John D Rockefeller Essay

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John D. Rockefeller John Davidson Rockefeller was born in Richford, New York in 1839. He was the second of six children in his family. His parents were William Avery Rockefeller, a travelling salesman, and Eliza Davidson, a housewife. From a young age John used to earn extra money by selling potatoes and candy and even loaning small sums of money to neighbors. When he was 12 his family moved to Moravia, New York, and soon after they moved again to Owego. John attended the Owego Academy. When John was 14 his famly moved again to Strongsville, Ohio. Rockefeller attended Cleveland's Central High School, he then took a ten week course in bookkeeping at Folsom's Commercial College. In September 1855, when John turned 16, he got a job as an…show more content…
By 1880, according to the New York World, Standard Oil was "the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a…show more content…
As a result, Rockefeller and his associates owned dozens of separate corporations operating in just one state, making their management of the whole enterprise very awkward. In 1882, Rockefeller's lawyers created an innovative form of corporation to centralize their holdings, giving birth to the Standard Oil Trust. The "trust" was a corporation of corporations, and the entity's size and wealth drew much attention. Nine trustees, including Rockefeller, ran the 41 companies in the trust. The public and the press were immediately suspicious of this new entity, but other businesses seized upon the idea and copied it. Standard Oil had become invincible, always prevailing against competitors and critics. It had become the richest, biggest, most feared business in the world, seemingly immune to the boom and bust of the business cycle, consistently making profits year after year. Its vast American empire included 20,000 domestic wells, 4,000 miles of pipeline, 5,000 tank cars, and over 100,000 employees. Its share of world oil refining topped out above 90% but slowly dropped to about 80% for the rest of the

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