This text survives in an untitled 1906 typescript made by Josephine Hobby, now in the Mark Twain Papers. Hobby copied an earlier typescript, now lost, created by Jean Clemens from Isabel Lyon’s notes of Clemens’s original dictation in April 1904, and Clemens briefly revised and corrected Hobby’s copy. It is the only one of the six known Florentine dictations that Clemens did not include in his final text for the autobiography (see the Introduction, note 55).
Clemens’s friendship with multimillionaire Henry Huttleston Rogers (1840–1909), vice-president of Standard Oil, began in the fall of 1893, when Clemens’s publishing firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, was close to financial collapse. Rogers became Clemens’s financial adviser and provided the funds needed to keep the company afloat, at least temporarily. The firm nevertheless declared bankruptcy in April 1894, but not before Rogers arranged for the transfer of all Clemens’s assets, including the copyright on his books, to Olivia Clemens, on the grounds that she was owed more than $60,000 by the bankrupt firm.
Clemens created the dictation at a time when Olivia was quite ill and Rogers had just recently been very publicly sued for several million dollars by the Bay State Gas Company. After Rogers’s death Clemens wrote, “I am grateful to his memory for many a kindness and many a good service he did me, but gratefulest of all for the saving of my copyrights; a service which saved me and my family from want, and assured us permanent comfort and prosperity” (SLC 1909c; see also AD, 26 May 1906; HHR, 10–26, 42–43; “Mark Twain’s Company in Trouble,” New York Times, 19 Apr 1894, 9).
Paine published the dictation under the title he gave it, “Henry H. Rogers,” but without the article from the Boston Sunday Post that Clemens instructed be reproduced at the end, and he also joined it with the later manuscript about Rogers (SLC 1909b; MTA , 1:250–56). Neider declined to include any part of this text.
1893–1904 Ⓐapparatus note
Florence. Spring of 1904. (April.)Ⓐapparatus note
Mr. Rogers has been visiting the witness stand periodically in Boston for more than a year now. For eleven years he has been my closest and most valuable friend. His wisdom and steadfastness saved my copyrights from being swallowed up in the wreck and ruin of Charles L. Webster and Co., and his commercial wisdom has protected my pocket ever since in those lucid intervals wherein I have been willing to listen to his counsels and abide by his advice—a thing which I do half the time and half the time I don’t.
He is four years my junior; he is young in spirit, and in looks, complexion and bearing, easy and graceful in his movements, kind-hearted, attractive, winning, a natural gentleman, the best bred gentleman I have met on either side of the ocean in any rank of life from the Kaiser of Germany down to the boot-black. He is affectionate, endowed with a fine qualityⒶapparatus note of humor, and with his intimates he is a charming comrade. I am his principal intimate and that is my idea of him. His mind is a bewildering spectacle to me when I see it dealing with vast business complexities like the affairs of the prodigious Standard Oil Trust, the United States Steel and the rest of the huge financial combinations of our time—for he and his millions are in them all, and his brain is a very large part of the machinery which keeps them alive and goingⒺexplanatory note. Many [begin page 193] a time in the past eleven years my small and troublesome affairs have forced me to spend days and weeks of waiting-time down in the city of New York, and my waiting-refuge has been his private office in the Standard Oil Building, stretched out on a sofa behind his chair, observing his processes, smoking, reading, listening to his reasonings with the captains of industry and intruding advice where it was not invited, not desired and in no instance adopted so far as I remember. A patient man, I can say that for him.
