Part 21

“Mr. Rogers,” I said, “if you will look at my letter you will see that I did not suggest that you make the article correspond with your opinion of this case. I am convinced that I cannot do that. I asked you to examine the article and see if I had made any errors in statement or had omitted any essential testimony on either side.”

He smiled. “Never mind, go ahead,” he said.

The letter was admirable, almost every point well taken. There was nothing which it was not proper for me to consider at least, and with certain of his points I said at once that I was willing to comply. The discussion of the letter finished, I inwardly breathed a sigh of satisfaction. We were going to part on friendly terms with neither of us having yielded our convictions.

But I had not counted on the resources of Henry Rogers in a matter in which he was deeply concerned, particularly one which touched his personal pride and aroused his fighting spirit. For as I was about to go he sprang on me an entirely new interpretation of the case. Not only was the suit of the independent refinery in which he had been indicted a continuation of the original blackmailing scheme, but the lawyers in the case had themselves been in the conspiracy. He laid before me a number of documents which he claimed proved it. The chief of these was the itemized report of the receiver. This report, he said, showed that the lawyers had taken the case knowing that if the Buffalo concern did not win there would be no fees, and showed that when the matter had finally been settled they had made what the receiver considered exorbitant claims for their services. There were five of them, and they finally were allowed some thirty thousand dollars.

“You can see,” Mr. Rogers said as he pointed out these facts, “why they were so eager to convict us. They were making a raid on the Standard, and the bench was with them.”

His charge that the bench was with them, he based on the fact that two of the lawyers originally in the case had later been elevated to the bench. They had not of course heard the case, but they had put their information and conclusions at the disposal of their successors.

I was startled by this sudden and sinister accusation and sat for some time with my head bent over the papers, forgetting his presence, trying to get at the meaning of the documents. Was there any other explanation than that which Mr. Rogers had given me with such conviction? Looking up suddenly for the first time in my experience with Mr. Rogers, I caught him looking at me with narrowed and cunning eyes. I took alarm on the instant.

“We are not the only ones, you see, Miss Tarbell.”

“If this means what it seems to mean you are not. But I shall have to study these documents, Mr. Rogers; I shall have to consult a lawyer about the practice common in such cases.”

“That will be all right,” he said.

He was more exultant than I had ever found him. “I knew that paper would come in well some day. To get it I consented to our people buying the Buffalo refinery—we did not want it, but I wanted to get the receiver’s reports and know just what had been done with the money we had paid them.”

On the whole I had never seen him better pleased with himself than he 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.