Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975)

by William Manchester

  Like so much else in his extraordinary career, this final tableau is deceptive. All his life John D. deftly masked his real self from an inquisitive public. Leafing through an album of photographs of him is like reviewing the disguises of a celebrated character actor. His use of his hair is illustrative. When side whiskers were the fashion, John D. wore them. After they went out and long mustaches came in, he went to the barber, and when shorter mustaches became the vogue he went again, always emerging the image of the average businessman.

  This protean performance became impossible after a series of illnesses brought on by anxiety over the government’s determination to disassemble his beloved Standard Oil Trust. All his hair fell out, including his eyebrows. To his horror, his bald head glittered like a knob of buffed marble. He wore a skullcap for awhile, and then he acquired a wardrobe of wigs, one for church, another for golf and a third for street wear. By then there wasn’t much point in pretending he was average anyway, so he lived on into great old age wearing the quaint frock coat and plug hat of Victorian bankers.

  Inasmuch as his lifetime spanned three generations and the industrialization of a continent, he had time to play a great many roles. Americans over fifty recall him as the wraithlike citizen of Ormond Beach who was mortified by the local garden club’s decision to disqualify him from its annual flower show after the ladies discovered that his butler had arranged his blossoms—logical to the end, John D. argued that the butler was an extension of himself—but at the height of his powers he had been anything but vulnerable. Throughout the last third of the nineteenth century, he was a powerfully built, rawboned titan with hypnotic eyes who was, in his own words, “all business,” and who strode purposefully over the mustard-colored carpets at 26 Broadway, Standard Oil’s great keep, swapping refineries, railroads and mountain ranges glittering with iron ore.

  His refusal to abandon cherished objectives reminded James Ford Rhodes of Napoleon and Bertrand Russell of Bismarck, and his passion for facts was much like that of a fictional character, the industrialist Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times. Indeed, throughout John D.’s life Dickensian names cropped up in his retinue with extraordinary frequency. They included his ruthless successor as president of Standard Oil (Archbold), the former Baptist clergyman who opened his fortune to a host of charities (Gates), a labor-baiting monopolist (Welborn), the pompous homeopath who enjoyed issuing bulletins about his health at the turn of the century (Biggar), a night nurse (Sly) and the physician who checked him a few days before his death and thought he looked just fine (Merryday). A clergyman who matched John D. stroke for stroke on the golf course was a Bustard.

  One character in his life that the tycoon never resembled was his father, William A. (Big Bill) Rockefeller, a celebrated mountebank who roamed the frontier playing a violin on his hip, selling elixir by the bottle and advertising himself at county fairs as a “botanic physician” or “herbal doctor.” Big Bill was a cancer quack. He was also a rake. Between hawking fake nostrums and hoodwinking credulous rubes, he spent a lot of time in strange beds, and on one of his infrequent visits to his family in the upstate New York town of Richford, he was indicted by a Cayuga County grand jury on charges of ravishing a working girl. After that, his appearances in his home became even rarer. His most famous son evokes a rare pity when it is recalled that, as a lonesome child, he played by the road in a homemade suit and waited, month after poignant month, for a glimpse of his absent father.

  Big Bill was spectacular when he did come—an immaculately dressed giant with a Stonewall Jackson beard who galloped up behind sleek new horses, never with less than a thousand dollars in his pocket. It would be wrong to picture him as generous, however. To a neighbor he boasted that he cheated his sons “to make ’em sharp.” He loaned little John D. five-dollar gold pieces at ten percent interest. That seems hard, but few parental lessons have been better learned. At the age of seven the boy was filling a blue china dish on the family mantel with coppers earned from digging potatoes, managing a turkey flock, and—an omen—buying candy by the pound and selling it to his brothers and sisters by the piece.

  At thirteen he was lending $50 at compound interest. At fourteen he was a boarder in Cleveland, a city to which he had moved in order to attend Central High, where Mark Hanna, a fellow student, later recalled that John D. was “sane in every way but one—he was money-mad.” To a classmate, the future billionaire confided that the thought of his father supporting him gave him a “cold chill.” After a three-month bookkeeping course he went to work for a produce commission merchant, where, he later said, he fell in love with “all the method and system of the office.”

