Lincoln Steffens. He had made himself felt in the journalistic and
political life of New York City by a fresh form of reportorial attack.
Young, handsome, self-confident, with a good academic background and two
years of foreign life and observation, Steffens began his professional
career unencumbered by journalistic shibboleths and with an immense
curiosity as to what was going on about him. He was soon puzzled and
fascinated by the relations of police and politicians, politicians and
the law, law and city officials, city officials and business, business
and church, education, society, the press. Apparently groups from each
of these categories worked together, supporting one another, an
organization close, compact, loyal from fear or self-interest or both.
It was because of this organization, Steffens concluded, that graft and
vice and crime were established industries of the city. Attacks from
outraged virtue had slowed up the system at intervals ever since the
Civil War, but never permanently deranged it. A few rascals might be
exterminated, but they were soon replaced. The system had bred new
rascals, grown stronger and more cunning with time. He set out to trace
its pattern. Incredibly outspoken, taking rascality for granted,
apparently never shocked or angry or violent, never doubtful of himself,
only coolly determined to demonstrate to men and women of good will and
honest purpose what they were up against and warn them that the only way
they could hope to grapple with a close corporation devoted to what
there was in it was by an equally solid corporation devoted to decent
and honest government, business, law, education, religion. First as a
reporter and later as the city editor of the _Globe_, Steffens stirred
the town.
It was entirely in harmony with the McClure method of staff building
that this able, fearless innocent should be marked for absorption. He
was persuaded to take the editing of the magazine, now in its tenth year
and steadily growing in popularity and influence. He was to be the great
executive—the editorial head that would shift some of the burden from
the shoulders of Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips. But the machine was
running smoothly even if with little outward excitement. Steffens made a
brave effort to adjust himself to the established order, to learn the
situation. Naturally he took Mr. McClure’s meteoric goings and comings,
his passionate and often despairing efforts to make his staff “see” what
he did, his cries that the magazine was stale, dying, more seriously
than those of us who had been longer together. He seems to have been
bewildered by what went on in the excited staff meetings held whenever
Mr. McClure came in from a foraging expedition. I had come to look on
Mr. McClure’s returns as the most genuinely creative moments of our
magazine life. He was an extraordinary reporter; his sense of the
meaning, the meat of a man or event, his vivid imagination, his
necessity of discharging on the group at once, before they were cold,
his observations, intuitions, ideas, experiences, made the gatherings on
his return amazingly stimulating to me. Sifting, examining, verifying,
following up, were all necessary. Mr. McClure understood that and
trusted John Phillips to see that it was done, but he properly fought
for his findings. In his “Autobiography” Steffens credits me with a tact
in our editorial scrimmages which I do not deserve. It is true, as he
says, that I was the friend of each and all, but what I was chiefly
interested in was seeing the magazine grow in delight and in usefulness.
I knew our excited discussions were really fertile. They also were
highly entertaining.
It was in this unsatisfied seeking by Mr. McClure for more and more of
contemporary life that Lincoln Steffens’ chief contribution to it and to
the political life of his period had its root. Mr. McClure’s fixed
conviction that great editing was not to be done in the office he
finally applied to Steffens, who was bravely struggling there to become
the great editor he had been called to be.
“You can’t learn to edit a magazine in the office,” Mr. McClure told
him. “Get out, go anywhere, everywhere, see what is going on in the
cities and states, find out who are the men and the movements we ought
to be reporting.”
And so Stef went for a month, to the Middle West mainly, constantly
reporting back to the office in McClure fashion what he was finding. He
combed the universities and the newspaper offices; he looked up
politicians; he searched for writers, anything and everywhere which
might possibly be grist to the greedy mill in New York.
One of the schemes on which he had been commissioned to check up was a
series of articles on city and state governments. Almost at once he
began to see larger and larger possibilities in the idea. There should
be two series, he wrote the office, descriptions of the actual
government of four or five typical cities and of as many states,
humanized by studies of the men who ruled them or who were fighting the
true rulers. A meeting with young district attorney Folk of St. Louis,
then in the thick of a fight to reform his town, whetted his appetite.
