by Ron Chernow
Exhausted by work and beset by self-doubt, Junior pondered whether to marry Abby Aldrich and prayed daily for divine guidance for four years. “I always had a dread of marrying someone and finding out later that I loved someone else more. I knew a great many girls and I had so little confidence in my own judgment.”36 Things looked promising in April 1900, when Junior joined Senator Aldrich and Abby on a journey to Cuba aboard President McKinley’s yacht, the Dolphin, a senatorial trip to study conditions there following the Spanish-American War. Still, Junior hesitated, unable to suppress his doubts. In the stuffy Rockefeller household, both parents and son balked at bringing up the subject. Finally, his sister Edith, acting as intermediary, told her brother that their parents were worried about him and felt that they were being kept in the dark, at last opening the forbidden subject to discussion.
In February 1901, Junior and Abby submitted to a six-month separation as a trial of their affections. After the time had expired, Junior was strolling by the lake at Forest Hill with Cettie when he summoned up the strength to ask her opinion of Abby Aldrich. Her hearty, laughing response was categorical. “Of course you love Miss Aldrich. Why don’t you go at once and tell her so?”37 Junior needed that maternal validation, that direct push. Soon afterward at West Fifty-fourth Street, he heard God’s voice in the wee hours, blessing his choice of Abby. “After many years of doubt and uncertainty, great longing and hope, there came a supreme peace of calm.”38 Before dawn, he dashed off a letter to Abby, asking if he could visit her. Stopping off to see Senator Aldrich on his yacht in Newport, he asked for his daughter’s hand and began to lay out his salary and financial prospects. Doubtless with some amusement, the senator brushed aside all money concerns and delivered the predictable bromide, “I am only interested in what will make my daughter happy.”39 An ecstatic Junior went to the Aldrich summer estate at Narragansett Bay and proposed to Abby by moonlight. “I can’t believe that it is really true that all this sacred joy . . . is mine. . . . For so long, long a time it has been the one thing in life above all others that I have yearned for,” Junior wrote his mother.40 Abby then had six suitors, leading Junior to observe retrospectively, “I kept wondering why she ever consented to marry a man like me.”41 But she never regretted her decision. As she wrote to a cousin many years later, “Don’t you think him quite the dearest man that ever was?”42
When the engagement was announced in August 1901, the press had a field day. “Croesus Captured,” trumpeted one paper.43 Many articles commented upon the odd match of the fun-loving Aldriches and the dour Rockefellers. As one paper said, “Young Mr. Rockefeller . . . is a Sunday-school teacher, and doesn’t believe in cards, dancing or decollete gowns, and Miss Abbie [sic] has never been able to make up her mind that she can renounce these things.”44 Although Senator Aldrich and Senior came in for their usual rough treatment, Abby and Junior were applauded for their more progressive views.
The extravagant wedding at Warwick on October 9, 1901, reflected the cosmopolitan style of Senator Aldrich, who made scant concessions to his Baptist in-laws. By chartered steamer and private railway car, he transported a huge portion of the American plutocracy to the affair, which glittered with Goulds and Whitneys, McCormicks and Havemeyers. The marriage was a satirical bonanza for muckrakers. As David Graham Phillips darkly interpreted the union, “the chief exploiter of the American people is closely allied by marriage with the chief schemer in the service of their exploiters.”45
The affair began with a small private wedding, limited to thirty-five guests and presided over by the Reverend J. G. Colby, who had married John and Cettie thirty-seven years before. Then a thousand people trooped gaily through a vast reception in the ballroom. Senator Aldrich refused to truckle to the temperance views of his in-laws and personally selected an array of vintage wines. This was too much for Cettie, who developed chills, asthma, and diarrhea the night before the wedding and took to her bed for spiritual safety, skipping the ceremony the next day—an exact replica of her performance at Junior’s senior-year dance at Brown. Once the stylish guests had fled, Junior and Abby spent a glorious month in seclusion at the house Senior had purchased in the Pocantico Hills of Westchester.
