CHAPTER 24

The Millionaires’ Special

In April 1901, a specially chartered train, jammed with millionaires, pulled out of Manhattan and headed down the eastern seaboard for a ten-day tour of black colleges in the South, many of them financed with northern money, culminating in a conference on southern education in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The train carried so many tony members of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia high society that the press pejoratively tagged it “The Millionaires’ Special.” This swank excursion was the brainchild of department-store magnate Robert C. Ogden, an associate of John Wanamaker. Certain that the “betterment of humanity” was “demanded by Divine authority,” Ogden coupled evangelical faith with a retailer’s flair for publicity.¹ In calling attention to the backward state of southern schools, he hoped to seal an alliance between Yankee philanthropists and southern reformers, healing the sectional strife left over from the Civil War and bringing southern economic development up to parity with the North.

For one passenger, twenty-seven-year-old John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the trip kindled a fuse that would glow brightly for the rest of his life. Struggling with ethical quandaries at Standard Oil, he must have hungered for the purity of social activism. Having led a circumscribed life, bounded by private schools, estates, and 26 Broadway, Junior welcomed this firsthand exposure to urgent social problems. The train rolled through a South pervaded by Jim Crow laws and riled by repeated outbreaks of racial violence. Literacy statistics conveyed a dismal story of derelict schools. While only 4.6 percent of the American population was illiterate, the figure soared to 12 percent for southern whites and 50 percent for southern blacks. Educational reform had scarcely penetrated the rural hinterlands and bayous of black communities, and their impoverished schools scandalized northern educators. Kentucky was the sole southern state with compulsory school-attendance laws, which were then all but universal in the North. Yet as the rich philanthropists alighted at the celebrated showcases of black education—Hampton Institute in Virginia, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, the Rockefellers’ own Spelman Seminary in Atlanta—the trip had its share of inspirational interludes. “The trip has been a constant revelation to me,” Junior told newspaper reporters upon his return. “Tuskegee was especially interesting. Mr. [Booker T.] Washington is a truly remarkable man. His school is doing a wonderful work for the race. I’m glad I made the trip.” ² Junior described the journey to Ogden as “the most instructive experience of my life.”³ In an elated mood, he sat down and wrote an enthusiastic report about it to his father.

Senior’s interest in southern black education antedated this junket by two decades, going back to 1882 when Spelman Seminary was still operating from a leaky church basement. In his own travels through the South, he often attended black Baptist churches on Sunday mornings. Each of his children had been matched to a black scholarship student whose education was paid for by the family, and for several years Junior corresponded with his “adopted” black student at Hampton Institute. In 1900, the Rockefeller family had virtually made over the Spelman campus, paying for a new hospital, two dormitories, a dining hall and kitchen, a power plant, and a residence for the school president. During the 1901 train tour, Junior addressed students in the Spelman chapel and was feted with gospel music. Noting the new buildings bequeathed by the Rockefellers, the school’s annual report that year rang with resounding hosannas for the family: “The Lord gives us all these wonderful blessings through the generous hand of Hon. John D. Rockefeller.”⁴

Before the 1901 trip, Senior had toyed with establishing a trust fund for black education instead of funneling all his money through the American Baptist Education Society—part of his evolution away from the limitations of sectarian giving. That the 1901 trip might be the prelude to some big benefaction was hinted at when Junior told Ogden, “For several years the question of colored education has been much in our minds and in our thoughts. We have endeavored to arrive at some plan which might help in working out this great question.”⁵ For all the noble sentiments behind the Millionaires’ Special, black education remained an inflammatory issue among southern whites, who feared it might weaken segregation. As the chartered train circled back toward New York, the missionary spirit of the passengers suffered a jarring clash with political realities when Henry St. George Tucker, the president of Washington and Lee University, boarded the train in Virginia to deliver a rebuke to the prevailing euphoria:

If it is your idea to educate the Negro you must have the white of the South with you. If the poor white sees the son of a Negro neighbor enjoying through your munificence benefits denied to his boy, it raises in him a feeling that will render futile all your work. You must lift up the “poor white” and the Negro together if you would ever approach success. ⁶

Perhaps because his auditors did not fully fathom the implications of this admonition, it was lustily applauded. If it tempered naive talk with a gritty touch of political realism, it also opened the way for some egregious concessions to the more bigoted southern whites.

As well-meaning, paternalistic men eager to alleviate the suffering of blacks but not wanting to threaten the established order, these rich northern reformers typified their time and were perhaps unusual only in having any concern for black welfare at all. Nevertheless, their political compromises rendered them vulnerable to charges of racism, especially among purists champing at piecemeal reform. One is frankly taken aback by the views of some of these men committed to bettering black education—views often indistinguishable from those of the southern whites they criticized. When Ogden convened a group called the Southern Education Board, its executive secretary, Edgar G. Murphy, declared that the two races “must dwell apart,” “must live apart,” and “must be schooled apart.”⁷ Even Frederick T. Gates yanked his children from the Montclair, New Jersey, public schools because “some of the colored and of the foreign-born children were ill mannered, filthy, and unsanitary.”⁸ He favored vocational training for blacks, not intellectual equality with whites. “Latin, Greek and metaphysics form a kind of knowledge that I fear with our colored brethren tend even more than with us to puff up rather than to build up,” he had written ten years earlier. “The colored race is not ready it seems to me for high culture.”⁹ Such attitudes gave a foretaste of the way that the Rockefeller philanthropies would accommodate southern segregationists.

In the aftermath of the Millionaires’ Special, Junior and Senior consulted many experts on southern education, including Booker T. Washington, who joined them one Sunday night for tea on West Fifty-fourth Street. Washington, too, endorsed practical, vocational training for blacks, not exposure to abstract subjects. On February 27, 1902, flanked by Abby in an oak-paneled study of their house, Junior chaired a meeting of ten men to consider southern education. Swirling brandy snifters and warmed by a blazing fire, they talked until well after midnight, hatching plans for a new philanthropy to be launched with a one-million-dollar gift from Senior. Junior hoped to name it the Negro Education Board, but it was, tellingly, given the neutral name of the General Education Board (GEB) instead. On the same colossal scale as everything else attached to Rockefeller, it would turn into the world’s foremost educational foundation. It was an extension of the ABES with the Baptist trappings pared away.

