by Ron Chernow
While Rockefeller was casting about for some means to spend money more liberally without compromising his scrupulous standards, a group of Baptist leaders met in Washington in May 1888 to form the American Baptist Education Society (ABES). The driving force behind this new association was Dr. Henry Morehouse, the executive officer of the American Baptist Home Mission Society who had advised Rockefeller on Spelman Seminary. Morehouse thought Baptist education was in a woeful state and urgently in need of reform. For Rockefeller, the new group was providential, promising to serve as a handy conduit for channeling large amounts of money to worthy, well-researched Baptist schools.
To serve as executive secretary of the new group, Morehouse drafted a fiery, articulate young Baptist minister, the thirty-five-year-old Frederick T. Gates, who had recently resigned a pastorate in Minnesota and now gravitated toward more worldly affairs. Soon after he assumed the post, Gates championed a Baptist university in Chicago to fill a glaring void. The eastern churches held more money, but the fastest-growing part of the membership resided in the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes region. Before writing his report, he conducted an intensive study of Baptist education with prosecutorial zeal and ministerial fervor and he confirmed many of the arguments that Thomas W. Goodspeed had adduced. Because many Baptists schools were located in rural backwaters, midwestern congregants often attended schools of other denominations. Having tripled in size in two decades and ranking as America’s second largest metropolis with 1.7 million residents, Chicago seemed the optimal site for a major college.
Gates presented his findings in a richly detailed report that exhibited the exhaustive research that would endear him to Rockefeller. At the beginning, Gates, still unfamiliar with his patron, believed that Rockefeller would respond better to a bold plan than something tentative or equivocal. Hence, he portrayed this new Baptist university as the nucleus of a national educational network, confiding to Morehouse, “A scheme so vast, so continental, so orderly, so comprehensive, so detailed, will in my view capture a mind so constituted as Mr. Rockefeller’s is.”29 On October 15, 1888, he electrified a Baptist convention in Chicago with an impassioned paper entitled “The Need for a Baptist University in Chicago, as Illustrated by a Study of Baptist College Education in the West.”
The Gates report has often been credited with convincing Rockefeller to opt for Chicago, yet William Rainey Harper provided timely assistance. Two weeks after Gates made his sensational address, Dr. Harper spent ten hours at Vassar with Rockefeller and then joined him on the train to New York. During this momentous day, Rockefeller first declared his intention to found a Baptist university in Chicago. As Harper informed Goodspeed, “[Rockefeller] himself made out a list of reasons why it would be better to go to Chicago than to remain in New York.”30 Rockefeller leaned toward the Midwest for several reasons. He feared the complications that might result from the bullheaded Dr. Strong’s leadership of any New York school. He also worried that an eastern school might be encrusted with tradition, whereas a Chicago school could “strike out upon lines in full sympathy with the spirit of the age.”31 Then there was a political dimension that Rockefeller never dared to articulate openly. He had to convince the public that he would not meddle or convert the school into a mouthpiece for his corporate interests. As he put it three decades later, Chicago “was sufficiently removed from Wall Street to encourage the hope that it would escape suspicion of being dominated by the so-called interests.” 32
Twice during the next month, Rockefeller spent a day with Harper, first in Poughkeepsie, then in New Haven, for nonstop talks about the proposed university. Harper was astonished by his patron’s unreserved passion. “I have never known him to be so interested in anything,” Harper told Goodspeed, “and this promises much.”33 Growing more enthusiastic by the hour, Rockefeller advanced a three-pronged plan for a college and university in Chicago, a theological seminary in New York (doubtless to placate Dr. Strong), and an educational trust of western colleges. This last step, a brainchild of Harper, envisioned a string of colleges throughout the West sharing common management with the Chicago university. Warming to the project, Rockefeller planned to visit Cornell on an inspection tour and court three Baptist professors for Chicago. In eloquent testimony to his commitment, Rockefeller told Harper of his readiness to give three million of the first four million dollars needed by the Chicago school. On December 3, 1888, the ABES formally endorsed the plan to found a new school in Chicago; ABES would be the official channel for Rockefeller’s contributions.
