was taken out in a barouche—the only one in the countryside, I was
told—the band behind, and paraded up and down the distracted streets of
Tulsa. A day or two later when I went on my journey, it was with a
seatful of candy, magazines, books, flowers, everything that the
community afforded for a going-away present. I never had been before nor
have been since so much the prima donna.
But all this was preliminary to the real task of finding out what was
happening in Kansas, outside of the production of oil. The legislation
already passed was intended to make the Standard Oil Company the servant
of the state. But I had long ago learned it was one thing to pass laws
and another thing to enforce and administer them. How were they getting
on?
I went first to see the governor—E. W. Hoch—a humorless and honest man.
It was he who had sponsored the state refinery. I found him impressed by
what he had done, but a little doubtful about how things were going to
come out. He was opening his mail when I went in and he showed me
letters nominating him for the Presidency. He had been receiving many of
them, he said. It was obvious they came from radical socialists
rejoicing over the encouragement that he was giving to the public
ownership of industry. He liked the applause but did not like the
source. He was no socialist, he protested to me. He was a firm believer
in the competitive system. The state refinery was a “measuring stick.”
He had wanted to settle definitely just what the profits of the refinery
business in Kansas were. Nobody knew except experts, and they wouldn’t
tell. A first-class oil refinery would settle for all time the cost of
refining Kansas oil and force the sale at a reasonable price. He was not
trying to drive private industry out of the state. He merely wanted to
force private industry to be reasonable—the private industry being of
course the Standard Oil Company.
Governor Hoch and the state as a whole were soon feeling the effect of
the letdown which always follows an exciting legislative campaign,
particularly for the winner. Not since the early nineties had Kansas
enjoyed so rousing a time. And now it was over and they had to come down
to business. But could they get down to business? Could they administer
the new laws? Meetings were being held, half in jubilation over the
successful legislation, half in anxiety about the next step. I was asked
to come and speak at one of them.
I was no speaker, but I could not let them down. Moreover, because of my
familiarity with past exciting experiments on the part of indignant oil
independents I realized better than they did, so I thought, the hard
pull they had before them.
“Your problem now,” I told them, “is to do business. As far as laws can
insure it you have free opportunity; but good laws and free opportunity
alone do not build up a business. Unless you can be as efficient and as
patient, as farseeing as your great competitor—laws or no laws, you will
not succeed. You must make yourselves as good refiners, as good
transporters, as good marketers, as ingenious, as informed, as
imaginative in your legitimate undertakings as they are in both their
legitimate and illegitimate.”
My speech was not popular. What they wanted from me was a rousing attack
on the Standard Oil Company. They wanted a Mary Lease to tell them to go
on raising hell, and here I was telling them they had got all they could
by raising hell and now they must settle down to doing business.
“You have gone over to the Standard Oil Company?” said one disgusted
Populist.
I saw I had ruined my reputation as the Joan of Arc of the oil industry,
as some one had named me. But there were hard-headed independent
legislators and business men in the state who consoled me, “You are
right, we must learn to do business as well as they do.”
One immediate national effect of the Kansas disturbance was to arouse
the legislatures of other oil-producing states in the Southwest to enact
laws not unlike those of Kansas, though I do not remember that a state
refinery was sponsored anywhere else. There was a wide demand that
Congress place the pipe-line system under the Interstate Commerce
Commission, subject it to the same restrictions as interstate rails, but
most important was the fine popular backing the row gave the
trust-busting campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, now President of the
United States. He had begun his attack on big business by putting an end
to the first great holding company the country had seen—the Northern
Securities Company. He had followed this by a bill establishing a
department for which people had been asking for a decade or more, that
of Commerce and Labor, including a Bureau of Corporations with power to
examine books and question personnel. Congress at first shied at the
measure, but Mr. Roosevelt thundered, “If you do not pass it this
session I will call an extra session.” And they knew he would.
Ironically enough it was the Standard itself that broke the reluctance
of Congress. The proposal had shocked it out of its usual discretion.
There never was an organization in the country which held secrecy more
essential to doing business. Breaking down the walls behind which it
operated was not to be tolerated. It seems to have been the peppery John
Archbold who took charge of the fight against the bill, using all the
political influence of the company, which was considerable at that
moment.
Roosevelt soon learned something of what was going on—it is not certain
how much; and when he saw his measure in danger he gave out the
statement that John D. Rockefeller had wired his friends in the Senate,
“We are opposed to any antitrust legislation—it must be stopped.”
The last thing in the world that John D. Rockefeller would have done was
to send such a telegram to anybody. Probably Mr. Roosevelt knew that;
but somebody in the Standard was passing on such a word, and Mr.
Rockefeller was the responsible head of the organization. His name did
the work. Congress passed the bill in a hurry. The Bureau of
Corporations was speedily set up, an excellent man at its head—James
Garfield. The first task assigned it by the President was an
investigation of the petroleum industry.