With crisp efficiency, Senator Aldrich shepherded an incorporation bill through Congress in January 1903, making it the only Rockefeller philanthropy to enjoy the public endorsement of a perpetual, federal charter.¹⁰ Banishing the former accent on black education, the elastic charter delineated the group’s aim as “the promotion of education within the United States without distinction of race, sex or creed.” With the Tarbell series under way, Rockefeller kept a salutary distance from his new foundation. Where he hovered over the RIMR at one remove, he delegated more power in the GEB to his son and never met with its board. As Abraham Flexner later wrote of Senior’s detachment, “I recall that when in 1914 I wrote a history of the General Education Board from 1902 to 1914 we searched the files of the General Education Board in vain in order to obtain a facsimile of his signature to be placed beneath the lithograph prefaced to the text. There was not a single letter in the files of the Board which bore his signature.” ¹¹ Nevertheless, Junior and Gates reported regularly to Rockefeller, who, along with his son, reserved the right to designate the use of two-thirds of the money given. Rockefeller believed that certain universal principles of businesslike efficiency should apply to nonprofit ventures no less than to profit-making ones. In making his first million-dollar appropriation to the GEB, he stipulated that the money should be ladled out over ten years. He tried to influence the pace and scope of his philanthropies, not their contents, and ensure measured, fiscally responsible growth.

For executive secretary, Gates shrewdly chose Dr. Wallace Buttrick, a fellow graduate of the Rochester Theological Seminary and an ex-Baptist preacher. Like Gates, Buttrick renounced the pulpit for philanthropy and more worldly satisfactions. It was no accident that so many ex-ministers flocked to the sanctuary of the Rockefeller philanthropies, which advanced secular causes with an evangelical spirit. An amiable, roly-poly man, blessed with an easy laugh, Buttrick brought consuming dedication to his work. When a minister inquired, “What is your idea of Heaven?” he rejoined, “My office.”¹²

As a former board member of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, Buttrick had studied black mission schools in the South exhaustively. On his office wall, he had a large map, sprinkled with colored pins, showing the major American educational facilities. Where Gates was an uncompromising, table-thumping orator, Buttrick brought a statesman’s tact to the job, defusing tense situations with humor. Without offending applicants, he could deftly expose weaknesses in their projects. His intuitions were so exact that Gates said Buttrick had “cat’s whiskers; he feels objects before he gets to them.”¹³ His greatest drawback—and a real one—was that he thought it expedient to truckle to white supremacists to maintain GEB operations in the South. He told an audience of Tennessee school superintendents, “The Negro is an inferior race—the Anglo-Saxon is superior. There cannot be any question about that.”¹⁴

To endow the board with a safely conservative cast, Gates preferred “successful business men who would steer the ship along traditional lines and would not be carried out of their course by any temporary breeze or even by hurricanes of sentiment.”¹⁵ The first chairman was William H. Baldwin, president of the Long Island Railroad, a vocal apostle for black education—so long as white people stayed on top. Of the southern black, Baldwin observed, “He will willingly fill the more menial positions, and do the heavy work, at less wages, than the American white man or any foreign race which has yet come to our shores. This will permit the Southern white laborer to perform the more expert labor, and to leave the fields, the mines, and the simpler trades for the Negro.”¹⁶ With such men at the helm, the GEB, for all its good works, would fall considerably short of heaven. Neither Junior nor Senior held such baldly racist sentiments, but they agreed that the board had to accommodate retrograde southern views in order to function. It is interesting to note in this context that Standard Oil of Ohio did not hire its first permanent black employee until 1906.

At the beginning, the well-heeled GEB grafted its work onto that of the Southern Education Board, the shoestring operation started by Robert Ogden. Taking up its cause, the GEB campaigned in the South to improve educational standards, taking as its first major mission the creation of high schools. Before Reconstruction, no southern state except for Tennessee had tax-supported educational systems. As a legacy of this history, the four-year high school was practically nonexistent in the region, and there was not a single such school for blacks; many high schools were really extra rooms crudely tacked on to elementary schools. The GEB identified the creation of new high schools as a top priority, since their graduates would furnish teachers for lower-grade schools and also provide a bumper crop of college students, magnifying reform efforts up and down the educational ladder.

Lacking the resources to create a complete high-school system, the GEB established a pattern mimicked by future Rockefeller philanthropies. Rather than trying to accomplish everything through its own budget, it would awaken public opinion and stimulate government action. It took on a crusading spirit, borrowed from the Baptists, and sent forth circuit riders to proselytize for the cause. Ironically, as Standard Oil took a hostile attitude toward state and federal antitrust suits, Rockefeller was forging extensive public-private partnerships for social change. The GEB paid the salaries of special professors at state universities who would roam the state, pinpoint sites for high schools, then drum up political support from local taxpayers. These professors were also affiliated with state education departments, giving a necessary political camouflage at a time when Rockefeller’s name was still anathema across America. So revolutionary was the impact of GEB money that by 1910 it had helped bring into being eight hundred southern high schools.

The GEB was repeatedly blocked in its original ambition to foster black education. Submitting to racism, the foundation limited its support to a “very few” counties that could yield “the largest permanent results,” in Buttrick’s words.¹⁷ Only in 1914 did the organization hire rural school agents for both races in the South, and even then it tended to hire white agents for black schools and continued to encourage schools to teach blacks useful trades and ignore their minds. In the end, it came in for biting criticism from blacks such as W.E.B. Du Bois who did not want to see the school system slot blacks into menial jobs. Du Bois later excoriated the GEB in his autobiography for supporting the idea “that the races in the schools should be separated socially; that colored schools should be chiefly industrial; and that every effort should be made to conciliate southern white opinion.”¹⁸ While the GEB achieved remarkable things in upgrading southern education, it failed to deliver major results where it had originally wanted them most: in black education. In the end, nine-tenths of the GEB’s money went to white schools or to promote medical education—a sorry sequel for a foundation that was supposed to be called the Negro Education Board.