For the first months of married life, the newlyweds lived with John and Cettie at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street then crossed the street to a rented four-story mansion at number 13. Junior tried, with some trepidation, to initiate his free-spirited wife into the cramped, clerical ways of the Rockefellers, suggesting she might like to keep a weekly expense account. “I won’t,” Abby said bluntly, ending the matter forever. To a family muzzled by taboos, she brought a refreshing candor. When a visitor asked her, “Whatever are you going to do with this great big empty house, Abby?” she looked at him in astonishment. “Why, we shall fill it up with children!” 46
The young Frederick T. Gates. (Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library)
CHAPTER 20
The Standard Oil Crowd
Outwardly at least, Frederick T. Gates was the antithesis of his famous patron, as florid and melodramatic as Rockefeller was cool and withdrawn. With close-set eyes that looked slightly crossed, head tilted to one side with a sardonic smile, the philanthropic chief often looked as if he was skeptically sizing up the world. A tall, well-built man with a restless, energetic air, he could talk with gusto for hours at a stretch, as if delivering a fiery sermon or Shakespearean soliloquy. Capable of tremendous flashes of wrath or indignation, he was colorful in both action and speech. When he pontificated, he threw his feet up on the desk, jabbing his finger through swirling cigar smoke, or jumped up from his seat, hair tousled, tie askew, to pace the floor with lawyerly deliberation. One colleague said he had “a voice that thundered out of Sinai” and he knew no middle ground in advocating a cause.1 In a prose self-portrait, Gates described himself as “eager, impetuous, insistent, and withal exacting and irritable.”2
Like Rockefeller himself, Gates yoked together two separate selves—one shrewd and worldly, the other noble and high-flown. Born in upstate New York in 1853, not far from the Susquehanna River that flowed through Rockefeller’s boyhood, Gates was the son of a high-minded, impecunious Baptist minister, who had eked out a meager existence in small, impoverished towns. As a boy, Gates rebelled against the Puritan heritage that viewed earthly life as a melancholy sojourn. In his memoirs, he recalled that the “singing was pleasing, but otherwise Sunday school was a bore, as was church. I remember well my weekly relief when it was over and we could go home for dinner.” 3 Of his twice-daily prayers, he said, “If it taught anything, it taught us thus early that prayer is a mere empty form of words.”4 The wonder was that the boy grew up to be a preacher.
When Gates was a teenager, his father went to Kansas for the American Baptist Home Mission Society, which only aggravated the family’s financial woes. Gates had to quit school at fifteen to help pay off their debt. For several years, he taught school and clerked in a dry-goods store and a bank, storing up valuable business experience. After briefly attending Highland University in Kansas, he entered the University of Rochester in 1875, where his interest in religion was rekindled. A good Baptist, he would not dance, play cards, or frequent the theater. Two years later, he entered the Rochester Theological Seminary, then under the sway of its president, Dr. Augustus H. Strong. Gates was briefly entranced by Strong’s theological system. “His instruction formed the foundation of our seminary course, and at that time it was almost wholly imaginary” was his later mordant judgment. 5 Gates was drawn to the ministry, not as a retreat into an otherworldly life so much as a liberation from poverty and academic drudgery.
After graduating from the seminary in 1880, Gates was assigned his first pastorate in Minnesota. When his young bride, Lucia Fowler Perkins, dropped dead from a massive internal hemorrhage after sixteen months of marriage, the novice pastor not only suffered an erosion of faith but began to question the competence of American doctors—a skepticism that later had far-reaching ramifications for Rockefel
ler’s philanthropies. A period photo shows a handsome young man with a long, lean face, a handlebar mustache, and a somewhat wistful air. After launching into “a zealous campaign to convert sinners,” Gates soon lightened up, scrapping much of the scholastic baggage he had picked up in the seminary. To succeed as a pastor, he decided that he had to study the economic, intellectual, and social forces of his time. A biblical modernist, he employed science, history, and reason to explicate sacred texts. He also worked to retire the church’s debt and wrote essays for the Minneapolis Tribune.
