Rockefeller and Standard Oil (The Many Nations of North America)

Standard Oil for good or for ill has been the defining force of American industry for over a hundred years. As the world’s largest oil company, Standard Oil has shaped the fates of nations and earn the Rockefellers an imperial crown. Standard Oil’s beginnings were rather inauspicious, its founder John D Rockefeller was a minor grocer who soon noticed the boom bust nature and easy money of the rapidly expanding oil industries of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Realizing that the true money is made through reefing and distribution, he and a group of backers soon monopolized the burgeoning oil refining industry of Cleveland. From there standard oil spread across first the USA and by the 1880’s the CSA. Through vertical organization their business soon came to dominate the drilling, transport, refining, and retail of oil and oil based products. While several state governments within both the US and CSA tried to dissolve the standard oil trust, Standard Oil’s response was usually to create a new oil company for the region in question that was ultimately still subservient to the demands of the mother Company. Despite the USA’s and CSA’s neutrality in world war one, Standard Oil played a crucial role in assuring that Britain would receive a steady stream of American oil, arms sales and loans. While the Entente would ultimately lose the war, both Britain and Standard Oil would nevertheless profit greatly. The dissolution of the Ottoman empire opened to the world the vast oil reserves of the middle east. Britain would receive significant oil concessions in Mesopotamia and Persia while Standard Oil would gleefully leap upon those of Arabia and Yemen. In the post war era standard oil continued to turn a steady profit providing Russia with both drilling technology and technical consulting. But with all of this success was soon threatened by the global depression. Standard Oil and its fellow corporate trusts played a prominent role in leading to the dissolution of the US. Their goal was to create a corporate dominated plutocracy that would encompass most of the US’s former territories. Unfortunately the new nations soon began quarrelling, Henry Ford resented Rockefeller’s presence in the GLC and his industrial allies quickly began to reduce Standard Oil’s influence on political affairs. Rockefeller responded by making New York into his personal fiefdom and using its independence as bargaining chip towards his corporate and political rivals, ultimately pushing it towards a union with New England. Rockefeller however overestimated his own popularity within New York. A popular and largely bloodless uprising by the ambitious New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt overthrew the corporate government and brought about New York’s secession from New England. One Roosevelt’s first acts of office was to nationalize all of Standard Oil’s New York assets and property while placing a warrant out for the arrest of the Rockefellers. Now an Old man John D Rockefeller was forced to flee to New England, which was run over by the rightist Cabot regime. Reeling from the loss of New York, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. had tried to preserve his influence on national government by cancelling elections and enacting increasingly authoritarian government policies. New England, having long resented tyranny began to seethe with discontent, although Rockefeller was an exile, he was a wealthy one and the would be revolutionaries quickly courted him for his favor. The charismatic Joe Kennedy would ultimately earn the Rockefellers favor and on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party they would strike. Cabot’s government, riddled with dissention soon collapsed and the disgraced leader was apprehended. Cabot’s trial would be a media sensation as the former senator/president was brought before a court on capital charges. Refusing to abide by the court’s authority Cabot contemptuously offered Kennedy a crown, an offer much to his chagrin that Kennedy accepted.