by Ron Chernow
For John and Cettie, the temperance movement gratified their puritan itch to save the world, and their children joined a prohibition group called the Loyal Legion, which scared them with evil visions of demon rum. As a charter member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Cettie and other well-bred ladies periodically descended on a Cleveland slum known as Whiskey Hill, which was mostly populated by immigrant mill hands. Around 11 A.M., they surged into the saloons, falling on their knees and praying for the sodden sinners. These militant ladies rented storefronts and set up a series of “friendly inns” that dispensed “wholesome foods and sarsaparilla” to thirsty “souls drowning in drink.” 28 John was the principal donor of the main temperance outpost, Central Friendly Inn, making him an early pioneer in the settlement-house movement. Sometimes he joined Cettie on raids into the grogshops and never forgot how in one saloon he came upon a former classmate from E. G. Folsom’s Commercial College who sat there, bloated and red-faced, doomed shortly to die from drink.
Cettie’s parents had transferred their abolitionist ardor to the temperance cause after the Civil War. By 1870, they were living in Brooklyn, New York, where they exhibited the same fiery moralism that had distinguished their civic and religious activism in Ohio. In a division of labor, Mr. Spelman agitated to shut down the 2,500 rum shops he counted in Brooklyn, while Mrs. Spelman acted directly on drinkers through prayer and persuasion in taverns. During the post-1873 depression, Mr. Spelman foresaw an impending Armageddon pitting rum against temperance, Satan against Christ. He viewed hard times as the Lord’s punishment for avarice manifested by the grasping demands of both workmen and employers. As he sternly concluded, “God’s method for punishing man’s folly and extravagance are silent, but resistless.” 29 Mr. Spelman, who now drew a paycheck from Standard Oil in New York, couched his economic views in terms that suited his son-in-law. “The great trouble arises from extravagant management and reckless and ruinous competition on freights,” he declared, tacitly endorsing monopoly. After Harvey Spelman died in 1881, his wife returned to Cleveland to live with John and her two daughters, Cettie and Lute, and the combined influence of the three Spelman women added to the militant, Christian spirit that informed the Rockefeller household.
The man who was now infuriating his rivals with the devilish cunning of his business methods was a tender son to his aging mother. Eliza retained the old Cheshire Street house, where John’s portrait held pride of place above the parlor mantel. Though she spent most of her time with Frank and Mary Ann, she reserved summers for Forest Hill. She was still profoundly attached to her eldest son. She confided in John, felt a peaceful glow in his presence, and he responded with deep compassion. As Junior recalled, “She always sat next to Father at the table and how well I can remember often seeing him hold her hand lovingly at the table. Grandmother trusted Father absolutely and loved him devotedly. ‘John’s judgment’ on any question was to her always right and the last word.”30 Rockefeller wrote often to “his dear mother” and struck a note of fond banter not evident elsewhere in his letters. “Your rooms at Forest Hill seem very lonesome and we hope you will not permit them to remain vacant all the summer,” he wrote her one June. “The robins already begin to inquire for you and we can have the whole lawn full if you will only come back to greet them.” 31
By the late 1870s, Eliza’s health began to fail—she was now in her late sixties—and John pleaded with her to stop smoking her pipe. In a preview of her son’s later alopecia, all her hair fell out and she sometimes wore a gray toupee. As Eliza’s strength declined, John grew more solicitous. “When she was feeling ill and confined to her room, Father would go to her in his quiet, cheery, reassuring way and tell her she was doing nicely and would soon be well,” said Junior, “whereupon she never failed to take new courage and improve in health.”32 Her maladies took precedence over Standard Oil business, and if she had a nervous attack while John was at a meeting, he rushed back to Forest Hill, went straight to her bedside, took her hand, and said, “There, there, Mother. It’s all right.” 33
To explain his father’s disappearance, John D. often told people that Bill had asthma—which was true as far as it went—and needed a dry, warm western climate. Once or twice a year, Devil Bill—or Dr. William Levingston—popped up in Cleveland in his typically idiosyncratic fashion. Without any warning, he telephoned Forest Hill from the last stop of the Cleveland trolley line and asked to have a carriage sent to fetch him. Or he appeared in an impressive rig, behind a fine team of horses, and rode grandly up Euclid Avenue. Or, pulling up in front of the Standard Oil building, he bolted up the steps like a much younger man. A blithe spirit, he wandered about and always did as he pleased. As one Standard Oil attorney said, “If you didn’t like it, you could go hang!” 34 He still looked impressive, with a bald head, massive forehead, and a full red beard now speckled with gray. In many respects, he was the same carefree, ebullient spirit of yesteryear, sporting snappy clothes and a diamond stickpin in his shirtfront, playing his fiddle, cracking jokes, and telling tall tales.