In 1905, the GEB extended its purview to higher education with a $10 million gift from Rockefeller, followed by another $32 million in 1907—hailed by the board as “the largest sum ever given by a man in the history of the race for any social or philanthropic purposes.”¹⁹ (It would be equivalent to $500 million today.) Much of this last gift was routed to the University of Chicago. As the GEB bolstered college and university endowments, it applied the rules that Rockefeller had insisted upon, often futilely, with William Rainey Harper: that gifts should stimulate matching grants; that local communities should help to take up the financial burden of their schools; that universities should be founded in population centers with thriving economic bases; and that endowment income should not cover more than half the operating expenses.

Not long after the GEB was started, it became woefully evident that the defects of southern education could not be remedied without stronger local economies. Gates was struck by this revelation as he and Buttrick took a train excursion through the South. He was staring out the window and ruminating when he suddenly exclaimed: “This is a favored section of the world. It has a superb climate, an abundance of fertile soil, and no end of labor. It must be enriched so that it can properly tax itself if it is to support education and public health. It is your job, Buttrick, to find out how.”²⁰

Nobody ever accused Gates of thinking small. If education depended upon healthy tax rolls, then they would lift the entire tax base of the South. And if that meant enhancing the productivity of southern agriculture, well, so be it. Such was the godlike perspective, if not the mortal hubris, made possible by great wealth. Where other philanthropic executives could only tinker, the Rockefeller proconsuls were urged to indulge more spacious fantasies.

In the spring of 1906, Gates and Buttrick traveled to Washington to meet with a pioneering scientist at the Department of Agriculture, Dr. Seaman A. Knapp, a former teacher, editor, and gospel preacher. In his experimental farmwork, Knapp had striven toward something analogous to Rockefeller’s work in medicine: He tried to bring a scientific spirit to a business bogged down in ancient folklore. Three years earlier, Knapp had gained legendary status when he saved Texas from a boll-weevil infestation that threatened to destroy its cotton industry; farms were deserted and counties depopulated as panicky people despaired of ever again profiting from the crop. If this situation was duplicated in the cotton-dependent South, it would presage disaster. By establishing a demonstration farm in Terrell, Texas, Knapp showed how the boll-weevil plague could be contained through the careful selection of seeds accompanied by intensive farming. From that time, Knapp kept an eye out for private money to enlarge his project. Now, the seventy-three-year-old Knapp and Agriculture Secretary James Wilson met with Gates and Buttrick, who gratified Knapp’s dreams by calling for the sort of public-private partnership that was fast becoming a GEB trademark. If the Agriculture Department drew up plans and supervised the farm-demonstration projects, the project would be greased with monthly checks from the GEB.

In the following years, Rockefeller money helped stamp out boll weevils and improve the yield of southern crops and livestock, swelling the tax base to support public schools. By 1912, more than 100,000 farms had altered the way they cultivated cotton and other crops as a direct result of demonstration work done jointly by the GEB and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Emboldened by such feats, the Rockefeller philanthropies steadily expanded their southern programs, among which the most successful was the campaign to eradicate hookworm. As had happened with Dr. Knapp, this odyssey started out with the dispiriting quest of a frustrated dreamer on the federal payroll, Dr. Charles Wardell Stiles.

When the United States acquired Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War, an army surgeon named Dr. Ashford made a startling discovery: Many poor islanders thought to suffer from malaria were actually infected with hookworm. The son of a Methodist minister, Stiles had crisscrossed the South for years for the U.S. Public Health Service. Based on Ashford’s work, he was seized by the wild surmise that the poor whites of the South—infamous in popular myth for their indolent, sluggish lives—might be suffering from hookworm. In September 1902, outfitted with just a microscope, Dr. Stiles journeyed through the South examining human feces, and, sure enough, he found hookworm eggs everywhere. It was an exhilarating discovery, since hookworm could be cured with fifty cents’ worth of salts and thymol.

When Dr. Stiles reported these results at a Washington, D.C., medical convention that December, he stated that southerners long considered lazy were simply enervated by hookworm. His remarks were greeted with both profound outrage and mocking amusement. The next day, the New York Sun published the lecture under the whimsical headline, “Germ of Laziness Found?” Stiles was aghast: He was being turned into a figure of fun, his great finding trivialized by interminable hookworm jokes. As a zoologist—and therefore presumed ignorant of the human body—he fared no better among physicians: Dr. William Osler went so far as to deny hookworm’s existence in America. Few doctors were prepared to accept that the chronic anemia or continuous malaria commonly attributed to poor whites was, in fact, caused by hookworm, contracted by barefoot people through their soles.

For several years, Dr. Stiles persevered in his crusade to locate private money to apply his theory, and he found an unexpected champion in 1908 when President Roosevelt appointed him to a commission on country life. While touring the South that November, he told another member of the commission, Walter Hines Page, a North Carolina native, that a shuffling, misshapen man on a train platform was suffering from hookworm, not laziness or congenital idiocy. “Fifty cents worth of drugs would make that man a useful citizen in a few weeks,” he said flatly.²¹ He explained to Page that thymol pried the hookworms loose from the intestine walls—some victims harbored up to five thousand in their systems—and then epsom salts flushed them from the body. As a board member of the Rockefeller Institute, Page was the perfect ambassador to bring Stiles to Rockefeller’s attention.

