by Ron Chernow
Baptism in Business
When the sign reading “Clark and Rockefeller” was hoisted atop the warehouse at 32 River Street, the local business community warmly greeted the new arrivals. The Cleveland Leader wrote, “As experienced, responsible and prompt businessmen, we recommend their house to the favorable consideration of our readers.”1 In this first partnership, success seemed to come quickly and easily to Rockefeller. With a booming traffic in meat, grain, and other foodstuffs circulating through the Great Lakes, he and Clark nimbly bought and sold carloads of produce. As the firm’s ambitious circular stated, they were prepared to deal in “grain, fish, water, lime, plaster, coarse fine solar and dairy salt.”2 The fledgling firm weathered just enough perils to lend, retrospectively, nostalgic charm to this maiden period. Two months after opening for business, the partners had to cope with a severe frost that damaged midwestern crops. Having contracted to buy a large shipment of beans, they wound up with a big, semispoiled batch, strewn with dirt and rubbish. “When we were not needed in the office we used to go out to the warehouse, my partner and I, and sort out those beans.” 3 This setback didn’t detract from the firm’s overall performance, for by year’s end it had netted a highly respectable $4,400, tripling the income that John had made during his last year at Hewitt and Tuttle.
But because of the bean fiasco, John had to turn again, however grudgingly, to Big Bill for a rescue loan. To excel in commodities, it was imperative to offer generous financing, and Clark and Rockefeller advertisements trumpeted to prospective clients that they were “prepared to make liberal advances and consignments of produce, etc.”4 With his son, Bill often liked to play sadistic money games and then defended his knavish behavior by citing some warped, pedagogical purpose. As he bragged to a Strongsville neighbor, “I trade with the boys and skin ’em and I just beat ’em every time I can. I want to make ’em sharp.” 5 John was by now resigned to the bizarrely commercial character of his dealings with his father, and in his memoirs he even idealized Bill’s lending maneuvers as teaching him valuable lessons. “To my father I owe a great debt in that he himself trained me to practical ways. He was engaged in different enterprises; he used to tell me about these things, explaining their significance; and he taught me the principles and methods of business.” 6
As John knew, his father’s style as a banker followed a grimly manic pattern of conviviality giving way to Scrooge-like severity. “Our relations on finances were a source of some anxiety to me, and were not quite so humorous as they seem now as I look back on them,” Rockefeller allowed, permitting a smidgen of anger to show.7 When Bill offered a 10 percent loan, the real motive was something other than altruism, for he had an infuriating habit of calling in loans at the least opportune time. “Just at the moment when I required the money most he was apt to say, ‘My son, I find I have got to have that money,’ ” John D. recalled in his memoirs. “ ‘Of course, you shall have it at once,’ I would answer, but I knew that he was testing me, and that when I paid him, he would hold the money without its earning anything for a little time and then offer it back later.” 8 About this continuing psychodrama, Rockefeller later said, in another fleeting moment of candor, “he would never know how angry I felt beneath the surface.”9
An intimate, critical perspective on the perverse relations between Rockefeller and his father comes from George W. Gardner, who joined Clark and Rockefeller as a partner on April 1, 1859. Having worked with Clark at Otis, Brownell, he was evidently invited into the firm to shore up its capital. Scion of an elite Cleveland family, cut from a different cloth than the self-made men of Rockefeller’s early years, Gardner later served as mayor of Cleveland and commodore of the Cleveland Yacht Club. With Gardner’s arrival, Rockefeller’s name was dropped from the firm’s title, and the new partnership was styled Clark, Gardner and Company, the ostensible and quite cogent reason being that Gardner’s name would entice more clients. Rockefeller always felt uneasy about venting anger or making an egotistical show of protest, and he pretended to accept this demotion with equanimity. “Maurice Clark was very pleasant about it,” he later insisted. “And he said, ‘Never mind. It won’t be very long—before many years you’ll be doing better than any of us.’ Yes, he was very nice about it. I made no objection.”10 Yet this stinging blow rankled, as he later admitted. “I considered this a great injustice to me as I was an equal partner and Gardner brought in only his share of the capital, but I thought it best to submit.”11 It says much about Rockefeller that he thought it unseemly and unchristian to confess to such understandable feelings of injured pride.
Rockefeller was bound to clash with Gardner and Clark, for he was a Roundhead among Cavaliers and approached his work with unflagging, humorless energy. “Your future hangs on every day that passes,” he admonished himself.12 “Long before I was twenty-one men called me, ‘Mr Rockefeller,’ ” he recalled. “Life was a serious business to me when I was young.”13 The only time he showed any youthful gaiety was when sealing a lucrative deal. Like the resident moral overseer, he felt contempt for Clark and Gardner’s easygoing ways and irreverent spirit, and they found this young killjoy both a welcome and grating presence in the office.
Afraid that any levity would diminish their chances of getting loans, the twenty-year-old sought to stifle the excesses of his older partners. When Gardner and three friends purchased a $2,000 yacht, Rockefeller roundly condemned this extravagance. One Saturday afternoon, Gardner was about to escape from the office for an afternoon sail when he saw Rockefeller hunched glumly over his ledgers. “John,” he said agreeably, “a little crowd of us are going to take a sail over to Put-in-Bay and I’d like to have you go along. I think it would do you good to get away from the office and get your mind off business for a while.” Gardner had touched an exposed nerve and, as he recounted years later to a reporter, his young partner wheeled on him savagely. “George Gardner,” he sputtered, “you’re the most extravagant young man I ever knew! The idea of a young man like you, just getting a start in life, owning an interest in a yacht! You’re injuring your credit at the banks—your credit and mine. . . . No, I won’t go on your yacht. I don’t even want to see it!” With that, Rockefeller leaned back over his account books. “John,” said Gardner, “I see that there are certain things on which you and I probably will never agree. I think you like money better than anything else in the whole world, and I do not. I like to have a little fun along with business as I go through life.”14
Later on, Rockefeller learned to camouflage his business anxiety behind a studied calm, but during these years it was often graphically displayed. Clark remembered one daring venture when the firm wagered its entire capital on a large grain shipment to Buffalo. With foolish, atypical imprudence, Rockefeller suggested that they skip the insurance and pocket the $150 premium; Gardner and Clark reluctantly acquiesced. That night, a terrible storm blew across Lake Erie, and when Gardner came to the office the next morning, a frightfully pale Rockefeller paced the floor in agitation. “Let’s take out insurance right away,” he said. “We still have time—if the boat hasn’t been wrecked by now.” Gardner ran off to pay the premium. By the time he got back, Rockefeller was waving a telegram announcing the ship’s safe arrival in Buffalo. Whether unnerved by the episode or upset at having paid the unnecessary premium, Rockefeller went home ill that afternoon. 15
One suspects that Rockefeller associated the bon vivant Gardner with his father, much to Gardner’s detriment. Indeed, Gardner felt an affinity with Bill, relishing his bonhomie and outlandish humor and calling him “one of the most companionable and most likeable old men I ever knew. He would crack jokes and have more to say in one conversation than John would utter in a week.”16 Gardner was the first of many Rockefeller associates to note the unanswered questions about Bill, who returned to Cleveland at irregular intervals, invariably depositing or withdrawing huge amounts of cash from Clark, Gardner. “I wondered what business a man could be in that he would have $1,000 to spare one month and need it the next,” sai
d Gardner.17
Thanks to Gardner, we can date the earliest moment at which we can say with some certainty that John knew of his father’s scandalous relationship, if not of his bigamy. The firm was starting to cultivate business contacts in Philadelphia, and it occurred to Gardner that on his next trip there, he might solicit information from Bill. “So I asked John for his father’s address. He hesitated and finally said he couldn’t remember.” This immediately puzzled Gardner, who knew Rockefeller had a phenomenal memory, and he asked if he could secure the address from Eliza at lunchtime. After lunch, John never alluded to the matter, and as they prepared to leave that evening, Gardner again inquired after the address. “He flushed up and said he’d forgotten to ask for it when he went home. I pressed him no further, and never found out where his father lived.”18 When John began to fathom the depth of his father’s duplicity toward his mother, he must have inwardly reeled, and he reacted with the same repressed emotion and steadfast evasion that had served him as a boy. Already Rockefeller was treating his father as the supreme taboo subject, setting a pattern for the unremitting secrecy that would pervade Standard Oil.
Photos of Rockefeller from the Clark, Gardner period show a tall young man with a vigorous air and alert, penetrating eyes. His tightly compressed lips expressed a fierce determination and a guarded nature. Big and broad-shouldered, he had an incipient stoop that gave him a wary air. Despite his occasional, priggish blowups with Gardner, he had that sublime self-confidence that speaks with quiet authority. Neatly dressed and well groomed, Rockefeller was the first to arrive at and the last to leave work each day. In a natural division of labor, Clark took charge of buying and selling while Rockefeller tended the books. Rockefeller seemed destined to succeed as much from his fastidious work habits as from innate intelligence. With the avidity of a zealous auditor, he liked to smoke out wrongdoing and uncover errors. Maurice Clark thought John congenial but “too exact. He was methodical to an extreme, careful as to details and exacting to a fraction. If there was a cent due us, he wanted it. If there was a cent due a customer, he wanted the customer to have it.”19 The portrait, if slightly chilling, also underscores Rockefeller’s prudish honesty during this phase of his career.
From the outset, Rockefeller had to wrestle with the demons of pride and greed. When rebuffed by a bank officer for a loan, he shot back in anger, “Some day I’ll be the richest man in the world.”20 He went through the week cautioning himself with proverbs taught by Eliza, such as “Pride goeth before a fall,” and this spiritual self-scrutiny intensified with his growing wealth.21 When he rested his head on the pillow at night, he warned himself, “Because you have got a start, you think you are quite a merchant; look out, or you will lose your head—go steady. Are you going to let this money puff you up? Keep your eyes open. Don’t lose your balance.”22 Had Rockefeller not feared his own capacity for excess, he wouldn’t have engaged in such strenuous introspection. As he said, “These intimate conversations with myself, I’m sure, had a great influence on my life. I was afraid I could not stand my prosperity, and tried to teach myself not to get puffed up with any foolish notions.”23 It’s easy to suppose that Rockefeller’s typically sententious style was borrowed from church and first polished by these nightly sermons that he preached to himself.
That Rockefeller led an unblemished Christian life played no small role in his business accomplishments, for he appealed to the older citizens in town. During his first year with Clark, he hired someone to look after the books while he took to the open road to drum up business, traveling widely in Ohio and Indiana. Contrary to what one might expect, Rockefeller was a smoothly persuasive salesman. Instead of brashly trying to poach clients from rivals, he modestly outlined his firm’s services. “I would go into an office and present my card and say to the man that I supposed his business connections were satisfactory, and that I did not wish to intrude upon him, but that I had a proposition that I myself believed in and believed it would be to his advantage, that I did not expect him to decide off hand but asked him to think it over and I would see him again about it. ”24 Orders to handle commodity trades poured in almost faster than he could handle them. “I found that old men had confidence in me right away, and after I stayed a few weeks in the country, I returned home and the consignments came in and our business was increased and it opened up a new world for me.” 25
Rockefeller handled people adroitly and wasn’t the cold curmudgeon of later myth. However, he was persistent, which pleased or displeased people according to taste. Previewing a problem that bedeviled the oil business, the commodity business was chronically short of railroad cars to transport flour, grain, and pork, and Rockefeller badgered one railroad official so much that the older man finally wagged a finger at him and snapped, “Young man, I want you to understand you can’t make a shuttlecock of me.” 26 Rockefeller often related how the firm’s best customer once pressed him to violate conservative business practice and advance him money before the produce or bill of lading was in hand. Though Rockefeller refused him, he still tried to keep the customer. “But he stormed about, and in the end I had the further humiliation of confessing to my partner that I had failed.”27 Only afterward did Rockefeller learn that the customer’s intransigence was a cunning trap set by a local banker to see whether these young men could withstand temptation and hew to their conservative principles.
For all his populist mistrust of bankers, Rockefeller owed much of his incandescent rise to their assistance. “The hardest problem all through my business career was to obtain enough capital to do all the business I wanted to do and could do, given the necessary amount of money.” 28 The banking system was then weak and atomized. Many Main Street banks were thinly capitalized, and they inspired so little trust that Rockefeller’s firm kept spare cash in the safe. Rockefeller got his first extrafamilial loan from a kindly, benevolent old banker named Truman P. Handy, who agreed to take warehouse receipts as collateral. After getting this $2,000 loan, John almost floated down the sidewalk. “Just think of it,” he mused, “a bank had trusted me for $2,000! I felt that I was now a man of importance in the community.”29 Handy made Rockefeller swear that he would never speculate with the $2,000, and the young man must have sensed that he had won the first of many influential mentors in Cleveland’s financial community. Besides being a bank president, the gravely proper Handy was a Sunday-school superintendent and had sounded out Isaac Hewitt on the young man’s character and habits. As Rockefeller realized, his credit rating depended upon reports of his sterling character—just as he had lectured George Gardner—and his status as a mainstay of the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church guaranteed him a friendly reception at banks. Thus, Rockefeller’s initial loan shows the close mesh of Christianity and capitalism in his early career.
Famously averse to borrowing in later years, Rockefeller was extraordinarily adept at it when he needed the capital. As Clark said, “Oh, John was the greatest borrower you ever saw!”30 In bargaining with banks, Rockefeller gave evidence of his father’s wiliness and mastery of crowd psychology. If he wanted to borrow $5,000, he let it be bruited about town that he wished to invest $10,000. This rumor would certify his firm’s rock-solid credit while also giving bankers an added incentive to extend him a loan. Rockefeller’s need for money only grew during the Civil War, which was a bonanza for the commodity business. As a partner in a Cleveland produce house, John D. Rockefeller was strategically positioned to profit from the war, and for the rest of the century his career seemed to march in perfect lockstep with the progress of American business history.
For Rockefeller, the Civil War was principally an opportunity to pile up riches, yet he betrayed intense sympathy for the Union cause and fervently advocated abolishing slavery. As early as his 1854 high-school essay on freedom, he had railed against “cruel masters” who worked their slaves “beneath the scorching suns of the South. How under such circumstances can America call herself free?”31 As a teenager, he had contributed to several char
ities that aided blacks. At the time, his antislavery views were representative of the prevailing views in Cleveland, which had many relocated New Englanders and was a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. With its favorable political climate and position as a big Lake Erie port, Cleveland was a stop on the Underground Railroad that transported fugitive slaves to freedom in Canada, and many of them surreptitiously boarded ships just blocks from Rockefeller’s office. When slave hunters invaded the town, abolitionist sympathizers rushed to the Stone Church on the Public Square and tolled the bell to alert the populace. In 1860, Rockefeller cast his first presidential vote for Abraham Lincoln, and on the eve of the war he attended meetings that resounded with thunderous denunciations of slavery. Abolitionist fervor was especially widespread among evangelical Christians who deplored slavery and Catholicism as twin tyrannies, and northern Baptist congregations warmly received black preachers and lecturers who spoke for the abolitionist cause.
So why didn’t Rockefeller act on his keenly felt sympathies when Lincoln appealed for 75,000 volunteers after Fort Sumter’s fall in April 1861? Why did he turn a deaf ear to the torchlight rallies and street-corner recruiters swarming through Cleveland that spring? “I wanted to go in the army and do my part,” Rockefeller said. “But it was simply out of the question. We were in a new business, and if I had not stayed it must have stopped—and with so many dependent on it.”32 This last sentence hinted gingerly at what must have been the main reason behind his failure to serve: his father’s desertion of the family and his own need to sustain it. Though the Union government offered no occupational exemptions from the draft, men were excused if they were the sole means of support for siblings, children, or parents. Though only twenty-one at the outbreak of the war, John D. was effectively in the position of a middle-aged father responsible for a family of six.