“If we take up the states,” he wrote, “I would prefer to wait for
William Allen White to write the articles. The cities will be more in my
line. If I should be entrusted with the work I think I could make my
name.”
A few weeks later he was entrusted with the work. The result was “The
Shame of the Cities” which, as he prophesied, made his name.
11
A CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY SEEKS MY ACQUAINTANCE
As Steffens’ case shows there was always much fingering of a subject at
_McClure’s_ before one of the staff was told to go ahead. The original
hint might come from Mr. McClure’s overflowing head and pocket, Mr.
Phillips’ notebooks, as much a part of him as his glasses, the daily
mail, the chance word of a caller. We all turned in our pickings. They
must concern the life of the day, that which was interesting people. An
idea, once launched, grew until fixed on somebody; and, once started, it
continued to grow according to the response of readers. No response—no
more chapters. A healthy response—as many chapters as the material
justified.
It was by this process that my next long piece of work came into being:
“The History of the Standard Oil Company.”
The deluge of monopolistic trusts which had followed the close of the
Spanish-American War and the “return of prosperity” was disturbing and
confusing people. It was contrary to their philosophy, their belief
that, given free opportunity, free competition, there would always be
brains and energy enough to prevent even the ablest leader monopolizing
an industry. What was interfering with the free play of the forces in
which they trusted? They had been depending on the Federal Antitrust Law
passed ten years before. Was it quite useless? It looked that way.
There was much talk in the office about it, and there came to the top
finally the idea of using the story of a typical trust to illustrate how
and why the clan grew. How about the greatest of them all—the Standard
Oil Company?
I suppose I must have talked rather freely about my own recollections
and impressions of its development. It had been a strong thread weaving
itself into the pattern of my life from childhood on.
I had come into the world just before the discovery of oil, the land on
which I was born not being over thirty miles away from that first well.
The discovery had shaped my father’s life, rescuing him as it did
thousands of others from the long depression which had devastated the
eighteen-fifties. I had grown up with oil derricks, oil tanks, pipe
lines, refineries, oil exchanges. I remembered what had happened in the
Oil Region in 1872 when the railroads and an outside group of refiners
attempted to seize what many men had created. It was my first experience
in revolution. On the instant the word became holy to me. It was your
privilege and duty to fight injustice. I was much elated when, not so
long afterwards, I fell on Rousseau’s “Social Contract” and read his
defense of the right to revolt.
I had been only dimly conscious of what had happened in the decade
following—the decade in which the Standard Oil Company had completed its
monopoly. It was the effect on the people about me that stirred me, the
hate and suspicion and fear that engulfed the community. I had been so
deeply stirred by this human tragedy, as I have told, that I had made a
feeble and ineffectual attempt to catch it, fix it in a novel.
The drama continued to unfold while I was abroad, came into our very
household when a partner of my father’s ruined by the complex situation
shot himself, leaving father with notes. To pay them it was necessary in
the panic of ’93 to do what in his modest economy was unsound and
humiliating—mortgage our home. While the personal tragedies came in my
mother’s letters, my brother wrote me vivid accounts of what was going
on in the outside oil world, of the slow action of the Interstate
Commerce Commission from which all independents had hoped so much, of
businesses ruined while they waited for the decision; of the Ohio suit
which drove the trust to reorganization, a legal victory which in no way
weakened its hold or crippled its growth. Depressing as this was, I was
elated by my brother’s reports of the growing strength of a strongly
integrated cooperative effort of producers, refiners, transporters,
marketers, the Pure Oil Company. The only escape possible for those who
would do independent business, he argued ably, was to build their own
combination depending less on agitation, politics, legislation, more on
sound business. Fight if necessary, but above all do business.
