by Andrea Mays
Henry Folger attended public school in Brooklyn, earning commendations as well as a scholarship to Adelphi Academy. Founded in 1863 by businessman Charles Pratt and abolitionists Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and Horace Greeley, the academy offered Pratt’s son and Folger an excellent education. It was at Adelphi that Henry met and became friends with young Charles Millard Pratt. Henry ranked in the top five of his graduating class, delivering an oration at commencement. The speech, “Every Man Is the Architect of His own Fortune,” contained the prophetic remarks that it was up to each of them “to decide . . . whether, at death, we shall leave them [our characters] lasting monuments of imperishable marble, or the mouldering remains of abandoned ruins.”2 One of their science teachers, William Clark Peckham, encouraged the boys to attend college at his alma mater, Amherst, and so, upon graduation, Folger and Pratt set off for western Massachusetts. In time, Folger’s friendship with Pratt and his family would affect his personal and professional lives in ways that he could not have imagined.
Nothing about Henry Folger’s early years hinted that he would become a passionate Shakespearian or an obsessive collector. He did not descend from a line of educated antiquarians or wealthy arts patrons. Nor was he the son, nephew, or protégé of a great bibliophile. Unlike, say, J. P. Morgan, the financier and bibliophile, Folger was not born into the habits of the wealthy or privileged. His mother taught him a love of reading and a facility with numbers, and his father may have provided hard-bitten lessons on how to deal with financial difficulties.
Henry’s letters home to his mother during his freshman year at college reveal a young man enjoying his education but challenged by Amherst’s academic rigor, and continually worried about—one might say obsessed with—his finances.3 He wrote home every Sunday, sometimes more frequently. He complained in his letters to his siblings that they sent him fewer letters than he alone was writing to them. In that era, Amherst was still primarily a preparatory school for men who planned to go into the ministry. Henry described his daily routine: awaken early, breakfast by 7:15 AM at his lodgings, chapel, calisthenics, and first recitation. He asked his mother to send him some “cheap writing paper” so he could keep up his family correspondence.4 Unlike his wealthy friend Charles Pratt, who enjoyed more luxurious lodgings, Henry counted every penny he spent, well aware that others did not have to scrimp and save as he did.
Henry described his plight in an almost Dickensian style, laced with humor. In one letter, he joked to his mother that “when [my roommate] and I get rich we propose to have curtains.”5 Even the basic conveniences were a financial stretch for him. Pratt occupied a room in a society (fraternity) house that, Folger observed, contained such miraculous luxuries as a clock, marble-topped table, armchair, and writing desk: “He must have spent considerable in fitting up his room.”6 Concerned with husbanding not just every dollar but every cent, Folger mailed one letter home, enclosing it in a monogrammed envelope, about which he said, “We like it very much, but each envelope costs a cent and a half, so we don’t use them often.” One letter to his mother, written on borrowed stationery instead of his own plain writing paper, showed Folger’s frequent humor: “I am writing in Pratt’s room, on his paper. Rather fancy to send to an old lady, don’t you think so?”7
In October 1875, during his first semester, Henry changed lodgings because of the “toughness of the meat” served at meals, as well as the “odors arising from the Deacon’s books”—an amusing complaint suggesting that Henry had not yet fallen under the spell of bibliomania. Henry wrote his mother often about his fastidious housekeeping habits, reassuring her almost weekly how he cleaned and swept his room, including the dusty carpet, and washed the windows. It was an early first hint of an obsessive nature.
Later that year, as a further economy, Folger decided to “take in his own washing” instead of sending it out to the laundresses who served the college men. He detailed to his mother how he washed his laundry in his room—fetching a pail of water, heating it on the stove in his shared quarters, soaping the clothing and linens, then rinsing and hanging them up to dry. For two pairs of stockings, three towels, and a handkerchief, Henry boasted, “in all twenty-five cents worth of washing saved.”8 But his scheme proved flawed. He confessed that he left the clothes to dry above the stove, and had then gone ice-skating. By the time he returned, the unattended items had been reduced to cinders, prompting him to ask the rhetorical question, “How long can one do without a towel?”9 A few days later, he wrote to his mother, telling her not to send replacement towels; he would buy them locally in Amherst. But could she please “write how much towels should cost so that I may have the satisfaction of knowing whether I have been cheated.”10 When his roommate also scorched a towel, Henry reconsidered their strategy, writing: “I have begun to debate whether or not it is a real saving to wash our own cloths [sic].”11
Henry spent most of his time studying, attending lectures, and attending church. However, he and his friends took time to enjoy simple New England pleasures: not only ice-skating but also sledding, long walks, and gathering apples, pears, or chestnuts. Years later, when Henry worked in Manhattan, he would continue to enjoy eating the hot chestnuts sold in wintertime by street vendors.
