CHAPTER XXII

ANOTHER TALE OF TWO CITIES

The South is the most American part of America. Close observers note as its especial characteristic the preservation of the original Anglo-Saxon types, which gave this country its first and deepest impress.

The South is not yet so steeped as the North in the commercialism to which it is all of life to buy and sell, and its population, less affected by trade and immigration, remains more nearly American, as the fathers were American, than the parts of the country flooded by the full force of the modern tide. Only in the South is there record all through this history of a man "too prejudiced to buy" from those who claimed the sole right to sell.

The merchants of Columbus, Mississippi, were buying their oil of the southern branch of the combination when they were offered a supply at cheaper prices by an independent refiner. They asked the combination to meet this competition of the market. This was refused. There were eleven firms there which sold oil in connection with other things. The combination "coolly informed us," wrote one of the firms to a journal of the trade, "that we were in their power, and could not buy oil from any one else, and that we should either pay such prices as they demanded or not sell oil. We immediately formed an association among ourselves and ordered from other parties. On receipt of our first car they immediately put the retail price below the cost per car lots, and for some time tried to whip us in that way, as we still declined to handle their oil. They then wrote offering to rebate to several of the larger firms if they would withdraw and leave the smaller ones to fight the battle alone. This proposition we declined, and they again tried the low-price dodge, their agent telling us that they would spend $10,000 to crush us out. This game they have now been trying for three years, and in that time we have not handled one gallon of their oil." As these devices, irresistible in more commercial civilizations, did not fool the brotherhood of Columbus, a special agent was sent to Columbus to carry on the war.

"You can tell the Columbus merchants if this does not succeed we will have it out on other lines," the agent was instructed, in the strain of the letter to the merchant of Nashville.[511] "The battle has not fairly opened yet; sharpen up your sword, we mean war to the knife." And again: "We want Columbus squelched," was the word sent the agent from the headquarters at Louisville.

He was ordered to start a grocery store in Columbus, to compete in their entire business with the "black-mailers." While the fight was on, and it was still hoped to conquer Columbus, the following was kept prominently before the people in the daily papers:

"We desire to state that we did not establish an agency in Columbus to force the wholesale grocers to handle our oil."

But seven years later the general in command of this department told Congress it was his practice to fight in that way. "Almost invariably I did that always."[512]

"To threaten the people elsewhere with Columbus," the agent at Columbus was told, "will make them scat, as it were, and take our oil at any price." But the people of Columbus did not "scat." The new store had a complete stock of groceries. Prices on everything, including oil, were put "down to the bone." But one essential feature of the enterprise all the ingenuity and power of the invader could not furnish--customers. Goods were advertised at cost; alluring signs were hung out with daily variations; but the people would not buy. A few citizens who bought at the beginning, without understanding the plan of campaign, came out in the newspapers with cards of apology, and pledges that they would not repeat the mistake. Local bankers refused to honor the drafts of the enemy, threw out its accounts, and gave notice that they would advance no money to persons who bought at its store. The public opinion of Columbus so bitterly resented the attack upon the livelihood of its merchants, because they had dared to buy where they thought best, and so clearly saw that the subjugation of the merchants would be but the preliminary of a conquest of themselves, that any one seen within the doors of the odious store fell into instant and deep disgrace. "Their store is regarded as a pest-house," wrote one of the leading business men, "and few respectable people ever darken their doors, their trade being confined mostly to negroes. Their oil trade has dwindled down to almost nothing, and we are selling now to merchants in other towns who heretofore bought exclusively from them."

At the first sign of aggression the merchants had given up competition, which they saw meant only mutual ruin, and had tied themselves together in an association. Now as the struggle widened the people did the same, and found a greater benefit and pleasure in co-operation than in keeping up the delusion of the "higgling of the market" where there was no market. The _Index_, of Columbus, printed an agreement signed by hundreds "of those who will sustain our home merchants in the struggle they are making.... It will receive many more signatures among our citizens.... The people have only to understand to properly decide in this matter between right and wrong."

"You ask if the feeling is bitter against them in our 'community,'" one of the merchants wrote. "I can only liken it to the spirit which prevailed when the people of Boston emptied King George's taxed tea into Boston Harbor."

