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?

The services over, he became the friendly patron saint of the flock.

Coming down the aisle where people were passing out, he shook hands with

everyone who stopped, saying, “A good sermon.” “The Doctor gave us a

good sermon.” “It was a very good sermon, wasn’t it?”

My two hours’ study of Mr. Rockefeller aroused a feeling I had not

expected, which time has intensified. I was sorry for him. I know no

companion so terrible as fear. Mr. Rockefeller, for all the conscious

power written in face and voice and figure, was afraid, I told myself,

afraid of his own kind. My friend Lewis Emery, Jr., priding himself on

being a victim, was free and happy. Not gold enough in the world to

tempt him to exchange his love of defiance for a power which carried

with it a head as uneasy as that on Mr. Rockefeller’s shoulders.

My unhappiness was increased as the months went by with the multiplying

of tales of grievances coming from every direction. I made a practice of

looking into them all, as far as I could; and while frequently I found

solid reasons for the complaints, frequently I found the basic motives

behind them—suspicion, hunger for notoriety, blackmail, revenge.

The most unhappy and most unnatural of these grievances came to me from

literally the last person in the world to whom I should have looked for

information—Frank Rockefeller—brother of John D. Rockefeller.

Frank Rockefeller sent word to me by a circuitous route that he had

documents in a case which he thought ought to be made public, and that

if I would secretly come to him in his office in Cleveland he would give

them to me. I knew that there had been a quarrel over property between

the two men. It made much noise at the time—1893—had gone to the courts,

had caused bitterness inside the family itself; but because it was a

family affair I had not felt that I wanted to touch it. But here it was

laid on my desk.

So I went to Cleveland, where John Siddall had a grand opportunity to

play the role of sleuth which he so enjoyed, his problem being to get me

into Mr. Rockefeller’s office without anybody suspecting my identity. He

succeeded.

I found Mr. Rockefeller excited and vindictive. He accused his brother

of robbing (his word) him and his partner James Corrigan of all their

considerable holdings of stock in the Standard Oil Company. The bare

facts were that Frank Rockefeller and James Corrigan had been interested

in the early Standard Oil operations in Cleveland and had each acquired

then a substantial block of stock. Later they had developed a shipping

business on the Lakes, iron and steel furnaces in Cleveland. In the

eighties they had borrowed money from John D. Rockefeller, putting up

their Standard Oil stock as collateral. Then came the panic of ’93, and

they could not meet their obligations. In the middle of their distress

John Rockefeller had foreclosed, taking over their stocks, leaving them,

so they charged, no time in which to turn around although they felt

certain that they would be able a little later, out of the substantial

business they claimed they had built up, to pay their debt to him. Their

future success proved they could have done so.

I could see John Rockefeller’s point as I talked with his brother Frank.

Frank Rockefeller was an open-handed, generous trader—more interested in

the game than in the money to be made. He loved good horses—raised them,

I believe, on a farm out in Kansas; he liked gaiety, free spending. From

his brother John’s point of view he was not a safe man to handle money.

He did not reverence it; he used it in frivolous ways of which his

brother did not approve. So it was as a kind of obligation to the

sacredness of money that John Rockefeller had foreclosed on his own

brother and his early friend James Corrigan. He was strictly within his

legal rights and within what I suppose he called his moral right.

But the transaction left a bitterness in Frank Rockefeller’s heart and

mind which was one of the ugliest things I have ever seen. “I have taken

up my children from the Rockefeller family lot. [Or “shall take up”—I do

not know now which it was.] They shall not lie in the same enclosure

with John D. Rockefeller.”

The documents in this case, which I later analyzed for the character

sketch on which we had decided, present a fair example of what were

popularly called “Standard Oil methods” as well as what they could do to

the minds and hearts of victims.

The more intimately I went into my subject, the more hateful it became

to me. No achievement on earth could justify those methods, I felt. I

had a great desire to end my task, hear no more of it. No doubt part of

my revulsion was due to a fagged brain. The work had turned out to be

much longer and more laborious than I had had reason to expect.

The plan I had taken to Mr. McClure in the fall of 1890, which we had

talked over in Salsomaggiore, Italy—I still have notes of our talk on a

yellow piece of the stationery of the Hôtel des Thermes—called for three

papers, possibly twenty-five thousand words. But before we actually

began publication Mr. Phillips and Mr. McClure decided we might venture

on six. We went through the six, and the series was stretched to twelve.