One college ritual involved the sharing of food treats sent from home. The boys would pool their bounty and put on a “spread.” One Thanksgiving feast featured a big turkey that a student received in a shipping box that “looked like a coffin,” Henry recalled. Pratt apparently had the best gustatory treats to share; Folger wrote, “We are compelled to yield the palm of supremacy in spreads to him.”12
At home from college for Christmas in 1875, eighteen-year-old Henry received from his seven-year-old brother Stephen a gift of an edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Henry began reading the plays, for his college courses as well as for his own enjoyment. He acquired a commonplace book, a kind of intellectual journal in which its owner lists books read, records observations made, gathers curious miscellanea, and inscribes favorite quotations. Henry started to copy down comments about Shakespeare uttered by various luminaries such as Thomas Carlyle, Abraham Lincoln, and the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Folger would keep this book for the rest of his life.
Henry had arrived at Amherst College around the same time that Shakespeare was becoming part of the curriculum at American colleges. His coursework included Greek, history, Latin, math, orthography, declamation, and literature. He and Charles Pratt joined the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, to which Henry Ward Beecher had also belonged. He participated in the Alpha Delta Phi Shakespeare discussion group.
Henry matured into a short man of slight build. He possessed a fine, loud, and deep bass-baritone voice and sang in the glee club as well as in an Amherst production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta H.M.S. Pinafore, playing the part of Dick Deadeye. It was from this character that his future wife, Emily, chose one of her nicknames for Henry, whom she sometimes referred to as “Dick.” Friends and classmates described him as a studious, gentle, and shy but friendly young man.
In his junior year, a family disaster threatened to destroy Henry’s world. His father’s current business, a water meter company, failed during the financial panic of 1873, and his family could no longer afford to pay his Amherst tuition and expenses. Henry wrote to his father beseeching him to pay room and board of $68.50, “a fearful large amount, but I find that I have got through this term on about half the money I had the first one, and can’t see a place where I could have been more ‘economous.’ ”13 Henry moved back home to Brooklyn and enrolled in the tuition-free City College of New York. But two of his Amherst classmates, Charles M. Pratt and William M. Ladd, were unwilling to see their promising friend leave school over finances.14 They arranged a personal loan for Henry from Pratt’s father, with his assurance that he would pay them back. Thanks to their friendship and assistance, Henry would graduate on time, and from Amherst.
Despite the loan he received, which allowed hi
m to stay at Amherst, his finances were far from secure. In spring of his senior year, he wrote his mother about the sacrifices he made in his own personal comfort, relating that “our coal has given out—cheering prospect. I have to forage around the cellar picking up a hand-full here and there when the fellows are not looking. It is ruining my spiritual worthiness, but we can’t freeze.”15
On March 19, 1879, in his senior year, he paid twenty-five cents for a ticket to hear the seventy-five-year-old literary statesman Ralph Waldo Emerson speak in College Hall at Amherst on the topic “The Superlative, or Mental Temperance.”16 The lecture, which admonished the audience to write plainly and simply, was not an Emersonian classic. Folger saved his ticket to that talk, and preserved it with his growing collection of personal memorabilia as a reminder of what turned out to be a life-altering event, not because of the content of the lecture but because of where Emerson’s other writings would lead him.17 Listening to this literary star inspired Henry to read another of his lectures, “Remarks at the Celebration of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Shakespeare,” which Emerson had delivered in 1864 at the Revere House in Boston.18 There Emerson had waxed: “Wherever there are men, and in the degree in which they are civil, have power of mind, sensibility to beauty, music, the secrets of passion, and the liquid expression of thought [Shakespeare] has risen to his place as the first poet of the world.”
