Is this harrowing statement true? The widow continued the business four years after her husband’s death. Competition increased, prices tumbled, the margin of profit was constantly narrowing, new appliances simplified refining-processes and the widow’s plant was no longer adapted to the business. She sold for sixty-thousand dollars, the Standard paying twice the sum for which a refinery better suited to the purpose could be constructed. Foolish friends afterwards told her she had sold too low and the widow wrote a severe letter to the president of the Standard. The company had bought the property to oblige her and at once offered it back. She declined to take it, or sixty-thousand dollars in Standard stock, evidently realizing that the refinery had lost its profit-earning capacity and that even the new management might not be able to make it pay. This will serve to illustrate the unfairness of “Wealth Against Commonwealth,” which has been widely quoted because of its presumed reliability and the high standing of the publishers. Yet this story of imaginary wrong has been worked into speeches, sermons and editorials of the fiercest type! In its treatment of the widow the Standard was truly magnanimous. Few business-men would consent to undo a transaction and have their labor for naught, simply because the other party had become dissatisfied. Possibly Mr. Lloyd would not be as generous if there was any profit in the transaction. If the Standard cut prices to ruin the widow and other competitors, would not oil have gone up again when they were disposed of? No such upward movement occurred. The widow disappeared. Many small refineries disappeared. Monopoly railroad-contracts, if such ever existed, have disappeared, but the price of refined-oil has been falling steadily for twenty years, declining from an average of nineteen cents a gallon in 1876 to five cents in 1895. The potent fact in this connection is that the Standard has continued to make profits with the declining price of oil. This conclusively demonstrates that the decline was due to economic improvements in the productive methods and not to a malicious cut to ruin a widow or anybody else, as Mr. Lloyd assumes. Otherwise a profit accompanying the fall in price would have been impossible and the Standard would have been sold out by the sheriff long years ago.
All the dealers in slander from Lloyd down to the chronic kicker who has attempted to make money by annoying the Standard have played the Rice case as a trump-card. According to their version, Mr. Rice was an angelic Vermonter, whose success inspired the Standard with devilish enmity and it determined to compass his ruin. Rice had operated at Pithole and at Macksburg and owned a small refinery at Marietta. It was alleged that the Cleveland & Marietta Railroad discriminated against him, doubling his freight-charge and giving the Standard a drawback on all the oil that went over the road. This was an iniquitous arrangement, entered into by the receiver of the road and cancelled by the Standard whenever a report of what was done reached New York. Mr. Rice had paid two-hundred-and-fifty dollars wrongfully, the money was at once refunded and Mr. Rice did not harass the company into buying his twenty-thousand dollar refinery for half a million. This will serve as an example of the dishonest misstatements that had wrought lots of good people up to white heat. The sins of the trusts may be very scarlet and very numerous, but economic literature should not pollute the sources of information and the foundations of public opinion.
An oft-repeated story is that the Standard owes its success to railway-discriminations. In proof of this the testimony of A. J. Cassatt is quoted. The testimony, published in a congressional investigation-report, shows that granting rebates was then the custom of railway-companies. Largely the same rebates were granted to all who shipped over the railways. Special to the Standard was payment of a joint freight-rate over pipe-line and railroad. A large rebate was given for one summer to all shippers by rail to equalize low rates by canal, of which many shippers took advantage. The only discriminatory rebate received by the Standard was ten per cent. for equalizing its large shipments over three trunk-lines, shipping exclusively by rail, even when water-rates were cheaper, furnishing terminal facilities and exempting the roads from loss by fire or accident. Courts in England and this country have very properly held that railways have the right to carry for less rates under such circumstances. Many wise men are of the same opinion. Subsequently it was developed that, while the short-lived agreement existed, the Standard’s strongest competitors were getting lower rates of freight than it was paying! Why do the Lloyd brand of critics ignore this pointed fact?
