All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

But all this was preliminary to the real task of finding out what was happening in Kansas, outside of the production of oil. The legislation already passed was intended to make the Standard Oil Company the servant of the state. But I had long ago learned it was one thing to pass laws and another thing to enforce and administer them. How were they getting on?

I went first to see the governor—E. W. Hoch—a humorless and honest man. It was he who had sponsored the state refinery. I found him impressed by what he had done, but a little doubtful about how things were going to come out. He was opening his mail when I went in and he showed me letters nominating him for the Presidency. He had been receiving many of them, he said. It was obvious they came from radical socialists rejoicing over the encouragement that he was giving to the public ownership of industry. He liked the applause but did not like the source. He was no socialist, he protested to me. He was a firm believer in the competitive system. The state refinery was a “measuring stick.”

He had wanted to settle definitely just what the profits of the refinery business in Kansas were. Nobody knew except experts, and they wouldn’t tell. A first-class oil refinery would settle for all time the cost of refining Kansas oil and force the sale at a reasonable price. He was not trying to drive private industry out of the state. He merely wanted to force private industry to be reasonable—the private industry being of course the Standard Oil Company.

Governor Hoch and the state as a whole were soon feeling the effect of the letdown which always follows an exciting legislative campaign, particularly for the winner. Not since the early nineties had Kansas enjoyed so rousing a time. And now it was over and they had to come down to business. But could they get down to business? Could they administer the new laws? Meetings were being held, half in jubilation over the successful legislation, half in anxiety about the next step. I was asked to come and speak at one of them.

I was no speaker, but I could not let them down. Moreover, because of my familiarity with past exciting experiments on the part of indignant oil independents I realized better than they did, so I thought, the hard pull they had before them.

“Your problem now,” I told them, “is to do business. As far as laws can insure it you have free opportunity; but good laws and free opportunity alone do not build up a business. Unless you can be as efficient and as patient, as farseeing as your great competitor—laws or no laws, you will not succeed. You must make yourselves as good refiners, as good transporters, as good marketers, as ingenious, as informed, as imaginative in your legitimate undertakings as they are in both their legitimate and illegitimate.”

My speech was not popular. What they wanted from me was a rousing attack on the Standard Oil Company. They wanted a Mary Lease to tell them to go on raising hell, and here I was telling them they had got all they could by raising hell and now they must settle down to doing business.

“You have gone over to the Standard Oil Company?” said one disgusted Populist.

I saw I had ruined my reputation as the Joan of Arc of the oil industry, as some one had named me. But there were hard-headed independent legislators and business men in the state who consoled me, “You are right, we must learn to do business as well as they do.”

One immediate national effect of the Kansas disturbance was to arouse the legislatures of other oil-producing states in the Southwest to enact laws not unlike those of Kansas, though I do not remember that a state refinery was sponsored anywhere else. There was a wide demand that Congress place the pipe-line system under the Interstate Commerce Commission, subject it to the same restrictions as interstate rails, but most important was the fine popular backing the row gave the trust-busting campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, now President of the United States. He had begun his attack on big business by putting an end to the first great holding company the country had seen—the Northern Securities Company. He had followed this by a bill establishing a department for which people had been asking for a decade or more, that of Commerce and Labor, including a Bureau of Corporations with power to examine books and question personnel. Congress at first shied at the measure, but Mr. Roosevelt thundered, “If you do not pass it this session I will call an extra session.” And they knew he would.