CHAPTER 13

Seat of Empire

When John D. Rockefeller turned forty on July 8, 1879, he was already numbered among America’s twenty richest men, yet he was likely the most obscure of the pantheon. While this resulted largely from his aversion to publicity, it also stemmed from his residing in Cleveland. As one chronicler said of the town, “Its rich folk were not scandalous or showy; its politics had not the violent quality essential to American fame.”¹ In other words, it was an ideal place for a reclusive magnate. Throughout his career, Rockefeller pooh-poohed “exaggerated” press estimates of his wealth, yet they often understated his true worth. In the late 1870s, one newspaper pegged his wealth at more than $5 million, when his Standard Oil stock alone was by then worth $18 million, or $265 million in 1996 dollars. By comparison, when America’s richest citizen, Commodore Vanderbilt, died in 1877, he left an estate valued at nearly $100 million.

Photos of Rockefeller from this period show two contrasting faces. In his serious mode, his expression seemed grim and unsmiling, with tremendous force in his gaze but no softness or joy. Yet when photographed in leisure hours in the sanctuary of Forest Hill, he looked trim and whimsical, surprisingly boyish for such a powerful man. Gone were the old side-whiskers, but he still had a full red mustache and sandy brown hair. In a period when moguls prided themselves on their embonpoint, Rockefeller was as lean as a grey-hound. And at a time when top hats and watch chains were de rigueur for any self-respecting plutocrat, Rockefeller generally conformed to the requisite style, but his family constantly had to remind him to buy a new suit when his current one got too shiny.

If Rockefeller generally enjoyed excellent health, there were early warning symptoms of the toll taken by the excruciating pressures of Standard Oil. In 1878, he wrote to Eliza, “I am eating celery which I understand to be very good for nervous difficulty.”²Colleagues plied him with advice to take more vacations and spend more time away from business, even though Rockefeller later said he was almost semiretired at this point. He tried to spend as many afternoons as possible at Forest Hill in “the bracing air of Lake Erie.”³ He displayed a strong interest in herbal medicines and other folk remedies, advising one associate that he could dispense more easily with tobacco if he had an orange peel before breakfast every day. Big Bill’s interest in medicine, conventional and otherwise, began to surface in his son and became more pronounced with time.

Now that Rockefeller headed almost all of America’s oil refineries and pipelines, the press belatedly awakened to his existence, acknowledging him as a new deity in the industrial firmament. In November 1878, he sat for his first full-length newspaper profile in the New York Sun. The article disclosed the scope of an ambition that Rockefeller took pains to deny: “The people of Cleveland say that it is his ambition to become the richest man in Ohio and one of the ten richest men in the United States. . . . He is in a fair way of being able to count on his fingers the men in the country who are richer than he is.”⁴ This first sketch, which portrayed him as quiet, reserved, and methodical, was shot through with ambivalence. Of Rockefeller’s business ability, the reporter rhapsodized: “Business men in Cleveland, in the oil regions and in New York who know him or know of him, regard him as one of the great commercial intellects of the country.” ⁵ Yet the article concluded that his Olympian success arose from a strange, unsavory bargain with the railroads—a pact that people surmised but could never quite prove. Within a year, the Hepburn hearings began to document what had long been mooted about Rockefeller’s dealings with the railroads, and by the early 1880s he had moved a considerable distance from his former anonymity to something closer to universal notoriety.

In late 1883, Rockefeller’s life assumed a marginally higher profile when he moved to New York. Eighteen eighty-four would prove to be a pivotal year for the country, marked by bank failures and panics and the demise of General Grant’s brokerage firm, Grant and Ward. The Democratic reformer Grover Cleveland triumphed in the presidential election over the corrupt Republican candidate, James G. Blaine, installing a Democrat in the White House for the first time in many years.

Rockefeller had long felt the gravitational pull of New York, with its lively export trade in kerosene, and routinely spent part of each winter there. Haunted by his father’s wanderings, he was loath to abandon Cettie and the children, and for two winters in the mid-1870s he lodged them at the Windsor Hotel on Fifth Avenue, where Jay Gould often plotted his corporate raids. From 1877 to 1884, Rockefeller and his family stayed at the Buckingham Hotel, a residential hotel on Fifth Avenue on the present site of the Saks department store. They had a large suite of rooms in the shadow of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, whose huge stained-glass windows loomed up dreamily outside their windows at night. (One of Junior’s early memories was of being reprimanded sharply by his mother for failing to thank a hotel waiter for bringing him food.) After Harvey Spelman’s death in 1881, Grandmother Spelman and Aunt Lute took a suite on the same floor and shared meals with them. From late spring through early fall, the entourage returned to Forest Hill, where Rockefeller stayed in touch with the New York office by sophisticated telegraphy.

Business now dictated Rockefeller’s move to the East Coast. In an age of long-distance pipelines, huge volumes of crude oil were flowing to seaboard refineries where they fed a flourishing export traffic, relegating Cleveland and other inland centers to an inferior status. Responding to the export boom, Standard Oil established sprawling refineries in Brooklyn, Bayonne, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. A latent tension now strained relations between the Cleveland headquarters and its burgeoning New York branch. One day, Benjamin Brewster, a Standard director, told Rockefeller that a two-headed calf belonged only in the circus and that the combine needed a single head. “You can’t have one head in Cleveland and another in New York,” he told Rockefeller. “And therefore either you have got to quit Cleveland and come on here or we have got to pack up and leave New York and go out to Cleveland.” ⁶

By the time Rockefeller and Oliver Payne transferred to New York in late 1883 and early 1884, Henry Flagler had preceded them by two years. Though now immensely rich, John and Cettie possessed the low-key style and resolute sense of privacy of old money and searched for a house on a peaceful side street. They swapped nine parcels of Manhattan real estate, appraised at $600,000, for a four-story brownstone mansion at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street. Garlanded with ivy, flanked by lawns, the residence stood on a site that would later house the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden. If roomy and comfortable, it was extremely modest for someone of Rockefeller’s wealth and, like his Cleveland residence, subtly masked the size of his fortune. For all its social cachet, Fifth Avenue was now a busy, nerve-jangling thoroughfare, as Junior remembered with dismay: “It was paved with cobblestones and I can still hear the noise of the steel tires rumbling along the street. It was fearfully noisy.”⁷ By contrast, West Fifty-fourth Street was a shady retreat, situated north of the Elgin Botanical Gardens, which later formed part of Rockefeller Center. Opposite the Rockefeller home stood Saint Luke’s Hospital, with lawns and gardens that spread a fragrant tranquillity over the street.

The home that the Rockefellers bought was the opulent boudoir of the beautiful Arabella Worsham, who had tried to pass herself off as a niece of railroad mogul Collis Huntington when she was actually his mistress. When Huntington’s wife died in late 1883, he decided to marry Arabella and make an honest woman of her. The sober brownstone that had sheltered their assignations went on the market, and it is amusing to think of the Rockefellers snapping up their love nest. A frugal man, John D. followed his accustomed practice of keeping the furnishings, even if the style in this case diverged ludicrously from his own. The interior contained touches of voluptuous sensuality, such as Arabella’s exotic Moorish salon on the ground floor and the Turkish bath upstairs. The sumptuous master bedroom was artistically designed in Anglo-Japanese style, with dark ebonized woodwork, a queen-size canopied sleigh bed, and a magnificent silver and gilt chandelier. The bay window provided an intimate Turkish corner, tantalizingly glimpsed through a stained-glass screen. Doubtless as a legacy of Arabella Worsham—one can’t picture the prudish Rockefellers shopping for such things—4 West Fifty-fourth Street had paintings by Corot, Meissonier, Daubigny, and other French painters then in vogue among local parvenus. The house also had the latest conveniences, including one of the city’s first elevators in a private residence. The only thing removed by Rockefeller were the worn carpets, which he donated to the needy through a local church.