Attempt was made to intimidate the press. Advertisements were discontinued because the papers supported the cause of the people. "If the agent," said the _Index_, of Columbus, "thought the cash that might be obtained for such advertisements could purchase the silence of this journal when it should speak, or its support in a wrong cause, he reckoned without his host." "The pledge" was signed by practically every man in the place. The country people about Columbus, when they came to town to sell produce and buy supplies, took back with them blanks of the agreement not to buy the obnoxious oil, and circulated them among their neighbors for signature. Agents were sent among these country people to win back their trade, but they could not be moved. The competition was made "war to the knife," and the knife "to the bone." It was a singular sight--this concentration of millions to "kill" these little men in this remote country town in far-off Mississippi. Nothing was too small to do. When one of the Columbus "rebels" bought oats for his trade, a competitive stock of the same kind of oats was hurried into Columbus, and these instructions sent with it: "Put your sign out. Rust-proof oats to arrive at 98 cents to $1 a bushel. This will kill him. The same signs should be posted about meats, sugar, coffee, etc."

The plan of action of the Merchants' Association was simple: they declined to handle the enemy's oil at any price. "Then to have a stock of our own always on hand, ready to sell whenever we could at a profit, and hold in reserve whenever they put prices below cost; and in this way we have made it a losing business to them for over three years, and will continue to do so as long as they remain in our town.... When our association buys a car of oil, each member pays for and takes charge of an equal share, but the oil remains the property of the association; and should any member sell out before the others, he has the right to buy from them at cost, and the next car is not ordered until all are nearly sold out."

It is "our pleasure to make oil cheap"; but a written proposition was made to the merchants that if they would repent and return, the price would be 20 cents a gallon, with a rebate to the loyal dealers. As this oil could be, and was being, laid down in Columbus at 12 cents a gallon, the proposition amounted to a request that the merchants join in imposing a tax on the people of 8 cents a gallon, which must be added to the retail price, and go to swell the profits of the "sympathetical co-operation." "Can any one," said the _Index_, "after knowing these facts, doubt that in a pecuniary point our merchants could have done better by surrendering the principle and joining the ring? But, at the same time, could any reasoning man (even viewing it in the light of policy alone) advise such a course?--one which, if adopted, would only open the door for other monopolies to enter and demand high prices on meat, flour, and the other necessaries of life, until our city becomes the highest market in the land. Let all good citizens, then, unite in a steady effort to resist the yoke which this monopoly is now trying to force upon us, and let us teach them and all others that our people are too loyal to each other and too intelligent to allow themselves to be made the instruments of their own destruction.

"Remember, that should our merchants be forced to yield, the day of low prices will be a short one, and then these strangers, having accomplished their purpose and forced their yoke upon you and us, will return to their homes, and while rioting in the taxes wrung from you, with your own assistance, will laugh at you for allowing yourselves to be so easily duped, and, emboldened by their success in forcing upon you high-priced oil, will soon return to demand high prices on sugar, coffee, and every other article of trade."

The nose for news of the American press scented out the novelty of a whole community acting as one man in successful resistance to those who had till then found nowhere any cohesive brotherliness to make a stand against them. The newspapers of the county took the matter up. It was absolutely the first time any method had been found that could prevail against the tactics of divide and conquer, which had been elsewhere irresistible. Public attention was fascinated by the revelation that a brotherhood to ravage the people turned impotent when the people were roused to meet it with their brotherhood of the commonwealth. There was in the spectacle a moral illumination--the light that never fails. Instead of becoming, as had been planned, a warning to all the people of the dire destruction to be visited upon any who dared to disobey, the encounter between the one-man power of united Columbus and the one-man power of hundreds of millions of dollars became every day more brilliantly a sign in the sky, showing all the people how the invasion of their industrial liberties could be changed into a ruin more complete than the retreat from Moscow. Scores of such assaults on the people had been won before. "What was being done at Columbus," said one of the papers, "is but what they have done before at Aberdeen, and at hundreds of other places North and South."

But as despoilers always have to fear, one defeat may undo a lifetime of conquest. The success of the people of Columbus was teaching the people of the whole country, and of all markets, that their real enemy was not the oil trust, but the lack of trust in each other. The people were learning there was a magic in association more potent than the trick of combinations. The _Index_ proposed to the people of the South to join the citizens of Columbus, and make the fight general. "There is this about it: if there was concentrated action among the smaller cities and towns throughout even this section of the State, we would have no fear of the result. The oil trust may be too strong for a single small locality, but if a combination of a certain number of localities handling oil were effected, they would soon be forced to retire. Such a combination can be and should be brought about at once."

