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

by Ron Chernow

Rockefeller often seems to be missing from his own biographies, flitting through them like a ghostly, disembodied figure.

When Random House proposed that I write the first full-length biography of Rockefeller since Allan Nevins’s in the 1950s, I frankly balked, convinced that the subject had been exhausted by writers too eager to capitalize on his fame. How could one write about a man who made such a fetish of secrecy? In the existing literature, he came across as a gifted automaton at best, a malevolent machine at worst. I couldn’t tell whether he was a hollow man, deadened by the pursuit of money, or someone of great depth and force but with eerie self-control.

Like many moguls of the Gilded Age, Rockefeller was either glorified by partisan biographers, who could see no wrong, or vilified by vitriolic critics, who could see no right.

Rockefeller never clarified why he dropped out of high school around May 1855, just two months shy of commencement exercises on July 16, but Bill’s second marriage on June 12 supplies the missing piece of the puzzle. About to enter into his second marriage, Bill must have been drastically scaling back on first-family expenditures,

In his posthumously published Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin describes how he drew up a little moral ledger that allowed him, at a glance, to track his virtues and vices every day. Many people in the mid–nineteenth century kept such journals to enforce thrift and also objectify their moral performance.

Rockefeller never wavered in his belief that his career was divinely favored and asserted bluntly, “God gave me my money.”70 During the decades that he taught Sunday-school classes, he found plenty of scriptural evidence to buttress this claim. (Of course, his critics would cite many contrary quotations, warning of the pernicious influence of wealth.)

Rockefeller said this in his late seventies, and one wonders whether the equation between moneymaking and money giving only entered his mind later. Yet even as a teenager, he took palpable pleasure in distributing money for charitable purposes, and he insisted that from an early date he discerned the intimate spiritual link between earning and dispensing money.

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.

“The only time I ever saw John Rockefeller enthusiastic was when a report came in from the creek that his buyer had secured a cargo of oil at a figure much below the market price. He bounded from his chair with a shout of joy, danced up and down, hugged me, threw up his hat, acted so like a madman that I have never forgotten it.”14These isolated joyful outbursts only underscored the usual constriction of his personality.

Rockefeller’s overwhelming influence on the oil industry stemmed from the conflict between his overmastering need for order and the turbulent, unruly nature of the infant industry.

As he said, “It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.”

period after the Civil War was the most fertile in American history for schemers and dreamers, sharp-elbowed men and fast-talking hucksters, charlatans and swindlers.

For many in the North, the high drama of preserving the union and emancipating the slaves had exhausted their capacity for altruism, leaving a residual contagion of greed.

As a gray eminence of the business world in his retirement, John D. betrayed a deep suspicion of financiers, boasted that he never borrowed, and was celebrated for his financial conservatism. Yet at this stage of his career, he turned inescapably to bankers.

Convinced that struggle was the crucible of character, Rockefeller faced a delicate task in raising his children. He wanted to accumulate wealth while inculcating in them the values of his threadbare boyhood.

The children were told so often that cards were sinful that they couldn’t distinguish one card suit from another. To teach self-restraint, Rockefeller limited them to one piece of cheese daily.

the most creative and dynamic of economic systems, capitalism can also seem wasteful and inefficient to those who endure its rocky transitions and violent dislocations. By bringing forth superior methods, capitalism renders existing skills and equipment outmoded and thus fosters unceasing turmoil and change.

Rockefeller’s foremost academic supporter, Allan Nevins, believed that after the Civil War it was so cheap and easy to enter oil refining that only a monopoly could have curbed surplus capacity and brought order to the industry.

It is too glib to say that Rockefeller was a hypocrite who used his piety as a cloak for greed. The voice that reverberated in his ears was one of burning zeal, not low, devious cunning. He was a sincere if highly self-serving churchgoer and, however deluded, extremely devout.

I believe the power to make money is a gift from God—just as are the instincts for art, music, literature, the doctor’s talent, the nurse’s, yours—to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.

The completion of the Baltimore campaign left John D. Rockefeller, still in his thirties, the sole master of American oil refining. Since no major crude-oil deposits had been unearthed beyond western Pennsylvania—Russia, perhaps, being the lone exception—it also meant that he monopolized the world kerosene market.

Commodore Vanderbilt reportedly said that Rockefeller was the one man in America who could dictate terms to him; meanwhile, his son, William H. Vanderbilt, discreetly purchased Standard Oil stock for his own account.34 It was the younger Vanderbilt who said presciently of Rockefeller in the 1870s: “He will become the richest man in the country,” thus inheriting the title from his father.35 Standard Oil eventually became so enmeshed in the railroad business that it controlled virtually all the oil traffic that traveled over the Erie and the New York Central tracks.

Two of his most cherished maxims were “Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed” and “A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.”7

He once asked rhetorically, “Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things … fail because we lack concentration—the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?”9

As Rockefeller instructed a recruit, “Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it.… As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels, and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.”25 True to this policy, Rockefeller tried to extricate himself from the intricate web of administrative details and dedicate more of his time to broad policy decisions.