Then suddenly, in early 1889, Rockefeller grew aloof toward William Rainey Harper, who had committed the classic error of promoting his cause too assertively. What especially distressed Rockefeller was that Harper wanted to start with a full-blown university, whereas he preferred to begin with a college and expand incrementally. To break this impasse, Harper tactfully bowed out and allowed Gates to take charge of the lobbying campaign. A master at reading the minds of potential donors, Gates intuited that Rockefeller felt put upon by Harper’s quixotic plans and, to lessen his anxieties, he sent Rockefeller a scaled-down plan for a plain Chicago college. Much relieved, Rockefeller invited Gates and Morehouse for lunch on January 21, 1889. When Gates first set eyes on the great sphinx, he found him polite and decorous, if cryptic. “In parting with me,” Gates reported to Harper, “he said that his mind worked slowly in these matters, but he was glad to have had this opportunity for extended conversation, and closed by saying, ‘I think we are in the way of progress.’ ”34
An important upshot of the lunch was that Rockefeller invited Gates to accompany him on a train trip to Cleveland. Gates saw that a low-key approach was the perfect antidote to Harper’s rousing oratory, and he decided to let Rockefeller initiate discussion about the Chicago school aboard the train. “I think this was soon perceived by Mr. Rockefeller,” Gates said in his memoirs, “that it surprised and pleased him, and that he amused himself by putting my sense of propriety to the test.” Though the train left New York at 6 P.M., the two men never referred to what was uppermost in their minds. When they were joined by a phalanx of Standard Oil men, Gates noted the magnetic power Rockefeller had over them. “I observed that he spoke very little indeed, and always in a low and quiet voice.”35 At one point, when the porter making up Rockefeller’s berth accidentally smacked him over the head, Rockefeller “uttered no word, made no exclamation, gave not one word of reproof to the careless porter, and reassured him when he offered profuse apologies,” recalled Gates.36
Having failed to broach the Chicago question with Rockefeller, Gates crept into his sleeping berth that night “a miserable, disappointed man.”37 As it turned out, Rockefeller was coyly enjoying a cat-and-mouse game, and as they neared Cleveland the next morning, he began to pummel Gates with questions about the ABES. Rockefeller wanted reassurance that the ABES board was truly disinterested and devoid of unstated agendas. He also wanted Gates to make on-site inspections of schools and not rely on secondhand reports. On the strength of these assurances, Rockefeller decided to make the Baptist society his preferred vehicle for denominational gifts, an important first step on the road to wholesale philanthropy. Clearly, Rockefeller was contemplating new ways of distributing money through central agencies that could offer expert advice and buffer him from applicants.
Gates often marveled at the inexplicable ways of his new patron, who enjoyed keeping everyone in suspense. As the ABES board meeting approached on February 20, 1889, Gates awaited word of a large contribution from Rockefeller. Only as the meeting was called to order did a messenger arrive with a $100,000 pledge to the organization. Later on, when Rockefeller asked him what the society did with the money, Gates said it went into a bank account that paid no interest. This so mortified Rockefeller’s sense of thrift that he borrowed back the $100,000 and paid the society 6 percent. “I can’t endure to see that money idle,” Rockefeller told Gates. “I feel about it as one does to come into a room, ill swept, with the corners full of cobwebs and dus
t. I want to clean up that room.”38
In the spring of 1889, Gates went through another baffling period of silence. He was hoping to announce Rockefeller’s decision to bankroll a Chicago university when the ABES held its general meeting in Boston on May 18. At the last minute, Rockefeller advised Gates to stop by his home en route to Boston and listened silently to the latter’s appeal for a large commitment to the Chicago project. Sticking with his habitual policy of creative procrastination, Rockefeller promised nothing and invited Gates for breakfast the next morning.