Before we were through we had nineteen articles, and when the nineteen

were off my hands I asked nothing in the world but to get them into a

book and escape into the safe retreat of a library where I could study

people long dead, and if they did things of which I did not approve it

would be all between me and the books. There would be none of these

harrowing human beings confronting me, tearing me between contempt and

pity, admiration and anger, baffling me with their futile and

misdirected power or their equally futile and misdirected weakness. I

was willing to study human beings in the library but no longer, for a

time at least, in flesh and blood, so I thought.

The book was published in the fall of 1904—two fat volumes with generous

appendices of what I considered essential documents. I was curious about

the reception it would have from the Standard Oil Company. I had been

told repeatedly they were preparing an answer to flatten me out; but if

this was under way it was not with Mr. Rockefeller’s consent, I

imagined. To a mutual friend who had told him the articles should be

answered Mr. Rockefeller was said to have replied: “Not a word. Not a

word about that misguided woman.” To another who asked him about my

charges he was reported as answering: “All without foundation. The idea

of the Standard forcing anyone to sell his refinery is absurd. The

refineries wanted to sell to us, and nobody that has sold or worked with

us but has made money, is glad he did so.

“I thought once of having an answer made to the McClure articles but you

know it has always been the policy of the Standard to keep silent under

attack and let their acts speak for themselves.”

In the case of the Lloyd book they had kept silent, but only because Mr.

Rockefeller had been unable to carry out his plans for answering. What

he had proposed was a jury of the most distinguished clergymen of the

day to consider Mr. Lloyd’s argument and charges. Certain clergymen

invited refused unless there should be a respectable number of

economists added to the jury. That, apparently, Mr. Rockefeller did not

see his way to do, and the plan was abandoned. So far as I know Mr.

Lloyd’s book was never answered by the Standard Oil Company.

But I wanted an answer from Mr. Rockefeller. What I got was neither

direct nor, from my point of view, serious. It consisted of wide and

what must have been a rather expensive anonymous distribution of various

critical comments. The first of these was a review of the book which

appeared in the _Nation_ soon after its publication. The writer—one of

the _Nation’s_ staff reviewers, I later learned—sneered at the idea that

there was anything unusual in the competitive practices which I called

illegal and immoral. “They are a necessary part of competition,” he

said. “The practices are odious it is true, competition is necessarily

odious.” Was it necessarily odious?

I did not think so. The practices I believed I had proved, I continued

to consider much more dangerous to economic stability than airing them,

even if I aired them in the excited and irrational fashion the review

charged. As I saw it, the struggle was between Commercial Machiavellism

and the Christian Code.

The most important of the indirect answers was an able book by Gilbert

Holland Montague. It separated business and ethics in a way that must

have been a comfort to 26 Broadway.

As soon as published, Mr. Montague’s book became not exactly a best

seller but certainly a best circulator—libraries, ministers, teachers,

prominent citizens all over the land receiving copies with the

compliments of the publisher. Numbers of them came back to me with

irritated letters. “We have been buying books for years from this

house,” wrote one distinguished librarian, “and never before was one

sent with their compliments. I understand that libraries all over the

country are receiving them. Can it be that this is intended as an

advertisement, or is it not more probable that the Standard Oil Company

itself is paying for this widespread distribution?”

The general verdict seemed to be that the latter was the explanation.

Some time later there came from the entertaining Elbert Hubbard of the

Roycroft Shop of East Aurora, New York, an essay on the Standard

extolling the grand results from the centralization of the industry in

their hands.

I have it from various interested sources that five million copies were

ordered printed in pamphlet form by the Standard Oil Company and were

distributed by Mr. Hubbard. They went to schoolteachers and journalists,

preachers and “leaders” from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Hardly were

they received in many cases before they were sent to me with angry or

approving comments. For a couple of years my birthday and Christmas

offerings were sure to include copies of one or the other of these

documents with the compliments of some waggish member of the McClure

group.

