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
His pitch to the rest of the refiners, pierced together afterward from sworn testimony of some of the men who heard it, went like this.
This scheme is bound to work.
It means an absolute control by us of the oil business.
There's no chance for anyone outside of it.
But we're going to give everybody a chance to come in.
You are to turn over your refinery to my appraisers, and I will give you Standard Oil Company stock or cash, as you prefer, for the value we put on it.
I advise you to take the stock.
Frank Rockefeller, Rockefeller's own brother, later told Congress that the hard version sounded like, if you don't sell your property to us, it will be valueless because we've got advantages with the railroads.
Among the men who came to him was Isaac Hewitt, who is now one of the partners in a rival refinery.
Hewitt, remember, was the man who gave John D. Rockefeller his first position as a bookkeeper.
And now he came to his former clerk's house on Usled Avenue, hat in hand, to plead for his business.
Together they strolled down the avenue where Rockefeller told his old boss bluntly that his firm would not survive, that he should take the deal.
Then Rockefeller added a sentence that entered Rockefeller folklore.
I have ways of making money you know nothing about.
And he was right.
Another refinery, John Heisel, claimed that he got the same pitch.
But after he heard it, he told Rockefeller that he wasn't afraid of him.
To which Rockefeller responded, you may not be afraid to have your hand cut off, but your body will suffer.
In four weeks, between mid-February and mid-March 1872, Standard Oil bought out 22 of Cleveland's 26 refineries.
During one 48-hour stretch in early March, they bought six.
Showing 1461–1480 of 20,679 · page 74 of 1034
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