by Ron Chernow
It was Rockefeller’s prolonged digestive troubles that most titillated the public, providing enduring satisfaction to moralists who believed that if Rockefeller could not be brought to justice, he could at least be tormented through his bodily afflictions. He had serious digestive problems in the early 1890s, perhaps even stress-related ulcers, and looked pale and haggard. For a time, to soothe his stomach, he lunched on milk and crackers at 26 Broadway, spartan fare that he enjoyed and sometimes even ordered by choice. He recovered from his digestive troubles, however, and they never recurred in any really threatening way. Yet he remained extremely fussy about his food, taking small, sparing bites in a manner that spawned a thousand myths about his ruined system. For years it was bruited that he had a standing million-dollar offer for any doctor who could repair his stomach.
Those who believed that Rockefeller was suffering divine retribution would have been interested to learn that in November 1888 Cettie was seriously injured in an alcohol-lamp explosion that badly burned both her hands and face. She had to be bedridden for several weeks. Only a few mystifying references to this ghastly accident appear in Rockefeller’s letters. One can’t help but wonder whether the lamp was actually burning Standard Oil kerosene and whether Rockefeller turned it into an alcohol lamp in his correspondence. Would the wife of John D. Rockefeller have used alcohol lamps? If Cettie was the casualty of impure Standard Oil kerosene, her husband might well have viewed her accident as celestial judgment upon him.
During 1891, under doctor’s orders, Rockefeller took time off from work and spent eight months at Forest Hill, the family’s sovereign cure for illness. His private secretary, George D. Rogers, was placed under strict instructions to spare him all but urgent business matters. For the first time in twenty-one years, his mind was cleansed of Standard Oil. To restore his health, he worked with his farm laborers in the field, rode his bike, ate simply, and jokingly claimed he was becoming a “great concert singer.” 70 These traditional remedies worked like a charm, for by June 1891 he wrote Archbold, “I am happy to state that my health is steadily improving. I can hardly tell you how different the world begins to look to me. Yesterday was the best day I have seen for three months.”71 By the end of the summer, he had gained fifteen pounds, fresh color was restored to his face, and he resumed a more normal schedule. On February 23, 1892, he had Gates post a letter to the University of Chicago trustees, pledging another million dollars with these words: “I make this gift as a thank offering to Almighty God for returning health.” 72 In fact, the offering was as much a grudging response to Harper’s improvident spending as a token of Rockefeller’s gratitude to the Lord.
Having always enjoyed ruddy health, Rockefeller was evidently shaken by his lengthy illness, for he dreaded rushing back to work and precipitating a relapse. He now contemplated something inconceivable for most other restless tycoons of the period: retirement. He had no psychological need to spend his life amassing money and told Gates that he had all he wanted. As he later explained, “I felt that at fifty it was due me to have freedom from absorption in active business affairs and to devote myself to a variety of interests other than money making, which had claimed a portion of my time since the beginning of my business career.”73 Though he craved retirement, several crises tethered him to business for another three or four years until he stopped going to 26 Broadway altogether in 1897. In the meantime, he reported to the office less and less, as the focus of his life shifted slowly from earning money to dispensing it as intelligently as possible.
Although Harper had the founder’s promise that he would attend opening ceremonies, Rockefeller, eager to prove that he would not meddle with the school, later rejected the idea. One also suspects that he subtly wished to telegraph his displeasure to Harper over the handling of university finances. In early 1892, Gates visited Chicago and was “utterly appalled” at the yawning chasm between Harper’s extravagant schemes and the available money. Yet with all his openhanded spending, Harper had accomplished one of the great feats in education history. True to his wishes, he opened the school on October 1, 1892, without ceremony “as if it were the continuation of a work which has been conducted for a thousand years.”74 His hastily gathered faculty was so studded with renowned scholars that the university was catapulted instantly into the front ranks of higher education. On the first day of classes, the new school boasted 750 students, one-fourth of them women, with ten Jewish students, eight Catholics, and a handful of blacks.
