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
I persuaded our partners to keep silent too.
The more we progressed, yet kept on gaining success and keeping silent, the more we were abused.
Mr. Flagler said to me, why, John, you must have hide like a rhinoceros.
We all said nothing and went on sawing wood.
And sawing wood was what he meant by sticking to their business.
Doing so worked fine while nobody looked closely.
The trouble started, though, when somebody finally did.
His name was Henry Lloyd.
He was a newspaperman who had married into the family that owned the Chicago Tribune, which left him rich and free to write about whatever he wanted.
He chose to write about Standard Oil, and in May 1881, he wrote an article called The Story of a Great Monopoly.
It was one of the first serious accounts of the Standard Oil Trust ever to appear in print.
In it, he told 40 million kerosene-burning Americans that the light in their homes was priced by a single company most of them had never heard of.
He included a line built to be quoted, America has the proud satisfaction of having furnished the world with the greatest, wisest, and meanest monopoly known to history.
Lloyd also handed the company the nickname that stuck, the octopus.
For decades after, cartoonists would draw Standard Oil as a creature with tentacles around the statehouses and railroads, with one arm even reaching from the dome of the Capitol.
As reporting goes, it was sloppy.
Much of it rested on rumor and innuendo.
And when Lloyd came back in 1894 with a whole book of it called Wealth Against Commonwealth, much of that was wrong too.
But it landed anyway.
Because underneath the ranting sat an idea that many Americans were ready to believe.
Showing 1901–1920 of 20,679 · page 96 of 1034
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