retail store in America that does not show the influence of
A. T. Stewart and his legitimate successor, John Wanamaker.

H. H. ROGERS

Success is rooted in reciprocity. He who does not benefit the world
is headed for bankruptcy on the high-speed clutch.

_H. H. Rogers_

[Illustration: H. H. ROGERS]

One proof that H. H. Rogers was a personage and not a person lies in the
fact that he was seldom mentioned in moderate language. Lawson passed
him a few choice tributes; Ida Tarbell tarred him with her literary
stick; Upton Sinclair declared he was this and that; Professor Herren
averred that he bore no likeness whatever to Leo Tolstoy--and he might
also have added, neither did he resemble Francis of Assisi or Simeon
Stylites. Those who did not like him usually pictured him by recounting
what he was not. My endeavor in this sketch will be simply to tell what
he was.

Henry Huddleston Rogers was a very human individual. He was born in the
village of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in the year Eighteen Hundred Forty.
He died in New York City in Nineteen Hundred Nine, in his seventieth
year. He was the typical American, and his career was the ideal one to
which we are always pointing our growing youth. His fault, if fault it
may be, was that he succeeded too well. Success is a hard thing to
forgive. Personality repels as well as attracts.

The life of H. H. Rogers was the complete American romance. He lived the
part--and he looked it. He did not require a make-up. The sub-cortex
was not for him, and even the liars never dared to say he was a
hypocrite. H. H. Rogers had personality. Men turned to gaze at him on
the street; women glanced, and then hastily looked, unnecessarily hard,
the other way; children stared.

The man was tall, lithe, strong, graceful, commanding. His jaw was the
jaw of courage; his chin meant purpose; his nose symboled intellect,
poise and power; his brow spelled brain. He was a handsome man, and he
was not wholly unaware of the fact. In him was the pride of the North
American Indian, and a little of the reserve of the savage. His silence
was always eloquent, and in it was neither stupidity nor vacuity. With
friends he was witty, affable, generous, lovable. In business
negotiation he was rapid, direct, incisive; or smooth, plausible and
convincing--all depending upon the man with whom he was dealing. He
often did to others what they were