Standard Oil Company

Standard Oil is presented as a corporation whose reach extends well beyond the oil fields: its name appears on a burning tanker near Genoa, in arguments about control of oil in the Near East, and in plans for postwar publicity work. The novel makes the company a meeting point between global commerce and political power, while showing that claims made in its defense or against its rivals are often voiced by interested observers rather than settled as neutral fact.

Corporate Competition and Global Markets

A newspaper interview with Emile Deen describes the rivalry between Standard Oil and Royal Dutch as a struggle for control of world markets that the war halted. Deen identifies envy, discontent, and suspicion as its basic forces, setting the company within a contest shaped by industrial expansion, new territory, natural resources, and the growth of large fortunes. The passage links corporate competition to the conditions of modern economic development, rather than treating oil as an isolated commodity.

The postwar contest becomes more specific in conversation at the Café de la Paix. Mr. Rasmussen, an engineer with Standard Oil, argues that Anglo-Persian and Dutch interests are moving ahead of the United States in the Near East. He names Baku, Mohommarah, and Mosul, and fears that Britain will secure advantages before the peace settlement is complete. He also objects to the possibility of Armenia being assigned to the United States as a mandate, noting the devastation and hunger there. His account joins oil strategy to the question of who will bear the costs of governing and feeding a war-ravaged population.

Rasmussen frames the issue as a threat to American primacy in world oil production. J. Ward Moorehouse responds that public opinion can still be stirred, while Eveline Hutchins asks about the Russian claim to Baku. Rasmussen invokes self-determination to dispute a Russian right to the region, describing its population as mostly Turkish and Armenian; he nevertheless says he would prefer the reds to Britain. The exchange exposes the flexibility of the principles being used: national claims, humanitarian obligations, and corporate competition overlap, but do not resolve into a single consistent position.

Oil, Shipping, and the War

The novel also places Standard Oil in the physical routes of wartime trade. As a ship approaches Genoa at night, a red glare is mistaken for evidence that the Germans have captured and are burning the town. It proves instead to be a large, new Standard Oil tanker on fire outside the breakwater, its bow settled low and flames spreading across the water. The harbor, lighthouses, town, and crowded ships glow in the blaze. The scene gives the company a material presence in a dangerous maritime world: its interests travel aboard vessels exposed to the same hazards and uncertainty as the wider wartime shipping network.

The oil debate later turns from shipping to territorial access. In Paris, Don Robbins tells Richard Ellsworth Savage that Britain is occupying Mosul, the Karun River, Persia, and, according to rumor, Baku. He predicts that oil will shape any American decision about recognizing the soviets and says that Wilson’s idealism fails to grasp the force of petroleum and manganese. Robbins’s account is a character’s political reading, not an official statement by Standard Oil. Its significance lies in how bluntly it places resource competition beside diplomatic ideals and the public language of peace.

Finance and Corporate Influence

The novel’s broader financial passages provide a parallel scale for understanding corporate power, though they do not identify Standard Oil as the owner of the financial institutions discussed. A montage of Morgan interests lists banks, trust companies, insurance companies, railroads, street railways, an express company, and the International Mercantile Marine, presenting interlocking directorates as a means through which power could extend across sectors. Elsewhere, the account says that by 1917 the Allies had borrowed $1.9 billion through the House of Morgan, and that by the end of the Peace Conference the phrase J. P. Morgan suggests carried the force of $74 billion. These figures belong to the book’s portrayal of finance and political leverage, not to a balance sheet for Standard Oil. Read alongside the oil discussions, they make corporate competition part of a much wider structure in which private economic influence bears on international decisions.

Publicity and the Postwar Career

Standard Oil’s influence also enters through public relations. After tea in Paris, Moorehouse tells Savage that he may soon run publicity work for Standard Oil and suggests that Savage could become a public-relations counsel. Savage later writes to his mother that Moorehouse has promised him a position in Paris advising large corporations such as Standard Oil. He regards the job as a way to leave military regulations behind while continuing his own work on the side, and notes that others call it the opportunity of a lifetime. The prospect shows how corporate power is represented not only through ships, oil fields, or diplomatic maneuvering, but through the people who shape public understanding of business.

Narrative Significance

The company’s appearances connect separate scales of the novel: a tanker burning off Genoa, a Paris café conversation about Baku and mandates, and the professional networks emerging after the war. In each, oil is more than a source of fuel. It is a reason to compete for territory, a subject around which political arguments are made, and a route into influential employment. Yet the narrative preserves friction between those dimensions: Rasmussen’s concern for American oil primacy sits beside humanitarian talk about Armenia, while Robbins casts the same resource contest as a test of Wilsonian idealism. Standard Oil thus helps the novel show how the language of national interest and public ideals can become entangled with commercial rivalry.