All in the Day's Work — Chapter 18: Gambling with Security. Part 1

18 GAMBLING WITH SECURITY

My ten weeks of daily talking on the Peace Conference and the Covenant of the League of Nations ended the War for me.

Also, it forced me to consider anew the problem of security.

It was nearly four years now since I had put an end to it by severing my connection with _The American Magazine_.

But the years had been so full of the War, the scramble to do something that somebody thought was needful, and at the same time to keep the pot boiling, that I had not realized what had happened.

It meant for me, as I now saw, the end of an economic era.

I sat down to take stock.

Here I was sixty-three with only a small accumulation of material goods.

I must work to live and satisfy my obligations.

To be sure I had my little home in Connecticut which in the fifteen years since I had acquired it had not only grown increasingly dear to me; it had also taken on an importance which I had not foreseen.

It had become the family home.

Here my mother had come to pass the last summers before her death in 1917; here my niece Esther had been married under the Oaks; here my niece Clara and her husband Tristram Tupper, battered by war service, had come in 1919 to live in our little guest house.

Here Tris had written his first successful magazine story.

Here their two children passed their first years.

Near by, my sister had built herself a studio to become her home.

A hundred associations gave the place a meaning and dignity which I had never expected to feel in any home of my own, something that only comes when a place has been hallowed by the joys and sorrows of family life.

I had carried out my original intention of never letting it become a financial burden; so, adrift as I now was, I not only could afford my home but felt that it was the strongest factor in my scheme of security, for here I knew I could retire and raise all the food I needed if free lancing petered out.

I was quite clear about the work I wanted to do.

It was to continue writing and speaking on the few subjects on which I felt strongly, and of which I knew a little.

These subjects had made a pattern in my mind.

If men would work out this pattern I felt that they would go a long way towards ending the world’s quarrels, quieting its confusions.

First and most important were the privileges they had snatched.

I wanted to see them all gradually scrapped, cost what it might economically.

They were a threat to honest men, to sound industry, to peaceful international life.

I wanted to help spread the knowledge of all the intelligent efforts within and without industry and government, to put an end to militancy, replace it with actual understanding.

And then I wanted to do my part towards making the world acquainted with the man who I believed had best shown how to carry out a program of cooperation based on consideration of others—that was Abraham Lincoln.

There was a man, I told myself, who took the time to understand a thing before he spoke.

He knew that hurry, acting before you were reasonably sure, almost invariably makes a mess of even the best intentions.

He wanted to know what he was about before he acted, also he wanted all those upon whom he must depend for results to know what he was about and why.

Whatever he did, he did without malice, taking into account men’s limitations, not asking more from any one than he could give.

More than anybody I had studied he applied in public affairs Frederick Taylor’s rules for achievement of which I have spoken above.

The more people who knew about Lincoln, the more chance democracy had to destroy its two chief enemies, privilege and militancy.

I proposed to take every chance I had to talk about him.

[Illustration: © _Jessie Tarbox Beals_ _Posing as a gardener, 1925_ ] This was the program on which I was so set that I was willing to follow it even if it did take away from me the comforts of a regular salary.

Giving up the salary troubled me less than finding myself without the regular professional contacts which I had so enjoyed for twenty years, and on which I found, now I was free, that I had come to depend more than I would have believed.

Not belonging to an editorial group meant that when I dropped my pen at lunch time I no longer could join a half-dozen office mates full of gossip of what the morning had brought: the last Tarkington manuscript;

something of Willa Cather’s; a letter from Kipling; that new person from Louisville, George Madden Martin, with a real creation, Emmy Lou; that new person from Wisconsin, Edna Ferber, with a bona fide human being in hand, Emma McChesney; or it might be Dunne’s last “Dooley,” or Baker’s last adventure in “Contentment,” or gossip from the last man in Washington, perhaps direct from the White House, and always surely from our liberal friends in Congress.

This was the stuff of our lunch-table talk.

We gloated or mourned, and our eyes were always on what was coming rather than what had been.

I no longer had an office next door to these friends.

My study had become my workshop.

Now I must pay my own secretary’s bill, my own telephone calls, buy my own stationery.

I gasped when I found what these extras amounted to.

Freedom, I saw, was going to be expensive as well as lonesome.

However, for nineteen years I have kept to my decision.

How little I have contributed to my program in these nineteen years!

The chief piece of writing I planned to do I have never finished.

That was bringing “The History of the Standard Oil Company” up to date.

I had dropped the story in 1904, but the dissolution of the company in 1911 left me with the melancholy conviction that sooner or later I should have to estimate the trial and put down how the new set-up was working.

I talked two or three times with George Wickersham, the Attorney General who brought the suit, and he always cautioned me not to hurry, to let the decision have a chance to work out.

I think we decided that about ten years would do it.

But the War put a different face on oil.

It suddenly became a matter for government control.

It was no longer a private business.

It was life and death for the Allies.

Oil was as necessary to them, Clemenceau wrote to Wilson, as the blood of men.

Everything that rolled or sailed or flew must have it.

The great struggle of the nations with navies, England at the head, to command oil at its source, followed the War.

The earth was ransacked for it in a terrific predatory hunt.

In this effort of the nations to command oil supplies great names arose challenging that of Rockefeller—Sir Henri Deterding, Marcus Samuel, William Knox D’Arcy.

The Standard Oil Company no longer ruled the oil world.

There were the Royal Dutch and the Shell making up finally the Royal Dutch Shell; there was the Anglo-Persian.

All of the dramatic and frequently tragic goings-on had to settle down into something like orderly procedure before the history I had in mind could be written.

The time came, along in 1922, when Mr. Wickersham said, “You had better 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.