by Ron Chernow
In this story, one can almost feel the erotic charge that the banknote aroused in the boy, the way it cast a hypnotic trance over him. One is reminded of how Big Bill bundled his bills, stored them away, then enjoyed peeking at his hidden treasure. This lusting after money is the more striking in a phlegmatic young man who claimed never to struggle with disruptive impulses. “I never had a craving for tobacco, or tea and coffee,” he once stated flatly. “I never had a craving for anything.”47
If motivated by greed more than he ever cared to admit, Rockefeller also derived a glandular pleasure from work and never found it cheerless drudgery. In fact, the business world entranced him as a fount of inexhaustible wonders. “It is by no means for money alone that these active-minded men labor—they are engaged in a fascinating occupation,” he wrote in his memoirs, published in 1908–1909. “The zest of the work is maintained by something better than the mere accumulation of money.”48
Because American culture encouraged—nay, glorified—acquisitive behavior, there was always the possibility that it might be taken to extremes and people would end up enslaved by their greed. As a result, children were taught to monitor and supervise their behavior. 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. Adolescents kept diaries larded with pep talks, exhortations, inspirations, and warnings. Andrew Carnegie wrote hortatory memos to himself, while William C. Whitney kept a small notebook of little homilies. A contradictory impulse was at work: People were spurring themselves to excel but also trying to curb their insatiable appetites in the new competitive economy.
John D. Rockefeller took such internal monitoring to an advanced stage. Like a good Puritan, he scrutinized his daily activities and regulated his desires, hoping to banish spontaneity and unpredictability from his life. Whenever his ambition was about to devour him, his conscience urged restraint. Since he worked a long day at Hewitt and Tuttle, business threatened to become an overwhelming compulsion. Starting work each day at 6:30 A.M., he brought a box lunch to the office and often returned after dinner, staying late. One day he decided to throttle this obsession. “I have this day covenanted with myself not to be seen in [the office] after 10 o’clock P.M. within 30 days,” he wrote to himself.49 It is telling that the young man made such a pledge to himself and equally revealing that he found it impossible to obey.
No less than his business life, Rockefeller’s private life was ruled by bookkeeping entries. Since he found numbers so clean and soothing in their simplicity, he applied the business principles of Hewitt and Tuttle to his own personal economy. 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.
As Ledger A confirms, Rockefeller was now self-supporting and entirely free of his father, spending half his income for his lodging with Mrs. Woodin and for a washerwoman. He took pride in memories of this threadbare adolescence. “I could not secure the most fashionable cut of clothing. I remember I bought mine then from a cheap clothier. He sold me clothing cheap such as I could pay for and it was a great deal better than buying clothes I could not pay for.”51 He was long puzzled by one lapse from strict economy: He bought a pair of fur gloves for $2.50 to replace his customary woolen mittens and, at age ninety, was still clucking his tongue over this shocking extravagance. “No, I can’t say to this day what caused me to waste that $2.50 on regular gloves.”52 Another expense pregnant with interest for the mature Rockefeller was his purchase of an illuminant called camphene for eighty-eight cents per gallon. Thanks to massive economies of scale, Standard Oil eventually sold a superior illuminant, kerosene, for five cents a gallon—something Rockefeller was wont to recall when people later accused him of gouging the populace.
In one critical respect, Rockefeller didn’t exaggerate the value of Ledger A, for it spoke authoritatively to the question of whether he was a rapacious man who later misused charity to cleanse a “tainted” fortune. Here Ledger A speaks with a firm and unequivocal voice: Rockefeller was fantastically charitable from boyhood. During his first year on the job, the young clerk donated about 6 percent of his wages to charity, some weeks much more. “I have my earliest ledger and when I was only making a dollar a day I was giving five, ten, or twenty-five cents to all these objects,” he observed.53 He gave to the Five Points Mission in a notorious lower Manhattan slum, as well as to “a poor man in church” and “a poor woman in church.”54 By 1859, when he was twenty, his charitable giving surpassed the 10 percent mark. Despite a pronounced tilt toward Baptist causes, he gave early hints of an ecumenical bent, contributing money to a black man in Cincinnati in 1859 so he could buy his wife out of slavery. The next year, he gave to a black church, a Methodist church, and a Catholic orphanage.
The clerk’s philanthropic gifts were as salient as his business talents. It testifies to Rockefeller’s deeply paradoxical nature that he was smitten by a $4,000 banknote but equally entranced by an 1855 book entitled Extracts from the Diary and Correspondence of the Late Amos Lawrence. A wealthy New England textile manufacturer, Lawrence gave away more than $100,000 in a planned, thoughtful fashion. “I remember how fascinated I was with his letters,” said Rockefeller, who might have gotten from Lawrence his later habit of handing out freshly minted money to people. “Crisp bills! I could see and hear them. I made up my mind that, if I could manage it, some day I would give away crisp bills, too.”55 However rare and admirable such thoughts are in a teenage boy, we must note that it was again a case of money exerting a magical effect upon his mind. He saw that money could bring majesty in the moral as well as secular sphere, which excited him more than fancy estates or clothes.
