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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