by Ron Chernow
While many well-to-do students boarded at the school, the Rockefeller boys undertook a three-mile hike to school every morning and, like many students, wandered barefoot down the dusty lanes in warm weather. This long trek led John past fine, imposing homes with well-trimmed lawns facing the Susquehanna River. With his slow, deliberate pace, he often set out early and reflected in an unhurried manner as he walked, his eyes always fixed on the ground ahead. Not averse to taking shortcuts, however, he sometimes sat by the roadside and asked passing teamsters for a lift.
John was a plodding, lackluster student, with no discernible trace of brilliance, and only one aspect of school life truly seemed to intrigue him. Every Saturday, the principal demonstrated the newfangled devices then revolutionizing American business, and John was riveted by displays of a telegraph instrument (invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1837), galvanic batteries, and other modern contrivances. Such things captured his mind more than the rousing social issues raised by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published in 1852 in horrified response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
To the extent that the Rockefeller children had difficulties with schoolwork, it stemmed from the chaotic situation at home. For five growing, energetic children, their small cottage was noisy and cramped. Each evening, Eliza packed her brood off to a teenage neighbor named Susan La Monte, who tutored them and ensured that they completed their homework. She remembered William and Frank as typically mischievous boys, kicking and teasing each other, while John was oddly self-possessed, already a boy-man, a model of adult decorum. “I have no recollection of John excelling at anything. I do remember he worked hard at everything; not talking much, and studying with great industry. . . . There was nothing about him to make anybody pay especial attention to him or speculate about his future.” 67
An 1852 photo of the Rockefeller children shows John, age thirteen, William, eleven, and Mary Ann, nine, sitting in the inky gloom of a photo studio. They are a cheerless trio as they stare blankly into the camera. Wearing a plaid suit, and with his hair neatly brushed back from a wide forehead, John has a long, impassive face, and his expression is inscrutable. William has a softer, rounder face, and his garments—including a polka-dotted vest and a watch chain—suggest his father’s more outgoing personality. Mary Ann wears the plain dress of a farm girl, her hair in pigtails and parted down the middle. Although the group portrait suggests middle-class respectability, its somber mood—which also must owe something to the slower photography of the day—discloses something less than the idyllic boyhood John liked to evoke.
The drudgery of daily life was often leavened by play as John had his first chances to flirt with young ladies, and he exhibited flashes of droll wit. One afternoon, at a Sunday picnic—he was perhaps twelve—he passed a group of young ladies seated before heaps of food and observed, “Remember, girls, if you eat slowly, you can eat more!”68 Rockefeller was intensely aware of the opposite sex yet, knowing of his father’s history, kept his impulses under tight control. Susan La Monte saw a sensitivity in the boy that escaped casual observers; she was struck by “his great admiration of beauty. There was a little girl going to school near our home, a pretty little thing named Freer, with red cheeks and bright eyes and a sweet face. In after years Mr. Rockefeller would ask for her, and when she was left a widow in distress he aided her with a modest pension.” 69 Susan La Monte saw that the boy’s eerie self-discipline concealed a deep fund of emotion, and she remembered the ceremony of grief he went through when one of her sisters died. “On the day she died John came to our house and stretched out on the ground and would not go away. He was so sorry that he would not go away, but lay there all day.”70 Such stories reveal a sensitivity in Rockefeller that would always be there but that would later be studiously concealed behind the polished façade of the hard-driving businessman.
Margaret Allen, who first met William Avery Rockefeller in the early 1850s, while she was still in her teens. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
CHAPTER 3
Bound to Be Rich
As a roving salesman, William Avery Rockefeller was fast becoming a relic of an earlier America when markets were extended not by new methods of communication or transportation but by the salesman simply covering more ground. A magnetic pull lured Big Bill even farther west, away from the burgeoning cities and industries of the eastern seaboard and toward remote hamlets on the American frontier. In early 1853, the Rockefellers were again uprooted and swept along in the whirlwind of Bill’s life when he took them by train to a prairie town in Ohio called Strongsville, about a dozen miles southwest of Cleveland. At this juncture, Bill quietly began to distance himself from his dazed family, having formed a new romantic attachment that proved far deeper than earlier infidelities and that finally severed his familial ties.