Though West Fifty-fourth Street was a tree-lined oasis, the Rockefellers had chosen the most sybaritic precinct of New York society in the Gilded Age. Much of the wealth amassed in what Mark Twain called the “raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century” had now settled in Manhattan. The old New York aristocracy, huddled around Washington Square and Gramercy Park, shuddered at the pretentious uptown mansions, which paid tribute to postwar fortunes in railroads, steel, and oil. Along Fifth Avenue near the Rockefeller home, the palaces of the rich—notably the fantastic, turreted confections of William K. Vanderbilt at Fifty-first Street and Cornelius Vanderbilt II at Fifty-eighth Street—stretched uptown in gaudy profusion.

With Standard Oil moving its headquarters to New York, the neighborhood was becoming a colony of company directors. At one point in this corporate relocation, twenty-eight Standard Oil executives arrived in a single Pullman car from Cleveland and were taken straight to the Saint James Hotel, where William presided over their first breakfast and John their first dinner. The latter liked to greet new arrivals at the train station and help them to find houses. Soon, the Fifth Avenue strip near Rockefeller’s home was thickly populated with Standard Oil men, Henry Flagler occupying the southeast corner of Fifty-fourth Street and William Rockefeller the northeast corner, with Benjamin Brewster next door to William. William departed from his brother’s ascetic style and raised his children in a looser, freer atmosphere, causing envious pangs among John’s children. As Junior said, “We children didn’t have what those children had and we used to notice the difference. They had a gay kind of social life, with many parties which we used to wish we could have.”⁸ Since William refused to take on debt to build his house, he sold $50,000 of Standard Oil stock to John despite his brother’s heartfelt plea to retain the stock. William’s imprudent decision figured importantly in the enormous disparity in wealth that developed between the two brothers.

In New York, John D. did not acquire cosmopolitan interests but stuck with his old Cleveland pastimes, creating a large ice-skating rink every winter in a space adjoining his house. Each morning, curious pedestrians could glimpse the chief of the American oil industry, dressed in overcoat and top hat, ice skates strapped to his patent-leather boots, as he glided placidly around the horseshoe-shaped area. A great enthusiast for the sport, he created rows of shelves in his house on which dozens of guests could store their skates.

Though Rockefeller resisted the yacht-owning fad that swept New York society in the 1880s and owned neither a boat nor private railroad car, he spared no expense for fast-trotting horses in his large, heated stable at 21 West Fiftyfifth Street. Every afternoon after work, he took out his black gelding trotters and mingled with the pageant of fashionable carriages thronging Central Park, often racing against his brother William, with an excited Junior seated at his side. So keenly did Rockefeller relish trotting that at one point he told his son, “I drove four times yesterday making an aggregate in the two days of about eighty miles. Don’t you think I am an enthusiastic youth?”⁹ Junior left a description of his father’s racing style that seems a metaphor for his assertive but careful stewardship of Standard Oil:

Other drivers would often lose their tempers when a horse broke gait or pulled hard; Father never. If a horse was excitable or difficult he always kept his temper, and patiently, quietly worked with the animal until he steadied it. Frequently I have seen him driving at a very rapid pace through Central Park; in the middle of the roadway through two streams of traffic, pushing always a little to the left, as he explained to me, so as to open his way through, but keeping margin enough on the right so that if the approaching traffic did not swing over in time, he would still have room enough to pass. ¹⁰

Never dazzled by New York, Rockefeller was insulated from the beau monde that threw costly dinners and costume balls and frequented the theater, opera, and clubs. He had no interest in debauchery, and it is hard to picture him milling about with portly men smoking cigars or women wearing expensive furs and jewels. The newspapers noted his total boycott of social functions. As one periodical said, “He never entertains notables, his home is never given to entertainment, and he follows the policy of self-effacement at all times and in all places.”¹¹ Although he joined the Union League Club, Rockefeller did not feel comfortable with the splendor of the Astors and Vanderbilts. When Cettie asked for a new four-wheeled carriage in 1882, John stared at her, aghast, and said they could scarcely afford it unless they traded in the old one. Abiding by his daily rituals, he still enjoyed bread and milk in the morning and a paper bag of apples in the evening. Each morning before work, a barber shaved him in his dressing room before he trotted down the brownstone stoop at exactly the same hour and for a nickel took the Sixth Avenue elevated train downtown. The wheels of his mind already turning, he jotted penciled notes on his shirt cuff as the train jolted toward Wall Street. Moving with spectral stealth, as if tiptoeing on a cushion of air, he slipped into the Standard Oil building at the stroke of nine. “I never knew anyone to enter an office as quietly as Mr. Rockefeller,” said his private secretary, George Rogers. “He seemed almost to have a coat of invisibility.”¹²

In late 1883, Standard Oil began to assemble real estate at the southern tip of Manhattan for new headquarters, destined to soar above Broadway at Bowling Green on the onetime site of Alexander Hamilton’s home. Having long outgrown William’s old offices at two different locations on Pearl Street, the firm had operated for three years from modest, unprepossessing quarters at 44 Broadway. Now, on May 1, 1885, after spending nearly one million dollars on it, Standard Oil moved into its impregnable new fortress, a massive, granite, nine-story building. The combine’s name didn’t appear outside, just the building number. Twenty-six Broadway soon became the world’s most famous business address, shorthand for the oil trust itself, evoking its mystery, power, and efficiency. Standard Oil was now America’s premier business, with a reach that ramified into a labyrinth of railroads, banks, and other businesses. The purple prose aroused by the new building perhaps owed less to its imposing neoclassical architecture than to its symbolic heft. Said one reporter: “Many worthy men are convinced that No. 26 Broadway is the most perilous shelter on earth—a cave for pirates, a den for the cutthroats of commerce.”¹³ Otherwise sober writers seemed to swoon before the saturnine grandeur of Rockefeller’s seat of power:

At the lower end of the greatest thoroughfare in the greatest city of the New World is a huge structure of plain gray-stone. Solid as a prison, towering as a steeple, its cold and forbidding facade seems to rebuke the heedless levity of the passing crowd, and frown on the frivolity of the stray sunbeams which in the late afternoon play around its impassive cornices. Men point to its stern portals, glance quickly up at the rows of unwinking windows, nudge each other, and hurry onward, as the Spaniards used to do when going by the offices of the Inquisition. The building is No. 26 Broadway. ¹⁴

Reporters who managed to slip past the watchful guards found a world at odds with the grim exterior, a dignified place with mahogany rolltop desks and mustard-colored carpets. The subdued atmosphere—people instinctively conferred in hushed tones—mirrored Rockefeller’s own personality. Rockefeller’s office faced south and east, with a spectacular view of New York harbor. As one reporter commented, “There is an absence of bustle and noise. While transactions involving millions may be involved, the negotiations are conducted in a quiet methodical manner, apparently free from excitement.”¹⁵ The offices had some unusual security features, including ground-glass partitions that reached to the ceiling and obscured the proceedings within. In a quintessential Rockefeller touch, the doors were equipped with special secret-rim locks: One had to know how to twist the rim with thumb and forefinger before turning the knob, so that an intruder could find himself suddenly trapped in a maze of ostensibly locked doors.

