expected, which time has intensified. I was sorry for him. I know no
companion so terrible as fear. Mr. Rockefeller, for all the conscious
power written in face and voice and figure, was afraid, I told myself,
afraid of his own kind. My friend Lewis Emery, Jr., priding himself on
being a victim, was free and happy. Not gold enough in the world to
tempt him to exchange his love of defiance for a power which carried
with it a head as uneasy as that on Mr. Rockefeller’s shoulders.
My unhappiness was increased as the months went by with the multiplying
of tales of grievances coming from every direction. I made a practice of
looking into them all, as far as I could; and while frequently I found
solid reasons for the complaints, frequently I found the basic motives
behind them—suspicion, hunger for notoriety, blackmail, revenge.
The most unhappy and most unnatural of these grievances came to me from
literally the last person in the world to whom I should have looked for
information—Frank Rockefeller—brother of John D. Rockefeller.
Frank Rockefeller sent word to me by a circuitous route that he had
documents in a case which he thought ought to be made public, and that
if I would secretly come to him in his office in Cleveland he would give
them to me. I knew that there had been a quarrel over property between
the two men. It made much noise at the time—1893—had gone to the courts,
had caused bitterness inside the family itself; but because it was a
family affair I had not felt that I wanted to touch it. But here it was
laid on my desk.
So I went to Cleveland, where John Siddall had a grand opportunity to
play the role of sleuth which he so enjoyed, his problem being to get me
into Mr. Rockefeller’s office without anybody suspecting my identity. He
succeeded.
I found Mr. Rockefeller excited and vindictive. He accused his brother
of robbing (his word) him and his partner James Corrigan of all their
considerable holdings of stock in the Standard Oil Company. The bare
facts were that Frank Rockefeller and James Corrigan had been interested
in the early Standard Oil operations in Cleveland and had each acquired
then a substantial block of stock. Later they had developed a shipping
business on the Lakes, iron and steel furnaces in Cleveland. In the
eighties they had borrowed money from John D. Rockefeller, putting up
their Standard Oil stock as collateral. Then came the panic of ’93, and
they could not meet their obligations. In the middle of their distress
John Rockefeller had foreclosed, taking over their stocks, leaving them,
so they charged, no time in which to turn around although they felt
certain that they would be able a little later, out of the substantial
business they claimed they had built up, to pay their debt to him. Their
future success proved they could have done so.
I could see John Rockefeller’s point as I talked with his brother Frank.
Frank Rockefeller was an open-handed, generous trader—more interested in
the game than in the money to be made. He loved good horses—raised them,
I believe, on a farm out in Kansas; he liked gaiety, free spending. From
his brother John’s point of view he was not a safe man to handle money.
He did not reverence it; he used it in frivolous ways of which his
brother did not approve. So it was as a kind of obligation to the
sacredness of money that John Rockefeller had foreclosed on his own
brother and his early friend James Corrigan. He was strictly within his
legal rights and within what I suppose he called his moral right.
But the transaction left a bitterness in Frank Rockefeller’s heart and
mind which was one of the ugliest things I have ever seen. “I have taken
up my children from the Rockefeller family lot. [Or “shall take up”—I do
not know now which it was.] They shall not lie in the same enclosure
with John D. Rockefeller.”
The documents in this case, which I later analyzed for the character
sketch on which we had decided, present a fair example of what were
popularly called “Standard Oil methods” as well as what they could do to
the minds and hearts of victims.
The more intimately I went into my subject, the more hateful it became
to me. No achievement on earth could justify those methods, I felt. I
had a great desire to end my task, hear no more of it. No doubt part of
my revulsion was due to a fagged brain. The work had turned out to be
much longer and more laborious than I had had reason to expect.
The plan I had taken to Mr. McClure in the fall of 1890, which we had
talked over in Salsomaggiore, Italy—I still have notes of our talk on a
yellow piece of the stationery of the Hôtel des Thermes—called for three
papers, possibly twenty-five thousand words. But before we actually
began publication Mr. Phillips and Mr. McClure decided we might venture
on six. We went through the six, and the series was stretched to twelve.
