How Not to Get Rich

by Alan Pell Crawford

  Taking Hall with him, Twain spent eleven days in Chicago, much of the time confined to bed with a nasty flu. He hoped to option some of his typesetter royalties to the Chicago investors, but they weren’t interested. Paige came to call at Twain’s lodgings at the Great Northern Hotel. The meeting was cordial but, it appears, tense. Twain tried to make Paige feel guilty for the interminable delays, and the inventor was “a most daring and majestic liar, absolutely frank in his confessions of misconduct,” shedding “even more tears than usual.” Then Paige turned the tables on his long-suffering benefactor, saying it “broke his heart” when Twain had left for Europe, leaving “him & the machine to fight along the best way they could.”

  Apparently, Paige was still negotiating with the Chicago group, which wanted to build a factory to produce the machine, and the negotiations were taking longer than expected—or at least longer than Twain had hoped. They thought they could have a machine finished by July. “The bloody machine offers but a doubtful outlook,” Twain told Hall after he had returned to Europe in May. They could expect nothing “for a long time to come; for when the ‘three weeks’ are up, there will be three months’ tinkering to follow, I guess. That is unquestionably the boss machine of the world, but it is the toughest one on prophets . . . that has ever seen the light.” All in all, Twain was “disgusted” with the visit.

  “Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms,” he said. “And yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.”

  Paige evidently believed that big money would soon roll in, or at least he liked to talk as if it would, and not just to Twain, either. On June 10, 1892, under the headline “Sadly Blighted Affections,” the New York Times reported that a stage actress named Jesse Hall was suing the inventor for breach of promise to marry. She and Paige had moved in together, but he put off the wedding until his invention’s earnings would begin to arrive. When that happened, he said he would pay her $800,000. (He was worth between $3 and $4 million, according to the newspapers, though this was clearly untrue.) Paige and his fiancée were content with this arrangement, until he caught his intended “flirting with a good-looking clerk” and abruptly called off the nuptials. The plaintiff’s lawyer asked the court to award his client $950,000. How the case was resolved is not known, beyond the obvious fact that the defendant did not have $950,000, and never would. Twain seems not to have known about the lawsuit or said nothing about it if he did. Had he known, it would have provided more fuel for his mounting contempt for Paige.

  BY AUGUST, when Twain returned to the villa in Italy, the situation had not improved. “We are skimming along like paupers, and a day can embarrass us,” Twain told Hall. Charles Langdon, Livy’s brother, informed her that only about $10,000 of her inheritance remained, and as long as the mines were closed, she could expect no more money from the family business. Livy didn’t know how they would get by “unless we sell our house,” which they were determined not to do, since they hoped to move back in when conditions improved. The $10,000, she figured, should get them through another year.

  Meanwhile, Twain counted up his assets, including his stock in Webster & Company and the copyrights to his books, and thought it came to about $250,000. He doesn’t seem to have known what exactly his debts were, but he asked Hall if he thought another publishing company might pay him $200,000 for his debts and for a two-thirds interest in the firm. Twain was still eager to sell his options on the Paige Compositor royalties, but, as should come as no great surprise, no one was interested. What he wanted to hang on to most of all were the royalties on his own books. The fact that he was worried about being able to do so is an indication that he realized he might be forced to sell those as well.

  In short, Twain wanted out—out of the publishing business and out of the typesetting business, too, if he could find a way. “I am terribly tired of business,” Twain told Hall, being “by nature and disposition unfit for it.” He was done with speculation and now wished only to be done with debt. “Get me out of business!”

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  “His Money Is Tainted”

  But Hall could not get Twain “out of business,” and on August 29, 1893, Twain left Italy and again sailed for New York. There he hoped once more to attend to his messy finances and, if possible, find additional investors for both Webster & Company and the Paige Compositor. Twain arrived on September 7, suffering from a bad cold. For “economy’s sake,” he checked into the Lotos Club on Fifth Avenue, “drank almost a whole bottle of whisky,” and went to bed before dark.