This private office was a spacious high-ceiled chamber on the eleventh floor of the Standard Oil Building, with large windows which looked out upon the moving life of the river with the Colossus of Liberty enlightening the world holding up her torch in the distance. When I was not there it was a solitude, since in those intervals no one occupied the place except Mr. Rogers and his brilliant private secretary, Miss KatharineⒶapparatus note I. Harrison, who he once called in on an emergency thirteen or fourteen years ago from among the seven hundred and fifty clerks laboring for the Standard Oil in the building. She was nineteen or twenty years old then and did stenographic work and typewriting at the wage of that day which was fifteen or twenty dollars a week. He has a sharp eye for capacity and after trying Miss Harrison for a week he promoted her to the post of chief of his private secretaries and raised her wages. She has held the post ever since; she has seen the building double its size and increase its clerical servants to fifteen hundred and her own salary climb to ten thousand dollars a year. She is the only private secretary who sits in the sanctum, the others are in the next room and come at the bell call. Miss Harrison is alert, refined, well read in the good literature of the day, is fond of paintings and buys them, she is a cyclopedia in whose head is written down the multitudinous details of Mr. Rogers’s business, order and system are a native gift with her, Mr. Rogers refers to her as he would to a book and she responds with the desired information with a book’s confidence and accuracy. Several times I have heard Mr. Rogers say that she is quite able to conduct his affairs, substantially, without his help.
Necessarily Mr. Rogers’s pecuniary aid was sought by his full share of men and women without capital who had ideas for sale—ideas worth millions if their exploitation could be put in charge of the right man. Mr. Rogers’s share of these opportunities was so large that if he had received and conversed with all his applicants of that order he might have made many millions per hour it is true but he would not have had half an hour left in the day for his own business. He could not see all of these people, therefore he saw none of them, for he was a fair and just man. For his protection, his office was a kind of fortress with outworks, these outworks being several communicating rooms into which no one could get access without first passing through an outwork where several young colored men stood guard and carried in the cards and requests and brought back the regrets. Three of the communicating rooms were for consultations, and they were seldom unoccupied. Men sat in them waiting—men who were there by appointment—appointments not loosely specified but specified by the minute hand of the clock. These rooms had ground glass doors, and their privacy was in other ways protected and secured. Mr. Rogers consulted with a good many men in those rooms in the course of his day’s work of six hours; and whether the matter in hand was small and simple or great and complicated it was discussed and despatched with marvelousⒶapparatus note celerity. Every day these consultations supplied a plenty of vexations and exasperations for Mr. Rogers—I know this [begin page 194] quite well—but if ever they found revealment in his face or manner it could have been for only a moment or two for the signs were gone when he re-entered his private office and he was always his brisk and cheerful self again and ready to be chaffed and joked, and reply in kind. His spirit was often heavily burdened, necessarily, but it cast no shadow, and those about him sat always in the sunshine.
Sometimes the value of his securities went down by the million day after day, sometimes they went up as fast, but no matter which it was the face and bearing exhibited by him were only proper to a rising market. Several times every day Miss Harrison had to act in a diplomatic capacity. Men called whose position in the world was such that they could not be dismissed with the formula “engaged” along with Mr. Rogers’s regrets, and to these Miss Harrison went out and explained, pleasantly and tactfully, and sent them away comfortable. Mr. Rogers transacted a vast amount of business during his six hours daily, but there always seemed time enough in the six hours for it.
That Boston Gas lawsuit came on at a bad time for Mr. Rogers, for his health was poor and remained so during several months. Every now and then he had to stay in his country house at Fairhaven, Mass.,Ⓐapparatus note a week or two at a time, leaving his business in Miss Harrison’s hands and conferring with her once or twice daily by long distance telephone. To prepare himself for the witness stand was not an easy thing, but the materials for it were to be had, for Mr. Rogers never destroyed a piece of paper that had writing on it and as he was a methodical man he had ways of tracing out any paper he needed no matter how old it might be. The papers needed in the gas suit, wherein Mr. Rogers was sued for several millions of dollarsⒺexplanatory note,Ⓐapparatus note went back in date a good many years and were numberable by the hundreds; but Miss Harrison ferreted them all out from the stacks and bales of documents in the Standard Oil vaults and caused them to be listed and annotated by the other secretaries. This work cost weeks of constant labor, but it left Mr. Rogers in shape to establish for himself an unsurpassable reputation as a witness.