The struggle at Columbus lasted three years. It had seemed unequal enough--a few thousands of dollars against hundreds of millions. But three years of this commercial warfare failed to break the spirit or resources of the brave--and wise because brave--people. The community never broke rank. They laughed when they were tempted with cheap coffee, flour, sugar, to join in the attempt to bankrupt their home merchants. They could see that the gift of forced cheapness, used to destroy natural cheapness, was a Trojan horse bearing within itself the deadliest form of dearness. Defeated, the oil lords gave up the contest, closed their store in Columbus, and left the people of that place free.

"England," says Emerson, "reaches to the Alleghanies; America begins in Ohio." In the Western Reserve of Ohio, hive of abolitionists and Union soldiers, was the same spirit of America which, at Columbus, Mississippi, had defended its market rights as outposts of all other rights. It was only a few years ago discovered that the flames of the "burning springs" of the Caspian Sea, China, and America, whose torches kindled the lamp of history, were beacon-fires uncomprehended by a procession of civilizations, and waiting to light man to the knowledge that the earth beneath him was a city of domes, huge receivers storing up the products of vaster gas-retorts below. Man found that he need not wait for this spirit to come to him out of the "caverns measureless to man." He could go to it, as in oil, and, tapping the great tanks, could lead their flighty contents to homes and mills, to emerge there as light and warmth and power.

Experience in oil had made ready skill and capital to use the new treasure. In a very few years thousands of miles of pipe were laid, and millions of capital invested in the natural-gas business, mainly in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The gas was found in the same general localities as oil, and the methods of procuring and distributing it were similar, and the similarity easily extended to the methods of administering this bounty of nature as "property." Toledo began to be supplied in 1887 with the new fuel through pipe lines by two companies. They obtained their franchises as competitors, but were soon found to be one in ownership, prices, and all details of management. The discovery that the two companies at Toledo were really one, and that one the evil one of the oil trust, aroused the apprehensions of the people, and these were increased by a number of circumstances.

The Toledo companies got from the city as a free gift a franchise worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, on condition that they would supply Toledo before a certain date. But in the midst of the work of laying pipes they suspended operations, and declared that they would do nothing more unless the City Council fixed, at rates dictated by them, the prices the people were to pay. These rates were enough to pay not only a fair dividend, but to return in a few years every dollar of capital invested in lands, pipes, etc. Later they demanded another increase which, according to the sworn statement by their superintendent of the amount of gas supplied daily, would have amounted to $351,362.50 a year. They made the charges regardless of the ordinance, and used delay in furnishing gas as a means to make people willing to pay these illegal rates. Consumers seeking to renew their contracts were informed that the price would be doubled. The companies had assured the people that they should get their heat at half the price of coal; but when the bills were footed up, the gas in many cases cost more than coal. The companies refused to supply fuel to an oil refinery which had been built in Toledo in opposition to the trust refineries. The companies discriminated against some customers, and in favor of others. The power to say which manufacturer should have cheaper fuel than his competitor was a power to enact prosperity or ruin.[513] It was a power to force themselves into control of any business they desired to enter.

Those who controlled these gas companies appeared in the Circuit Court of the city in a proceeding which alone contained warning enough to put any self-governing community on guard. The Court was asked to deny the right of farmers in Wood County to give a way over their lands to the Toledo, Findlay, and Springfield Railway, being built to give the independent oil-refiners and producers of the Ohio oil-field a route to market. The farmers in question had made leases to an oil corporation of the trust, giving only the specific right to bore for and pipe and store oil and gas. The farmers supposed that they had parted only with what they had signed away in the leases. They supposed they still owned their farms. When the new railroad sought the privilege of a right of way the farmers granted it. Suit was at once brought for an injunction to prevent this use of the land. According to the logic of the claim in these cases a farmer who has made such a lease could not build a road across his own farm without permission. "Most certainly not," was the reply made by one of the lawyers to the judge who asked if the farmer could do so.

