Titan
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In all, Rockefeller gave $61 million to the research institute. By the 1950s, it had bred so many imitators that it needed to change direction and was transformed from a research center into a specialized university offering only Ph.D.s and research fellowships. The name was officially changed to Rockefeller University in 1965. Its faculty roster became heavily laden with Nobel Prize winners, and by the 1970s it had housed sixteen of them. For the son of an itinerant vendor of dubious nostrums, this was a most implausible feat. The loftiest encomium to Rockefeller’s impact in this field came from Winston Churchill, who wrote shortly before Rockefeller’s death:
When history passes its final verdict on John D. Rockefeller, it may well be that his endowment of research will be recognized as a milestone in the progress of the race. For the first time, science was given its head; longer term experiment on a large scale has been made practicable, and those who undertake it are freed from the shadow of financial disaster. Science today owes as much to the rich men of generosity and discernment as the art of the Renaissance owes to the patronage of Popes and Princes. Of these rich men, John D. Rockefeller is the supreme type.37
A documentary photo used by the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission in trying to stamp out hookworm in the South. The small boy on the left suffered from the disease, which had stunted his growth. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
CHAPTER 24
The Millionaires’ Special
In April 1901, a specially chartered train, jammed with millionaires, pulled out of Manhattan and headed down the eastern seaboard for a ten-day tour of black colleges in the South, many of them financed with northern money, culminating in a conference on southern education in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The train carried so many tony members of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia high society that the press pejoratively tagged it “The Millionaires’ Special.” This swank excursion was the brainchild of department-store magnate Robert C. Ogden, an associate of John Wanamaker. Certain that the “betterment of humanity” was “demanded by Divine authority,” Ogden coupled evangelical faith with a retailer’s flair for publicity.1 In calling attention to the backward state of southern schools, he hoped to seal an alliance between Yankee philanthropists and southern reformers, healing the sectional strife left over from the Civil War and bringing southern economic development up to parity with the North.
For one passenger, twenty-seven-year-old John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the trip kindled a fuse that would glow brightly for the rest of his life. Struggling with ethical quandaries at Standard Oil, he must have hungered for the purity of social activism. Having led a circumscribed life, bounded by private schools, estates, and 26 Broadway, Junior welcomed this firsthand exposure to urgent social problems. The train rolled through a South pervaded by Jim Crow laws and riled by repeated outbreaks of racial violence. Literacy statistics conveyed a dismal story of derelict schools. While only 4.6 percent of the American population was illiterate, the figure soared to 12 percent for southern whites and 50 percent for southern blacks. Educational reform had scarcely penetrated the rural hinterlands and bayous of black communities, and their impoverished schools scandalized northern educators. Kentucky was the sole southern state with compulsory school-attendance laws, which were then all but universal in the North. Yet as the rich philanthropists alighted at the celebrated showcases of black education—Hampton Institute in Virginia, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, the Rockefellers’ own Spelman Seminary in Atlanta—the trip had its share of inspirational interludes. “The trip has been a constant revelation to me,” Junior told newspaper reporters upon his return. “Tuskegee was especially interesting. Mr. [Booker T.] Washington is a truly remarkable man. His school is doing a wonderful work for the race. I’m glad I made the trip.” 2 Junior described the journey to Ogden as “the most instructive experience of my life.”3 In an elated mood, he sat down and wrote an enthusiastic report about it to his father.