In these new quarters, the Standard Oil mandarins preserved a tradition launched years before. Each day at noon, the executive committee gathered for lunch in a top-floor room decorated with hunting and fishing trophies and with a port view that suited their global empire. There was no surer proof of favor in the Standard Oil empyrean than to receive an invitation to dine at the long table. Arriving in silk hats, frock coats, and gloves, the directors always took the same assigned seats. In his deceptively self-effacing style, Rockefeller yielded the head of the table to his most frequent adversary, Charles Pratt, who was the group’s oldest member; Flagler sat to Pratt’s right, then Rockefeller, then Archbold. It says much about his managerial approach that Rockefeller sat indistinguishably among his colleagues, though the leveling arrangement scarcely disguised his unique status. As philosopher Herbert Spencer once said, “A business partnership, balanced as the authorities of its members may theoretically be, presently becomes a union in which the authority of one partner is tacitly recognized as greater than that of the other or others.”¹⁶

Few outsiders knew that one of Rockefeller’s greatest talents was to manage and motivate his diverse associates. As he said, “It is chiefly to my confidence in men and my ability to inspire their confidence in me that I owe my success in life.”¹⁷ He liked to note that Napoleon could not have succeeded without his marshals.¹⁸ Free of an autocratic temperament, Rockefeller was quick to delegate authority and presided lightly, genially, over his empire, exerting his will in unseen ways. At meetings, Rockefeller had a negative capability: The quieter he was, the more forceful his presence seemed, and he played on his mystique as the resident genius immune to petty concerns. As one director recalled, “I have seen board meetings, when excited men shouted profanity and made menacing gestures, but Mr. Rockefeller, maintaining the utmost courtesy, continued to dominate the room.”¹⁹ Sometimes, he dozed on a couch after lunch. “I can see him now,” one executive recalled, “lying back on a lounge at a directors’ meeting, eyes closed taking it all in. Now and then he’d open his eyes and make a suggestion.”²⁰

Rockefeller placed a premium on internal harmony and tried to reconcile his contending chieftains. A laconic man, he liked to canvass everyone’s opinion before expressing his own and then often crafted a compromise to maintain cohesion. He was always careful to couch his decisions as suggestions or questions. Even in the early days, he had lunched daily with brother William, Harkness, Flagler, and Payne to thrash out problems. As the organization grew, he continued to operate by consensus, taking no major initiative opposed by board members. Because all ideas had to meet the supreme test of unanimous approval among strong-minded men, Standard Oil made few major missteps. As Rockefeller said, “We made sure that we were right and had planned for every contingency before we went ahead.” ²¹

Even though Rockefeller feuded sporadically with Charles Pratt, Henry Rogers, and others, the firm was free of the petulant bickering and bureaucratic jealousy that usually accompany vast power. At least to hear Rockefeller tell it, the directors—former foes who had banded together in corporate brotherhood—were bound by an almost mystic faith. For him, their belief in each other explained their cohesion and certified their virtue. “Crooked men cannot be held as these Standard Oil Company men were held for all this long term.”²² The continuity of leadership made the firm all but impervious to snooping reporters and government investigators, who could never penetrate the tight-knit phalanx of like-minded men who ran the oil empire for four consecutive decades.

The unity of the Standard Oil partners was especially impressive given the organization’s byzantine structure, a far-flung patchwork of firms, each nominally independent but in reality taking orders from 26 Broadway. In the absence of a federal incorporation law, Rockefeller, like other contemporary businessmen, had to cope with a tangle of restrictive laws that made it fiendishly difficult to run an interstate company. As he said, “Our federal form of government, making every corporation created by a state foreign to every other state, renders it necessary for persons doing business through corporate agency to organize corporations in some or many of the different states in which their business is located.”²³ This handicap forced business leaders to devise cunning ways to circumvent laws and led them to corrupt politicians and legislatures; much of Rockefeller’s political cynicism issued from this source. For Standard Oil, a national operation from the start, the antiquated legal framework lured it into myriad legal adaptations. But if Rockefeller correctly considered the legal system an unfair impediment, it was also a spur to his ingenuity.

His first major improvisation came with an ingenious trust agreement that was executed privately in 1879. Under its charter, Standard Oil of Ohio couldn’t own companies outside the state, so it assigned three midlevel employees—Myron R. Keith, George F. Chester, and George H. Vilas—to serve as trustees who held stock in a score of subsidiaries outside the state. When they received dividends, they distributed them to the thirty-seven investors of Standard of Ohio as individuals, in amounts proportionate to their stakes in the parent company. (Of the 35,000 Standard shares, Rockefeller held nearly 9,000, or three times the amount of Flagler, Harkness, Pratt, or Payne.)²⁴ This jerry-built structure enabled Rockefeller to swear under oath that Standard Oil of Ohio didn’t own property outside of Ohio, even though it controlled most of the pipelines and refineries in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland; technically speaking, the trustees owned these properties.

The 1879 agreement, a makeshift arrangement, lasted only three years. When the state of Pennsylvania tried in 1881 to tax the property of Standard of Ohio within its borders, Rockefeller feared that other states might copy this precedent and hold him hostage. At the same time, he had absorbed so many new pipelines and refineries that he was struggling to coordinate policy among many scattered units. The time had come to streamline operations, impose guidance, and attain new efficiencies. The brains behind this next stage of development was an affable, roly-poly lawyer and Presbyterian elder named Samuel C. T. Dodd, a man so fat that one wag claimed he was the same size in every direction. As general solicitor of Standard Oil from 1881 to 1905, he was its leading theoretician and publicist, as much ideologist as lawyer. A carpenter’s son from Franklin, Pennsylvania, and an amateur poet passionate about classical literature, he had been a vocal, high-minded resident of Titusville. Ironically, as a Democratic member of Pennsylvania’s constitutional convention in 1872, Dodd had won attention as a scourge of the railroads, excoriating Rockefeller and the South Improvement Company for taking advantage of rebates.

The way Dodd entered Standard Oil should have tipped him off to the depth of Rockefeller’s guile. In 1878, two refiners named Taylor and Satterfield hired him in a dispute against United Pipe Lines, which was ostensibly owned by Vandergrift and Forman. Since Dodd was also a lawyer for Captain Jacob J. Vandergrift, he found himself representing both sides in the case. At one point, Vandergrift made a shocking confession to him: United Pipe Lines actually belonged lock, stock, and barrel to Standard Oil. At the behest of his clients, Dodd journeyed to Cleveland to draw up a mutually satisfactory settlement. As he recalled:

Here, for the first time, I met John D. Rockefeller, a very pleasant, gentlemanly, unassuming man, but slow in his deliberations and particular as possible at every point of negotiation. Being a little vexed one day at my objection to some clause he desired in the contract which was being drawn, he said in a sarcastic tone: “Mr. Dodd, do you often act for both sides in a case?” I said, “Not often, Mr. Rockefeller, but I am always ready to do so when both sides want an honest lawyer.” This seemed to amuse him and we soon brought the matter to a settlement.²⁵

When Rockefeller hired him in 1879, Dodd held out, not for more money or titles but for assurances of his integrity. Taking a relatively small salary (it would never exceed $25,000 a year), he resisted Rockefeller’s plea that he take Standard Oil stock, arguing that this might compromise his legal judgment, and he never became a Standard director for that reason. He also emphasized that he would never alter his settled views on the injustice of railroad rebates. To all these conditions, Rockefeller assented breezily—perhaps too breezily. As will be seen, he spent years fooling Dodd about Standard Oil’s relations with the railroads, to the point that one must conclude that Dodd fairly asked to be duped and suspended all skepticism. After being hired by Rockefeller, Dodd was ostracized by many former clients along Oil Creek. To these critics, he shrugged and said, “Well, as the ministers say when they get a call to a higher salary, it seems to be the Lord’s will.” ²⁶ Rockefeller bestowed this encomium on Dodd: “A more just man never lived. . . . He was a lovable, loyal man.”²⁷ In many antitrust hearings, Rockefeller looked to the redoubtable Dodd and awaited his nod of approval before answering questions.

