In studying the testimony of independents over a period of some thirty years I had found repeated complaints that their oil shipments were interfered with, their cars side-tracked en route while pressure was brought on buyers to cancel orders. There were frequent charges that freight clerks were reporting independent shipments.
I did not take the matter seriously at first. The general suspicion of Standard dealings by independents had to be taken into consideration, I told myself. Then, too, I was willing to admit that a certain amount of attention to what your competitor is doing is considered legitimate business practice. I knew that in the office of McClure’s Magazine we were very keen to know what other publishers were doing. And, too, there is the overzealous and unscrupulous employee who in the name of competition recognizes no rules for his game.
But the charges continued to multiply. I met them in testimony, and I met them in interviews. There was no escaping espionage, men told me. “They know where we send every barrel of oil. Half the time our oil never reaches its destination.” I could scarcely believe it. And then unexpectedly there came to my desk a mass of incontrovertible proofs that what I had been hearing was true and more. As a matter of fact this system of following up independent oil shipments was letter-perfect, so perfect that it was made a matter of office bookkeeping.
“It looks sometimes,” Mr. Rogers had said to me, “as if something had the Standard Oil Company by the neck, something bigger than we are.”
In this case the something bigger was a boy’s conscience. A lad of sixteen or seventeen in the office of a Standard plant had as one of his regular monthly duties the burning of large quantities of records. He had carried out his orders for many months without attention to the content. Then suddenly his eyes fell one night on the name of a man who had been his friend since childhood, had even been his Sunday-school teacher, an independent oil refiner in the city, a Standard competitor. The boy began to take notice; he discovered that the name appeared repeatedly on different forms and in the letters which he was destroying. It made him uneasy, and he began to piece the records together. It was not long before he saw to his distress that the concern for which he was working was getting from the railroad offices of the town full information about every shipment that his friend was making; moreover, that the office was writing to its representative in the territory to which the independent oil was going, “Stop that shipment—get that trade.” And the correspondence showed how both were done.
What was a youth to do under such circumstances? He didn’t do anything at first, but finally when he could not sleep nights for thinking about it he gathered up a full set of documents and secretly took them to his friend.
Now this particular oil refiner had been reading the McClure’s articles. He had become convinced that I was trying to deal fairly with the matter; he had also convinced himself in some way that I was to be trusted. So one night he brought me the full set of incriminating documents. There was no doubt about their genuineness. The most interesting to me was the way they fitted in with the testimony scattered through the investigations and lawsuits. Here were bookkeeping records explaining every accusation that had been made. But how could I use them? Together we worked out a plan by which the various forms and blanks could be reproduced with fictitious names of persons and places substituted for the originals.
It was after this material had come to my hands that I took the subject up with Mr. Rogers. “The original South Improvement Company formula, Mr. Rogers, provided for reports of independent shipments from the railroads. I have come on repeated charges that the practice continues. What about it? Do you follow independent shipments? Do you stop them? Do you have the help of railroad shipping clerks in the operation?”
“Of course we do everything we legally and fairly can to find out what our competitors are doing, just as you do in McClure’s Magazine,” Mr. Rogers answered. “But as for any such system of tracking and stopping, as you suggest, that is nonsense. How could we do it even if we would?”
“Well,” I said, “give me everything you have on this point.”