Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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There were long days of excitement. Father coming home at night, silent and stern, a sternness even unchanged by his after-dinner cigar, which had come to stand in my mind as the sign of his relaxation after a hard day. He no longer told of the funny things he had seen and heard during the day; he no longer played his jew’s-harp, nor sang to my little sister on the arm of his chair the verses we had all been brought up on:

Augusta, Maine, on the Kennebec River,

Concord, New Hampshire, on the Merrimack, etc.

The commotion spread. The leaders of the New York Petroleum Association left out of the original conspiracy, and in a number of cases (as was soon to be shown) outraged chiefly for that reason, sent a committee to the Oil Region to see what was doing. The committee was joyfully welcomed, partly because its chairman was well known to them all. It was my Rouseville neighbor, Henry H. Rogers.

Mr. Rogers had left the Creek in 1867 and become a partner in the Pratt firm of refiners and exporters of Brooklyn, New York. He and his associates saw as clearly as his old friends in the Oil Region that—let the South Improvement Company succeed in its plan for a monopoly—everybody not in the ring would be forced to go out of business. The New York men seem to have been convinced that the plans for saving themselves which the organized producers and refiners were laying stood a good chance of success, for back in New York Mr. Rogers gave a long interview to the Herald. He did not mince words. Cleveland and Pittsburgh were “straining every nerve to create a monopoly.” They would succeed if their control of the railroads continued. He and his fellows felt as the men in the Oil Region did, that the breaking up of the South Improvement Company was a “necessity for self-existence.” They were as bold in action as in words, for when a little later the president of the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller (to date, the only beneficiary of the South Improvement Company), sought an interview in New York with Mr. Rogers and his committee he was treated cavalierly and according to the newspapers retreated after a brief reception “looking badly crestfallen.”