Part 54

Another reason for hesitation was that I knew if I did undertake it, and was as fair as I knew how to be, I should at once be under suspicion by groups with whose intentions for the most part I sympathized. They were unwilling to consider Gary in any light save that of Scapegoat Number One. An attack—yes—they would welcome it. An attempt to set down his business life as he had actually lived it—no. That was whitewashing.

Finally I took the matter to Judge Gary himself. “I do not know that I want to write your life,” I told him. “If I find practices which seem to me against public policy as I understand it I shall have to say so. I appreciate your efforts to make working conditions for labor as good as you know how to make them, but it does not follow that I can stand for your financial policies. It is not your humanitarianism but your ethics I suspect.”

“Well,” Judge Gary laughed, “if you can find anything wrong in our doings I want to know it. I had George Wickersham in here for a year or more going over the whole set-up telling me what he thought we ought not to do, and I followed every suggestion he made. The Government has had its agency here for two years examining our books, and they gave us a clean bill of health. The Supreme Court has refused to declare us a monopoly in restraint of trade. Do your worst, and if you find anything wrong I shall be grateful.”

I felt more of an amateur than ever after that. I also concluded that it would be sheer cowardice on my part to refuse the job which I really needed. I had not been long at my task, however, before I was heartened by the certainty that, from the formation of the Corporation, Judge Gary had made a steady and surprisingly successful fight to strip the businesses which he was putting together of certain illegal privileges, as well as to set up an entirely new code of fair practices—the Gary Code, it was jeeringly called in Wall Street.

Orders went out neither to ask nor to accept special favors from the railroads. Full yearly reports of the financial condition of the Corporation, whether good or bad, were sent out. These reports reached the public as early as they did the directors themselves, putting an end to the advance information which many insiders were accustomed to using for stock selling or buying. Various forms of predatory competition were attacked from the inside. Judge Gary not only laid down his code, he followed it up, preached it zealously to his board.

Another unheard-of innovation was his support of President Theodore Roosevelt’s attempts to control business. It had become an axiom of Big Business to fight every effort of the Government to inspect or regulate. When Gary took the opposite course, applauded Roosevelt’s efforts, declared that he was doing business good, doing him good, he was treated as a traitor by many colleagues.

Well, this seemed to me as good business doctrine as I had come across in any concern—much better, more definite and practical as a matter of fact than I got from most corporation critics. But how far was this followed up in practice? Before I was through I made up my mind that Judge Gary’s code was applied just as completely and as rapidly as he could persuade or drive his frequently doubting and recalcitrant associates to it. But that took time, took frequent battles. Indeed, more than once he had come close to losing his official head, fighting for this or that plank in his platform. The Gary Code and the effort to put it into practice reconciled me to my task.

Judge Gary was an easy man to work with because he was so interested in following his own story. He had been too busy all his life to give attention to the route by which he had come. Now he enjoyed the looks back. Finding that he was willing to take literally his promise to open records and answer questions, I laid out a little plan for covering his life chronologically. It pleased him, for he was the most systematic of men. It gave him delight to remember. “How a man’s mind unravels!” he exclaimed one day when he had suddenly recalled something long forgotten.

Our interviews were carried on always at 71 Broadway. He kept his appointments exactly. Rarely did he keep me waiting, and if by necessity he did he always apologized. If I came late I was made to feel clearly that that was a thing not to be done.

While Judge Gary was prepared to be frank in his talks with me he was not prepared to be misquoted. He evidently had learned that even with the best intentions a reporter may distort what a man has said out of all resemblance to what he meant. He guarded against this by always having at our interviews a secretary who took down in shorthand all that he said, all that I said. I made longhand notes, dictating them as soon as I went back to my desk. I do not remember that a question of misunderstanding of meaning ever came up.

Convinced that the Gary Code was genuine, not mere window dressing for the public, nothing interested me more than how a man in his fifties who had been for twenty years a successful corporation lawyer was willing to preach to Wall Street as he had done. I finally concluded the truth to be that Elbert Gary had never outgrown his early bringing up. He had never gotten over a belief in the soundness of what he had learned in Sunday school and of what later he had taught through most of his manhood in Sunday school. The difference between him and some of his fellows in business brought up in the same way was that he insisted that the Sunday-school precepts of honesty, consideration for others, fair play, should be preached on week days as well as Sundays, in the board room as well as the church. If he ever sensed that his preaching was both comic and irritating to Wall Street—which I doubt—he never gave sign of such a perception.

I soon found that I need not hesitate to bring him all sorts of criticisms of his doings as I unearthed them in studying the public’s reactions to the Steel Corporation’s operations. They never fretted or irritated him; rather he enjoyed analyzing them for my benefit. He never dismissed radical opinions as nonsense. In the year I was working with him there was never a public radical meeting in New York—and there were a good many of them that year—that he did not read all the speeches, and comment on them intelligently and with good humor.

“We must know about these things,” he said. “We must know all about Lenin, all about Mussolini. They are great forces; they are trying new forms of government.” His knowledge prevented him from being scared.

Above all Gary enjoyed stories of his struggles to establish his own preeminence and his own code in the Steel Corporation. At the start he had several of the strong men in the Corporation against him; but he had won out, and it gave him the greatest satisfaction to show me letters of congratulation, to quote former opponents as saying, “You were right, I was wrong.” Particularly he enjoyed the very good terms on which he stood with Theodore Roosevelt, whose unpopularity in Wall Street surpassed even that of the second Roosevelt.

