was at that moment. His satisfaction was so great that for the first
time in our acquaintance he gave me a little lecture for a caustic
remark I had made. “That is not a Christian remark,” he said. I
contended that it was a perfect expression of my notion of a Christian.
“You ought to go to church more frequently,” he said. “Why don’t you
come and hear my pastor, Dr. Savage?”
We parted on good terms after a discussion of our religious views and
churchgoing practices, and he gave me a cordial invitation to come back,
which I agreed to do as soon as I had studied the new angle in the
Buffalo case.
Aided by a disinterested and fair-minded lawyer, I gave a thorough study
to the documents; but do my best I could not convince myself that Mr.
Rogers’ contention was sound. It is not an unusual thing for lawyers to
take cases they believe in, knowing that their compensation depends on
their winning. Many clients with just cases would be deprived of counsel
if they had to insure a fixed compensation, for not infrequently, as in
the Buffalo case, all that a client has is involved in a suit. The
practice is so common among reputable lawyers that it certainly cannot
be regarded as a proof of a conspiracy, unless there is a reason to
suppose that they have taken a case of whose merits they themselves are
suspicious. There was no evidence that the counsel of the independent
concern were not convinced from the first that they had a strong case.
Their claims were large; but lawyers are not proverbial for the modesty
of their charges and, besides, exorbitant charges can hardly be
construed as a proof of conspiracy.
When I finally had written out my conclusion I sent a copy of it to Mr.
Rogers, saying I should be glad to talk it over with him if he wished.
He did wish—wrote me that he had new material to present. But before the
date set for the meeting an article in our series was published which
broke off our friendly relations.
In studying the testimony of independents over a period of some thirty
years I had found repeated complaints that their oil shipments were
interfered with, their cars side-tracked en route while pressure was
brought on buyers to cancel orders. There were frequent charges that
freight clerks were reporting independent shipments.
I did not take the matter seriously at first. The general suspicion of
Standard dealings by independents had to be taken into consideration, I
told myself. Then, too, I was willing to admit that a certain amount of
attention to what your competitor is doing is considered legitimate
business practice. I knew that in the office of _McClure’s Magazine_ we
were very keen to know what other publishers were doing. And, too, there
is the overzealous and unscrupulous employee who in the name of
competition recognizes no rules for his game.
But the charges continued to multiply. I met them in testimony, and I
met them in interviews. There was no escaping espionage, men told me.
“They know where we send every barrel of oil. Half the time our oil
never reaches its destination.” I could scarcely believe it. And then
unexpectedly there came to my desk a mass of incontrovertible proofs
that what I had been hearing was true and more. As a matter of fact this
system of following up independent oil shipments was letter-perfect, so
perfect that it was made a matter of office bookkeeping.
“It looks sometimes,” Mr. Rogers had said to me, “as if something had
the Standard Oil Company by the neck, something bigger than we are.”
In this case the something bigger was a boy’s conscience. A lad of
sixteen or seventeen in the office of a Standard plant had as one of his
regular monthly duties the burning of large quantities of records. He
had carried out his orders for many months without attention to the
content. Then suddenly his eyes fell one night on the name of a man who
had been his friend since childhood, had even been his Sunday-school
teacher, an independent oil refiner in the city, a Standard competitor.
The boy began to take notice; he discovered that the name appeared
repeatedly on different forms and in the letters which he was
destroying. It made him uneasy, and he began to piece the records
together. It was not long before he saw to his distress that the concern
for which he was working was getting from the railroad offices of the
town full information about every shipment that his friend was making;
moreover, that the office was writing to its representative in the
territory to which the independent oil was going, “Stop that
shipment—get that trade.” And the correspondence showed how both were
done.
What was a youth to do under such circumstances? He didn’t do anything
at first, but finally when he could not sleep nights for thinking about
it he gathered up a full set of documents and secretly took them to his
friend.
