Without any comment on the business practices of Standard Oil, I do think it's interesting that the price of crude actually increased substantially after the antitrust ruling.
World War I, increased demand, and a period in the 1920s during which there was genuine concern that all the oil that could be found had been.
That fear disappeared with the East Texas oilfield discovery in 1930. Which so increased the supply of oil relative to demand that prices fell to 13 cents per barrel.
This created a number of problems, including the prospect of damaging oilfields to the point that future extraction would be compromised. It ended up with the governors of both Texas and Oklahoma calling out the state militia, and, in Texas's case, the Texas Rangers, and seizing control of wellheads by force of arms in an effort to constrain extraction and drive oil prices up -- to $1/bbl.
This resulted in the Texas Railroad Commission effectively controlling US oil output (with oversight from the US Department of Interior) from 1931 to 1972, at which point, peak US oil meant that there was no longer any surplus extraction capacity to limit. Shortly afterward the Arabs tried another of their periodic embargos against the US and Europe, and, to everyone's shock, it actually worked.
If you look at the price of oil, from 1931 to 1972 it was remarkably stable. Even WWII and the post-war consumption boom barely moved the needle. Post 1974, everything goes all to hell. We're still there now.
Daniel Yergin's masterpiece work, The Prize, covers this history in great depth.
I should have been more specific - I was more remarking on the period between 1911 and 1914, which saw crude prices rise; that seemed rather interesting, since I'd expect an antitrust ruling to have the opposite effect if Standard had been keeping prices high through elimination of potential competition. The effect of WWI is quite obvious, naturally.
The rest of the history, though, is quite interesting. I've added that book to my reading list. Thank you!
