Challenge and Response: A Modern History of Standard Oil Company

From the dust jacket: This is the story of the Standard Oil Company (Indiana), one of America's ten largest corporations and among the five largest U.S. petroleum companies. In this, the first history to appear since Paul H. Giddens' 1955 history, Standard's story of the last thirty years is told for the first time. It is the story of a company that had, despite its size, been primarily a fiscally conservative, domestic oil company and which changed direction in this period to emerge as a world leader in its industry. Building on and reworking the material of Dr. Giddens' earlier book, Emmett Dedmon has, in the early chapters, re-chronicled the first seventy years of Standard and brought to life the personalities that guided it through the early automobile boom and kept it viable through the depression years and the Second World War. Then, as the title CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE would suggest, Mr. Dedmon details the interplay between the new conditions of the post-war world and the people of Standard Oil who made the decisive responses that kept pace with a rapidly changing environment.....