by Ron Chernow
At this point, we need to sketch in some events in William Avery Rockefeller’s life in the early 1850s, for his behavior began to shade over from the eccentric to the quasi-pathological. A man of multiple disguises, he had always been fond of assuming names; even when he first arrived in Richford, he had told some people that his name was Rockafellow. During the Owego years, Bill occasionally appeared in surrounding towns and presented himself as an eye-and-ear specialist named Dr. William Levingston. We know now that by the time he transplanted his family to Ohio, he was leading a full-blown double life as both Dr. William A. Rockefeller and Dr. William Levingston, the latter name appropriated from the town of his father’s birth, Livingston, New York. While this second name probably began as a simple alias to shield his family from his shady practices, it hardened in the early 1850s into a separate identity away from home. Bill’s traveling partner in his later years attributed Bill’s use of the pseudonym to the fact that he was practicing medicine without a license or diploma and always feared retribution from indignant local doctors, who instigated legal proceedings against him on several occasions.20
In the last gasp of his lumber career, Bill had ventured north into Canada in the early 1850s, buying up fine walnut and ash and selling it at a handsome profit to timber mills. After he moved to the town of Niagara, Ontario (almost certainly without his family’s knowledge), he began to canvass the surrounding countryside as a traveling doctor. “Dr. Levingston” was a blatant quack, but he partially believed his own bombast and had enough success stories to deceive his patients and perhaps even himself. As his future partner said, “He had not studied medicine in any college. But he was a natural healer and had great skill. He had great fame in Canada and northern New York.”21
Devil Bill had an unerring instinct for spotting those pretty, docile, long-suffering women who would patiently endure his escapades. Around 1852, with his oblivious family still in Owego, he met a lovely, gentle teenage girl in Norwich, Ontario, named Margaret Allen. Bill was then forty-two and Margaret about seventeen, or only four years older than John D. By a small oversight, Dr. Levingston neglected to mention his other life as Doc Rockefeller, to say nothing of his wife and five children, and he wooed Margaret like a lusty bachelor. Bill was an expert confidence man, and Margaret’s trusting family was totally fooled. “He was a steady, temperate man of good habits, kind hearted, sociable and well liked by everybody,” said Margaret’s sister of this jolly wooer. “He was a famous marksman and loved to hunt. He was fond of a good story.”22 Doc Levingston was clearly more popular with the Allens than Doc Rockefeller had been with the Davisons, and Bill was tempted to start afresh with an adoring, innocent young woman, supported by a friendly family. On June 12, 1855, he married Margaret Allen in Nichols, New York, just south of Owego, and started a clandestine life as a bigamist that would persist for the rest of his days.
One can plausibly argue that every time Bill moved his family to another town, it related to his secret philandering, and that he probably relocated his family in Cleveland because Ontario lay just across Lake Erie. True to his earlier behavior, Bill didn’t take up permanent residence with Margaret at first. To initiate her into his capricious ways, he started out by visiting her in Ontario once a year and staying with her credulous family. He didn’t plan, at the outset, to desert his original family, and for a time in the 1850s Bill continued to tread a tightrope between his old and new wives, neither of whom knew of the existence of the other.
It seems likely that Bill’s second marriage had immediate repercussions in the life of his oldest son. All along John had planned to attend college, with Eliza fortifying his resolve in the hope that he would someday become a Baptist minister. Then he received a letter from his father that dispelled his dreams. As he recalled, “My father . . . conveyed an intimation that I was not to go [to college]. I felt at once that I must get to work, find a situation somewhere.”23 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 firstfamily expenditures, albeit without disclosing the reason for the sudden urgency. As John said, “There were younger brothers and sisters to educate and it seemed wise for me to go into business.”24 Bill was eager to groom his eldest son as the surrogate father who would care for Eliza during his longer absences.
Never a great believer in book learning, Bill probably derided a college degree as a costly indulgence at a time when people didn’t equate it with enhanced income. Young men on the make were more likely to attend so-called business colleges or to take correspondence courses to supplement their education. Following his father’s suggestion, John paid forty dollars for a three-month course of study at E. G. Folsom’s Commercial College, a chain college with branches in seven cities. The Cleveland branch occupied the top floor of the Rouse Building, the town’s premier office building, which overlooked the Public Square. It taught double-entry bookkeeping, clear penmanship, and the essentials of banking, exchange, and commercial law—the sort of purposeful courses that appealed to John. By the time his studies ended in the summer of 1855, he had turned sixteen and was ready to flee the traumas of his family life by focusing his energies on a promising business situation.