Now this particular oil refiner had been reading the _McClure’s_
articles. He had become convinced that I was trying to deal fairly with
the matter; he had also convinced himself in some way that I was to be
trusted. So one night he brought me the full set of incriminating
documents. There was no doubt about their genuineness. The most
interesting to me was the way they fitted in with the testimony
scattered through the investigations and lawsuits. Here were bookkeeping
records explaining every accusation that had been made. But how could I
use them? Together we worked out a plan by which the various forms and
blanks could be reproduced with fictitious names of persons and places
substituted for the originals.
It was after this material had come to my hands that I took the subject
up with Mr. Rogers. “The original South Improvement Company formula, Mr.
Rogers, provided for reports of independent shipments from the
railroads. I have come on repeated charges that the practice continues.
What about it? Do you follow independent shipments? Do you stop them? Do
you have the help of railroad shipping clerks in the operation?”
“Of course we do everything we legally and fairly can to find out what
our competitors are doing, just as you do in _McClure’s Magazine_,” Mr.
Rogers answered. “But as for any such system of tracking and stopping,
as you suggest, that is nonsense. How could we do it even if we would?”
“Well,” I said, “give me everything you have on this point.”
He said he had nothing more than what he had already told me.
As I have said, the article came out just before I was to see Mr. Rogers
on what I hoped would be the last of the Buffalo case. The only time in
all my relations with him when I saw his face white with rage was when I
met the appointment he had made. Our interview was short.
“Where did you get that stuff?” he said angrily, pointing to the
magazine on the table.
All I could say was in substance: “Mr. Rogers, you can’t for a moment
think that I would tell you where I got it. You will recall my efforts
to get from you anything more than a general denial that these practices
of espionage so long complained of were untrue, could be explained by
legitimate competition. You know this bookkeeping record is true.”
There were a few curt exchanges about other points in the material, but
nothing as I now recall on the Buffalo case. The article ended my visits
to 26 Broadway.
Nearly four years passed before I saw Henry Rogers, and in that period
exciting and tragic events had come his way.
There was the copper war. He and his friends had attempted to build up a
monopoly in copper to match that of the Standard Oil Company in
petroleum, the Amalgamated Copper Company. A youngster, F. Augustus
Heinze, had come into Montana, and by bold and ruthless operation put
together a copper company of his own. The two organizations were soon at
each other’s throats. It was a business war without a vestige of
decency, one in which every devious device of the law and of politics
was resorted to by both sides.
But Mr. Rogers had other troubles. He and his friends had been engaged
in organizing the gas interests of the East. They had engineered stock
raids which had been as disastrous to Wall Street as to gambling Main
Street. Such operations in the past had never cost him more than a
passing angry comment by the public press. Now, however, came something
damaging to his reputation and his pride. It was a series of lurid
articles by a bold and very-much-on-the-inside broker and
speculator—Thomas Lawson of Boston. For nearly two years Lawson
published monthly in _Everybody’s Magazine_ under the admirable title
“Frenzied Finance” circumstantial accounts of the speculation of the
Rogers group and what they had cost their dupes. That story cut Mr.
Rogers’ pride to the quick. He is said to have threatened the American
News Company with destruction if it circulated the magazine.
Taken all together the excitement and anger were too much for even his
iron frame and indomitable spirit, and in the summer of 1907 he suffered
a stroke which put him out of the fight for many weeks. When he came
back it was at once to collide with the Government suit against the
Standard Oil Company, and soon after that with the “rich man’s panic” of
1907, a panic for which his old enemy in copper, F. Augustus Heinze, was
largely responsible.
Early in November, when the panic was still raiding the banks and the
millionaires of the country, I stood one day at a corner on Fifth Avenue
waiting for the traffic to clear. Suddenly I saw an arm waving to me
from a slowly passing open automobile, and there was H. H. Rogers
smiling at me in the friendliest way.
When I reported the encounter at the office Mr. Phillips at once said:
“Why not try to see him? If he’ll talk about what is going on, what a
story he could tell!”
