Part 27

After I came in, the first to become such a permanent acquisition was Ray Stannard Baker. An article on the capture of John Wilkes Booth by Baker’s uncle, Colonel L. C. Baker, written from personal reminiscences and documents, was submitted by Baker, then on the staff of the Chicago Record. It was “the General’s” ideal of a McClure’s article. Baker was urged to write more, and each piece emphasized the first impression. The year after his first appearance in the magazine, May, 1897, he joined the staff and became a regular contributing editor.

Baker was an admirable craftsman, as well as a capital team worker. He had curiosity, appreciation, a respect for facts. You could not ruffle or antagonize him. He took the sudden calls to go here when he was going there, with equanimity; he enjoyed the unconventional intimacies of the crowd, the gaiety and excitement of belonging to what was more and more obviously a success. He was the least talkative of us all, observant rather than garrulous, the best listener in the group, save Mr. Phillips. He had a joyous laugh which was more revealing of his healthy inner self than anything else about him.

When I learned a few years later that Baker was the author of the wise, homely, whimsical “Adventures in Contentment,” “The Friendly Road” and other delightful essays under the nom de plume of David Grayson I said at once, “How stupid of me not to have known it! Haven’t I always known that Baker is a David Grayson?” Few practical philosophers, indeed, have so lived their creed as Ray Stannard Baker, and none have had a more general recognition from the multitude of people in the country who, like him, believe in the fine art of simple living. It is a comforting and beautiful thing to have had as a friend and co-worker over many years so rare a person as Ray Stannard Baker.

By good fortune McClure’s in this period happened on a reader of real genius—Viola Roseboro—the only “born reader” I have ever known. I found her in the office after one of my frequent jaunts after material. It was as a talker that I first learned to admire and love her. Her judgments were unfettered, her emotions strong and warm, her expressions free, glowing, stirring, and she loved to talk, though only when she felt sympathy and understanding. She loved to share books, of which she read many, particularly in the biographical field; she wanted none but the best—no imitation, no mere fact-finding. Her eagerness to let no good thing slip, her consciousness of the all too little time a human being has in this world to explore its riches made her rigid in her choice. An unsleeping eagerness to find talent and give it a chance, and secondarily, she said, to enrich the magazine, made every day’s work with the unsifted manuscripts an adventure. If she found exceptional merit that was also suited to McClure’s she might weep with excitement. And she stood to it till faith grew in those less sure of the untried. It was when McClure’s was making a great hunt for a good serial that I saw her one morning bringing into the editorial sanctum Booth Tarkington’s “The Gentleman from Indiana,” tears celebrating the discovery as she cried, “Here is a serial sent by God Almighty for McClure’s Magazine!”

This woman of unusual intelligence, loyalty and of truly Spartan courage was a precious addition to the crowd. Ill health, threatened blindness, have never lowered her enthusiasm, her ceaseless effort to find the best, to give the best. She is still doing it.

The most brilliant addition to the McClure’s staff in my time was Lincoln Steffens. He had made himself felt in the journalistic and political life of New York City by a fresh form of reportorial attack. Young, handsome, self-confident, with a good academic background and two years of foreign life and observation, Steffens began his professional career unencumbered by journalistic shibboleths and with an immense curiosity as to what was going on about him. He was soon puzzled and fascinated by the relations of police and politicians, politicians and the law, law and city officials, city officials and business, business and church, education, society, the press. Apparently groups from each of these categories worked together, supporting one another, an organization close, compact, loyal from fear or self-interest or both. It was because of this organization, Steffens concluded, that graft and vice and crime were established industries of the city. Attacks from outraged virtue had slowed up the system at intervals ever since the Civil War, but never permanently deranged it. A few rascals might be exterminated, but they were soon replaced. The system had bred new rascals, grown stronger and more cunning with time. He set out to trace its pattern. Incredibly outspoken, taking rascality for granted, apparently never shocked or angry or violent, never doubtful of himself, only coolly determined to demonstrate to men and women of good will and honest purpose what they were up against and warn them that the only way they could hope to grapple with a close corporation devoted to what there was in it was by an equally solid corporation devoted to decent and honest government, business, law, education, religion. First as a reporter and later as the city editor of the Globe, Steffens stirred the town.

