Mr. Rockefeller on the Stand

This seemed to be the predicament of Mr. Rockefeller. I should not believe that he personally hired thugs or wanted them hired; I should not believe that the inhumanity of Colorado is something he had conceived. It seems far more true to say that his impersonal and half-understood power has delegated itself into unsocial forms, that it has assumed a life of its own which he is almost powerless to control [...] His intellectual helplessness was the amazing part of his testimony. Here was a man who represented an agglomeration of wealth probably without parallel in history, the successor to a father who has with justice been called the high priest of capitalism [...] Yet he talked about himself on the commonplace moral assumptions of a small business man. (p. 12)