While I was still in Paris this clutter of recollections, impressions,
indignations, perplexities, was crystallized into something like a
pattern by Henry D. Lloyd’s brilliant “Wealth Against Commonwealth.” I
had been hearing about the book from home, but the first copy was
brought me by my English friend H. Wickham Steed, who, fresh from two
years’ contact with German socialism, took the work with great
seriousness. Was not this a conclusive proof that capitalism was
necessarily inconsistent with fair and just economic life? Was not
socialism the only way out, as Lloyd thought?
I was more simple-minded about it. As I saw it, it was not capitalism
but an open disregard of decent ethical business practices by
capitalists which lay at the bottom of the story Mr. Lloyd told so
dramatically.
The reading and discussions whetted my appetite; and when I came back to
America in 1894, and heard anew in the family circle of what had been
going on, my old desire to get the drama down seized me. Where were
those notes I had made back in my _Chautauquan_ days? Gathering dust in
the tower room. I looked them up, saw that I had done well in choosing
Pithole for my opening scene. Nothing so dramatic as Pithole in oil
history. How many men it had made and ruined! But “the bottom had
dropped out” in 1866. What was left of it now—1894? My brother and I
drove over to see.
Thirty years before, Pithole had been a city of perhaps twenty thousand
men and women with all the equipment for a permanent life. Now here were
only stripped fields where no outline of a town remained. We spent a
long day trying to place the famous wells, to fix my father’s tank
shops, so profitable while Pithole lasted, to trace the foundations of
the Bonta House, which had furnished the makings of our home in
Titusville. The day left us with a melancholy sense of the impermanence
of human undertakings; and, more to the point, it showed me that if I
were to reconstruct the town with its activities and its people, picture
its rise and its fall, I must go back to records, maps, reminiscences;
that I must undertake a long and serious piece of investigation before I
began. But, given the material, how about my ability to make it live, to
create the drama which I felt? One must be an artist before he can
create—that I knew. I was no artist.
Mr. McClure’s call to come on and write a life of Napoleon put an end to
my hesitations; and, Napoleon done, there had been Lincoln and the
Spanish-American War—no time to consider oil or even to rejoice over the
final success of the integrated industry to which my brother had tied
his fortune.
But here I was again faced with the old interest. The desire to do
something about it, get down what I had seen, seized me. Was it possible
to treat the story historically, to make a documented narrative? The
more I talked, the more convinced I was that it could be done. But to
tell the story so that people would read it was another matter. Mr.
Phillips finally put it up to me to make an outline of what I thought
possible. We couldn’t go ahead without Mr. McClure’s approval, and he
was ill, in Europe with all his family.
“Go over,” said John Phillips; “show the outline to Sam, get his
decision.” And so in the fall of 1890 I went to Lausanne in Switzerland
to talk it over with Mr. McClure. A week would do it, I thought; but I
hadn’t reckoned with the McClure method.
“Don’t worry about it,” said he. “I want to think it over. Mrs. McClure
and you and I will go to Greece for the winter. You’ve never been there.
We can discuss Standard Oil in Greece as well as here. If it seems a
good plan you can send for your documents and work in the Pantheon.” And
he chuckled at the picture.
Almost before I realized it we were headed for Greece via the Italian
Lakes, Milan and Venice. In Milan Mr. McClure suddenly decided that he
and Mrs. McClure needed a cure before Greece and headed for the ancient
watering place of Salsomaggiore. Here, in the interval of mud baths and
steam soaks and watching such magnificent humans as Cecil Rhodes and his
retinue recuperating from their latest South African adventure, we
finally came to a decision. I was to go back to New York and see what I
could make of the outline I had been expounding. Greece was to be
abandoned.
Leaving Mr. and Mrs. McClure to finish their cure, I headed for New York
to write what, as far as title was concerned, certainly looked like a
doubtful enterprise for a magazine like _McClure’s_: “The History of the
Standard Oil Company.”
