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

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-121
Author(s):  
Kyle Williams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Petroleum Industry ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Policy Ideas ◽  
Industry Competition ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Standard Oil Company ◽  
Oil Company

AbstractThe 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.

scholarly journals JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, STANDARD OIL, AND THE RISE OF CORPORATE PUBLIC RELATIONS IN PROGRESSIVE AMERICA, 1902–1908

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-263
Author(s):  
Stephen R. Leccese
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
The Public ◽  
Corporate Public Relations ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
Standard Oil Company ◽  
Oil Company

When the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of Standard Oil in 1911, it marked the end of an unsuccessful campaign by the company to improve its public standing. Standard Oil's failure to mollify public opinion in the aftermath of Ida Tarbell's muckraking masterpiece, “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” has resulted in a historiographical record that negatively assesses the company's response. This article reassesses the company response by placing it within the wider context of business history in the early twentieth century. It offers a detailed exploration of the public relations initiatives of Standard Oil from 1902 to 1908. Additionally, the article views the affair through the lens of standard corporate practices of the early Progressive Era, when large businesses had only begun to promote favorable public images. It argues that progressive reform inadvertently aided the rise of big business by teaching corporations the importance of promoting favorable public images. This wider context reveals that Standard Oil's public relations response, if unsuccessful, was not as aloof as others have argued. In fact, the company made a concerted effort to change public opinion about its business practices.

Oil For the Lamps of China: Alice Tisdale Hobart’s Dark Novel of American Capitalism and Chinese Revolution

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
Sherman Cochran
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Chinese Revolution ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
American Corporation ◽  
Standard Oil Company ◽  
Oil Company

Among American works of fiction about China before World War II, Alice Tisdale Hobart’s Oil for the Lamps of China (1933) was second only to Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth (1931) in influence and sales. Hobart’s novel, evidently set during the Northern Expedition of 1926-28, also inspired a Warner Brothers film by the same name in 1935. Unlike the film, Hobart’s novel did not give a boosterish picture of American capitalism. In portraying the leading character, Steven Chase, a field agent for an American oil firm in China, Hobart drew on the experience of her husband, a field agent for Standard Oil Company. Her husband, like Chase, was callously fired after loyally serving the company and adapting to Chinese culture and protecting company property from anti-imperialist mobs. The novel is memorable for its vivid characterizations of Americans and Chinese working for an American corporation in China and for its dark view of American capitalism and Chinese revolution.

Small Business in the Peruvian Oil Industry: Lobitos Oilfields Limited Before 1934

1982 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 400-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rory Miller
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Petroleum Industry ◽  
Oil Industry ◽  
International Market ◽  
Corporate Management ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
Standard Oil Company ◽  
Trading Network ◽  
Petroleum Company ◽  
Oil Company

For much of the twentieth century, the petroleum industry of Peru was dominated by the International Petroleum Company (or IPC), a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Yet IPC never obtained a monopoly. Other firms, such as Lobitos Oilfields Limited, a concern founded by British merchants, produced a significant amount of Peru's output. In this article, Professor Miller examines Lobitos's development from the time of the company's founding in 1900 through the pivotal year of 1934. Although the fortunes of Lobitos were closely linked to the pertubations of the international market and the shifting policies of the Peruvian government, corporate management enjoyed an unusual flexibility not only because the firm's interests were sometimes identical with those of its powerful rival IPC, but also because its merchant founders had established a vast trading network throughout South America. These additional factors allowed Lobitos to survive as a relatively small, unintegrated independent in an age of giant, fully-integrated multinationals.

Punarvivaham vs. Pativratyam: Pulugurta Lakshmi Narasamamba and the Widow Remarriage Question in Colonial Andhra

2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110017
Author(s):  
Shaik Mahaboob Basha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Child Marriage ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Women's Journals

