National Affairs: Gas at $1 a Gallon?

Complete control and domination of the oil industry by the Standard Oil Companies, in violation of the 1911 dissolution decree of the Supreme Court, was charged by the La Follette Oil Investigation Committee in its report presented to the Senate after a three months' inquiry into conditions and prices in the oil business.

The methods of control as set forth in the report include division of marketing territory between the various Standard Oil Companies on almost the same basis as before the dissolution, ownership of the principal pipe lines, interlocking stock ownership, fixing of prices in the producing fields, excessive and discriminatory freight rates, and ownership of the basic patents for "cracking," the technical name for reducing crude oil to gasoline.

" If a few great oil companies are permitted to manipulate prices for the next few years as they have been doing since 1920," the report asserts, " the people of this country must be prepared before long to pay at least a dollar a gallon for gasoline."

Prominent oil men in the Standard Oil companies in New York, headed by Walter C. Teagle, President of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, declared that dollar gasoline was an economic impossibility.