It's too bad that humanity hasn't figured out a way to record and share and pool knowledge yet, but them's the breaks.
There was no real effort to understand the possible sources of noise or error in the measurements.
In 1920 the Industrial Revolution has been going on for over 100 years, the US petroleum industry was already big enough to have been affected by antitrust action, and Henry Ford's assembly line has been enabling mass motorization for the better part of a decade.
If you were interested in studying the relationship between bias and funding you might do a survey of published papers and articles on the subject.
If you can identify some measurable criteria that can be used to rate how "green" a paper's funding is then you can use that as an axis and compare the surveyed papers to reveal trends.