The question of widow remarriage, which occupied an important place in the social reform movement, was hotly debated in colonial Andhra. Women joined the debate in the early twentieth century. There was a conservative section of women, which bitterly opposed the widow remarriage movement and attacked the social reformers, both women and men. Pulugruta Lakshmi Narasamamba led this group of women. Lakshmi Narasamamba treated widow remarriage (punarvivaham) with contempt and termed it as an affront to the fidelity (pativratyam) of Hindu women. According to her, widow remarriage was equal to ‘prostitution’, and the widows who married again could not be granted the status of kulanganas (respectable or chaste women). Lakshmi Narasamamba’s stand on the question of widow remarriage led to the emergence of a fiery and protracted controversy among women which eventually led to the division of the most famous women’s organization, the Shri Vidyarthini Samajamu. She opposed not only widow remarriage but also post-puberty marriage and campaigned in favour of child marriage. This article describes the whole debate on the widow remarriage question that took place among women. It is based on the primary sources, especially the woefully neglected women’s journals in the Telugu language.

scholarly journals R. Jakobson as Mediator of Cultural Transfer between Linguistics and Literary Experiments

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-317
Author(s):  
Vladimir Feshchenko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Russian Science ◽  
Cultural Transfer ◽  
Parallel Processes ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Literary Experience ◽  
Special Language ◽  
Cultural Transfers

The article analyzes one of the forms of nomadism in the intellectual world, which is called cultural transfers. One of the directions in the study of cultural transfers is the migration of concepts and notions between scientific knowledge (in this case linguistic) and literary experience (mainly experimental). The article is devoted to one of such migration trajectory from the perspective of interdiscourse methodology. We discuss the works of one of the agents of cultural transfer in the field of linguistics – R. Jakobson. The task of the article is to draw a trajectory according to which the linguistic concepts of Jakobson intertwine with parallel processes in literary (mainly poetic) experiments. The analysis concludes that precisely in connection with close contexts and transfers between poetry and linguistics, the Russian science of language represented by Jakobson develops a view of literature as a special language and a special communicative system. This trend is not typical for the Anglo-American linguistic tradition of the twentieth century, the quintessence of which in the middle of the century was represented in the theories of N. Chomsky and his circle.

scholarly journals Las relaciones públicas, la comunicación visual y el mito del capitalismo transnacional (1943-1950)

2021 ◽  
pp. 493-522
Author(s):  
Edward Goyeneche-Gómez
Keyword(s):  
New Jersey ◽  
America Latina ◽  
Standard Oil Company ◽  
Oil Company

El artículo estudia las transformaciones de las relaciones públicas (PR) internacionales, entre 1943 y 1950, en el contexto de la industria privada norteamericana, vinculado al desarrollo del Proyecto Fotográfico de la Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), que buscaba la construcción de un nuevo mito sobre el capitalismo transnacional, que conectara la economía, la sociedad y la cultura, más allá de los estados nacionales, en medio de una crisis discursiva generada por la Segunda Guerra Mundial y las ideologías populistas y folcloristas dominantes. Se demuestra que esa multinacional, buscando enfrentar una crisis de imagen, revolucionó el campo de las relaciones públicas, a partir del uso de un aparato de comunicación visual, denominado fotografía documental industrial, que permitiría conectar de manera inédita y contradictoria, en torno a la historia del petróleo, a Estados Unidos con sociedades de todo el globo, principalmente con América Latina.

scholarly journals A MODEL OF EXPRESSIONIST STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT IN THE WORK OF THE WRITER (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE WORKS OF LEO PERUTS)

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (78) ◽  
pp. 59-63
Author(s):  
E.A. Radaeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Strategy Development ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Large Interval ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
First Time

The purpose of this study is to present a model for the development of the expressionist method in the genre of the novel using the example of the evolution of the novelistic work of the Austrian writer of the early twentieth century L. Perutz. The results obtained: the creative method of the Austrian writer is moving from scientific knowledge to mysticism; in the center of all novels created with a large interval, there is always a confused hero, broken by what is happening (in other words, the absurdity of the world), whose state is often conveyed through gestures; the author finally moves away from linear narration to dividing the plot into almost autonomous stories, thematically gravitating more and more to the distant historical past. Scientific novelty: the novels of L. Perutz are for the first time examined in relative detail through the prism of the aesthetics of expressionism.

scholarly journals Natural Resources and the Constitution: Some Recent Developments and their Implications for the Future Regulation of the Resource Industries

1980 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowland J. Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
Petroleum Industry ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Future ◽  
Recent Developments

This paper reviews recent developments with respect to constitutional jurisdiction over natural resources. Particular reference is made to discussions between the federal and pro vincial governments directed towards reallocation of authority. It also examines poten tial implications of the constitutional reform movement for the future regulation of the petroleum industry.

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