Before we were through we had nineteen articles, and when the nineteen
were off my hands I asked nothing in the world but to get them into a
book and escape into the safe retreat of a library where I could study
people long dead, and if they did things of which I did not approve it
would be all between me and the books. There would be none of these
harrowing human beings confronting me, tearing me between contempt and
pity, admiration and anger, baffling me with their futile and
misdirected power or their equally futile and misdirected weakness. I
was willing to study human beings in the library but no longer, for a
time at least, in flesh and blood, so I thought.
The book was published in the fall of 1904—two fat volumes with generous
appendices of what I considered essential documents. I was curious about
the reception it would have from the Standard Oil Company. I had been
told repeatedly they were preparing an answer to flatten me out; but if
this was under way it was not with Mr. Rockefeller’s consent, I
imagined. To a mutual friend who had told him the articles should be
answered Mr. Rockefeller was said to have replied: “Not a word. Not a
word about that misguided woman.” To another who asked him about my
charges he was reported as answering: “All without foundation. The idea
of the Standard forcing anyone to sell his refinery is absurd. The
refineries wanted to sell to us, and nobody that has sold or worked with
us but has made money, is glad he did so.
“I thought once of having an answer made to the McClure articles but you
know it has always been the policy of the Standard to keep silent under
attack and let their acts speak for themselves.”
In the case of the Lloyd book they had kept silent, but only because Mr.
Rockefeller had been unable to carry out his plans for answering. What
he had proposed was a jury of the most distinguished clergymen of the
day to consider Mr. Lloyd’s argument and charges. Certain clergymen
invited refused unless there should be a respectable number of
economists added to the jury. That, apparently, Mr. Rockefeller did not
see his way to do, and the plan was abandoned. So far as I know Mr.
Lloyd’s book was never answered by the Standard Oil Company.
But I wanted an answer from Mr. Rockefeller. What I got was neither
direct nor, from my point of view, serious. It consisted of wide and
what must have been a rather expensive anonymous distribution of various
critical comments. The first of these was a review of the book which
appeared in the _Nation_ soon after its publication. The writer—one of
the _Nation’s_ staff reviewers, I later learned—sneered at the idea that
there was anything unusual in the competitive practices which I called
illegal and immoral. “They are a necessary part of competition,” he
said. “The practices are odious it is true, competition is necessarily
odious.” Was it necessarily odious?
I did not think so. The practices I believed I had proved, I continued
to consider much more dangerous to economic stability than airing them,
even if I aired them in the excited and irrational fashion the review
charged. As I saw it, the struggle was between Commercial Machiavellism
and the Christian Code.
The most important of the indirect answers was an able book by Gilbert
Holland Montague. It separated business and ethics in a way that must
have been a comfort to 26 Broadway.
As soon as published, Mr. Montague’s book became not exactly a best
seller but certainly a best circulator—libraries, ministers, teachers,
prominent citizens all over the land receiving copies with the
compliments of the publisher. Numbers of them came back to me with
irritated letters. “We have been buying books for years from this
house,” wrote one distinguished librarian, “and never before was one
sent with their compliments. I understand that libraries all over the
country are receiving them. Can it be that this is intended as an
advertisement, or is it not more probable that the Standard Oil Company
itself is paying for this widespread distribution?”
The general verdict seemed to be that the latter was the explanation.
Some time later there came from the entertaining Elbert Hubbard of the
Roycroft Shop of East Aurora, New York, an essay on the Standard
extolling the grand results from the centralization of the industry in
their hands.
I have it from various interested sources that five million copies were
ordered printed in pamphlet form by the Standard Oil Company and were
distributed by Mr. Hubbard. They went to schoolteachers and journalists,
preachers and “leaders” from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Hardly were
they received in many cases before they were sent to me with angry or
approving comments. For a couple of years my birthday and Christmas
offerings were sure to include copies of one or the other of these
documents with the compliments of some waggish member of the McClure
group.