After eight years in Minnesota, Gates, thin and emaciated, seemed destined for a career as theadbare as his father’s. Then one day in 1888, heaven sent relief in the shape of a rich man, George A. Pillsbury, a founder of the flour fortune, the state’s wealthiest Baptist, and then the mayor of Minneapolis. He told Gates in confidence that he suffered from an incurable disease and needed advice about making a $200,000 bequest to a local Baptist academy. Gates advised Pillsbury to start out by giving the academy $50,000, contingent on the Baptists raising an equal sum—what we would today call a matching grant— then leave the remaining $150,000 in his will. Gates was subsequently drafted to drum up the $50,000, which he did so superlatively well that he threw up the ministry for good and became executive secretary of the new American Baptist Education Society. His contact with Rockefeller and involvement in the University of Chicago followed soon thereafter.
Those Baptists who thought they had slipped an advocate into Rockefeller’s inner sanctum were grievously disappointed. At first, Rockefeller still gave disproportionately to Baptist causes, as missionaries from every continent descended upon Gates’s office in droves. But despite his fondness for Baptist clergy, Rockefeller was also exposed to many greedy, calculating pastors and began to retreat from the sectarian spirit that had guided his giving. As Gates said, “I think his greatest trouble was with ministers because he had a natural liking for them and they were always trying to get money out of him.”6 By 1895, Rockefeller told Gates that he wanted to give to the five main Protestant denominations. This delighted the lapsed minister, who had grown so dismayed by the Baptist church in his town of Montclair, New Jersey, that he had switched to the local Congregational church. He was increasingly convinced “that Christ neither founded nor intended to found the Baptist Church, nor any church.”7
For someone like Gates, torn between heaven and earth, serving as Rockefeller’s chief philanthropic adviser was an ideal synthesis. When they started working together in 1891, Rockefeller was fifty-two and Gates thirty-eight. In spite of his uncommon intelligence, Gates often felt self-conscious under Rockefeller’s icy scrutiny. As he grew more comfortable in his presence, he developed a powerful loyalty to him. “I will do my best to serve in any business capacity,” Gates humbly told him early on, “but I beg you not to place any confidence in me (I have little in myself ) and to begin with matters in which I could not possibly do much harm.” He ended by saying, “No one but my father has been so kind to me.”8 Having long chafed at a minister’s salary, Gates could now indulge his ripest fantasies of wealth. Where his father had made less than $400 a year, Gates started with Rockefeller at $4,000 a year, his salary rising to $32,000 by 1902.
What Gates gave to his boss was no less vital. Rockefeller desperately needed intelligent assistance in donating his money at a time when he could not draw on a profession of philanthropic experts. Painstakingly thorough, Gates combined moral passion with great intellect. He spent his evenings bent over tomes of medicine, economics, history, and sociology, trying to improve himself and find clues on how best to govern philanthropy. Skeptical by nature, Gates saw a world crawling with quacks and frauds, and he enjoyed grilling people with trenchant questions to test their sincerity. Outspoken, uncompromising, he never hesitated to speak his piece to Rockefeller and was a peerless troubleshooter.
Gates believed implicitly in Rockefeller’s goodness and wisdom. “If he were placed in a group of say twenty of the greatest men of affairs of today,” he once remarked in a speech, “before these giants had been with him for long, the most self-confident, self-assertive of them would be coming to him in private for his counsel.”9 Having known many rich people, Gates was impressed that Rockefeller had no private yachts or railroad cars. He was always quick to defend Rockefeller, sometimes wittily. When a man complained to him that Rockefeller in his Cleveland years cared only for money, Gates retorted, “In heaven’s name, what else could he do in that city!”10 In a typical utterance, Gates said, “The Rockefellers have done incomparably more to permanently enrich the commonwealth than any other family since the founding of the republic.”11
Gates did not consider Rockefeller totally innocent in business, but he believed that whatever reprehensible deeds he had committed had simply reflected the business morals of his time. Yet he had no firsthand knowledge of the matter, for while he supervised Rockefeller’s philanthropic and outside business investments, he was always excluded from anything pertaining to Standard Oil. As Junior said, “The oil companies didn’t like him and consequently I was the person who was the liaison.”12 Since Gates entered the scene just as Rockefeller was retiring and was sequestered from his single largest holding, he had the luxury of believing in Rockefeller’s innocence by assuming that he had behaved as well at Standard Oil as in his subsequent ventures.