As they got older, the Rockefeller children were enchanted by Grandfather Rockefeller, whom they regarded as a colorful, folksy relic of the family’s rustic past. Innocent of his darker side, they loved his rough country ways, lusty fiddling, and bawdy humor. His antics must have relieved the bottled-up tensions in this straitlaced household. Junior, who found him “jolly and entertaining,” said, “My Grandfather Rockefeller was a most lovable person. . . . All the family loved him. He was a very entertaining man, coming and going when he felt like it.”35 Much as he once had with his own children, Bill gave his grandchildren rifles and taught them to shoot, nailing a bull’s-eye to a distant tree and regaling them with tales of his wild-duck hunting. The sassy Edith pleased him most, and when she hit the target, he executed a dance (much like John) and hollered, “Bet you she hits it eight times out of ten!”36 After a few days of such uproarious times, Grandpa would abruptly disappear, giving no sense of where he went.
John resented his father and never wrote to him, but he didn’t poison the children’s minds against him, and he behaved civilly in his presence, even if he kept studiously aloof. To strangers and the press, he never spoke of his father as anything but a fine, upstanding figure. Bill’s visits provoked similarly ambivalent sentiments in Eliza. When he visited Forest Hill in 1885, she refused, at first, to see him, blaming a stitch in her side, then agreed to spend the day with him. By this point, she was surely glad to be rid of him.
In many respects, Bill’s life as Doc Levingston resembled his former life with Eliza. He spent winters with Margaret in Freeport, Illinois, then took to the open road for the rest of the year, leaving her alone. A renegade individualist, he felt that footloose American urge to eke out a living on the fringes of civilization, and he penetrated ever farther into the wilderness. As a flimflam man, he had to practice his wiles on country bumpkins and other credulous folks and stay away from skeptical city slickers. Either because suckers had grown scarce or sheriffs more vigilant, he now traversed entire states to peddle his wares.
In his incarnation as Dr. Levingston, Bill had to not only endure the silent lash of John’s indignation, but forgo any claims to his money. Could God have devised a more excruciating curse for his sins? Faced with his son’s dizzying wealth, he must have sometimes pondered whether to throw off his disguise and resume his Rockefeller identity. Yet this was not a feasible option, since he could not do so without shocking Margaret and betraying his own shameful bigamy. So the father of the leading figure in the oil industry went on practicing his petty scams on the road under an assumed name.
Rockefeller’s sisters played a limited role in his adult life. His favorite sister, Lucy, was sweet and placid, arguably the best-adjusted sibling, but she was chronically sick and died in 1878 at age forty—the event that probably triggered the deterioration of Eliza’s health. Her husband, Pierson Briggs, spent nearly fifteen years as a purchasing agent for Standard Oil of Ohio. He was
a kindly, jolly man and very popular with John’s children. After Lucy’s death, Briggs remarried into a wealthy Cleveland family while his musical daughter, Florence, spent a great deal of time at Forest Hill under the watchful care of John and Cettie.