Perhaps no job search in American history has been so mythologized as that begun by sixteen-year-old John D. Rockefeller in the sweltering Cleveland of August 1855. Although he was a rural boy, his family hadn’t been full-time farmers, and this must have made it easier for him to escape from his small-town, agricultural past and enter the new market economy. Though times were tough, the boy set out with no modest ambition as he pored over the city directory, identifying those establishments with high credit ratings. Already endowed with instinctive respect for big business, he knew exactly what he wanted. “I went to the railroads, to the banks, to the wholesale merchants,” he later said. “I did not go to any small establishments. I did not guess what it would be, but I was after something big.”25 Most of the businesses he visited lay in a bustling area known as the Flats, where the Cuyahoga River twisted through a clanging, roaring landscape of lumber mills, iron foundries, warehouses, and shipyards before emptying into Lake Erie, which was crowded with side-wheel steamboats and schooners. His quest had a touch of callow grandiosity. 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
Despite incessant disappointment, he doggedly pursued a position. Each morning, he left his boardinghouse at eight o’clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his rounds of appointed firms. This grimly determined trek went on each day—six days a week for six consecutive weeks—until late in the afternoon. The streets were so hot and hard that he grew footsore from pacing them. His perseverance surely owed something to his desire to end his reliance upon his fickle father. At one point, Bill suggested that if John didn’t find work he might have to return to the country; the thought of such dependence upon his father made “a cold chill” run down his spine, Rockefeller later said. 27 Because he approached his job hunt devoid of any doubt or self-pity, he could stare down all discouragement. “I was working every day at my business—the business of looking for work. I put in my full time at this every day.”28 He was a confirmed exponent of positive thinking.
With almost thirty thousand inhabitants, Cleveland was a boomtown that would have thrilled any young man avid for business experience. It had drawn many transplants from New England who had brought along the Puritan mores and Yankee trading culture of their old hometowns. While the streets were largely unpaved and the town lacked a sewage system, Cleveland was expanding rapidly, with immigrants pouring in from Germany and England as well as the eastern seaboard. The plenty of the Midwest passed through this commerci
al crossroads of the Western Reserve: coal from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, iron ore from around Lake Superior, salt from Michigan, grain and corn from the plains states. As a port on Lake Erie and the Ohio Canal, Cleveland was a natural hub for transportation networks. When the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad arrived in 1851, it created excellent opportunities for transport by both water and rail, and nobody would more brilliantly exploit these options than John D. Rockefeller.
For all the thriving waterfront commerce, the job prospects were momentarily bleak. “No one wanted a boy, and very few showed any overwhelming anxiety to talk with me on the subject,” said Rockefeller.29 When he exhausted his list, he simply started over from the top and visited several firms two or three times. Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.
Then, on the morning of September 26, 1855, he walked into the offices of Hewitt and Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers on Merwin Street. He was interviewed by Henry B. Tuttle, the junior partner, who needed help with the books and asked him to return after lunch. Ecstatic, Rockefeller walked with restraint from the office, but when he got downstairs and rounded the corner, he skipped down the street with pure joy. Even as an elderly man, he saw the moment as endowed with high drama: “All my future seemed to hinge on that day; and I often tremble when I ask myself the question: ‘What if I had not got the job?’ ”30 In a “fever of anxiety,” Rockefeller waited until the noon-day meal was over, then returned to the office, where he was interviewed by senior partner Isaac L. Hewitt. Owner of a good deal of Cleveland real estate and a founder of the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, Hewitt must have seemed a mighty capitalist indeed. After scrutinizing the boy’s penmanship, he declared, “We’ll give you a chance.”31 They were evidently in urgent need of an assistant bookkeeper, since they 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. All the latent dynamism that had been dormant during his country youth would now quicken into robust, startling life in the business world. He was finally liberated from Big Bill, the endless flight from town to town, the whole crazy upside-down world of his boyhood.
Poised on a high stool, bent over musty ledger books at Hewitt and Tuttle, the new clerk could gaze from the window and watch the busy wharves or canal barges drifting by on the Cuyahoga River a block away. Though his day began at dawn, in an office lit dimly by whale-oil lamps, this mercantile world never struck him as arid or boring but “was delightful to me—all the method and system of the office.”32 Work enchanted him, work liberated him, work supplied him with a new identity. “My duties were vastly more interesting than those of an office boy in a large house today,” he later said.33 The mature Rockefeller liked to dub himself “just a man of figures,” and he found nothing dry or soporific about the tall ledgers.34 Having helped Eliza keep the books, he enjoyed a head start. “As I began my life as a bookkeeper, I learned to have great respect for figures and facts, no matter how small they were. . . . I had a passion for detail which afterward I was forced to strive to modify.”35
Business historians and sociologists have stressed the centrality of accounting to capitalist enterprise. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber identified “rational bookkeeping” as integral to capitalism’s spirit and organization.36 For Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism “turns the unit of money into a tool of rational cost-profit calculations, of which the towering monument is double-entry bookkeeping.”37 It thus seems fitting that John D. Rockefeller, the archetypal capitalist, betrayed a special affinity for accounting and an almost mystic faith in numbers. For Rockefeller, ledgers were sacred books that guided decisions and saved one from fallible emotion. They gauged performance, exposed fraud, and ferreted out hidden inefficiencies. In an imprecise world, they rooted things in a solid empirical reality. As he chided slipshod rivals, “Many of the brightest kept their books in such a way that they did not actually know when they were making money on a certain operation and when they were losing.”
