by Ron Chernow
In 1882, two of Rockefeller’s interests dovetailed memorably in a commitment to a black women’s school at a time when higher education for both blacks and women was held suspect. He had had a long-standing interest in education, having contributed for years to Denison University, a Baptist college in Ohio. In the 1880s and 1890s, he gave so openhandedly to A. C. Bacone’s Indian University (today Bacone College) in present-day Oklahoma that its first major building was named Rockefeller Hall. During the Civil War, Rockefeller gave to black ministers, churches, orphanages, and a deaf and mute society. He never relinquished a special solicitude for black welfare—quite atypical for a businessman at that time. Imbued with Baptist egalitarianism, he was ripe for conversion to a new cause when Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles reentered his life.
The Rockefellers had first met Packard and Giles on their honeymoon stopover at Oread Collegiate Institute, where the two women were newly recruited teachers. They were absorbed in the dismal plight of poor blacks, partly as an extension of their Baptist evangelism. After the Civil War, Baptists had been in the vanguard of forming churches for freed slaves and teaching them to read the Bible and had enjoyed the strongest growth in the black community of any denomination. So when Packard was named corresponding secretary of the new Woman’s American Baptist Home Mission Society in 1878, she had a serviceable vehicle for advancing black education. When she and Giles toured southern black schools two years later, they were appalled by the educational facilities for black women and found one especially glaring omission: Georgia, with the largest black population, lacked a single institution of higher learning for black women. To rectify this, in 1881 they opened a school for young black women—many of them born under slavery and still illiterate—in the dank, dilapidated basement of the Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta, christening it the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary. The first class had eleven students, mostly mothers. For two sedate, decorous New England ladies to venture into the troubled area of southern race relations represented a courageous act.
In June 1882, Packard and Giles visited Cleveland to make an appeal to potential donors at the Willson Avenue Baptist Church. For forty years, the Spelmans had passionately backed abolitionism and sundry black causes. The recently deceased Harvey B. Spelman had sat on the executive committee of the American Freedmen’s Union Commission. In consequence, Reverend King had a powerful hunch that the Rockefellers would respond enthusiastically to the pleas of Packard and Giles and promised the two women that if they came to his church, he would deliver John and Cettie Rockefeller in the audience.
Packard and Giles dressed with the same spinsterish simplicity, but the similarities ended there. Tall and blue-eyed, Packard was a brisk woman with a ready wit and great managerial gifts, while the younger Giles seemed timorous, gentle, and retiring in manner. That evening they made an affecting presentation, summoning up images of the 150 students, many unlettered but eager, who crowded the drab church basement to learn. As rain dripped down the walls and gathered in stagnant pools on the muddy floor, Packard and Giles sometimes stood in puddles as they taught eleven or twelve classes apiece each day; some classes were tightly wedged into a dusty area formerly used for coal storage. Breathing air thick with smoke and dust and ducking overhead heating pipes, the students had to kneel and write on wooden benches. To teach math, Packard and Giles laid sticks across the planks and had the students count them. At first, most of the women were provided with little more than a Bible, pad, and pencil, and the lighting was so poor that they couldn’t read on rainy days.
This poignant presentation would have wrung tears from a stone, and the Rockefellers were transfixed. As Harriet Giles recalled, “It was at that meeting that Mr. John D. Rockefeller first became interested in the school. After having emptied his pockets when the box was passed, he asked [us] the characteristic question, ‘Are you going to stick?’ and added, ‘If so, I will do more for you.’ ”65 On the spot, he pledged $250 more for their building fund. Much to the amazement of the teachers, he returned the next afternoon with three carriages and took them off to Forest Hill, where they drove about as honored guests.
