Titan

by Ron Chernow

  Second, the article brought an emotional response from Dr. Charles Johnston, Bill’s handsome, dark-skinned young disciple and traveling companion in the Dakota years. When he read the World exposé, Johnston was petrified that he would lose his license to practice medicine if it was shown that he and Bill had sold patent medicines illegally. Released from his pledge of secrecy by Bill’s death, he told the World, “For years I have wondered why the secret was kept so safely. For twenty-five years the secret has been locked in my breast, but it was well known to others, and I have wondered when it would become known.”141 To protect his professional status, he portrayed Bill sympathetically as a “natural healer,” not as a cunning mountebank. Years later, when he no longer feared legal reprisals, he gave a less sanitized history of their scams. Perhaps more than Bill’s real children, Charles Johnston retained a tender spot for him, telling the World that he still cherished the violin that Bill had given him when he was too old and gouty to play. And he made a public plea that the Rockefeller family should posthumously forgive this fallible man. “I think it’s time that John D. Rockefeller and his brother should acknowledge him as their father, because all the world knows it now.” 142

  Deaf to Johnston’s plea, Rockefeller probably never forgave the father whose erratic ways had likely set him off on his exaggerated quest for money, power, and respectability. Bill’s body was never brought back to Cleveland and his granite tombstone was paid for from Margaret Levingston’s meager estate.

  Frederick T. Gates, seated, with Dr. Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)

  CHAPTER 23

  Faith of Fools

  Had John D. Rockefeller died in 1902, at the outset of the Tarbell series, he would be known today almost exclusively as a narrow man of swashbuckling brilliance in business, a man who personified the acquisitive spirit of late-nineteenth-century American industry. But just as the muckrakers were teaching the public that Rockefeller was the devil incarnate, he was turning increasingly to philanthropy. What makes him so problematic—and why he continues to inspire such ambivalent reactions—is that his good side was every bit as good as his bad side was bad. Seldom has history produced such a contradictory figure. We are almost forced to posit, in helpless confusion, at least two Rockefellers: the good, religious man and the renegade businessman, driven by baser motives. Complicating this puzzle is the fact that Rockefeller experienced no sense of discontinuity as he passed from being the brains of Standard Oil to being the monarch of a charitable empire. He did not see himself in retirement as atoning for his sins, and he would have agreed emphatically with Winston Churchill’s later judgment: “The founder of the Standard Oil Company would not have felt the need of paying hush money to heaven.”1 He was also insistent that his massive philanthropy paled in importance beside the good he had done in creating jobs and furnishing affordable kerosene at Standard Oil.

  As his fortune grew big enough to beggar the imagination, John D. retained his mystic faith that God had given him money for mankind’s benefit. Obviously, God disagreed with Miss Tarbell, or else why had He lavished such bounty on him? Rockefeller regarded his fortune as a public trust, not as a private indulgence, and the pressure to dispose of it grew imperative in the early 1900s as his Standard Oil stock and other investments appreciated fantastically. In the pre-Gates era, Rockefeller had found it difficult to expand his giving in proportion to his wealth—a strain that had pushed him steadily toward a psychic precipice. Tarbell stressed that Rockefeller had given away only a small fraction of his total wealth: between thirty-five and forty million dollars, or the equivalent of three years of Standard Oil dividends. (In fact, he had already given away several times that amount.) To parry the political attacks against him and mollify public opinion, he now had to disburse money on a much larger scale. For purely selfish reasons, he had to show that as a philanthropist he could act in a disinterested, public-spirited manner. Those commentators who see his charity as crudely furthering his economic interests miss a far more important goal: his need to prove that rich businessmen could honorably discharge the burden of wealth. The judicious disposal of his fortune might also blunt further inquiry into its origins.

  It was thus from political necessity that Rockefeller distanced himself from his philanthropies, which would be marked by a low-profile style. The muckrakers had fostered such distrust of Rockefeller that he needed to counter suspicions that his charity was just another trick, a way to burnish his public image in the wake of investigations. The Rockefeller philanthropies would be constrained by a fundamental paradox: While extremely powerful, they were also inhibited in exercising that power. In explaining why members of the Rockefeller boards never gave interviews, Gates once said that if they extolled their benefactions, it would “inevitably lend color to the suspicion that [Rockefeller’s] gifts are not free from the taint of self-seeking.” 2

  Gates helped Rockefeller to define his priorities so as to forestall political criticism. Rockefeller began to assign a lesser place to partisan or parochial concerns, such as the Anti-Saloon League or Anthony Comstock and his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, in favor of programs with broad appeal and universal support—things unarguably good that helped all classes of people and lacked any tincture of self-interest. Groups that did not meet these criteria were either relegated to Rockefeller’s small, private gifts or discarded altogether. In his memoirs, Rockefeller said that he had sought progress in six areas of life, and the choices are notable for their general, noncontroversial nature: “(1) material comforts (2) government and law (3) language and literature (4) science and philosophy (5) art and refinement (6) morality and religion.”3 Who could protest such emphases?

