all of his competitors,
thus monopolizing the industry.....