I had hoped that the book might be received as a legitimate historical

study, but to my chagrin I found myself included in a new school, that

of the muckrakers. Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United

States, had become uneasy at the effect on the public of the periodical

press’s increasing criticisms and investigations of business and

political abuses. He was afraid that they were adding to the not

inconsiderable revolutionary fever abroad, driving people into

socialism. Something must be done, and in a typically violent speech he

accused the school of being concerned only with the “vile and debasing.”

Its members were like the man in John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” who

with eyes on the ground raked incessantly “the straws, the small sticks,

and dust of the floor.” They were muckrakers. The conservative public

joyfully seized the name.

Roosevelt had of course misread his Bunyan. The man to whom the

Interpreter called the attention of the Pilgrim was raking riches which

the Interpreter contemptuously called “straws” and “sticks” and “dust.”

The president would have been nearer Bunyan’s meaning if he had named

the rich sinners of the times who in his effort to keep his political

balance he called “malefactors of great wealth”—if he had called them,

“muckrakers of great wealth” and applied the word “malefactors” to the

noisy and persistent writers who so disturbed him.

I once argued with Mr. Roosevelt that we on _McClure’s_ were concerned

only with facts, not with stirring up revolt. “I don’t object to the

facts,” he cried, “but you and Baker”—Baker at that time was carrying on

an able series of articles on the manipulations of the railroads—“but

you and Baker are not _practical_.”

I felt at the time Mr. Roosevelt had a good deal of the usual conviction

of the powerful man in public life that correction should be left to

him, a little resentment that a profession outside his own should be

stealing his thunder.

This classification of muckraker, which I did not like, helped fix my

resolution to have done for good and all with the subject which had

brought it on me. But events were stronger than I. All the radical

reforming element, and I numbered many friends among them, were begging

me to join their movements. I soon found that most of them wanted

attacks. They had little interest in balanced findings. Now I was

convinced that in the long run the public they were trying to stir would

weary of vituperation, that if you were to secure permanent results the

mind must be convinced.

One of the most heated movements at the moment was the effort to

persuade the public to refuse all gifts which came from fortunes into

the making of which it was known illegal and unfair practices had gone.

“Do not touch tainted money,” men thundered from pulpit and platform,

among them so able a man as Dr. Washington Gladden. The Rockefeller

fortune was singled out because about this time Mr. Rockefeller made

some unusually large contributions to colleges and churches and general

philanthropy. “It is done,” cried the critics, “in order to silence

criticism.” Frequently some one said to me, “You have opened the

Rockefeller purse.” But I knew, and said in print rather to the disgust

of my friends in the movement, that there was an unfairness to Mr.

Rockefeller in this outcry. It did not take public criticism to open his

purse. From boyhood he had been a steady giver in proportion to his

income—10 per cent went to the Lord—and through all the harrowing early

years in which he was trying to establish himself as a money-maker he

never neglected to give the Lord the established proportion. As his

fortune grew his gifts grew larger. He not only gave but saw the money

given was wisely spent; and he trained his children, particularly the

son who was to administer his estate, to as wise practice in public

giving as we have ever had. That is, it did not take a public outcry

such as came in the early years of this century against the methods of

the Standard Oil Company to force Mr. Rockefeller to share his wealth.

He was already sharing it. Indeed, in the fifteen years before 1904 he

had given to one or another cause some thirty-five million dollars.

If his gifts were larger at this time than they had ever been before,

his money-making was greater. If they were more spectacular than ever

before, it may have been because he thought it was time to call the

public’s attention to what they were getting out of the Standard Oil

fortune. At all events it seemed to me only fair that the point should

be emphasized that it had not taken a public revolt against his methods

to force him to share his profits.

I could not escape the controversies, hard as I tried. Nor could I

escape events, events which were forcing me against my will to continue

my observations and reports. My book was hardly published before it was

apparent that the oil field which it had covered and which for so long

had been supposed to be the only American oil field of importance was

soon to be surpassed by those in the Southwest. The first state to force

recognition of the change on the country at large was Kansas, where

suddenly in the spring of 1905 there broke out an agitation as

unexpected to most observers as it was interesting to those who knew

their oil history. Kansas, we old-timers told ourselves, was duplicating

what the Oil Creek had done in 1872. It was putting on a revolt. How had

it come about?