I had hoped that the book might be received as a legitimate historical
study, but to my chagrin I found myself included in a new school, that
of the muckrakers. Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United
States, had become uneasy at the effect on the public of the periodical
press’s increasing criticisms and investigations of business and
political abuses. He was afraid that they were adding to the not
inconsiderable revolutionary fever abroad, driving people into
socialism. Something must be done, and in a typically violent speech he
accused the school of being concerned only with the “vile and debasing.”
Its members were like the man in John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” who
with eyes on the ground raked incessantly “the straws, the small sticks,
and dust of the floor.” They were muckrakers. The conservative public
joyfully seized the name.
Roosevelt had of course misread his Bunyan. The man to whom the
Interpreter called the attention of the Pilgrim was raking riches which
the Interpreter contemptuously called “straws” and “sticks” and “dust.”
The president would have been nearer Bunyan’s meaning if he had named
the rich sinners of the times who in his effort to keep his political
balance he called “malefactors of great wealth”—if he had called them,
“muckrakers of great wealth” and applied the word “malefactors” to the
noisy and persistent writers who so disturbed him.
I once argued with Mr. Roosevelt that we on _McClure’s_ were concerned
only with facts, not with stirring up revolt. “I don’t object to the
facts,” he cried, “but you and Baker”—Baker at that time was carrying on
an able series of articles on the manipulations of the railroads—“but
you and Baker are not _practical_.”
I felt at the time Mr. Roosevelt had a good deal of the usual conviction
of the powerful man in public life that correction should be left to
him, a little resentment that a profession outside his own should be
stealing his thunder.
This classification of muckraker, which I did not like, helped fix my
resolution to have done for good and all with the subject which had
brought it on me. But events were stronger than I. All the radical
reforming element, and I numbered many friends among them, were begging
me to join their movements. I soon found that most of them wanted
attacks. They had little interest in balanced findings. Now I was
convinced that in the long run the public they were trying to stir would
weary of vituperation, that if you were to secure permanent results the
mind must be convinced.
One of the most heated movements at the moment was the effort to
persuade the public to refuse all gifts which came from fortunes into
the making of which it was known illegal and unfair practices had gone.
“Do not touch tainted money,” men thundered from pulpit and platform,
among them so able a man as Dr. Washington Gladden. The Rockefeller
fortune was singled out because about this time Mr. Rockefeller made
some unusually large contributions to colleges and churches and general
philanthropy. “It is done,” cried the critics, “in order to silence
criticism.” Frequently some one said to me, “You have opened the
Rockefeller purse.” But I knew, and said in print rather to the disgust
of my friends in the movement, that there was an unfairness to Mr.
Rockefeller in this outcry. It did not take public criticism to open his
purse. From boyhood he had been a steady giver in proportion to his
income—10 per cent went to the Lord—and through all the harrowing early
years in which he was trying to establish himself as a money-maker he
never neglected to give the Lord the established proportion. As his
fortune grew his gifts grew larger. He not only gave but saw the money
given was wisely spent; and he trained his children, particularly the
son who was to administer his estate, to as wise practice in public
giving as we have ever had. That is, it did not take a public outcry
such as came in the early years of this century against the methods of
the Standard Oil Company to force Mr. Rockefeller to share his wealth.
He was already sharing it. Indeed, in the fifteen years before 1904 he
had given to one or another cause some thirty-five million dollars.
If his gifts were larger at this time than they had ever been before,
his money-making was greater. If they were more spectacular than ever
before, it may have been because he thought it was time to call the
public’s attention to what they were getting out of the Standard Oil
fortune. At all events it seemed to me only fair that the point should
be emphasized that it had not taken a public revolt against his methods
to force him to share his profits.
