Standard Oil 1911: The Breakup That Made Rockefeller Richer

The full story of Standard Oil, how John D. Rockefeller built America's great oil monopoly from Cleveland, how Ida Tarbell exposed it, and how the 1911 Supreme Court broke it into 34 companies. On the fifteenth of May, 1911, the chamber of the Supreme Court in Washington was crowded and very still. Lawyers sat shoulder to shoulder on the hard benches. Reporters leaned forward with their pencils ready. A research-led business history documentary, built from company records, court filings, contemporary reporting and historians. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Verdict of May 1911 3:41 Kerosene and a Young Bookkeeper 9:50 Rebates and the Cleveland Massacre 16:30 Building the Trust 23:33 Ida Tarbell Takes On the Trust 29:50 Thirty-Four Pieces SOURCES Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Random House, 1998 Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, McClure, Phillips and Co., 1904 (serialised in McClure's Magazine 1902-1904) Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, Simon and Schuster, 1991 Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 1, decided May 15, 1911 Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, Scribner, 1940 Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, 15 U.S.C. sections 1-7 Steve Weinberg, Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, W. W. Norton, 2008 Where the sources disagree, the narration says so. Illustrations are artistic reconstructions created with AI tools; narration voice is synthetic. #businesshistory #documentary #economics