  The most perplexing issue for Rockefeller was how to square philanthropy with self-reliance. His constant nightmare was that he would promote dependence, sapping the Protestant work ethic. “It is a great problem,” he acknowledged, “to learn how to give without weakening the moral backbone of the beneficiary.”4 He dreaded the thought of armies of beggars addicted to his handouts. Back in the 1880s, when considering support for a veterans’ organization in Cleveland, he warned brother Frank that he did “not want to encourage a horde of irresponsible, adventuresome fellows to call on me at sight for money every time fancy seizes them.” 5 He constantly reminded his son that it was easier to launch a charitable commitment than to end it.

  He was also wary of upsetting the existing social hierarchy. Staunchly convinced that society meted out just deserts, he believed that the rich had been recompensed for superior intelligence and enterprise. Conversely, the failures that a man makes in his life are due almost always to some defect in his personality, some weakness of body, mind or character, will or temperament. . . . It is my personal belief that the principal cause for the economic differences between people is their difference in personality, and that it is only as we can assist in the wider distribution of those qualities that go to make up a strong personality that we can assist in the wider distribution of wealth.6

  He contributed to education and medical research, for they strengthened recipients and better prepared them for the evolutionary struggle—that is, he equipped them to compete but did not tamper with outcomes. For this reason, he never used his wealth to alleviate poverty directly and scorned any charity that smacked of social welfare. “Instead of giving alms to beggars,” Rockefeller said, “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.” 7 Unlike Carnegie, he did not build libraries, athletic facilities, or music halls for the recreation of ordinary people but promoted pure research that would lead to more generalized benefits.

  In focusing on prevention rather than relief, Rockefeller was influenced by two contemporary reform movements. By 1900, many progressives had tired of dealing with the symptoms of social ills and began to search for fund
amental causes. Instead of falling back on isolated good deeds, they aspired to a systematic attack on the underpinnings of poverty. Backed by a new faith in scientific method, they drew on a burgeoning new middle class, educated by an expanding university system, and enlisted the knowledge of experts in business, labor, agriculture, and other areas. This new technical class provided a ready-made population to staff the Rockefeller philanthropies. Such “scientific reform” appealed to Rockefeller, who liked to analyze systems and probe underlying causes. After all, he himself had profited from scientific breakthroughs at Standard Oil, such as the Frasch process.

  Rockefeller’s work was also buttressed by the social-gospel movement, which united social reform with moral uplift and religious renewal, reaching its high point between 1900 and 1920. For both Rockefeller senior and junior, this was a perfect synthesis, a way to be politically liberal and modern while clinging to an old-fashioned aversion to gambling, prostitution, alcohol, and other vices traditionally shunned by Baptists. It also guaranteed that reform took place under the safe aegis of religious authority. The social-gospel movement provided a way that the Rockefellers could make a smooth transition from narrow denominational giving to more secular, ecumenical causes.

  Frederick T. Gates was the tutelary spirit of the Rockefeller philanthropies. Though nearly invisible to the public at the time, he advanced large claims for his contributions in his posthumously published memoirs. Yet Gates was groomed by Rockefeller, and if he was granted a large measure of freedom, it was partly because Rockefeller had trained him as his proxy. Since he held aloof from his charitable empire, Rockefeller’s role has almost invariably been underrated, but Gates allowed that it was Rockefeller himself who furnished the idea for founding a medical-research institute. Around 1894, when William Rainey Harper first proposed a medical school for the University of Chicago, Rockefeller countered with a novel proposal for a medical department devoted mainly or exclusively to research. Gates had the courtier’s knack for delivering on his sovereign’s wishes with unmatched energy and intelligence, so when he proposed a medical-research institute three years later, he knew his words would find a sympathetic echo in Rockefeller.

  On summer vacation with his family in the Catskill Mountains in 1897, Gates tackled a book of door-stopping length: Principles and Practice of Medicine, a thousand-page tome by William Osler of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, the most renowned contemporary physician. (Whereas Rockefeller scarcely ever cracked a book, except for slim volumes of sermons, Gates read exhaustively and said he had scoured more than a thousand volumes in steering the Rockefeller philanthropies.) That spring, Gates had survived a serious illness, awakening his curiosity about American medicine. Osler’s magnum opus was not light summer fare, but with a medical dictionary at his side Gates waded through its pages with mounting amazement. He confided to William Rainey Harper that he had “scarcely ever read anything more intensely interesting.”8 Gates was appalled by the backward state of medicine unintentionally disclosed by Osler’s book: While the author delineated the symptoms of many diseases, he seldom identified the responsible germs and presented cures for only four or five diseases. How could one respect medicine that was so strong on anecdote and description but so weak on diagnosis and treatment? Gates had a sudden, vivid sense of what could be done by a medical-research institution devoted to infectious diseases. His timing was faultless, for major strides were being made in bacteriology. For the first time, specific microorganisms were being isolated as the causes of disease, removing medicine forever from the realm of patent-medicine vendors such as Doc Rockefeller.