“_McClure’s_ has courage.” How often that remark was made after our
undertaking was under way! But courage implies a suspicion of danger.
Nobody thought of such a thing in our office. We were undertaking what
we regarded as a legitimate piece of historical work. We were neither
apologists nor critics, only journalists intent on discovering what had
gone into the making of this most perfect of all monopolies. What had we
to be afraid of?
I soon discovered, however, that, if we were not afraid, I must work in
a field where numbers of men and women were afraid, believed in the
all-seeing eye and the all-powerful reach of the ruler of the oil
industry. They believed that anybody going ahead openly with a project
in any way objectionable to the Standard Oil Company would meet with
direct or indirect attack. Examination of their methods had always been
objectionable to them. “Go ahead, and they will get you in the end,” I
was told by more than one who had come to that conclusion either from
long observation or from long suffering.
Even my father said, “Don’t do it, Ida—they will ruin the magazine.”
It was a persistent fog of suspicion and doubt and fear. From the start
this fog hampered what was my first business, making sure of the
documents in the case. I knew they existed. Almost continuously since
its organization in 1870 the Standard Oil Company had been under
investigation by the Congress of the United States and by the
legislatures of various states in which it had operated, on the
suspicion that it was receiving rebates from the railroads and was
practicing methods in restraint of free trade. In 1872 and again in 1876
it was before Congressional committees; in 1879 it was before examiners
of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and before committees appointed by
the legislatures of New York and of Ohio for investigating railroads.
Its operations figured constantly in the debate which led up to the
creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887; and again and
again since that time the Commission had been called upon to examine
directly or indirectly into its relations with the railroads.
In 1888, in the Investigation of Trusts conducted by Congress and by the
State of New York, the Standard Oil Company was the chief subject for
examination. In the state of Ohio, between 1882 and 1892, a constant
warfare was waged against the Standard in the courts and the
legislature, resulting in several volumes of testimony. The legislatures
of many other states concerned themselves with it. This hostile
legislation compelled the trust to separate into its component parts in
1892, but investigation did not cease; indeed, in the great industrial
inquiry conducted by the Commission appointed by President McKinley, the
Standard Oil Company was constantly under discussion, and hundreds of
pages of testimony on it appear in the nineteen volumes of reports which
the Commission submitted.
This mass of testimony—most, if not all, of it taken under
oath—contained the different charters and agreements under which the
Standard Oil Trust had operated, many contracts and agreements with
railroads, with refineries, with pipe lines; and it contained the
experiences in business from 1872 up to 1900 of multitudes of
individuals. These experiences had exactly the quality of the personal
reminiscences of actors in great events, with the additional value that
they were given on the witness stand; and it was fair, therefore, to
suppose that they were more cautious and exact in statement than are
many writers of memoirs. These investigations, covering as they did all
of the important steps in the development of the trust, included full
accounts of the point of view of its officers in regard to that
development, as well as their explanations of many of the operations
over which controversy had arisen.
Aside from the great mass of sworn testimony accessible to the student,
there was a large pamphlet literature dealing with different phases of
the subject, as well as files of the numerous daily newspapers and
monthly reviews, supported by the Oil Region, in the columns of which
were to be found, not only statistics, but full reports of all
controversies between oil men.
But the documentary sources were by no means all in print. The Standard
Oil Trust and its constituent companies had figured in many civil suits,
the testimony of which was in manuscript in the files of the courts
where the suits were tried.
I had supposed it would be easy to locate the records of the important
investigations and cases, but I soon found I had been too trustful. For
instance, there was a Federal investigation of the South Improvement
Company, the first attempt to make a hard and fast alliance between
oil-bearing railroads and oil refiners, an alliance which inevitably
would kill everybody not admitted, since by the contract the railroads
not only allowed the privileged refiners a rebate on all their
shipments, but paid them a drawback on those of independents. The
railroads also agreed to give them full information about the quantity
and the destination of their rivals’ shipments. The Standard Oil Company
as a monopoly had grown out of this pretty scheme.
