Part 32

“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?