Pioneering in Big Business, 1882-1911

Ralph and Muriel Hidy wrote the first volume of the authorised history of Standard Oil, produced with the company's cooperation and full access to its records. It covers the period from the formation of the Standard Oil Trust in 1882 to the Supreme Court dissolution in 1911.

The research is unmatched for the period. The Hidys reconstruct the company's operations from internal correspondence, board minutes and financial records: the crude oil purchasing organisation, the refining capacity and its costs, the pipeline system, the marketing organisation with its bulk stations and tank wagons, the export business that supplied most of the world's kerosene, and the management structure of committees through which the trust coordinated nominally separate companies. They document how decisions were actually made, which was by consensus among a small executive committee rather than by John Rockefeller alone.

The book is written as business history rather than as prosecution or defence, though the sponsorship inevitably shapes emphasis. It should be read against Ida Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company, which is hostile and based on outside sources, and against Ron Chernow's later biography, which used both. The Hidys' treatment of the railroad rebates and of the competitive practices that led to the antitrust case is more measured than Tarbell's and less complete on the effects. For an operator the value is the detailed record of how a nineteenth-century firm built and coordinated an integrated production and distribution system.