For a number of years “wildcatters” with or without money had been

prospecting for oil in the state. Only a modest production had rewarded

them at first, but in 1904 oil suddenly poured forth in great

quantities. On the instant Kansas went oil-mad, practically every farmer

in the state dreamed of flowing wells. As soon as it was proved that

Kansas was to be a large field the Standard took charge. It leased,

drilled, and, most important, it threaded the state with its pipe-line

system. No sooner was oil proved to be on a farmer’s land than the

pipe-line people were there caring for it at market rates. But they

began not only to develop and handle scientifically and efficiently, but

quite as scientifically and efficiently they began to get rid of all the

small fry that in the early days of small wells had been refining and

marketing. They would take all the oil that Kansas could produce, they

said, but on their own terms: they wanted no interference.

As soon as this became clear to Kansas the state rose in revolt. The

Populists, who for six years now must needs grumble in a corner, came

out to inveigh with all of their old fervor against the trust. Women’s

clubs took it up, political parties took it up. A program was developed,

the gist of which was that Kansas would take care of its own oil. Bills

were introduced into the legislature calculated to control railroad

rates, pipe-line rates, competitive marketing. To the joy of the

Populists and to the horror of the conservatives a bill for a state

refinery was presented by the governor himself. Kansas had a hemp

factory in the state penitentiary not doing so badly. Why should not the

penitentiary run an oil refinery, too? The legislature agreed to do it.

The excitement grew and so attracted the attention of the country that

the office concluded that I must go out and see what I could make of it.

I did not much want to go, not only because of my desire to free myself

of the subject but because my heart was too heavy with personal loss to

feel enthusiasm for any task. In the spring of 1905 my father had died

after a long slow illness. To me he had always been everything that is

summed up in the word “dear.” Modest, humorous, hard-working, friendly,

faithful in what he conceived to be the right, he loved his family and

friends and church, and asked only to serve them. His business

associates held him as a man of honor and a gentleman.

Father’s death for a time darkened my world. Later I began to realize

that the dearness of him was to remain as a permanent thing in my life.

But in 1905 this sense of continued companionship was something which

came slowly out of a dark sea of loss. So it was with a heavy heart that

I went to see what was happening in Kansas.

First I wanted to see with my own eyes if the fields I had been hearing

about were as rich as advertised; so I spent some ten days driving about

southeastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma, then just coming in with

the promise of great wells. It was about as exciting a journey as I ever

have made. It was on one of these trips I saw my first dust storm.

Driving in a buckboard behind two spirited horses across a practically

unbroken prairie, my companion suddenly looked behind him.

“Jehoshaphat!” he shouted. “Wrap your head up.” I turned to see the sky

from horizon to zenith filled with dark rolling clouds. It was not from

fire. What was it? “A dust storm,” my companion cried.

Quickly and expertly he prepared to take it. He loosened the checkreins

of the horses, and the spirited animals evidently knowing what they were

in for dropped their heads as low as they could hold them and leaned up

against each other. We wrapped ourselves as closely as we could and,

like the horses, clung to each other. The storm did not last long, but

it was pretty awful while it did. The air was thick, you could not

breathe. But it passed, and I was ordered to shake myself out. I found

that I was almost engulfed with a fine black dust, that it was packed

close to the hubs of the wheels of our buckboard. It was ten days before

I got rid of that dust, for it was ten days before I had a real bath.

The dust had turned the primitive water supplies into a muddy liquid

quite impossible to drink and hopeless for cleansing.

The wonder of it was that the real discomforts counted not at all at the

time. I had joined an eager, determined, exultant procession of

wildcatters and promoters, of youths looking for their chance or seeking

adventure for the first time, tasting it to the full.

Nothing so great as this Kansas and Indian Territory field had ever been

known. Every well was to be a gusher, every settlement a city. On every

side they were selling town lots and stock in oil companies. One of the

most irresponsible stock-selling schemes I have ever known, I happened

on in one of these trips. Two anxious-faced boys were going about among

experienced oilmen begging them for oil leases, preferably oil leases on

which there was a proved well. The lads had come as sightseers and had

been caught in the wild excitement of the region. Everybody had a scheme

to make himself and his friends rich. Why not they? And largely as a

joke they had sent out a flamboyant letter offering stock in a mythical

oil field. The letter had gone to scores of innocents in the East, and

in answer schoolteachers, clergymen, and women with little or no money

had poured in subscriptions.

