by Ron Chernow
Having devoted his career to eliminating risk from the petroleum business, Rockefeller was unsettled by the uncertainties that dogged the Chicago project. For a long time, the question of who would lead the college was every bit as vexing as who—besides Rockefeller—would support it. William Rainey Harper seemed the natural candidate. As the star salesman who had converted Rockefeller to the cause, he enjoyed his special trust. Whatever his occasional qualms about Harper’s flamboyant rhetoric, Rockefeller was sure the young biblical scholar had unique credentials to run the school. Although Harper might not have known it, Rockefeller revealed his thoughts to him in an unprecedented fashion. Right after Christmas 1888, Harper had dropped by 26 Broadway. Since Rockefeller had been ailing, he asked after his health and Rockefeller replied:
I have made little progress, Doctor Harper. My wife has been sick and I have been anxious about her. My time has been taken up with the consideration of petitions from many sources—I have never known them so numerous. Montreal has come down upon me. Richmond, with a great reinforcement, has come down upon me. From every quarter the demands are growing more numerous, and more insistent. . . . I did not ask you to come and see me Sunday because I spent the day in bed; Christmas, too, I spent in bed—I was so tired. I have had some unusually worrying business matters in the last three weeks; still, the thing [the University of Chicago] is on my mind and I want to hear more about it.51
For a man who lived behind the heavy draperies of Victorian reticence, this was a remarkably candid response.
The intuitive Harper sensed that something else was preying on his mind, and Rockefeller confided that he had received a jarring letter from Dr. Strong. While masquerading as a family Christmas greeting—Charles’s marriage to Bessie lay just ahead—it was a transparent attempt to sabotage Harper and the Chicago project. A self-styled inquisitor, Dr. Strong had examined the class notes of his daughter Kate, who was taking a Bible course at Vassar with Harper, and written to Rockefeller that he had unearthed heretical tendencies in Harper’s teachings. Rockefeller was far more disturbed by Strong’s defamatory tactics than the specific charges leveled against Harper. When Harper was next in Poughkeepsie, he was greeted by a letter from Dr. Strong, who threatened, as a Vassar trustee, to lodge an official complaint if Harper continued to teach the Sunday Bible class there. When Goodspeed found out about this mean-spirited attack, he said to Harper, “The man seems mad, daft.”52
Harper was always Rockefeller’s choice for president, and at times the venture seemed to hinge upon his acceptance. In his grandiloquent visions of this new institution, Harper was not above gently flattering Rockefeller, making the new institution sound like the collegiate equivalent of Standard Oil. “And let it be a university made up of a score of colleges with a large degree of uniformity in their management; in other words, an educational trust,” Harper advised him.53 These sublime words both inspired and petrified Rockefeller. Hounded by requests for money, he didn’t know if he had the income to juggle so many commitments. In January 1889, he told Harper that they should start modestly with a college and defer the university till a later day. “So many claims have pressed upon me,” he explained, “I have not really needed a University to absorb my surplus.”54
Harper agonized over whether to take the presidential post at Chicago or stick with the biblical scholarship he loved. The question was a proxy for the larger issue of whether he sought power and status in life or the quieter rewards of scholarship. Harper was an original theorist and a charismatic teacher who hated to lose contact with his students, but he was also intensely ambitious. To pin him down, Yale offered him a generous, six-year compensation package that would allow him to hold two prestigious chairs at once. Learning of this, Rockefeller wrote Harper, “It would break my heart if I did not believe you would stay in the fold all right. For all the reasons I believe you will. Be sure you do.”55 When Harper conferred with him two weeks later, Rockefeller pleaded with him to avoid any permanent commitment to Yale.
When the University of Chicago charter was adopted in May 1890, the school still lacked a president. To force the issue, Rockefeller dispatched Gates to New Haven that July to notify Harper that he was the board’s unanimous choice to head the school. Far from settling things, this only sent Harper into fresh paroxysms of indecision. In spite of Rockefeller’s reiterated preference for a small college, Harper wanted nothing less than a full-fledged university and believed the one million dollars raised so far a mere pittance that fell short of his visions. As Harper wrestled with the dilemma, Rockefeller wrote to him in August, promising to add a premium to his salary. “I do not forget that the effort to establish the University grew out of your suggestion to me at Vassar and I regard you as the father of the institution, starting out under God with such great promise of future usefulness.” 56 Harper must have noted Rockefeller’s use of the hitherto taboo word university.
