Part 30

For two years our bargain was faithfully kept, I usually going to his office at 26 Broadway. That in itself at the start, for one as unfamiliar as I was with the scene and customs of big business, was an adventure. My entrance and exit to Mr. Rogers’ office were carried on with a secrecy which never failed to amuse me. The alert, handsome, businesslike little chaps who received me at the entrance to the Rogers’ suite piloted me unerringly by a route where nobody saw me and I saw nobody into the same small room opening on to a court, and it seemed never the same route. I was not slow in discovering that across the court in the window directly opposite there was always stationed a gentleman whose head seemed to be turned my way whenever I looked across. It may have meant nothing at all. I only record the fact.

The only person besides Mr. Rogers I ever met in those offices was his private secretary, Miss Harrison: a woman spoken of with awe at that date as having a $10,000 salary, one who knew her employer’s business from A to Z and whom he could trust absolutely. She radiated efficiency—business competency. Along with her competency went that gleam of hardness which efficient business women rarely escape. Miss Harrison appeared only on rare occasions when an extra document was needed. She was as impersonal as the chairs in the room.

We discussed in these interviews, with entire frankness, the laws which they had flouted. I could not shock Mr. Rogers with records—not even when I confronted him one day with the testimony he had given on a certain point which he admitted was not according to the facts. He curtly dismissed the subject. “They had no business prying into my private affairs.” As for rebates, “Somebody would have taken them if we had not.”

“But with your strength, Mr. Rogers,” I argued, “you could have forced fair play on the railroads and on your competitors.”

“Ah,” he said, “but there was always somebody without scruples in competition, however small that somebody might be. He might grow.”

There it was, the obsession of the Standard Oil Company, that danger lurked in small as well as great things, that nothing, however trivial, must live outside of its control.

These talks made me understand as I could not from the documents themselves the personal point of view of independents like Mr. Rogers who had been gathered into the organization in the first decade of monopoly making. For instance, there was Mr. Rogers’ reason for desiring the trust agreement made in 1882:

“By 1880,” said Mr. Rogers, “I had stock in nearly all of the seventy or so companies which we had absorbed. But the real status of these companies was not known to the public. In case of my death there would have been practically no buyer except Mr. Flagler, Mr. Rockefeller, and a few others on the inside. My heirs would not have reaped the benefit of my holdings. The trust agreement changed this. The public at once realized the value of the trust certificate. That is, my estate was guarded in case of my death.”

He often emphasized the part economies had played not only in building up the concern but in their individual fortunes—economies and putting their money back into the business. “We lived in rented houses and saved money to buy stock in the company,” he told me once.

Only one who remembers, as I do, the important place that owning your own home took in the personal economy of the self-respecting individual of that day can feel the force of this explanation.

I was curious about how he had been able to adjust his well known passion for speculation with Mr. Rockefeller’s well known antagonism to all forms of gambling.

“Didn’t he ever object?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said a little ruefully, “I was never a favorite. I suppose I was a born gambler. In the early days of the Charles Pratt Company, the company of which I was a member—I always carried on the speculations for the concern—Mr. Pratt said: ‘Henry, I haven’t got the nerve to speculate. I kicked all the clothes off last night worrying about the market.’ ‘Give me the money,’ I told him, ‘and I will furnish the nerve.’ We simply raked in the money”—making a gesture with both hands. “And of course it came out of the producer.”

“That is what my father always said,” I told him. “One of the severest lectures he ever gave came from one of those booms in the market which sent everybody in the Oil Region crazy. I suppose you were responsible for it. I remember a day when the schools were practically closed because all the teachers in Titusville were on the street or in the Oil Exchange—everybody speculating. I was in high school; the fever caught me, and I asked father for $100 to try my luck in the market. He was as angry with me as I ever saw him. ‘No daughter of mine,’ he said, etc., etc.”

“Wise man,” Mr. Rogers commented.

“But it was not because he was so cautious,” I said. “It was because he thought it was morally wrong. He would no more have speculated in the stock market than he would have played poker for money.”

“I always play poker when the market is closed,” commented Mr. Rogers. “I can’t help it. Saturday afternoons I almost always make up a poker party, and every now and then John Gates and I rig up something. He’ll come around and say, ‘Henry, isn’t it about time we started something?’ We usually do.”

All of these talks were informal, natural. We even argued with entire friendliness the debatable question, “What is the worst thing the Standard Oil Company ever did?” Only now and then did one of us flare, and then the other generally changed the subject.

“He’s a liar and hypocrite, and you know it,” I exploded one day when we were talking of a man who had led in what to me was a particularly odious operation.

“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—$400 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.