  He liked everything about it—the smell of the ledgers, the feel of the high desk, the sunlight slanting across his blotter—and after he had opened his own produce commission office at the age of nineteen, he began working later each evening. At one point he wrote in his private journal that he had “covenanted” with himself not to be seen at his books after 10 P.M. for thirty days. Later he wrote under this, “Don’t make any more such covenants.” His mother, a chanter of proverbs, had taught him that “willful waste makes woeful want,” and he was nagged by the fear that he might squander precious hours.

  One day in 1863 he glanced out the window and observed a kerosene scow floating by on the muddy water of the Cuyahoga River. He was making good money selling salt and mess pork to the Union Army, but the war wouldn’t last forever, and he reasoned correctly that after it, the moving frontier would leave Cleveland produce behind. Therefore, he invested in a small refinery. By the end of the year he was donning hip boots and toiling in the slime of Pennsylvania’s oil regions.

  Allan Nevins once called the Rockefeller fortune a historical accident. Certainly John D. looked out his window at the right time. As a child in Richford he had read by candlelight. The only oil business then had been run by the whalers of New England. Petroleum was something that ruined salt wells, or was sold by peddlers like Big Bill to relieve aching joints. Then, while John D. was still in Central High, a Dartmouth professor had found a way to refine it, and the month after the young commission merchant’s twentieth birthday, the first oil well was sunk near Titusville, Pennsylvania. Gasoline was merely an annoying by-product in the eighteen-sixties, but even so, the possibilities were exciting: kerosene for illumination, paint bases, industrial lubricants.

  At the time of John D.’s arrival on the scene the petroleum market was being drowned by overproduction. The price of oil hovered just above that of water. Willful waste was making woeful want, the oil industry needed organizing to curb the cutthroat price war among rival drillers, and nobody could organize like John D. He wasted nothing. Meal stops were short on the trains of those days, so when he traveled he would leap off, cram his cheeks with food, and methodically masticate all the way to the next station. (“I always had a good big mouth,” he later explained gravely.) Blotting his signature took valuable energy, so he hired a man to stand by his desk, blotter in hand. Concluding that he needed more rest, he moved a couch into the office and addressed colleagues from his pad.

  In his new enterprises little economies mounted. Forty drops of solder were being used to seal each five-gallon can of kerosene; he experimented, found that 39 drops would do as well and rejoiced in the saving. Barrels cost other refiners $2.50 apiece; John D. made them for 96 cents each. Presently he had his own wagons, lighters, warehouses and railroad tank cars. By 1869 his refinery was the largest in Cleveland, and he was learning that the bigger he became, the more efficient he became. To him the lesson was plain: He would achieve the ultimate in efficiency if he became the only oil man in the world.

  John D. wasn’t much interested in oil production, in the frowzy oil regions he scornfully called “mining camps.” He was after the refineries, which J. A. Hobson, the English economist, has compared to the highway “narrows” that medieval barons seized to tax passing commerce. Control the refineries, seize the narrows, and John D. would dominate the indu
stry. His weapon for reducing competition was similar to what is called today the quantity discount—the more a customer buys, the greater his markdown. His capacity had reached 1,500 barrels a day. Many of his rivals were refining only a barrel or two. He was in a position to drive them to the wall by demanding lower transportation costs than they could get, and that was what he did. First he demanded, and received, a rebate of 15 cents a barrel from the Lake Shore and Southern Michigan Railroad. The principle established, he incorporated the Standard Oil Company of Ohio with $1 million on Jan. 10, 1870.

  His rebates grew higher and higher; at one point competing refineries were paying transportation charges five times those of Standard Oil. Even more vicious were his “drawbacks”—fixed rates that the railroads paid him for every barrel of rival oil they carried. They didn’t haggle. He was managing their traffic, guaranteeing them huge daily shipments and absorbing all their credit risks. After the panic of 1873, he began absorbing competitors right and left, and in 1882, when he organized the Standard Oil Trust, altering the meaning of a word whose definition had been benign, he had 14,000 miles of pipeline webbed under U.S. soil and controlled 95 percent of the country’s refining capacity.

