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

Abstract

The 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.

Kerosene Is King: Kerosene Consumers and the Antitrust Movement against Standard Oil, 1859–1911

“…"For the first time in the history of the oil business," Tarbell asserted, "the consumers as a body were taking part in an oil fight." 1 Tarbell was not alone in recognizing consumers' support as pivotal to anti-monopoly politics. In the 1900s, anti-monopoly reformers believed that consumers' participation in the political coalition against big business, the so-called "trusts," gave new momentum to the antitrust movement on the national level, which had virtually stalled since passage of the Sherman Act in 1890.…”