This letter alerted Harper to the fact that he now enjoyed considerable bargaining power in shaping the new institution, and his rhetoric only grew more sonorous. “The denomination and indeed the whole country are expecting the University of Chicago to be from the very beginning an institution of the highest rank and character,” he replied to Rockefeller. “Already it is talked of in connection with Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, and Cornell.”57 Harper characterized the money raised so far as insufficient to realize such lofty aims. Among other things, he envisaged a university where he could perpetuate his own scholarly interests and act as president and professor. When Rockefeller consented to his demand for an extra million dollars to transfer the Morgan Park Theological Seminary to the new Chicago campus, the thirty-four-year-old Harper capitulated and formally accepted the presidency in February 1891. It now seemed clear that his spacious dreams would carry him beyond the small, cloistered world of a biblical scholar.
Over time, the immoderate Harper gave liberal interpretations to Rockefeller’s vague promises of money, but he never misrepresented the scope of his plans. Even before accepting the presidency, he boasted to Rockefeller, “I believe that ten years will show an institution at Chicago which will amaze the multitudes.”58 Working sixteen-hour days, Harper now negotiated more than 120 faculty appointments in little more than a year. Rockefeller might think the university a plant of slow growth, but Harper wanted it to bloom overnight. The new president raided so many Ivy League faculties—the ranks of Yale and Cornell were especially depleted—that his ransacked rivals complained of foul play. Harper dangled sizable sums before reluctant prospects, enlarging the school’s future financial requirements. This nationwide talent search netted nine college presidents for the first faculty. Harper signed up John Dewey and George Herbert Mead for the philosophy department and enticed novelist Robert Herrick to join the English department, while Albion Small initiated America’s first graduate department in sociology. Another eminent recruit, economist Thorstein Veblen, came to regard Harper as the educational counterpart of capitalists such as Rockefeller and satirized him as a captain of erudition, one of a new species of empire builders in higher education.
However inspired he was by Harper, Rockefeller felt sorely beset by his extravagant spending, and their relations began to fray. With outside fund-raising stalled, it seemed that Rockefeller’s worst nightmare was coming true: He would end up sole benefactor of an institution that would bleed him dry for years. Whenever they met, they stayed away from money talk and spoke of educational policy. Financial matters were shunted off into increasingly testy private exchanges between Gates and Harper—exchanges that Rockefeller reviewed privately. By the spring of 1891, Rockefeller began to develop the queasy sense that Harper regarded his money as a blank check to cover annual deficits. To their surprise and disbelief, Rockefeller and Gates saw that the new president would not drop his busy lecture schedule (which netted him $4,000 a year) and contemplated a $3,000 offer to head the Chautauqua School of the English Bible, while also planning a fancy Eur
opean trip—all the while banking a handsome $10,000 salary at the University of Chicago. As Rockefeller fumed in the summer of 1891, Gates met with Harper and urged him to shed his outside activities. “Of course he rejected these proposals,” Gates informed Rockefeller, “as well as the intimation contained in it that his motives are not without their mercenary side.”59 It was an odd situation: the world’s richest man chastising a biblical scholar for unseemly materialism.
To some extent, Rockefeller sent out conflicting messages and was partly to blame for Harper’s profligacy. It was Rockefeller, after all, who urged Harper to pay top dollar for America’s best academic minds. As Gates told Harper after one meeting with Rockefeller, “We talked at great length about salaries of head professors pro and con and as a result he wished me to say to you positively that the best men must be had.” 60 Such talk could easily inspire a cavalier attitude toward money. Gates also had an ulterior motive for wishing Harper away from the lecture circuit. Though he was not the freethinker darkly portrayed by Dr. Strong, Harper did have heterodox religious views and brooded morbidly on his own heresy. Practicing the higher criticism, he had moved away from a stress on biblical inerrancy to a scholarly search for the authorship of sacred texts. Though becoming a modernist in his own right, Gates wanted Harper to muzzle his unorthodox views in public. Potential donors were already worried about the new university’s diluted Baptism and questioned Harper’s doctrinal purity. To one such critic, Gates insisted, “Dr. Harper is a man of evangelistic spirit and annually secures scores of conversions at Yale,” implying that he would continue this practice at Chicago. 61 When Gates expressed concern to Harper about his views, the latter made a clean breast of his liberal religious views to Rockefeller so that he would never be shocked by his unorthodoxy.
