Question

You are the lawyer defending of prosecuting one of the following individuals of
your choice Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, or Vanderbilt. Make-a final
argument that either defends one of these gentlemen as captains of industry o r
condemns on of them as robber barons. Remember that final arguments are
persuasive as to sway the jury in your favor, so the use and citing of solid
evidence is important in this case. (1 page) Fine outside evidence to prove your
point as well.

Answer 1

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,

You have heard testimony, seen documents, and read the evidence. I ask you to look clearly at the record and decide whether John D. Rockefeller was a visionary builder of American industry — or a robber baron who bought his empire by crushing competition and bending public institutions to his will.

Start with the facts. By the 1880s, Standard Oil controlled roughly nine-tenths of the nation’s refining capacity, a level of dominance hostile to any functioning market (see Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, 1904). How was this achieved? Not by superior products alone, but by a deliberate program of secret rebates with railroads, preferential freight rates, and cutthroat tactics that drove independent refiners into bankruptcy or forced them to sell at fire-sale prices. Investigative reporting and contemporaneous business records show systematic secret agreements that gave Standard Oil an unfair cost advantage and treated competitors differently — classic discriminatory practices that subvert competition (Tarbell, 1904).

When corporations use secrecy and coercion to exclude rivals, they do not merely win — they steal the future of free enterprise. The law recognized this. Applying the Sherman Antitrust Act, the United States Supreme Court in 1911 found Standard Oil guilty of monopolistic combination and ordered its dissolution (Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911)). That is not a moral judgment by a journalist or a partisan politician; that is the judgment of American law. The Court concluded that Standard Oil’s structure and methods were in restraint of trade — precisely the behavior a free nation forbids.

Yes, Mr. Rockefeller gave away great sums to education, medicine, and research in his later years. His philanthropic work saved lives and founded institutions that endure. But philanthropy does not erase the means by which fortune was amassed. You would not excuse a thief because he later donates part of the spoils to charity. Nor should we let largesse become a shield for practices that impoverished competitors, concentrated economic power, and jeopardized democratic institutions by trading on secrecy and influence.

Consider also the human cost: small refinery owners ruined, workers placed in powerless dependence, consumers who faced a marketplace with fewer choices and more vulnerability to price manipulation. The concentrations of wealth here were not the byproduct of fair competition; they were the result of an engineered monopoly.

In closing, laws, historians, and contemporary investigators converged on this truth: Standard Oil was not merely a successful company — it was a machine of exclusion. The Supreme Court’s breakup and Ida Tarbell’s painstaking exposure confirm that Rockefeller’s rise was built on predatory strategies incompatible with a free and fair market (Tarbell, 1904; Standard Oil, 1911). Judge this man not by the monuments his charity erected, but by the methods he employed to erect his fortune.

Find John D. Rockefeller what the evidence warrants: not merely a captain of industry, but a robber baron whose practices demanded — and received — legal condemnation.