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In 1882 the Standard Oil was organized as a Trust. Ten years later the trust feature was dropped in favor of a " community of interest " in which John D. was one of 99 stockholders, under a holding company known as the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey. This reorganization followed the Sherman Anti-Trust Law of 1890, a feature of the Standard's duel with the Government, which had begun with the investigation of 1872. In 1876 Standard influence had caused the pigeonholing of the first Interstate Commerce Bill. In 1879 Rockefeller and his associates were indicted for conspiracy, but all suits were withdrawn in 1880 in return for agreements by the Standard and the Pennsylvania to abandon practice against producers. In 1907 Judge Landis found the com-pany guilty on 1,462 rebating counts and imposed a record fine of $29,240,000. This decree was set aside on a technicality by a higher court, and the suit was dismissed on retrial.
In 1907 the Federal Government, at the instance of Roosevelt, to whose campaign fund it is alleged that the Standard contributed in 1904, brought suit against the Standard " as a combination in restraint of trade " under the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. The case lasted four years, and dissolution was ordered in 1911. In consequence the New Jersey Co. gave up the ownership of the stock of its constituent companies, thus ceasing to be a " combination," and capitalized for $100,000,000. At that time the New Jersey Co., as holding company, owned practically all the capital stock of 38 other companies, with par value of $145,000,000, and a majority of New Jersey stock was controlled by twelve men. The Supreme Court decision came in May and the dissolution was effected on October 1, 1911. The legal offense was the holding of the stock of 19 specified companies in combination. The 38 companies that constitute the Standard group are not legally combined, but practically they act as one corporation.
Theodore Roosevelt felt this defect in the wording of the Anti-Trust Law, and on June 3, 1911, wrote in The Outlook: "What is urgently needed is the enactment of drastic and far-reaching legislation which shall put the great Inter-State business corporations of the type of the Standard
Oil Co. . . . at least as completely under the control and regulation of the Government in each and every respect as the Inter-State railways are now put. . . . Our prime object must be to have the regulation accomplished by continuous administrative action and not by necessarily intermittent law suits."
Needless to say, no such legislation has been enacted, and the Standard Oil Companies since the " dissolution " of 1911, continue to operate in effect as a monopoly, if not a combination.