Where Eliza and the children had at least enjoyed their own homes in Richford, Moravia, and Owego, retaining some modicum of dignity, Bill now dumped them at the home of his sister and brother-in-law, Sara Ann and William Humiston, paying his relatives three hundred dollars a year to board his clan. To his hapless family, this must have seemed, after all their wanderings, terribly unfair. Their lives had always been uncommonly restless, but now they were castoffs, pariahs in a strange new Ohio town, tumbling back down the social ladder they had so arduously climbed.
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. 1 The Humistons greatly admired Eliza for her excellent business head and thrifty money management, but enormous tension was bottled up in the overcrowded Humiston household. Billy junior later portrayed his cousins William and Frank as very rowdy and John as a prig. “John was just such a boy as he is a man—sanctimonious and precise.”2 Fortunately for all concerned, the Rockefellers soon moved out and took up residence on a small farm at the edge of Strongsville.
By now Big Bill had relinquished all interest in lumber and other settled trades and had permanently assumed the persona of the rambling doctor or “botanic physician,” as he was soon listed in the Cleveland directory. In the first year after he deposited his family in Strongsville, Bill returned only three or four times, but, by a curious fluke, the townspeople learned a good deal about his fraudulent activities on the road. One day, a Strongsville resident, Joe Webster, checked into a hotel in Richfield, Ohio, and was stunned to see a sign in the lobby trumpeting the news, “Dr. William A. Rockefeller, the Celebrated Cancer Specialist, Here for One Day Only. All cases of cancer cured unless too far gone and then can be greatly benefited.” Soon after, with the smooth vaudevillian patter employed by so many patent-medicine vendors, Bill collected a crowd outside the hotel. Standing up in his buggy, his sign propped against the wheels, a showman in a silk hat, black frock coat, and dark red beard, he presented himself as Doc Rockefeller and offered full-fledged cancer cures for the extremely steep price of twenty-five dollars; those strapped for cash could purchase cheaper bottles of medicine. When Webster approached him afterward, Bill wasn’t abashed and bragged that he had lately been “doctoring” as far afield as Iowa and was buying up land there. After Webster returned to Strongsville and told of his startling discovery, word quickly got around town and everybody thereafter referred to their shadowy, footloose neighbor as Doc Rockefeller—doubtless with some mirth. The moniker stuck.
In the fall of 1853, after eight months in Strongsville, Big Bill decided that the time had come for John and William to resume their educations, so he drove them into Cleveland and settled them as boarders with a Mrs. Woodin on Erie Street, where they paid a dollar a week for room and board. John was penalized by the Cleveland scho
ols because his family had moved around so much. In the sole extant reference to the matter, he wrote in 1923, “I had just come from New York State and recall my humiliation in being obliged to remain one term in the old Clinton Street School—I had been for several years in the Owego Academy . . . and supposed I should go at once into the High School instead of the Grammar School.”3 For this proud boy, the demotion must have been one of many small but wounding indignities suffered during these anxious years.
When John finally entered high school (later called Central High School) in 1854 at the age of fifteen, it was still a modest, one-story affair, shaded by trees and standing behind a clean white picket fence; it would receive a much fancier new building in 1856. Operating on the progressive theory of free education for boys and girls, the school enjoyed a superb reputation. Since it stressed composition, John had to submit essays on four topics to advance to the next grade: “Education,” “Freedom,” “The Character of St. Patrick,” and “Recollections of the Past.” At a time when America was deeply split over the question of extending slavery to new territories—the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in May 1854—these writings exhibit Rockefeller as a young democrat and confirmed abolitionist. In “Freedom,” he branded it a “violation of the laws of our country and the laws of our God that man should hold his fellow man in bondage.” Unless slavery was curbed speedily, he prophesied, it “will end in the ruin of our country.”4 America would only progress, he believed, with an educated citizenry. “In former times when learning was confined to the monks and priests, then it was that the world stood still, and it was not until the people were educated and began to think for themselves that it progressed.”5 Such views on abolitionism and universal literacy echoed those of northern Baptist evangelicals who scorned political no less than ecclesiastical despotism. As a self-made man, Rockefeller would always deplore aristocracies and priesthoods as effete, reactionary foes of true progress, defenders of privilege against enterprising commoners.
