by Ron Chernow
It is hard to picture a young woman more perfectly suited to John D. Rockefeller’s values than the sensible, cheerful Laura Celestia Spelman, who shared his devotion to duty and thrift. They ratified each other’s views about the fundamentals of life. Two months younger than John, Cettie was short and slender, with a round face, dark brown eyes, and a wealth of chestnut hair parted down the middle and smoothly pulled back from her forehead. Rockefeller would never have tolerated a noisy woman, and Cettie was soft in voice and manner. Like John, though, her mild surface belied an adamantine determination. She was “gentle and lovely, but resolute with indomitable will,” noted her sister Lucy, better known in the family as Lute.56 “There was a persuasion in her touch as she laid her fingers ever so gently on your arm.”57 Again like John, her geniality covered a hard core of sustained willpower. “She was full of mirth and cheer, yet . . . rather inclined to be grave and reserved,” Lute recalled.58 A paragon of self-control, she never lost her temper and lacked the skittish frivolity of youth.
Early on, John and Laura must have spotted each other as kindred souls, especially when it came to religion. Cettie so unswervingly performed her duties at church and Sunday school that even her loving sister tactfully suggested that she went to extremes. “She was a religieuse. God and church came first with her. She cared little for the ‘social life,’ so called; and together she and her husband deepened and expanded their religion to cover and include every phase of life.”59 Even in photos, one notes a Quakerish simplicity to her appearance, her black dress and lace collar evoking her Puritan ancestors. Despite her evangelical beliefs, she never imposed her views on others and preferred to instruct by example. As one high-school classmate remembered, “She exerted a strong influence upon the rest of us. For one thing she didn’t believe in dancing and theatregoing, because she did not think it was proper for church people to engage in pursuits that she considered worldly.”60 For all that, Laura was no shallow philistine and had a wide range of interests in art, culture, and society. She played the piano for three hours daily and often accompanied John in duets, but she also had a taste for literature and poetry and could be an entertaining conversationalist.
An assiduous student, she was the valedictorian of her high-school class and her commencement speech, “I Can Paddle My Own Canoe,” was a ringing manifesto of female emancipation. (She graduated seven years after the first historic attempt by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott to organize women in Seneca Falls, New York.) From this speech, we can infer something of her adolescent values. “We may not tamely submit, and suffer ourselves to be led by any person or party, but have a mind of our own, and having once formed a decision ever abide by it.”61 This credo augured well for a woman destined to be embroiled in her future husband’s controversial career. In an outspoken statement of feminist belief, she chided men for depriving women of culture then hypocritically blaming them for their dependency. “But give woman culture—let her thread the many paths of science—allow mathematics and exact thought on all subjects to exert their influence on her mind and conventions need not trouble about her ‘proper sphere.’ ”62
In 1856, Harvey and Lucy Spelman left Cleveland for Burlington, Iowa; the move evidently reflected renewed business hardships for Mr. Spelman, and they stayed away from Cleveland for three years. To alleviate the financial stress, Cettie and Lute stayed behind and jointly applied for teaching posts in the Cleveland public schools. Two years later, as the economic pinch eased, the two sisters spent a year at the Oread Collegiate Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. Established in 1849, this junior college was among the first institutions of higher learning open to women. Founded by abolitionist Eli Thayer, Oread stressed Christianity and the reading of the classics. Drawings show a picturesque, medieval-looking building on a hill, festooned with turrets, towers, and crenellations and surrounded by a stone wall. The cultural atmosphere, with its impassioned support for women’s rights and black welfare, must have been highly congenial to the sisters. Among other speakers, they heard inspirational lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and John Brown. A devotee of the Protestant work ethic, Cettie even approved of the school’s daily regimen, which was minutely budgeted from wake-up at 5:30 A.M. until the lights went out at 9:45 P.M. “I do not call the rules strict but am pleased with all of them,” she informed her former music teacher.63 At Oread, she dropped an occasional friendly note to Rockefeller, though the relationship was at this point less one of romance than of close camaraderie.
