Frenzied Finance Part 27

In answer to my quick inquiry as to what plans I had ever upset he waved a chilling hand toward me. "Don't start in looking for trouble," he said. "There are certain things which cannot be done by a man who works as you do. From the very beginning you have insisted upon taking the public into your confidence, with the result that they get large profits which otherwise would come to us. If you did your business as we do ours--acted first and talked after, or, better still, did not talk at all--there would be no difference of opinion between us. Still, we recognize that each man must do business in his own way, and we have let you go ahead where it was possible." After a short pause he continued:

"While you were getting the Boston companies in shape I unearthed another situation which almost seemed as though it were made to order for us. What do you know of the Anaconda Company?"

The way he asked this question in one of his cross-bred, cat-purring-and-fox-bark tones which I had seen him work on others, and which I had observed always denoted a perfect knowledge of your answer to his question before you had it, did not help my guessing any.

I told him I knew nothing more than that there was such a company with stock dealt in on the English and our markets.

"Nothing more than that?" And he looked at me quizzically. "Have you been watching the stock's actions in the market?"

In a second it flashed over me that Anaconda had been quite active of late, that is, had been largely traded in without attracting much attention, although the price had been steadily advancing.

"I thought you boasted you could read the tape, Lawson?" he went on, "and that nothing could be happening in a field you were interested in without your smelling it out? When I tell you Mr. Rockefeller and myself have bought control of the biggest copper property in the world, measured either by the number of shares and their selling price or by production, without your even suspecting it, much less the public's jumping in and running up the price on us, you can see there is something in our quiet way of doing things compared with your public way."

"All right, Mr. Rogers; I have never contended that there were as many dollars in my way of doing things as in yours--as many dollars for _us_."

"Lawson," said he, "the public are about ready to invest in the first section of our new consolidated company, are they not?"

"Sitting up nights to see that they get a place in line the minute we scatter our first handbills," I answered.

"Well, are we ready to put our things together? Have we got the necessary companies to meet the ideas you have been educating the public into?"

"We have things in such shape that we can whip a $75,000,000 or a $100,000,000 company up for public subscription in a very few days, if you give the word."

Mr. Rogers leaned toward me and said in his most decisive and imperious tones:

"Very well; I have plans all shaped up which will allow us to offer the first section, but not made up as we first arranged. Mr. Rockefeller and myself have decided to put entirely new companies in the first section, and to reserve the b.u.t.te and the Montana and other companies you have been working on for the second section."

The blow had fallen. My head swam. Visions of Clark, Ward, Untermyer, Utah, and others I had seen on the rack writhed fearfully across the stage of memory. Here I was loaded with b.u.t.te, Montana, and other stocks which I had felt as certain were to go into the first section as one can feel in regard to a thing which seems in one's own control. On my public and private a.s.surances as the accredited agent of Mr. Rogers and William Rockefeller and "Standard Oil," my friends and following had large amounts of money in the same securities. The market was booming on what I had proclaimed was to happen, and here an absolutely new condition was being imposed, a condition which gave all my a.s.sertions the lie, which discredited me, and would, I felt sure, precipitate a terrible disaster.

Inevitably the copper public would be dazed, would be shaken; a reaction would follow which would bring on a panic and a destruction of values impossible to measure. In it all, I should be left alone to bear the brunt of the storm of ruin, wrath, and denunciation as the result of what must seem base trickery to those who had accepted my representations. I tried to pull myself together, for I felt Mr. Rogers'

keen eyes burning into the back of my head, appraising the effect of his words and measuring the degree of my numb terror. He saw, in spite of all my efforts to appear calm, that I knew I had been given a knock-out blow.

As in a dream I inquired what companies it had been decided should go into the first section.

"Anaconda, Washoe, Colorado, and all the big timber lands, coal-mines, banks, stores, and other Montana properties that go to make up the Daly-Haggin-Tevis properties," he replied crisply.

I found my numb inertia melting in a fierce anger. I jumped up. I raised my voice:

"Mr. Rogers, do you mean to tell me that Mr. Rockefeller and yourself have deliberately decided to take advantage of the situation I have made--the situation I have not only made but put myself into--to try to sell to the investors of this country other property than that I have promised them they were to have? You cannot mean that--you surely cannot, for you and all your 'Standard Oil,' even though you were many times bigger than you are, would never have dared to tell it to me face to face."

I was boiling over--becoming literally frenzied at the picture unrolling before me.

Now it was Mr. Rogers' turn to be aroused. His voice quivered with intensity and his fist came down on his desk with a force that shook the inkstand. It flashed into my brain that this anger was a.s.sumed to cow me, and I tried to look through his eyes on to his mind tablets back of them, and read what was there recorded. The gaze that met mine was polished steel ice coated, off which my glances slipped and slid. I dropped into my chair.