I wish to make a momentary digression here and call up an illustration of what I have been saying about Mr. Rogers’s habits in the matter of order and system. When he was a young man of twenty-four out in the oil regions of Pennsylvania and straitenedⒶapparatus note in means he had some business relations with another young man; time went on, they separated and lost sight of each other. After a lapse of twenty years this man’s card came in one day, and Mr. Rogers had him brought into the private office. The man showed age, his clothes showed that he was not prosperous, and his speech and manner indicated that hard luck had soured him toward the world and the Fates. He brought a bill against Mr. Rogers, oral in form,Ⓐapparatus note for fifteen hundred dollars—a bill thirty years old. Mr. Rogers drew the check and gave it to him, saying he could not allow him to lose it though he almost deserved to lose it for risking the claim thirty years without presenting it. When he was gone Mr. Rogers said,Ⓐapparatus note
“My memory is better than his; I paid the money at the time; knowing this, I know I took a receipt although I do not remember that detail. To satisfy myself that I have not been careless, I will have that receipt searched out.”
It took a day or two, but it was found, and I saw it, then it was sent back to its place again amongst the archives.
Here follows that Boston sketchⒺexplanatory note.
[begin page 195]
PEN PICTURES OF THE BIG STANDARD OIL
MILLIONAIRE,
H. H. ROGERS, AS HE APPEARED
DURING THE PRESENT GAS HEARING
Boston has had the unique experience of having on the witness stand in court one of the wealthiest and brainiest men in this country, a man in the charmed inner circle of the very inner circle of the little ring of financial giants that make up the most powerful aggregation of wealth in this country. It has seen him for four days probed with an incessant volley of questions by one of the ablest lawyers in the Commonwealth and it saw him step off the witness stand at the end as calm and serene and unruffled, and fresh and vigorous, as though he were two score of years younger than he is, and as though he had just finished a pleasure trip on his yacht, instead of having passed through what to most men would be an extremely trying ordeal.
And for verbal fencing, Henry H. Rogers showed that he, by replies that were as quick as a flash and as impenetrable as adamant, isⒶapparatus note entitledⒶapparatus note to wear a crown of superiority over any witness examined in Massachusetts for many a day.
When he had finished the court had gleaned precious little about the case beyond what it had already learned from Mr. WinsorⒺexplanatory note, except for Mr. Rogers’ version of the famous telephone conversation with Mr. LawsonⒺexplanatory note, and that certainly is interesting, in view of the fact that Mr. Lawson’s understanding seems to have been quite different from Mr. Rogers’, this difference apparentlyⒶapparatus note throwing a sidelight upon the present relations between the two men that isⒶapparatus note interesting, to say the least.
It is reported that Mr. Whipple, keen as he is, unrelenting in his pursuit of a fact, acknowledges that Mr. Rogers was the best fencer he ever met in his legal career. That he was enough for Mr. WhippleⒺexplanatory note, sometimes a little too much, was the general opinion of those who saw the two cross swords.
Mr. Rogers was ill soon after he came to Boston. Our east wind, or the smell of escaping gas with the lid partially off, or something else, was too much for him, and he took to his humble bed in Boston’s Waldorf-Astoria, or the nearest thing to it that the Hub possesses. There were some people who thought that meant that he was going to dodge, that he would be too ill to testify and leave Boston in the lurch, just as a famous operatic star or an actress sometimes does. But the people who knew him said: “No, Mr. Rogers is no dodger; he is a fighter in the heavyweightⒶapparatus note championship class, and he will see it through.” And he did.
One afternoon Mr. Winsor, after some 10 trying days on the witness stand, answered his last question, smiled his last smile to the court and spectators and stepped down.
The next morning a few “supes” and players of minor parts came on and did their little turn. Then a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman, one bearing the mark of a leader among men, took the centre of the stage, the witness box. For the first time the crowd in the court room got a good look at the man of many millions as Mr. Rogers faced the questioning counsel.
The court gave permission to the witness to sit while he gave his evidence, in consideration of his recent illness.
