# Mobil Oil The Standard Oil Company of New York — Socony — was one of the 34 pieces the Supreme Court made of [[Standard Oil]] in 1911; it merged with Vacuum Oil in 1931, became Socony Mobil in 1955 and Mobil Oil in 1966, and merged with Exxon in 1999 to form [[ExxonMobil]], the largest reunion of the Rockefeller fragments. The flying red horse survives as a brand. The page exists for what the company did in the thirty years between the name change and the merger. ## The company that answered back Under [[Rawleigh Warner Jr.]] and his public-affairs chief [[Herbert Schmertz]], Mobil decided in the early 1970s that the oil industry's problem was not its conduct but its silence. The answer was a public-affairs operation without precedent: op-ed advertisements on the *New York Times* opinion page from 1970 — [[Advocacy Advertising]], a form Mobil invented and ran for three decades, arguing about price controls, offshore drilling, the Alaska pipeline, the media and the environmental movement — paired with the Masterpiece Theatre sponsorship on PBS (1971–2004) that made "Mobil" a byword for cultural patronage, and a campaign to establish in law that a corporation may speak on public questions as a citizen does. Internal Mobil strategy documents from the period, held at the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas, show the corporate-speech argument being built as a strategy before the courts adopted it as doctrine in *First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti* (1978). The [[Corporate Free Speech]] page is built on those documents; [[Citizens United]] is where the doctrine ended up. ## Climate Mobil's own scientists, like Exxon's, understood the greenhouse problem by the 1980s; Mobil's advertisements through the 1990s were the industry's most visible source of doubt about it, and the company was a founding member of the Global Climate Coalition. The better-documented record is Exxon's ([[ExxonMobil]], [[Climate Change Denialism]]), but the advocacy-ad archive is Mobil's, and it is the direct ancestor of the [[Merchants of Doubt]] method: the sponsored argument that a question science has settled remains open. ## See Also - [[Rawleigh Warner Jr.]] · [[Herbert Schmertz]] · [[Advocacy Advertising]] · [[Corporate Free Speech]] · [[Citizens United]] - [[ExxonMobil]] · [[Standard Oil]] · [[Climate Change Denialism]] · [[Merchants of Doubt]] · [[Energy Sector]]