"In the name of all that's sensible, Lawson, hear me out and quit acting like a child." He stopped a second and then went on impressively. "In looking over the copper field I discovered a number of things you failed to see. First, that Haggin and Tevis, who own Anaconda with Marcus Daly, have grown so wealthy that they have left the management of their Montana copper and silver properties entirely to Daly, and he has been coddling the mines along, saying nothing about their real worth and quietly pa.s.sing by the richest parts, awaiting the day when he could buy his partners out. Shortly after you let it be known that we were to go into 'Coppers,' Daly came to me to talk things over, and it took me only a short time to get under his waistcoat and find just what he had out there, and it took me still less time to decide that he offered something a little better than anything we had yet turned up. These properties, which we can secure for $24,000,000, which will carry with them the majority of the 1,200,000 shares of Anaconda, alone are worth $75,000,000, and with the addition of the Colorado, Washoe, and Parrott, which he recommends that we buy and which he is in a way to secure for us at a bargain, will cost not over $15,000,000. So it came right down to this: We could trade with Daly immediately, while if we waited until the first section was out to the public the inevitable appreciation of Anaconda stock in the market would alone make it impossible; for even if Daly was willing to go in with us, Haggin and Tevis would not let him at anything like the prices he now names. It seemed best to take action at once, so we closed with him; and we have also just closed with the Washoe and Colorado, and we want you to secure the Parrott. Under these circ.u.mstances, could we do otherwise than we have done?"

His argument seemed conclusive. It looked so fair and unanswerable that I could not disguise from him that my fears had fled. I was immensely relieved. My fight oozed; I became as pliable as any of the brittle clay which he daily kneaded for each shaping with his applications of oil.

"What are your plans, Mr. Rogers?" I asked quietly.

"This is what we thought would be the thing to do if you agreed, Lawson, for, of course, you are, after all, the one who must decide. First, you shall go over everything we have done, and if you feel sure we have property worth at least, at the hardest kind of hard-pan prices, $75,000,000, we want to whoop up the country to the very top notch of expectation, and while doing so begin to hint that there are to be three or four sections, and that the first one will embrace Anaconda, Colorado, Washoe, Parrott, and lots of other unnamed things. Then our idea was to offer the $75,000,000 by public subscription, and by using every dollar we receive for it to support it in the market, to make it sell afterward under all conditions at a big premium over cost, so that every one would make big profits, and so, consequently, by the time the second section came along, the demand for subscriptions would be unprecedented. We could continue this until all the good 'Coppers' were in our company, and then our consolidation would be a prodigious success, just as you outlined at the start. There cannot possibly be any loss to any one; in fact, success is so a.s.sured that William Rockefeller, Daly, Stillman, and all the others who will be a.s.sociated with us, do not propose to sell a share of their stock, but, on the contrary, will go along with us to the finish. So good does it look to us that I feel it will really beat out Standard Oil itself as a money-maker, and you must remember that whatever else they may say about Standard Oil, no one who has ever owned a share has lost money; on the contrary, every one has made large profits."

CHAPTER XVII

"EXTRACT EVERY DOLLAR"

"Standard Oil's" arguments always are absolutely flawless, and this was one of their best. I was fast becoming imbued with the wisdom of the plan which Mr. Rogers was revealing so adroitly, and began secretly to wonder if after all I was not a novice in such business.

Unerringly Mr. Rogers followed my thoughts. He piled Pelions of better things on Ossas of good ones. Surely it was after watching some parallel hoodwinking put through by a remote ancestor of "Standard Oil" that Puck enunciated his famous dictum, "What fools these mortals be." I fell in like the veriest tyro--hypnotized and happy.

"How much of this first section do you figure, Mr. Rogers, that we are to give to the public?" I inquired.

"We, Mr. Rockefeller and myself, have carefully considered this phase of it, and as we all want to retain as much as possible of the stock, we would not sell over $5,000,000 to the public."

"But can you do this?" I asked. "If the public know 'Standard Oil' is retaining nearly all the stock they will sour on it."

"Leave that to us," he said, knowingly. "We can iron this out so easily you need not give it another thought, for no one can have any possible rights in the matter until he has been allotted stock, and as all those who come in are to have big profits from the start, they will raise no objection to anything we do."

"All right, if you think it's wise. You know," I responded; "but who will be in this besides ourselves?"

