Sublime

Rockefeller would come to freely attribute the secret of the firm’s success to his partner, for they were not long in the business, said Rockefeller, before Flagler realized that the negotiation of a lower freight rate was the key to the entire matter. If oil could be brought to their refineries at a rate below that offered to competitors, it would

Thanks in part to those conflicts of interest and lack of competition that Senator Shelby had talked about, along with a good helping of old-fashioned greed, the credit rating agencies had assigned AAA ratings (even safer than Enron’s rating) to billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities that should have been labeled “junk.” If “tricking an

More important, Tarbell did not understand that the great Gould–Vanderbilt–Scott trunk line battles were never primarily about oil; they were about dominating the grain traffic routes to Chicago and the Midwest. In the early days especially, oil freight was hardly more than ballast for the much bigger business of grain shipping.

It came from Dallas—from anti-New Deal oilmen who didn’t care what Lyndon Johnson’s politics were so long as he protected their profits. In 1941, the specter of federal regulation by the hated Ickes was becoming more and more of a possibility, and they needed protection in Washington more than ever, and their trusted advisor, Alvin Wirtz, assured t

Meanwhile, Jim Hill vastly expanded his fuel business. In 1869 he and partners Chauncey Griggs and John Armstrong created a concern called Hill, Griggs and Company, concentrating at first on the cordwood business that he had been interested in for several years. Logging primarily off forestlands to the north, they sold heavily, once again, to the r

In this, as in so many other ways, he was without peer, the preeminent builder of the frontier economy of the Northwest. By controlling the transportation structure of the region—a near-monopoly railroad that, at the time of his death, was only beginning to feel the competition of automobiles and public highways—he exercised more sweeping economic

It took considerable doing, but on April 9, 1901, nearly two years after he had proposed to Mary Lily, a bill was introduced into the Florida legislature “to be entitled an act making incurable insanity a ground for divorce.” Before the month was out, the bill had sailed through both houses and had been signed into law by the governor. Florida news