But would he see me? I was a little dubious about trying. Still the
greeting and the smile seemed to mean that at least he harbored no ill
will. Suppose, I said, he is sufficiently subdued to go over with me his
exciting life. What a document of big business in the eighties and
nineties he could produce if he would put down his recollections with
the frankness with which he had sometimes talked to me! It seemed worth
trying for, and I asked for an appointment. I had not made a mistake.
Mr. Rogers was harboring no ill will. I was promptly invited to come to
his house. He greeted me heartily. I found him physically changed,
stouter, less sinewy, but quite as frank as ever. He told me of his
stroke; he spoke bitterly of what he called the Roosevelt panic as well
as of Roosevelt’s interference with the business of the Standard Oil
Company. He gave me my cue when he began to talk about the early days of
the Oil Region. “There is a whole chapter,” he said, “that has not been
written, that from ’59 to ’72.”
We were getting on swimmingly when our interview was cut short by a card
handed him—Joseph Seep, the head of the Standard Oil Purchasing Agency.
It amused him greatly that Mr. Seep should have come in while I was
there.
“Now you’ll have to go,” he said, and he put me out by a circuitous
route. As at 26 Broadway callers were not to see one another.
As we came into a dark hall he turned on the light. “You see we have to
economize now,” he said laughingly. Our good-bye was cordial. “We’ll
talk about this again,” he said. “Call up Miss Harrison in a week or ten
days, and we’ll make an appointment.”
The appointment was never made. The coming months were too difficult for
Mr. Rogers. His vast business affairs continued complicated; the legend
of his invincibility in the market was weakened. Moreover, such was the
bitterness of the Standard Oil Company over the Government suit that I
doubt if he or his associates would have considered it wise for him to
talk to me. They probably thought he had talked already too much to too
little purpose. They—and he probably—never understood how much he had
done to make me realize the legitimate greatness of the Standard Oil
Company, how much he had done to make me understand better the vastness
and complexity of its problems and the amazing grasp with which it dealt
with them.
Their complaint against me, Mr. Rogers’ complaint, was that I had never
been able to submerge my contempt for their illegitimate practices in my
admiration for their genius in organization, the boldness of their
imagination and execution. But my contempt had increased rather than
diminished as I worked.
I never had an animus against their size and wealth, never objected to
their corporate form. I was willing that they should combine and grow as
big and rich as they could, but only by legitimate means. But they had
never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me. I am
convinced that their brilliant example has contributed not only to a
weakening of the country’s moral standards but to its economic
unsoundness. The experience of the last decade particularly seems to me
to amply justify my conviction.
I was never to see Mr. Rogers again, for in May of 1909 he suddenly
died—two years before the Supreme Court dissolved the Standard Oil
Company.
12
MUCKRAKER OR HISTORIAN?
It was inevitable that my visits to 26 Broadway should be noised among
critics and enemies of the Standard Oil Company curious about what
_McClure’s_ was going to do. It was not infrequent for some one on the
independent side to say with a wise nod of the head: “Oh, they’ll get
around you. You’ll become their apologist before you get through.” It
was quite useless for me to insist that I was trying to be nobody’s
apologist, that I was trying to balance what I found. At least two
people of importance whose experiences I was anxious to hear from their
own lips refused to see me. I learned later that Henry D. Lloyd had
written them after he learned I was seeing Mr. Rogers that they had
better not talk, better not show me their papers, that inevitably I
should be taken in.
Now I had already talked with Mr. Lloyd, already had help from him, but
the Rogers association evidently upset him for a time. My first article
seemed to reassure him, for he wrote me at once on its appearance: “I
read your first installment of the story of the Standard Oil Company
with eager curiosity, then intense interest and then great
satisfaction.” He seems to have divined at once where I was heading.
The suspicion of my relations with 26 Broadway cut me off for some two
years from one of the most interesting independent warriors in the
thirty years’ struggle. This was one Lewis Emery, Jr., whom I had known
from childhood. He had grown up in the oil business, side by side with
H. H. Rogers; he had been a producer and a refiner as well as one of the
powerful factors in building up the Pure Oil Company, the integrated
concern in which my brother was carrying on. From the start Mr. Emery
had fought the Standard’s pretensions, individually and collectively,
politically and financially. He had a gift for language—a marvelous
vituperative vocabulary—and he had no restraint in using it. He was a
feature of almost every investigation, every lawsuit, a member of every
combination of producers and refiners. Where he was, there were sure to
be lively exchanges between him and the representatives of the other
side. His particular abomination was John Archbold, vice president of
the Standard Oil Company, a person as free with charges and epithets as
Lewis Emery himself.