Owing money weighed heavily on Henry. His desire to erase his indebtedness extended to sacrificing his mother’s attendance at his commencement: “Had I the money, you would come. . . . If, however, you had the money my circumstances are such that I would rather use it to pay my indebtedness than your expenses.”19 He would have been proud to have his mother attend his commencement: “There are just two fellows in the class who have two orations,” wrote Henry in the third person, “and Folger is one of them.”20 Indeed, Henry had won several cash prizes at Amherst for oratory, including, at commencement, the prestigious Hyde Prize.21
Henry Folger graduated Phi Beta Kappa, ranking fifth in the class of 1879. He had gained a fine liberal arts education. But he also learned a harder, sometimes bitter life lesson at college. The penny-pinching habits of those early lean years molded him. Some of his economizing schemes sound almost comical, but the painful experience of being in financial difficulty, and the humiliation of being forced to withdraw from Amherst, even temporarily, must have seared the value of money into him. Money meant more than the things it could buy. Money meant opportunity and freedom from his past. Soon he would learn that the same frugal habits of an impecunious college boy trying to save a few pennies on laundry soap would, when applied on a grand, massive scale, become the very catalyst of his success. For the rest of his life, Henry Folger would scrutinize the smallest expenditure with the same attention that he paid to the largest sums, in both his business and personal lives.
He had a choice to make: he could remain at Amherst, where he had been invited to stay on as a tutor; teach public speaking in Minnesota; or return home to Brooklyn, where he had been offered a position at the company owned by the father of his best college friend, Charles Pratt. Folger chose business over academia. He moved back to Brooklyn and a week after graduation started as a clerk at Charles Pratt’s Astral Oil Works.
Prior to the American Civil War, Charles Pratt worked for a company selling paint and whale oil products. After the war, he moved to New York and opened a kerosene refinery in Brooklyn—Astral Oil Works—that produced not only kerosene but other petroleum products including naphtha, engine oils, greases, paints, waxes, lubricants, and even a waste product called gasoline, which was not yet used to fuel engines but was marketed as “Pratt’s Spirit.” Pratt’s kerosene advertising campaign made the ludicrous but charming assertion that “the holy lamps of Tibet are primed with Astral Oil.” Pratt was not the only man who saw that whale oil’s reign was in decline and that kerosene was the lighting fuel of the future. As it became cheaper, it would permit the common man to extend the day beyond nightfall.
Another man, John D. Rockefeller, founder and president of Standard Oil Company, led the kerosene revolution and undertook plans to consolidate and dominate the industry. Rockefeller, possessed by a conservative, religious, and unquenchable work ethic, recognized talent when he saw it, boasting he could buy it on the open market the same way he bought coffee.22 He approached Pratt and his partner, H. H. Rogers, offering them cooperation or consolidation with Standard, on whatever terms Pratt dictated, as long as he kept the alliance secret. While Henry and classmate Charles M. Pratt progressed in their studies, Pratt’s father agreed to a business deal that would change his, his son’s, and Henry Folger’s lives forever. In October 1874, Standard Oil joined with Pratt’s large refinery works in Brooklyn, New York, continuing Standard’s eastward expansion. When their companies merged, Pratt and Rogers gained positions of power and influence, with Rockefeller first among equals. Pratt and Rogers received Standard Oil stock and became part of the organization. Like many of Standard’s mergers at the time, this one was done quietly and kept secret for many years, giving the public and smaller oil producers the illusion that they were doing business with the independent Pratt, rather than with the detested Standard Oil.23
On August 27, 1859, Edwin Drake drilled a well 69.5 feet deep and struck oil on Watson’s Flats near Titusville, Pennsylvania, inaugurating the petroleum era. It was a moment that exemplified a transition in America, away from agriculture and small business toward giant enterprises. Expansion and improvement in transportation networks meant companies could efficiently produce and transport product over longer distances, across the country and across the world, at scales hitherto unimagined. The whaling industry had already been in decline, reflected in both higher prices and the desire of consumers for a less pungent source of home lighting. Drake's well produced a meager twenty-five barrels per day. Two hundred miles west of the strike in Titusville, Cleveland, Ohio, emerged as one of the competitors to Pennsylvania oil refining. The key product refined from crude oil was kerosene, the inexpensive but volatile source of illumination that supplanted increasingly scarce and expensive whale oil.
In 1865, John Davison Rockefeller, age twenty-six, and his partners Maurice Clark and Samuel Andrews bet on the future of the oil business. Rather than investing in the risky boom-and-bust oil exploration and extraction aspects of the business, they invested in a refinery in Cleveland. Oil prices could fluctuate widely, and independent wells could and did run dry at any moment, but all crude producers needed refineries. It was not a sure thing, but Rockefeller and his partners believed that by investing in a modern, safe, large refinery, they could profit by producing kerosene for a mass market. By 1865, Cleveland had thirty refineries. By 1869, the expanding firm of Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler operated not only in Cleveland but also in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and New York City.