The newspapers were not privy to these internal tensions and lampooned the implausible pairing of the trust king and the biblical scholar. Harper was irritated by cartoons that showed him sprinting after Rockefeller and his money bags. In one cartoon strip, Harper desperately pursued Rockefeller across a frozen Hudson River, hopping from one ice floe to the next until a weary Rockefeller dropped a thick wad of bills behind him to sate the university president. When Rockefeller later gave one million dollars to Yale, another cartoonist drew Harper astride a college building marked “University of Chicago,” glaring enviously at another college building marked “Yale.” Harper was often portrayed as a sycophant of the rich. In one cartoon, he was seen greeting fashionable ladies at the train station and carrying their luggage, which was marked “Proper Function of College Presidents.”
There must have been moments in 1891 when John D. Rockefeller wondered how he had gotten entangled in a project so vast and headed by such a brilliantly erratic man. Had he known what lay ahead, it seems doubtful that he would have persevered. But he had now publicly staked his reputation on this hugely expensive endeavor and, in the last analysis, wherever William Rainey Harper led, John D. Rockefeller would grudgingly follow. He was not a man to abandon a project that had received his blessing.
However mingled with joy, Rockefeller’s anguish over the University of Chicago came at a moment of physical vulnerability and tipped him over the edge toward a breakdown. Gates’s letters to Harper are laced with references to their patron’s sharply deteriorating health. In April 1891, Gates said after a tête-à-tête with Rockefeller: “He was kindness itself, but appeared very sad and depressed. . . . He even told me that anxiety and worry about the matter [i.e., university finances] had made him sick and it was this that took him from his business and drove him to Cleveland. We must not press him for money. Let us see to it and see if we can not cut down expenses and get through the first year with the smallest possible deficit.”62
This was more than mere bluff or tactical posturing on Gates’s part, though there was doubtless some of that. Starting in early 1889, Rockefeller had complained continually of fatigue and depression. For several decades, he had expended superhuman energy in the creation of Standard Oil, mastering myriad details; all the while, pressure had built steadily beneath the surface repose. One could now see in his face the subdued melancholy of a man who had sacrificed too much for work. In early 1890, Rockefeller stayed away from the office for several months due to an unspecified illness. Later in the year, he promised to stop working on Saturdays and take more vacations, but the symptoms harried him into the following spring.
By 1891, the top executive ranks were beginning to thin at Standard Oil. Charles Pratt died suddenly that year, and Henry Flagler was increasingly distracted by his Florida hotel and railway ventures. Having groomed John D. Archbold as his successor, Rockefeller began to shift day-to-day power to his feisty, bantam protégé. More reviled than honored for his triumphs, Rockefeller, fifty-two, felt embattled by endless subpoenas from court cases and congressional hearings. Though he brushed off his critics as minor irritants and professed faith in his own integrity, it could not have been easy to face such universal opprobrium. Keeping up the pose of indifference must have taken its own toll.