At the end of their tour, Stiles and Page stopped at Cornell University for a reception, where Stiles met a round, jovial man who had already been briefed by Page: Wallace Buttrick. The two men went back to Buttrick’s hotel room and “talked hookworm almost all night.”²² After years of useless speeches, Stiles was now dazed by the dreamlike speed of events. Back in Washington, he got a telegram summoning him to a New York meeting with Gates and Simon Flexner of the RIMR. After delivering a monologue and showing slides for forty minutes, Gates interrupted him to bring Starr Murphy into the meeting. “This is the biggest proposition ever put up to the Rockefeller office,” Gates told Murphy. “Listen to what Dr. Stiles has to say. Now, Doctor, start from the beginning again and tell Mr. Murphy what you have told me.”²³ These sessions lasted for two days, and by the end Gates and his fellows were sold on a mass-mobilization program to eradicate hookworm from the South. It was an ideal opportunity for large-scale philanthropy: Here was a condition that could be easily diagnosed and cheaply cured, with an estimated two million victims in the South. The results would be rapid and visible, giving the program more populist appeal than the rarefied work of the medical-research institute. It would, in short, simultaneously serve the overlapping objectives of science, philanthropy, and Rockefeller public relations.

Junior was deputed, as was so often the case, to sell his father on the need for a commission to fight hookworm. Although Stiles had modestly suggested a half-million dollars, Gates fixed on one million dollars as a nice round sum that would capture the South’s attention. Since the region remained touchy about any assumption that it was riddled with listless imbeciles, Junior reassured his father that the board would recruit a southern contingent. On October 20, 1909, Junior implored him to act fast and stake out a leadership role in the hookworm fight. Two days later, Rockefeller replied: “Answering your letter 20th with reference to hook worm, it seems to me that $1,000,000 is a very large amount to promise, but I will consent to this sum, with the understanding that I shall be conferred with step by step and consent to whatever appropriations are made from time to time. This, however, need only be known to such as you choose to have know it.”²⁴ Since Rockefeller had started to take winter golfing vacations at the Hotel Bon Air in Augusta, Georgia, he derived special pleasure from the gift. As he said, “It has been my pleasure of late to spend a portion of each year in the South and I have come to know and to respect greatly that part of the country and to enjoy the society and friendship of many of its warm-hearted people.” ²⁵

As expected, many southern editors reacted to the hookworm campaign as a calculated affront to their honor and dignity. Originally, the effort was to be known as the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm in the South. To avoid stigmatizing the South, it was shortened to the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission or even the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Instead of being based in New York, like other Rockefeller programs, it opened in 1910 in Washington, D.C., diplomatically south of the Mason-Dixon line.

The executive secretary was a Tennessee native, Dr. Wickliffe Rose. Another clergyman’s son, Rose, forty-seven, was a shy, immaculate man who often wore bow ties and stared primly through wire-rimmed spectacles or pince-nez. Steeped in the writings of Kant and Hegel, grounded in the Latin and Greek classics, and fond of writing poetry in French, he had been dean of Peabody College and the University of Nashville before becoming general agent of the Peabody Education Fund, where he came to the GEB’s attention. The courtly Rose, modest and painstakingly thorough, supplied both the tact and determination that made the hookworm campaign a smashing success.

In mapping out his strategy, Rose adopted the GEB model of using Rockefeller money as a catalyst for government cooperation. The first order of business was a detailed survey to identify the centers of hookworm infestation. Once again, the states were urged to hire sanitation directors to educate the public about the menace. State medical boards sent young doctors into rural areas, their salaries paid by Rockefeller money. These campaigns were often carried out under the auspices of state health boards, thus providing political protection. As Gates privately explained this decision, “To put Mr. Rockefeller’s name prominently forward . . . would impair the usefulness of the work.”²⁶ This was doubly necessary since many southern communities saw the Sanitary Commission’s work as a degrading new form of northern carpetbagging. Yet for all the efforts to shroud Rockefeller’s involvement, many southerners knew the program’s real sponsorship and devised preposterous theories to explain it. One was that Rockefeller was entering the shoe business and financed the hookworm campaign to accustom southerners to wearing shoes year-round, instead of only during the winter months.

The campaign relied on extensive publicity and showy gimmicks, and it sent out “health trains” with traveling exhibitions on modern sanitation. Perhaps the single most important factor in its success was the introduction of dispensaries for public-health work. In 1910, only two southern counties had such dispensaries. That number burgeoned to 208 counties within three years, thanks to Rockefeller money. To coax crowds into these dispensaries, the field workers (in a manner oddly reminiscent of Doc Rockefeller) distributed handbills saying, “See the hookworms and the various intestinal parasites that man is heir to.”²⁷ In the rousing spirit of tent revival meetings, rural people formed long lines and gaped at hookworm eggs through microscopes or examined them squirming in bottles. Because infected people were cured swiftly, it seemed no less miraculous than faith healing to many people, and the throngs often erupted into singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” In a single day in 1911, 454 people were cured of the disease. One field director in Kentucky wrote, “I have never seen the people at any place so wrought up and so full of interest and enthusiasm.” ²⁸ Except for Florida, every southern state joined in the program.

Pretty soon, the gentle, decorous Wickliffe Rose ran an operation of military scope. During the first year of work, 102,000 people were examined in nine southern states, and 43,000 were identified with hookworm. At the end of five years, Gates reported to Rockefeller that nearly half a million people had been cured. While the disease had not been extirpated completely, it had been reduced drastically. “Hookworm disease has not only been recognized, bounded and limited,” Gates boasted to Rockefeller, “it has been reduced to one of the minor infections of the south, perhaps the most easily and universally recognized and cured of all.” ²⁹ Most important, the states had set up machinery to perpetuate the work and avert backsliding. Lauding the campaign as “well planned and well executed,” Rockefeller especially praised its deft diplomatic touch in dealing with a politically charged situation. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was a landmark in epidemiology and preventive medicine, as Charles W. Eliot recognized when he called it “the most effective campaign against a widespread disabling disease which medical science and philanthropy have ever combined to conduct.”³⁰ In 1913, the newly formed Rockefeller Foundation asked Wickliffe Rose to take the hookworm campaign abroad, extending the fight to fifty-two countries on six continents and freeing millions of people from this worldwide scourge.