If there had been few subscriptions they would have been able to return

them, but here they were when I saw them with literally a suitcase full

of checks and money orders and not a foot of land leased, and in the

excitement there was practically no land to be had. They must either get

a lease or go to the penitentiary, they concluded. Hence their alarm,

their pitiful begging of older men to help them out of the predicament

into which their irresponsibility had plunged them.

It was not long before I found I was being taken for something more

serious than a mere journalist. Conservative Standard Oil sympathizers

regarded me as a spy and not infrequently denounced me as an enemy to

society. Independent oilmen and radical editors, who were in the

majority, called me a prophet. It brought fantastic situations where I

was utterly unfit to play the part. A woman of twenty-five, fresh, full

of zest, only interested in what was happening to her, would have

reveled in the experience. But here I was—fifty, fagged, wanting to be

let alone while I collected trustworthy information for my

articles—dragged to the front as an apostle.

The funniest things were the welcomes. The funniest of all was at the

then new town of Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had arrived late at night in what

seemed to me a no man’s land, and after considerable trouble had found a

place in a rough little hostelry where I was so suspicious of the look

of things that I moved the bureau against the lockless door. I am sure

now that I was as safe there as I should have been in my bed at home.

I had registered, of course, and the next morning before I had finished

my breakfast I was waited on by the editor of the local newspaper, who

took me to his office, a barnlike structure next door, for an interview.

Almost immediately a handsome youth in knickerbockers and high laced

boots came hurriedly in.

“I think I ought to tell you, Miss Tarbell,” he said with a grin, “that

you are in for a serenade.”

“A serenade,” I said, “what do you mean?”

“Well,” he said, “the Tulsa boomers have been making a tour of cities to

the north. Their special train has just come in; they want something to

celebrate, and, learning that you were in town they are sending up the

band to welcome you. They want a speech.”

I had never made an impromptu speech in my life. I was horrified at the

idea. “You must get me out of this,” I begged of my gallant but very

amused informer.

“No,” he said, “there is no way to escape. Here they are.”

And there they were—a band of thirty or forty pieces, several of the

players stalwart Indians.

I had to face it, and for once in my life I had a happy idea. “Go buy me

two boxes of the best cigars that are to be had in town.” And I shoved a

bill into his hand. “Go quickly.”

And then the band began. Not so bad, but so funny. There I was standing

on the sidewalk with all the masculine inhabitants of Tulsa—so it seemed

to me—packed about, some of them serious and some of them highly

delighted at my obvious consternation. I had not guessed wrong about the

cigars. They preferred them to a speech, I saw as I passed around the

circle distributing them to the players. What was left I gave to the

bodyguard which had assembled to back me up. A compliment I have always

treasured was given by one of the Indians, as he watched me disposing of

my goods: “He all right.” Still more flattering it was as I went around

in Tulsa that day to meet gentlemen who had fat cigars tied with little

red ribbons in their buttonholes, and to have them point gaily to them

as I passed.

But the serenade was not the end of the celebration. That afternoon I

was taken out in a barouche—the only one in the countryside, I was

told—the band behind, and paraded up and down the distracted streets of

Tulsa. A day or two later when I went on my journey, it was with a

seatful of candy, magazines, books, flowers, everything that the

community afforded for a going-away present. I never had been before nor

have been since so much the prima donna.

But all this was preliminary to the real task of finding out what was

happening in Kansas, outside of the production of oil. The legislation

already passed was intended to make the Standard Oil Company the servant

of the state. But I had long ago learned it was one thing to pass laws

and another thing to enforce and administer them. How were they getting

on?

I went first to see the governor—E. W. Hoch—a humorless and honest man.

It was he who had sponsored the state refinery. I found him impressed by

what he had done, but a little doubtful about how things were going to

come out. He was opening his mail when I went in and he showed me

letters nominating him for the Presidency. He had been receiving many of

them, he said. It was obvious they came from radical socialists

rejoicing over the encouragement that he was giving to the public

ownership of industry. He liked the applause but did not like the

source. He was no socialist, he protested to me. He was a firm believer

in the competitive system. The state refinery was a “measuring stick.”