Nevertheless, Rockefeller had come through earlier assaults unscathed. What really disturbed him was not so much making money but spending it. One Cleveland society woman, a friend, told a story of sitting beside him on a streetcar when the conductor came to collect fares. When Rockefeller handed him a quarter, the conductor deducted two nickel fares, assuming he would pay for the lady, and gave him fifteen cents change. “My change is five cents short,” Rockefeller declared. “Why, no. I took out two fares and gave you back fifteen cents,” explained the conductor. “But I did not tell you to take out two fares,” Rockefeller retorted. “Let this be a lesson to you, and never assume that a passenger is paying for two people unless he says so.”63 Rockefeller reviewed every bill that arrived at home and often patrolled the hallways, turning off gaslights. Such habits were not simply reflexive stinginess but were rooted in bedrock beliefs about the value of money. When he discovered that one railroad overcharged him $117 for carrying his family and horses, he had the Standard Oil treasurer immediately retrieve the money. “I need the $117 to build mission churches in the West,” he explained, showing the association in his own mind between savings and charity.64
With such uncommon respect for the dollar, he couldn’t cope with the psychological demands of the University of Chicago and other philanthropic commitments. As Rockefeller said, “I investigated and worked myself almost to a nervous breakdown in groping my way, without sufficient guide or chart, through the ever-widening field of philanthropic endeavor. It was forced upon me to organize and plan this department upon as distinct lines of progress as our other business affairs.”65 The figures of Rockefeller’s contributions between 1889 and 1892 reflect the expanding nature of his giving. From $124,000 in 1889 (right before his big pledge to Gates), his donations soared to $304,000 in 1890, $510,000 in 1891, and then a spectacular $1.35 million in 1892 ($22 million today) as he opened the spigot for the University of Chicago. Clearly, he needed someone to help with the avalanche of appeals overwhelming him, and by late 1889 he began to forward begging letters to Frederick T. Gates. “I am disposed more and more to give only through organized agencies,” he told Gates.66 Finally, in March 1891, suffering from broken health and all too aware of his mortal limitations, Rockefeller summoned Gates for a confidential parley:
“I am in trouble, Mr. Gates. The pressure of these appeals for gifts has become too great for endurance. I haven’t the time or strength, with all my heavy business responsibilities, to deal with these demands properly. I am so constituted as to be unable to give away money with any satisfaction until I have made the most careful inquiry as to the worthiness of the cause. These investigations are now taking more of my time and energy than the Standard Oil itself. Either I must shift part of the burden, or stop giving entirely. And I cannot do the latter.”
“Indeed you cannot, Mr. Rockefeller,” Gates replied.
“Well, I must have a helper. I have been watching
you. I think you are the man. I want you to come to New York and open an office here. You can aid me in my benefactions by taking interviews and inquiries, and reporting the results for action. What do you say?”67
Gates accepted and in March 1891 transplanted his family to Montclair, New Jersey, and took up offices in the Temple Court, near 26 Broadway. This action, which ended his ministerial career, made him an earthly potentate instead. At first, Gates retained his position as secretary of the ABES and funneled Rockefeller money around the country. By 1892, Gates joyously proclaimed to Rockefeller, “Our denomination has a larger, better distributed, better organized, and more efficient educational property than any other denomination in America.”68 Only after 1900 did the two men begin to branch out into the revolutionary schemes that transformed old-fashioned denominational charity into modern philanthropy. By that point, Gates had assembled a team of advisers tutored in Rockefeller’s principles, trained in his methods, and fired with his evangelical zeal.
For the remainder of his life, Rockefeller’s medical status provoked so much fantasy, gossip, and speculation that we should try to define it here with some precision. Rockefeller had been fit and youthful well into his fifties. He never adopted the sleek, portly look of his fellow plutocrats and seemed ten years younger than his age. What, then, ailed him in the early 1890s? Broadly speaking, the answer was overwork, brought on by the combined stress of work and charity. As his inseparable companion and homeopathic physician, Dr. Hamilton Biggar, said, “A little more of that would have killed him. Mr. Rockefeller was close to the edge of a breakdown . . . when he finally let himself be persuaded that he could no longer do the work of several men with the strength of one.”69 But if overwork weakened his immune system, he also succumbed to opportunistic diseases. In 1891, a national grippe swept the nation, and Rockefeller was laid low. Dr. Biggar also diagnosed him as having a catarrh of the upper part of the bronchial tubes. For years, Rockefeller suffered from liver trouble—at one point he bought a “liver pad” from a local drugstore, wearing it with beneficial results—and in the early 1890s, Dr. Biggar plugged him full of an unnamed brew he had concocted for this trouble.