Mr. Rogers is all that his pictures represent him to be, and much, very much, more. The first thing that almost anyone would notice is his head, a literal “dome of thought,”Ⓐapparatus note large, finely shaped, extraordinarily high above the line of the eyes, rounded and fully developed in the back, the head of a man with tremendous capacity for thought, a strong, forceful head, that of a man capable of planning and of executing his plans, distinctly the head of a man of affairs, of tremendous affairs.
[begin page 196] The head might attract more attention than the face, although the latter is clearly that of a man of high standing among men, clear cut, almost ascetic in some of its lines, aggressive as to the chin, firm as to the mouth, keen as to the eyes.
The gray, well-trimmed mustache, the alert, vigorous, trim, well kept, well groomed, well set up figure, impart a military air that fits perfectly upon this man of power.
Mr. Whipple is ready to begin his bombardment of questions. Mr. Rogers sits at ease, his legs crossed, his arms upon the rails at the side of the witness box, his head thrown up and back, his eyes inscrutable, his whole demeanor that of waiting on the defence. He doesn’t pose at all, apparently. Many men do in similar positions. Their whole attitude is one of consciousness of being looked at and of trying to look as impressive as possible. But Mr. Rogers isn’t one of that sort. His attitudes fit him as well as the clothes he wears, and that is to perfection.
Mr. Whipple asks the customary questions as to name, residence, etc. Then as to occupation and as to this Mr. Rogers gives some inkling as to his baffling course as a witness. He admitted that he had been in the petroleum business for 40 years, and said: “I am trying to think if I have been in the gas business.” Everybody laughs. Evidently Mr. Rogers is going to be a very amusing witness, at times. Even Mr. Whipple, who can take a joke, even if it is on himself, smiles.
And this smile of Mr. Rogers is worth seeing. It isn’t any little, skimpy, cold, selfish, calculating smile, but the real, genuine, simon-pure article. It makes one think that Mr. Rogers, to those who have the privilege of knowing him well, might be a very pleasant, even a jolly, companion. Shakspere says one may smile and smile and be a villainⒺexplanatory note, but it’s hard to believe it if he smiles just as Mr. Rogers does. It isn’t any smile that won’t come off, however, for the next instant it has vanished and the keen, alert, waiting look has taken its place.
During the first day Mr. Rogers smiled quite often as he deftly parried his opponent’s thrusts, but towards the end of that day, Mr. Whipple, who smiles the hardest when he is about to do his worst, got in a pretty good blow and Mr. Rogers put on a serious and a rather annoyed look. Mr. Whipple wanted Mr. Rogers to produce a certain private correspondence book, and Mr. Rogers objected to doing this. Just as matters began to wax rather warm the judge poured oil on the troubled waters by adjourning court.
The next morning Mr. Rogers, urbane and pleasant, produced the book. That was Friday, and court adjourned to Monday to give Mr. Whipple time to look over the book so as to use its contents to the best advantage.
Monday morning the siege of Mr. Rogers’ citadel of knowledge of gas affairs was renewed by Mr. Whipple and a full day was put in at questions and answers. Whether the court was enlightened much by the day’s developments is not to be stated, but it is pretty certain that the public wasn’t. The way Mr. Rogers parried questions that he didn’t want to answer was well worth listening to. Here is a sample of it.
Q. Were your relations with Mr. AddicksⒺexplanatory note unfriendly in 1901? A. I cannot answer as to that.
Q. Well, as to 1902? A. Oh, we had our differences.
Tuesday was an unusually fruitful day as to interesting topics, at least.
Time and again when Mr. Whipple asked questions as to points on which Mr. Rogers’ recollection was a bit hazy, the witness would refer counsel to his books and papers and memoranda, saying that if anything could be found in them bearing upon the matter at hand, he would be willing and even glad to have it produced.
