“That is what my father always said,” I told him. “One of the severest lectures he ever gave came from one of those booms in the market which sent everybody in the Oil Region crazy. I suppose you were responsible for it. I remember a day when the schools were practically closed because all the teachers in Titusville were on the street or in the Oil Exchange—everybody speculating. I was in high school; the fever caught me, and I asked father for $100 to try my luck in the market. He was as angry with me as I ever saw him. ‘No daughter of mine,’ he said, etc., etc.”
“Wise man,” Mr. Rogers commented.
“But it was not because he was so cautious,” I said. “It was because he thought it was morally wrong. He would no more have speculated in the stock market than he would have played poker for money.”
“I always play poker when the market is closed,” commented Mr. Rogers. “I can’t help it. Saturday afternoons I almost always make up a poker party, and every now and then John Gates and I rig up something. He’ll come around and say, ‘Henry, isn’t it about time we started something?’ We usually do.”
All of these talks were informal, natural. We even argued with entire friendliness the debatable question, “What is the worst thing the Standard Oil Company ever did?” Only now and then did one of us flare, and then the other generally changed the subject.
“He’s a liar and hypocrite, and you know it,” I exploded one day when we were talking of a man who had led in what to me was a particularly odious operation.
“I think it is going to rain,” said Mr. Rogers, looking out of the window with ostentatious detachment.
Mr. Rogers not only produced documents and arguments; he produced people with whom I wanted to talk. The most important was Henry Flagler, who had been in on the South Improvement Company, that early deal with the railroads which had started the Standard Oil Company off on the road to monopoly. There had always been a controversy as to who had suggested that fine scheme. Mr. Flagler was in it. What did he know? Mr. Rogers arranged that I talk with him.
Henry Flagler was not an acceptable figure even to Wall Street in those days. There were scandals of his private life which, true or not, his fellow financiers did not like. Bad for business. I found him a very different type from Henry Rogers. He, for instance, did not conceal his distrust of John Rockefeller. “He would do me out of a dollar today,” he cried, off his guard, and with an excited smash of his fist on the table; and then, catching himself and with a remarkable change of tone: “That is, if he could do it honestly, Miss Tarbell, if he could do it honestly.”
Mr. Flagler knew what I had come for, but instead of answering my direct questions he began to tell me with some show of emotion of his own early life, how he had left home because his father was a poor clergyman—$400 a year, a large family of children. He had not succeeded until he went into the commission business with Mr. Rockefeller in Cleveland. “And from that time we were prospered,” he said piously. In the long story he told me, the phrase, “We were prospered,” came in again and again. That was not what I was after. Their prosperity was obvious enough. Finally I returned with some irritation to the object of my visit.