"Every one of us--Stillman, Daly, Olcott, Flower, Morgan, all who can be of use to us will have to be let in on some of the ground floors. The foundation profits, as we agreed under the old plan, will be twenty-five per cent. to you, seventy-five per cent. to us. After that we will jointly take care of those we let in. Is that all right?"

When Henry H. Rogers sets out to batter down an antagonist he is as fierce as an eagle foraging for her young; victorious, he is as amiable and generous as a salesman who has unloaded on a customer a big cargo of damaged goods. Anything the victim wants he can have by simply naming it.

Fascinated by his mastery of the subject and the obvious completeness of his plans, I could only continue to a.s.sent. He went on:

"There's another section of the subject we must get at now, Lawson, and decide on once and for all. You seem to have made no provisions for the most important end of the whole business, the selling end. What is your idea as to how we shall control the selling end?"

"I had given that little thought, Mr. Rogers," I replied. "I believe that easily takes care of itself. The demand is always greater than the supply. We shall have the metal to sell, the world will be more anxious to buy than we to sell: what more can be necessary?"

"Lawson," said the master brain of the greatest and most successful commercial enterprise in the world, "you know the stock-market, but you don't know the first principle of working to advantage a great business in which you absolutely control the production. The novice a.s.sumes that consumption when it is greater than production makes the price, but this is one of the many time-worn sophistries of business. Do you suppose Standard Oil has built itself up to where it is and made the money it has simply because there were always more lamps than we had oil? If you do, you are in dense ignorance of the foundation requisite for great success. As the world goes to-day, the prices of necessities and luxuries are fixed and should be fixed by the man who controls both the selling and the producing end, for there is a greater profit to be had by supply to regulated demand and demand to regulated supply than from a charge made and regulated by supply and demand. Standard Oil gets to-day and has always since its birth got its enormous profit from its 'regulation' department. Production yields it a proper profit and by supplying legitimate demands it earns other fair profits, but its big gains come from so adjusting one to the other that there can be no such thing as compet.i.tion. Do you see?"

"I agree that is not my end, Mr. Rogers, though in a general way I know about railroad rebates, steams.h.i.+p comebacks, and such things; but I don't see how they are required in our copper business, where the demand is of such proportions that the producer sets the price and makes a profit away above what may be gained in other business enterprises.

Surely no one would ask larger gains than are naturally made out of copper."

"Lawson," responded Mr. Rogers with oracular emphasis, "that is where your business education is flawed. No man has done his business properly who has missed a single dollar he could have secured in the doing of it.

I do not think a fair judge would find me guilty of avarice, either in business or in the manner of my living, and yet I am made fairly miserable if I discover that, in any business I do, I have not extracted every dollar possible. It is one of the first principles Mr. Rockefeller taught me; it is one he has inculcated in every 'Standard Oil' man, until to-day it is a religion with us all."

There you have it--the fundamental precept of the gospel of greed. "What must ye do to be rich? Extract every dollar." How the formula explains "Standard Oil," and how completely it reveals the Rockefeller att.i.tude of mind! Greed crystallized into a practice, dignified into a principle, consecrated into a religion and become a fanaticism. But, mind you, not the dross, but the rule; not profit, but precedent. Money no object, but our laws must be kept. Shylock's G.o.d is "Standard Oil's." The ravenous l.u.s.t for gold that possesses these men is not an appet.i.te, but a fever.

In them it is the craving of the tiger for blood. Gorged and glutted with riches, their millions piled into the hundreds, masters of the revenues of empires, still they are as the daughters of the horse-leech.

Once in Ogreland there was a giant, larger and fiercer than any of his fellows, and it was the habit of this monster to compel the inhabitants of the territory which he ruled to render him every evening a tribute of human hearts. At sundown he would come out of his castle and seat himself in a great chair in front of the huge iron gate, and his va.s.sals would lay at his feet the dripping sacks of hearts for which they had scoured the land. "How many have you brought me to-day, my merry men?"

he would say as he weighed the sacks in his mighty fingers. "Are they large and juicy?" How they came or whence, he cared not at all; the screams of the unfortunates whose hearts were torn from their b.r.e.a.s.t.s he neither heard nor thought of; hearts he must have, and if people were killed, so much the worse for them. But the ogre _ate_ all the human hearts his va.s.sals gathered for him; he lived on them and grew greater and l.u.s.tier, for they were the food his great frame required for its sustenance, and he never had all he really wanted.

"Standard Oil" in our life to-day plays the role of this mythological giant, forcing its tribute of dollars from the people, indifferent to the blood and tears in which they are soaked, oblivious of the cries of the victims from whom they have been dragged; but, unlike the giant, _"Standard Oil" does not need this tribute to sustain its life, nor to make richer its blood_.