“How did John D. Rockefeller, within a few years’ time manage to rise from a partnership in a Small mercantile business to control of the greatest monopoly the world has ever seen? This full and completely unvarnished account uncovers inrich detail the unprecedented ideas and maneuvers by which he achieved his amazing success and built his vast empire. Bringing new information and fresh insight to one of the most colorful stories of American business history, the book reveals that Rockefeller’s iron-fisted dominion over America’s railroads and oil resources was largely centered in one inconspicuous company with a few employees and a single technical contrivance - his “secret weapon.” Vith eye-opening candor, vigor, and humor, author Albert Z. Carr tells the fast-moving and surprising story of that company through nearly a century of its growth, to its sudden emergence as one of the important corporate enterprises of our own day. Among the exciting episodes Mr. Carr describes are the greatest business scandal in American history; a private war between Standard Oil and the Pennsylvania Railroad; why Rockefeller created the Standard Oil Trust; how Theodore Roosevelt worked to dissolve the Trust; what happened when the government took over all United States railroads; the Teapot Dome affair, and a sensational proxy fight; how throats are cut in big business; how American railroads and the “secret weapon” saved England in 1941, and how the “secret weapon” company was transformed. Mr. Carr has given this splendid book all the best characteristics of modern biography. Highlighted is the inner life of business - its problems, fears, pressures and tensions - and its psychological effects on the men who run giant corporations. These men are neither glorified nor belittled. Rather, they are painted in a clear human perspective that enables the reader to see not only what they did, but how they did it, bringing out the great part played by chance as it shaped their fortune.” BOOK JACKET