  Whiskey enabled him to sleep. Otherwise, Twain continued to pace the floor for hours, trying to figure out just how bad his money problems were and how he might sort them out. The Mount Morris Bank, from which the publishing company and Twain personally had taken loans, was now pressing for immediate repayment of at least $5,000, and Twain had no idea where that money would come from. Even worse, that was only half of the $10,000 that was owed. Livy had budgeted about $5,000 a year for the family to live on, while they carried, by some reckoning, $100,000 in debt. Webster & Company owed them $175,000, and it was failing. Poor Hall, who had stopped drawing a salary, had borrowed $15,000 from family friends.* Twain was terrified that, should the firm go bankrupt, he might lose even the royalties on his past and future books, and “if they go, I am a beggar.” Somehow Livy managed to remain hopeful. “Nothing,” he said, “daunts [Livy] or makes the world look black to her—which is the reason I haven’t drowned myself.”

  The morning after his first night at the Lotos Club, Twain set off for Hartford, where he hoped to find someone to advance him the $5,000 to pay the bank. Two local businessmen turned him down. Livy once again spoke of selling their Hartford home, which Twain refused to do. He had been willing to consider borrowing against it, but one of the businessmen told him he wouldn’t be able to borrow even $3,000 against it, despite the fact that Twain said it was worth $170,000, or $4.5 million in today’s dollars. This was a considerable gain over the home’s appraisal of $66,650 back in 1877, or maybe just an exaggeration.

  Twain also wrote to Susan Crane, Livy’s sister by adoption in Elmira, asking if she and her husband could come up with the $5,000, “telling her I had no shame, for the boat was sinking.” The Cranes scraped together the money, but any relief Twain might have felt was short-lived. There had been a mistake, Hall informed him. It wasn’t $5,000 the bank demanded, but $8,000.

  Back in New York City, Twain “raced around Wall Street,” he told Livy, “assailing banks and brokers—couldn’t get anything.” No one was lending money “at any rate of interest whatever or upon any sort of security, or by anybody.” When he had finished his rounds and come up empty-handed, Twain fell onto his bed at eight. Although ruin seemed inevitable, he was “so physically exhausted that mental misery had no chance & I was asleep in a moment.”

  Within days, Twain was taken in by Clarence Rice, his personal physician, at his home on East 19th Street and Irving Place. Rice was a nose-and-throat specialist to the stars according to Powers, whose A-list patients included Enrico Caruso and Lillian Russell. During their visits, Rice mentioned that he “had ventured to speak to a rich friend of his who was an admirer of mine.” Rice had spoken of Twain’s financial difficulties to this well-to-do gentleman, and a few evenings later—at Rice’s connivance, in all likelihood—Rice and Twain encountered the rich friend in the lobby of the Murray Hill Hotel.

  “I want you to know my friend, Mr. H. H. Rogers,” Rice said. “He is an admirer of your books.”

  Twain saw before him a lean, elegantly dressed man with a white mustache, bushy white eyebrows, and an engaging demeanor.

  “I was one of your early admirers,” Rogers said. “I heard you lecture a long time ago on the Sandwich Islands. I was interested in the subject in those days, and I heard that Mark Twain was a man who had been there. I didn’t suppose I’d have a
ny difficulty getting a seat, but I did; the house was jammed. When I came away I realized that Mark Twain was a great man, and I have read everything of yours since that I could get hold of.”

  When the three men took a seat, Twain told stories. Rogers listened and laughed. As they rose to leave, Rogers suggested that Twain should someday find the time to visit him at his home. He would like Mrs. Rogers to meet him.

  Before the three parted, Dr. Rice spoke again.

  “Mr. Rogers,” he said, “I wish you would look into [Twain’s] finances a little. I am afraid they are a good deal confused.”

  Rogers said he would be happy to do so, and they went their separate ways.