By occurrences like these an increasing number of influential citizens were convinced that the gas companies would hold a power over the comfort and daily life of the people not wise to surrender entire to any corporation. An agitation was begun for the supply of gas to the people by themselves acting through the municipality. Six thousand citizens sent a petition, in the session of 1887-88, to the Legislature to pass the necessary enabling act. There was a discussion of the project for two years. Public opinion grew more favorable every day. The citizens chartered a special train to carry a delegation to Columbus the day the pipe-line law came before the Senate. The Legislature in 1889 passed the law. It authorized the people of Toledo to issue bonds to the extent of $750,000 to buy gas land and build pipe lines. This legislation was, of course, bitterly opposed by the existing gas companies, and they demanded of the Legislature that before the law became operative it should be ratified by a three-fifths vote of the people. The friends of this scheme of municipal self-help and independence accepted the challenge. In the ensuing campaign the opposition to the people was officered by the president of one of the natural-gas companies, twice Governor of Ohio, afterwards United States Secretary of the Treasury. The natural-gas trustees of the City of Toledo in an official communication said: "There is reason to believe the money of the natural-gas companies was freely spent to defeat it."

The act was ratified April, 1889, by a vote of 7002 for to 4199 against--"a vote," say the trustees, "in which the heavy taxpayers were largely acting with the majority."[514] Organized labor took an enthusiastic part in the work of this election. The Central Labor Union held a special meeting which filled the largest public hall. Men paraded the streets with banners favoring the policy of independence. The Knights of Labor held meetings to discuss the project, and the Central Council, representing all the assemblies in the city, passed unanimously resolutions appealing to all members of the order and all working-men to support no candidate who would not pledge himself to the city pipe line. At a meeting of the glassworkers it was resolved to be "the duty of every working-man to vote 'Yes' for the pipe line next Monday." "Many of us glassworkers," said the resolutions adopted, "have been employed in factories in the Ohio Valley, receiving their natural-gas fuel from a gigantic corporation similar to that which now supplies Toledo. We have seen our employers unfairly dealt with, and arbitrarily treated in the matter of making rates. Some of them were forced to go into the courts, to prevent the extortion of the piratical company who were bent on assessing each citizen and industry at the highest rate possible, irrespective of its effect on the industries or the wages of the employés. Many manufacturers were compelled to move their plants to the cheap gas-fields of Ohio and Indiana. The employés were compelled to break up their homes and emigrate, in order to follow their trade for a livelihood." The question came before the people again the next spring, when both the Republican and Democratic parties by acclamation renominated a natural-gas trustee, whose term was expiring, to succeed himself. At the election the vote was 8958 for, and only 58 against--a practically unanimous indorsement of the project by the people.

Toledo now began to make history. "It is entirely safe to say," a well-known citizen declared in the Toledo _Blade_, "that in the history of this country no other people have been called to the experience which Toledo has been undergoing for the past year. Communities often are agitated and divided on questions of local policy; but no second case will be found in which a people, after settling such questions among themselves according to recognized rules, were confronted with warfare, bitter and persistent, such as this city is now called to meet, and at the hands of a combination wholly of non-residents, without the slightest proper voice in their domestic concerns." In every direct encounter with the "commons" the "lords" had been defeated--in the two years' debate which preceded the first appeal to the Legislature; in the Legislature, where the bill passed the House almost unanimously, and the Senate more than two to one; in the appeal to the voters; before the governor, who had been approached to cripple the enterprise of the municipality by naming unfriendly trustees. The gas companies had tried at each city election, after the Legislature acted in 1889, to seat in the City Council a majority in their interest; but the people, making the city pipe line the issue of the election, gave an overwhelming preponderance of their votes to the men pledged to see it through.

"Strong and subtle opposition"[515] was then brought to bear on the Common Council to prevent it from passing the necessary ordinances; but, in spite of it, both branches of the Council voted them unanimously. A clearer case of the will of the people and of law and order there could not be. A free and intelligent community, in a matter of vital concern to its industrial freedom and business prosperity, after thorough discussion, in which all sides had been freely heard, had by constitutional proceedings decided by an overwhelming majority upon a policy altogether within its legal, moral, and contract rights. The ablest lawyers, writers, and financiers that money could hire had had it under the microscope to find some breach for attack, but had not been able to find a flaw. All was constitutional, legal, proper, and expedient. A glance at the contestants brings out in clear outlines some conditions of our modern development which have come upon us almost unawares. The City of Toledo was a vigorous community of 90,000 people; its opponent was a little group of men; but they controlled in one aggregation not less than $160,000,000, besides large affairs outside of this. The assessed valuations of the property of the people on which Toledo could levy taxation was, in 1889, but $33,200,000. The total income of the municipality was $961,101; that of a single member of the little group opposing them had been acknowledged to be $9,000,000 a year, and was believed by the best informed to be several times as much. This individual income was greater than the product of all the manufactories of the city, and three times greater than the combined wages of the workmen in these establishments. There were several members of the natural-gas syndicate who collected and disbursed every year more than the community. Toledo had about the same population as Kansas in 1856. The slave power of the South that assailed the liberties of the 90,000 in Kansas numbered millions, but the new power in the North, which in a short generation had grown so strong that it did not fear to attack the 90,000 freemen of Toledo, counted only nine names. The people could act only after public deliberation, and through the slow stages of municipal and State procedure. Their antagonist met in secret council, and devised plans executed by a single hand, armed with the aggregated power of hundreds of millions of dollars, and liable, if found illegal or criminal, to only "nominal" punishment, or only 6 cents damages.[516]

