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.
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.