Inspired by these women, Rockefeller, though socially conservative, became unalterably committed to black education. As one chronicler of Rockefeller philanthropy has noted, “The Rockefeller files are more extensive on this subject of the welfare of the Negro race than on almost any other.” 66 More than any benevolent project, the black women’s college in Atlanta became a Rockefeller family affair, as John was joined in his interest by his Spelman wife, sister-in-law, and mother-in-law. When it came to black education and welfare, Rockefeller displayed unwonted ardor. “Kindly assure the colored people of my sympathy for and interest in them and tell them, I hope they will in addition to securing knowledge from books, strive to learn to do all kinds of work, and better than any other class of men,” he wrote to one minister friend in the late 1880s.67 Reciprocating the personal tone of his correspondence, Sophia Packard always saluted him as “Dear Brother” or “Dear Friend.” Amid the hectic rounds of his life, Rockefeller always found time to send letters and small, thoughtful gifts to Packard and Giles to buck up their morale.
Rockefeller’s involvement in the Atlanta school was at first cautious but gradually acquired irresistible momentum. In late 1882, the Atlanta school bought nine acres and five buildings that had housed Union occupation troops. By late 1883, the fast-growing school had enrolled 450 students, the mortgage on the barracks property was coming due, and the school wavered on the edge of fiscal crisis. At this point, Packard and Giles entreated Rockefeller for a donation to secure the school on a permanent footing: “Give it a name; let it if you please be called Rockefeller College, or if you prefer let it take your good wife’s Maiden name or any other which suits you.” 68 Although Rockefeller retired the $5,000 debt, he humbly declined to use his own name. Instead, in a fitting tribute to his in-laws, he opted for the Spelman name, thus giving birth to Spelman Seminary, renamed Spelman College in 1924. It developed into one of America’s most respected schools for black women, counting Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mother and grandmother among its many prominent alumnae.
On April 11, 1884, Rockefeller and his family went by train to Atlanta to celebrate the school’s third anniversary, and 450 students packed the chapel to glimpse their patrons. Rockefeller adored Negro hymns and spirituals and now heard them in abundance. After the opening hymn, Sophia Packard exclaimed, “I bless the Lord that I have lived to see this day.”69 In a string of brief speeches, Cettie Rockefeller paid tribute to the liberating power of song, sister Lute memorialized their father’s abolitionist work, and their mother told how the Spelman home had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Though Rockefeller virtually never spoke in public, he delivered a talk of unaffected eloquence: “It is in your hearts to make the school one that people will believe in. God will take these small beginnings to do a great work. I am thankful to be here.”70 When Rockefeller sat down, it was announced, amid sustained cheers and hosannas, that the school had been renamed Spelman Seminary.
As a paradigm of future Rockefeller philanthropy, several things about Spelman should be flagged for attention. In a delicate balancing act, Rockefeller gave enough to get projects under way, yet not so much as to obviate future fund-raising. In 1886, Rockefeller Hall was dedicated, which included dormitory rooms and a beautiful chapel. During the coming years, he gave another eleven acres plus the money for additional dormitories, a laundry, a dining hall, and numerous other buildings, creating a lovely, elegant campus. Presented with architectural plans for one new building, he commented, “My suggestion is to err in getting what seems at present too much room rather than not enough. I judge the crop of colored folks will be large.”71 In the 1890s, Rockefeller sent his own landscape architects to redesign the campus, and he himself selected the trees and shrubbery.
Yet for all this fervent support, Packard and Giles had to struggle for years to keep the school afloat. With
one check, Rockefeller might have relieved their anxiety forever, but he wanted to avert excessive dependence and keep alive a creative ambiguity about his intentions. While briefly serving on the Spelman board of trustees, he preferred to remain slightly detached and subtly enigmatic, never telegraphing his plans too far in advance.
Another cardinal principle of Rockefeller philanthropy was to rely upon expert opinion. Many of his gifts to Spelman Seminary were channeled through Dr. Henry L. Morehouse, the field secretary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, which increasingly functioned as a conduit for Rockefeller’s wholesale philanthropy in education. Taxed by too many pleas for money, Rockefeller wrote to Morehouse on December 24, 1883, and inquired whether “to avoid having all these people from every part of the country calling” on him it might not be “much better for the cause” for him “to give all through the Home Mission Society.”72 Frederick T. Gates later took credit for this sane, efficient method of giving through umbrella groups that would then allocate money locally, but the idea had already taken root in Rockefeller’s mind. In these early years, one also sees Rockefeller using contributions to stimulate collaboration from others as he inched toward the concept of matching grants. For instance, in 1886, he pledged $30,000 to Morehouse, hoping that it would prove the catalyst for a $150,000 fund drive.
