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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
He summed up his attitude in a single line, you can abuse me, you can strike me, so long as you let me have my own way.
Years later, he would regret his silence.
The letters home show what he was telling himself through these weeks.
We will do the right thing and not be troubled about what the papers say, he wrote to Setti, in the middle of the boycott.
I want to act perfectly, conscientiously, and fearlessly in the matter and feel confident of good results.
A week later, he wrote again, We know a few things that people generally may not.
At all events, we know our own intentions, and they are right and only so.
In a town along Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, a 14-year-old girl watched her father, an oil producer, come home one night with a grim look on his face.
He had signed a pledge, he told his family, that he would not sell out to the Cleveland ogre known as Standard Oil.
Her name was Ida Tarbell, and hers was a name that Rockefeller would come to know very well in a few decades.
Because of the public outcry, the South Improvement Company died before it ever started.
Despite what was happening, Rockefeller was steadfast, but the railroad, sensing the political winds, caved within weeks and canceled all the contracts.
The Pennsylvania legislature next revoked the company's charter.
A congressional committee branded the whole thing as the most gigantic and daring conspiracy ever to confront a free nation.
By April 1872, the South Improvement Company was officially dead, and Rockefeller himself wired the other producers to say all the contracts were void.
For the rest of his life, he protested that the company had never done any business at all.
There was never a shipment made or a rebate or a drawback collected under the South Improvement Plan.
And all of that was completely true.
It was also besides the point because Rockefeller and Standard Oil hadn't actually needed this scheme to succeed as a business to prove valuable.
The idea that it existed put fear into the heart of every refiner in Cleveland.
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