He still talked with emotion of the decision of the Government to bring suit against the Steel Corporation under the Sherman Law. He thought he had satisfied it that the Steel Corporation was not a monopoly in restraint of trade, that it was what Mark Twain called a good trust; and when the Attorney General’s office decided that there might be a question about the quality of this goodness Gary was terribly disturbed. There were advisers who thought he ought to try to settle the suit outside, but he would not have it so. The Government had doubts, and he must satisfy them. He believed that the law did not apply to the Steel Corporation; he believed that the Corporation was not contrary to a sound business policy, a menace to the country. That must be settled once for all. Of course he was jubilant over the outcome: it justified his conviction.

Judge Gary had done a great job, and he knew it; but, interestingly enough, it never made him pompous. As a matter of fact he was simple, natural, in talking about it. Along with this really simple enjoyment of his own conflict he had a nice kind of dignity and a carefulness of conduct which were not entirely natural to him. To be sure he had always been a good Methodist, a good citizen, a hard-working lawyer; but at the same time in all these earlier years he had led what was then called a gay life. He had liked a fast horse, liked to hunt and see the world. He was curious about all kinds of human performances, looked into them whenever he had the chance. When he became the head of the Steel Corporation he could no longer sing in the choir—he had to go to the Opera and sit in a box. He no longer drove fast horses. He wanted to fly, and the board of the Steel Corporation passed an ordinance against it—too dangerous. When he traveled it was more or less in state, and he couldn’t slip out with a crowd of men at the stopping places to see the town.

It was hard on him, but he felt deeply that he owed it to the Steel Corporation to be above reproach. Not a little of this carefulness was due, I think, to the effect on the public, the exhibits that several of the new steel men had made of themselves after the Corporation was formed in 1901 and their offices were centered in New York. They were rich beyond their wildest dreams. The restrictions of the home towns were gone, and they broke loose in a riotous celebration which scandalized even Mr. Morgan. Gary joined in nothing which approached orgies. He was too hard a worker and always had been, and he saw with distress the effect the high living of certain of the steel men was having on the public. It was a danger, he felt, equal to the speculation in steel stock by officers of the corporation. To counteract it he gradually became more and more a model of correctness.

I came out of my task with a real liking for Judge Gary and a profound conviction that industry has not produced one in our time who so well deserves the title of industrial statesman. But I had to pay for saying what I thought. Under the heading of “The Taming of Ida M. Tarbell” my favorite newspaper declared that I had become a eulogist of the kind of man to whom I was sworn as an eternal enemy. But Judge Gary was not the kind of captain of industry to which I objected. On the contrary, he was a man who, at the frequent risk of his position and fortune, had steadily fought many of the privileges and practices to which I had been objecting.

However, one is judged largely by the company one keeps. Judge Gary belonged to an industrial world where the predatory, the brutal, the illegal, the reckless speculator constantly forced public attention. That there was another side to that world, a really honest and intelligent effort in the making to put an end to these practices, few knew or, knowing, acknowledged. I could not complain. I knew how it would be when I started. But I must confess that more than once, while I was carrying on my work, I shivered with distaste at the suspicion I knew I was bringing on myself. The only time in my professional life I feel I deserve to be called courageous was when I wrote the life of Judge Gary.

My active interest in the industrial life of the country brought me unexpected adventures. The most instructive as well as upsetting was serving on a couple of those Government conferences which twentieth century Presidents have used so freely in their attempts to solve difficult national problems. An Industrial Conference called by President Wilson for the fall of 1919 was the first of these. Mr. Wilson felt clearly at the end of the War that our immediate important domestic problem was to establish some common ground of agreement and action in the conduct of industry. What he wanted evidently was a covenant by which employer and employee could work out their common problems as cooperators, not as enemies. There was need of action, as any one who remembers those days will agree. The whole labor world was in an uproar, and one of the periodical efforts to organize the steel industry was under way. Mr. Gompers, the head of the American Federation, sponsoring the strike, had had little or no sympathy with a contest at the moment but had been pushed into it by the adroitness of the radical elements boring from within throughout the War.

“These disturbances must not go on. It should be possible to make plans for a peaceful solution,” Mr. Wilson said.

And so a Conference was called. In spite of my refusal to serve on his Tariff Commission, President Wilson had evidently not given me up. As a matter of fact our acquaintance and mutual confidence had grown during the War.

He now named me as one of four women representatives, the others being Lillian Wald, head of the Nurses’ Settlement in New York City, Gertrude Barnum, assistant director of the investigation service of the United States Department of Labor, and Sara Conboy of the textile workers’ union.

The Conference was an impressive and exciting body of some fifty persons divided into three groups representing the public, labor, the employers. I, of course, sat in the first group, where I found as my colleagues a bewildering assortment of men from various ranks of life. There were Dr. Charles Eliot, Charles Edward Russell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Judge Gary, John Spargo, Bernard Baruch, Thomas L. Chadbourne, Jr., and a score or more less known to the public, though not necessarily less influential.

At the head of the labor group was Samuel Gompers. Among his colleagues were some of the most experienced labor leaders in the country.

The members of the employer group were chosen from among men who had been particularly helpful in directing their industries during the War.

There were many interesting characters on the body. Two that I particularly enjoyed were Henry Endicott, who with the Johnsons had established the famous shoe towns near Binghamton, New York, and a delightful pungent character from Georgia—Fuller E. Callaway—who in twenty years had built up from scratch mills and a village with homes and schools—everything to give life and a chance to hard-working mill people. Mr. Callaway’s story of what he had done in Georgia was one of the very few joyous contributions to a gathering doomed to be a dismal failure.

A body could have scarcely had a heartier welcome from the public than we did. People seemed to feel we should find a way to end the fighting; that was what we were there for, Secretary of Labor Wilson told us in his keynote speech. If we could produce a document which would secure the rights of all those concerned in an industry, it would find a place in the hearts of men like the Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Emancipation Proclamation. He brought us all to our feet—all save a few who were too interested in political strategy to entertain a high purpose.