It was entirely in harmony with the McClure method of staff building that this able, fearless innocent should be marked for absorption. He was persuaded to take the editing of the magazine, now in its tenth year and steadily growing in popularity and influence. He was to be the great executive—the editorial head that would shift some of the burden from the shoulders of Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips. But the machine was running smoothly even if with little outward excitement. Steffens made a brave effort to adjust himself to the established order, to learn the situation. Naturally he took Mr. McClure’s meteoric goings and comings, his passionate and often despairing efforts to make his staff “see” what he did, his cries that the magazine was stale, dying, more seriously than those of us who had been longer together. He seems to have been bewildered by what went on in the excited staff meetings held whenever Mr. McClure came in from a foraging expedition. I had come to look on Mr. McClure’s returns as the most genuinely creative moments of our magazine life. He was an extraordinary reporter; his sense of the meaning, the meat of a man or event, his vivid imagination, his necessity of discharging on the group at once, before they were cold, his observations, intuitions, ideas, experiences, made the gatherings on his return amazingly stimulating to me. Sifting, examining, verifying, following up, were all necessary. Mr. McClure understood that and trusted John Phillips to see that it was done, but he properly fought for his findings. In his “Autobiography” Steffens credits me with a tact in our editorial scrimmages which I do not deserve. It is true, as he says, that I was the friend of each and all, but what I was chiefly interested in was seeing the magazine grow in delight and in usefulness. I knew our excited discussions were really fertile. They also were highly entertaining.

It was in this unsatisfied seeking by Mr. McClure for more and more of contemporary life that Lincoln Steffens’ chief contribution to it and to the political life of his period had its root. Mr. McClure’s fixed conviction that great editing was not to be done in the office he finally applied to Steffens, who was bravely struggling there to become the great editor he had been called to be.

“You can’t learn to edit a magazine in the office,” Mr. McClure told him. “Get out, go anywhere, everywhere, see what is going on in the cities and states, find out who are the men and the movements we ought to be reporting.”

And so Stef went for a month, to the Middle West mainly, constantly reporting back to the office in McClure fashion what he was finding. He combed the universities and the newspaper offices; he looked up politicians; he searched for writers, anything and everywhere which might possibly be grist to the greedy mill in New York.

One of the schemes on which he had been commissioned to check up was a series of articles on city and state governments. Almost at once he began to see larger and larger possibilities in the idea. There should be two series, he wrote the office, descriptions of the actual government of four or five typical cities and of as many states, humanized by studies of the men who ruled them or who were fighting the true rulers. A meeting with young district attorney Folk of St. Louis, then in the thick of a fight to reform his town, whetted his appetite. “If we take up the states,” he wrote, “I would prefer to wait for William Allen White to write the articles. The cities will be more in my line. If I should be entrusted with the work I think I could make my name.”

A few weeks later he was entrusted with the work. The result was “The Shame of the Cities” which, as he prophesied, made his name.

11 A CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY SEEKS MY ACQUAINTANCE

As Steffens’ case shows there was always much fingering of a subject at McClure’s before one of the staff was told to go ahead. The original hint might come from Mr. McClure’s overflowing head and pocket, Mr. Phillips’ notebooks, as much a part of him as his glasses, the daily mail, the chance word of a caller. We all turned in our pickings. They must concern the life of the day, that which was interesting people. An idea, once launched, grew until fixed on somebody; and, once started, it continued to grow according to the response of readers. No response—no more chapters. A healthy response—as many chapters as the material justified.

It was by this process that my next long piece of work came into being: “The History of the Standard Oil Company.”

The deluge of monopolistic trusts which had followed the close of the Spanish-American War and the “return of prosperity” was disturbing and confusing people. It was contrary to their philosophy, their belief that, given free opportunity, free competition, there would always be brains and energy enough to prevent even the ablest leader monopolizing an industry. What was interfering with the free play of the forces in which they trusted? They had been depending on the Federal Antitrust Law passed ten years before. Was it quite useless? It looked that way.

There was much talk in the office about it, and there came to the top finally the idea of using the story of a typical trust to illustrate how and why the clan grew. How about the greatest of them all—the Standard Oil Company?

I suppose I must have talked rather freely about my own recollections and impressions of its development. It had been a strong thread weaving itself into the pattern of my life from childhood on.