He had wanted to settle definitely just what the profits of the refinery

business in Kansas were. Nobody knew except experts, and they wouldn’t

tell. A first-class oil refinery would settle for all time the cost of

refining Kansas oil and force the sale at a reasonable price. He was not

trying to drive private industry out of the state. He merely wanted to

force private industry to be reasonable—the private industry being of

course the Standard Oil Company.

Governor Hoch and the state as a whole were soon feeling the effect of

the letdown which always follows an exciting legislative campaign,

particularly for the winner. Not since the early nineties had Kansas

enjoyed so rousing a time. And now it was over and they had to come down

to business. But could they get down to business? Could they administer

the new laws? Meetings were being held, half in jubilation over the

successful legislation, half in anxiety about the next step. I was asked

to come and speak at one of them.

I was no speaker, but I could not let them down. Moreover, because of my

familiarity with past exciting experiments on the part of indignant oil

independents I realized better than they did, so I thought, the hard

pull they had before them.

“Your problem now,” I told them, “is to do business. As far as laws can

insure it you have free opportunity; but good laws and free opportunity

alone do not build up a business. Unless you can be as efficient and as

patient, as farseeing as your great competitor—laws or no laws, you will

not succeed. You must make yourselves as good refiners, as good

transporters, as good marketers, as ingenious, as informed, as

imaginative in your legitimate undertakings as they are in both their

legitimate and illegitimate.”

My speech was not popular. What they wanted from me was a rousing attack

on the Standard Oil Company. They wanted a Mary Lease to tell them to go

on raising hell, and here I was telling them they had got all they could

by raising hell and now they must settle down to doing business.

“You have gone over to the Standard Oil Company?” said one disgusted

Populist.

I saw I had ruined my reputation as the Joan of Arc of the oil industry,

as some one had named me. But there were hard-headed independent

legislators and business men in the state who consoled me, “You are

right, we must learn to do business as well as they do.”

One immediate national effect of the Kansas disturbance was to arouse

the legislatures of other oil-producing states in the Southwest to enact

laws not unlike those of Kansas, though I do not remember that a state

refinery was sponsored anywhere else. There was a wide demand that

Congress place the pipe-line system under the Interstate Commerce

Commission, subject it to the same restrictions as interstate rails, but

most important was the fine popular backing the row gave the

trust-busting campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, now President of the

United States. He had begun his attack on big business by putting an end

to the first great holding company the country had seen—the Northern

Securities Company. He had followed this by a bill establishing a

department for which people had been asking for a decade or more, that

of Commerce and Labor, including a Bureau of Corporations with power to

examine books and question personnel. Congress at first shied at the

measure, but Mr. Roosevelt thundered, “If you do not pass it this

session I will call an extra session.” And they knew he would.

Ironically enough it was the Standard itself that broke the reluctance

of Congress. The proposal had shocked it out of its usual discretion.

There never was an organization in the country which held secrecy more

essential to doing business. Breaking down the walls behind which it

operated was not to be tolerated. It seems to have been the peppery John

Archbold who took charge of the fight against the bill, using all the

political influence of the company, which was considerable at that

moment.

Roosevelt soon learned something of what was going on—it is not certain

how much; and when he saw his measure in danger he gave out the

statement that John D. Rockefeller had wired his friends in the Senate,

“We are opposed to any antitrust legislation—it must be stopped.”

The last thing in the world that John D. Rockefeller would have done was

to send such a telegram to anybody. Probably Mr. Roosevelt knew that;

but somebody in the Standard was passing on such a word, and Mr.

Rockefeller was the responsible head of the organization. His name did

the work. Congress passed the bill in a hurry. The Bureau of

Corporations was speedily set up, an excellent man at its head—James

Garfield. The first task assigned it by the President was an

investigation of the petroleum industry.

This investigation reported in 1906 that the Standard Oil Company was

receiving preferential rates from various railroads and had been for

some time. One of the most spectacular business suits the country had

seen up to that time followed. The Standard was found guilty by Judge

Kenesaw Landis, the present arbitrator of the manners and morals of

national baseball, and a punishment long known as the “Big

Fine”—twenty-nine million dollars—inflicted. The country gasped at the

size of the fine, but not so the Bureau of Corporations. My

correspondent there contended that over eight thousand true indictments

had been found, and that the maximum penalty would have amounted to over

a hundred and sixty million dollars!