At Columbus the struggle was with something very simple but extraordinarily difficult to overcome, as simple things often are--an obstinate, immovable, thoroughly angry public opinion, acting only through private voluntary means, its set will to exchange the fruits of its labor with whom and on what terms it pleased. There was absolutely no leverage to be got to bear upon the people of Columbus except by changing their feelings. Compulsion was out of the question. But at Toledo compulsion was possible. There the people had acted not through unofficial combination as at Columbus, but through the official machinery of the town and State. If the law could be turned against them by able counsel or compliant judges; if any smallest fault, however technical, could be found in the legislation of the State or the city or the practical administration of the official machinery provided for the natural-gas business of the city--if this could be done, the people of Toledo could be compelled, however little their will had changed, to see their enterprise of independence balked; this compulsion could be carried to the use of force if they resisted, and the militia of the State and the regular army could be brought into the conflict.

Such is the prize of power which tempts--more than tempts, drives as by fate--our overgrown wealth to fortify itself by control of judges, governors, presidents, commanders-in-chief--all the agents of the supreme authority and force.

Columbus was so local that its people were sufficient unto themselves. All they had to do was to keep on saying, We will not buy. But Toledo was a citizen of the great world of affairs and finance. It was part of London, New York, Chicago. Much of it was owned as an investment elsewhere. Sensitive nerves connected it with all the markets, especially the greatest of all--the money-market. It sold and bought and borrowed and lent far beyond its own border. What Wall Street gossips said about the people of Columbus would not make a dollar's difference to the whole town in a year, but a whisper started through the offices of the great capitalists in New York and abroad would flash back by wire to Toledo, and go like a quick poison through its industries and credit, private and public.

"Private enterprise" could not afford to let the people of Toledo go forward with their public enterprise. Many millions had been invested in getting control of a business representing $200,000,000. Many towns and cities, as Fostoria, Sandusky, Fremont, Clyde, Bellevue, Norwalk, Perrysburgh, Tiffin, and Detroit, were being supplied with gas at a handsome profit. If Toledo should set a successful example of self-supply, it would find imitators on every side. The essence of "private enterprise" was that the people should get their gas from Captains of Industry, and pay them for their captaincy two or three times the real cost as profit, just as monarchical countries pay kings for kindly supplying the people with the government which really comes from the people. The essence of municipal supply was that the people should supply themselves at cost without profit, and without Captains of Industry, except as the people provided them. Toledo, in fine, proposed to keep step with the modern expansion of self-government, which finds that it can apply principles and methods of democracy to industry. It proposed to add another to many demonstrations already made, noticeably in this very department of gas supply to municipalities, of the truth that the ability to carry on the business of supplying the various wants of mankind is not a sort of divine right vouchsafed from on high to a few specially inspired and gifted priests of commerce, by whose intermediation alone can the mysteries of trade be operated; but, like the ability to govern and be governed, is one of the faculties common to mankind, capable of being administered of, by, and for the people, and not needing to be differentiated as the prerogative of one set of men. The Toledo experiment was another step forward in the world-wide movement for the abolition of millionaires--a movement upon which the millionaires look with unconcealed apprehension for the welfare of their fellow-beings.

Mankind views with equanimity the expulsion of the profit-hunter from the businesses of carrying letters, minting coins, administering justice, maintaining highways, collecting taxes, in which millionaireism has been universally put an end to. It views with hopes of larger results the newer manifestations of the same tendency which in England have abolished millionaireism in telegraphs and parcel express; in Germany and France, Australia, and India have gone a long way towards the abolition of the millionaire in railroads; and in various cities and towns in Europe, America, and Australia have put up local signs, "No millionaires allowed here," by the municipalization of trade in water, gas, electricity, street-railways, baths, laundries, libraries, etc. The trust of millionaires was therefore fighting for a principle, and what will good men not sacrifice to principle!