Dodd was a wizard at contriving forms that obeyed the letter but circumvented the spirit of the law. As the Keith-Chester-Vilas travesty became known, Dodd studied new organizational structures that might allow Standard to expand business while maintaining centralized control. That the major directors lived in separate cities—mostly Cleveland, New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—was impeding finely meshed coordination. Dodd came up with a sudden brainstorm as to how to meld intrastate firms into an interstate giant. The first step was to set up a separate Standard Oil company in each state in which it had major interests. As a result, Standard Oil of New York was formed on August 1, 1882, with William Rockefeller as president; four days later, John became president of the new Standard Oil of New Jersey. This stratagem was designed to prevent each state from taxing Standard Oil property located outside the state. Dodd realized that separate companies required separate boards of directors and considered how to prevent a fragmentation of power. The answer, he explained, was that “you could have a common name, a common office, and a common management by means of a common executive committee. The stock could in effect be made common by placing the corporate stock in the hands of Trustees who shall issue certificates of interest in the Trust estate, which certificates will be entitled to their due proportions of the various stock dividends.”²⁸ As Dodd noted, this elaborate stock swap would create a union not of corporations but of stockholders, ensuring that the companies could behave in concert without running afoul of the law.

Dodd and Flagler drafted the new Standard Oil trust agreement, which was dated January 2, 1882. The public knew nothing of this contrivance that spawned a $70 million enterprise and controlled 90 percent of American refineries and pipelines until it emerged, accidentally, in antitrust hearings six years later. The agreement created a board of nine New York–based trustees— the group that assembled daily for lunch at 26 Broadway. Today, we would term it a holding company, but at the time it seemed an imaginary entity, lacking any real legal existence. It couldn’t make deals, sign contracts, or keep books, though it wielded infinite power. It received the stock of Standard of Ohio and forty other companies—twenty-six of them partially, fourteen fully owned—with the power to name their officers and directors. Among the shareholders, the distribution of power and wealth remained lopsided, with Rockefeller holding more than one-third of the trust certificates, a block worth $19 million. The five members of the Cleveland wing—John and William Rockefeller, Flagler, Payne, and Harkness—retained a commanding majority of shares and formed a pool within the top echelon to buy and sell jointly interests in other companies.

For the first time, the trust’s formation created negotiable securities, and this profoundly affected the Standard Oil culture. Not only did Rockefeller urge underlings to take stock but made money abundantly available to do so. As such shareholding became widespread, it welded the organization more tightly together, creating an esprit de corps that helped in steamrolling over competitors and government investigators alike. With employees receiving huge capital gains and dividends, they converted Standard Oil into a holy crusade. Rockefeller hoped the trust would serve as a model for a new populist capitalism, marked by employee share ownership. “I would have every man a capitalist, every man, woman and child,” he said. “I would have everyone save his earnings, not squander it; own the industries, own the railroads, own the telegraph lines.”²⁹

In many ways, Standard Oil’s metamorphosis previewed the trajectory of other major American business organizations in the late nineteenth century as they moved from freewheeling competition to loosely knit cartels to airtight trusts. The 1882 agreement introduced the concept of the trust as something synonymous with industrial monopoly. During the 1880s, industrywide pools sprouted in many industries in America, England, and Germany, but their leaders found it difficult to prevent cheating and secret price-cutting among members. Now, Standard Oil came up with a way to introduce centralized control, backed by enforcement powers and managerial direction. So many companies duplicated the pattern over the years that one can say, with pardonable exaggeration, that the 1882 trust agreement executed by Standard Oil led straight to the Sherman Antitrust Act eight years later.

Rockefeller was a unique hybrid in American business: both the instinctive, first-generation entrepreneur who founds a company and the analytic second-generation manager who extends and develops it. He wasn’t the sort of rugged, self-made mogul who quickly becomes irrelevant to his own organization. For that reason, his career anticipates the managerial capitalism of the twentieth century.

Since he never owned more than a third of his company, he needed the cooperation of other people. Having created an empire of unfathomable complexity, he was smart enough to see that he had to submerge his identity in the organization. Many people noted that Rockefeller seldom said “I,” except when telling a joke, preferring the first-person plural when discussing Standard Oil. “Don’t say that I ought to do this or that,” he preached to colleagues. “We ought to do it. Never forget that we are partners; whatever is done is for the general good of us all.” ³⁰ He preferred outspoken colleagues to weak-kneed sycophants and welcomed differences of opinion so long as they weren’t personalized. In their private deliberations, the Standard executives, for all their swashbuckling reputation, tended to be cordial and formal. As Cleveland Amory said of them, “No group of American tycoons were ever more forbidding or high and mighty publicly or more gentle and shy and retiring privately.”³¹

By creating new industrial forms, Rockefeller left his stamp on an age that lauded inventors, not administrators. That he created one of the first multinational corporations, selling kerosene around the world and setting a business pattern for the next century, was arguably his greatest feat. As he said, “Our nation was in a state of transition from agriculture to wholesale manufacture and commerce, and we had to invent methods and machinery as we went along.”³² Whatever the debates about his ethics, economists and historians have unanimously extolled his role as a pioneer of the modern corporation. Despite the legal impediments, he was able to fuse together dozens of disparate firms into a seamless whole. What might have been a cumbersome apparatus developed into an efficient instrument in Rockefeller’s hands. Standard Oil led the way in industrial planning and large-volume production, exploiting economies of scale that might otherwise have been hard to achieve at this stage in a purely competitive state. Under Rockefeller’s tutelage, the trust made notable strides in improving kerosene, developing by-products, and reducing the cost of packaging, transporting, and distributing petroleum products worldwide. As one biographer has remarked, “Rockefeller must be accepted as the greatest business administrator America has produced.” ³³ An oil historian echoes this verdict: “Rockefeller was the single most important figure in shaping the oil industry. The same might arguably be said for his place in the history of America’s industrial development and the rise of the modern corporation. ”³⁴

The secret to unifying the dozens of affiliated concerns proved to be the committee system patented by Standard Oil. The inner sanctum was the executive committee. Though they recommended actions to field supervisors, they held considerable power in reserve, for they had to approve all expenditures above $5,000 and salary increases above $50 a month, enabling them to retard the growth of any unit. Below the executive committee came a battery of specialized committees dedicated to transportation, pipelines, domestic trade, export trade, manufacturing, purchasing, and so on. These committees standardized the quality of subsidiaries engaged in similar work, enabling managers to swap insights and align their operations. As Rockefeller said of this innovation: “A company of men, for example, were specialists in manufacture. These were chosen experts, who had daily sessions and study of the problems, new as well as old, constantly arising. The benefit of their research, their study, was available for each of the different concerns whose shares were held by these trustees.” ³⁵ Under the committee system, Standard Oil created a self-sufficient universe, overseeing plants that made acid, chemicals, staves, barrels, wicks, pumps, and even tank cars. It shut down more than thirty obsolete refineries, concentrating more than a quarter of world kerosene production in three monster plants in Cleveland, Bayonne, and Philadelphia.