By 1910, medicine and education had emerged as the top priorities of the Rockefeller philanthropies, and that year the two trends fruitfully dovetailed. The stimulus was a report with the deceptively bland title Medical Education in the United States and Canada. Its author, Abraham Flexner, was the brother of RIMR director Simon. Where Simon was precise and conciliatory, Abe was a combative iconoclast who relished a good intellectual brawl. After graduating from Johns Hopkins, he started a small, innovative private school in Louisville that won a fine reputation among Ivy League colleges. He had the maverick’s talent for casting a fresh, critical eye on practices sanctified by custom, and he provoked a national debate when he proposed that students should graduate college in three years.

When the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching invited him to survey American and Canadian medical schools, Abe pleaded ignorance, but with typical zealousness he visited all 155 schools and came away appalled by the experience. Like his brother, he took the Johns Hopkins Medical School as his model of a competent school. “Without this pattern in the back of my head,” he admitted later, “I could have accomplished little.” ³¹ By contrast, the majority of schools he visited seemed to be dreary, haphazard affairs, run negligently by local doctors to supplement their income from private practice.

As Flexner doggedly made the rounds, nobody realized that he was the exterminating angel who would snuff out many fly-by-night institutions. The tableaux he described would have been richly satirical had they not been strictly accurate reportage. Since most medical schools relied solely upon tuition fees and could not afford modern equipment, they still languished in the dark ages of medicine. In Washington State, Flexner asked the dean of one school whether they had a physiology lab. “Surely,” said the dean. “I have it upstairs. I will bring it to you.” And he proudly produced a little pulse-taking device. One osteopathic school in Iowa had desks, blackboards, and chairs but could not muster any charts or scientific apparatus. Of the 155 schools, only 23 required more than a high-school education. Since some schools did not even demand that, they were not exactly bursting with brainpower.

In 1910, Flexner published his polemic, known as the Flexner Report—the most pitiless and influential indictment of medical education ever printed. Naming the most notorious diploma mills, the report sparked furious debate, and more than one hundred schools either perished in the ensuing controversy or were absorbed by universities. Among the major casualties were the quaint homeopathic schools so dear to John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Already in decline, the schools were dealt a lethal blow by the Flexner Report.

Gates devoured the report. Disgusted with medical practice, he believed that young doctors ended up either as “confirmed pessimists, disappointed and chagrined, or else mere reckless ‘pill-slingers’ for money.” ³² With a big pile of cash at his disposal, Gates would not let the Flexner Report gather dust. When he invited the author to lunch, Flexner pointed to two maps in his book—one showing the locations of the medical schools he visited, the other showing what the country needed. “How much would it cost to convert the first map into the second?” Gates asked, and Flexner replied, “It might cost a billion dollars.” “All right,” Gates announced, “we’ve got the money. Come down here and we’ll give it to you.”³³ When Gates asked Flexner how he would spend the first million to overhaul medical research, he said, “I should give it to Dr. Welch.”³⁴ Thus, Welch’s Johns Hopkins Medical School was consecrated as the prototype to be emulated by recipients of Rockefeller money. Hopkins ran its lab departments on a full-time basis, with many faculty members applying themselves solely to teaching and research, a pattern that Gates wished to see duplicated everywhere. Never before had a rich benefactor spent his money in this area. As Dr. Welch said, “It marked . . . the first large public recognition of medical education and medical research as a rewarding subject of philanthropy.”³⁵

In 1913, Flexner formalized his ties with Rockefeller and joined the GEB staff. Flexner and his cohorts singled out well-regarded institutions—Vanderbilt University in the South, the University of Chicago in the Midwest—to serve as regional models. Medical schools that wanted Rockefeller grants had to upgrade entrance standards, institute four-year programs, and adopt the full-time teaching approach. This movement to universalize the Johns Hopkins model proceeded even though it had one highly disgruntled critic: John D. Rockefeller, Sr., who still waged a lonely battle for an alternate form of medicine. “I am a homeopathist,” he complained to Starr Murphy in 1916. “I desire that homeopaths should have fair, courteous and liberal treatment extended to them from all medical institutions to which we contribute.” To Rockefeller’s credit, he did not pull rank on his advisers and often yielded to their judgments, even when they ran counter to his personal wishes. “I am glad to have the aid of experienced men who are able to sift out the applications and give to the deserving, ” he once said. “I am not a good one to judge such things: I am too soft-hearted.”³⁶

In the spring of 1919, the GEB asked its founder for fifty million dollars to extend scientific medical education across the country, the world war having exposed the poor health of many soldiers and the inadequacy of base hospitals. For months, Rockefeller retreated into one of his baffling silences. Just when his lieutenants despaired of a response, he sent a letter pledging about $20 million for the project—a bonanza soon expanded to $50 million. By the time Flexner left the GEB in 1928, it had distributed more than $78 million to propagate the scientific approach to medical education. The sum total of these developments resulted in nothing less than a revolution in medical education. Doc Rockefeller’s son had banished laggards from the profession and introduced a new era of enlightenment in American medicine. In its thirty-year existence, the GEB dispensed $130 million, equal to more than $1 billion today.