The younger sister, Mary Ann, married a genial man named William Rudd, the president of Chandler and Rudd, a Cleveland grocery concern, and they had two sons and two daughters. Quiet and withdrawn, Mary Ann turned into a queerly reclusive personality. Always clad in funereal black clothes that covered a deformed body—some people thought she was a hunchback—she laid down arbitrary social rules at her Euclid Avenue house. For example, visitors had to arrive punctually and could only stay briefly. Despite her husband’s wealth, Mary Ann insisted on a crackpot frugality and behaved as if they were always strapped for cash. In a morbid caricature of the Protestant work ethic, she scrubbed the front porch of their plain white house, performed her own housework, and refused to have any servants. She never went to church and seldom visited John and Cettie, even though they lived a short distance away. The antithesis of his hermit wife, William Rudd was a frequent visitor at Forest Hill, where he found a refuge from the lugubrious atmosphere at home. One of John D.’s favorite people, Rudd overflowed with gags and pranks, and his pockets always bulged with nuts and candy for the children. One day, he lugged a sack of dirty old potatoes to Forest Hill; the Rockefeller children were mystified until they found a gold piece artfully tucked into each potato.
Of the three brothers, John remained the most like Eliza, while William mixed qualities of both parents. Frank aped Bill’s swaggering ways. He was an avid hunter and rollicking storyteller who loved to drink, smoke cigars, make boisterous jokes, and hobnob in Cleveland clubs. Yet increasingly, a disagreeable side surfaced in Frank: Choleric, paranoid, and suspicious, he constantly clashed with John. As one of Frank’s friends said, “You never saw two men from one family that were more unlike.”37 Though they went through periods of reconciliation, their mutual dislike soon ripened into a hatred that split the family, with William lining up with John and Big Bill siding with Frank. Although he liked William—who often tried to make peace between his brothers—Frank felt William was too much under John’s thumb, and it irked him that he, too, didn’t rebel openly against John’s leadership.
After being wounded in the Union army, Frank attended business school and, like John and William, got a bookkeeping job in a small commission house. But unlike his brothers, he didn’t prosper, foreshadowing things to come. Trying to emulate his brothers, Frank entered oil refining as a competitor to Standard Oil after he married the tall, handsome Helen E. Scofield in 1870. The Scofields were a relatively old Cleveland family, and Helen’s father, William Scofield, was a partner in Alexander, Scofield and Company, one of the major refiners that John absorbed during the 1872 Cleveland Massacre. That Frank married the daughter of one of John’s chief competitors could only have been interpreted by John as a provocation.
In 1876, the antipathy between the two brothers flared into open conflict when Frank testified before a congressional committee probing the South Improvement Company and charged John with heavy-handed tactics in buying out Alexander, Scofield. Already sensing the press’s insatiable desire for incendiary statements about his brother, Frank electrified reporters with John’s warning, “We have a combination with the railroads. We are going to buy out all the refiners in Cleveland. We will give every one a chance to come in. We will give you a chance. Those who refuse will be crushed. If you don’t sell your property to us it will be valueless.”38 According to Frank, the experience of Alexander, Scofield wasn’t unique. “There are some twenty men in Cleveland who sold out under the fright, and almost any of them would tell you that story.”39 Confronted with this indictment years later, John shook his head sadly and moaned, “Poor Frank!”40 Indeed, after these public outbursts, Frank often came to John and apologized profusely. “John, can you forgive me? I have been an ass.”41 One possible reason for this contrition was that Frank was chronically in debt to his brother.
Every time the brothers tried to call a truce, it ended abysmally. After allegedly being squeezed out in 1872, Frank took the money for his Alexander, Scofield interest and invested in a fleet of Lake Erie boats. In a conciliatory gesture, John gave him a contract for Standard Oil shipments, but Frank botched the opportunity. While Frank was away hunting, Standard Oil urgently needed more lake shipments, and his poorly maintained fleet couldn’t cope with the increased volume. When Frank returned to Cleveland, John reprimanded him sharply. “Frank, this will have to stop. If you are going to attend to business, very well. If not, we shall have to make other arrangements.” When Frank grew belligerent, John replied, “What do you think your interest in those boats is worth? State your figure!” The following day, John wrote a check and bought up Frank’s interest in the boats. 42 Frank incessantly gambled in stocks and commodities, further alienating his more prudent brother.