“You are a liar,” he shouted one day in an investigation when Mr. Emery
had made an exaggerated charge.
Joseph H. Choate was Mr. Archbold’s lawyer.
“There, there, Mr. Archbold!” he said. “We’ll put Mr. Emery on the stand
and convict him of perjury.”
Without noticing Mr. Choate’s remark Mr. Emery called across the table,
“Young man, if this table wasn’t so wide I would tweak your nose for
that.”
Such exchanges were not infrequent.
Henry Rogers, who really liked Lewis Emery, was always trying to calm
him down. “Can’t you stop this, Lew?” he said one day. “Come with us,
and it will be better for you. There is no hope for you alone, but with
us there is a sure thing.”
Mr. Emery, who told me of this offer, said: “Henry, I can’t do it even
if I wanted to. They would mob me in the Oil Region if I went back on
them.”
They would not have mobbed him, but they would have done what would have
been worse for a man of his temperament, his passion for free action
whether wise or unwise—they would have ostracized him.
The most tragic effect I had seen in my girlhood of “going over to the
Standard,” as it was called, was partial ostracism of the renegade. When
a man’s old associates crossed to the other side of the street rather
than meet him, when nobody stopped him on the street corner to gossip
over what was going on, few men were calloused enough not to suffer. It
was worse than mobbing. The Oil Region as a matter of fact never mobbed
any man so far as I know, though it did occasionally destroy property
and once at least hung Mr. Rockefeller himself in effigy.
By this time Lewis Emery had fought his way to a substantial position in
the oil world; but to the end he prided himself on being a victim. When
he finally talked to me after he learned from Mr. Lloyd that the embargo
against me had been raised, he said, with what seemed to me considerable
satisfaction: “I have been tortured. I am a wounded man because of them,
and I hate them.”
In spite of this he was getting a good deal out of life. He was a rich
man, and he was making the most of his money. He never let money stifle
his personality. His success in being himself was in striking contrast
to that of most of the successful oil men of that day whom I knew. Most
of them, independent and Standard, submitted to an application of
veneer, a change of habits which destroyed much of their natural flavor.
They took little part in politics and social agitation; they remained
regular in all things; they made their investments only in sure
enterprises. You knew always where to find them. But not so Lewis Emery,
Jr. He continued to wear his clothes naturally, to go on his own erratic
way. He threw himself into political movements, wise and unwise, and he
never lost his pioneering spirit. After he was seventy years old, as a
final fling, he took on a gold mine in Peru, a gold mine which was
reached by climbing mountains and descending narrow paths cut out of
rock, crossing swaying rope bridges—approaches fit only for the most
daring mountain climbers. Yet there he was when nearly eighty charging
up and down those mountains and trotting his mule across those bridges
when younger men led their mules and crept.
The degree to which he was reconciled to me after two years of ostracism
was proved by his annual invitation to come along to Peru with his
party. And I would have gone and told the story of his mine as he wanted
me to do if it had not been for the pictures he sent me—those pictures
of unprotected swaying bridges suspended from mountain side to mountain
side, hundreds of feet above the rushing rocky streams. I had not the
head for that, and so gave up what would have been, I am sure, one of
the most amusing adventures that ever came my way.
Not a few of the personal experiences in gathering my materials left me
with unhappy impressions, more unhappy in retrospect perhaps than they
were at the moment. They were part of the day’s work, sometimes very
exciting parts. There was the two hours I spent in studying Mr. John D.
Rockefeller. As the work had gone on, it became more and more clear to
me that the Standard Oil Company was his creation. “An institution is
the lengthened shadow of one man,” says Emerson. I found it so.