There were several smiles by the witness, the audience and even the court, during this day. At one time Mr. Rogers smiled at some inward recollection aroused by the reading [begin page 197] of a personal note to him from Mr. Winsor, following a trip the latter had had as Mr. Rogers’ guest on the millionaire’s yacht. This seemed to annoy Mr. Whipple. He walked up close to the witness and fired the question at short range, with briar points in his tone: “Why do you smile, Mr. Rogers?” “I smile because it is natural for me to smile,” said Mr. Rogers, in his very pleasantest, most affable way. Talk about a soft answer turning away wrath! Mr. Rogers is a past master of that little trick all right.
Tuesday was the day Mr. Rogers told of the telephone conversation with Mr. Lawson, and, in view of Mr. Lawson’s version Friday last of the same conversation, Mr. Rogers’ statement is well worth repeating:
“I called up Mr. Lawson on the telephone and asked him how he felt about this reorganization of the New England Gas and Coke Company. He said he felt very unpleasantly. I asked him how, and he recited some private grievances.”
Mr. Whipple—State what they were.
Mr. Rogers—He said, “You know how I feel towards Mr. WhitneyⒺexplanatory note and those other people down there, who interfered with me in reference to the New York Yacht Club matterⒺexplanatory note. If I were able I’d rather lose $1,000,000 than make any compromise with them.” I told him if he felt in that frame of mind and preferred it to business it was one thing. He asked me my judgment, and I told him that I thought it would be a wise thing for him to participate in the reorganization.
He said: “Well, that’s the way I feel about it, but I am willing to be influenced by you, and take your advice in the matter.” I said, “It is not for me to advise, it is for you to determine.”
He made some few remarks which I cannot recall, and finally said, “Well, what can I get?” I said: “I don’t know. What do you want?” He said: “I think I ought to have 15 or 20 per cent out of the profits of the reorganization.” I said: “That’s pretty steep, considering that you are not to do much.”
He said: “Well, do the best you can. I am willing to leave it to you.”
I went back and reported to Mr. Winsor that I thought Mr. Lawson would be glad to have an interest in the reorganization.
Mr. Winsor asked: “What interest does he want?” I said I thought he would like to have 15 or 20 per cent. Mr. Winsor said: “I think that is pretty steep for not doing very much.” “Well,” I said, “maybe it is a little too much,” and it was finally settled that Mr. Lawson was to have 10 per cent for the reorganization and any profits that came from his own securities. Mr. Winsor said it was all right, and we took a piece of paper out of my desk and he wrote the memorandum and I initialed it, giving the substance of the conversation with Mr. Lawson.
Next morning I told Mr. Lawson over the telephone of the arrangement, and he said it was all right.
Another time that Mr. Rogers smiled, and caused everybody within hearing to smile, too, was when he was telling on Thursday, his last day on the stand, and near the close of his evidence, of his “scolding” Mr. Addicks.
“Perhaps my words were somewhat emphatic,” Mr. Rogers confessed to Mr. Whipple in a burst of confidence.
Q. Let us see what you do say when you get emphatic with J. Edward Addicks and take him to task? A. Well, in the interest of courtesy, and having a little modesty yet, I do not think I want to go into it further.
Q. Did you use words to Mr. Addicks that you do not care to repeat here? A. I must confess that at the time I was very positive. (Laughter.) In substance I said that his letters or that of his man (Senator AlleeⒺexplanatory note) were outrageous, and I wanted to know what he meant [begin page 198] by having “his man” send them to me. He said he knew nothing about them, and I think that is all there was about the case.
Q. Did you threaten Mr. Addicks? A. Oh, no; I never threaten anybody. (Laughter.)
Q. But you scolded him? A. We just had a little talk. It seems that sometimes I am not half as furious as I think I am. (Laughter.)
Then Mr. Rogers smiled, not a grim smile, either, but a sort of a happy, reminiscent smile, like that of a 10-year-old boy who remembers an extra piece of mince pie.
Soon after that Mr. Rogers stepped off the stand for good, bowed pleasantly to the newspaper men to whom he hardly ever failed to speak as he passed them, and left the courtroom.
He certainly made one of the most entertaining witnesses Boston has heard in a long time. We shall be pleased to see you in a similar capacity again, Mr. Rogers.
