He said he had nothing more than what he had already told me.
As I have said, the article came out just before I was to see Mr. Rogers on what I hoped would be the last of the Buffalo case. The only time in all my relations with him when I saw his face white with rage was when I met the appointment he had made. Our interview was short.
“Where did you get that stuff?” he said angrily, pointing to the magazine on the table.
All I could say was in substance: “Mr. Rogers, you can’t for a moment think that I would tell you where I got it. You will recall my efforts to get from you anything more than a general denial that these practices of espionage so long complained of were untrue, could be explained by legitimate competition. You know this bookkeeping record is true.”
There were a few curt exchanges about other points in the material, but nothing as I now recall on the Buffalo case. The article ended my visits to 26 Broadway.
Nearly four years passed before I saw Henry Rogers, and in that period exciting and tragic events had come his way.
There was the copper war. He and his friends had attempted to build up a monopoly in copper to match that of the Standard Oil Company in petroleum, the Amalgamated Copper Company. A youngster, F. Augustus Heinze, had come into Montana, and by bold and ruthless operation put together a copper company of his own. The two organizations were soon at each other’s throats. It was a business war without a vestige of decency, one in which every devious device of the law and of politics was resorted to by both sides.
But Mr. Rogers had other troubles. He and his friends had been engaged in organizing the gas interests of the East. They had engineered stock raids which had been as disastrous to Wall Street as to gambling Main Street. Such operations in the past had never cost him more than a passing angry comment by the public press. Now, however, came something damaging to his reputation and his pride. It was a series of lurid articles by a bold and very-much-on-the-inside broker and speculator—Thomas Lawson of Boston. For nearly two years Lawson published monthly in Everybody’s Magazine under the admirable title “Frenzied Finance” circumstantial accounts of the speculation of the Rogers group and what they had cost their dupes. That story cut Mr. Rogers’ pride to the quick. He is said to have threatened the American News Company with destruction if it circulated the magazine.
Taken all together the excitement and anger were too much for even his iron frame and indomitable spirit, and in the summer of 1907 he suffered a stroke which put him out of the fight for many weeks. When he came back it was at once to collide with the Government suit against the Standard Oil Company, and soon after that with the “rich man’s panic” of 1907, a panic for which his old enemy in copper, F. Augustus Heinze, was largely responsible.
Early in November, when the panic was still raiding the banks and the millionaires of the country, I stood one day at a corner on Fifth Avenue waiting for the traffic to clear. Suddenly I saw an arm waving to me from a slowly passing open automobile, and there was H. H. Rogers smiling at me in the friendliest way.