Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

by Ron Chernow

journalists had blackened his reputation in the early 1900s and made him America’s most hated businessman.

William Avery Rockefeller had been the sort of fast-talking huckster who thrived in frontier communities of early-nineteenth-century America, and Tarbell amply reported his misdemeanors. At one point in her blistering portrait, she said, “Indeed he had all the vices save one—he never drank.”

In the 1830s, many settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut were swarming excitedly into wilderness areas of western New York, a migration that Alexis de Tocqueville described as “a game of chance” pursued for “the emotions it excites, as much as for the gain it procures.”3 The construction of the Erie Canal in the 1820s had lured many settlers to the area.

Even as an adolescent, he disappeared on long trips in midwinter, providing no clues as to his whereabouts. Throughout his life, he expended considerable energy on tricks and schemes to avoid plain hard work. But he possessed such brash charm and rugged good looks—he was nearly six feet tall, with a broad chest, high forehead, and thick auburn beard covering a pugnacious jaw—that people were instantly beguiled by him.

This child, born during Martin Van Buren’s presidency and destined to become the country’s foremost capitalist, would survive into the second term of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Like many other future magnates—Andrew Carnegie (born in 1835), Jay Gould (1836), and J. Pierpont Morgan (1837)—he was born in the late 1830s and would therefore come to maturity on the eve of the post–Civil War industrial boom.

The Nancy Brown affair wasn’t the only indignity visited upon Eliza, for she was often abandoned by Bill during her three cheerless years in Richford. He remained a restless and defiant individualist who preferred life beyond the pale of society. Early in the marriage, he stayed put for a while, operating a small sawmill on Michigan Hill and dealing in salt, fur, horses, and timber, but he soon resumed the footloose life of a peddler, his trips cloaked in unfathomable mystery. Like a fugitive, he would depart furtively under cover of night and return after dark, weeks or months later, flinging pebbles at the window to signal his return. To tide over his family in his absence, he arranged for credit at the general store. “Give my family anything they want while I’m away,” he instructed Chauncey Rich, whose father, Ezekiel, had founded Richford, “and when I come back I’ll settle.”15 Never knowing when this credit might be canceled, Eliza became extremely frugal and drilled her children in thrifty maxims such as “Willful waste makes woeful want.”

Of his family’s decision to leave Richford, Rockefeller offered an economic explanation that probably served as the standard cover story of his childhood: stingy soil. “The country there is beautiful,” Rockefeller would say, “but the settlers wasted their energy in trying to get the stumps out of the ground, and trying to make crops grow in the poor soil.”25 The true reason, of course, was Eliza’s horror at the town’s low moral tone, as reflected by its single church; she was probably also eager to remove the children from the influence of her boisterous, drunken Rockefeller in-laws and expose them to the steadier Davisons. By no coincidence, the Rockefellers moved to Moravia, three miles from the Davison farm, where Eliza could enjoy her father’s presence during her husband’s habitual absences.

Now, in 1843, with Big Bill again on the road during months of her pregnancy, Eliza gave birth to a second daughter, Mary Ann; two years later, twins arrived. The boy, Frank, was healthy, but Frances was sickly from birth and received some seventy visits from a local doctor before she died just short of her second birthday. Eliza tried to protect the seven-year-old John D. from this first lacerating brush with death, but it remained engraved on his memory. When he visited Moravia as an old man in his eighties, he pointed to a field and explained that “when Frances was buried I was sent over to that field to pick stones, so that I should not know.”3 He later exhibited an unacknowledged dread of death, and Eliza was perhaps the first to intuit it.

John D. Rockefeller was drawn to the church, not as some nagging duty or obligation but as something deeply refreshing to the soul. The Baptist church of his boyhood provides many clues to the secrets of his character. As a young man, he was raised on a steady diet of maxims, grounded in evangelical Protestantism, that guided his conduct. Many of his puritanical attitudes, which may seem antiquated to a later generation, were merely the religious commonplaces of his boyhood. Indeed, the saga of his monumental business feats is inseparable from the fire-and-brimstone atmosphere that engulfed upstate New York in his childhood. Even his father, wont to flirt with the devil’s company, knew many hymns by heart and urged his children to go to church; he once offered John five dollars to read the Bible cover to cover, thus creating an early, unintentional association between God and money. Always an iconoclastic, outlaw spirit, Bill never actually joined a church—that would have been going too far—so John identified religion with his beloved mother, who found in the Bible a balm for her troubled spirit.

While the first Baptist church had been founded by Roger Williams in Rhode Island in 1639, the denomination didn’t flourish until the so-called Great Awakening that began around 1739.

Recruited from the common people, often unpaid and poorly educated, Baptist ministers ventured into the hinterlands where other clergymen feared to tread. Because they opposed religious establishments and owed no allegiance to supervisory bishops or a central church hierarchy, they could start up a church in any creek or hollow. They emerged as a major religious force by the close of the eighteenth century.