HEATH.
Standard Oil Trust . . . keeps them alive and going] From a small beginning as an oil investor, Rogers had advanced to a position of immense power and wealth. In 1890 he became a vice-president and a director of the Standard Oil Company, and his financial interests extended to natural gas, copper, steel, banking, and railroads. Although generous and amiable with his friends, he earned the sobriquet “hell hound” for his ruthless (and, by more rigorous standards, unethical) business practices ( HHR, 2–7).
gas suit, wherein Mr. Rogers was sued for several millions of dollars] The lawsuit stemmed from a war for control of gas distribution in Boston that began in 1894. The principal combatants were Rogers, of Standard Oil, and J. Edward Addicks, of the Bay State Gas Company of Delaware (see the note at 196.40). In 1896 the Standard Oil interest won control over all the Boston gas companies, and Addicks abandoned the competition. In the ensuing years, however, a number of disputes developed over control of the various companies and the price of stocks traded in the consolidation transactions. The plaintiff in the lawsuit, filed in 1903, was the Bay State Gas Company. Among the defendants were the Massachusetts Gas Companies, a trust formed in 1902 that now controlled the industry in Boston; Kidder, Peabody and Company, the investment banking firm that handled the stock sales; and Henry H. Rogers. The plaintiff alleged that in 1902 some of the stocks were sold at artificially low prices, defrauding the Delaware Company and forcing it into a “fictitious default” (“Industrial Affairs,” Wall Street Journal, 17 June 1903, 5). One of the disputed transactions—the 1896 sale of his Brookline Gas Company—earned Rogers a $3 million profit, money that should have gone to investors. The case was not resolved until 1907, when Rogers agreed to return half of the $3 million ( HHR, 76 n. 1, 306 n. 3; New York Times: “Standard Oil in Control,” 1 Nov 1896, 6; “Bay State Gas War Ended,” 21 Jan 1898, 1; “Decision on Gas Merger,” 13 Dec 1903, 17; “Rogers a Defendant in Boston Gas Suit,” 3 Apr 1904, FS2; Chicago Tribune: “Gas Suit for $3,000,000,” 16 Apr 1904, 6; “Rogers to Share Gas Deal Profits,” 1 Feb 1907, 2).
Here follows that Boston sketch] The article that follows, a “pen picture” of Rogers as a witness in the gas lawsuit, appeared in the Boston Sunday Post of 27 March 1904. Katharine Harrison, Rogers’s secretary, forwarded Clemens a clipping of the sketch, which he acknowledged in a letter to Rogers of 12 April 1904:
The Boston sketch has just arrived & I thank that ten-thousand-dollar secretary of yours for sending it: the one I have read so much about, recently as being as unpumpable as the Sphynx, & the only secretary of her sex that either earns that salary or gets it. That sketch is fine, superfine, gilt-edged; you will live one while before you see it bettered. It is a portrait to the life—in it I see you & I hear you, the same as if I were present; & by help of its vivid suggestiveness my fancy can fill in a lot of things the writer had to leave out for lack of room. (Salm, in HHR, 562)
Mr. Winsor] Robert Winsor (1858–1930), a prominent financier, was a partner in the investment banking firm of Kidder, Peabody and Company (“Robert Winsor Dies,” New York Times, 8 Jan 1930, 25).
