“But with your strength, Mr. Rogers,” I argued, “you could have forced fair play on the railroads and on your competitors.”
“Ah,” he said, “but there was always somebody without scruples in competition, however small that somebody might be. He might grow.”
There it was, the obsession of the Standard Oil Company, that danger lurked in small as well as great things, that nothing, however trivial, must live outside of its control.
These talks made me understand as I could not from the documents themselves the personal point of view of independents like Mr. Rogers who had been gathered into the organization in the first decade of monopoly making. For instance, there was Mr. Rogers’ reason for desiring the trust agreement made in 1882:
“By 1880,” said Mr. Rogers, “I had stock in nearly all of the seventy or so companies which we had absorbed. But the real status of these companies was not known to the public. In case of my death there would have been practically no buyer except Mr. Flagler, Mr. Rockefeller, and a few others on the inside. My heirs would not have reaped the benefit of my holdings. The trust agreement changed this. The public at once realized the value of the trust certificate. That is, my estate was guarded in case of my death.”
He often emphasized the part economies had played not only in building up the concern but in their individual fortunes—economies and putting their money back into the business. “We lived in rented houses and saved money to buy stock in the company,” he told me once.
Only one who remembers, as I do, the important place that owning your own home took in the personal economy of the self-respecting individual of that day can feel the force of this explanation.
I was curious about how he had been able to adjust his well known passion for speculation with Mr. Rockefeller’s well known antagonism to all forms of gambling.
“Didn’t he ever object?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said a little ruefully, “I was never a favorite. I suppose I was a born gambler. In the early days of the Charles Pratt Company, the company of which I was a member—I always carried on the speculations for the concern—Mr. Pratt said: ‘Henry, I haven’t got the nerve to speculate. I kicked all the clothes off last night worrying about the market.’ ‘Give me the money,’ I told him, ‘and I will furnish the nerve.’ We simply raked in the money”—making a gesture with both hands. “And of course it came out of the producer.”