All in the Day's Work — Chapter 11: A Captain of Industry Seeks My Acquaintance, Part 2

“I think it is going to rain,” said Mr. Rogers, looking out of the window with ostentatious detachment.

Mr. Rogers not only produced documents and arguments; he produced people with whom I wanted to talk.

The most important was Henry Flagler, who had been in on the South Improvement Company, that early deal with the railroads which had started the Standard Oil Company off on the road to monopoly.

There had always been a controversy as to who had suggested that fine scheme.

Mr. Flagler was in it.

What did he know?

Mr. Rogers arranged that I talk with him.

Henry Flagler was not an acceptable figure even to Wall Street in those days.

There were scandals of his private life which, true or not, his fellow financiers did not like.

Bad for business.

I found him a very different type from Henry Rogers.

He, for instance, did not conceal his distrust of John Rockefeller.

“He would do me out of a dollar today,” he cried, off his guard, and with an excited smash of his fist on the table; and then, catching himself and with a remarkable change of tone: “That is, if he could do it honestly, Miss Tarbell, if he could do it honestly.

” Mr. Flagler knew what I had come for, but instead of answering my direct questions he began to tell me with some show of emotion of his own early life, how he had left home because his father was a poor clergyman— a year, a large family of children.

He had not succeeded until he went into the commission business with Mr. Rockefeller in Cleveland.

“And from that time we were prospered,” he said piously.

In the long story he told me, the phrase, “We were prospered,” came in again and again.

That was not what I was after.

Their prosperity was obvious enough.

Finally I returned with some irritation to the object of my visit.

“I see you do not know or are unwilling to say, Mr. Flagler, who originated the South Improvement Company; but this is certain: Mr. Rockefeller had the credit of it in the Oil Region.

You know, yourself, how bitter the feeling was there.

” “But, ah, Miss Tarbell,” he said, “how often the reputation of a man in his lifetime differs from his real character!

Take the greatest character in our history.

How different was our Lord and Saviour regarded when he was alive from what we now know him to have been!

” After that, further questioning was of course hopeless, and until Mr. Rogers returned I sat listening to the story of how the Lord had prospered him.

I never was happier to leave a room, but I was no happier than Mr. Flagler was to have me go.

Mr. Rogers produced Mr. Flagler and others of lesser importance.

But although I referred to his semi-promise in our first interview to produce Mr. Rockefeller I found that after a few months there was no hope of this.

If I hinted at it he parried.

Nearly a year went by after my first interview with Mr. Rogers before the articles began to appear.

I rather expected him to cut me off when he realized that I was trying to prove that the Standard Oil Company was only an enlarged South Improvement Company.

But to my surprise my arguments did not seem to disturb him.

They had won out, had they not?

He sometimes complained that I had been unnecessarily blunt or a bit vindictive, but he continued to receive me in friendly fashion and to give me, perhaps not all the help he might, but always something to make me think twice, frequently to modify a view.

But if he was not himself disturbed by what I was doing why did he continue the interviews?

Gradually I became convinced it was because of his interest in my presentation of a particular episode in their history.

It was a case in which Mr. Rogers and John Archbold, along with all of the members of the board of a subsidiary company, the Vacuum Oil Company of Rochester, New York, had been indicted for conspiring to destroy an independent refinery in Buffalo, New York.

In my opening interview with Mr. Rogers he with some show of feeling had told me he wanted me to get a correct and impartial version of this Buffalo case, as he always called it.

There had been a break in his voice when with hesitation he said: “That case is a sore point with Mr. Archbold and me.

I want you to go into it thoroughly.

I have the reports of the testimony before the grand jury; it took me months to secure them.

Of course in a sense I have no right with them.

I told my children that if their father’s memory is ever attacked this will serve to vindicate him.

He must stand or fall in their estimation by that testimony.

” At our second interview he produced the testimony before the grand jury, repeating again that of course he had no business with it but he had to have it.

He would not allow me to take it away, and at his request I read the sixty or more pages in his presence.

It seemed quite clear to me, as I told Mr. Rogers on finishing the reading, that his connection with the affair had been so indirect that there was no reason for his indictment, although it seemed equally clear to me that there was ample reason for the indictment of certain members of the Vacuum board.

The judge was of that opinion, for he dismissed the indictment against Mr. Rogers and two of his fellow directors while sustaining that against the responsible operating heads of the concern.

I soon discovered that what Mr. Rogers wanted me to make out was that the three men who had founded the independent enterprise, all of them former employees of the Vacuum Oil Company, had done so for the sole purpose of forcing the Standard to buy them out at a high price; that is, that it was a case of planned blackmail.

But the testimony certainly showed little evidence of that while it did show clearly enough that the managers of the Vacuum Oil Company, from the hour they had learned of the undertaking, had made deliberate and open attempts to prevent the Buffalo refinery doing business.

The more thoroughly I went into the matter—and I worked hard over it—the more convinced I was that, while there had been bad faith and various questionable practices on the part of members of the independent firm, they had started out to build up a business of their own.

Also it was clear they had had hardly a shadow of success under the grilling opposition of the Standard concern.

This included various suits for infringement of patents, all of which the Standard had lost.

In course of the years of litigation four juries—two grand juries and two petit juries—gave verdicts against the Standard Oil Company.

Finally the independent concern was so shot to pieces by the continuous bombardment that it had to be put into the hands of a receiver.

The Standard offered to settle for ,000, and the judge ordered the acceptance.

This made it the owner of the bone of contention.

I had a feeling that my final conclusion in the matter would probably end my relations with Mr. Rogers.

I did not want to spring that conclusion on him, that is, I wanted him to know ahead of publication where I had come out.

Although I had never allowed him to read an article before its appearance, that being part of the original compact, I broke my rule in this case.

Promptly I received a letter asking me to call at 26 Broadway.

He received me in his usual cordial way and told me he had gone over my article carefully, compared it with certain papers in his possession and had written me a letter in which he had stated his criticisms.

Handing me the letter, he said, “I think it will be a good plan for you to read that out loud, so that we can talk it over here.

” I began to read, but broke off with the first sentence.

Mr. Rogers had written that he appreciated my request that he should make the story correspond with his knowledge and opinion of the case.

“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.