The committee system was an ingenious adaptation, integrating the policy of constituent companies without stripping them of all autonomy. We must recall that Standard Oil remained a confederation and most of its subsidiaries were only partially owned. A top-down hierarchical structure might have hampered local owners whom Rockefeller had promised a measure of autonomy in running their plants. The committee system galvanized their energies while providing them with general guidance. The committees encouraged rivalry among local units by circulating performance figures and encouraging them to compete for records and prizes. The point is vitally important, for monopolies, spared the rod of competition, can easily lapse into sluggish giants. At Standard Oil, in contrast, as Rockefeller stated, “the stimulus to make the best showing, each concern for itself, led to active and aggressive work in competition.”³⁶

For many years, Rockefeller had tried to free himself from details and applauded the committee system as relegating him to a fifth wheel. He never attended individual committee meetings but sometimes, in his odd way, dropped by when committee heads conferred. As one member said:

I have seen Mr. Rockefeller often at a meeting of the heads of the different departments of the Company, listening carefully to each one and not saying a word. Perhaps he would stretch out on a lounge and say: “I am a little tired, but go right on gentlemen, for I know you want to reach a decision.” He might close his eyes now and then; but he never missed a point. He would go away without saying a word but good-bye. But next day when he came down he had digested the whole proposition and worked out the answer—and he always worked out the right answer.³⁷

Although Standard Oil encouraged cooperation and allowed strong executives to flourish, Rockefeller retained unrivaled influence. While colleagues embarked on shopping binges to buy palatial homes and European art, Rockefeller husbanded his money. He believed in Standard Oil and gladly purchased all available stock from other directors. “Oh, I was the dumping ground for them all in those days,” he once laughed, and his unequaled shareholding gave his opinions extra weight.³⁸

Beyond the size of his stake, Rockefeller also possessed an unlikely charisma. He never backslapped, roughhoused, or skylarked with his colleagues, and his statesmanlike calm evoked feelings of awe. As one reporter said in 1905, “No man, however unimpressionable he may be, can stand in the presence of Mr. Rockefeller without feeling the repressed power of the man.” ³⁹ He seemed to possess oracular powers. As Archbold conceded, “Rockefeller always sees a little further than the rest of us—and then he sees around the corner.”⁴⁰ Another Standard executive, Edward T. Bedford, paid him this high tribute: “Mr. Rockefeller was really a superman. He not only envisaged a new system of business upon a grand scale but he also had the patience, the courage and the audacity to put it into effect in the face of almost insuperable difficulties, sticking to his purpose with a tenacity and confidence [that were] simply amazing.”⁴¹

He also had a tactful, easy manner with less exalted employees and never reacted angrily when presented with grievances. Once a year, each employee had the right to appear before the executive committee and argue for a higher salary, and Rockefeller always reacted pleasantly. As one employee recalled, “When H. H. Rogers would say gruffly that he had had enough and we had no right to ask for an increase of salary, Mr. Rockefeller would say, ‘Oh, give him a chance.’ ”⁴² But the mildness was deceiving, for while Rockefeller might sometimes be prepared to pay wages 10 or even 20 percent above the prevailing levels, he would never countenance unions or organized employee protest.

In the last analysis, Rockefeller prevailed at Standard Oil because he had mastered a method for solving problems that carried him far beyond his native endowment. He believed there was a time to think and then a time to act. He brooded over problems and quietly matured plans over extended periods. Once he had made up his mind, however, he was no longer troubled by doubts and pursued his vision with undeviating faith. Unfortunately, once in that state of mind, he was all but deaf to criticism. He was like a projectile that, once launched, could never be stopped, never recalled, never diverted.

Amid the murky temptations of Manhattan, the Rockefeller home was a tranquil island of missionary work, temperance meetings, and prayer vigils. Beset by fears of big-city vice and determined to avoid exposure to liquor, cards, tobacco, and dancing, the Rockefellers still socialized only with kindred spirits. The greater the controversy surrounding Standard Oil, the more decorous their home life.

The family belied John Wesley’s dictum that “wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion.” ⁴³ The Rockefellers had also figured out how to solve the riddle that John Adams posed to Thomas Jefferson in 1819: “Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, Vice and folly?” ⁴⁴ The fear that wealth would adulerate their values only pushed John and Cettie deeper into church activism and the temperance movement. In 1883, John sat on an advisory committee of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which was campaigning for an amendment to the Ohio constitution to outlaw the manufacture and sale of liquor. Though the initiative petered out, he later became a major benefactor of the Ohio Anti-Saloon League and grew steadily more militant in the cause. “I fear unless a great temperance reform sweeps over our whole land, the Republic itself may be imperilled,” he thundered.⁴⁵Among other pet causes of this period, he gave substantial sums to the revivalist Dwight L. Moody and urged Henry Flagler to follow suit.

Right before the Rockefellers left Cleveland, some friends asked Cettie why her children hadn’t been baptized, and she was haunted by the question. She began intensive prayer meetings with her children, which led three of the four—Alta (twelve), Edith (eleven), and John (nine)—to be baptized jointly on October 28, 1883, the last Sunday before their move to New York. Afterward, Cettie recorded her impressions: “It was a beautiful and impressive sight, after the morning service—there were plants and flowers around the baptistry, and a dove suspended over it.” ⁴⁶ Since the Rockefellers returned to Cleveland each summer, John and Cettie retained their positions at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. Upon arriving in Manhattan, they joined the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church and imported the Reverend William H. P. Faunce from Springfield, Massachusetts, to head it. It never occurred to the Rockefellers to trade up to a more socially prestigious denomination. “Most Americans when they accumulate money climb the golden spires of the nearest Episcopal Church,” H. L. Mencken later observed. “But the Rockefellers cling to the primeval rain-god of the American hinterland and show no signs of being ashamed of him.” ⁴⁷ They would not have felt comfortable with the splendor and formality of a high-church denomination.

After having been taught at home for many years, the Rockefeller children began to venture forth tentatively from their often-stifling family cocoon. Rockefeller said he educated his children at home because he had divided his time between Cleveland and New York for several years, but he also might have wanted to sequester them from forbidden contacts. Bessie, Alta, and Edith now attended the Rye Female Seminary in Westchester County, directed by a Mrs. Life, the former Susan La Monte, who had tutored Rockefeller in his early adolescence in Owego. Though the progeny of one of America’s richest men, the three young heiresses seemed to drift about in a state of perpetual longing. As one intimate companion recollected,

The allowances given to the children were small. Edith confided to me one day while we were shopping that it was the dearest wish of her heart to have some silk underwear, but that “Mother wouldn’t hear of it.” Alta yearned for a high hat to wear with her riding costume, and when after months of cajoling she finally got it, she had [a] picture taken. . . . Then the dream of her life became riding boots.⁴⁸

Edith became positively clothes crazy, displaying a craving for fashionable outfits and jewelry in defiance of her parents’ values.

By avoiding talk of money as unbecoming, Rockefeller concealed from his children the magnitude of his fortune. When Bessie enrolled at Vassar in the mid-1880s—she was the only daughter to attend college—she went on a shopping expedition with some classmates to purchase a Christmas present for a favorite teacher. At a Manhattan store, they found the perfect gift: a $100 desk. Since Bessie and her companions had only $75, they asked the merchant if he could wait a few days for the remaining $25. He agreed to do so if a New York businessman would vouch for them. “My father is in business,” Bessie offered meekly. “He will vouch for us.” Who is your father? asked the man. “His name is Mr. Rockefeller,” she said. “John D. Rockefeller; he is in the oil business.” The merchant gasped. “John D. Rockefeller your father!” When he agreed to ship the furniture, Bessie imagined he had merely changed his mind to please them.⁴⁹

When it came time for Junior to dispense with private tutors, he went to the New York School of Languages, followed by a school run by C. N. Douglass, and then the tony Cutler School, whose student body included Albert Milbank, Cornelius N. Bliss, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Junior trudged the pavement to school each morning while he watched poorer classmates rolling by in fine carriages. Though he belittled his own intelligence, this bright, dutiful boy always scored high grades and led a purposeful life that allowed small time for leisure. When not doing homework, he often practiced his violin, and for eight years he took lessons from Richard Arnold, first violinist of the Philharmonic Orchestra. Though never spanked or punished, Junior had to put up with unremitting religious indoctrination from Cettie.⁵⁰ By comparison, Father was almost playful. Eager to please his parents and other adult authority figures, Junior took things too seriously and was petrified of making a mistake.

