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.