page_806 < previous page page_806 next page > Page 806 in that era, were unethical. Nor was the company's handling of labor any better. The Industrial Revolution had harmful effects on many farmers and residents of small-town America. Led by a number of charismatic leaders, those people demanded industrial, railroad, and labor reforms. They focused their spleen on Standard Trust and the railroads. This led in 1887 to a semblance of railroad regulation, the Interstate Commerce Act, and in 1890 to the relatively ineffective Sherman Antitrust Act. In 1911 the Supreme Court declared that the Standard Trust had operated to monopolize and restrain trade, and it ordered the trust dissolved into thirty-four companies. That the trust's share of the industry had declined from 33 to 13 percent the Court held to be of little consequence. The splitting-off of the Standard affiliates proved difficult. Some marketed, some produced, some refined, and these concerns quickly moved toward vertical integration of their businesses. But the 1911 decision ensured that though the industry might have giants, they at least competed with one another. Increasing sales of gasoline first for automobiles and then for airplanes in the early 1900s came as oil discoveries across the United States mounted. The oil industry had a vast new market for what had been for many years a useless by-product of the distilling process. As soon as the internal combustion engines created demand, refiners sought better methods to produce and improve gasolines. Before its entry into World War I, the United States contributed oil to the Allies, and in 1917 the oil companies cooperated with the Fuel Administration. At war's end executives who had served with that agency created the American Petroleum Institute (1919), which in time became a major force in the economy and the business. Although the U.S. oil industry had marketed abroad extensively before the war, it owned few foreign properties. Judging from government surveys, many producers believed that a major oil shortage would soon occur. Both Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes began to pressure American companies to seek oil abroad. These firms invested in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and South America and searched for oil everywhere while they continued to export quantities of oil from the United States. The individual who focused attention back on the United States was Columbus Marion ("Dad") Joiner. Joiner became convinced that some flatlands in an East Texas basinlike structure contained oil. He obtained a lease near Tyler, Texas, and on October 5, 1930, after having drilled two dry holes, struck perhaps the largest oil pool ever found in America. It lay beneath 140,000 acres and contained 5 billion barrels. H. L. Hunt, an oil entrepreneur, bought Joiner's leases and later sold them to oil companies at a profit of $100 million, thereby adding to his already substantial fortune. In a sense the Joiner strike came at an inopportune time; it was the onset of the Great Depression. The price of oil plummeted to ten cents a barrel in 1931, creating chaos in the industry. But some New Deal measures restored a modicum of prosperity, and then World War II stimulated the oil business enormously. The various oil strikes focused attention on a legal situation unique to the United States. Land ownership carried with it rights to all subsoil minerals, termed the common law "right of capture." Oil companies, like other mineral companies, negotiated with each landowner for drilling rights. This right of capture continued for years despite the efforts of such industry giants as conservation-minded Henry L. Doherty of Cities Service Oil Company, who sought to institute oil field unitization. The right of capture ensured early exhaustion of oil fields and tragic waste of a valuable energy source. Wallace E. Pratt, a geologist and longtime Jersey Standard leader, has estimated that by releasing the natural gas that often underlies petroleum pools and by using poor production techniques, oil producers have wasted at least 75 percent of the oil and natural gas found to date in the United States. World War II made the oil industry a key American resource. Oil company research and executive leadership played major roles in the conflict. Research increased the number of products made from petroleum and natural gas, including the explosive TNT and artificial rubber. Â < previous page page_806 next page >