It is a small miracle that, with so much duty so regularly dinned into their heads, the Rockefeller children didn’t go batty. They did, however, erupt in a mass of psychosomatic symptoms. During his first year at Cutler, at age thirteen, Junior racked up a 98.1 grade average only to succumb to some sort of nervous collapse from overwork.⁵¹ Too much expectation had been heaped on this frail vessel, and he buckled beneath the weight. His father ordered the staple Victorian cure of hard outdoors work. In late 1887, Junior and his mother wintered at Forest Hill, where he furiously chopped wood (fifteen cents a cord), broke stones, burned brush, and raked leaves, working the nervous tension from his system. Junior enjoyed this fleeting monopoly on his mother’s affections and the respite from his regimented New York life. His letters to his father evoke the melancholy beauty of a snowbound winter, with moonlit sleigh rides and afternoons skating on the frozen lake as he pushed Cettie before him in a wooden chair.

Reinvigorated by his stay, Junior completed a second year at Cutler before being transferred to a school custom-made for him. John and William Rockefeller conferred with a talented instructor, John A. Browning, who created the tiny Browning School with just two classes: one built around Junior, the other around William’s son Percy. A Rockefeller operation from the outset, it was set up in a family-owned brownstone on West Fifty-fifth Street, with John and William paying Browning’s salary and reserving the right to screen applicants. From the beginning, the school emphasized manual crafts as well as classical studies and was animated by an egalitarian spirit. Nettie Fowler McCormick of the Chicago reaper clan sent her two sons, Harold and Stanley, and the student body of twenty-five also included two sons of William’s estate superintendent in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Browning School was yet another attempt by John D. to prevent his children from putting on airs or slipping into idle dissipation.

The letters Junior sent his father from Forest Hill during the winter of 1887–1888 make clear that his mother was also recuperating from a bout of ill health. He told a friend, “Although it would be pleasant to be with the rest of the family, when we think how much good it is doing mother—and she really is getting much better, she sleeps so well and feels so much better—we are perfectly happy to be separated.” ⁵² Always weak, Cettie was beginning to betray signs of the frailty that would convert her into an invalid. She enjoyed driving with her husband and shared his love of skating but took these activities only in small doses. “She was not strong . . . and could not endure much exercise,” said her son.⁵³

For the biographer of John D. Rockefeller, the most exasperating lacuna in his story is Cettie’s transformation from a bright, witty girl into a rather humorless woman, prone to a nunlike religiosity. One wonders what happened to the high-spirited, vivacious young woman who was the high-school valedictorian and literary editor at Oread Collegiate Institute. By the 1880s, when she was in her forties, her letters were suffocated by a treacly piety and endless platitudes as she grew righteous and slightly unreal. As one magazine noted, “It would be hard to find anyone who has anything to say against Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, for the reason that Mrs. Rockefeller’s life is almost wholly devoted to religious and benevolent work.”⁵⁴ She uttered only noble and uplifting thoughts, constantly thanked the Lord, and never stooped to gossip or flip remarks.

Was this the case of another smart Victorian woman who felt trapped by the few options open to her and took to bed and religion from boredom or self-defense? The social conventions of her day clearly approved of her decision to confine herself to church and home. But one also wonders whether her cloistered religiosity wasn’t a reaction to the mounting controversy surrounding Standard Oil. This gentle, brown-eyed woman adored her husband and believed implicitly in his goodness, but she was bothered by the charges hurled against him. We know from two of Rockefeller’s colleagues that Cettie sometimes wanted him to respond to attacks that he preferred to slough off and ignore. In the 1860s and early 1870s, Rockefeller wrote her confidential, highly informative letters about his business dealings, including the SIC. Starting in the 1880s, however, his letters suddenly became bland and empty, full of banalities about the weather and barren of business news.

In general, Rockefeller kept his family apart from Standard Oil matters, with one curious exception. At the breakfast table, he sometimes read aloud samples from the reams of abusive crank mail that swamped his office. Perhaps he did this to make light of the threats or take the sting from controversy. Aside from this, he steered clear of anything even faintly controversial. Did Cettie’s religion become her impenetrable shield against the venomous criticism of her husband? And did John become more self-righteous about temperance and other social issues to assert his own virtue and assuage his conscience? These are intriguing questions, but ones avoided so sedulously by Rockefeller and his family that they left no comments that might shed any light on them. Certain aspects of Rockefeller’s married life—those critical things whispered about Standard Oil in the privacy of the bedroom at night—will likely remain a mystery forever.

Rockefeller always took umbrage at the accusation that he was a narrow workaholic, yet he didn’t begin to travel abroad until after he had moved to New York and was well into his forties. A stubborn provincial, he didn’t hanker after the exotic, and he shunned Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other distant outposts serviced by Standard Oil. For him, the aim of travel wasn’t to submit to the charms of an alien place but to transport his culture there intact. He never traveled without a clergyman (typically Edward Judson or Augustus Strong) and a doctor (usually Hamilton Biggar) in tow to cater to his spiritual and physical needs. Although Rockefeller never owned a private railroad car, the railroads hooked one up for him, as needed, to a transcontinental train for domestic trips. These plush carriages were divided into six compartments, including a kitchen, pantry, observatory room, private room, and staterooms. Streaking across the Great Plains, the family exuberantly sang hymns, or the children practiced their musical instruments. For an hour each morning, the clergyman led a Bible session, expounding another beatitude. In mapping his itinerary, Rockefeller ensured access to a Baptist church each Sunday, and he especially liked to drop in on black churches, often leaving a substantial donation in his wake. Most of all, he rejoiced to find a good, rousing tent meeting on the road—that was a real vacation treat for a man who always found religion an uplifting experience.

In 1883, Rockefeller and Henry Flagler toured Jacksonville and Saint Augustine, Florida, and reviewed the state’s economic prospects with Dr. Andrew Anderson and tobacco mogul George P. Lorillard. The next year, the Rockefellers headed down to Atlanta, swung west to New Orleans, and wound up in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Two years later, they made an extended trip to Yellowstone Park and returned by way of Chicago. By this point, even Rockefeller wondered whether he would ever escape the continental United States, telling Benjamin Brewster, “I may never get to Europe with my family although we have been expecting we might go in a year or two, but I am very desirous to know more of this dear land in which we live.”⁵⁵

Deliverance came on June 1, 1887, when Rockefeller and his family set sail for a three-month European vacation, the Standard Oil executives trailing after them on a tugboat to wave good-bye. They must have been relieved because they feared that his indefatigable exertions at Standard Oil might injure his health. It took Rockefeller time to shed his obsessive concern for Standard Oil and allow himself to be lulled by the restful sea spirit. While still 460 miles from Southampton, unable to stop wondering about oil, he broke down and wired George Rogers, “I find I already thirst for knowledge about the business.”⁵⁶ A month later, he pleaded from Berlin, “Can’t you glean more of interest from Ex[ecutive] Com[mittee] for me about current business. Am anxious for every scrap of information.” ⁵⁷

After the Civil War, so many Americans flocked to Europe for vacations, presenting a cavalcade of innocents abroad, that their showy vulgarity and bumptious patriotism were frequently parodied by contemporary writers. The Rockefellers must have struck the Europeans as a dry, antiseptic family, somewhat awkward and ill at ease with foreign languages. Rockefeller made no concessions to the European milieu, which only accentuated his homespun style. In London, he booked a hotel room in Piccadilly that gave his family a front-row seat for Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and they stared agog as she whisked by in a magnificent golden carriage.