I had come into the world just before the discovery of oil, the land on which I was born not being over thirty miles away from that first well. The discovery had shaped my father’s life, rescuing him as it did thousands of others from the long depression which had devastated the eighteen-fifties. I had grown up with oil derricks, oil tanks, pipe lines, refineries, oil exchanges. I remembered what had happened in the Oil Region in 1872 when the railroads and an outside group of refiners attempted to seize what many men had created. It was my first experience in revolution. On the instant the word became holy to me. It was your privilege and duty to fight injustice. I was much elated when, not so long afterwards, I fell on Rousseau’s “Social Contract” and read his defense of the right to revolt.

I had been only dimly conscious of what had happened in the decade following—the decade in which the Standard Oil Company had completed its monopoly. It was the effect on the people about me that stirred me, the hate and suspicion and fear that engulfed the community. I had been so deeply stirred by this human tragedy, as I have told, that I had made a feeble and ineffectual attempt to catch it, fix it in a novel.

The drama continued to unfold while I was abroad, came into our very household when a partner of my father’s ruined by the complex situation shot himself, leaving father with notes. To pay them it was necessary in the panic of ’93 to do what in his modest economy was unsound and humiliating—mortgage our home. While the personal tragedies came in my mother’s letters, my brother wrote me vivid accounts of what was going on in the outside oil world, of the slow action of the Interstate Commerce Commission from which all independents had hoped so much, of businesses ruined while they waited for the decision; of the Ohio suit which drove the trust to reorganization, a legal victory which in no way weakened its hold or crippled its growth. Depressing as this was, I was elated by my brother’s reports of the growing strength of a strongly integrated cooperative effort of producers, refiners, transporters, marketers, the Pure Oil Company. The only escape possible for those who would do independent business, he argued ably, was to build their own combination depending less on agitation, politics, legislation, more on sound business. Fight if necessary, but above all do business.

While I was still in Paris this clutter of recollections, impressions, indignations, perplexities, was crystallized into something like a pattern by Henry D. Lloyd’s brilliant “Wealth Against Commonwealth.” I had been hearing about the book from home, but the first copy was brought me by my English friend H. Wickham Steed, who, fresh from two years’ contact with German socialism, took the work with great seriousness. Was not this a conclusive proof that capitalism was necessarily inconsistent with fair and just economic life? Was not socialism the only way out, as Lloyd thought?

I was more simple-minded about it. As I saw it, it was not capitalism but an open disregard of decent ethical business practices by capitalists which lay at the bottom of the story Mr. Lloyd told so dramatically.

The reading and discussions whetted my appetite; and when I came back to America in 1894, and heard anew in the family circle of what had been going on, my old desire to get the drama down seized me. Where were those notes I had made back in my Chautauquan days? Gathering dust in the tower room. I looked them up, saw that I had done well in choosing Pithole for my opening scene. Nothing so dramatic as Pithole in oil history. How many men it had made and ruined! But “the bottom had dropped out” in 1866. What was left of it now—1894? My brother and I drove over to see.

Thirty years before, Pithole had been a city of perhaps twenty thousand men and women with all the equipment for a permanent life. Now here were only stripped fields where no outline of a town remained. We spent a long day trying to place the famous wells, to fix my father’s tank shops, so profitable while Pithole lasted, to trace the foundations of the Bonta House, which had furnished the makings of our home in Titusville. The day left us with a melancholy sense of the impermanence of human undertakings; and, more to the point, it showed me that if I were to reconstruct the town with its activities and its people, picture its rise and its fall, I must go back to records, maps, reminiscences; that I must undertake a long and serious piece of investigation before I began. But, given the material, how about my ability to make it live, to create the drama which I felt? One must be an artist before he can create—that I knew. I was no artist.

Mr. McClure’s call to come on and write a life of Napoleon put an end to my hesitations; and, Napoleon done, there had been Lincoln and the Spanish-American War—no time to consider oil or even to rejoice over the final success of the integrated industry to which my brother had tied his fortune.

But here I was again faced with the old interest. The desire to do something about it, get down what I had seen, seized me. Was it possible to treat the story historically, to make a documented narrative? The more I talked, the more convinced I was that it could be done. But to tell the story so that people would read it was another matter. Mr. Phillips finally put it up to me to make an outline of what I thought possible. We couldn’t go ahead without Mr. McClure’s approval, and he was ill, in Europe with all his family.

“Go over,” said John Phillips; “show the outline to Sam, get his decision.” And so in the fall of 1890 I went to Lausanne in Switzerland to talk it over with Mr. McClure. A week would do it, I thought; but I hadn’t reckoned with the McClure method.