Over the years, Laura’s growing commitment to religion smothered her literary bent, but at Oread she was a veritable bluestocking, writing poetry, running the literary society, and editing the campus literary magazine. In a revealing article in the Oread Euphemia, she wrote about three aristocracies then ruling America—an aristocracy of intellect in New England, wealth in the mid-Atlantic states, and blood in the South. In view of later events, her descriptions of Boston’s intellectual preeminence or southern social decadence are less noteworthy than the vitriol she poured on the New York nouveaux riches. “In this specified portion of our glorious republic, the ‘parvenu’ lady, with a brain all guiltless of ever having developed an idea, attires her self in habiliments, whose cast (but not style) would admit of their being worn in the presence of royalty.” After lambasting the dominion of the “almighty dollar” in the mid-Atlantic aristocracy, she concluded mordantly, “The gigantic intellect of Boston must bow to Wall St. Stocks and Bonds.”64 Such midwestern scorn for Wall Street’s monied upstarts was certainly consonant with Rockefeller’s beliefs. Little did the two know they would one day become synonymous with the “almighty dollar” and reside in the heart of Manhattan’s swankest, most sinful precincts.
In the spring of 1859, the Spelman sisters returned to Cleveland and began to take French, Latin, piano, and voice lessons at the Cleveland Institute. That autumn, Cettie and Lute, who always moved in tandem, began to teach in the public schools, Cettie serving as a teacher and principal’s assistant while Lute taught boys in the same building. Later on, Laura left no doubt of her family’s straitened circumstances at the time. “I had to do [work], which was a good thing,” she later told her son, “and I loved to do it, which was another good thing.”65 Despite a well-merited reputation as a disciplinarian, she was a popular teacher, and on her last day on the job “all the girls in her class remained after dismissal to say good-bye to her and to cry over losing her,” said one pupil. “My! how they cried.”66
In the early 1860s, Laura was sufficiently pleased with work that she felt in no special rush to get married. All the while, John Rockefeller, with the dogged patience that would defeat scores of embattled competitors, waited determinedly in the wings. In April 1860, Laura wrote her former music teacher, “I seem to have no anxiety about leading a life of single-blessedness,” but she mentioned Rockefeller and said that “a gentleman told me not long ago, that he was in no particular rush to have me get married, but he hoped that in the multitude of my thoughts I would not forget the subject.” 67 She must have been torn when contemplating a match with Rockefeller, for teachers had to remain single, and marriage would end her career.
In 1862, Rockefeller, buoyed by his rising wealth in the produce business, began to woo Cettie in earnest, often appearing at her school at day’s end to take her home. The Spelmans then lived in a lovely area of apple groves and greenery called The Heights, and on weekends John and brother William often rode out there under the guise of watching Civil War recruits drill nearby. After the Spelmans moved to a new home in downtown Cleveland, John, often wearing boots spattered with oil from his new refinery, stopped by and took Cettie out for drives in his buckboard, and she heard with delight the details of his business. “Her judgment was always better than mine,” Rockefeller said. “She was a woman of great sagacity. Without her keen advice, I would be a poor man.”68 There was loving exaggeration here, but in the early days of their marriage, he did bring home
the books and review them with her.
Despite her constant reluctance, Rockefeller pursued her with quiet persistence; in love as in business, he had a longer time frame, a more settled will, than other people. By early 1864, with the first profits rolling in from refining, he had become a substantial person in Cleveland, cutting an impressive figure in his frock coat, silk hat, and striped trousers. He was a handsome young man, with a fine, straight nose, rather humorless mouth, and vaguely mournful visage. His mustache flowed into fluffy side-whiskers, but his hair was already receding at the temples. His eyes were steady and lucid, as if confidently scanning the horizon for business opportunities.