This investigation reported in 1906 that the Standard Oil Company was
receiving preferential rates from various railroads and had been for
some time. One of the most spectacular business suits the country had
seen up to that time followed. The Standard was found guilty by Judge
Kenesaw Landis, the present arbitrator of the manners and morals of
national baseball, and a punishment long known as the “Big
Fine”—twenty-nine million dollars—inflicted. The country gasped at the
size of the fine, but not so the Bureau of Corporations. My
correspondent there contended that over eight thousand true indictments
had been found, and that the maximum penalty would have amounted to over
a hundred and sixty million dollars!
But even the twenty-nine million dollars, so modest in the view of the
Bureau of Corporations, was not allowed to stand, for in 1908 Judge
Peter Grosscup of the Circuit Court of Appeals in Illinois upset it.
Roosevelt was angry. “There is too much power in the bench,” he told his
friends.
But by this time the Government had under way another and a much more
serious line of attack, from which Roosevelt was hoping substantial
results. Back in 1890 the Congress had enacted what was known as the
Sherman Antitrust Law, a law making illegal every contract and
combination restraining trade and fostering monopoly. The Government was
now seeking to apply this law to the Standard Oil Company. Was it not
the first industry to attempt monopoly? Had it not been the model for
all the brood?
Such a suit was no new idea. Independent oilmen had long talked of it,
and in 1897 they had been ready to go ahead when at the last moment the
lawyer to whom they had entrusted their case was taken suddenly ill and
died. It must have seemed to the energetic Lewis Emery, Jr., who had
been engineering the attack that the Lord himself had “gone over to the
Standard.”
Ten years went by, and then in September, 1907, the United States of
America began suit against the Standard Oil Company of New York _et al._
There were months and months of hearings. If I had been a modern
newspaper woman I could have made a good killing out of that long
investigation, for more than one editor asked me to analyze the
testimony as it came along or give my impressions of the gentlemen who
appeared on the witness stand. But I had no stomach for it; I never
attended a public examination though I of course read the published
testimony with care.
I knew well enough that the time would come when, if I did my duty as a
historian, I must analyze the suit; but that must be after it was ended
and a sufficiently practical test had been made of the decision. It
would be a long time, I told myself, before I should be obliged to take
up the story where I had left it.
13
OFF WITH THE OLD—ON WITH THE NEW
Twelve years had gone by since I tied myself, temporarily as I thought,
to the McClure venture. To my surprise, the longer I was with the
enterprise the more strongly I felt it was giving me the freedom I
wanted, as well as a degree of that security which makes freedom so much
easier a load to carry. Here was a group of people I could work with,
without sacrifice or irritation. Here was a healthy growing undertaking
which excited me, while it seemed to offer endless opportunity to
contribute to the better thinking of the country. The future looked fair
and permanent.
And then without warning the apparently solid creation was shattered and
I found myself sitting on its ruins.
Looking back now, I know that the split in the McClure staff in 1906 was
inevitable. Neither Mr. McClure nor Mr. Phillips, the two essential
factors in the creation, could have done other than he did. The points
at issue were fundamental. Each man acted according to an inner
something which made him what he was, something he could not violate.
Back of the difficulty lay the fact that at this time Mr. McClure was a
sick man. The hardships of his youth and early manhood, the intense
pressure he had put on himself in founding his enterprises had exhausted
him. For several years he had been obliged to take long vacations,
usually in Europe with his family, his staff carrying on his work in his
absence. The enterprises were bringing him larger and larger returns and
more and more honor; but that was not what he most wanted. He wanted to
be in the thick of things, feel himself an active factor in what was
doing. Above all he wanted to add to what he had already achieved, to
build a bigger, a more imposing House of McClure.
“What he wanted was more money,” I have heard men comment.
They were wrong. I have never known a man freer from the itch for money
as an end than S. S. McClure. Money for him meant power to do things, to
build, to help others. On his way up he had gathered about him a horde
of dependents with whom he was always ready to share his last dollar. He
was reckless with money as with ideas.
In these years when he was practically living in Europe, though
returning regularly to the United States, his chief interest was not in
what his enterprises were accomplishing, but in adding something bigger
than they were or could be. Only by doing this could he prove to himself
and to his colleagues that he was a stronger and more productive man
than ever. Nothing else would satisfy him.
His passion to build, to realize his ambitions, made him careless about
laying foundations. What he did usually had the character of
improvisation, frequently on a grand scale, sometimes merely gay spurts
of fancy. I was myself caught in one of the latter when Mr. McClure in
London suddenly ordered me in Paris to drop whatever I was doing and to
hurry into Germany to collect material for an animal magazine.