Since Rockefeller believed in meritocracy, not aristocracy, he favored educational opportunities for minorities. Spelman Seminary taught nursing, teaching, printing, and other useful trades, but the focal point was training young black women for a good Christian life. Some of the first graduates went to the Congo as missionaries. As Packard and Giles told Rockefeller several years later, “God is blessing the school spiritually as well as temporally; a number [of students] have entered upon the Christian life since the term commenced. We believe the salvation of the race and our country depends upon the Christian training of these girls who are to be future mothers and educators.”73 In the early years, Spelman Seminary encouraged a Victorian gentility among the students, turning out well-bred young ladies in hats and gloves. At the same time, it evinced much of the practical, enterprising spirit espoused by Booker T. Washington, the principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, who stressed vocational training for blacks. Before long, this approach to black education would be anathematized as futile and condescending by W.E.B. Du Bois and other critics who thought blacks capable of the same higher education as whites and felt they were doomed to mediocrity by vocational training. But whatever its early imperfections, Spelman College ultimately evolved into one of the most highly regarded institutions for black women in America.
CHAPTER 14
The Puppeteer
Because Standard Oil had long exercised a global monopoly, Rocke-feller’s name was already known abroad. Foreign markets were larger and more lucrative than domestic markets—some 70 percent of American oil went abroad in the mid-1880s—while some feeble competition managed to sputter on at home in the face of daunting odds. In the early 1870s, kerosene penetrated China, Japan, and other far-off spots, and one American traveler in 1874 saw Standard kerosene flickering in the ancient quarters of Babylon and Nineveh. In the early 1880s, 85 percent of world crude-oil production was still extracted from Pennsylvania soil, making it America’s fourth-largest export, and only Russian oil constituted a serious competitive threat. Since it made no sense to clamp down excess capacity at home only to see it expand abroad, Rockefeller could never tolerate foreign rivals, telling one colleague, “We have the capacity to do all the home trade as well as the export, and I hope we can devise ways and means to accomplish it later on; at all events we must continue to strive for it.”1
Standard Oil studied foreign markets and posted a cultivated oil merchant, William Herbert Libby, to the Far East in 1882 to make a two-year survey. Observing that oil had “found its way into more nooks and corners of the civilized and uncivilized countries than any other product in business history emanating from a single source,” Libby proselytized for kerosene in Japan, China, and India.2 After translating into Chinese a pamphlet touting the safety of kerosene lamps, Libby had the satisfaction of seeing sampans laden with Standard Oil products floating up rivers deep in China’s interior. To inflate demand, the combine sold hundreds of thousands of cheap lamps and wicks and sometimes distributed them gratis along with the first kerosene purchase. “In many countries,” said Rockefeller, “we had to teach the people . . . to burn oil by making lamps for them; we packed the oil to be carried by camels or on the backs of runners in the most remote portions of the world; we adapted the trade to the needs of strange folk.”3
For a time, Standard ruled foreign markets no less dictatorially than domestic ones, and with crude oil found in large quantities only in western Pennsylvania, it seemed this idyll might last forever. Then this fool’s paradise was roughly shattered in the early 1870s by a giant scramble for oil at the Russian port of Baku on the Caspian Sea. For more than a century, the natives had scooped up crude oil from huge pits, selling it mostly to Persians to lubricate their cart wheels, grease leather harnesses, and alleviate rheumatic pains. In the early 1870s, this primitive industry was suddenly thrust into the modern world when drillers struck wells of unprecedented force. Amid deafening roars, black geysers shot into the air with such staggering power that some of them couldn’t be capped for months; one raging gusher spouted 2,400 tons of oil within its first twenty-four hours.