Rockefeller expressed himself with great clarity and precision. (Schoolmates called him “John D.” because he signed his essays this way.) He also excelled as a debater, demonstrating that beneath his reserved manner he could articulate his thoughts forcefully. 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.” 6 He bore another, equally doleful nickname, “the Deacon,” and it says much about his preferences that he actually liked this sobriquet. As his future sister-in-law, Lucy Spelman, said, “He was a studious boy, grave, reserved, never noisy or given to boisterous play.” 7 Rockefeller frequently hugged his slate to his chest, a pose that hinted at his guarded nature.
However private or solitary, John D. always had his quota of friends. One close chum was Mark Hanna, the descendant of well-to-do grocers and commodity brokers and later a U.S. senator and Republican Party boss. Another friend, Darwin Jones, who formed a boyhood triumvirate with them, recalled the sharply etched contrast between Hanna and Rockefeller. “Mark was of the virile type, always active and took part in almost all forms of athletics, while John Rockefeller was reserved, studious, though always pleasant. No matter what the excitement, John retained his quietude and smiled on all occasions.” 8 In future years, Rockefeller cringed when Mark Hanna was quoted posthumously as describing him as “sane in every respect save one—he is money mad!”9 As at Owego Academy, classmates in Cleveland remembered Rockefeller voicing the fervent wish to be worth a hundred thousand dollars someday.
John’s boyhood gravity pleased many adults but unsettled others, who found something queer and unnatural about him. One high-school teacher described him, with patent distaste, as “the coldest blooded, the quietest and most deliberate chap.”10 Even as a teenager, Rockefeller demanded to be treated with adult dignity. In recollecting the school principal, Dr. Emerson E. White, Rockefeller mentioned only his behavior toward him: “Mr. White was a gentleman. He treated me like a gentleman—and treated all the boys so.”11 Rockefeller was sensitive about adults who behaved in a high-handed fashion toward him. Having assumed so much responsibility at home, he now thought of himself as a mature person. Bill had set him up with his own bank account, and his life was far more independent than those of his classmates.
This tough, self-possessed boy had no tincture of rebellion in his makeup. Seeing his education solely in utilitarian terms, he studied hard but showed no intellectual playfulness. “I was very sedate and earnest,” he said, “preparing to meet the responsibilities of life.” 12 Once again, he displayed a fantastic mind for numbers. “Arithmetical problems most attracted him,” said Lucy Spelman, “for he had been taught at home to keep accurate account of his gains and losses.” 13
Perhaps the most surprising dimension of John D.’s early adolescence was his deep absorption in music. He even briefly aspired to be a musician and practiced the piano for up to six hours a day, driving Eliza mad with the racket while they still lived in Owego. The piano was then the symbol of a decorous middle-class home and his playing might have hinted at his genteel aspirations. For a man who would distrust other art forms as vaguely subversive, encouraging ungovernable emotions and pagan sensuality, music provided him with an artistic medium that he could wholeheartedly enjoy with church approval.