As if he knew he would someday be rich and had to prepare for the appointed hour, the assistant bookkeeper became a perceptive observer of the businessmen around the port and noted their avoidance of ostentation. For instance, he tremendously admired a shipping merchant named L. R. Morris and was struck “by the way he walked, the way he looked, quite unaffected by his great riches. I saw other wealthy men, and I was glad to see that they went about their business without any display of power or money. Later I saw some who wore rich jewels and luxurious clothes. It seemed unfortunate that they were led into such lavish style.” If Rockefeller kept to a Quakerish sobriety of dress and later resisted the vulgar display of the Vanderbilts and other Gilded Age moguls, with their elaborate mansions and yachts, it had something to do with his Baptist beliefs, but also with the plain, understated style of the wealthy Cleveland businessmen he studied so attentively at a formative stage of his life.
Like innumerable young people before him, Rockefeller turned to the church for all-encompassing answers to intractable family problems. He possessed a sense of calling in both religion and business, with Christianity and capitalism forming the twin pillars of his life. While Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species began to chip away at many people’s faith after it was published in 1859, Rockefeller’s religion remained of the simple, undeviating sort. When challenges to orthodoxy arose in later decades, he stuck by the spiritual certainties of his boyhood. Because of his father’s often unscrupulous behavior, the young clerk wa
s ripe for fiery denunciations of sin and the talk of personal salvation and moral reformation that were then staples of Baptist discourse. From the beginning, his Baptist faith served as a powerful instrument to control forbidden feelings and check his father’s unruly nature within him. After the constant flux of his childhood, he yearned to be rooted in a church that would act as his substitute family but without the shameful aspects of his real one.
While John and William boarded with Mrs. Woodin and her daughter, Martha, the four of them began to attend a poor, struggling church nearby called the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. Organized three years earlier by the well-heeled First Baptist Church, the mission church was a spare white building with a belfry and tall narrow windows, standing in a flat, treeless space. Several religious revivals had rolled through Cleveland in the 1850s, and the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church was created in the aftermath of a revival meeting that lasted 150 consecutive nights.
The church gave Rockefeller the community of friends he craved and the respect and affection he needed. Having studied in Deacon Alexander Sked’s Bible class, Rockefeller was recruited to the church by Sked, a florist by trade, a poetical Scot who loved to spout psalms and prophecies and seemed to know the whole Bible by heart. Born in Scotland in 1780, Sked arrived in America in 1831 and moved to Cleveland four years later. During services, he would lift his hands in supplication to God, his face shining with fervor. This pious, elderly man served as a mentor to Rockefeller, who sought him out to report the good news when he got his job at Hewitt and Tuttle, an encounter that produced an unexpected snub that Rockefeller never forgot. “Before I went away, he remarked that he liked me pretty well, but that he had always liked my brother William better. I could never think why he said that. I did not hold it against him, but it puzzled me.” 56
In the fall of 1854, after making a personal confession of faith, John was immersed in the baptismal basin by Deacon Sked and became a full-fledged church member. Never a snob, Rockefeller was proud of being “brought up in a mission church.”57 Notwithstanding his worldly ambition, he didn’t seek social shortcuts to success by joining a prosperous congregation or a high-church denomination. As a loner and outsider, he was drawn by the warm fellowship of the faithful and liked the egalitarian atmosphere of the Erie Street church, which gave him the opportunity to associate, as he put it, with “people in the most humble of circumstances.”58 A central tenet of Baptism is the autonomy of individual congregations, and the mission churches, which weren’t dominated by established families, were the most democratic of all. The Erie Street church was populated by salesmen, shop assistants, railroad conductors, factory workers, clerks, artisans, and others of extremely modest means. Even in its later, fancier incarnation as the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, the membership remained more plebeian than patrician. In his later years, Rockefeller declared, with heartfelt warmth, “How grateful I am that these associations were given to me in my early boyhood, that I was contented and happy with . . . the work in the church, with the work in the Sunday school, with the work with good people—that was my environment, and I thank God for it!”59
Instead of merely attending services, Rockefeller performed numberless tasks in the church. While still in his teens, he became a Sunday-school teacher, a trustee, and an unpaid clerk who kept the board minutes in his own hand. Free of false pride, he delighted even in menial chores, and one woman in the congregation left this vivid vignette of his ubiquitous presence:
In those years . . . Rockefeller might have been found there any Sunday sweeping out the halls, building a fire, lighting the lamps, cleaning the walks, ushering the people to their seats, studying the bible, praying, singing, performing all the duties of an unselfish and thorough going church member. . . . He was nothing but a clerk, and had little money, and yet he gave something to every organization in the little, old church. He was always very precise about it. If he said that he would give fifteen cents, not a living soul could move him to give a penny more, or a penny less. . . . He studied his Bible regularly and diligently, and he knew what was in it. 60
