(See front cover)
"These are harsh words, Sir Henri," said, last week, the U. S. petroleum industry.
Not publicly, however, was this sentiment expressed, for both last week and this week oil men were gathered in convention at Chicago's Stevens Hotel, where they discussed production, restricted production, overproduction and other topics conventional to oil conventions. They also discussed prospects of appointing some outstanding personage as Oil Tsar. One such personage, for example, would be Calvin Coolidge, onetime (1923-29) U. S. President, now occupationless.
It was thought that the little oil men were not too eager for the appointment of a Great Man as Tsar, inasmuch as Great Man's influence, presumably exerted in sympathy with the program of the large oil companies, might give production restriction an irresistible impetus. But where-ever discussion was unofficial and unpublished, delegates to the tenth annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute talked of Sir Henri Wilhelm August Deterding, of Royal Dutch, of price wars and of invaded territory.
For, last week, pausing in Manhattan en route to Chicago, Sir Henri had said to newsgatherers: "We will continue to sell and meet competition in the States or wherever it arises. We never have compromised and we never will. . . . We create no price wars but we are able to, and will, meet all price competition. Our companies fear no one, not even American competition, and there will be no compromise."
Sir Henri Deterding is, as everyone knows, head of the Royal Dutch-Shell petroleum interests, largest crude oil producing company in the world. Old in the oil business, veteran of many oil wars, Sir Henri at one time battled, not unsuccessfully, with Standard of New Jersey in its pre-dissolution period. In more recent years he has (despite his non-compromise statement) preferred peace to war, as witness his agreement (in March) with U. S. oil interests concerning the marketing of Russian oil. In April he sat in on an American Petroleum Institute oil restriction program, gave tacit approval to U. S. attempts at oil rationalization. But the restriction program, in its nation-wide aspect at least, fell through, and in August Sir Henri suddenly shocked U. S. oilmen, particularly the Standard Oil Company of New York, with an invasion of Socony's own territory. Throughout New England, and in and around New York, appeared filling stations selling Shell gasoline. Marketed by Shell Union Oil Corp., which, although a Royal-Dutch-Shell subsidiary, is third largest U. S. oil producer, Shell Gasoline represented foreign competition in a particularly acute form. Most of the Shell Gasoline has been imported from Venezuela whence it can be sold in the U. S. at prices difficult for U. S. oilmen to duplicate.