"I get the feeling that the five of you are like Saudi Arabia," Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) fumed to the CEOs of the world's five largest oil companies on Capitol Hill on May 12. "You're caught up in your profits, you're highly defensive, and you yield on nothing. You're deeply and profoundly committed to sharing nothing."

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So it continued at the hearing on a Democratic proposal to repeal tax breaks for the oil industry, a venerable ritual in Washington at times of high gas prices. Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee railed about Big Oil's outsized profits, tax breaks, high prices, and failure to contribute to society. Republicans defended the companies just as fervently, arguing among other things that the proposed legislation would worsen the country's economic malaise. None of it was new, save for a certain poetic symmetry: The hearing took place almost 100 years to the day after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, the ruling that created the oil industry as we know it today and set the tone for the climate of paranoia and suspicion that has hung over Big Oil ever since. And there was no small irony in Rockefeller's turn as inquisitor: His great-grandfather, the most famous oilman of all time, had been at the center of the dispute -- and on the opposite side of it.

In its May 15, 1911, opinion, the court wrote that Standard Oil had come by its hegemony "not as a result of normal methods of industrial development, but by … excluding others from the trade, and thus centralizing in the combination a perpetual control of the movements of petroleum and its products." Such a judgment was a long time in coming for Standard, the company that John D. Rockefeller, a Cleveland refinery owner and former produce trader, had built over the space of four decades into the world's first gigantic multinational company. Anger had built for much of those years over his underhanded attempts to drive rivals out of business and capture 90 percent and more of the U.S. market. But it finally came to a head after a 24-month investigative series by a writer named Ida Tarbell in McClure's Magazine starting in 1902. Tarbell's stories described kickbacks that Rockefeller arranged with railroads, effectively forcing his rivals to subsidize Standard's business. Almost as soon as he took his oath of office, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered a government investigation of the company. In 1906, the government filed restraint-of-trade charges against Standard.

The Supreme Court ruling forced Standard to break itself up into 34 companies, producing today's Exxon and Chevron and no-longer-extant companies such as Mobil, Amoco, and Unocal. But in a sense, the breakup came too late: The basic DNA of the industry had already been set. Alone among the personalities and industrial creations of the Gilded Age, Rockefeller and Standard Oil have continued to loom over their industries, and the global economy, into the 21st century. The most successful among Standard's heirs -- ExxonMobil -- routinely reports the highest profit of any commercial enterprise on the planet, a feat it has achieved by explicitly observing many of Rockefeller's practices: the accumulation of big cash reserves, highly disciplined spending, centralized and methodical decision-making, and brilliantly engineered and executed complex projects. The public, meanwhile, has largely forgotten the Supreme Court case, along with the specifics of the charges, but not the sentiments underlying the decision. Simply put, Americans are wary of oilmen -- as are people in nearly every other corner of the Earth to which the industry has spread in the past century. "There's a legacy of distrust," Paul Sankey, an oil analyst with Deutsche Bank, told me. "The industry was born of a PR disaster [and] has never shed the image."

Such a disaster was perhaps inevitable, given how widely Rockefeller's views diverged from the U.S. government's when it came to his business. Although memorialized as an archcapitalist, Rockefeller believed that Adam Smith's invisible hand was nonsense, a creation of "virtuous academic Know-Nothings about business." The unbridled free market was a "sinking ship," he told his biographer. Rather, he believed in "cooperation," as he called his collusion with railroads and like-minded oilmen. In general, Rockefeller believed that flat-out capitalism was fatally chaotic and acted accordingly, variously buying out and crushing his rivals to the best of his ability.

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