As the party crossed to France, John D. was alert for sharp characters out to swindle him and prey upon his American innocence. Because he didn’t speak French, he knew he looked like a vulnerable rube. At one point, he suspected, correctly, that their tour guide was fleecing them. Politely firing the man, he took charge of financial matters and pored over stacks of incomprehensible bills. Junior left a splendid vignette of his father trying to decipher a French check:

I can see him now, going over the long French bills, studying each item, many of them being unintelligible to him. “Poulets!” he would exclaim. “What are poulets, John?” Or again, “Bougies, bougies—what in the world is a bougie?” And so on down the bill. Father was never willing to pay a bill which he did not know to be correct in all its items. Such care in small things might seem penurious to some people, yet to him it was the working out of a life principle.⁵⁸

Another traveling companion remembered the Rockefellers sitting at a private dining room in a Roman hotel as the paterfamilias dissected the weekly bill, trying to ascertain whether they had really consumed two whole chickens, as these slippery foreigners alleged:

Mr. Rockefeller listened for a while to the discussion, and then said quietly: “I can settle that very easily. John, did you have a chicken leg?” “Yes.” “Alta, did you have a chicken leg?” “Yes.” “Well, Mother, I think I remember that you had one. Is that right?” “Yes,” said the mother. “I know that I had one, and no chicken has 3 legs. The bill is correct.” I can still see the faces of that family group and hear the tone of Mr. Rockefeller’s voice as he so quietly and so uniquely settled that dispute.⁵⁹

As he grew older, Junior was deputized to handle tips and bills, which he later cited as excellent business training.

Needless to say, Rockefeller spurned the European music halls and spent most of the trip making pilgrimages to churches or touring pretty scenery. At first, he declined an audience with the pope and yielded only when advised that it might please the Catholic workmen at Standard Oil. Still a man of exceptional fortitude, he and Junior went off for a vigorous mountain climb in Zermatt, Switzerland, and his stamina amazed his son. On this European trip, Rockefeller even found time to read and grew enraptured in Paris by Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur and by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’sLast Days of Pompeii on a visit to Vesuvius. Yet he couldn’t disappear into a reverie for long. He was now so famous that as he went from city to city, his arrival was celebrated in the local papers and crank mail and begging letters began to follow him. So many letters piled up at hotels along the way that he finally had to purchase a big trunk just to carry them back. It was testimony to Rockefeller’s thoroughgoing sense of responsibility that he preserved each letter for review at home. For a man who had fled to Europe for a peaceful interlude, it must have been startling to realize that his fame and notoriety were now so widespread in a world dominated by Standard Oil that he could no longer find refuge anywhere from his own reputation.

Beleaguered by supplicants, Rockefeller tried to expand his disbursements to keep pace with his mounting income, and his donations nearly doubled from $61,000 in 1881 to $119,000 three years later. Notwithstanding his somewhat frigid image, he took a close interest in the recipients of his charity and directly monitored their progress. Even as he was being reviled as a corporate malefactor in the press, this contradictory man agonized over the judicious application of his money and found it harder to exercise scrutiny over charities than over business. In this seminal phase of Rockefeller philanthropy, the entire family judged the merits of applications, and the children sometimes audited important meetings. Once grace was said at breakfast, Rockefeller pulled out a folder stuffed with appeals from around the globe and assigned them to the children for further study. At this point, he drew no invidious distinctions among the children and involved all four equally in disposing of his fortune.

Rockefeller’s benevolent innovations have often been credited to his extraordinary philanthropic chief, Frederick T. Gates, who arrived on the scene in the 1890s. Yet by the 1880s, Rockefeller had already formulated certain core principles for his bequests, many of them stemming from beliefs he had long entertained as a businessman. For instance, like other industrialists, he worried that charity fostered dependence and pauperized recipients. After he had escorted his family to the notorious Five Points slum of lower Manhattan on their first Thanksgiving Day in New York, he lauded a shelter for homeless men but carped at the “policy of feeding all the tramps that came. My impression is they only do it once a year. I would give them work and make them earn their food.”⁶⁰

Again, contrary to his stereotype, Rockefeller was acutely concerned about the poverty that accompanied industrialization, urbanization, and immigration in the late nineteenth century. Far from taking refuge in the world to come, he also stressed salvation in this world, prodding one clergyman to go into “the midst of the multitudes thronging up and down the Bowery or thereabouts, and settle and stay right there with them, establish a church.” ⁶¹ Starting in 1882, he underwrote the ministry of Edward Judson, who exemplified his belief that a shepherd should abide with his flock. He was the youngest son of Adoniram Judson, a saintly figure among nineteenth-century Baptists for converting the Burmese and translating the Bible into their tongue. Abandoning an affluent congregation in New Jersey, Edward Judson took over the Berea Baptist Church on Manhattan’s West Fifteenth Street to evangelize among poor Italian immigrants. As an exponent of the social gospel, which blended social work with spiritual comfort, he convinced Rockefeller to contribute to a fresh-air and cool-water fund offering poor immigrants a refreshing two-week retreat in the country each summer.

As a regular dinner guest on Fifty-fourth Street, Judson won over Rockefeller to his vision of a comprehensive religious center that would unite elements of both an urban church and settlement house, ministering to both the worldly and spiritual needs of congregants, a vision spectacularly realized with construction of the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in 1892. For this imposing edifice, designed in Greco-Romanesque style by McKim, Mead and White with stained-glass windows by John La Farge, Rockefeller contributed $40,000 of the original $256,000. Both a community center and house of worship, it offered a broad spectrum of services from day nurseries to sewing classes for the poor. By this point, Rockefeller was indisputably the most powerful Baptist layman, and his largesse was already stirring fierce dissension in the ranks—not at all surprising in a denomination filled with working people. In the late 1880s, Judson told him about a convention of Baptist ministers in Philadelphia at which “some very shallow and ill-advised . . . vehement insinuations were made against the Standard Oil,” prompting another clergyman to deliver a “brave, ringing speech” in Rockefeller’s defense.⁶² During the next two decades, this controversy grew more obstreperous as the Baptists tried to figure out whether the munificent oil mogul had been sent to them from heaven or hell.

The most important concept Rockefeller bequeathed to philanthropy was that of wholesale giving, as opposed to small, scattershot contributions. As Cleveland’s wealthiest philanthropist in the early 1880s, Rockefeller already felt oppressed by the appeals cascading in on him. In 1881, he apologized to Reverend George O. King of the Willson Avenue Baptist Church in Cleveland, saying, “I have been holding back [an] answer in part from the fact that I had so many obligations for benevolent objects that I was almost overwhelmed.” ⁶³ Since for Rockefeller the imperative to make money and donate money emanated from a common religious impulse—“I am more and more satisfied no member of a church can afford not to contribute as the Lord prosper him,” he told a friend—he approached his donations with extreme gravity. ⁶⁴

In 1882, two of Rockefeller’s interests dovetailed memorably in a commitment to a black women’s school at a time when higher education for both blacks and women was held suspect. He had had a long-standing interest in education, having contributed for years to Denison University, a Baptist college in Ohio. In the 1880s and 1890s, he gave so openhandedly to A. C. Bacone’s Indian University (today Bacone College) in present-day Oklahoma that its first major building was named Rockefeller Hall. During the Civil War, Rockefeller gave to black ministers, churches, orphanages, and a deaf and mute society. He never relinquished a special solicitude for black welfare—quite atypical for a businessman at that time. Imbued with Baptist egalitarianism, he was ripe for conversion to a new cause when Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles reentered his life.

The Rockefellers had first met Packard and Giles on their honeymoon stopover at Oread Collegiate Institute, where the two women were newly recruited teachers. They were absorbed in the dismal plight of poor blacks, partly as an extension of their Baptist evangelism. After the Civil War, Baptists had been in the vanguard of forming churches for freed slaves and teaching them to read the Bible and had enjoyed the strongest growth in the black community of any denomination. So when Packard was named corresponding secretary of the new Woman’s American Baptist Home Mission Society in 1878, she had a serviceable vehicle for advancing black education. When she and Giles toured southern black schools two years later, they were appalled by the educational facilities for black women and found one especially glaring omission: Georgia, with the largest black population, lacked a single institution of higher learning for black women. To rectify this, in 1881 they opened a school for young black women—many of them born under slavery and still illiterate—in the dank, dilapidated basement of the Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta, christening it the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary. The first class had eleven students, mostly mothers. For two sedate, decorous New England ladies to venture into the troubled area of southern race relations represented a courageous act.

