Shane Parrish
speaker
20,679 appearances
49 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Shane Parrish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
It was so full of loopholes that people took to calling it the Swiss Cheese Act.
Standard Oil lost no sleep or money over it.
The trust was simply very good at not being caught.
Every time a court came close, the company would change shape.
When Ohio's courts ruled that their present arrangement was illegal, the partners dissolved it on paper into 20 separate companies, but then continued to run all 20 from the same office.
When the state next pressed for Standard Oil's books, 16 boxes of records turned up conveniently burned.
And in 1899, the empire slipped into its final and cleverest disguise.
New Jersey had just made a new kind of company legal.
It was termed a holding company.
And its only job was to own other companies.
So the entire empire reorganized under a single entity, Standard Oil of New Jersey.
It had now held 41 firms that operated from coast to coast.
If the government wanted to dismantle the machine now, it would have to sue a single massive corporation and win.
It would take a president willing to try.
In September of 1901, an anarchist shot President McKinley and a young man named Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office.
This new president drew a line between the good trusts and the bad ones and put Standard Oil at the top of the naughty list.
And in November 1906, his government sued under the Sherman Act to dissolve Standard Oil of New Jersey.
By the following summer, seven federal and six state suits were also opened and running at once against Standard Oil.
The main case became the largest antitrust proceeding the country had ever seen.
Over 400 witnesses, 11 million words of testimony, and 12,000 pages.
Showing 2161–2180 of 20,679 · page 109 of 1034
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