CHAPTER II
REPRESENTATIVE TRUSTS
NOTE
Since the pool was primarily only a gentlemen’s agreement and
its provisions and regulations were unenforcible through the courts,
it possessed certain disadvantages. But since the pool has persisted
throughout the entire course of our industrial history since the Civil
War and has been the form under which some of our more recent
combinations have operated, it may be asserted that these dis
advantages have been somewhat overestimated. Yet it is none the
less true that there were certain undesirable features connected
with it and very shortly a new form of combination was devised
known as the Trust. For many years it was supposed that the
Standard Oil Trust of 1882 was the first agreement of this character.
More recent revelations, however, have shown that the original
Trust agreement was made by this company in 1879. In conse
quence, both the agreement of 1879 and that of 1882 have been
included under this group.
The Standard Oil Company did not long retain the monopoly
of this new scheme of combination. Others saw plainly the ad
vantages it afforded, and speedily adopted it. In the latter part
of 1884 the American Cotton Oil Trust was organized in the State
of Arkansas. It embraced some eighty-five concerns doing business
throughout the South. In 1887 three other Trusts were formed.
The Distillers’ and Cattle Feeders’ Trust was a successor to the
Western Export Association, a pool of the whisky manufacturers
north of the Ohio River which had been organized in 1881. The
others organized in the same year were the National Lead Trust
and the Sugar Trust. The technical name of the latter combination
was the Sugar Refineries Company. It may also be noted than an
abortive attempt was made to organize the Cordage Industry into
a Trust. The Trust agreements reproduced here are all at the
present time well known documents but it has none the less seemed
advisable to include them in the space of this book for sake of com
pleteness and for purposes of analyzation.—Ed.
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