In June 1882, Packard and Giles visited Cleveland to make an appeal to potential donors at the Willson Avenue Baptist Church. For forty years, the Spelmans had passionately backed abolitionism and sundry black causes. The recently deceased Harvey B. Spelman had sat on the executive committee of the American Freedmen’s Union Commission. In consequence, Reverend King had a powerful hunch that the Rockefellers would respond enthusiastically to the pleas of Packard and Giles and promised the two women that if they came to his church, he would deliver John and Cettie Rockefeller in the audience.

Packard and Giles dressed with the same spinsterish simplicity, but the similarities ended there. Tall and blue-eyed, Packard was a brisk woman with a ready wit and great managerial gifts, while the younger Giles seemed timorous, gentle, and retiring in manner. That evening they made an affecting presentation, summoning up images of the 150 students, many unlettered but eager, who crowded the drab church basement to learn. As rain dripped down the walls and gathered in stagnant pools on the muddy floor, Packard and Giles sometimes stood in puddles as they taught eleven or twelve classes apiece each day; some classes were tightly wedged into a dusty area formerly used for coal storage. Breathing air thick with smoke and dust and ducking overhead heating pipes, the students had to kneel and write on wooden benches. To teach math, Packard and Giles laid sticks across the planks and had the students count them. At first, most of the women were provided with little more than a Bible, pad, and pencil, and the lighting was so poor that they couldn’t read on rainy days.

This poignant presentation would have wrung tears from a stone, and the Rockefellers were transfixed. As Harriet Giles recalled, “It was at that meeting that Mr. John D. Rockefeller first became interested in the school. After having emptied his pockets when the box was passed, he asked [us] the characteristic question, ‘Are you going to stick?’ and added, ‘If so, I will do more for you.’ ”⁶⁵ On the spot, he pledged $250 more for their building fund. Much to the amazement of the teachers, he returned the next afternoon with three carriages and took them off to Forest Hill, where they drove about as honored guests.

Inspired by these women, Rockefeller, though socially conservative, became unalterably committed to black education. As one chronicler of Rockefeller philanthropy has noted, “The Rockefeller files are more extensive on this subject of the welfare of the Negro race than on almost any other.”⁶⁶ More than any benevolent project, the black women’s college in Atlanta became a Rockefeller family affair, as John was joined in his interest by his Spelman wife, sister-in-law, and mother-in-law. When it came to black education and welfare, Rockefeller displayed unwonted ardor. “Kindly assure the colored people of my sympathy for and interest in them and tell them, I hope they will in addition to securing knowledge from books, strive to learn to do all kinds of work, and better than any other class of men,” he wrote to one minister friend in the late 1880s.⁶⁷ Reciprocating the personal tone of his correspondence, Sophia Packard always saluted him as “Dear Brother” or “Dear Friend.” Amid the hectic rounds of his life, Rockefeller always found time to send letters and small, thoughtful gifts to Packard and Giles to buck up their morale.

Rockefeller’s involvement in the Atlanta school was at first cautious but gradually acquired irresistible momentum. In late 1882, the Atlanta school bought nine acres and five buildings that had housed Union occupation troops. By late 1883, the fast-growing school had enrolled 450 students, the mortgage on the barracks property was coming due, and the school wavered on the edge of fiscal crisis. At this point, Packard and Giles entreated Rockefeller for a donation to secure the school on a permanent footing: “Give it a name; let it if you please be called Rockefeller College, or if you prefer let it take your good wife’s Maiden name or any other which suits you.” ⁶⁸ Although Rockefeller retired the $5,000 debt, he humbly declined to use his own name. Instead, in a fitting tribute to his in-laws, he opted for the Spelman name, thus giving birth to Spelman Seminary, renamed Spelman College in 1924. It developed into one of America’s most respected schools for black women, counting Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mother and grandmother among its many prominent alumnae.

On April 11, 1884, Rockefeller and his family went by train to Atlanta to celebrate the school’s third anniversary, and 450 students packed the chapel to glimpse their patrons. Rockefeller adored Negro hymns and spirituals and now heard them in abundance. After the opening hymn, Sophia Packard exclaimed, “I bless the Lord that I have lived to see this day.”⁶⁹ In a string of brief speeches, Cettie Rockefeller paid tribute to the liberating power of song, sister Lute memorialized their father’s abolitionist work, and their mother told how the Spelman home had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Though Rockefeller virtually never spoke in public, he delivered a talk of unaffected eloquence: “It is in your hearts to make the school one that people will believe in. God will take these small beginnings to do a great work. I am thankful to be here.”⁷⁰ When Rockefeller sat down, it was announced, amid sustained cheers and hosannas, that the school had been renamed Spelman Seminary.

As a paradigm of future Rockefeller philanthropy, several things about Spelman should be flagged for attention. In a delicate balancing act, Rockefeller gave enough to get projects under way, yet not so much as to obviate future fund-raising. In 1886, Rockefeller Hall was dedicated, which included dormitory rooms and a beautiful chapel. During the coming years, he gave another eleven acres plus the money for additional dormitories, a laundry, a dining hall, and numerous other buildings, creating a lovely, elegant campus. Presented with architectural plans for one new building, he commented, “My suggestion is to err in getting what seems at present too much room rather than not enough. I judge the crop of colored folks will be large.”⁷¹ In the 1890s, Rockefeller sent his own landscape architects to redesign the campus, and he himself selected the trees and shrubbery.

Yet for all this fervent support, Packard and Giles had to struggle for years to keep the school afloat. With one check, Rockefeller might have relieved their anxiety forever, but he wanted to avert excessive dependence and keep alive a creative ambiguity about his intentions. While briefly serving on the Spelman board of trustees, he preferred to remain slightly detached and subtly enigmatic, never telegraphing his plans too far in advance.

Another cardinal principle of Rockefeller philanthropy was to rely upon expert opinion. Many of his gifts to Spelman Seminary were channeled through Dr. Henry L. Morehouse, the field secretary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, which increasingly functioned as a conduit for Rockefeller’s wholesale philanthropy in education. Taxed by too many pleas for money, Rockefeller wrote to Morehouse on December 24, 1883, and inquired whether “to avoid having all these people from every part of the country calling” on him it might not be “much better for the cause” for him “to give all through the Home Mission Society.”⁷² Frederick T. Gates later took credit for this sane, efficient method of giving through umbrella groups that would then allocate money locally, but the idea had already taken root in Rockefeller’s mind. In these early years, one also sees Rockefeller using contributions to stimulate collaboration from others as he inched toward the concept of matching grants. For instance, in 1886, he pledged $30,000 to Morehouse, hoping that it would prove the catalyst for a $150,000 fund drive.

Since Rockefeller believed in meritocracy, not aristocracy, he favored educational opportunities for minorities. Spelman Seminary taught nursing, teaching, printing, and other useful trades, but the focal point was training young black women for a good Christian life. Some of the first graduates went to the Congo as missionaries. As Packard and Giles told Rockefeller several years later, “God is blessing the school spiritually as well as temporally; a number [of students] have entered upon the Christian life since the term commenced. We believe the salvation of the race and our country depends upon the Christian training of these girls who are to be future mothers and educators.”⁷³ In the early years, Spelman Seminary encouraged a Victorian gentility among the students, turning out well-bred young ladies in hats and gloves. At the same time, it evinced much of the practical, enterprising spirit espoused by Booker T. Washington, the principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, who stressed vocational training for blacks. Before long, this approach to black education would be anathematized as futile and condescending by W.E.B. Du Bois and other critics who thought blacks capable of the same higher education as whites and felt they were doomed to mediocrity by vocational training. But whatever its early imperfections, Spelman College ultimately evolved into one of the most highly regarded institutions for black women in America.