Later on, Rockefeller was peculiarly reluctant to divulge to his children details of his courtship, referring to the delicacy of the situation. One gathers that another man, more practiced in the arts of love, was after Laura and that by March 1864 John feared his rival might best him. The time had come to force the situation. As one person who heard the story secondhand remembered, “John D. wanted to marry her, so he went to her one day and proposed in a business-like way, just like he would make a business proposition. She accepted him in the same business-like way.” 69 One imagines the two of them smiling shyly with relief. Shortly afterward, the ascetic Rockefeller did something wholly out of character, spending a shocking $118 for a diamond engagement ring. The splurge, one suspects, had a point: He wished to telegraph to the Spelmans that he was no longer a callow country boy but a rising young businessman who could support them in a style to which they were accustomed.
After a discreet, six-month engagement, on September 8, 1864, hard on the heels of Sherman’s march into Atlanta, John D. Rockefeller, twenty-five, married Laura Celestia Spelman, twenty-four, in the living room of the Spelman home on Huron Street. It was a small, private affair attended only by the two families. Like many things in Rockefeller’s life, it was carried out in secrecy, and the Cleveland papers printed no notice of it—very odd given the Spelmans’ prominence. It is unlikely that Big Bill attended, and John might have worried that his absence would spark curiosity about him. Having established his financial wherewithal, Rockefeller now reverted to type and spent just $15.75 on the wedding ring, which was duly recorded in Ledger B under the rubric “Sundry Expenses.”70 In a denominational compromise, the pastors from Laura’s Plymouth Congregational Church and John’s Erie Street Baptist Mission Church jointly officiated, though Laura henceforth switched her allegiance to the Baptists.
Refusing to deviate from routine, John worked the morning of his wedding day, visiting both his downtown office and the cooperage at the refinery. He had arranged a special luncheon for twenty-six employees, without disclosing at first the reason for the celebration. When the jovial bridegroom left for the wedding, he told the foreman facetiously, “Treat them well, but see that they work.”71 With the Swiss precision that governed his life, Rockefeller allotted exactly one month—September 8 to October 8, 1864—for a honeymoon that traced a conventional itinerary. The newlyweds started off at Niagara Falls, followed by a stay at the Saint Lawrence Hall Hotel in Montreal and the Summit House in Mount Washington, New Hampshire. On the way home, they stopped off at Oread Collegiate Institute and met two new teachers, Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles, who would play important roles in their future.
Prior to his honeymoon, Rockefeller’s travels had been limited, and the provincial young man in the tall silk hat exhibited voracious curiosity throughout the trip. While touring Niagara Falls, he peppered the guide with so many questions that the man grew distracted, ran the buggy into a ditch, and smashed a wheel. At another point, they met an old man in the roadway whom John so sedulously drained of local lore that the latter finally pleaded with weary resignation, “For God’s sake if you will go with me over to that barn yonder, I will start and tell you everything I ever knew.”72 This was the same monotonously inquisitive young man who was known as “the Sponge” in the Oil Regions.
For the first six months of their marriage, John and Laura lived with Eliza at 33 Cheshire Street; then they moved into a dignified, two-story brick house at 29 Cheshire Street. Surrounded by a white picket fence, the house had tall, graceful windows but was disfigured by an ugly portico. Even though Rockefeller now operated and partially owned the largest refinery in Cleveland, he and Laura lived frugally without house servants. Rockefeller always cherished the chaste simplicity of this early period and preserved their first set of dishes, which stirred him to wistful reflections in later years. Thus, by the end of the Civil War, John D. Rockefeller had established the foundations of his personal and professional life and was set to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities beckoning him in postwar America. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business.