  With a rush of emotion, Gates drafted a strongly worded memo to Rockefeller, advocating the establishment of such an institute and citing European precedents, including the Pasteur Institute in Paris (founded in 1888) and the Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin (1891), both of which greatly elevated the prestige of European medicine. At the time, the concept of a medical-research institute was still alien in America. The country’s medical schools were mostly commercial operations, taught by practicing doctors who picked up spare money by lecturing on the side. Standards were so abysmal that many schools did not even require a college degree for entry. Since these medical mills had no incentive to undertake serious research, medicine hovered in a twilight area between science and guesswork. Gates got Rockefeller to hire Starr Murphy to canvass medical opinion about setting up an institute. He found that many physicians were frankly skeptical that the country contained enough scientific talent to staff such an institution, and they recommended the distribution of small grants to individual labs instead.

  Rockefeller responded to Gates’s memo with prolonged silence and let it marinate for a couple of years. But Rockefeller eventually realized that medical research ideally suited his needs. It would be safe, universally popular, and noncontroversial. While there was no guarantee that Rockefeller scientists would discover anything new, there was equally little chance that they would embarrass the founder. They would pick scientists associated with topflight universities and then set them to work with a free hand. Such an institution would also fill a void in the philanthropic universe. Gates told Osler, “This line of philanthropy, now almost wholly neglected in this country, is the most needed and the most promising of any field of philanthropic endeavor.”9 In fact, the promotion of medical science tallied so perfectly with Rockefeller’s needs that it would end up forming the common denominator of his foundations.

  The proposal encountered skepticism in the medical community. It seemed quite rash, even quixotic, to pay grown men to daydream and come up with useful discoveries. At the time, institutionalized innovation was no less novel a notion in medicine than in industry. With other Rockefeller ventures, Gates had mostly responded to entreaties, whereas he now had to sell the idea in the teeth of widespread resistance.

  Gates had hoped the institute would be associated with the University of Chicago, an opportunity lost when Dr. Harper consummated a merger with the Rush Medical College. Rush was exactly the sort of proprietary medical school that Gates wanted to see abolished. American medicine was then embroiled in open warfare between two schools: the allopaths, who used remedies that produced effects different from the disease in question, and homeopaths, who tried to induce in healthy persons prophylactic symptoms similar to the disease being fought. Rush was strongly biased toward allopathy, while Rockefeller favored homeopathy; Gates dismissed both allopathic and homeopathic medicine as scandalous pseudo-science. In 1898, he admonished the University of Chicago, “I have no doubt that Mr. Rockefeller would favor an institution that was neither allopath or homeopath but simply scientific in its investigation of medical science.”10 Nevertheless, Harper persisted in the Rush merger and forfeited any chance to have a Rockefeller medical-research institute in Chicago. After encountering allopathic sympathizers at Harvard and Columbia, Rockefeller’s advisers decided that it would be easier to set up an autonomous institution in New York.

  Rockefeller was pleased by the decision to support a modest, freestanding research center. After all the bitter wrangling with Harper, he was doubtless sated with academic politics and administrative dreamers. An independent medical institute would be tightly controlled and minimize the chances of unpleasant fiscal surprises. In endowing the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (RIMR), he rigorously avoided the mistakes he had made with the University of Chicago, which became his cautionary tale of how not to build an institution. After the battle royal with Augustus Strong over the site for a Baptist university, Rockefeller must also have been glad to select his adopted town as the site of the research center.

  If the University of Chicago seemed to emerge full-blown from the fertile brain of Dr. Harper, then the RIMR, founded in June 1901, was deliberately launched more modestly. It had no initial endowment and was lodged in temporary quarters in a Lexington Avenue loft building. This muted approach was designed to cool off any expectations that sudden miracles would emerge from
this first American facility devoted solely to biomedical research. Deviating from custom, Rockefeller consented to the use of his name. The amount he pledged for this project—$200,000 over ten years—was considered spectacular at the time. To avoid a reprise of his Chicago problems, Rockefeller promised no additional gifts and deliberately kept administrators in the dark so that they would not feel overly confident of his support.

  Rockefeller placed a premium on recruiting the best people for leading positions. “John, we have money,” he told his son, “but it will have value for mankind only as we can find able men with ideas, imagination and courage to put it into productive use.”11 That Rockefeller placed scientists, not lay trustees, in charge of expenditures was thought revolutionary. This was the institute’s secret formula: gather great minds, liberate them from petty cares, and let them chase intellectual chimeras without pressure or meddling. If the founders created an atmosphere conducive to creativity, things would, presumably, happen.

  A stellar team was soon assembled. The chief adviser in this search was Dr. William H. Welch, professor of pathology and first dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. A bald, portly bachelor with a goatee, fondly called “Popsy” by his students, this sociable bear of a man liked everything from food to theater to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Trained in Germany, he had transplanted high German medical standards to America by opening the first pathology lab at Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1878. When Hopkins inaugurated its medical school fifteen years later, Welch oversaw a faculty trained mostly in Germany and working as full-time teachers and researchers—a milestone in American medicine. Spurred by Rockefeller money, this model would later be copied across America. When in doubt, the Rockefeller lieutenants used the Johns Hopkins Medical School as the benchmark by which they judged progress in medical education.