Part 53

The world will not forget the man who led in this effort to achieve enduring peace. That is what I was saying in those bitter days and have been saying in all the melancholy ones since.

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.

© 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.