One popular evangelist, Jacob Knapp, described tormented sinners crawling up the sides of burning pits while devils with pitchforks, perched on the rim, sadistically prodded them back down into the flames. The revival movement was self-perpetuating, for the saved were expected to rescue others from Satan’s clutches. They would go door-to-door, trying to flush sinners from their homes until the entire town was caught up in passionate, hysterical emotion.

Because liquor was considered a satanic brew, a believer couldn’t make it, sell it, or offer it to guests, and a temperance pledge became a standard component of accepting Christ into one’s life.

The Second Great Awakening had explicitly linked personal conversion with community reform, spawning political activism. During the colonial period, Americans had liberally consumed demon rum, but the new evangelical emphasis on social uplift helped to foster a national temperance movement in the 1820s and 1830s.

For a woman of Eliza’s intense pride and religiosity, it must have been hard to endure the unaccountable absences of her gallivanting husband, and she drew closer, of necessity, to her oldest son, who struck her as precocious and prematurely wise.

Growing up as a miniature adult, burdened with duties, he developed an exaggerated sense of responsibility that would be evident throughout his life. He learned to see himself as a reluctant savior, taking charge of troubled situations that needed to be remedied.

When selling patent medicines, his marksmanship served him extremely well, for he would use it to draw a crowd in strange towns. Setting up a manikin with a clay pipe in its mouth, he retreated to a distance of two hundred paces, shot the pipe to smithereens, then offered a ten-dollar bill to anybody in the crowd who could match his prowess.

The bane of John’s boyhood wasn’t poverty so much as chronic worry about money, and it is easy to see how cash came to seem like God’s bounty, the blessed stuff that relieved all of life’s cares. After the family spent anxious weeks or months running up credit bills and waiting for Father’s return, Bill would abruptly materialize, a jolly Santa Claus, swimming in lucre. He would compensate for his long absence by extravagant shows of generosity with his children. For John, money became associated with these brief but pleasurable interludes when the mercurial father was at home and the Rockefellers functioned as a true family.

Once, while sick in bed, she discovered that John had neglected to perform a task for her, and judgment was swift: She sent him to the Susquehanna to select a willow switch. With the quiet cunning that would become a pronounced trait of his nature, he nicked the switch in several places with his knife, so it would bend and crack after the initial blows. Eliza wasn’t deceived. “Go and get another switch,” she instructed him, “and see that it is not slashed this time.”

Inspired by a Sunday-school class on forgiveness, the children initiated a custom that suggests how religion permeated their lives. Each night, when they got into bed, they turned to their siblings and said, “Do you forgive me all I have done to you today?”61 By the time they fell asleep, the air had been cleared of all recriminations or festering anger.

“The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good thing to let the money be my slave and not make myself a slave to money.”

Mark Twain singled out the California gold rush as the watershed event that sanctified a new money worship and debased the country’s founding ideals.

The six Rockefellers were squashed into a small house with six or seven Humistons, even though Bill seems to have been flush with cash at the time. Years later, Billy Humiston insisted that Devil Bill was considered rich, that he gave out loans at hefty rates, kept three or four fine guns, stocked a rich wardrobe, and sported diamond rings and a gold watch—all of which suggested that the abrupt move to Ohio was less a matter of financial stringency than of personal convenience.

He began one speech with the line “I’m pleased although I’m sad,” and this gambit so tickled his fellow students that they nicknamed him “Old Pleased-Although-I’m-Sad.”

At each firm, he asked to speak to the top man—who was usually unavailable—then got straight to the point with an assistant: “I understand bookkeeping, and I’d like to get work.”26

told Rockefeller to hang up his coat and go straight to work, without any mention of wages. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for an adolescent to serve an unpaid apprenticeship, and it was three months before John received his first humble, retroactive pay.

For the rest of his life, he would honor September 26 as “Job Day” and celebrate it with more genuine brio than his birthday. One is tempted to say that his real life began on that day, that he was born again in business as he would be in the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church.

Before the Civil War, most businesses still confined themselves to a single service or product.

When he started working in September 1855, he paid a dime for a small red book, anointed Ledger A, in which he minutely recorded his receipts and expenditures. Many of his young contemporaries kept such record books but seldom with such exacting care. For the remainder of his life, Rockefeller treated Ledger A as his most sacred relic. Producing it before Bible classes more than fifty years later, he became almost tearful and trembled as he thumbed its pages, so potent were the emotions it evoked. At a Bible class of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in 1897, a deeply moved Rockefeller held the book aloft and intoned, “I haven’t seen this book for twenty-five years. You couldn’t get it from me for all the modern ledgers in New York and what they all would bring in.”50 The book rested in a safety-deposit vault, like some priceless heirloom.

Rockefeller never wavered in his belief that his career was divinely favored and asserted bluntly, “God gave me my money.”

Many eminent nineteenth-century theologians took the Calvinist view that wealth was a sign of God’s grace and poverty a telltale sign of heavenly disfavor.