  HENRY HUTTLESTON (H. H.) ROGERS entered this world in 1840, during the best possible time in human history to get yourself born, according to Gladwell’s Outliers, if your intention was to get rich. As a young man in his native Massachusetts, Rogers had clerked in a grocery store, sold newspapers, and served as a baggage master on the railroads. Somehow managing to save $600 by his early twenties, he set off for the newly opened oil fields of Pennsylvania, where he established a small refinery. By 1862, he had gone to work for Charles Pratt & Company, which was based in Brooklyn, where it controlled the distribution of oil throughout the New York City metropolitan area. By 1874, Rogers was working for John D. Rockefeller at the Standard Oil conglomerate, the largest refinery in the world. Rogers rose to vice president and director, overseeing the company’s far-flung interests from his office on the eleventh floor of the Standard Oil building at 26 Broadway in ­Manhattan.

  Along the way, Rogers had also developed a reputation as one of the most ruthless tycoons of his day. H. H., critics said, stood for Hell Hound. In 1894, when the conglomerate he and William Rockefeller had formed, the Consolidated Gas Company (later known as Con Ed), became the subject of congressional hearings, Rogers proved “an irascible and contemptuous witness,” according to New York World. His “share in the unfair and abhorrent methods of Standard Oil was so considerable,” the New York Times charged, “that he ought therefore to have suffered from increasing torments of remorse, and undoubtedly he did not so suffer.” Rogers, the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell reported, was “as fine a pirate as ever flew his flag on Wall Street.” Lewis Leary, the sympathetic editor of the Twain-Rogers correspondence, reports that the tycoon was instrumental in the formation of Amalgamated Copper, the “giant trust built on the corpses of competitors from Boston to Montana, with an initial capital investment of $75,000,000, more than half of which was said to have been in watered stock.”

  In time, Rogers held corporate positions in copper, gas, steel, electricity, banking, insurance, and railroads. At least he showed no partiality, New York World conceded, “grinding up the poor and rich in his money making schemes.” The New York Times said Rogers “was of that class” that made his great fortune “colossal by not giving the other fellow a fair chance.” Commenting on his uncanny ability to escape prosecution for his business methods, the Wall Street Journal called him “the Artful Dodger.”

  At his peak, Rogers would have been worth $40.9 billion in today’s money, outranking even his contemporary J. P. Morgan. In the book The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates—A Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present, Rogers was ranked #22, ahead of Morgan at #23, Bill Gates at #31, and Warren Buffett at #39.

  When a friend of Twain’s learned that Rogers had taken an interest in his finances, he was appalled. “It’s a pity his money is tainted,” the friend pointed out.

  “It is twice tainted,” Twain conceded. “It tain’t yours, and it tain’t mine.”

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  “Mark Twain Loses All”

  The day after Twain and Rogers met, Hall set off for the Standard Oil building with the Webster & Company financial books. A series of meetings—often informal, over billiards—followed. Rogers asked questions, and Twain and sometimes Hall explained the situation as best they could. As Rogers saw it, there were two major and interconnected challenges: There was the publishing company, of course, and there was also the matter of the Paige Compositor. Funds from the publishing company’s earnings had been used to keep the compositor company operating, as Paige continued to get the machine ready for use. Rogers approached the complexities of the two businesses with calm and reasoned objectivity, which Twain could not do.

  Almost instantly, Twain sensed that Rogers’s critics might have judged the man too harshly. Although he could be merciless in business, Rogers was also a gregarious fellow, quick-witted and amusing, broad in his interests and enthusiasms, a raconteur with gifts not unlike Twain’s own, and another self-made man who enjoyed poker, cigars, billiards, and swearing. Remarkably loyal and capable of great generosity, Rogers was a friend and benefactor of both Helen Keller and Booker T. Washington.