Significantly, Rockefeller surrounded himself in the early 1890s with brand-new men who could defend his past with total sincerity—and total ignorance. By recruiting subordinates who had never worked at Standard Oil, he had a chance for a fresh start, where he could make his behavior, for the first time, as ethical as his rhetoric. Led by Gates, these subordinates guaranteed that the Rockefeller millions were donated or invested scrupulously. Once he had an ex-pastor on the payroll, Rockefeller was necessarily kept on his best behavior, locked into a new moral regimen. Junior’s presence at 26 Broadway further ensured that father would behave more ethically than in the past.
As at Standard Oil, Rockefeller encouraged independence, and once he had carefully trained his philanthropic lieutenants, he gave them a wide berth. Gates found his boss patient, kind, and considerate, but realized that Rockefeller’s genial midwestern manner and humor were something of a cover. “His usual attitude towards all men was one of deep reserve, concealed beneath commonplaces and humorous anecdotes. He had the art with friends and guests of chatting freely, of calling out others, but of revealing little or nothing of his own innermost thoughts.”13 When Gates went to the oracle for guidance, he sometimes left more mystified than before. As he wrote of Rockefeller, “His deliberation was sometimes extreme; his reluctance to argue and speak out his thoughts fully, his skill in not exposing the slightest surface for attack, his long silences, so that we could not locate even his objections, were sometimes baffling.”14 Rockefeller never offered blame or praise and revealed his opinion of employees only by adding or subtracting to their duties. His psyche was like a set of Chinese boxes: If you penetrated the outer wall, then you faced another wall, then another, ad infinitum.
As Rockefeller moved into retirement, his wealth was accumulating at an astonishing rate. During his tenure at Standard Oil, the trust had usually paid a fixed dividend of 12 percent, reflecting his prudent leadership. With Archbold at the helm, by contrast, the dividends surged, jumping to 31 percent in 1896 and 33 percent in 1897 and 1899. Buoyed by these dividends, the price of Standard Oil shares leaped from 176 in 1896 to a high of 458 three years later. However much Rockefeller deplored this extravagant dividend policy, he was its foremost beneficiary, and it heightened the pressure on him to gear up his philanthropy to handle increasing amounts of money.
With hundreds of appeals pouring in daily from around the world, Rockefeller made Gates promise that he would never forward begging letters to him or reveal his address. While Rockefeller continued to give out hundreds, if not thousands, of individual bequests to needy friends, relatives, and strangers— he sent one upstate cousin a p
air of well-worn shoes, another an old suit—he increasingly followed a policy enunciated in an 1889 letter to Gates: “I am more and more disposed to give only through organized institutions.”15 Gates executed this policy of wholesale giving faithfully, dismissing small requests for money with the fatal remark, “This is a retail business.”16
Sometimes Rockefeller gave Gates glimpses into his inner sadness. One day, Gates remarked to Rockefeller that benevolence was its own reward, that the man who looked for gratitude would die embittered. “His only reply, uttered with deliberation and unwonted emphasis, was, ‘DON’T I KNOW THAT?’ ”17 Gates saw that while he was always surrounded by people, Rockefeller had few, if any, real friends and was isolated by his wealth. Visiting Rockefeller at a southern hotel around 1910, Gates found him rather lonely and forlorn and suggested he contact some cultivated local men. “Well, Mr. Gates,” said Rockefeller, “if you suppose I have not thought about the matter you are mistaken. I have made some experiments. And nearly always the result is the same—along about the ninth hole out comes some proposition, charitable or financial!”18 Rockefeller experienced more disenchantment with people in charity than in commerce, once telling his son, “I have lent and given people money, and then seen them cross the street so that they would not have to speak to me.”19