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Soon after the Sherman Antitrust Act became law in 1 890, Rockefeller dis solved the Standard Oil Trust and formed Standard Oil Co. (New Jersey), a name that was used until 1972. Jersey Standard eventually owned the shares of all the other companies in the old trust. But its stranglehold on the indus try was broken at the century's turn by one of the worst pieces of "expert" advice ever given. Anthony F. Lucas, a wildcatter drilling near Beaumont, Texas, appealed to Jersey Standard for financial backing, and Jersey sent a pro duction specialist to look at the area; he found "no indication whatever to war rant the expectation of an oilfield on the prairies of southeastern Texas." Lucas got his backing elsewhere and a few months later blew in a titanic gusher, opening the Spindletop field, which doubled world crude production overnight. Two of the companies organized to market that oil, Gulf and Texaco, gave Standard its first effective competition.
In 1911, the Supreme Court split the combine up into 34 companies. Among them: Standard of California, Standard of Indiana, Standard of Ohio, and Standard of New York (now known as Mobil). Jersey Standard kept the biggest piece of the business-three huge U.S. refineries and most of the foreign operations-but was left with very little crude production. Its wealth enabled it to buy its way over the next few decades into many of the big oilfields that were discovered around the world. Jersey began buying into Humble in 1919, purchased a big interest in Venezuela's Creole Petroleum in 1928, bought a share of Arabian-American Oil Co. (Aramco) from the original partners, California Standard and Texaco, for a bargain-basement $74 million in 1948.
Growing in that fashion, Jersey Standard for many years operated as a loose federation of companies. Jamieson recently has tightened up the operation. He still preserves local autonomy, but provides somewhat more frequent consultation and guidance to the company's many units. Indeed, after Houston operating headquarters dispatched the luckless Roy Baze to testify before Senator Jackson, Jamieson decided that New York headquarters would henceforth choose all Exxon witnesses to present testimony to Congress. Says one close associate: "It was the clearest signal I ever heard Ken give."
Civil Service. The foreign units operate largely as national companies. In Canada, Exxon owns 75% of Imperial Oil, which posts sales of more than $2 billion a year. Imperial Chairman William O. Twaits says that Exxon chiefs in New York merely "want to know what we are planning and if we can finance it. We have the same relationship with them that we would have with a bank to which we owed a lot of money -except our relationship with Exxon is much more amicable."
To tie its global empire together, Exxon has built a top management that resembles a world government. Citizens of Germany, Italy and Venezuela sit on the parent Exxon's 17-man board of directors. Jamieson always chooses a non-American from one of the overseas operations