  Before long, Twain had become a regular visitor to his new friend’s office, with its commanding view of the Statue of Liberty. Rogers’s inner sanctum was a kind of fortress, Twain found, at the entrance to which sat “men who were there by appointment—appointments not loosely specified, but specified by the minute hand of the clock.” Twain loved spending time at Rogers’s office, “stretched out on a sofa behind his chair, observing his processes,” and admiring the unruffled efficiency of his dealings with other captains of industry. Twain was also immensely reassured by the fact that such a capable hand as Rogers would look into his financial troubles and see what, if anything, could be done. Whereas Twain was impulsive and often scatterbrained, Rogers was focused and methodical—“serene, patient, all-enduring,” in Twain’s words—impressive in the aplomb with which he handled himself.

  Twain was also deeply moved by the fact that Rogers was taking any interest at all in another man’s troubles. His “time is worth several thousand dollars an hour,” but he was not charging his new friend, Mark Twain, a cent. “The only man I care for in the world; the only man I would give a damn for; the only man who is lavishing his sweat and blood to save me & mine” he told Livy, was a notorious robber baron.

  Over a period of weeks, Rogers came up with a financial plan, both for the publishing company and for the compositor venture. He told Twain to “stop walkingthe floor . . . You may have to go walking again, but don’t begin till I tell you my scheme has failed.” The scheme involved rescuing both enterprises, while reducing costs and maximizing profits down the road. Twain was hoping Rogers would invest in the Paige Compositor himself, and under the plans Rogers had cooked up, that was a definite possibility. Impressed by the machine, Rogers was keenly aware that whatever technology the newspaper industry adopted, those who held stock in the new technology would make a lot of money. And to that end, Rogers was willing to consider using his own money to bail out both of Twain’s financial operations.

  Strengthening their own positions—Rogers’s as well as Twain’s—would require elbowing out all the other investors in the Paige Compositor, the largest being Paige himself. They would need to get rid of him and restructure the company with themselves as sole owners. So, in December 1893, Rogers met with all the investors (except Paige, who was in Chicago) at the Murray Hill Hotel. There he persuaded them that the value of the entire company was not several million dollars, as they supposed, but $276,000. Twain told Livy it was “better than a circus . . . to see Mr. Rogers apply his probe & his bung-starter & remorselessly let the wind & the water” from the company’s so-called assets. He let the investors know he was interested in buying their shares in a company that was obviously not worth what they had believed, but that he was also willing to walk if they did not sell at his price. Rogers “sweetly and courteously . . . stripped away all the rubbish,” Twain told Livy, and then offered to buy their shares at 20 cents on the dollar. He gave them the rest of the day and night to consider what they might do, but his patience was not unlimited. It was all a bluff—Rogers told Twain he had no intention of walking away—but it worked. Fearing they would lose
everything if they didn’t accept Rogers’s offer, all the investors sold.

  Twain and Rogers now controlled all the stock, except for that portion owned by Paige. They wanted him out of the way, too, except as an employee. Eager “to hang this last remaining scalp on our belt,” as Twain said, they took the train to Chicago to meet with the inventor and persuade him to “forsake all previous claims” and accept the terms of the company they were now forming, with themselves as principal stockholders. Meeting with Paige and his lawyer, they told him he was “bankrupt, deep in debt, without credit & without a friend or a well-wisher in the world.” Under the circumstances, he should accept their terms. But Paige held out, demanding a payout, a salary, and an assurance that his debts to Pratt & Whitney would be assumed by the new company. Without reaching an agreement, Twain and Rogers took the next train back to New York, knowing, as Rogers told Twain, that Paige “is the only one who can’t wait.” On January 15, 1894, they got word that Paige had agreed to the new terms, giving Twain and his superbly positioned benefactor sole control of the new typesetting technology and its future. Twain was ecstatic.

  I came up to my room and began to undress, and then, suddenly and without warning, the realization burst upon me and overwhelmed me: I and mine, who were paupers an hour ago are rich now and our troubles are over! I walked the floor for half an hour in a storm of excitement. Once or twice I wanted to sit down and cry. You see, the intense strain of three months and a half of daily and nightly work and thought and hope and fear had been suddenly taken away, and the sense of release and delivery and joy knew no way to express itself.