Also aggravating fraternal tensions was the fact that John despised Frank’s father-in-law, William Scofield, a relationship so acrimonious that John supposedly told Sam Andrews on one occasion, “There, Sam, is Scofield. I’ll knife that fellow under the ribs some day. You’ll see.”43 The story was told to Ida Tarbell by Cleveland refiner J. W. Fawcett and might be apocryphal—Rockefeller almost never spoke so viciously—but he did bear a special grudge against Scofield. When Standard Oil bought out Alexander, Scofield in 1872, the selling partners pledged to steer clear of refining. Nevertheless, a year later—in what Rockefeller considered an unforgivable breach of faith—Scofield organized a new refining company, Scofield, Shurmer and Teagle. “They were a lot of pirates,” Rockefeller said later. “You may call them that with justice.”44 After fuming for three years, he cut a secret deal with his nemesis in 1876. Investing $10,000 in Scofield, Shurmer, he forged a joint venture, agreed to purchase crude oil for them, market their refined oil, and negotiate their railroad rebates, while also assigning them a refining quota. In thrashing out this deal, Rockefeller and his new secret partners agreed to communicate by a special post-office box, prompting Ida Tarbell to write, “In fact, smugglers and house-breakers never surrounded their operations with more mystery.”45 If Rockefeller imagined he had neutralized a rival, he was soon disabused. When Scofield, Shurmer produced far beyond their quotas, Standard Oil was forced to sue them. In a significant decision—but one that didn’t inhibit Rockefeller in future—a Cleveland judge ruled against Standard Oil in 1880, saying that by assigning production limits to a competitor, it had executed a contract in restraint of trade.
In 1878, in yet another affront to his brother, Frank joined with C. W. Scofield and J. W. Fawcett to start a Cleveland refinery known as the Pioneer Oil Works. Often operating through William as an intermediary, John began a determined campaign to bring Frank’s company into Standard Oil, telling him that Standard could refine oil at half the cost. At first, this campaign seemed to backfire. In the spring of 1879, Frank began to plot strategy with some independent refiners from Marietta, Ohio, who had accused Standard Oil of colluding with the railroads and wanted to take the company to court. John D. was mortified when subordinates informed him that his youngest brother was holed up at a drugstore down the block along with men who were trying to buttonhole Standard Oil executives and serve them with subpoenas. Things grew only more lunatic with the passage of time.
CHAPTER 12
Insurrection in the Oil Fields
In 1875, Henry E. Wrigley, the head of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, issued a doomsday warning that the state—and hence the world—production of oil had peaked and would soon experience a precipitous decline, aggravating fears that had overshadowed the oil industry since its inception. Within months, his forecast was refuted when a new field was discovered in Bradford, Pennsylvania, northeast of the old Oil Creek fields. As thousands of wild-eyed drillers besieged the area, oil production soared, and prices sank from $4 a barrel in 1876 to 70 cents two years later. Once
again, the industry’s salvation proved its undoing, with the boom-and-bust cycle unleashing volatile emotions among producers who found themselves rich one moment and then desperate the next.
As the master of storage tanks and pipelines, refineries and by-product plants, Rockefeller had become a byword in the oil fields, a phantom of vast, indeterminate proportions who operated entirely through agents. His remoteness frustrated opponents, who felt they were boxing with a ghost. In the crisis provoked by the new Bradford production, he was blamed for price manipulation even when he simply reflected the law of supply and demand. With the immediate-shipment controversy of 1878, the running warfare between Standard Oil and the producers expanded from minor skirmishes into a large, violent engagement reminiscent of the South Improvement Company furor.
The roots of the controversy were as follows. As oil wells sprang up around Bradford, Standard Oil wanted to retain its pipeline monopoly and worked overtime to connect new wells to its system free of charge. In a bravura performance, Daniel O’Day’s scrappy, hustling teams hooked up five wells a day to the United Pipe Lines network and threw up huge tank farms to store the surplus oil. They moved at a breathtaking tempo: Between April and November 1878, the Bradford tankage swelled from a little more than 1 million barrels to 4.5 million. Nonetheless, the producers, repeating past errors, exercised no discipline and drilled far beyond the system’s capacity. When their oil ran into the ground for lack of storage space, they didn’t praise Standard’s efforts to accommodate them but detected a malevolent conspiracy. O’Day’s letters to Rockefeller reflect exasperation at the misperception. No matter how fast they went, he moaned, “There will be at least ten thousand barrels a day that I don’t know how we can move, no matter how good our disposition to do it might be.”1