But even the twenty-nine million dollars, so modest in the view of the

Bureau of Corporations, was not allowed to stand, for in 1908 Judge

Peter Grosscup of the Circuit Court of Appeals in Illinois upset it.

Roosevelt was angry. “There is too much power in the bench,” he told his

friends.

But by this time the Government had under way another and a much more

serious line of attack, from which Roosevelt was hoping substantial

results. Back in 1890 the Congress had enacted what was known as the

Sherman Antitrust Law, a law making illegal every contract and

combination restraining trade and fostering monopoly. The Government was

now seeking to apply this law to the Standard Oil Company. Was it not

the first industry to attempt monopoly? Had it not been the model for

all the brood?

Such a suit was no new idea. Independent oilmen had long talked of it,

and in 1897 they had been ready to go ahead when at the last moment the

lawyer to whom they had entrusted their case was taken suddenly ill and

died. It must have seemed to the energetic Lewis Emery, Jr., who had

been engineering the attack that the Lord himself had “gone over to the

Standard.”

Ten years went by, and then in September, 1907, the United States of

America began suit against the Standard Oil Company of New York _et al._

There were months and months of hearings. If I had been a modern

newspaper woman I could have made a good killing out of that long

investigation, for more than one editor asked me to analyze the

testimony as it came along or give my impressions of the gentlemen who

appeared on the witness stand. But I had no stomach for it; I never

attended a public examination though I of course read the published

testimony with care.

I knew well enough that the time would come when, if I did my duty as a

historian, I must analyze the suit; but that must be after it was ended

and a sufficiently practical test had been made of the decision. It

would be a long time, I told myself, before I should be obliged to take

up the story where I had left it.

13

OFF WITH THE OLD—ON WITH THE NEW

Twelve years had gone by since I tied myself, temporarily as I thought,

to the McClure venture. To my surprise, the longer I was with the

enterprise the more strongly I felt it was giving me the freedom I

wanted, as well as a degree of that security which makes freedom so much

easier a load to carry. Here was a group of people I could work with,

without sacrifice or irritation. Here was a healthy growing undertaking

which excited me, while it seemed to offer endless opportunity to

contribute to the better thinking of the country. The future looked fair

and permanent.

And then without warning the apparently solid creation was shattered and

I found myself sitting on its ruins.

Looking back now, I know that the split in the McClure staff in 1906 was

inevitable. Neither Mr. McClure nor Mr. Phillips, the two essential

factors in the creation, could have done other than he did. The points

at issue were fundamental. Each man acted according to an inner

something which made him what he was, something he could not violate.

Back of the difficulty lay the fact that at this time Mr. McClure was a

sick man. The hardships of his youth and early manhood, the intense

pressure he had put on himself in founding his enterprises had exhausted

him. For several years he had been obliged to take long vacations,

usually in Europe with his family, his staff carrying on his work in his

absence. The enterprises were bringing him larger and larger returns and

more and more honor; but that was not what he most wanted. He wanted to

be in the thick of things, feel himself an active factor in what was

doing. Above all he wanted to add to what he had already achieved, to

build a bigger, a more imposing House of McClure.

“What he wanted was more money,” I have heard men comment.

They were wrong. I have never known a man freer from the itch for money

as an end than S. S. McClure. Money for him meant power to do things, to

build, to help others. On his way up he had gathered about him a horde

of dependents with whom he was always ready to share his last dollar. He

was reckless with money as with ideas.

In these years when he was practically living in Europe, though

returning regularly to the United States, his chief interest was not in

what his enterprises were accomplishing, but in adding something bigger

than they were or could be. Only by doing this could he prove to himself

and to his colleagues that he was a stronger and more productive man

than ever. Nothing else would satisfy him.

His passion to build, to realize his ambitions, made him careless about

laying foundations. What he did usually had the character of

improvisation, frequently on a grand scale, sometimes merely gay spurts

of fancy. I was myself caught in one of the latter when Mr. McClure in

London suddenly ordered me in Paris to drop whatever I was doing and to

hurry into Germany to collect material for an animal magazine.