One notes his proprietary feeling about the church, how lovingly he tended it. In some respects, he acted as a volunteer janitor, sweeping the austere chapel, washing the windows, replenishing the candles in wall sconces or stoking the corner base burner with wood. On Sundays, he rang the bell to summon people to prayer and kindled the fire and then, to economize, snuffed out all the candles save one as people filed from the service. “Save when you can and not when you have to,” he instructed others and urged them to wear their good Sunday clothing to work as a sign of their Christian pride.61 Besides Friday evening prayer meetings, he went to services twice on Sunday and was always a conspicuous figure in a straight-backed pew, kneeling and leading the congregation in prayer. He prized the special intensity of feeling that Baptists brought to their faith, which provided an emotional release lacking elsewhere in his life. With a ripe baritone voice, refined by singing lessons at church, he boomed out hymns with deep joy. His favorite, “I’ve Found a Friend,” portrayed Jesus in tenderly familiar terms: “I’ve found a Friend; oh, such a Friend! / He bled, he died to save me.”62
In a world full of snares to entrap the unsuspecting pilgrim, Rockefeller tried hard to insulate himself from all temptation. As he later saw it, “a boy must ever be careful to avoid the temptations which beset him, to select carefully his associates and give attention as well to his spiritual and . . . mental and material interests.”63 Since evangelicals abstained from dancing, cards, and theater, Rockefeller restricted his private life to church socials and picnics, where he could play blindman’s buff and engage in other innocent pastimes. As a model Baptist, he was sought after by the young ladies. “The girls all liked John immensely,” said one congregant. “Some of them came dangerously near to being in love with him. He was not especially attractive in his person and his clothes were strenuously plain and well worn. He was thought much of by these spiritual minded young women because of his goodness, his religious fervor, his earnestness and willingness in the church, and his apparent sincerity and honesty of purpose.”64
Over lemonade and cake at church socials, Rockefeller developed a close attachment to a pretty young woman named Emma Saunders, who chafed that John wouldn’t broaden his social activities and insisted upon confining their dating to the church. For Rockefeller, the church was more than a set of theological positions: It was a fellowship of virtuous, like-minded people, and he always hesitated to stray too far from its protective embrace.
Though generally reserved, Rockefeller developed convivial habits in church that lingered for life, and it bothered him when people marched off right after the Sunday service. “There ought to be something that makes the church homelike,” he insisted. “Friends should be glad to see each other and to greet strangers.”65 Even in later years, when huge swarms of people congregated at the church door to glimpse the world’s richest man, he would still clasp people’s hands and bask in the glow of familial warmth. The handshake acquired symbolic meaning for him, for it was “the friendly hand extended to the man who doesn’t know that he is wanted [that] brings many a one into the church. This early feeling about handshaking has stayed with me. All my life, I have enjoyed this thing that says: ‘I am your friend.’ ”66
Just as Rockefeller was sensitive to condescending treatment in the business world, he couldn’t stand it in the religious realm either. Since mission churches weren’t self-financing, Rockefeller and other trustees had to submit to patronizing advice from the mother church. “This strengthened our resolve to show them that we could paddle our own canoe.” 67 While Rockefeller’s religious faith ran strong, he was most involved in the temporal affairs of the church, which he thought should be run like a tidy business. He soon had a chance to defend the church’s solvency when it fell behind on interest payments on a $2,000 mortgage held by a deacon. One Sunday, the pastor announced from the pulpit that this creditor threatened to foreclo
se on the church and that they had to raise $2,000 very fast to survive. As the stunned congregation filed out, they found Rockefeller stationed at the door, buttonholing people and asking them to pledge specific amounts. “I pleaded, urged, and almost threatened. As each one promised, I put his name and the amount down in my little book, and continued to solicit from every possible subscriber.”68 Perhaps nothing in his early life so foreshadowed his unswerving pursuit of business goals. “The plan absorbed me,” he admitted. “I contributed what I could, and my first ambition to earn money was aroused by this and similar undertakings in which I was constantly engaged.”69 In a matter of months, he had raised $2,000 and saved the church. By age twenty, he had emerged as the second most important member of the congregation, surpassed only by the preacher.
With a mostly spartan country education and scant exposure to big-city culture, John D. Rockefeller’s mind was largely furnished with precepts and phrases from his Baptist fundamentalist church. Throughout his life, he extracted from Christianity practical lessons for living and emphasized the utility of religion as a guide in mundane affairs. Over time, the American public would wonder how he squared his predatory bent with his religion, yet much that was preached in the church of his youth—at least as Rockefeller saw it— encouraged his moneymaking predilections. Far from placing obstacles in his path, the religion he encountered seemed to applaud him in his course, and he very much embodied the sometimes uneasy symbiosis between church and business that defined the emerging ethos of the post–Civil War American economy.
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.) When Benjamin Franklin was a boy, his father had pounded into his head the proverb “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings,” and Rockefeller often presented this text to his class. Martin Luther had exhorted his congregation, “Even though [your work] seems very trivial and contemptible, make sure you regard it as great and precious, not on account of your worthiness, but because it has its place within that jewel and holy treasure, the Word and Commandment of God.”71 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. Henry Ward Beecher, calling poverty the fault of the poor, proclaimed in a sermon that “generally the proposition is true, that where you find the most religion you find the most worldly prosperity.”72