Mr. Herbert L. Pratt has been chosen to be the head of the Standard Oil Company of New York, to replace Mr. Henry C. Folger, who resigned shortly after the Board of Directors failed to secure the stockholders' consent to an increase of capitalization from $225,000.000 to $300,000,000. This shift in the oil line-up has drawn public attention to the personalities, policy, present condition and past history of this oldest of American trusts.
Herbert L. Pratt was born in Brooklyn in 1871, and took a degree of Bachelor of Arts at Amherst in 1895. He is director of several companies, including the Asia Banking Corporation and the Bankers' Trust Company, Manhattan.
Harry C. Folger, his predecessor, was connected with the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey until 1911, when he became President of the New York Company. He is the author of several monographs on Shakespeare and is reputed to own the finest Shakespeare library in America. He is 66 years old.
More prominent than either Pratt or Folger in Standard Oil circles is Alfred C. Bedford, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Like; Pratt, the moving spirit of the oil industry is a Brooklynite. He is 59 years old, and was educated in Brooklyn and Europe. He has been in the employ of the Standard Oil since 1882. In 1907 he became a director of the dominant New Jersey Company, of which he has been President since 1916. During the war he was Chairman of the National Petroleum War Service Committee, and in 1919 Chairman of the International Trade Conference in America, organized under the U. S. Department of Commerce. At the Genoa Conference he was an informal observer, and is generally associated with the foreign activities of the mammoth oil company.