I could not escape the controversies, hard as I tried. Nor could I
escape events, events which were forcing me against my will to continue
my observations and reports. My book was hardly published before it was
apparent that the oil field which it had covered and which for so long
had been supposed to be the only American oil field of importance was
soon to be surpassed by those in the Southwest. The first state to force
recognition of the change on the country at large was Kansas, where
suddenly in the spring of 1905 there broke out an agitation as
unexpected to most observers as it was interesting to those who knew
their oil history. Kansas, we old-timers told ourselves, was duplicating
what the Oil Creek had done in 1872. It was putting on a revolt. How had
it come about?
For a number of years “wildcatters” with or without money had been
prospecting for oil in the state. Only a modest production had rewarded
them at first, but in 1904 oil suddenly poured forth in great
quantities. On the instant Kansas went oil-mad, practically every farmer
in the state dreamed of flowing wells. As soon as it was proved that
Kansas was to be a large field the Standard took charge. It leased,
drilled, and, most important, it threaded the state with its pipe-line
system. No sooner was oil proved to be on a farmer’s land than the
pipe-line people were there caring for it at market rates. But they
began not only to develop and handle scientifically and efficiently, but
quite as scientifically and efficiently they began to get rid of all the
small fry that in the early days of small wells had been refining and
marketing. They would take all the oil that Kansas could produce, they
said, but on their own terms: they wanted no interference.
As soon as this became clear to Kansas the state rose in revolt. The
Populists, who for six years now must needs grumble in a corner, came
out to inveigh with all of their old fervor against the trust. Women’s
clubs took it up, political parties took it up. A program was developed,
the gist of which was that Kansas would take care of its own oil. Bills
were introduced into the legislature calculated to control railroad
rates, pipe-line rates, competitive marketing. To the joy of the
Populists and to the horror of the conservatives a bill for a state
refinery was presented by the governor himself. Kansas had a hemp
factory in the state penitentiary not doing so badly. Why should not the
penitentiary run an oil refinery, too? The legislature agreed to do it.
The excitement grew and so attracted the attention of the country that
the office concluded that I must go out and see what I could make of it.
I did not much want to go, not only because of my desire to free myself
of the subject but because my heart was too heavy with personal loss to
feel enthusiasm for any task. In the spring of 1905 my father had died
after a long slow illness. To me he had always been everything that is
summed up in the word “dear.” Modest, humorous, hard-working, friendly,
faithful in what he conceived to be the right, he loved his family and
friends and church, and asked only to serve them. His business
associates held him as a man of honor and a gentleman.
Father’s death for a time darkened my world. Later I began to realize
that the dearness of him was to remain as a permanent thing in my life.
But in 1905 this sense of continued companionship was something which
came slowly out of a dark sea of loss. So it was with a heavy heart that
I went to see what was happening in Kansas.
First I wanted to see with my own eyes if the fields I had been hearing
about were as rich as advertised; so I spent some ten days driving about
southeastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma, then just coming in with
the promise of great wells. It was about as exciting a journey as I ever
have made. It was on one of these trips I saw my first dust storm.
Driving in a buckboard behind two spirited horses across a practically
unbroken prairie, my companion suddenly looked behind him.
“Jehoshaphat!” he shouted. “Wrap your head up.” I turned to see the sky
from horizon to zenith filled with dark rolling clouds. It was not from
fire. What was it? “A dust storm,” my companion cried.
Quickly and expertly he prepared to take it. He loosened the checkreins
of the horses, and the spirited animals evidently knowing what they were
in for dropped their heads as low as they could hold them and leaned up
against each other. We wrapped ourselves as closely as we could and,
like the horses, clung to each other. The storm did not last long, but
it was pretty awful while it did. The air was thick, you could not
breathe. But it passed, and I was ordered to shake myself out. I found
that I was almost engulfed with a fine black dust, that it was packed
close to the hubs of the wheels of our buckboard. It was ten days before
I got rid of that dust, for it was ten days before I had a real bath.
The dust had turned the primitive water supplies into a muddy liquid
quite impossible to drink and hopeless for cleansing.