  The Standard was now the largest and richest company in the world. Its undisputed commander was John D. He knew his refineries down to the last pipe and vat. No by-product escaped him—Vaseline, chewing gum, paraffin, whatever—and if a political campaign was shaping up, he was prepared to fuel the torchlights, even though, as in 1884, the first minority party to assemble was dedicated to putting him in jail. “Rockefeller,” said John Archbold, who served for many years as his chief lieutenant, “always sees a little farther than the rest of us—and then he sees around the corner.”

  It was part of John D.’s genius that he could persuade almost anyone to join him. Archbold was one convert. Another was Roger Sherman, a heroic enemy of monopoly in the courts who switched to become a Standard attorney. A third was Cettie Spelman, who became John D.’s wife. Cettie had been a dedicated Congregationalist, and her graduation essay at Central High had been “I Can Paddle My Own Canoe,” but when she married him she quietly followed him into the Baptist Church.

  Part of the trouble with fighting him was that you never knew where he was. All important messages were in code—Baltimore was “Droplet,” refiners were “douters,” the Standard itself was “Doxy.” Shadowy men came and went by his front door; shadowy companies used his back door as a mailing address. For a long time the public didn’t realize how powerful he was because he kept insisting he was battling firms that he secretly owned outright. John T. Flynn cites the case of a last-ditch Cleveland refiner going to Peru for oil and finding that all available wells had been bought by a company that was a subsidiary of a corporation owned by the Anglo-American Oil Company of England—which belonged to John D.

  By then Standard Oil was operating in each of the world’s twenty-four time zones. John D.’s six-hooped, bright blue barrels of Royal Daylight or Atlantic Red kerosene were being borne by elephants in India, by camels on the Sahara, by coolies in Asia. From Manchuria to the sacred fires of Baku on the Caspian, drillers knew that they need only reach the nearest Standard pipeline to get a certificate at least as good as gold. Foreign governments discovered what the vanquished refiners of Cleveland could have told them: there was no stopping John D. They built tariff walls; Standard men climbed them. Sinaean mandarins, at the urging of local vegetable oil guilds, made the use of Standard fuel a capital offense, and their peasants secretly bartered rice and chickens for Royal Daylight to light the lamps of China.

  And that was only the beginning. Peering around the corner and into the future, John D. saw the dawning age of the internal combustion engine. He quietly ordered the development of gasoline and machine oils. When Gottlieb Daimler unveiled his automobile on March 4, 1887, Standard Oil was ready. The sequel astonished the world. Unhampered by income taxes, the Rockefeller fortune, which had been $40 million the year the trust was founded, had quintupled by 1896. Despite gifts to charities, it more than quadrupled again by the eve of World War I. “Who,” John D. wondered at the end of his life, “would ever have thought that it would grow to such a size?”

  Even today the extent of his wealth boggles the mind. Nobody has ever been richer than John D. at his peak. Only the old pendragon himself, who had a balance sheet struck to the penny at the end of each day, knew exactly how much he had, and he was among the most discreet men in the history of commerce. It is known, however, that in 1913 his assets were worth over $900 million, and one dollar then was worth six today. At one point his fortune was growing at the rate of $100 a minute, which amounts to over $50 million a year. The precise extent of his heirs’ wealth is unknown even to them, because of interlocking trusts, jointly held estates, fluctuating securities markets and stocks that have been accumulating capital gains and compound interest for the better part of a century. However, the late Stewart Alsop estimated that the family’s combined wealth in the nineteen-seventies may run as high as $10 billion.