Architect Henry Ives Cobb had little more than a year to summon a campus into being, and five major buildings were completed in 1892, another five in 1893. Built at a moment of civic pride, the new university sprang up beside the fabled White City of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The fairgrounds featured a spectacular Standard Oil exhibit of a miniature refinery surrounded by a strange colonnade of Ionic columns with alternating oil-filled lamps and vases. From a Ferris wheel on the midway, visitors received a superb aerial view of the new school that Standard Oil profits had produced. Since Henry Ives Cobb also helped to plan the fairgrounds, the two projects appeared to blend into a seamless whole.
Once the university was inaugurated, President Harper did not stand still. Impulsive, never satisfied, he began to advance on a hundred fronts. Heedless of costs, he broached new initiatives to create a junior college, a night school, a correspondence school, extension courses for adults, a university press, a special division for laboratories, and museums. As leader of this educational trust, he wanted to dispatch scholars to teach at affiliated colleges in other states—an expensive initiative vetoed by Rockefeller. Harper also believed a university should benefit the surrounding city, and sociologists fanned out from the campus to undertake studies at Hull House and other settlement houses.
For all his pride in the university, Rockefeller dreaded this unbridled growth, which postponed the day when the new university might survive without him. Often, when Harper bagged another famous scholar, the university had to buy equipment for the newcomer—money Harper neglected to figure into his calculations. For all their mutual attraction, Rockefeller and Harper were destined to clash. As Gates framed the contrast:
Mr. Rockefeller, with a breadth of vision as great as Dr. Harper’s, was temperamentally cool, reserved, cautious, circumspect, deliberate, amazingly patient, but in the end, inflexible, adapting means to ends with long and accurate prevision. Dr. Harper was ardent, highly imaginative, with limitless capacity and insatiable eagerness for work, an undaunted optimist, minimizing difficulties, magnifying opportunities, rapid in conception, confiding, unsuspicious, bent on immediate results, willful, and impatient of opposition or delay. 75
As a businessman, Rockefeller believed in praying for good times while bracing for bad, and his recurring pleas for caution were vindicated in 1893 when panic seized the American economy and the university had to stall on paying salaries. To surmount the crisis, Rockefeller transferred another $500,000 to the university that October. He was now drawn in so deep that he couldn’t withdraw—and Harper knew it. Having sworn he would never cover operating deficits, Rockefeller had to renounce that policy and cover the budget shortfall for the next two years.
What made it so hard to enforce discipline in Chicago was that, after the obligatory protest, Rockefeller always came through with the money. In October 1895, Gates went to Chicago armed with a letter from Rockefeller pledging another three million dollars for the school’s endowment—possibly the largest such sum ever given at one time by one man for educational purposes and worth about $50 million today. Soon after, Harper and the university secretary, Thomas W. Goodspeed, attended a football game between Chicago and Wisconsin. During the first half, they told coach Amos Alonzo Stagg—who set up the first department of physical culture at an American university—about the gift. With Chicago trailing twelve to ten at halftime, Stagg suggested that the team be informed “because I felt that it would be a strong piece of psychology to do so,” as he said.76 When told by Harper of the g
ift in the locker room, the team’s captain roared, “Three million dollars!” and gave another player a gleeful slap on the back. “Just watch us play football.”77 With that, the born-again squad streamed back onto the field and beat Wisconsin twenty-two to twelve. Later on, students lit a huge celebratory bonfire on campus and sang hymns to Rockefeller, including one that began, “There was a man sent from God whose name was John.”78
Despite a standing offer to tour his creation, Rockefeller declined to visit Chicago for several years, reluctant to have the university overly identified with his name. As Gates told Harper, “There are as you know advantages to the University (advantages in your canvass for funds) in the disinterested way in which Mr. Rockefeller has given his money.” 79 Beyond that, Rockefeller cherished his privacy and hated public occasions. When Harper finally persuaded John and Cettie to attend the first class quinquennial celebration in July 1897, he promised that Rockefeller would not need to speak. The patron’s ideal was to amble unseen through the campus for a couple of hours, an anonymous voyeur, relishing his creation.
