David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…There's something Rockefeller says, own shares of Standard Oil and your family will never go hungry. Yeah. As Ida Tarbell, who we’re going to talk much about next time, wrote in her investigative reporting on Standard Oil, this is what she claimed that the Standard pitch was to other folks about joining the scheme. "You see, this scheme is bound to work. It means an absolute control by us of the oil business. There is no chance for anyone outside. We are 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 that we put on it. I advise you to take the stock. It will be for your own good." They're literally deciding what value they're going to pay for all these refiners. Of course, the offer that they put in is like 25%–50% of what the refineries even paid to build the factories in the first place. Rockefeller’s argument is, well, we're just going to shut most of these down anyway. We're actually doing them a favor by taking this thing that's just going to go out of business over the next few years, giving them some shares in our company. We don't want to be too terrible to these guys. They are our fellow countrymen and they're also in our industry. We're just bringing them in, we’re giving them some shares. I'm going to write the whole thing off anyway, so it's a crap factory.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.