  For as long as they can remember, opulence has been a central fact of the Rockefellers’ life. John D., Jr., the tycoon’s only son, said that from his birth big money “was there, like air or food or any other element.” Bobo Rockefeller, the first wife of one of Nelson’s younger brothers, the late Winthrop Rockefeller, who served three years as Governor of Arkansas, once observed that if you belong to the family, “you can almost feel the prices rise when you walk into a store.” During one of Nelson’s campaign autographing sessions in New York, an eager young man actually thrust a blank check toward his wiggling pen, and when the Rev. Frederick T. Gates, John D.’s chief almsgiver, once suggested to him that he ought to try to make more friends on golf courses, the old man replied drily, “I have made experiments, and nearly always the result is the same. Along about the ninth hole out comes some proposition, charitable or financial.”

  Greedy strangers were the least of the hardships his wealth brought him. From the day Standard Oil emerged as a stifler of competition, John D. was a target of ferocious press attacks. Editorial writers denounced him as the “Anaconda” and the “New Moloch.” Cartoonists depicted him as an octopus with pipelines for tentacles and dollar signs for eyes. For children he replaced the bogeyman; “Rockefeller will get you if you don’t watch out,” their mothers told them. He was accused of fleecing his friends and dynamiting rival refineries, and attacking him was smart politics.

  John D.’s daughter-in-law gave birth to a son, John D. 3d, but his grandfather couldn’t see him because the Attorney General of Missouri was harrying the old man up and down the roads around New York brandishing a subpoena. When Cettie died, John D. couldn’t bury her for four months because process servers were preparing to waylay him at the grave; the body had to be kept in a friend’s mausoleum while the Governor of Ohio straightened things out.

  The pattern of harassment had become clear in 1890, when the Sherman Antitrust Act became law. Two years later the Attorney General of Ohio announced that John D.’s trust violated the charter of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio. The trust was safe for a while—the New Jersey Holding Company Act rescued it before the bailiffs closed in—but then two calamities doomed it. An assassin made Theodore Roosevelt President, and Mark Hanna, who had been the Standard’s best friend in Washington, died. TR attacked all “malefactors of great wealth,” and everyone knew precisely which malefactor he had in mind.

  John D. was golfing when a messenger brought him word that Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, with a thump of his gavel, had fined the Standard $29,240,000 for shipping carloads at secret rates. He paused briefly, turned to his companions on the tee, and said, “Well, shall we go on, gentlemen?” Four years later, on May 15, 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the trust dissolved within six months. The monopoly was split into 33 giant companies. John D. formally quit as president, and by 1924 he wasn’t even a stockholder in the key firm, Jersey Standard, though to this day his heirs
get unsolicited advice on how to run Exxon, its corporate descendant.

  The titan’s attitude toward his critics never changed. To him they were all “spoiled children.” “We must be patient,” he told his son, and again, “Let the world wag.” Furtive by temperament, he fought extradition and dodged process servers, while telling his Sunday school class with a straight face, “The kind of man I like is one that lives for his fellows—the one that lives in the open.” He believed a strong man should “get all the money he honestly can” and extend charity to the poor. When hecklers gathered outside his door he mounted a bike and pedaled off to play golf.

  ***

  Early in the eighteen-eighties he had moved to Manhattan. Thereafter most of his middle years were spent within a triangle bounded by the roll-top desks at 26 Broadway, his brownstone house at 4 West 54th Street, and the Baptist Church on Fifth Avenue, though he would venture forth on special occasions—to meet the trains of new men from Cleveland, for example, introducing them to guides who would show them to available houses, and always taking his leave with a cheery, “God bless you, and God bless Standard Oil.” Winters he would have the side yard of his home flooded, and there, not far from the Rockefeller Center skating rink of today, he would methodically circle the ice each morning before work, with skates clamped to his patent-leather boots, his silk hat jammed over his pate and his frock coat sailing sedately behind. He also liked buggy racing. From time to time he would don a yellow duster and goggles, summon his carriage and pair, and trot over to Seventh Avenue looking for competition. He would go all out when he got it, winning, on one occasion, by hotrodding to safety at the last split-second and passing so closely by a heavy dray loaded with scrap iron that he scraped its hubcaps.