‘Get money; get it honestly and then give it wisely.’

“If those who ‘gain all they can’ and ‘save all they can,’ will likewise ‘give all they can,’ then the more they will grow in grace.”

The mood of national self-flagellation prompted a religious upsurge known as the Businessmen’s Revival. In 1857, businessmen gathered in many cities for lunchtime prayer meetings where they publicly swore off drink and other indulgences. During this massive outpouring of repentance, evangelical churches recruited tens of thousands of new members. The shift from euphoria to depression in the business sphere—mirrored by a shift from sin to salvation in the religious sphere—probably strengthened Rockefeller’s innate conservatism as a fledgling businessman while bolstering his already deep-seated Baptist inclinations.

By an exquisite (and, for Bill, surely excruciating) irony, this scheming, selfish, money-mad charlatan turned his back on his family just as his eldest son began to amass the largest fortune in history. John D. Rockefeller inhabited a stoic universe in which it was considered a sign of strength and mental health to banish your cares and forge ahead instead of morbidly dwelling on your parents’ failings. But if John nursed vengeful feelings toward Bill, it must have been secretly gratifying to him that his father left at the very dawn of his triumph and forfeited any claim to his wealth.

That Rockefeller led an unblemished Christian life played no small role in his business accomplishments, for he appealed to the older citizens in town.

“I would go into an office and present my card and say to the man that I supposed his business connections were satisfactory, and that I did not wish to intrude upon him, but that I had a proposition that I myself believed in and believed it would be to his advantage, that I did not expect him to decide off hand but asked him to think it over and I would see him again about it.”

This last sentence hinted gingerly at what must have been the main reason behind his failure to serve: his father’s desertion of the family and his own need to sustain it.

Like J. P. Morgan, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and other well-heeled young men, Rockefeller hired a substitute for $300 and ended up outfitting a small army.

Frank had already tried to slip off and furtively enlist and had been reprimanded by his father for his secrecy. “Young man,” said Bill, “when you go to war you will say goodbye to the family and go out the front door in broad daylight.”35 (It took a certain gall for Bill to get on his high horse on the subject of secrecy and family responsibility.)

The Civil War accelerated the North’s economic development, setting the stage for its postwar industrial prowess. It greatly enlarged its industrial capacity, broadening the infrastructure of railroads and telegraphs, coal mines and iron mills as the economy became more mechanized to meet the unprecedented demand for materials. Sewing machines stitched uniforms for soldiers while reapers harvested grain to feed them. As both sides swiftly conveyed huge armies from one theater of battle to the next, the railroad network had to be modernized and expanded accordingly. To encourage further development, the federal government began to provide land grants, with a dozen railroads ultimately taking title to a staggering 158 million acres. This pell-mell growth played a pivotal role in Rockefeller’s career, for the proliferation of railroads enabled him to extract discounts from them by playing one off against the other.

As farm boys in uniform were exposed to cities and given titillating glimpses of luxury goods and urban sophistication, consumerism received a huge impetus. Even many men who didn’t enter the army abandoned farms and villages during the war and flocked to populated areas with flourishing munition plants.

In the 1850s, the whale fisheries had failed to keep pace with the mounting need for illuminating oil, forcing up the price of whale oil and making illumination costly for ordinary Americans. Only the affluent could afford to light their parlors every evening. There were many other lighting options—including lard oil, tallow oil, cottonseed oil, coal oil refined from shale, and wicks dipped in fat—but no cheap illuminant that burned in a bright, clean, safe manner. Both urbanization and industrialization sped the search for an illuminant that would extend day into night, breaking the timeless rhythm of rural hours that still governed the lives of farmers and city folk alike.

It was less a matter of Drake discovering oil—its existence was scarcely a secret—than of his figuring out a way to tap commercial quantities in a controlled process so that it could be pumped from the earth in systematic fashion.

Speculators scrambled over the greasy slopes of the creek, leasing acreage from unsophisticated, often unlettered, owners; one farmer turned down an offer of a one-quarter royalty and stubbornly held out for a one-eighth share.

As a middleman, he belonged to a new breed of people in the emerging industrial economy who traded, refined, or distributed products in the widening chasm that separated raw-material producers in the countryside from their urban consumers.

It cost a pittance—as little as $1,000, or less than the cost of opening a well-stocked store—to construct a small refinery and hire hands to run it. By mid-1863, twenty refineries operated in the Cleveland area and shipped a quarter of their kerosene abroad. At first, the profits came in so thick and fast that everybody—big and small, clever and inept—made handsome profits without the fierce winnowing of adversity, the stern lash of marketplace discipline.

To reach the railroad, oil had to be carted in barrels across more than twenty miles of rough backcountry, a trade serviced by thousands of brawling, swearing teamsters with shaggy beards and slouch hats who charged extortionate rates.

(The Pennsylvania barrel, equal to forty-two gallons, remains the industry standard to this day.)