While keeping apart from the management of the RIMR and the GEB, Rockefeller remained more involved with the University of Chicago. Paradoxically, it was the philanthropic effort that most frustrated him and most frequently violated his charitable principles. Meant as an incentive to lure money from Chicago businessmen, his initial endowment had, perversely, deterred people from giving. Reams of press coverage presented the university as Rockefeller’s hobbyhorse. In 1903, Life magazine ran a cartoon of Ye Rich Rockefeller University, showing a lady holding aloft a lamp marked Standard Oil, her robes checkered with dollar signs. Though Rockefeller studiously avoided the campus and visited only three times (1897, 1901, and 1903), he got little credit for this self-abnegation. The public was quick to pounce on his every move as yet another ruse. As Gates wearily recalled:

The people of Chicago had ceased to give except in driblets. A hostile press often spoke of the University as if it were Standard Oil propaganda, its policies always dictated by the Founder, its professors subject to dismissal if they were other than mouthpieces of him, the splendid architectural creation of the Midway Plaisance was a monument to the glory of John D. Rockefeller, erected and maintained in his personal interest.³⁷

This myth inverted the truth, as Ida Tarbell’s spy Hiram Brown reported to J. M. Siddall. “Hiram says that John D. talks about Chicago University a good deal, but that he never brags about the money that he has given it, and that he never indicates that it is his private property,” Siddall reported. “He says that John D. talks about the men who teach in the University a great deal, and that he is constantly bragging about their ability and the great things they are doing.”³⁸ In the one area in which Rockefeller did openly intervene—university finances—he was powerless to brake the spendthrift Dr. William Rainey Harper. Each year, Rockefeller reluctantly gave another million dollars to bolster the permanent endowment to keep pace with his free-spending president. Though Rockefeller kept complaining about the chronic deficits, Harper ignored the founder’s warnings, and relations grew very strained between him and Gates. Rockefeller hated being pressured, and Gates always believed that had Harper asked for less, Rockefeller would have willingly given much more. Then, in December 1903, Harper and the trustees were called to New York for a special session in Rockefeller’s private office. In a dreadful miscalculation, Harper made an appeal for more money, despite the previous year’s shortfall. When polled in Harper’s presence, not a single trustee endorsed his position— a humiliating blow. That night, Senior and Junior huddled, and the next day Junior informed the board that his father would not add a penny to the endowment until the budget gap was plugged. Harper was strictly forbidden from enlarging existing departments or adding new ones. If harrowing for Harper, the episode was also distressing for Rockefeller, who had a fatherly feeling toward him.

Harper’s health, meanwhile, was being undermined by his perpetual exertions. In 1903, he kept complaining of fatigue, yet he was congenitally incapable of moderation. As his son said, “He had frequently told the family that he knew he was shortening his life by the way he was doing his work, but explained to the family that he felt the work could be done better by this method.” Three months after his showdown with Rockefeller, Harper underwent an appendectomy. The doctors found evidence of cancer but were unsure of their diagnosis and delayed telling him until February 1905. By then, the malignancy had grown incurable and Harper minced no words with Gates: “It is as clearly a case of execution announced beforehand as it could possibly be.”³⁹

When Rockefeller heard the news, he was distraught. “He cannot bring himself yet even to attempt to express his feelings,” Gates told Harper.⁴⁰ On February 16, 1905, he wrote Harper a letter whose laconic eloquence says much about the affection he felt for this flawed but deeply inspiring educator:

You are constantly in my thoughts. The feelings which I have always cherished toward you are intensified at this time. I glory in your marvelous courage and strength, and confidently hope for the best. I have the greatest satisfaction and pleasure in our united efforts for the university and I am full of hope for its future. No man could have filled your place. With highest esteem and tenderest affection.⁴¹

A few days later, about to undergo surgery, Harper repaid the tribute: “You have stood by me loyally; I can ask nothing more. The enterprise has proven to be larger and greater than we could have anticipated, but here it is—a splendid institution, and I know that you and your family will stand by it to the end.”⁴²

Harper continued to write and teach, even though he was wasting away from cancer. In August 1905, he made a final visit to his patron at Forest Hill. Though Ida Tarbell had just published her acid character portrait of Rockefeller, he seemed philosophic. As Harper said, “He believes that this is all providential, and that he is to be thoroughly vindicated. It is a subject, however, which still occupies a large part of his mind. . . . I have never known him to be more genial or communicative.” ⁴³ The two men spent bittersweet hours repairing the damage done to their friendship in recent years.

In January 1906, lying on his deathbed, William Rainey Harper, who had always had one eye fixed on heaven, the other on earthly prospects, called in two close friends, Ernest D. Burton and Albion W. Small. He had courted Rockefeller and his fortune during a period of extraordinary public outrage against Standard Oil, and now he seemed haunted, restless, his mind darkened by doubt. “I have not followed Jesus Christ as closely as I ought to have done,” he confessed to his friends. “I have come down from the plane on which I ought to have lived. I have justified it to myself at times as necessary because I was carrying so heavy loads. But I see now that it was all wrong.”⁴⁴ On January 10, 1906, he died at age fifty.

In the following days, Rockefeller’s mind returned to the exuberant period of his and Harper’s early planning for the university. Harper’s death perhaps affected him more than that of any colleague or friend. As he wrote the new university president, Harry Pratt Judson, “I am personally conscious of having met with an irreparable loss in his death. It seems a mysterious providence that he should have been cut off in the prime of his life and the height of his usefulness. I mourn him as though a member of my own family had been taken, and the sense of loss increases as the days go by.” ⁴⁵ Seldom did Rockefeller strike such a poignant note. For all his criticism of Harper’s improvidence, he recognized his supreme achievement in creating a school equivalent to an Ivy League college in little more than a decade. Soon after Harper’s death, he announced plans to build a campus library in Harper’s memory and provided a $100,000 endowment to support his widow. In a no-less-fitting memorial, he agreed to close the budget deficit for 1906–1907. If Judson lacked Harper’s vision and eloquence, he was a cautious administrator and sound budget planner—exactly the custodial figure the institution needed.