Cettie nevertheless had a strong didactic side that could verge on fanaticism. As she once confessed to a neighbor, “I am so glad my son has told me what he wants for Christmas, so now it can be denied him.”

To Sunday-school classes, he frequently reiterated his motto, “I believe it is a religious duty to get all the money you can, fairly and honestly; to keep all you can, and to give away all you can.”

That he had earned so much surely signaled divine favor, a grace so awesome as to suggest that God had chosen him for some special mission—or else why had He favored him with such bounty? The usual picture of the Gilded Age is that greed eroded religious values, whereas for Rockefeller, his golden heaps seemed like so many tokens of heavenly support.

Thus, only five years after the Cleveland Massacre, the thirty-eight-year-old Rockefeller, with piratical flair and tactical brilliance, had come to control nearly 90 percent of the oil refined in the United States. Perhaps a hundred tiny refineries still eked out a meager living in the interstices of the industry, but they were mostly tolerated as minor nuisances and scarcely threatened Standard Oil.

Yet despite decades of categorical denials, Rockefeller’s papers reveal that he and Standard Oil entered willingly into a staggering amount of corruption. (We should remark in passing that Allan Nevins, who had access to Rockefeller’s papers, somehow managed to document only a single instance of Standard Oil bribery—in the Pennsylvania state legislature in 1887.) Standard Oil officials betrayed no qualms about paying bribes, and there is no recorded instance of Rockefeller rebuking a subordinate for engaging in graft.

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.

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.

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 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.

By 1890, it was self-evident that oil existed throughout the earth’s crust and that only a freak accident (plus some timely Yankee ingenuity) had led to the business being founded in Titusville.

One must recall that Standard Oil was a federation of companies, not a single firm, and held only a partial interest in many affiliated companies.

When Frasch cracked the riddle of Lima crude, he was probably the only trained petroleum chemist in the United States. By the time Rockefeller retired, he had a test laboratory in every refinery and even one on the top floor of 26 Broadway. This was yet another way in which he converted Standard Oil into a prototype of the modern industrial organization, its progress assured by the steady application of science.

Standard Oil had taught the American public an important but paradoxical lesson: Free markets, if left completely to their own devices, can wind up terribly unfree. Competitive capitalism did not exist in a state of nature but had to be defined or restrained by law.

During the sanguinary clash a year earlier at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel mill, Henry Clay Frick had ordered Pinkerton detectives to fire at workers—a step that drew a rousing congratulatory telegram from John D.

Rockefeller stood high on the list of bogeymen regularly berated by Populists, and legend has it that he began to sleep with a revolver by his bed.

Standard Oil anticipated a major feature of the twentieth-century economy: the tendency of sophisticated, cash-rich corporations to outgrow their traditional bankers and become financial-service giants in their own rights.

The automobile would make John D. Rockefeller far richer in retirement than at work. When he stepped down from Standard Oil, he was probably worth about $200 million—$3.5 billion today—whereas, thanks to the internal-combustion engine, his fortune soared to $1 billion by 1913—surely history’s most lucrative retirement, and one that must have softened the sting of press vituperation.

Rockefeller experienced more disenchantment with people in charity than in commerce, once telling his son, “I have lent and given people money, and then seen them cross the street so that they would not have to speak to me.”

Gates had a talent for dressing up proposals to Rockefeller with the right touch of historic drama. He made each gift seem a momentous advance in human civilization and often mimicked Rockefeller’s own business rhetoric—talking about educational trusts, for instance—to sell him a program. Gates knew that Rockefeller viewed himself as an instrument of God in business and philanthropy. By striking this note, Gates could always capture his mentor’s attention.

Rockefeller’s success on the Mesabi Range precipitated a clash between America’s two wealthiest individuals, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. In their approach to business, the two men had often mirrored each other, stressing attention to detail, ruthlessly slashing costs, and keeping dividends low. Both had struggled with their own unacknowledged avarice, pioneered in philanthropy, and prided themselves on being friends of the working man. Yet they never seemed to get along. Each Christmas, they perfunctorily exchanged gifts, Rockefeller giving Carnegie a paper vest, while Carnegie sent the teetotaler excellent whiskey.

One might have thought Rockefeller would relax in retirement, but he was still a prisoner to the Protestant work ethic and attacked recreational interests with the same intensity that he had brought to business.

Rockefeller’s retirement began to assume the inexorable nature of a Greek tragedy: Just as he sought to extricate himself from the trust, its legal troubles deepened.

From the perspective of nearly a century later, Ida Tarbell’s series remains the most impressive thing ever written about Standard Oil—a tour de force of reportage that dissects the trust’s machinations with withering clarity.

What makes him so problematic—and why he continues to inspire such ambivalent reactions—is that his good side was every bit as good as his bad side was bad.

By the time the Roosevelt administration formulated its suit, Rockefeller had not darkened the door of 26 Broadway for years. After 1905, he even stopped drawing a token salary. But Rockefeller was still held responsible for the sins of Standard Oil and most vilified when least involved in the business.