famous telephone conversation with Mr. Lawson] Wealthy businessman and stockbroker Thomas W. Lawson (1857–1925) had become an active player in the gas company maneuvers in 1895. In the late 1890s he was the chief promoter and stockbroker in the consolidation of mining properties to form the Amalgamated Copper Company, which made millions for himself, Rogers, and William Rockefeller, but brought financial ruin to many investors. In 1902 he was involved in the transactions that led to the gas lawsuit. He testified that Rogers had offered him $1 million to withdraw his opposition to the reorganization of the New England Gas and Coke Company, a supplier whose indebtedness had forced it into receivership (see the note at 197.14). Rogers denied the charge, offering a different version of a telephone conversation that took place on 8 March 1902. Rogers’s “foul act of perjury,” as Lawson called it, ended their association, and in July 1904 Lawson began a series of articles in Everybody’s Magazine, exposing the rapacious and unethical business machinations of the financial world in general, and Addicks, Standard Oil, and Rogers in particular. In 1905 the articles were collected in a book: Frenzied Finance: The Crime of Amalgamated (Lawson 1905, 2–4, 23–31, 117, 123, 343–45; Adams 1903, 270–71; “Massachusetts Gas Trial,” Wall Street Journal, 26 Mar 1904, 5; New York Times: “Rogers Denies He Got Lawson Million,” 5 Apr 1904, 1; “Calls Rogers Bad Trustee,” 14 Apr 1904, 5).
Mr. Whipple] Sherman L. Whipple (1862–1930), the attorney for the plaintiff, was a graduate of Yale Law School and well known for his skill at examining witnesses (“Bay State Gas Hearing,” Washington Post, 3 Oct 1903, 1).
Shakspere says one may smile and smile and be a villain] “My tables! Meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” (Hamlet, act 1, scene 5).
Mr. Addicks] J. Edward Addicks (1841–1919) was an aggressive financier who established the Bay State Gas Company in 1884. After accumulating a fortune from his gas investments, he turned to speculation in copper mining, participating with Lawson and Rogers in promoting the Amalgamated Copper Company (see the note at 195.18–19). Beginning in 1889 he spent seventeen years trying to win a seat in the U.S. Senate, but failed despite spending an estimated $3 million (“J. E. Addicks of Boston Finance Fame Dies at 78,” Chicago Tribune, 8 Aug 1919, 16).
Mr. Whitney] Henry M. Whitney (1839–1923), a Boston “captain of industry,” was largely responsible for the development of the electric streetcar system in the Boston area. In early 1896 he entered the gas business as a new supplier of cheap gas, in competition with the Standard Oil and Addicks interests. His company, the New England Gas and Coke Company, ran into debt in 1902 and was forced to reorganize. Its assets passed to a new trust, the Massachusetts Gas Companies. This trust’s purchase of the stock of the Bay State Company in 1903, allegedly at artificially low prices, was the basis of the current lawsuit (Adams 1903, 259, 266–67, 270–72; Lawson 1905, 134).
those other people . . . Yacht Club matter] In 1901, a boat that Lawson had built expressly to enter the New York Yacht Club Race was disqualified on the grounds that only members of the club were eligible to compete. A club member was quoted as saying Lawson had previously applied for membership and been blackballed; Lawson denied ever having made an application (“A Club of Snobs,” Washington Post, 9 Mar 1901, 6; “Mr. Lawson Will Challenge Any Yacht,” New York Times, 10 Mar 1901, 1).
Senator Allee] James Frank Allee (1857–1938) served as a Republican senator from Delaware from 1903 to 1907.
Source documents.
TS Jean (lost) Typescript made in 1904 by Jean Clemens in Florence from Isabel Lyon’s handwritten record of Clemens’s dictation; now lost.TS Hobby Typescript, leaves numbered E. 1–8, made by Hobby from TS Jean: ‘1893 . . . Boston sketch.’ (192.1–194.42).
Post Clipping from the Boston Sunday Post, 27 March 1904, 23: ‘PEN PICTURES . . . HEATH.’ (195.1–198.13).
TS Hobby was made from an earlier typescript that is now lost, prepared in April 1904 in Florence by Jean Clemens, who transcribed the longhand notes taken by Isabel Lyon from Clemens’s dictation. The clipping of the article about Rogers in the Boston Sunday Post, apparently preserved with the typescript, has the notation ‘E. 10’ at the top, a clear indication that it was the source of the ‘Boston sketch’ that Clemens mentions at the end of TS Hobby. No page numbered E. 9, missing from the pagination sequence, has been found. Paine supplied the title adopted here when he published this dictation in MTA .