After all these excruciating dilatory tactics, the campaign for a Chicago college or university reached a surprisingly swift climax on a clear spring morning in May 1889. After breakfast, the two men strolled to and fro before the Rockefeller house on Fifty-fourth Street. After months of stalling, Rockefeller said he was ready to provide $400,000—considerably short of the figure he had quoted to Harper six months before. When Gates rejected this as insufficient, Rockefeller raised the ante to $500,000. Once again, Gates spurned the offer, citing the advantages of Rockefeller contributing the majority of the money. Gates held out for a stunning $600,000 contribution—equal to $9.5 million today—which was predicated upon another $400,000 being raised from other sources. Eager to commit this historic pledge to paper, they went down to Rockefeller’s office where he put his promise in writing.
The next day, clutching this paper, Gates rose before the Baptists in the Tremont Temple in Boston. Rumors had circulated about the gift, creating a tingling mood of expectation. “I hold in my hand,” Gates thundered, “a letter from our great patron of education, Mr. John D. Rockefeller.” A groundswell of cheers surged from the floor. “A letter in which, on the basis of the resolutions adopted by our board, he promises that he will give six hundred thousand dollars—” At this point, pandemonium erupted, with clergymen waving their handkerchiefs, whistling, and applauding. Driven to ecstasy by this earthly bounty, one minister on the podium flung his hat heavenward, while another theologian sprang to his feet and praised “the coming to the front of such a princely giver. . . . It is the Lord’s day. . . . As an American, a Baptist, and a Christian I rejoice in this consummation. God has kept Chicago for us; I wonder at his patience.”39 On this note, the ecstatic holy men rose up to offer a lusty rendition of “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.”40 Overnight, for all his infamy in business, Rockefeller wore a golden nimbus in the eyes of many Baptists.
This was a bruising repudiation of Dr. Augustus H. Strong, who had ridden his hobbyhorse too hard and given the victory to his enemies. At first, it was exceedingly difficult for him to renounce his dream and concede defeat. Falling into deep dejection, he went on plying Gates with letters for Rockefeller until Gates had to inform him point-blank, “There is no hope. Mr. Rockefeller returned your letter to me with the request that the subject be dropped, and that I so write you as would leave no hope of any interest on his part.” 41 After a time, when Strong’s name surfaced in conversation, Rockefeller would drawl sarcastically, “Well, I hope Dr. Strong finds his man!” 42 It took Strong years to recuperate.
In June 1889, a few weeks after Rockefeller’s gift, Andrew Carnegie began to publish in the North American Review an influential essay entitled “Wealth.” Carnegie saw capitalism as threatened by the widening gulf between the swelling fortunes of the great industrialists and the meager wages of downtrodden workers. To defuse tensions and spread economic benefits more widely, he argued that the rich should donate large sums to worthy causes during their lifetimes, lest their money be frittered away by idle heirs. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” Carnegie declared bluntly.43 Rockefeller was greatly influenced by Carnegie and when the Carnegie Library opened in Pittsburgh in 1896 dashed off a congratulatory note. “I would that more men of wealth were doing as you are doing with your money; but, be assured, your example will bear fruits, and the time will come when men of wealth will more generally be willing to use it for the good of others.”44 Rockefeller was especially struck by the broadly systematic nature of Carnegie’s library program, which would bring some twenty-eight hundred public libraries into existence worldwide. When Rockefeller later addressed Marshall Field, Philip D. Armour, and other Chicago moguls about philanthropy, he echoed Carnegie’s plea to make bequests before they died.
