The rhetoric of arrogance: the public relations response of the Standard Oil Trust

The dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust in 1911 was an early landmark in the development of corporate public relations. Faced with public criticism as a result of Ida Tarbell’s “History of the Standard Oil Company,” Standard Oil responded with aloofness and bolstering strategies that together created a “rhetoric of arrogance.” In later years, Standard’s founder seemed to recover from this public relations debacle, but the breakup of Standard Oil testifies to the hard lessons learned by his and other corporations in the early twentieth century: publics and their opinions matter and require candid responses. Corporations with positions of market leadership today might do well to revisit the lessons of Standard Oil.