In 1907, Gates and Junior quietly began to lobby Senior to drop the requirement that the university and a majority of the trustees be Baptists. The school’s fund-raising was hampered by its denominational character. Rockefeller was always of two minds on the matter, wanting the institution to remain under Baptist auspices while also arguing that it should be “conducted in a spirit of the widest liberality” with students drawn from every class of society.⁴⁶ For two years, Rockefeller deliberated before consenting to abolish the university’s denominational link. Yet this bold step was easy compared to the next one contemplated by his advisers. By 1908, Rockefeller had spent $24 million on the university, but the Chicago citizenry had not lifted the burden from his shoulders. One evening in late 1908, Gates held a conference in his Montclair home with Harry Pratt Judson and Starr Murphy. “What would be the greatest service Mr. Rockefeller could now render the University?” Gates asked Judson and then promptly answered his own question: “Dr. Judson, the greatest possible service Mr. Rockefeller could now render to the University would be to separate himself from it altogether, withdraw his representatives, and turn it absolutely over to the public forever.”⁴⁷ When Judson protested that the university was still incomplete and sorely in need of funds, Gates said that Rockefeller might make one final large gift before departing.

Bent upon this plan, Gates managed to convince Junior who, in turn, tried to win over his father, who was flabbergasted by the suggestion and silently tabled it. When Junior renewed the subject in early 1909, his father rejected it categorically. “I confess the thought rather staggers me. . . . The institution is so large and far reaching in its influence and we have been such a potent factor in its upbuilding that I tremble at the possibility of cutting loose from our relation and leaving it a great craft in the middle of the ocean.”⁴⁸ Though the campaign started out less than promisingly, Gates and Junior knew that major decisions were often protracted with Rockefeller. In November 1909, Junior suggested that his father make a last ten-million-dollar contribution to the school then cut loose forever. “Few men have founded great institutions and have had the courage to wean them,” he said.⁴⁹

A few weeks later, Gates weighed in with a letter that must rank as a seminal document in American philanthropy. It argued that a donor’s highest ideal should be to give birth to an institution that would then enjoy a life totally independent of him. Gates noted that many schools—technology, agriculture, forestry, and others—were still needed to complete the university but that the money for them would not issue from other sources so long as Rockefeller was the university’s patron. During the previous seven years, he had given nearly $12 million, while the midwestern public had given only $931,000—a pittance. Rockefeller’s withdrawal was imperative on political grounds as well:

It will conclusively demonstrate the fact which the public has not been able to grasp—the fact of your entire disinterestedness. It will disclose beyond possibility of cavil that your motives in founding the institution are solely to bless and benefit your fellow men; that you have not been seeking through it to increase your personal power, to propagate your political views, to help your cause, or to glorify your name.

Noting that other rich men demanded control, Gates went on:

Mr. Carnegie is, I believe, a member of every Board which he creates, and of course, the managing member. Mr. Clark, who founded Clark University, undisguisedly and notoriously ran the institution until his death. Mr. Stanford died soon after designating his property for the Leland Stanford, Jr. University. His wife, however, took up the reins and openly conducted the University for many years, demanding openly the dismissal of professors uncongenial to her and supervising every detail of administration.

In closing, Gates urged Rockefeller to withdraw from the university and set his creation free.⁵⁰

At first, Rockefeller did not reply or even acknowledge this letter, yet it set up far-reaching reverberations in his mind. Gates’s practical arguments must have counted heavily with him, but the idea of subordinating his ego to some larger institutional end would also have appealed to his religious sense of self-denial. He also believed that the “dead hand of fixed endowments” should not trap future generations with the outmoded agenda of the original donors. Perhaps for all these reasons, Rockefeller made a final $10 million payment to the University of Chicago in December 1910, bringing his total gifts to $35 million, or $540 million in 1996 dollars, then bid it farewell forever. In a valedictory to the board, he wrote, “It is far better that the University be supported and enlarged by the gifts of many than by those of a single donor. . . . I am acting on an early and permanent conviction that this great institution being the property of the people should be controlled, conducted and supported by the people.” ⁵¹ The withdrawal was not quite as total as Rockefeller implied. Between 1910 and 1932, the GEB and other Rockefeller philanthropies channeled $35 million to the university, supplemented by another $6 million from Junior. But Rockefeller, in a statesmanlike act, had established the concept of the patron as founder, not owner or overseer, of his creation. At their December 1910 meeting, the trustees of the university paid tribute to Rockefeller: “Mr. Rockefeller has never permitted the University to bear his name, and consented to be called its founder only at the urgent request of the Board of Trustees. He has never suggested the appointment or the removal of any professor. Whatever views may have been expressed by members of the faculty, he has neither indicated either assent or dissent.”⁵²

In the early 1900s, there was a well-nigh universal perception that John D. gave generously to philanthropy to fumigate his fortune. As Governor Robert M. La Follette said in 1905, “I read yesterday that Rockefeller has been to prayer meeting again; tomorrow he will be giving to some college or university. He gives with two hands, but he robs with many. If he should live a thousand years he could not expiate the crime he has committed. . . . He is the greatest criminal of the age.” ⁵³ Cartoonists stereotyped Rockefeller as a churchgoing hypocrite. One cartoon showed him as an angel with wings sprouting from his head, beneath the caption: “John the Baptist: High Finance Is Now Getting So High That Some People Expected to Get to Heaven from the Top of It.” ⁵⁴

Were John D.’s donations as saintly as he claimed? Could he possibly have been insensible to the political impact of his good deeds? An internal memo written to George Rogers in 1906 sheds some light on this intriguing question. To assist Standard Oil in its political travails, Archbold asked Rockefeller in October 1906 to publish a list of the dozen or so colleges to which he had given significant endowments. Rockefeller was extremely reluctant to print such a list. “It is a thing we have never done before,” he advised Rogers, “and is very distasteful to me, and would not be considered for a moment, only with the idea that it might prove of help to us in the Standard Oil Company.” If a list was made up, he wanted a guarantee that it would be returned and destroyed, blotting out any trace of his complicity.⁵⁵ This letter generally vindicates Rockefeller’s assertion that he did not exploit his philanthropy for selfish reasons, but it also shows that he occasionally bent his own rules. H. G. Wells was mostly right when he wrote in a 1934 book that “of all the base criticisms [Rockefeller’s] career has evoked, the charge that his magnificently intelligent endowments have been planned to buy off criticism or save his soul from the slow but sure vindictiveness of his Baptist God is surely the most absurd.” ⁵⁶ Since his adolescence, charity had been interwoven with the fabric of his life.