Everybody in the office interested in the work began to say, “After the
book is done you must do a character sketch of Mr. Rockefeller.” I was
not keen for it. It would have to be done like the books, from
documents; that is, I had no inclination to use the extraordinary gossip
which came to me from many sources. If I were to do it I wanted only
that of which I felt I had sure proof, only those things which seemed to
me to help explain the public life of this powerful, patient, secretive,
calculating man of so peculiar and special a genius.
“You must at least look at Mr. Rockefeller,” my associates insisted.
“But how?” Mr. Rogers himself had suggested that I see him. I had
consented. I had returned to the suggestion several times, but at last
was made to understand that it could not be done. I had dropped his name
from my list. It was John Siddall who then took the matter in hand.
“You must see him,” was Siddall’s judgment.
To arrange it became almost an obsession. And then what seemed to him
like a providential opening came. It was announced that on a certain
Sunday of October 1903 Mr. Rockefeller before leaving Cleveland, where
he had spent his summer, for his home in New York would say good-bye in
a little talk to the Sunday school of his church—a rally, it was called.
As soon as Siddall learned of this he begged me to come on. “We can go
to Sunday school; we can stay to church. I will see that we have seats
where we will have a full view of the man. You will get him in action.”
Of course I went, feeling a little mean about it too. He had not wanted
to be seen apparently. It was taking him unaware.
Siddall’s plan worked to perfection, worked so well from the start that
again and again he seemed ready to burst from excitement in the two
hours we spent in the church.
We had gone early to the Sunday-school room where the rally was to
open—a dismal room with a barbaric dark green paper with big gold
designs, cheap stained-glass windows, awkward gas fixtures. Comfortable,
of course, but so stupidly ugly. We were sitting meekly at one side when
I was suddenly aware of a striking figure standing in the doorway. There
was an awful age in his face—the oldest man I had ever seen, I thought,
but what power! At that moment Siddall poked me violently in the ribs
and hissed, “There he is.”
The impression of power deepened when Mr. Rockefeller took off his coat
and hat, put on a skullcap, and took a seat commanding the entire room,
his back to the wall. It was the head which riveted attention. It was
big, great breadth from back to front, high broad forehead, big bumps
behind the ears, not a shiny head but with a wet look. The skin was as
fresh as that of any healthy man about us. The thin sharp nose was like
a thorn. There were no lips; the mouth looked as if the teeth were all
shut hard. Deep furrows ran down each side of the mouth from the nose.
There were puffs under the little colorless eyes with creases running
from them.
Wonder over the head was almost at once diverted to wonder over the
man’s uneasiness. His eyes were never quiet but darted from face to
face, even peering around the jog at the audience close to the wall.
When he rose to speak, the impression of power that the first look at
him had given increased, and the impression of age passed. I expected a
quavering voice, but the voice was not even old, if a little fatigued, a
little thin. It was clear and utterly sincere. He meant what he was
saying. He was on his own ground talking about dividends, dividends of
righteousness. “If you would take something out,” he said, clenching the
hand of his outstretched right arm, “you must put something
in”—emphasizing “put something in” with a long outstretched forefinger.
The talk over, we slipped out to get a good seat in the gallery, a seat
where we could look full on what we knew to be the Rockefeller pew.
Mr. Rockefeller came into the auditorium of the church as soon as Sunday
school was out. He sat a little bent in his pew, pitifully uneasy, his
head constantly turning to the farthest right or left, his eyes
searching the faces almost invariably turned towards him. It was plain
that he, and not the minister, was the pivot on which that audience
swung. Probably he knew practically everybody in the congregation; but
now and then he lingered on a face, peering at it intently as if he were
seeking what was in the mind behind it. He looked frequently at the
gallery. Was it at Siddall and me?
The services over, he became the friendly patron saint of the flock.
Coming down the aisle where people were passing out, he shook hands with
everyone who stopped, saying, “A good sermon.” “The Doctor gave us a
good sermon.” “It was a very good sermon, wasn’t it?”