All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

“I see you do not know or are unwilling to say, Mr. Flagler, who originated the South Improvement Company; but this is certain: Mr. Rockefeller had the credit of it in the Oil Region. You know, yourself, how bitter the feeling was there.”

“But, ah, Miss Tarbell,” he said, “how often the reputation of a man in his lifetime differs from his real character! Take the greatest character in our history. How different was our Lord and Saviour regarded when he was alive from what we now know him to have been!”

After that, further questioning was of course hopeless, and until Mr. Rogers returned I sat listening to the story of how the Lord had prospered him. I never was happier to leave a room, but I was no happier than Mr. Flagler was to have me go.

Mr. Rogers produced Mr. Flagler and others of lesser importance. But although I referred to his semi-promise in our first interview to produce Mr. Rockefeller I found that after a few months there was no hope of this. If I hinted at it he parried.

Nearly a year went by after my first interview with Mr. Rogers before the articles began to appear. I rather expected him to cut me off when he realized that I was trying to prove that the Standard Oil Company was only an enlarged South Improvement Company. But to my surprise my arguments did not seem to disturb him. They had won out, had they not? He sometimes complained that I had been unnecessarily blunt or a bit vindictive, but he continued to receive me in friendly fashion and to give me, perhaps not all the help he might, but always something to make me think twice, frequently to modify a view.

But if he was not himself disturbed by what I was doing why did he continue the interviews? Gradually I became convinced it was because of his interest in my presentation of a particular episode in their history. It was a case in which Mr. Rogers and John Archbold, along with all of the members of the board of a subsidiary company, the Vacuum Oil Company of Rochester, New York, had been indicted for conspiring to destroy an independent refinery in Buffalo, New York.

In my opening interview with Mr. Rogers he with some show of feeling had told me he wanted me to get a correct and impartial version of this Buffalo case, as he always called it. There had been a break in his voice when with hesitation he said: “That case is a sore point with Mr. Archbold and me. I want you to go into it thoroughly. I have the reports of the testimony before the grand jury; it took me months to secure them. Of course in a sense I have no right with them. I told my children that if their father’s memory is ever attacked this will serve to vindicate him. He must stand or fall in their estimation by that testimony.”

At our second interview he produced the testimony before the grand jury, repeating again that of course he had no business with it but he had to have it. He would not allow me to take it away, and at his request I read the sixty or more pages in his presence. It seemed quite clear to me, as I told Mr. Rogers on finishing the reading, that his connection with the affair had been so indirect that there was no reason for his indictment, although it seemed equally clear to me that there was ample reason for the indictment of certain members of the Vacuum board. The judge was of that opinion, for he dismissed the indictment against Mr. Rogers and two of his fellow directors while sustaining that against the responsible operating heads of the concern.

I soon discovered that what Mr. Rogers wanted me to make out was that the three men who had founded the independent enterprise, all of them former employees of the Vacuum Oil Company, had done so for the sole purpose of forcing the Standard to buy them out at a high price; that is, that it was a case of planned blackmail. But the testimony certainly showed little evidence of that while it did show clearly enough that the managers of the Vacuum Oil Company, from the hour they had learned of the undertaking, had made deliberate and open attempts to prevent the Buffalo refinery doing business.

The more thoroughly I went into the matter—and I worked hard over it—the more convinced I was that, while there had been bad faith and various questionable practices on the part of members of the independent firm, they had started out to build up a business of their own. Also it was clear they had had hardly a shadow of success under the grilling opposition of the Standard concern. This included various suits for infringement of patents, all of which the Standard had lost. In course of the years of litigation four juries—two grand juries and two petit juries—gave verdicts against the Standard Oil Company.