Animals were an abiding interest with _McClure’s_. Rudyard Kipling laid

the foundation in the Jungle tales. After that great series few were the

numbers that did not have an animal in text and picture. It was as much

a passion as baseball was to become in the latter days with _The

American Magazine_.

I spent a lively month visiting zoos, interviewing animal trainers and

hunters and keepers, buying books and photographs, turning in what I

considered a pretty good grist of materials and suggestions. What became

of it, I never knew, for I never heard a word of it after I came back to

America. The only remnant I have now of that month is a powder box of

Dresden china bought at the showrooms of the factory of the crossed

swords, it being my practice when on professional trips to use my

leisure seeing the town, guidebook in hand, and buying all the souvenirs

my purse permitted.

It was in 1906 that Mr. McClure brought home from one of his foraging

expeditions the plan which was eventually to wreck his enterprises. He

had it cut and dried ready to put into action. Without consultation with

his partners he had organized a new company, the charter of which

provided not only for a _McClure’s Universal Journal_, but a McClure’s

Bank, a McClure’s Life Insurance Company, a McClure’s School Book

Publishing Company, and later a McClure’s Ideal Settlement in which

people could have cheap homes on their own terms. It undertook to

combine with a cheap magazine—which it goes without saying was to have

an enormous circulation with the enormous advertising which circulation

brings—an attempt to solve some of the great abuses of the day, abuses

at which we had been hammering in _McClure’s Magazine_. He proposed to

do this by giving them a competition which would draw their teeth.

By the time Mr. McClure got around to explaining his plan to me and

asking my cooperation he had worked himself up to regarding it as an

inspiration which must not be questioned. It seemed to me to possess him

like a religious vision which it was blasphemy to question. Obsessed as

he was, he was blind and deaf to the obstacles in the way. I am sure I

hurt Mr. McClure by telling him bluntly and at once that I would never

have anything to do with such a scheme.

In a recently published letter Lincoln Steffens tells how he saw Mr.

McClure’s plan. To him it was not only “fool” but “not quite right.”

Certainly it was not right. As organized, it was a speculative scheme as

alike as two peas to certain organizations the magazine had been

battering.

The tragedy of the situation was that Mr. McClure did not see and could

not understand the arguments of his associates that his plan was not

only impossible but wrong. This failure of judgment was, I am convinced,

due to his long illness. The mental and physical exhaustion from which

he was suffering, and which he could not bring himself to understand or

accept, explains the unwisdom of this undertaking, his contention that

it was an inspiration, his stubbornness in insisting that it be accepted

and set to work. Human reason has little influence on one who believes

he is inspired.

The members of the staff were little more than outsiders when it came to

the final decision. It was up to John Phillips to accept and do his

utmost to aid in the grandiose adventure or patiently to wait while

persuading the General that it was not the mission of the McClure crowd

to reconstruct the economic life of the country, that we were

journalists, not financial reformers. I think no man ever tried harder

to keep another from a suicidal undertaking; and certainly no man could

have been firmer from the start in his refusal to go along.

The struggle went on for six months, and no two men ever tried more

honestly to adjust their differences; but they were irreconcilable. It

came to a point where one or the other must sell his interest in the

magazine. It was Mr. McClure who bought out his partner.

Although _McClure’s Magazine_ is no longer on the newsstands, it does

occupy a permanent place in the history of the period that it served,

because it worked itself into the literary and economic life of the

country.

It was a magazine which from the first put quality above everything else

and was willing to chase checks around town in order to pay for it. For

those who collect Kipling there are the first publications of many of

his rarest poems, short stories, and such distinguished serials as

“Captains Courageous” and “Kim.” Here first appeared Willa Cather and O.

Henry.

It was a magazine which backed regardless of expense, one might say, the

investigations and reports of men like Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln

Steffens. For twelve years it encouraged with liberality and patience

the work of which I have been talking in this narrative.

Mr. McClure had two editorial policies when it came to getting the thing

he felt was important for the Magazine. First, the writer must be well

paid and the expense money be generous. Second, and most important of

all, he must be given time. He did not ask that you produce a great

serial in six months. He gave you years if it was necessary. I spent the

greater part of five years on “The History of the Standard Oil Company.”

I was what was called a contributing editor; that is, I turned in

suggestions as they came to me in my work around the country. I did

occasional extra articles that seemed to be in my line. I read and took