As hundreds of students and professors, clad in caps and gowns, trooped into a huge tent in the central quadrangle on a sweltering July day, only one figure wore a plain frock coat and silk hat: the university founder, who marched, as he had since boyhood, with his eyes fixed on the ground. Far from being a fire-breathing mogul, he seemed quiet and faintly embarrassed by the fuss being made over him. When he got up on stage, three thousand people gazed in fascination at this reclusive American legend who had mesmerized the public as both a sinner and saint. It was so stifling inside the tent that hundreds of palm-leaf fans undulated in the audience. When Harper rose and reviewed the future needs of the university, he turned expectantly toward Rockefeller and referred to the pressing need for a hall to replace this temporary tent, eliciting an ambiguous smile from Rockefeller, who must have squirmed in his seat. Then the titan rose to address the crowd:
“I want to thank your Board of Trustees, your President and all who have shared in this most wonderful beginning. It is but a beginning”—he was interrupted by frenzied applause—“and you will do the rest.” The audience quieted down. “You have the privilege to complete it, you and your sons and your daughters. I believe in the work. It is the best investment I ever made in my life. Why shouldn’t people give to the University of Chicago money, time, their best efforts? Why not? It is the grandest opportunity ever presented. Where were gathered ever a better Board of Trustees, a better Faculty? I am profoundly, profoundly thankful that I had anything to do with this affair.” A roar of appreciative laughter. “The good Lord gave me the money, and how could I withhold it from Chicago?” 80
Whatever his own discomfort, Rockefeller made an excellent impression. Before the day was out, he had laid cornerstones, listened to sermons, and given two more short talks. He spent the night at Harper’s house and was so unnerved by the absence of clocks—the visit made him deviate from his usual daily schedule—that he gave Mrs. Harper a thousand-dollar check as a gift and suggested she buy clocks. The next morning, Rockefeller mounted a bike and set off on a campus tour with university administrators in tow. Attired in a bicycle suit, he set off at a brisk pace, waving at cheering students along the route. The entourage flew down the midway to Jackson Park, circled the ghostly remains of the Columbian Exposition, stopped for refreshments, then whirled back down the midway. Rockefeller was enormously gratified and touched by the warm, spontaneous enthusiasm of the students. Everywhere he went they chanted, “John D. Rockefeller, wonderful man is he / Gives all his spare change to the U. of C.” Another knot of students burst into a fight song: “Who’s the feller? Who’s the feller? Rah, Rah, Rah / Rockefeller, he’s the feller, Sis, Boom Bah!”81
As a philanthropist, Rockefeller chose to cultivate a wise detachment from his creations and told Harper that he saw himself as a silent partner in the operation. Despite intermittent accusations to the contrary, he did not interfere with academic appointments or free expression, though sometimes tempted to do so. When several Chicago students denounced his monopolistic practices, an enraged Rockefeller complained to Gates of “statements from the students, derogatory to the founder, careless and inexcusable; but whether the report is correct, I do not know. . . . It seemed to me if . . . [it was] correct the men should be expelled from the Chicago University.” 82 In this and other cases, as best as one can tell, Rockefeller then countermanded the order, fearing the threat to academic freedom or at least to his own reputation.
It took courage to start a university in the 1890s, when academe swarmed with vocal critics of big business, and many of Rockefeller’s industrialist friends saw universities as so many breeding grounds for subversion. William chided his brother for sponsoring the school: “You are getting together a lot of scribblers, a crowd of Socialists who won’t do any good.” 83 Rockefeller wrestled with the issue but believed, on balance, that “while scribblers of the worthless kind brought poison with their ink to the minds of the people, yet multitudes of others come out of these institutions of learning to strengthen the good among us. Let us so hope.”84 The University of Chicago was scarcely immune to the radical currents on campus. In 1899, while at Chicago, Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, which portrayed the new captains of industry as brutal troglodytes and exposed the primitive impulses lurking behind their gaudy consumption habits.