Animals were an abiding interest with _McClure’s_. Rudyard Kipling laid
the foundation in the Jungle tales. After that great series few were the
numbers that did not have an animal in text and picture. It was as much
a passion as baseball was to become in the latter days with _The
American Magazine_.
I spent a lively month visiting zoos, interviewing animal trainers and
hunters and keepers, buying books and photographs, turning in what I
considered a pretty good grist of materials and suggestions. What became
of it, I never knew, for I never heard a word of it after I came back to
America. The only remnant I have now of that month is a powder box of
Dresden china bought at the showrooms of the factory of the crossed
swords, it being my practice when on professional trips to use my
leisure seeing the town, guidebook in hand, and buying all the souvenirs
my purse permitted.
It was in 1906 that Mr. McClure brought home from one of his foraging
expeditions the plan which was eventually to wreck his enterprises. He
had it cut and dried ready to put into action. Without consultation with
his partners he had organized a new company, the charter of which
provided not only for a _McClure’s Universal Journal_, but a McClure’s
Bank, a McClure’s Life Insurance Company, a McClure’s School Book
Publishing Company, and later a McClure’s Ideal Settlement in which
people could have cheap homes on their own terms. It undertook to
combine with a cheap magazine—which it goes without saying was to have
an enormous circulation with the enormous advertising which circulation
brings—an attempt to solve some of the great abuses of the day, abuses
at which we had been hammering in _McClure’s Magazine_. He proposed to
do this by giving them a competition which would draw their teeth.
By the time Mr. McClure got around to explaining his plan to me and
asking my cooperation he had worked himself up to regarding it as an
inspiration which must not be questioned. It seemed to me to possess him
like a religious vision which it was blasphemy to question. Obsessed as
he was, he was blind and deaf to the obstacles in the way. I am sure I
hurt Mr. McClure by telling him bluntly and at once that I would never
have anything to do with such a scheme.
In a recently published letter Lincoln Steffens tells how he saw Mr.
McClure’s plan. To him it was not only “fool” but “not quite right.”
Certainly it was not right. As organized, it was a speculative scheme as
alike as two peas to certain organizations the magazine had been
battering.
The tragedy of the situation was that Mr. McClure did not see and could
not understand the arguments of his associates that his plan was not
only impossible but wrong. This failure of judgment was, I am convinced,
due to his long illness. The mental and physical exhaustion from which
he was suffering, and which he could not bring himself to understand or
accept, explains the unwisdom of this undertaking, his contention that
it was an inspiration, his stubbornness in insisting that it be accepted
and set to work. Human reason has little influence on one who believes
he is inspired.
The members of the staff were little more than outsiders when it came to
the final decision. It was up to John Phillips to accept and do his
utmost to aid in the grandiose adventure or patiently to wait while
persuading the General that it was not the mission of the McClure crowd
to reconstruct the economic life of the country, that we were
journalists, not financial reformers. I think no man ever tried harder
to keep another from a suicidal undertaking; and certainly no man could
have been firmer from the start in his refusal to go along.
The struggle went on for six months, and no two men ever tried more
honestly to adjust their differences; but they were irreconcilable. It
came to a point where one or the other must sell his interest in the
magazine. It was Mr. McClure who bought out his partner.
Although _McClure’s Magazine_ is no longer on the newsstands, it does
occupy a permanent place in the history of the period that it served,
because it worked itself into the literary and economic life of the
country.
It was a magazine which from the first put quality above everything else
and was willing to chase checks around town in order to pay for it. For
those who collect Kipling there are the first publications of many of
his rarest poems, short stories, and such distinguished serials as
“Captains Courageous” and “Kim.” Here first appeared Willa Cather and O.
Henry.
It was a magazine which backed regardless of expense, one might say, the
investigations and reports of men like Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln
Steffens. For twelve years it encouraged with liberality and patience
the work of which I have been talking in this narrative.
Mr. McClure had two editorial policies when it came to getting the thing
he felt was important for the Magazine. First, the writer must be well
paid and the expense money be generous. Second, and most important of
all, he must be given time. He did not ask that you produce a great
serial in six months. He gave you years if it was necessary. I spent the
greater part of five years on “The History of the Standard Oil Company.”
I was what was called a contributing editor; that is, I turned in
suggestions as they came to me in my work around the country. I did
occasional extra articles that seemed to be in my line. I read and took
part in editorial counsels, but it was recognized that all the time I
demanded should be given to the serial. I know of no other editor and no
other publisher who has so fully recognized the necessity of generous
pay and ample time, if he were to get from a staff work done according
to the best editorial standard, and worthy of the magazine and the
writer.
When it was finally decided that Mr. Phillips was to sever his long
relation to _McClure’s_ several members of the editorial staff resigned,
including Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, John Siddall, the
efficient young managing editor Albert Boyden, and myself. We could not
see the magazine without Mr. Phillips.