Where could I get a copy of that investigation? More than one cynic
said, “You’ll never find one—they have all been destroyed.” When I had
located copies in each of two private collections I was refused
permission to put my hands on them.
To be sure, I did by persistent searching find that so-guarded
investigation in a pamphlet which is one of the three which are all I
know to be in existence. I am not supposing that there are not others,
for I quickly learned, when I was told that the entire edition of a
printed document had been destroyed, to go on looking. Once a document
is in print, somewhere, some time, a copy turns up, however small the
edition. For instance, there was the important Hepburn investigation of
the relations of railroads and private industries made by the State of
New York in 1879. I could not find a copy in the Oil Region where I was
working. The Standard had destroyed them all, I was told. At that time
there was in the Public Library of New York City one of the ablest of
American bibliographers—Adelaide Hasse. She had helped me more than once
to find a scarce document.
“How about this Hepburn investigation?” I wrote Miss Hasse.
“Here in the Library for your use whenever you will come around.” But
she added: “Only one hundred copies were ever published. It is a scarce
piece. I have known of a complete set selling for $100.00. It was
understood at the time,” she explained, “that one or two important
railroad presidents whose testimony was given before the committee
bought up and destroyed as many sets as they could obtain.”
In the end all the printed documents were located. But there was the
unprinted testimony taken in lawsuits. Had incriminating testimony been
spirited away from the court files? Henry Lloyd made such an accusation
in his first edition of “Wealth Against Commonwealth.” It disappeared
from a second edition. I wrote to ask him, “Why?” “The testimony was put
back after my book first appeared,” he answered. I was particularly
anxious to have the original of one of these documents, but when I came
to look for it, it was not in the files. Where was it? How was I to
locate it? And if I did succeed would there be any chance—to judge from
past experience—that it would be turned over to me? I saw that I must
have an assistant, someone preferably in Cleveland, Ohio, so many years
the headquarters of the Standard’s operations. It meant more expense,
and I was already costing the office an amount which shocked my thrifty
practice. But Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips, being generous and patient
and also by this time fairly confident that in the end we should get
something worth while, told me to go ahead.
I had learned in my Lincoln work that an assistant, even if faithful and
hard-working, may be an incumbrance when it comes to investigation. It
needs more than accuracy; it needs enthusiasm for finding out things,
solving puzzles—anybody’s puzzles. I wanted a young man with college
training, a year or two of experience as a reporter, intelligent,
energetic, curious, convinced everything he was asked to do was
important, even if he did not at the moment know why. He must get his
fun in the chase—you in the bag. Also he must be trusted to keep his
mouth shut.
I can recommend the technique I practiced in this case for finding my
rare bird. From each of three different editors in Cleveland I asked the
name of a young man whom he thought competent to run down a not very
important-looking bit of information. To each of the names given me I
wrote instructions from New York. I would be around soon to pick up the
report, I told them, adding that I should prefer that he say nothing
about the assignment.
When I went to Cleveland to view my prospects I found both number one
and number two fine intelligent fellows. Their reports were excellent,
but they had not the least interest in what they had done. I thanked
them, paid them, and said, “Good day.” The third young man came, short
and plump, his eyes glowing with excitement. He sat on the edge of his
chair. As I watched him I had a sudden feeling of alarm lest he should
burst out of his clothes. I never had the same feeling about any other
individual except Theodore Roosevelt. I once watched the first Roosevelt
through a White House musicale when I felt his clothes might not contain
him, he was so steamed up, so ready to go, attack anything, anywhere.
The young man gave me his report; but what counted was the way he had
gone after his material, his curiosity, his conviction that it was
important since I wanted it. I thought I had my man. A few more trials
convinced me John M. Siddall was a find. He at that time was an
associate of Frank Bray in the editing of _The Chautauquan_, the
headquarters of which had been shifted to Cleveland from Meadville.