Two elements accounted for Rockefeller’s success as a businessman: his personal talents as a manager and his ability to realize small cost savings for each gallon of kerosene his company refined. He achieved cost savings through vertical integration—essentially cutting out the middleman—and enormous economies of scale. Rockefeller and one of his partners, railroad titan Henry Flagler, secured quantity discounts from the railroads by guaranteeing shipment of large volumes of oil from wells to refineries, and from refineries to customers. No other oil producer or refiner could guarantee similar volumes or receive such discounts, and it infuriated them. With transportation a significant portion—more than a third—of the total cost of refined kerosene, this amounted to an insurmountable cost advantage for Standard, and a boon to its customers, who profited handsomely from the cost reductions the company was able to achieve.
Not all of Rockefeller’s dealings with the railroads benefited consumers.24 The arrangement between Standard and the railroads was of the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” variety. In later years, Rockefeller “evened” traffic across the railroads, spreading his
business around in proportions agreed upon by the railroads. They gave him preferential rates over his competitors, deterring refiners from entering the business, and he would serve to enforce the railroad cartel arrangement. The end result was a decrease in Standard Oil’s costs relative to its competitors’—good for Standard’s customers, bad for its competitors.
Rockefeller continued to lower his firm’s average cost by vertically integrating his firm, including more stages of production in the company. Rather than contracting with other firms, he used company employees to minimize his costs. The purchase of barrels accounted for a significant expense in shipping crude. Rockefeller soon realized that barrel makers were unreliable and charged prices that he could beat if he hired his own coopers and made the barrels in-house. He reduced the cost per barrel to his company by two-thirds, and ensured a steady supply. Not satisfied that he had squeezed every penny out of his barrel costs, he purchased timberland, so that his barrel makers could use staves cut from the company’s own lumber, cutting out the lumber supplier. Frustrated that the wooden barrels leaked during transport, and aware of the high labor costs of loading and unloading barrels, Rockefeller produced the first primitive railroad tanker cars. Just as the automobile would finish off the buggy-whip industry, Rockefeller’s cost cutting resulted in the collapse of the barrel-making industry. By 1872, he had vertically integrated his operations into almost every aspect of refining—including storage, loading, marketing, barrel making, and wagon production.25
Rockefeller was an exceptional manager and leader. While his enterprise grew to an enormous size, covering dozens of locations in several states, he managed to create an esprit de corps among the men who worked with and for him. He surrounded himself with talented men with various skills, inviting them to join the company as he encountered them. Some, such as H. H. Rogers, had begun as vociferous opponents, but later became officers or employees of the company. A man who exercised great self-control, Rockefeller, a devout Baptist, treated his coworkers, from officers to clerks, with respect; he listened without interrupting; if he felt the need to disagree with his partners, he did so in private, without embarrassing them in public. In a note to an office of Ohio Standard in 1885, Rockefeller suggested that a decision on a contentious issue be delayed for a while: “There has been so much discussion on this, and some warmth.”26 Rockefeller was the conciliator when forceful men’s strong opinions differed. No public acrimony marred the organization; decisions were conveyed from the executive committee not as orders but rather as suggestions and requests. Not dictatorial, Rockefeller was primus inter pares. Men who disagreed with the direction the company was taking were free to leave; Rockefeller or other shareholders would buy back the stock at any time. Although no large organization—run by committees or otherwise—can operate completely without acrimony, the men running Standard worked hard at minimizing it. The executive committee received information and recommendations from the other committees, including frequent statistical updates from the committee clerk, then laid down general policies for the committees to implement. In 1878, the price of kerosene continued to fall, the transition from whale oil to kerosene for home lighting continued, and Standard controlled ninety percent of the nation’s refining capacity.27 Nevertheless, the firm’s long-term position and profits were hardly guaranteed: in 1879, just one year later, Thomas Alva Edison invented the first commercially viable carbon filament incandescent lightbulb. Rockefeller foresaw that the future would involve fierce competition among kerosene, natural gas, and electric light. He prepared the company for the coming changes. By the time Folger graduated from Amherst, Standard was already a huge and profitable enterprise. Soon Henry’s future would be inextricably linked to the fortunes of Standard Oil and its founder.