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Play at Home. These deals and counterdeals will radically change the flow of oil around the world. The Western Hemisphere now supplies almost 80% of the world's oil (see chart). As production increases in the Middle East, its oil will supply all Europe and the Far East. The flow of oil across the Atlantic will stop; the Western Hemisphere will keep its oil to use at home.
Shortsighted U.S. oilmen loudly complained that this would cut down their markets. Venezuela, which produces about 84% of South American oil, worried that Standard planned to use the Middle East as a club to keep the leftish Venezuelan government from piling on any more taxes. Actually, world oil consumption is increasing so fast that the world needs all the oil it can get. Most important, the U.S. used its oil so lavishly during World War II that it has to find new foreign sources to stop the current drain on its own.
Unless it does get those sources, the U.S. will probably not have enough oil to fuel another global war. The U.S. cannot afford to become a "have not" in oil, any more than Standard can. And in the Middle East, where the U.S. has taken a strong hand, U.S. oil companies now have a strong leader. Jersey Standard is the kingpin. By its bold enterprise it has won the lion's share of the world markets in which the oil must be sold.
Work Abroad. The pattern of internationalism, by which Standard has prospered, was first established by John D. Rockefeller when he went into China with oil for its lamps (and also sold the lamps to burn the oil). Ever since, that pattern has been followed by Jersey Standard's hardheaded, world-minded presidents. As a matter of course, it was thus up to President Gene Holman to lay down the outlines of Standard's Middle Eastern campaign.
At 51, Gene Holman is a tall (6 ft.), broad-shouldered 185-pounder with green eyes and the ruddy face of an oilfield roughneck. His offhand, informal manner and slow Texas drawl disconcert those accustomed to more stuffing in bigwigs. One visitor snorted, only half facetiously: "You should be pompous and have a double-breasted fawn-colored vest with a big gold watch chain stretched across a protruding paunch, some handlebar moustaches and a Standard Oil bearing."
An easy talker, Holman can crisply sum up why he is a free-trader. To him, the risks of trading in a world full of civil wars and uneasy rulers are the normal risks of the oil business. He says: "I sweated over Arabia. The Middle East is a pretty big gamble, but the political trouble there is a normal business risk. Last year we spent $350,000,000 in foreign countries—a substantial amount of that in those politically and economically unstable countries. The point is, we believe in international trade. We don't believe in the sort of nationalism that tries to grow bananas at the North Pole."
Rock Bottom. Holman comes by his internationalism naturally. As a geologist, the first ever to head Standard, Gene Holman takes a global view, compounded of a mixture of business and science. It isn't enough, he believes, to devise new technologies. Technology raises politico-sociological problems which must also be solved. Gene Holman spends his days trying to solve the politico-sociological problems which Standard's new oil technologies have brought to backward lands.