Senior’s interest in southern black education antedated this junket by two decades, going back to 1882 when Spelman Seminary was still operating from a leaky church basement. In his own travels through the South, he often attended black Baptist churches on Sunday mornings. Each of his children had been matched to a black scholarship student whose education was paid for by the family, and for several years Junior corresponded with his “adopted” black student at Hampton Institute. In 1900, the Rockefeller family had virtually made over the Spelman campus, paying for a new hospital, two dormitories, a dining hall and kitchen, a power plant, and a residence for the school president. During the 1901 train tour, Junior addressed students in the Spelman chapel and was feted with gospel music. Noting the new buildings bequeathed by the Rockefellers, the school’s annual report that year rang with resounding hosannas for the family: “The Lord gives us all these wonderful blessings through the generous hand of Hon. John D. Rockefeller.”4
Before the 1901 trip, Senior had toyed with establishing a trust fund for black education instead of funneling all his money through the American Baptist Education Society—part of his evolution away from the limitations of sectarian giving. That the 1901 trip might be the prelude to some big benefaction was hinted at when Junior told Ogden, “For several years the question of colored education has been much in our minds and in our thoughts. We have endeavored to arrive at some plan which might help in working out this great question.”5 For all the noble sentiments behind the Millionaires’ Special, black education remained an inflammatory issue among southern whites, who feared it might weaken segregation. As the chartered train circled back toward New York, the missionary spirit of the passengers suffered a jarring clash with political realities when Henry St. George Tucker, the president of Washington and Lee University, boarded the train in Virginia to deliver a rebuke to the prevailing euphoria:
If it is your idea to educate the Negro you must have the white of the South with you. If the poor white sees the son of a Negro neighbor enjoying through your munificence benefits denied to his boy, it raises in him a feeling that will render futile all your work. You must lift up the “poor white” and the Negro together if you would ever approach success. 6
Perhaps because his auditors did not fully fathom the implications of this admonition, it was lustily applauded. If it tempered naive talk with a gritty touch of political realism, it also opened the way for some egregious concessions to the more bigoted southern whites.
As well-meaning, paternalistic men eager to alleviate the suffering of blacks but not wanting to threaten the established order, these rich northern reformers typified their time and were perhaps unusual only in having any concern for black welfare at all. Nevertheless, their political compromises rendered them vulnerable to charges of racism, especially among purists champing at piecemeal reform. One is frankly taken aback by the views of some of these men committed to bettering black education—views often indistinguishable from those of the southern whites they criticized. When Ogden convened a group called the Southern Education Board, its executive secretary, Edgar G. Murphy, declared that the two races “must dwell apart,” “must live apart,” and “must be schooled apart.”7 Even Frederick T. Gates yanked his children from the Montclair, New Jersey, public schools because “some of the colored and of the foreign-born children were ill mannered, filthy, and unsanitary.”8 He favored vocational training for blacks, not intellectual equality with whites. “Latin, Greek and metaphysics form a kind of knowledge that I fear with our colored brethren tend even more than with us to puff up rather than to build up,” he had written ten years earlier. “The colored race is not ready it seems to me for high culture.”9 Such attitudes gave a foretaste of the way that the Rockefeller philanthropies would accommodate southern segregationists.
In the aftermath of the Millionaires’ Special, Junior and Senior consulted many experts on southern education, including Booker T. Washington, who joined them one Sunday night for tea on West Fifty-fourth Street. Washington, too, endorsed practical, voca
tional training for blacks, not exposure to abstract subjects. On February 27, 1902, flanked by Abby in an oak-paneled study of their house, Junior chaired a meeting of ten men to consider southern education. Swirling brandy snifters and warmed by a blazing fire, they talked until well after midnight, hatching plans for a new philanthropy to be launched with a one-million-dollar gift from Senior. Junior hoped to name it the Negro Education Board, but it was, tellingly, given the neutral name of the General Education Board (GEB) instead. On the same colossal scale as everything else attached to Rockefeller, it would turn into the world’s foremost educational foundation. It was an extension of the ABES with the Baptist trappings pared away.