The rakish young Henry Morrison Flagler. (Courtesy of the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum)
CHAPTER 6
The Poetry of the Age
The period after the Civil War was the most fertile in American history for schemers and dreamers, sharp-elbowed men and fast-talking hucksters, charlatans and swindlers. A perfect mania for patents and inventions swept America, as everybody tinkered with some new contrivance. It was a time of bombastic rhetoric and outsize dreams. As always during a protracted war, millions of people postponed their lives until the ghastly bloodshed was over, then they turned to private life with newfound zeal. The sudden wealth of young businessmen such as Rockefeller fed envy among returning soldiers, who wished to emulate their good fortune. The money fever was, in part, the reaction to a war that had appealed to both the worst and the best in the national character, for Lincoln’s high-minded crusade had often been debased by profiteering contractors operating behind patriotic façades. For many in the North, the high drama of preserving the union and emancipating the slaves had exhausted their capacity for altruism, leaving a residual contagion of greed.
As the banker Thomas Mellon observed of these years of unfettered growth,
It was such a period as seldom occurs, and hardly ever more than once in anyone’s lifetime. The period between 1863 and 1873 was one in which it was easy to grow rich. There was a steady increase in the value of property and commodities, and an active market all the time. One had only to buy anything and wait, to sell at a profit; sometimes, as in real estate for instance, at a very large profit in a short time.1
A new cult of opportunity sprang up, producing a generation of business leaders for whom work was the greatest adventure life afforded. As Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote in The Gilded Age, “To the young American . . . the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open; there is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.”2 Or as one character in William Dean Howells’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham phrased it, “There’s no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age.”3 Self-made businessmen were the new demigods, and a copious self-help literature sermonized that young men who worked hard and saved could enter the millionaires’ pantheon. This new industrial boom downgraded the power of the old gentry and rural elites, substituting a new species of self-made men: economic marauders too busy making money to be overly concerned with tradition. The era of the Great Barbecue—the felicitous name coined by literary historian Vernon Parrington—was dominated by arrogant, enterprising men in railroads, shipping, and stock manipulation: Jay Cooke, Commodore Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, Jim Fisk, and many others. The age was presided over by an inept president, General Ulysses S. Grant, a small-town businessman before the war, who was enamored of the rich, no matter how frequently they tried to fleece him.
The public was divided about these colossal developments. The appetite for gain fostered new fortunes and built up the industrial infrastructure, setting the stage for American industrial preeminence, but it also unsettled people with a sense of something frightening, gigantic, and poorly understood t
hat was drastically transforming their innocent country. The Civil War invited people to repudiate their pasts as they staked out new lives. As Grant phrased it in his memoirs, “The war begot a spirit of independence and enterprise. The feeling now is, that a youth must cut loose from his old surroundings to enable him to get up in the world.”4 As people took unethical shortcuts to success, the universal race for riches threatened to overthrow existing moral systems and subvert the authority of church and state.
The triumph of the North meant the ascendancy of urbanization, immigration, industrial capitalism, and wage labor over an agrarian southern economy doomed to stagnate for decades. The war markedly accelerated the timetable of economic development, promoting the growth of factories, mills, and railroads. By stimulating technological innovation and standardized products, it ushered in a more regimented economy. The world of small farmers and businessmen began to fade, upstaged by a gargantuan new world of mass consumption and production. As railroad expansion gained momentum, populating the West and culminating in completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, it spawned an accompanying mania in land deals, stock promotions, and mining developments. People rushed to exploit millions of acres of natural resources that could be economically brought to market for the first time.
In short, by the end of the Civil War, the preconditions existed for an industrial economy of spectacular new proportions. Before the war, the federal government had only twenty thousand employees and shied away from attempts to regulate business. Unlike Europe, America had no tradition of political absolutism or ecclesiastic privilege to quench entrepreneurial spirits, and the weak, fragmented political system gave businessmen room to flourish. At the same time, America had the legal and administrative apparatus necessary to support modern industry. There was respect for private property and contracts; people could get limited corporate charters or file for bankruptcy; and bank credit, while not yet plentiful, was everywhere available in a highly fragmented banking system. In time, the government redefined the rules of the capitalist game to tame trusts and preserve competition, but as John D. Rockefeller set about building his fortune, the absence of clear-cut rules probably aided, at first, the creative vigor of the new industrial economy.