Nevertheless, the press treated each Rockefeller donation as another bid to buy back his reputation. Never was this truer than during the tainted-money controversy that flared up in March 1905, when it was revealed that Rockefeller had given $100,000 to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a Congregational group in Boston, likely the largest gift the group had ever received. Coming at the close of the Tarbell series, this farsighted gift was bound to stir up a hornet’s nest of controversy.

With the creation of the GEB, Rockefeller had begun to funnel money to nondenominational groups and transcend religious giving altogether. Gates, who regarded sectarianism as “the curse of religion at home and abroad, a blight upon religion, whether viewed from an economic, intellectual, or spiritual standpoint,” eagerly encouraged this trend.⁵⁷ As this lapsed minister jettisoned the Baptist Church, his Christianity sounded increasingly like high-minded social work. “My religion became . . . simply the service of humanity in the Spirit of Jesus. It is the religion of Jesus, of science, and of evolution alike.”⁵⁸ In his papers, Gates left a startling memo, “The Spirit of True Religion,” which he apparently wrote to clarify his thoughts and in which he candidly stated, “There is no essential difference between religion and morality except that the one is more intense and passionate than the other.” ⁵⁹ In 1903, he bluntly told one applicant that while Rockefeller was a Baptist, he would no longer establish Baptist schools “for the sole purpose of propagating those views which are peculiarly and distinctively Baptist.”⁶⁰

The $100,000 gift of what came to be called tainted money was solicited by Dr. James L. Barton, who met one Sunday with Starr Murphy and Gates in the latter’s Montclair home. While Gates did not initiate the meeting, he did recommend to Rockefeller that he contribute the $100,000. In a letter to Rockefeller, Gates made a secular case for this missionary money, again showing that Rockefeller was capable of responding to explicitly worldly rationales for religious giving:

Quite apart from the question of persons converted, the mere commercial results of missionary effort to our own land is worth, I had almost said, a thousand-fold every year of what is spent on missions. Our export trade is growing by leaps and bounds. Such growth would have been utterly impossible but for the commercial conquest of foreign lands under the lead of missionary endeavor. What a boon to home industry and manufacture!⁶¹

Setting aside his customary silence, Rockefeller praised this letter profusely and agreed to send a $100,000 check to Boston a few days later.

So as not to be branded publicity-mongers, Rockefeller and Gates allowed beneficiaries to announce the receipt of gifts. Eager for publicity in this case— which would declare Rockefeller’s emancipation from sectarian giving—Gates pored over the newspapers, vainly awaiting some mention of the record Congregational gift. When he got the Boston board’s monthly publication, he expected to see banner headlines. Instead, the news was tucked away in a two- or three-line item in which the secretary noted that he had received a $100,000 check from John D. Rockefeller “with surprise,” implying that the money was unsolicited.⁶² There was not a grudging syllable of thanks. The gift aroused a great ruckus as a chorus of Congregational ministers demanded that it be returned. Everybody had read in McClure’s about the nefarious methods by which this money had been procured.

The most visible critic was the Reverend Washington Gladden from Columbus, Ohio, a scourge of Rockefeller’s for many years. An articulate critic of the trusts, he was a leader of the social-gospel movement. Now, armed with facts supplied directly by Ida Tarbell herself, Gladden rose up in his Congregational church one Sunday morning to deliver a stinging tirade against the $100,000 gift. “The money proffered to our board of missions comes out of a colossal estate, whose foundations were laid in the most relentless rapacity known to modern commercial history,” he said.⁶³ In this sermon, Gladden dubbed Rockefeller’s check “tainted money,” an expression taken up by the press and fixed permanently in the political lexicon. He filed a protest with the Congregational Church, pleading for return of the money.

Faced with this uproar, Gates waited for the Boston board to make a clean breast of the story and admit that the money had been solicited. Instead, they suppressed the truth, and Barton even reassured reporters that it had been unsought. When Gates read this, he threatened to expose the gift’s genesis, and only then did the Congregational board come clean. Both Gates and Rockefeller were disappointed that Gladden never made a widespread public retraction. As Rockefeller said, he “failed to do the manly thing and correct the false impressions which his writings had occasioned.”⁶⁴ Of course, Rockefeller’s self-satisfaction begged the larger question of whether people should accept money gained by what they deemed unscrupulous means.

The tainted-money controversy elicited a splendid piece of satire from Mark Twain who, having befriended the Rockefellers and Henry Rogers, knew that rapacious businessmen could be kindhearted benefactors. In Harper’s Weekly, he published an open letter from Satan in which he chastised readers, “Let us have done with this frivolous talk. The American Board accepts contributions from me every year; then why shouldn’t it from Mr. Rockefeller? In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience-money, as my books will show; then what becomes of the sting when that term is applied to Mr. Rockefeller’s gift?”⁶⁵

As always, the public preferred to picture Rockefeller as crestfallen over the tainted-money hubbub. One newspaper said that he “sits by the hour under the trees that surround his costly home, brooding over the emphatic opposition public opinion has made against him. He speaks to no one save those who call upon most urgent matters.”⁶⁶ The truth was that Rockefeller did not waver or buckle under the torrent of bad publicity, though he was sobered by it. In July 1905, he turned up at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church in an excellent mood, if slightly worn out, and chatted jovially with old friends. He even allowed himself some drollery at the end of his Sunday-school speech. Pulling out his watch, he told the crowd, his eyes twinkling mischievously, “I’ve talked too long, I’m afraid. There are others here who wished to talk. I don’t want you to think I’m a selfish monopolist!”⁶⁷ The congregation responded with hearty applause.