When Hewitt and Tuttle assigned Rockefeller to pay the bills, he went at this task with an undisguised zeal, a precocious virtuosity, and “attended [to it] with more responsibility than the spending of my own funds.” 38 He closely reviewed the bills, confirming the validity of each item and carefully adding up the totals. He pounced on errors of even a few cents and reacted with scornful amazement when the boss next door handed his clerk a lengthy, unexamined plumbing bill and blithely said, “Please pay this bill.”39 Rockefeller was appalled by such cavalier indifference, having just caught the same firm in an overcharge of several cents. One suspects that this stickler for detail taught Hewitt and Tuttle a thing or two about economy. “I recall that there was one captain who was always putting in claims for damages to shipments and I decided to investigate. I examined all the invoices, bills of lading and other documents and found this captain had presented entirely unwarranted claims. He never did it again.”40 In all probability, the boy’s orderly nature reflected a need to govern potentially unruly emotions, an exaggerated reaction to his disorderly father and helter-skelter childhood.
Besides writing letters, keeping books, and paying bills, young Rockefeller also served as a one-man collection agency for Hewitt’s rental properties. Although patient and polite, he displayed a bulldog tenacity that took people by surprise. Sitting outside in his buggy, pale and patient as an undertaker, he would wait until the debtor capitulated. He dunned people as if his life depended upon it, an experience apparently laced with considerable anxiety. “How many times I have dreamed now and then up to recent years that I was trying to collect those bills!” he marveled fifty years later. “I would wake up exclaiming: ‘I can’t collect So-and-So’s account!’ ” 41 One explanation for his anxiety is that his flight from his distressing family life was still tenuous, and failure at work would mean reverting to reliance on his father. Another explanation is that while he was persistent, he was also extremely slow; as at school, some people thought him a rather dim-witted dolt who would never rise in the world, and he had to prove himself to naysayers.
However modest an operation, Hewitt and Tuttle was an excellent training ground for an aspiring young businessman, for it exposed Rockefeller to a broad commercial universe. Before the Civil War, most businesses still confined themselves to a single service or product. Hewitt and Tuttle, in contrast, traded a wide array of commodities on commission. Though it had started out dealing in foodstuffs, it had pioneered in importing iron ore from Lake Superior three years before Rockefeller was hired. The firm relied upon the railroad and the telegraph, the two technologies then revolutionizing the American economy. As Rockefeller remarked, “My eyes were opened to the business of transportation”—no small thing, given Standard Oil’s subsequent controversial relations with the railroads.42 Even a simple consignment of Vermont marble to Cleveland required complex calculations of the relative costs of railroad, canal, and lake transportation. “The cost of losses or damage had to be somehow fixed between these three different carriers, and it taxed all the ingenuity of a boy of 17 to work out this problem to the satisfaction of all concerned, including my employers.” 43 No business experience was ever wasted upon Rockefeller.
On the last day of 1855, Hewitt handed Rockefeller $50 for three months of work, or slightly more than 50 cents a day. Effective immediately, Hewitt announced, the assistant bookkeeper would have his wages boosted sharply to $25 a month or $300 per year. Oddly, Rockefeller felt guilty about the raise: “I felt like a criminal.”44 Aga
in, one has a hunch that he was jubilant but feared, out of religious scruples, his own greed. Accumulating money was one thing, Rockefeller knew, but outwardly coveting it was another.
In many ways, John D. Rockefeller exemplified the enterprising young businessman of his era. Thrifty, punctual, industrious, he was a fervent adherent of the gospel of success. He could have been the hero of any of the 119 inspirational tracts soon to be penned by Horatio Alger, Jr., books that bore such sonorous titles as Strive and Succeed, Luck and Pluck, Brave and Bold, and Bound to Rise. This last title, in fact, echoed Rockefeller’s ecstatic boast to an older businessman one day: “I am bound to be rich—bound to be rich—BOUND TO BE RICH!” He was said to have punctuated this refrain by several smart, emphatic whacks on his companion’s knee. 45 And John D. didn’t become demonstrative about too many topics.
Though Rockefeller steadfastly denied these stories of his boyhood obsession with money, he related the following story of his time at Hewitt and Tuttle:
I was a young man when I got my first look at a banknote of any size. I was clerking at the time down on the Flats here. One day my employer received a note from a down-State bank for $4,000. He showed it to me in the course of the day’s business, and then put it in the safe. As soon as he was gone I unlocked the safe, and taking out that note, stared at it with open eyes and mouth, and then replaced it and double-locked the safe. It seemed like an awfully large sum to me, an unheard of amount, and many times during the day did I open that safe to gaze longingly at the note.46