The Waterbury Democrat., 1937-05-25

to which his later rehabilitation is due to the wise management and high character of his son.
 AS you look back over this re- markable career, the feature which impresses you is that his life was g. planned life. All was ordered, laid out after careful thought, even the business of extending his life, and then followed through with an irrefragible resoluteness.
 This, too, must be the measure of his contribution to the amazing age in which he lived. He was the pre- cursor of the planned economy in industry. It would not be too much to say that that confused, furious disordered inprovisation-the MIRA which famed up as the bright particular policy of the New Deal was the culmination of the move ment in industry which Rockefeller had inaugurated.
 Wealth for Partners,
 Ruin for Competitors
 He came upon the scene g youthful wholesaler = when three mighty instruments were forged One was the corporation, the other was the development of our natura resources, the third was the ma chine. America did not always flow with excessive abundance. After the Civil War we began to produce iror and coal and meat and many things in vast quantities. Excessive sup. plies crushed enterprises. Imme- diately producers began to play witt the idea of controlling the abund. ance. Obviously they thought ol combinations - agreements among producers to limit production, tt raise prices, to regulate competition They actually tried to make code: of practice, though they did no call them codes.
 The movement went further in tht Pennsylvania oil regions because over production was wilder there The oil producers made trade agree ment after agreement. Rockefeller tried trade agreements among refin- CTS and also with producers. IT the legends of the times the pro- ducerS came to be pictured as vic- tims of the great Oil Moloch. As matter of fact they were trying tt do the same thing he was trying te do. They wanted to monopolize tht oil producing industry and squeeze high prices out of the. American people. They wanted to crush Rocke- feller. The difference between the two was that Rockefeller was intelli- gent and they were. not.
 Rockefeller made up his mind that regulation of production and prices by trade agreements -codes was impossible. Casting around for more effective weapon he saw the possibilities of the corpo- ration. Industrial corpora tions then were quite few and little un- derstood. Rockefeller'S unique contribution was this. He went to his competitors and proposed that instead of uniting in 8 trade pact they all unite with him in single corporation. They would turn their plants into the Standard Oil com pany and take, Standard Oil stock The more important would become part of the directorate of the com pany. The larger and smarter re- liners did this. Some of the smaller ones refused. Rockefeller was adamant. He told his competi- tors this was the only way to sound business in the refining industry. If they came in they would be rich. Those who came in became rich be- yond thier fondest dreams. Those who refused to come in he crushed remorselessly. Men in other indus tries witnessed this performance and initiated 1t. Thus the corporation became the means of uniting com- petitors to enable all to regulate ef- Actively the economic forces in their industries.
 Later Rockefeller used the trust form-deyised by his lawyer, w. 0. T. Dodd- to unite corporations. and still later he adopted the holding company device in New Jersey to combine still more effectively many corporations in many states. Thus