With crisp efficiency, Senator Aldrich shepherded an incorporation bill through Congress in January 1903, making it the only Rockefeller philanthropy to enjoy the public endorsement of a perpetual, federal charter.10 Banishing the former accent on black education, the elastic charter delineated the group’s aim as “the promotion of education within the United States without distinction of race, sex or creed.” With the Tarbell series under way, Rockefeller kept a salutary distance from his new foundation. Where he hovered over the RIMR at one remove, he delegated more power in the GEB to his son and never met with its board. As Abraham Flexner later wrote of Senior’s detachment, “I recall that when in 1914 I wrote a history of the General Education Board from 1902 to 1914 we searched the files of the General Education Board in vain in order to obtain a facsimile of his signature to be placed beneath the lithograph prefaced to the text. There was not a single letter in the files of the Board which bore his signature.” 11 Nevertheless, Junior and Gates reported regularly to Rockefeller, who, along with his son, reserved the right to designate the use of two-thirds of the money given. Rockefeller believed that certain universal principles of businesslike efficiency should apply to nonprofit ventures no less than to profit-making ones. In making his first million-dollar appropriation to the GEB, he stipulated that the money should be ladled out over ten years. He tried to influence the pace and scope of his philanthropies, not their contents, and ensure measured, fiscally responsible growth.
For executive secretary, Gates shrewdly chose Dr. Wallace Buttrick, a fellow graduate of the Rochester Theological Seminary and an ex-Baptist preacher. Like Gates, Buttrick renounced the pulpit for philanthropy and more worldly satisfactions. It was no accident that so many ex-ministers flocked to the sanctuary of the Rockefeller philanthropies, which advanced secular causes with an evangelical spirit. An amiable, roly-poly man, blessed with an easy laugh, Buttrick brought consuming dedication to his work. When a minister inquired, “What is your idea of Heaven?” he rejoined, “My office.”12
As a former board member of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, Buttrick had studied black mission schools in the South exhaustively. On his office wall, he had a large map, sprinkled with colored pins, showing the major American educational facilities. Where Gates was an uncompromising, table-thumping orator, Buttrick brought a statesman’s tact to the job, defusing tense situations with humor. Without offending applicants, he could deftly expose weaknesses in their projects. His intuitions were so exact that Gates said Buttrick had “cat’s whiskers; he feels objects before he gets to them.”13 His greatest drawback—and a real one—was that he thought it expedient to truckle to white supremacists to maintain GEB operations in the South. He told an audience of Tennessee school superintendents, “The Negro is an inferior race—the Anglo-Saxon is superior. There cannot be any question about that.”14
To endow the board with a safely conservative cast, Gates preferred “successful business men who would steer the ship along traditional lines and would not be carried out of their course by any temporary breeze or even by hurricanes of sentiment.”15 The first chairman was William H. Baldwin, president of the Long Island Railroad, a vocal apostle for black education—so long as white people stayed on top. Of the southern black, Baldwin observed, “He will willingly fill the more menial positions, and do the heavy work, at less wages, than the American white man or any foreign race which has yet come to our shores. This will permit the Southern white laborer to perform the more expert labor, and to leave the fields, the mines, and the simpler trades for the Negro.”16 With such men at the helm, the GEB, for all its good works, would fall considerably short of heaven. Neither Junior nor Senior held such baldly racist sentiments, but they agreed that the board had to accommodate retrograde southern views in order to function. It is interesting to note in this context that Standard Oil of Ohio did not hire its first permanent black employee until 1906.
At the beginning, the well-heeled GEB grafted its work onto that of the Southern Education Board, the shoestring operation started by Robert Ogden. Taking up its cause, the GEB campaigned in the South to improve educational standards, taking as its first major mission the creation of high schools. Before Reconstruction, no southern state except for Tennessee had tax-supported educational systems. As a legacy of this history, the four-year high school was practically nonexistent in the region, and there was not a single such school for blacks; many high schools were really extra rooms crudely tacked on to elementary schools. The GEB identified the creation of new high schools as a top priority, since their graduates would furnish teachers for lower-grade schools and also provide a bumper crop of college students, magnifying reform efforts up and down the educational ladder.
Lacking the resources to create a complete high-school system, the GEB established a pattern mimicked by future Rockefeller philanthropies. Rather than trying to accomplish everything through its own budget, it would awaken public opinion and stimulate government action. It took on a crusading spirit, borrowed from the Baptists, and sent forth circuit riders to proselytize for the cause. Ironically, as Standard Oil took a hostile attitude toward state and federal antitrust suits, Rockefeller was forging extensive public-private partnerships for social change. The GEB paid the salaries of special professors at state universities who would roam the state, pinpoint sites for high schools, then drum up political support from local taxpayers. These professors were also affiliated with state education departments, giving a necessary political camouflage at a time when Rockefeller’s name was still anathema across America. So revolutionary was the impact of GEB money that by 1910 it had helped bring into being eight hundred southern high schools.