Another favorite story is that some officers of the Standard were convicted of burning a rival refinery. As all know who ever took the trouble to investigate, they were indicted for conspiracy to injure a rival. The counts in the indictment embraced the enticing away of an employé, the bringing of suits to prevent infringement of patents and the serious charge of inciting an employé to burn the works. When all the evidence on the part of the State was in, the court directed the discharge of every person connected with the Standard.[Standard.] There was not a scintilla of evidence against them. Two of the indicted persons were convicted of conspiracy, but they were not connected with the Standard,[Standard,] and never owned a share of Standard stock. The majority of the jurymen made affidavits that they found the convicted persons guilty only of enticing away an employé. The employé thus enticed had first been enticed from the works of the convicted parties and induced to reveal the secret processes by which a valuable lubricating-oil was manufactured. The best citizens of Rochester certified that the men convicted were men of unimpeachable honor, while the men who testified against them were quite the reverse. The whole affair was a wicked plot to blacken the character of men who stood and who still stand as high as any in Rochester. The court, satisfied of their innocence of any grave offence, inflicted merely a nominal fine.
Many of the attacks in a well-known work by a leading socialist against the Standard are made up of court-cases. The accusations are copied, the moving speeches of plaintiffs’ attorneys are printed; but all else is omitted, except that the case was decided in favor of the Standard. The inference is left to be drawn, or the charge is made openly, that the court was corrupt. Had the evidence of both sides been given, there would be no more room for such an inference than for a pretty maiden’s small brother in the parlor when her best young man is about to pop the momentous question. The rustic divine, weak in his spelling and strong in his opposition to the feminine style of coiling the hair in a huge knot, had better grounds for declaring the Scripture endorsed his view of the fashion. Reading the familiar passage, “let him that is on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house,” he based his terrific sermon on this dismembered clause of the verse: “Top not, come down.”
One instance may be noted briefly. A Pennsylvania office-holder, whose unworthy motives an investigation exposed, charged that the Standard had defrauded the State of millions of taxes. The case was ably tried before an upright judge and the allegation found to be utterly baseless. Then the judge was charged with corruption. The case was taken to the highest court of the State, which affirmed the decision of the court below. At once the Supreme Court and the Attorney-General, who conducted the case for the State with signal ability, were accused of rank corruption. Perhaps the greatest surprise is that they were not charged with an attempt to get even with Moses by breaking all the commandments at one lick. An investigation committee, appointed by the Legislature, went fully into all the facts and allegations and reported that the case had been ably and fairly tried and correctly decided. It only remained to charge the legislative committee with corruption, which was done with great promptitude and emphasis. Yet every lawyer knows that the case of Pennsylvania against the Standard Oil-Company is a leading case on the subject of taxation of foreign corporations, establishing correct principles which, since its decision, the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed.
In another case a respectable old man conceived the idea that he had solved the problem of continuous distillation of oil, an invention which would very much cheapen the product and be worth millions to refiners. The Standard aided him in his experiments until convinced they were unsuccessful. He became crazed on the subject and brought suit, alleging he had been prevented from demonstrating his discovery. The case was tried and the baseless suit dismissed, with as little injury to the poor man’s feelings as possible. This incident figures in histories written to fire the popular heart in the war against wealth, accompanied by pictures of a soulless corporation and an insane old man, calculated to draw hot tears and inflame public indignation to a dangerous pitch. Of course the readers are supposed to infer that the court was corrupted and justice grossly outraged. And so the changes are rung along the whole line; but the Standard, regardless of malevolent assaults and villainous distortions of facts, goes right on with its business of furnishing the world with the best light in the universe.
Russian competition, the extent and danger of which most people do not begin to appreciate, was met and overcome by sheer tenacity and superior generalship. The advantages of capable, courageous, intelligent concentration of the varied branches of a great industry were never manifested more strongly. Deprived of the invincible bulwark the Standard offered, the oil-producers of Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana would have been utterly helpless. The Muscovite bear would have gobbled the trade of Europe and Asia, driving American oil from the foreign markets. Local consumption would not have exhausted two-thirds of the production, stocks of crude would have piled up and the price would have fallen proportionately. Instead of ranking with the busiest, happiest and most prosperous quarters of the universe, as they are to-day, the oil-regions of five states would have been irretrievably ruined, dragging down thousands of the brightest, manliest, cleverest fellows on God’s footstool! Instead of bringing a vast amount of gold from England, France and Germany for petroleum produced on American soil, refined by American workmen paid American wages and exported by an American company in American vessels, the trade would have been killed, the cash would have stayed across the waters and the country at large would have suffered incalculably! These are things to think of when some cheap agitator, with a private axe to grind, a mean spite to gratify or a selfish object to attain, raises a howl about monopoly and insists that the entire creation should “damn the Standard!”
