Part 33

It was inevitable that my visits to 26 Broadway should be noised among critics and enemies of the Standard Oil Company curious about what McClure’s was going to do. It was not infrequent for some one on the independent side to say with a wise nod of the head: “Oh, they’ll get around you. You’ll become their apologist before you get through.” It was quite useless for me to insist that I was trying to be nobody’s apologist, that I was trying to balance what I found. At least two people of importance whose experiences I was anxious to hear from their own lips refused to see me. I learned later that Henry D. Lloyd had written them after he learned I was seeing Mr. Rogers that they had better not talk, better not show me their papers, that inevitably I should be taken in.

Now I had already talked with Mr. Lloyd, already had help from him, but the Rogers association evidently upset him for a time. My first article seemed to reassure him, for he wrote me at once on its appearance: “I read your first installment of the story of the Standard Oil Company with eager curiosity, then intense interest and then great satisfaction.” He seems to have divined at once where I was heading.

The suspicion of my relations with 26 Broadway cut me off for some two years from one of the most interesting independent warriors in the thirty years’ struggle. This was one Lewis Emery, Jr., whom I had known from childhood. He had grown up in the oil business, side by side with H. H. Rogers; he had been a producer and a refiner as well as one of the powerful factors in building up the Pure Oil Company, the integrated concern in which my brother was carrying on. From the start Mr. Emery had fought the Standard’s pretensions, individually and collectively, politically and financially. He had a gift for language—a marvelous vituperative vocabulary—and he had no restraint in using it. He was a feature of almost every investigation, every lawsuit, a member of every combination of producers and refiners. Where he was, there were sure to be lively exchanges between him and the representatives of the other side. His particular abomination was John Archbold, vice president of the Standard Oil Company, a person as free with charges and epithets as Lewis Emery himself.

“You are a liar,” he shouted one day in an investigation when Mr. Emery had made an exaggerated charge.

Joseph H. Choate was Mr. Archbold’s lawyer.

“There, there, Mr. Archbold!” he said. “We’ll put Mr. Emery on the stand and convict him of perjury.”

Without noticing Mr. Choate’s remark Mr. Emery called across the table, “Young man, if this table wasn’t so wide I would tweak your nose for that.”

Such exchanges were not infrequent.

Henry Rogers, who really liked Lewis Emery, was always trying to calm him down. “Can’t you stop this, Lew?” he said one day. “Come with us, and it will be better for you. There is no hope for you alone, but with us there is a sure thing.”

Mr. Emery, who told me of this offer, said: “Henry, I can’t do it even if I wanted to. They would mob me in the Oil Region if I went back on them.”

They would not have mobbed him, but they would have done what would have been worse for a man of his temperament, his passion for free action whether wise or unwise—they would have ostracized him.

The most tragic effect I had seen in my girlhood of “going over to the Standard,” as it was called, was partial ostracism of the renegade. When a man’s old associates crossed to the other side of the street rather than meet him, when nobody stopped him on the street corner to gossip over what was going on, few men were calloused enough not to suffer. It was worse than mobbing. The Oil Region as a matter of fact never mobbed any man so far as I know, though it did occasionally destroy property and once at least hung Mr. Rockefeller himself in effigy.

By this time Lewis Emery had fought his way to a substantial position in the oil world; but to the end he prided himself on being a victim. When he finally talked to me after he learned from Mr. Lloyd that the embargo against me had been raised, he said, with what seemed to me considerable satisfaction: “I have been tortured. I am a wounded man because of them, and I hate them.”

In spite of this he was getting a good deal out of life. He was a rich man, and he was making the most of his money. He never let money stifle his personality. His success in being himself was in striking contrast to that of most of the successful oil men of that day whom I knew. Most of them, independent and Standard, submitted to an application of veneer, a change of habits which destroyed much of their natural flavor. They took little part in politics and social agitation; they remained regular in all things; they made their investments only in sure enterprises. You knew always where to find them. But not so Lewis Emery, Jr. He continued to wear his clothes naturally, to go on his own erratic way. He threw himself into political movements, wise and unwise, and he never lost his pioneering spirit. After he was seventy years old, as a final fling, he took on a gold mine in Peru, a gold mine which was reached by climbing mountains and descending narrow paths cut out of rock, crossing swaying rope bridges—approaches fit only for the most daring mountain climbers. Yet there he was when nearly eighty charging up and down those mountains and trotting his mule across those bridges when younger men led their mules and crept.