The GEB was repeatedly blocked in its original ambition to foster black education. Submitting to racism, the foundation limited its support to a “very few” counties that could yield “the largest permanent results,” in Buttrick’s words.17 Only in 1914 did the organization hire rural school agents for both races in the South, and even then it tended to hire white agents for black schools and continued to encourage schools to teach blacks useful trades and ignore their minds. In the end, it came in for biting criticism from blacks such as W.E.B. Du Bois who did not want to see the school system slot blacks into menial jobs. Du Bois later excoriated the GEB in his autobiography for supporting the idea “that the races in the schools should be separated socially; that colored schools should be chiefly industrial; and that every effort should be made to conciliate southern white opinion.”18 While the GEB achieved remarkable things in upgrading southern education, it failed to deliver major results where it had originally wanted them most: in black education. In the end, nine-tenths of the GEB’s money went to white schools or to promote medical education—a sorry sequel for a foundation that was supposed to be called the Negro Education Board.
In 1905, the GEB extended its purview to higher education with a $10 million gift from Rockefeller, followed by another $32 million in 1907—hailed by the board as “the largest sum ever given by a man in the history of the race for any social or philanthropic purposes.”19 (It would be equivalent to $500 million today.) Much of this last gift was routed to the University of Chicago. As the GEB bolstered college and university endowments, it applied the rules that Rockefeller had insisted upon, often futilely, with William Rainey Harper: t
hat gifts should stimulate matching grants; that local communities should help to take up the financial burden of their schools; that universities should be founded in population centers with thriving economic bases; and that endowment income should not cover more than half the operating expenses.
Not long after the GEB was started, it became woefully evident that the defects of southern education could not be remedied without stronger local economies. Gates was struck by this revelation as he and Buttrick took a train excursion through the South. He was staring out the window and ruminating when he suddenly exclaimed: “This is a favored section of the world. It has a superb climate, an abundance of fertile soil, and no end of labor. It must be enriched so that it can properly tax itself if it is to support education and public health. It is your job, Buttrick, to find out how.” 20
Nobody ever accused Gates of thinking small. If education depended upon healthy tax rolls, then they would lift the entire tax base of the South. And if that meant enhancing the productivity of southern agriculture, well, so be it. Such was the godlike perspective, if not the mortal hubris, made possible by great wealth. Where other philanthropic executives could only tinker, the Rockefeller proconsuls were urged to indulge more spacious fantasies.
In the spring of 1906, Gates and Buttrick traveled to Washington to meet with a pioneering scientist at the Department of Agriculture, Dr. Seaman A. Knapp, a former teacher, editor, and gospel preacher. In his experimental farmwork, Knapp had striven toward something analogous to Rockefeller’s work in medicine: He tried to bring a scientific spirit to a business bogged down in ancient folklore. Three years earlier, Knapp had gained legendary status when he saved Texas from a boll-weevil infestation that threatened to destroy its cotton industry; farms were deserted and counties depopulated as panicky people despaired of ever again profiting from the crop. If this situation was duplicated in the cotton-dependent South, it would presage disaster. By establishing a demonstration farm in Terrell, Texas, Knapp showed how the boll-weevil plague could be contained through the careful selection of seeds accompanied by intensive farming. From that time, Knapp kept an eye out for private money to enlarge his project. Now, the seventy-three-year-old Knapp and Agriculture Secretary James Wilson met with Gates and Buttrick, who gratified Knapp’s dreams by calling for the sort of public-private partnership that was fast becoming a GEB trademark. If the Agriculture Department drew up plans and supervised the farm-demonstration projects, the project would be greased with monthly checks from the GEB.