In 1873, Robert Nobel, a member of the illustrious Swedish family, arrived in the Caucasus on a mission unrelated to oil. His brother had a contract to produce rifles for the Russian government, and Robert was scouting walnut trees for use as rifle stocks. Instead, he stumbled upon the bedlam of Baku, a frantic scene of such ghastly beauty that Maxim Gorky later limned it as “a dark hell painted by an artist of genius.”4 A crossroads as exotic as it was hellish, a Moslem enclave bristling with minarets, mosques, and palaces, Baku presented two faces to the traveler. In the bazaars, vendors hawked everything from Russian sugar to Persian silks, while outside of town a thick canopy of black smoke enveloped the refineries.
Robert Nobel took his 25,000 rubles of walnut money and plumped it down to buy a refinery. Where local kerosene had hitherto been mocked as Baku sludge, the Nobel refineries produced kerosene equal to that of Standard Oil, which monopolized the Russian marketplace in the early 1870s. Bringing sophisticated management and ample funds to the industry, Nobel and his brothers had created by decade’s end an eight-mile pipeline to the Caspian Sea, where they floated the world’s first oil tanker, the Zoroaster. They pioneered a continuous refining method that was superior to Standard’s batch system for sorting out distillates. In 1879, the Nobels organized the Nobel Brothers Petroleum Producing Company and soon cobbled together an impressive distribution system, complete with flatcars, tank cars, and storage depots, ejecting Standard Oil from Russia. That year, a roving Standard operative, William Brough, sent Rockefeller samples of Russian crude and refined oil along with prophecies that in a few years the Nobels would build a pipeline or railroad from the Caspian to the Black Sea, setting the stage for Russian oil to challenge Standard Oil in European markets.
Rockefeller’s first influential critic, Henry Demarest Lloyd, in Boston in 1903. (Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin)
By the early 1880s, two hundred refineries cluttered Baku’s oil-stained slopes, and in 1883—true to Brough’s forecast—a railroad connected Baku on the Caspian Sea to Batumi on the Black Sea. The potent Russian wells flowed with such fierce abundance that it was cheaper to produce oil in Russia than at Titusville, and cut-rate kerosene soon flooded European markets, undercutting Standard’s prices. The American consul in Batumi, J. C. Chambers, who had been dispatched by Standard Oil to harvest intelligence, kept Rockefeller apprised of these developments and sounded an alarm about the Russians’ “quixotic ambition to drive the American oil from the markets of the world.” 5 Whatever the coolness between Rockefeller and American officialdo
m at home, they cooperated overseas to stop tariffs against American oil. Paying tribute to the State Department, Rockefeller later said, “Our ambassadors and ministers and consuls have aided to push our way into new markets to the utmost corners of the world.”6
Rockefeller seems to have been caught napping by the Russian incursion just as he had snuffed out all his major domestic rivals. When his Hamburg agent, Charles F. L. Meissner, reported in 1885 on extensive Russian penetration of European markets, Rockefeller, taken aback, fired off an indignant blast at his executive committee: “I am at a loss to understand how the bulk transportation could have been carried on to the extent referred to in Switzerland and elsewhere, without our having received more information about it. ” 7 To retaliate, Rockefeller resorted to the usual high-powered weaponry, cutting prices across Europe and starting an insidious whispering campaign to question the safety of Russian kerosene. His files also reveal numberless secret contacts in Paris and London hotels with shadowy, self-appointed intermediaries inquiring whether Standard wished to buy a stake in Nobel Brothers or join with them in slicing up European markets. In 1885, Standard’s peripatetic emissary, W. H. Libby, held talks with the Nobels in Saint Petersburg, but these overtures faltered. The Nobels’ power in Russia hinged on their relationship with the despotic czarist government, and they didn’t intend to admit Standard Oil into their preserve.
By the mid-1880s, another powerful force appeared on the world oil scene. The Paris Rothschilds, led by Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, had built refineries at Rijeka and Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. In organizing the Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company—better known by its Russian initials, Bnito— they stood to reap a fortune from inexpensive Russian oil. No sooner had the Rothschilds entered the business than reports filtered back to Rockefeller that the Nobels, who were heavily in debt to the Rothschilds, could not meet their payments and might be forced to make common cause with the French bankers. For many years, the Rothschilds, the Nobels, and Standard Oil circled around each other, each trying to forge links with a second party to isolate the third.