The degree to which he was reconciled to me after two years of ostracism was proved by his annual invitation to come along to Peru with his party. And I would have gone and told the story of his mine as he wanted me to do if it had not been for the pictures he sent me—those pictures of unprotected swaying bridges suspended from mountain side to mountain side, hundreds of feet above the rushing rocky streams. I had not the head for that, and so gave up what would have been, I am sure, one of the most amusing adventures that ever came my way.

Not a few of the personal experiences in gathering my materials left me with unhappy impressions, more unhappy in retrospect perhaps than they were at the moment. They were part of the day’s work, sometimes very exciting parts. There was the two hours I spent in studying Mr. John D. Rockefeller. As the work had gone on, it became more and more clear to me that the Standard Oil Company was his creation. “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” says Emerson. I found it so.

Everybody in the office interested in the work began to say, “After the book is done you must do a character sketch of Mr. Rockefeller.” I was not keen for it. It would have to be done like the books, from documents; that is, I had no inclination to use the extraordinary gossip which came to me from many sources. If I were to do it I wanted only that of which I felt I had sure proof, only those things which seemed to me to help explain the public life of this powerful, patient, secretive, calculating man of so peculiar and special a genius.

“You must at least look at Mr. Rockefeller,” my associates insisted. “But how?” Mr. Rogers himself had suggested that I see him. I had consented. I had returned to the suggestion several times, but at last was made to understand that it could not be done. I had dropped his name from my list. It was John Siddall who then took the matter in hand.

“You must see him,” was Siddall’s judgment.

To arrange it became almost an obsession. And then what seemed to him like a providential opening came. It was announced that on a certain Sunday of October 1903 Mr. Rockefeller before leaving Cleveland, where he had spent his summer, for his home in New York would say good-bye in a little talk to the Sunday school of his church—a rally, it was called. As soon as Siddall learned of this he begged me to come on. “We can go to Sunday school; we can stay to church. I will see that we have seats where we will have a full view of the man. You will get him in action.”

Of course I went, feeling a little mean about it too. He had not wanted to be seen apparently. It was taking him unaware.

Siddall’s plan worked to perfection, worked so well from the start that again and again he seemed ready to burst from excitement in the two hours we spent in the church.

We had gone early to the Sunday-school room where the rally was to open—a dismal room with a barbaric dark green paper with big gold designs, cheap stained-glass windows, awkward gas fixtures. Comfortable, of course, but so stupidly ugly. We were sitting meekly at one side when I was suddenly aware of a striking figure standing in the doorway. There was an awful age in his face—the oldest man I had ever seen, I thought, but what power! At that moment Siddall poked me violently in the ribs and hissed, “There he is.”

The impression of power deepened when Mr. Rockefeller took off his coat and hat, put on a skullcap, and took a seat commanding the entire room, his back to the wall. It was the head which riveted attention. It was big, great breadth from back to front, high broad forehead, big bumps behind the ears, not a shiny head but with a wet look. The skin was as fresh as that of any healthy man about us. The thin sharp nose was like a thorn. There were no lips; the mouth looked as if the teeth were all shut hard. Deep furrows ran down each side of the mouth from the nose. There were puffs under the little colorless eyes with creases running from them.

Wonder over the head was almost at once diverted to wonder over the man’s uneasiness. His eyes were never quiet but darted from face to face, even peering around the jog at the audience close to the wall.

When he rose to speak, the impression of power that the first look at him had given increased, and the impression of age passed. I expected a quavering voice, but the voice was not even old, if a little fatigued, a little thin. It was clear and utterly sincere. He meant what he was saying. He was on his own ground talking about dividends, dividends of righteousness. “If you would take something out,” he said, clenching the hand of his outstretched right arm, “you must put something in”—emphasizing “put something in” with a long outstretched forefinger.

The talk over, we slipped out to get a good seat in the gallery, a seat where we could look full on what we knew to be the Rockefeller pew.

Mr. Rockefeller came into the auditorium of the church as soon as Sunday school was out. He sat a little bent in his pew, pitifully uneasy, his head constantly turning to the farthest right or left, his eyes searching the faces almost invariably turned towards him. It was plain that he, and not the minister, was the pivot on which that audience swung. Probably he knew practically everybody in the congregation; but now and then he lingered on a face, peering at it intently as if he were seeking what was in the mind behind it. He looked frequently at the gallery. Was it at Siddall and me?