The plan I had taken to Mr. McClure in the fall of 1890, which we had talked over in Salsomaggiore, Italy—I still have notes of our talk on a yellow piece of the stationery of the Hôtel des Thermes—called for three papers, possibly twenty-five thousand words. But before we actually began publication Mr. Phillips and Mr. McClure decided we might venture on six. We went through the six, and the series was stretched to twelve. Before we were through we had nineteen articles, and when the nineteen were off my hands I asked nothing in the world but to get them into a book and escape into the safe retreat of a library where I could study people long dead, and if they did things of which I did not approve it would be all between me and the books. There would be none of these harrowing human beings confronting me, tearing me between contempt and pity, admiration and anger, baffling me with their futile and misdirected power or their equally futile and misdirected weakness. I was willing to study human beings in the library but no longer, for a time at least, in flesh and blood, so I thought.
The book was published in the fall of 1904—two fat volumes with generous appendices of what I considered essential documents. I was curious about the reception it would have from the Standard Oil Company. I had been told repeatedly they were preparing an answer to flatten me out; but if this was under way it was not with Mr. Rockefeller’s consent, I imagined. To a mutual friend who had told him the articles should be answered Mr. Rockefeller was said to have replied: “Not a word. Not a word about that misguided woman.” To another who asked him about my charges he was reported as answering: “All without foundation. The idea of the Standard forcing anyone to sell his refinery is absurd. The refineries wanted to sell to us, and nobody that has sold or worked with us but has made money, is glad he did so.
“I thought once of having an answer made to the McClure articles but you know it has always been the policy of the Standard to keep silent under attack and let their acts speak for themselves.”
In the case of the Lloyd book they had kept silent, but only because Mr. Rockefeller had been unable to carry out his plans for answering. What he had proposed was a jury of the most distinguished clergymen of the day to consider Mr. Lloyd’s argument and charges. Certain clergymen invited refused unless there should be a respectable number of economists added to the jury. That, apparently, Mr. Rockefeller did not see his way to do, and the plan was abandoned. So far as I know Mr. Lloyd’s book was never answered by the Standard Oil Company.
But I wanted an answer from Mr. Rockefeller. What I got was neither direct nor, from my point of view, serious. It consisted of wide and what must have been a rather expensive anonymous distribution of various critical comments. The first of these was a review of the book which appeared in the Nation soon after its publication. The writer—one of the Nation’s staff reviewers, I later learned—sneered at the idea that there was anything unusual in the competitive practices which I called illegal and immoral. “They are a necessary part of competition,” he said. “The practices are odious it is true, competition is necessarily odious.” Was it necessarily odious?
I did not think so. The practices I believed I had proved, I continued to consider much more dangerous to economic stability than airing them, even if I aired them in the excited and irrational fashion the review charged. As I saw it, the struggle was between Commercial Machiavellism and the Christian Code.
The most important of the indirect answers was an able book by Gilbert Holland Montague. It separated business and ethics in a way that must have been a comfort to 26 Broadway.
As soon as published, Mr. Montague’s book became not exactly a best seller but certainly a best circulator—libraries, ministers, teachers, prominent citizens all over the land receiving copies with the compliments of the publisher. Numbers of them came back to me with irritated letters. “We have been buying books for years from this house,” wrote one distinguished librarian, “and never before was one sent with their compliments. I understand that libraries all over the country are receiving them. Can it be that this is intended as an advertisement, or is it not more probable that the Standard Oil Company itself is paying for this widespread distribution?”
The general verdict seemed to be that the latter was the explanation.
Some time later there came from the entertaining Elbert Hubbard of the Roycroft Shop of East Aurora, New York, an essay on the Standard extolling the grand results from the centralization of the industry in their hands.