Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

Rockefeller’s preference for cooperation over competition constitutes the central theme of the book. Rockefeller was no systematic theorist. Had he been one, however, Chernow suggests that he would have been closer to Karl Marx than Adam Smith.

At an early stage in his career, Rockefeller became convinced that capitalism engendered wasteful economic competition. The years immediately following the Civil War were crucially instructive in this respect, for it was then that Rockefeller observed so many market fluctuations that he began “to doubt the workings of Adam Smith’s invisible hand” and became convinced that the oil industry “demanded a systemic solution” (130). In the quest for this solution he was aided by one of his partners, Henry Morrison Flagler, who during the Civil War also “had much occasion to ponder the contradictions of a market economy in which dynamic industries swiftly expand during prosperity only to find themselves overextended during downturns” (107). With Flagler at his side, negotiating revolutionary railroad deals that brought their firm unprecedented advantages, Rockefeller set out to transform the oil industry into a rational cartel, immune to the market economy’s boom-and-bust cycles.

The first step was to take control of rival Cleveland refiners. When word leaked out that the corrupt Pennsylvania legislature had voted to give Rockefeller and his railroad collaborators an exclusive charter that would allow them to collude on prices and shipments—a charter later revoked due to political pressure—Rockefeller used the threat of a state-sanctioned monopoly to scare his rivals.