In private, Rockefeller and Gates sometimes faulted Carnegie for letting his vanity peep out behind his benevolence. As Gates griped to Rockefeller, “Mr. Carnegie’s intimate friends tell me that it is no secret between them and him that he does these things for the sake of having his name written in stone all over the country. Have you observed that he always gives buildings while somebody else furnishes the money to keep them in repair?” 45 Rockefeller’s philanthropy was relatively discreet. Another tycoon might have been tempted to plaster his name on the Chicago college, especially during a contentious period that saw the passage of both antitrust and railroad-reform legislation. Yet this only hardened Rockefeller’s resolve to prove that he was not currying public favor. With the University of Chicago, his sole concession to vanity was to allow the trustees to affix his name to the school seal, official documents, and letter-heads. A proposal to place a lamp on the university seal was rejected, lest anyone mistake it for a vulgar allusion to oil. Even though Rockefeller was the Prospero who single-handedly conjured the University of Chicago into being, he didn’t allow any campus building to bear his name, and the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel was christened only after his death.
It was an auspicious time for such a venture. While enjoying the wealth of a nascent world power, America was still saddled with cultural institutions that seemed provincial beside their European counterparts, and many businessmen were eager to endow schools and museums. Rockefeller was not the only magnate to create a major university in the late nineteenth century: The railroad fortunes of both Johns Hopkins and Leland Stanford were similarly applied, while closer to home Rockefeller had the example of the Pratt Institute, set up by Charles Pratt in 1887. Instead of making isolated gifts, Rockefeller wanted to finance institutions whose research would have a pervasive influence. Of the University of Chicago, he later said, “Following the principle of trying to abolish evils by destroying them at the source, we felt that to aid colleges and universities, whose graduates would spread their culture far and wide, was the surest way to fight ignorance and promote the growth of useful knowledge. ”46 To Rockefeller, the least imaginative use of money was to give it to people outright instead of delving into the causes of human misery. “That has been our guiding principle, to benefit as many people as possible,” he affirmed. “Instead of giving alms to beggars, if anything can be done to remove the causes which lead to the existence of beggars, then something deeper and broader and more worthwhile will have been accomplished.”47
Businessmen such as Rockefeller and Carnegie saw themselves as applying their managerial wisdom to the charity world. As at Standard Oil, Rockefeller wanted to reduce waste and duplication in the charitable sphere and deplored the lack of study behind much giving. “Today the whole machinery of benevolence is conducted upon more or less haphazard principles,” he stated in his memoirs.48 The University of Chicago was Rockefeller’s signature project in which he clarified his approach and schooled Frederick T. Gates, his son, and other advisers as his future surrogates.
From the outset, Rockefeller swore that he would avoid the rich man’s trap of endowing institutions that would become dependent wards. His ideal was to create organizations that would take on independent lives and outgrow him. Having pledged $600,000 for the Chicago college, he gave the ABES one year from June 1, 1890, to drum up the other $400,000 from outside sources. To accomplish this, Gates moved temporarily to Chicago and joined forces with Goodspeed in a grueling fund-raising drive that nearly drove them to distraction. They were stymied by restrictions written into the school’s articles of incorporation, which stipulated that two-thirds of the trustees and the president be members of Baptist churches. If
the enterprise’s spirit was ecumenical (several prominent Jews contributed), the institution’s charter was explicitly denominational. This confusion emanated from Rockefeller, who insisted that the new institution remain under Baptist auspices yet be “conducted in a spirit of the widest liberality,” with students drawn from every class of society.49 Unfortunately, Chicago numbered few Baptists among its high-spending citizens. Instead of being stimulated by Rockefeller’s involvement, many potential donors smugly assumed that the fledgling school would never want for money. Of their excruciating year of pleading, Gates later said it “cost more brain work, anxiety, anguish, tears, prayers and shoe leather than all the millions that have since gone into the university.” 50 A promising contribution came in January 1890 when Marshall Field donated a ten-acre parcel for the new school on the south side of Chicago, just north of the site of an upcoming fair that would attract worldwide attention: the World’s Columbian Exposition. Delighted by this act of faith, Rockefeller agreed that he and Field would jointly review the names of proposed trustees.