The best-publicized controversy about Rockefeller’s role at Chicago involved the dismissal in 1895 of a young political economist, Edward Bemis, who advocated municipal gas ownership and attacked the Standard Oil–controlled United Gas Improvement Company. The official explanation for the firing was that Bemis was more an activist than a scholar and did not measure up to the university’s high standards. Since Bemis had been hired by Harper himself and went on to a career of some distinction in utility regulation, one suspects a political motive behind his dismissal, yet there is no evidence that Rockefeller was the culprit. It seems more likely that Harper sacked him in anticipation of Rockefeller’s wrath. A year earlier, Harper had warned Bemis about his political activities after he made an inflammatory speech criticizing the railroads’ behavior during the Pullman strike. Such visible activism handicapped Harper in courting local business, as he made clear in a letter to Bemis in July 1894:
Your speech at the First Presbyterian Church has caused me a great deal of annoyance. It is hardly safe for me to venture into any of the Chicago clubs. I am pounced upon from all sides. I propose that during the remainder of your connection with the university you exercise great care in public utterances about questions that are agitating the minds of the people. 85
Rockefeller refrained from such pressure because he knew the political value of his nonpartisan patronage of a university at a time when he was being accused of subverting other institutions to advance his own interests.
Rockefeller did, however, request a voice in fiscal matters—the one thing that Harper denied him. Like many donors, Rockefeller wished to give freely, but Harper was constantly trying to speed up the process. In appointing Gates as his buffer with Harper, Rockefeller hoped to keep the university guessing about future gifts, but the tactic did not work. “Harper was insatiable in his appetite for money,” said one Standard Oil counsel. “Gates was the guardian of the treasurer.”86 As time passed, the strains between Gates and Harper grew intolerable. Both men were idealists steeped in religion, marred by a streak of worldly ambition, and each accused the other of hypocritically exploiting Rockefeller for personal gain.
At first, Gates admired Harper as an inspirational figure who overspent out of naive enthusiasm. He later modified this sanguine view when Harper stoutly denied that a first-rate university could be run as an efficient business and declared, “A university that is properly operated always has a deficit.” When this remark appeared in the press, it grated on Rockefeller and Gates as rank betrayal.
According to Gates, Harper flouted several clear understandings
with Rockefeller: that the university would never be indebted; would never use endowment funds for university buildings; and would never form an alliance with any medical college in Chicago. When Gates put these points in writing and asked Harper to circulate them to board members, they mysteriously disappeared. When he remonstrated with Harper for hiring more expensive professors and launching new journals, the university president simply ignored him. Soon after Gates insisted that he forgo new buildings, Harper appealed to Chicago’s citizens to support a new building campaign. Just as Rockefeller feared, Harper had rashly leaped straight from a small college to a big university.
As Harper rolled up deficits, his patron kept adding millions to the endowment, but he could only be pushed so far. As legions of business rivals had learned, he sometimes groped toward a solution then acted in a swift, decisive manner. “I warned Dr. Harper,” Gates said. “I warned him many times. I warned him in words, in deed and in every possible way.”87 Sometimes, when Harper journeyed to New York, Gates thought the president had learned the error of his ways. Then Harper returned to Chicago and relapsed into free-spending habits.
After years of fruitless wrangling, the university was still struggling with a deficit of $200,000 in early 1897 when Rockefeller decided he had had enough. Bypassing Harper, he summoned two representatives from Chicago, Goodspeed and Henry Rust, to meet with Gates and Junior. Rockefeller himself did not attend these meetings, leaving these negotiations to his proxies. On this historic occasion, Gates expressed Rockefeller’s disappointment at Harper’s failure to raise money from outside sources to reduce the deficit. As Gates pointed out, Rockefeller believed that nonprofit institutions should be even more circumspect with money than business organizations: