go at it.” But it was not Mr. Wickersham’s dictum that hurried me to
undertake to tell the story of what had happened since 1904. It was an
entirely unexpected piratical attack on the two-volume edition of the
history which had been exhausted for some time. My publisher, wisely
enough, was waiting for the promised third volume before reprinting.
When it became known in the trade that the book was no longer on the
market a report was spread that the Standard Oil Company had bought and
destroyed the plates, and the price soared. Down in Louisiana Huey Long
paid one hundred dollars for a set, so I was told.
As I frequently received inquiries as to where the books could be found
or where a purchaser could be found for a set, I turned the
correspondence over to my secretary, a canny woman, who established a
trading relation with a dealer in old books; and the two of them were in
a fair way to do a nice little business when their hopes were blasted by
the appearance in a New York bookstore of an entirely new edition of the
work—a cheap edition, selling for five or six dollars. My publishers
made an immediate investigation and found that it had been printed in
England, probably from German plates.
As the third volume was not ready, there was nothing for the publisher
to do but reprint the two, which he very promptly did. On the appearance
of the reprint the pirated edition disappeared from the market. This
episode set me to work promptly at the third volume.
But I needed a financial backer if the work was to be put through
promptly. I found it unexpectedly in the editor-in-chief for whom the
first two volumes had been written—S. S. McClure. _McClure’s Magazine_,
which had been suspended for a few years, had been revived, Mr. McClure
in charge. He felt that bringing Standard Oil history up to date was a
logical and might be an important feature for the periodical.
For me there was satisfaction in trying to revive the old editorial
relations. I had always missed the gaiety and excitement Mr. McClure
gave to work, and, too, I had always felt a little anxious about, what I
suspected was happening to him in a group which, even if it was made up
of the very best of the town—men and women of ability and loyalty,
naturally eager to prove that they could make a _McClure’s Magazine_ as
good as ever had been made or better—could not, I was convinced,
understand Mr. McClure, get out of him what he had to give like his old
partner and friend John S. Phillips. So I was willing to give all I had
to help in the revival of the old periodical.
I had my book well in hand, some twenty thousand words written, when the
new _McClure’s_ was suspended and the third volume on the Standard Oil
Company was cast out before publication had begun.
Perhaps it was just as well, both for _McClure’s_ and for me. Repeating
yourself is a doubtful practice, particularly for editor and writer. I
feel now there was no hope of my recapturing the former interest in the
former way. The result would have smelt a bit musty. Indeed, though I
hate to admit it, I think there has been a slight mustiness about all I
have done in the nineteen years since I started “on my own”—that is, not
on assignment—built as it has been on work done before the Great War.
Left with twenty thousand words on hand and no editor, I was obliged to
make a quick turn in the interest of security and took on the first
piece of work that offered. For one reason or another I have never been
able to return to that third volume and it looks now as if it were a
piece of work for my ninth decade since it failed to mature in the
seventh and eighth!
If I failed to carry out my plan for tracing the maneuvers of the master
monopoly after the Government had taken it apart in 1911 and after it
adapted itself to the new and extraordinary situations forced by the
Great War, I did trace what could be done in a corporation whose parts
all had been built more or less on privilege, and which itself enjoyed
high tariff protection, when a man took hold of it who believed that
ordinary ethics did apply to business. This study was shaped around the
life of Judge Elbert H. Gary.
It was no idea of mine, this life of Gary, and when it was proposed to
me by that energetic and resourceful editor Rutger Jewett I promptly
said, “No.” But Mr. Jewett was insistent. He had talked the matter over
with Judge Gary, who had told him he would open his records and answer
my questions if I would do the book.
That meant, I supposed, that he had confidence in my ability to be
fair-minded, whatever my suspicions. His judgment was formed on my
handling of certain efforts to improve and humanize the conditions of
labor in the mills, factories, and towns of the United States Steel
Corporation. The Corporation under his direction had been a pioneer in
safety and sanitation work. It had developed a pension system, improved
communities, improved its housing, built schools and hospitals where
there was no community to take care of these needs. It was the broadest,
soundest record that I had found in my gathering of material for the
articles _The American Magazine_ had published under the title of “The
Golden Rule in Business.” I knew from my talks with Judge Gary that
there was nothing going on in the Steel Corporation in which he was more
deeply interested.
Moreover, I knew he was a man I could talk with freely. More than once,
when he as spokesman of the Corporation was under attack for arbitrary
dealings with labor, I had gone to him for his side of the case; and
although I might not agree, and frequently did not, I always came away
enlightened and with a rather humiliated feeling that I had shown myself
an amateur in a conversation where he was very much the expert.
But was I equal to finding out the truth of things in this enormous
industrial labyrinth which he ruled? Moreover, if Judge Gary had been an
industrial plunderer, should I be willing so to present him? I had no
heart for a repetition of my experience with H. H. Rogers.
Another reason for hesitation was that I knew if I did undertake it, and
was as fair as I knew how to be, I should at once be under suspicion by
groups with whose intentions for the most part I sympathized. They were
unwilling to consider Gary in any light save that of Scapegoat Number
One. An attack—yes—they would welcome it. An attempt to set down his
business life as he had actually lived it—no. That was whitewashing.
Finally I took the matter to Judge Gary himself. “I do not know that I
want to write your life,” I told him. “If I find practices which seem to
me against public policy as I understand it I shall have to say so. I
appreciate your efforts to make working conditions for labor as good as
you know how to make them, but it does not follow that I can stand for
your financial policies. It is not your humanitarianism but your ethics
I suspect.”
“Well,” Judge Gary laughed, “if you can find anything wrong in our
doings I want to know it. I had George Wickersham in here for a year or
more going over the whole set-up telling me what he thought we ought not
to do, and I followed every suggestion he made. The Government has had
its agency here for two years examining our books, and they gave us a
clean bill of health. The Supreme Court has refused to declare us a
monopoly in restraint of trade. Do your worst, and if you find anything
wrong I shall be grateful.”
I felt more of an amateur than ever after that. I also concluded that it
would be sheer cowardice on my part to refuse the job which I really
needed. I had not been long at my task, however, before I was heartened
by the certainty that, from the formation of the Corporation, Judge Gary
had made a steady and surprisingly successful fight to strip the
businesses which he was putting together of certain illegal privileges,
as well as to set up an entirely new code of fair practices—the Gary
Code, it was jeeringly called in Wall Street.
Orders went out neither to ask nor to accept special favors from the
railroads. Full yearly reports of the financial condition of the
Corporation, whether good or bad, were sent out. These reports reached
the public as early as they did the directors themselves, putting an end
to the advance information which many insiders were accustomed to using
for stock selling or buying. Various forms of predatory competition were
attacked from the inside. Judge Gary not only laid down his code, he
followed it up, preached it zealously to his board.
Another unheard-of innovation was his support of President Theodore
Roosevelt’s attempts to control business. It had become an axiom of Big
Business to fight every effort of the Government to inspect or regulate.
When Gary took the opposite course, applauded Roosevelt’s efforts,
declared that he was doing business good, doing him good, he was treated
as a traitor by many colleagues.
Well, this seemed to me as good business doctrine as I had come across
in any concern—much better, more definite and practical as a matter of
fact than I got from most corporation critics. But how far was this
followed up in practice? Before I was through I made up my mind that
Judge Gary’s code was applied just as completely and as rapidly as he
could persuade or drive his frequently doubting and recalcitrant
associates to it. But that took time, took frequent battles. Indeed,
more than once he had come close to losing his official head, fighting
for this or that plank in his platform. The Gary Code and the effort to
put it into practice reconciled me to my task.
Judge Gary was an easy man to work with because he was so interested in
following his own story. He had been too busy all his life to give
attention to the route by which he had come. Now he enjoyed the looks
back. Finding that he was willing to take literally his promise to open
records and answer questions, I laid out a little plan for covering his
life chronologically. It pleased him, for he was the most systematic of
men. It gave him delight to remember. “How a man’s mind unravels!” he
exclaimed one day when he had suddenly recalled something long
forgotten.
Our interviews were carried on always at 71 Broadway. He kept his
appointments exactly. Rarely did he keep me waiting, and if by necessity
he did he always apologized. If I came late I was made to feel clearly
that that was a thing not to be done.
While Judge Gary was prepared to be frank in his talks with me he was
not prepared to be misquoted. He evidently had learned that even with
the best intentions a reporter may distort what a man has said out of
all resemblance to what he meant. He guarded against this by always
having at our interviews a secretary who took down in shorthand all that
he said, all that I said. I made longhand notes, dictating them as soon
as I went back to my desk. I do not remember that a question of
misunderstanding of meaning ever came up.
Convinced that the Gary Code was genuine, not mere window dressing for
the public, nothing interested me more than how a man in his fifties who
had been for twenty years a successful corporation lawyer was willing to
preach to Wall Street as he had done. I finally concluded the truth to
be that Elbert Gary had never outgrown his early bringing up. He had
never gotten over a belief in the soundness of what he had learned in
Sunday school and of what later he had taught through most of his
manhood in Sunday school. The difference between him and some of his
fellows in business brought up in the same way was that he insisted that
the Sunday-school precepts of honesty, consideration for others, fair
play, should be preached on week days as well as Sundays, in the board
room as well as the church. If he ever sensed that his preaching was
both comic and irritating to Wall Street—which I doubt—he never gave
sign of such a perception.
I soon found that I need not hesitate to bring him all sorts of
criticisms of his doings as I unearthed them in studying the public’s
reactions to the Steel Corporation’s operations. They never fretted or
irritated him; rather he enjoyed analyzing them for my benefit. He never
dismissed radical opinions as nonsense. In the year I was working with
him there was never a public radical meeting in New York—and there were
a good many of them that year—that he did not read all the speeches, and
comment on them intelligently and with good humor.
“We must know about these things,” he said. “We must know all about
Lenin, all about Mussolini. They are great forces; they are trying new
forms of government.” His knowledge prevented him from being scared.
Above all Gary enjoyed stories of his struggles to establish his own
preeminence and his own code in the Steel Corporation. At the start he
had several of the strong men in the Corporation against him; but he had
won out, and it gave him the greatest satisfaction to show me letters of
congratulation, to quote former opponents as saying, “You were right, I
was wrong.” Particularly he enjoyed the very good terms on which he
stood with Theodore Roosevelt, whose unpopularity in Wall Street
surpassed even that of the second Roosevelt.
He still talked with emotion of the decision of the Government to bring
suit against the Steel Corporation under the Sherman Law. He thought he
had satisfied it that the Steel Corporation was not a monopoly in
restraint of trade, that it was what Mark Twain called a good trust; and
when the Attorney General’s office decided that there might be a
question about the quality of this goodness Gary was terribly disturbed.
There were advisers who thought he ought to try to settle the suit
outside, but he would not have it so. The Government had doubts, and he
must satisfy them. He believed that the law did not apply to the Steel
Corporation; he believed that the Corporation was not contrary to a
sound business policy, a menace to the country. That must be settled
once for all. Of course he was jubilant over the outcome: it justified
his conviction.
Judge Gary had done a great job, and he knew it; but, interestingly
enough, it never made him pompous. As a matter of fact he was simple,
natural, in talking about it. Along with this really simple enjoyment of
his own conflict he had a nice kind of dignity and a carefulness of
conduct which were not entirely natural to him. To be sure he had always
been a good Methodist, a good citizen, a hard-working lawyer; but at the
same time in all these earlier years he had led what was then called a
gay life. He had liked a fast horse, liked to hunt and see the world. He
was curious about all kinds of human performances, looked into them
whenever he had the chance. When he became the head of the Steel
Corporation he could no longer sing in the choir—he had to go to the
Opera and sit in a box. He no longer drove fast horses. He wanted to
fly, and the board of the Steel Corporation passed an ordinance against
it—too dangerous. When he traveled it was more or less in state, and he
couldn’t slip out with a crowd of men at the stopping places to see the
town.
It was hard on him, but he felt deeply that he owed it to the Steel
Corporation to be above reproach. Not a little of this carefulness was
due, I think, to the effect on the public, the exhibits that several of
the new steel men had made of themselves after the Corporation was
formed in 1901 and their offices were centered in New York. They were
rich beyond their wildest dreams. The restrictions of the home towns
were gone, and they broke loose in a riotous celebration which
scandalized even Mr. Morgan. Gary joined in nothing which approached
orgies. He was too hard a worker and always had been, and he saw with
distress the effect the high living of certain of the steel men was
having on the public. It was a danger, he felt, equal to the speculation
in steel stock by officers of the corporation. To counteract it he
gradually became more and more a model of correctness.
I came out of my task with a real liking for Judge Gary and a profound
conviction that industry has not produced one in our time who so well
deserves the title of industrial statesman. But I had to pay for saying
what I thought. Under the heading of “The Taming of Ida M. Tarbell” my
favorite newspaper declared that I had become a eulogist of the kind of
man to whom I was sworn as an eternal enemy. But Judge Gary was not the
kind of captain of industry to which I objected. On the contrary, he was
a man who, at the frequent risk of his position and fortune, had
steadily fought many of the privileges and practices to which I had been
objecting.
However, one is judged largely by the company one keeps. Judge Gary
belonged to an industrial world where the predatory, the brutal, the
illegal, the reckless speculator constantly forced public attention.
That there was another side to that world, a really honest and
intelligent effort in the making to put an end to these practices, few
knew or, knowing, acknowledged. I could not complain. I knew how it
would be when I started. But I must confess that more than once, while I
was carrying on my work, I shivered with distaste at the suspicion I
knew I was bringing on myself. The only time in my professional life I
feel I deserve to be called courageous was when I wrote the life of
Judge Gary.
My active interest in the industrial life of the country brought me
unexpected adventures. The most instructive as well as upsetting was
serving on a couple of those Government conferences which twentieth
century Presidents have used so freely in their attempts to solve
difficult national problems. An Industrial Conference called by
President Wilson for the fall of 1919 was the first of these. Mr. Wilson
felt clearly at the end of the War that our immediate important domestic
problem was to establish some common ground of agreement and action in
the conduct of industry. What he wanted evidently was a covenant by
which employer and employee could work out their common problems as
cooperators, not as enemies. There was need of action, as any one who
remembers those days will agree. The whole labor world was in an uproar,
and one of the periodical efforts to organize the steel industry was
under way. Mr. Gompers, the head of the American Federation, sponsoring
the strike, had had little or no sympathy with a contest at the moment
but had been pushed into it by the adroitness of the radical elements
boring from within throughout the War.
“These disturbances must not go on. It should be possible to make plans
for a peaceful solution,” Mr. Wilson said.
And so a Conference was called. In spite of my refusal to serve on his
Tariff Commission, President Wilson had evidently not given me up. As a
matter of fact our acquaintance and mutual confidence had grown during
the War.
He now named me as one of four women representatives, the others being
Lillian Wald, head of the Nurses’ Settlement in New York City, Gertrude
Barnum, assistant director of the investigation service of the United
States Department of Labor, and Sara Conboy of the textile workers’
union.
The Conference was an impressive and exciting body of some fifty persons
divided into three groups representing the public, labor, the employers.
I, of course, sat in the first group, where I found as my colleagues a
bewildering assortment of men from various ranks of life. There were Dr.
Charles Eliot, Charles Edward Russell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Judge
Gary, John Spargo, Bernard Baruch, Thomas L. Chadbourne, Jr., and a
score or more less known to the public, though not necessarily less
influential.
At the head of the labor group was Samuel Gompers. Among his colleagues
were some of the most experienced labor leaders in the country.
The members of the employer group were chosen from among men who had
been particularly helpful in directing their industries during the War.
There were many interesting characters on the body. Two that I
particularly enjoyed were Henry Endicott, who with the Johnsons had
established the famous shoe towns near Binghamton, New York, and a
delightful pungent character from Georgia—Fuller E. Callaway—who in
twenty years had built up from scratch mills and a village with homes
and schools—everything to give life and a chance to hard-working mill
people. Mr. Callaway’s story of what he had done in Georgia was one of
the very few joyous contributions to a gathering doomed to be a dismal
failure.
A body could have scarcely had a heartier welcome from the public than
we did. People seemed to feel we should find a way to end the fighting;
that was what we were there for, Secretary of Labor Wilson told us in
his keynote speech. If we could produce a document which would secure
the rights of all those concerned in an industry, it would find a place
in the hearts of men like the Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and
the Emancipation Proclamation. He brought us all to our feet—all save a
few who were too interested in political strategy to entertain a high
purpose.
We were there to plan for the future of industry. But almost at once we
discovered that it was not peace or the future of industry that was in
Mr. Gompers’ mind. Also, we discovered that the master politician of the
body was Mr. Gompers. We were hardly organized before he called upon us
to appoint a committee to report on the steel strike.
Dr. Charles Eliot, outraged, rose in all his very genuine majesty and
reminded the body that we were not there to attend to the troubles of
the present but to plan that such troubles might be avoided in the
future. But the steel strike was on the table, and we left it there when
we disbanded, a menace and an irritation.
It was not Mr. Gompers’ resolution, however, which ruined the
Conference. It was the inability of the representatives of labor and
employers to agree on a definition for collective bargaining. The
Conference as a whole contended that such a definition must be a leading
plank in the platform we were there to make, but there were to be many
other planks. Committees were at once formed to frame them. Almost every
member of the Conference, too, had some particular resolution that he
wanted to incorporate. I know I did. But most of us never found an
opportunity to present our notions. Collective bargaining and what it
meant were always getting in our way. The employer group and a
considerable number of the public group believed that the definition
which the labor group offered meant a closed shop. Judge Gary openly
charged this. But labor was quite as strong in its suspicion that the
definition which came from the employer group encouraged company unions,
at that moment flourishing in numbers that alarmed them. Suspicion
governed both groups.
This went on for two weeks; then Secretary Lane, the acting chairman of
the Conference, appealed to a very sick President, and from his bed
Woodrow Wilson begged us not to allow division on one point to destroy
our opportunity:
At a time when the nations of the world are endeavoring to find a
way of avoiding international war [he wrote], are we to confess that
there is no method to be found for carrying on industry except in
the spirit and with the very method of war? Must suspicion and
hatred and force rule us in civil life? Are our industrial leaders
and our industrial workers to live together without faith in each
other, constantly struggling for advantage over each other, doing
naught but what is compelled?
My friends, this would be an intolerable outlook, a prospect
unworthy of the large things done by this people in the mastering of
this continent; indeed, it would be an invitation to national
disaster. From such a possibility my mind turns away, for my
confidence is abiding that in this land we have learned how to
accept the general judgment upon matters that affect the public
weal. And this is the very heart and soul of democracy.