When the history of this wonderful century is written it will tell how an American boy, born in New York sixty years ago, clerked in a country-store, kept a set of books, started a small oil-refinery at Cleveland and at forty was the head of the greatest business in the world. This is, in outline, the story of John D. Rockefeller’s successful career. Yesterday, as it were, a youth with nothing but integrity, industry and ambition for capital—a pretty good outfit, too—to-day he is one of the half-dozen richest men in Europe or America. Better than all else, integrity that is part and parcel of his moral nature, industry that finds life too fruitful to waste it idly and ambition to excel in good deeds as well as in business are his rich possession still. Gathering the largest fortune ever accumulated in twenty-five years has not blunted his fine sensibilities, dwarfed his intellectual growth, stifled his religious convictions or absorbed his whole being. Increasing wealth brought with it a deep sense of increasing responsibility and he is honored not so much for his millions as for the use he makes of them. Even in an age unrivalled for money-getting and money-giving, Mr. Rockefeller’s keen foresight, executive ability and wise liberality have been notably conspicuous. His faith in the future of petroleum and his desire to benefit humanity he has shown by his works. Believing in the power of united effort to develop an infant-industry, his genius devised the system of practical co-operation that developed into the Standard Oil-Trust, against which prejudice and ignorance have directed their fiercest fire. Believing in education, his magnificent endowment of Chicago University—eight to ten-million dollars—ranks him with the foremost contributors to the foundation of a seat of learning since schools and colleges began. Believing in fresh air for the masses, he donated Cleveland a public park and a million to equip it superbly. Believing in spiritual progress, he builds churches, helps weak congregations and aids in spreading the gospel everywhere. Believing in the claims of the poor, his charities amount to hundreds-of-thousands of dollars yearly, not to encourage pauperism and dependence, but to relieve genuine distress, diminish human suffering and put struggling men and women in the way to improve their condition. He has differed from nearly all other eminent public benefactors by giving freely, quietly and modestly during his active life, without seeking the popular applause his munificence could easily obtain.
Mr. Rockefeller is a strict Baptist, a regular attendant at church and prayer-meeting, a teacher in the Sunday-school and a staunch advocate of aggressive Christianity. His advancement to commanding wealth has not changed his ideas of duty and personal obligation. He realizes that the man who lives for himself alone is always little, no matter how big his bank-account. He and his family walk to service or ride in a street-car, with none of the trappings befitting the worship of Mammon rather than the glory of God. Earnest, positive and vigorous in his religion as in his business, he takes no stock in the dealer who has not stamina or the profession of faith that is too destitute of backbone to have a denominational preference. The president of the Standard Oil-Company impresses all who meet him with the idea of a forceful, decisive character. He looks people in the face, his eyes sparkle in conversation and he relishes a bright story or a clever narration. You feel that he can read you at a glance and that deception and evasion in his presence would be utterly futile. The flatterer and sycophant would make as little headway with him as the bunco-steerer or the green-goods vendor. His estimate of men is rarely at fault and to this quality some measure of the Standard’s success must be attributed. As if by instinct, its chief officer picked out men adapted to special lines of work—men who would not be misfits—and secured them for his company. The capacity and fidelity of the Standard corps are proverbial. Whenever Mr. Rockefeller wishes to enjoy a breathing-spell at his country-seat up the Hudson or on his Ohio farm, he leaves the business with perfect confidence, because his lieutenants are competent and trustworthy and the machine will run along smoothly under their watchful care. He has not accumulated his money by wrecking property, but by building up, by persistent improvement and by rigidly adhering to the policy of furnishing the best articles at the lowest price. Fair-minded people are beginning to understand something of the service rendered the public by the man who stands at the head of the petroleum-industry and more than any other is the founder of its commerce. He has invested in factories, railroads and mines, giving thousands employment, developing the resources of the country and adding to the wealth of the nation. He is human, therefore he sometimes errs; he is fallible, therefore he makes mistakes, but the world is learning that John D. Rockefeller has no superior in business and that the Standard Oil-Company is not an organized conspiracy to plunder producers or consumers of petroleum. It is time to dismiss the idea that ability to build up and maintain a large business is discreditable, that marvellous success is blameworthy and that business-achievements imply dishonesty.