The wonder of it was that the real discomforts counted not at all at the
time. I had joined an eager, determined, exultant procession of
wildcatters and promoters, of youths looking for their chance or seeking
adventure for the first time, tasting it to the full.
Nothing so great as this Kansas and Indian Territory field had ever been
known. Every well was to be a gusher, every settlement a city. On every
side they were selling town lots and stock in oil companies. One of the
most irresponsible stock-selling schemes I have ever known, I happened
on in one of these trips. Two anxious-faced boys were going about among
experienced oilmen begging them for oil leases, preferably oil leases on
which there was a proved well. The lads had come as sightseers and had
been caught in the wild excitement of the region. Everybody had a scheme
to make himself and his friends rich. Why not they? And largely as a
joke they had sent out a flamboyant letter offering stock in a mythical
oil field. The letter had gone to scores of innocents in the East, and
in answer schoolteachers, clergymen, and women with little or no money
had poured in subscriptions.
If there had been few subscriptions they would have been able to return
them, but here they were when I saw them with literally a suitcase full
of checks and money orders and not a foot of land leased, and in the
excitement there was practically no land to be had. They must either get
a lease or go to the penitentiary, they concluded. Hence their alarm,
their pitiful begging of older men to help them out of the predicament
into which their irresponsibility had plunged them.
It was not long before I found I was being taken for something more
serious than a mere journalist. Conservative Standard Oil sympathizers
regarded me as a spy and not infrequently denounced me as an enemy to
society. Independent oilmen and radical editors, who were in the
majority, called me a prophet. It brought fantastic situations where I
was utterly unfit to play the part. A woman of twenty-five, fresh, full
of zest, only interested in what was happening to her, would have
reveled in the experience. But here I was—fifty, fagged, wanting to be
let alone while I collected trustworthy information for my
articles—dragged to the front as an apostle.
The funniest things were the welcomes. The funniest of all was at the
then new town of Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had arrived late at night in what
seemed to me a no man’s land, and after considerable trouble had found a
place in a rough little hostelry where I was so suspicious of the look
of things that I moved the bureau against the lockless door. I am sure
now that I was as safe there as I should have been in my bed at home.
I had registered, of course, and the next morning before I had finished
my breakfast I was waited on by the editor of the local newspaper, who
took me to his office, a barnlike structure next door, for an interview.
Almost immediately a handsome youth in knickerbockers and high laced
boots came hurriedly in.
“I think I ought to tell you, Miss Tarbell,” he said with a grin, “that
you are in for a serenade.”
“A serenade,” I said, “what do you mean?”
“Well,” he said, “the Tulsa boomers have been making a tour of cities to
the north. Their special train has just come in; they want something to
celebrate, and, learning that you were in town they are sending up the
band to welcome you. They want a speech.”
I had never made an impromptu speech in my life. I was horrified at the
idea. “You must get me out of this,” I begged of my gallant but very
amused informer.
“No,” he said, “there is no way to escape. Here they are.”
And there they were—a band of thirty or forty pieces, several of the
players stalwart Indians.
I had to face it, and for once in my life I had a happy idea. “Go buy me
two boxes of the best cigars that are to be had in town.” And I shoved a
bill into his hand. “Go quickly.”
And then the band began. Not so bad, but so funny. There I was standing
on the sidewalk with all the masculine inhabitants of Tulsa—so it seemed
to me—packed about, some of them serious and some of them highly
delighted at my obvious consternation. I had not guessed wrong about the
cigars. They preferred them to a speech, I saw as I passed around the
circle distributing them to the players. What was left I gave to the
bodyguard which had assembled to back me up. A compliment I have always
treasured was given by one of the Indians, as he watched me disposing of
my goods: “He all right.” Still more flattering it was as I went around
in Tulsa that day to meet gentlemen who had fat cigars tied with little
red ribbons in their buttonholes, and to have them point gaily to them
as I passed.