For the teenage boy, Mrs. Woodin’s boardinghouse was an education in itself. Her daughter, Martha, was several years older than John and William, and they engaged in lively, heated discussions on many topics, with the bright, outspoken Mrs. Woodin often joining in. The most controversial topic was lending money at interest. In an extremely peculiar arrangement, John, age fifteen, was already lending small sums to his father at interest; never sentimental when it came to business, he simply charged his father what the traffic would bear—a practice Bill probably applauded enthusiastically. According to Rockefeller, Mrs. Woodin was “violently opposed to loaners obtaining high rates of interest, and we had frequent and earnest arguments on the subject.”14 It was typical of Rockefeller that this question of business method and morality occupied his attention far more than the esoteric matters found in schoolbooks.
As if embarrassed by his peripatetic family life, Rockefeller tended to oversimplify the chronology of his early years, especially when speaking of his adolescence. After a year in Strongsville, John claimed, his family moved to Parma, about seven miles south of Cleveland, then into their own house in Cleveland proper. In fact, he omitted a critical two-step Cleveland detour before the shift to Parma, as can be gleaned from a revealing anecdote told by his school principal, Dr. White: “One day in 1854 a tall, angular boy came to me and said that his widowed mother and two sisters were coming to Cleveland to live and he wished my help in finding a temporary home for them.” The good-natured White invited the Rockefellers to move in with him and his new bride, and John “liked the idea and always insisted that it was a happy time for his mother.”15
Two words leap from the story—widowed mother. It seems of some psychological significance that the first recorded instance of Rockefeller’s capacity to lie came in an effort to hush up his father’s existence—in fact, to bury him alive. Since Bill popped up in Cleveland three or four times a year, it took a certain cheek for his son to invent this story. The small episode acquires added interest when one notes that more than thirty years later, when Eliza died before Bill did, John instructed the preacher to describe her as a widow at the funeral. Further, despite the principal’s gracious response, it must have been perfectly dreadful for John, as a teenager, to go on a begging mission to find temporary lodgings for his family.
When Bill reappeared, he moved his family to a house on Perry Street in downtown Cleveland, rented from a Mr. O. J. Hodge, who remembered John as “an unassuming youth who showed none of the hilarity often seen in boys of that age. Usually he sat quietly in his chair listening to what was being said.”16 As had been true since the Richford days, Bill was scrupulous about making timely
rent payments. “Never was rent—$200 for a year—paid more promptly, nor did I have in all respects a better tenant,” said the landlord.17 Before the year was out, Bill had resettled his family on a ten-acre, creek-side farm in Parma while John returned to Mrs. Woodin, who had relocated first to Saint Clair Street and then to Hamilton Street.
A contemporary photo of John with his two sisters and two brothers, all of them unsmiling, is again drenched in a mortuary gloom. Now a tall, thin boy who weighed about 140 pounds, John had tidily brushed light brown hair and clothes that were always clean and presentable. He later laughed at his solemn boyhood demeanor: “From fourteen years of age to twenty-five I was much more dignified than I am now,” he said with truth in his seventies.18 In Strongsville and Parma, Eliza fretted about the ubiquitous taverns in town and worked hard to shield her children from illicit entertainments. She must have been especially alarmed as her eldest son approached that perilous rite of passage, first love. Interestingly, John D. reenacted his father’s penchant for dalliances with the domestic help. In Strongsville, Eliza hired a household assistant, a pretty young farmer’s daughter named Melinda Miller, who did chores for the family and shared their meals. When the Rockefellers moved to Parma, Melinda resumed working for them, and John, a year younger than she, often came out from Cleveland to take walks with her. Rumors soon drifted about town that John had taken away the girl’s virginity. Whatever the truth, the Millers raised an unholy ruckus about the romance. In one of the less prophetic judgments in parental history, they argued that they didn’t want their daughter to throw herself away on a young man with such poor prospects. According to legend, one of Melinda’s parents came to fetch her by buggy to break up the liaison. Eventually, she married young Joe Webster, whose father had discovered Big Bill’s doctor act.19 From the standpoint of Rockefeller’s career, the failure of this relationship was fortunate, for he ended up with a woman of much greater social standing and intellectual attainment, who would provide him with the strong, stable home life and religious certitude that he craved.