Refining Nature: Standard Oil and the Limits of Efficiency, 1863-1920
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REFINING NATURE: STANDARD OIL AND THE LIMITS OF EFFICIENCY, 1863-1920 by JONATHAN JOSEPH WLASIUK Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Ted Steinberg Department of History CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY January, 2012 ii CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of ________________________Jonathan Joseph Wlasiuk___________________________ candidate for the_________________Doctor of Philosophy_________________degree*. (signed)___________ ____________Ted Steinberg______________________________ (Chair of the committee) Dan Cohen (Committee member) Peter Shulman (Committee member) Jessica Green (Committee member) (date)____September 26, 2011____ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. iii Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Joseph Wlasiuk All rights reserved iv For Anna, who did the heavy lifting. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract..............................................................................................................................vi Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 1 Improved Earth......................................................................................................29 2 Fire.........................................................................................................................63 3 Water......................................................................................................................97 4 Air........................................................................................................................127 5 Efficient Earth......................................................................................................163 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................195 Bibliography....................................................................................................................224 vi Refining Nature: Standard Oil and the Limits of Efficiency, 1863-1920 Abstract by JONATHAN JOSEPH WLASIUK Refining Nature: Standard Oil and the Limits of Efficiency, 1863-1920 My dissertation analyzes the social and ecological changes resulting from the production of illuminating oil. Using the cities of Cleveland, Ohio, and Whiting, Indiana, as case studies, I examine how the economic success of the Standard Oil Company was predicated on a new, corporate relationship with the environment and society. As Standard Oil concentrated new industrial pollutants in urban areas, municipal governments responded by building unprecedented public works infrastructure as a technological alternative to vital ecological systems. Although municipal governments and Standard Oil succeeded in providing citizens and customers with new levels of material comfort through applied science, they failed to anticipate the environmental consequences of their triumph. Technological replacements (sewers, water works, kerosene) for inefficient natural systems funneled new industrial hazards into the urban environment. As critics discovered that the geography of urban health aligned with spatial class divisions, a new critique of capitalism infused ecological observations into the reform movements that emerged from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 7 INTRODUCTION Refining Nature: The Environmental Costs of the Kerosene Age Historians have long studied the tension between public and private control of resources. Few entities embody this political and social conflict as dramatically as the private corporation. Even Adam Smith, the thinker most associated with describing the vicissitudes of early capitalism, warned of the danger of organized private wealth. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” Although corporations founded America, the London Company and Massachusetts Bay Company were bound to communal goals and aristocratic privilege. By law and custom, individual pursuit of wealth was subservient to the goals of the church, crown, and colony. Following the American Revolution, these legal and communal checks withered as the liberalism of the revolution became a full-fledged ideology in the early republic. John F. Kasson, an historian of the early market revolution in the United States, argues that American desires for industrial independence from Europe trumped the republican conception of the ideal, always agrarian, citizen who curbed private interests that might endanger social harmony. Kasson writes, “For Americans to import finished goods instead of making their own was thus a violation of the economy of nature, a rejection of her beneficence, and a flouting of America’s destiny.” American republican ideology was recast to view any impediment to private enterprise as a danger to the American political project. This new ideology significantly altered Americans’ relation with the material world. Thomas C. Cochran has written that “Under the pressure of lawyers the courts became distinctly favorable to entrepreneurial action” and the “protection of contracts against state interference were 8 post-Revolutionary stimulants to investment.” The anti-developmental bias of common law eroded under these new interpretations that made the courthouse an instrument in the colonization of the North American environment.1 The Standard Oil Company emerged at the turning of this ideological tide and owes it success to this altered republican ideology and the revolution in legal orthodoxy it precipitated. The rise in power of both corporations and the federal government define the modern era but scholars often underestimate the role of the corporate form by isolating its agency to the realm of economics. By uncovering the corporate relationship with the environment this study connects larger trends in society (urbanization, industrialization, the rise of Progressivism) to the material changes wrought by corporate action. As such, the methods of environmental history provides a new critical perspective to the rise of the corporation in the modern era that challenges the familiar discourses on the role of the corporation in society that tend to ignore the connections between 1 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Arch. Constable and Company,1806):177. The very first scholarly investigation of the Standard Oil Company focused on the tension between what Henry Demarest Lloyd identified as wealth and commonwealth, a central theme for many fin de siècle “muckraking” journalistic and scholarly investigations: see Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1894). A growing historiography centered on the subject of corporations has emerged in the past generation most notably in the works of Alfred Chandler, Jr. and Alan Trachtenburg, which sought to uncover, in Trachtenburg’s words, "the emergence of a changed, more tightly structured society with new hierarchies of control, and also changed conceptions of that society, of America itself”: see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982): 3-4; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1977); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., ed., The Coming of Managerial Capitalism (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1985). Since we cannot talk about these changes without a grounding in the shifting legal landscape that endowed private corporations with extraordinary rights and privileges toward the close of the nineteenth century legal history has emerged as a necessary companion to the study of corporations. Morton J. Horwitz’s two volume history of American law from the Revolution to the 1960s has established a narrative and periodization for historians, which historians interested in the development of environmental law have used as a framework for their own work: Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976); Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992); examples of legal histories that focus on environmental issues include Celia Campbell- Mohn, ed., Environmental Law: From Resources to Recovery (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1993); and Ted Steinberg, Slide Mountain: Or, the Folly of Owning Nature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996); Thomas C. Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1981): 9. 9 economy, environment, and community. With its successful drive to eliminate costs through technology and scientific management, the Standard Oil Company became a model for the modern industrial corporation in the twentieth century. It emerged at a time when public checks on private power withered and dissecting its internal logic and relationships with both society and nature informs our understanding of an essential condition of modernity—the corporation as the totalizing feature of daily life, a source of subsistence and a consumer of labor for billions worldwide. Although this dissertation focuses on the material reality of corporate action,