The last day we left the office, then on Twenty-third Street near Fourth
Avenue, some of us went together to Madison Square and sat on a bench
talking over our future. We were derelicts without a job.
But not for long.
[Illustration:
_First year of The American Magazine, 1907_
]
There was then in New York, though it was not generally known, a
magazine group which wanted a change. The magazine was very old—long
known as _Frank Leslie’s Illustrated_ _Monthly_, recently changed to
_The American Magazine_. Its owner was Frederick L. Colver; its editor,
Ellery Sedgwick (afterward editor of the _Atlantic_); its publisher,
William Morrow (afterward the founder of William Morrow & Company, the
book publishing house). Mr. Colver approached Mr. Phillips: “Why don’t
_you_ take it over?”
Finally in council assembled, our editorial group together with David A.
McKinlay and John Trainor of the McClure business department, decided to
incorporate the Phillips Publishing Company and buy _The American
Magazine_. With what we could put in ourselves and money from the sale
of stock to interested friends, we secured funds for the purchase and
sufficient working capital.
We left _McClure’s_ in March: six months later, October, 1906, appeared
our first issue. The announcement shows how seriously we took ourselves,
as befitted people who had seen something in which they deeply believed
go to pieces. We had been too cruelly bruised to take anything lightly,
but luckily we were able to make two additions to our staff, each man
with a vein of humor not to be dried up or muddled by any
cataclysms—William Allen White and Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley).
We had known Mr. White in the _McClure’s_ office since the day of his
famous editorial, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” After that came his
Boyville stories, two or three of which _McClure’s_ published, and then
at intervals studies of political situations and political figures. It
was not long before he began to come to New York. He was a little
city-shy then, or wanted us to think so. As I was one of the official
entertainers of the group, it occasionally fell to me to “take him by
the hand,” as he put it, and show him the town. I could have hardly had
a more delightful experience. He judged New York by Kansas standards,
and New York usually suffered. His affection and loyalty for his state,
his appreciation and understanding of everything that she does—wise and
foolish—the incomparable journalistic style in which he presents her are
what has made him so valuable a national citizen. His crowning
achievement among the many to be credited to him has been remaining
first, last, and always the editor of the Emporia _Gazette_. A staunch
friendship had sprung up between Mr. White and Mr. Phillips, and it was
natural enough that he interested himself in the new venture.
As for Peter Dunne, we went after him and rather to my surprise he came
along, taking a desk in our cramped offices and appearing with amazing
regularity. At this time he was some forty years old—the greatest
satirist in my judgment the country has yet produced. He had a wide
knowledge of men and their ways. There was no malice in his judgments,
but a great contempt for humbuggery as well as for all forms of
self-deception devoted to uplifting the world. However, he felt kindly
towards our ardent desire to improve things by demonstrating their
unsoundness and approved our unwillingness to use any other tools than
those which belonged legitimately to our profession. He came out
strongest in his contributions to the department of editorial comment,
which Mr. Phillips had introduced under the head of “The Interpreter’s
House.” We were all supposed to contribute whatever was on our minds to
this department. Mr. Phillips and Mr. Dunne did the censoring and
dovetailing. I did not often make “The Interpreter’s House,” much to my
chagrin. Dunne said, “You sputter like a woman,” which I fear was true.
If it had not been for him the first Christmas issue of “The
Interpreter’s House” would have been bleak reading. We had each of us
broken forth in lament for the particular evil of the world which was
disturbing us, offering our remedies.
It seems to me [wrote Dunne, editing our contributions] that we are
serving up a savory Christmas number ... a nice present to be found
in the bottom of a stocking....
You cannot go to the Patent Office in Washington and take out a
patent that will transform men into angels. The way upward, long and
tedious as it is, lies through the hearts of men. It has been so
since the founding of the Feast. Nothing has been proved more
clearly in the political history of the race than this, that good
will to men has done more to improve government than laws and wars.
... Let us close down our desks for the year. If you want to find me
for another week I will be found in the wonderful little toy shop
around the corner.
That editorial broke the tension which had made me think this was no
time to go home for Christmas. I went.
Peter Dunne hated the pains of writing. His labor affected the whole
office—sympathy with what he was going through, fear that his copy would
not be in on time, eagerness to see it when it came, to know if it was
“one of his best.” But Peter’s work was never what he thought it ought
to be, and he sought forgetfulness.
Indispensable on the new editorial staff, seeing Peter through his birth
pains, keeping the rest of us at our tasks, nursing new writers, making
up the magazine, was Albert Boyden. He had come fresh from Harvard to
_McClure’s_ and had at once made himself a place by his genius for
keeping things going and his gift for sympathetic friendliness. It was a
combination which became more valuable and irresistible as time went on.
Bert was everybody’s friend, whether editor, artist, or writer. “One can
have friends, one can have editors,” Ray Stannard Baker was to write
later, “but Bert was both.”