The Millionaire and the Bard

by Andrea Mays

  While Henry Folger worked during the day to pay off his college loan from Pratt, he enrolled in night classes at Columbia Law School. Despite this double workload, he pursued his literary interests by reading the works of many of the writers influenced by Shakespeare—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Ruskin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, James Russell Lowell, Victor Hugo, and Thomas Carlyle. In December 1879, he bought a copy of Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, which exceeded even Emerson’s wild enthusiasm for Shakespeare.

  Henry also purchased an inexpensive copy of Shakespeare’s collected works, a thirteen-piece set called the Handy Volume Edition. He never liked going anywhere without bringing along a book to fill idle time, and he often kept a volume from this set within reach, reading from it whenever he could steal a free moment. By then, Shakespeare had become a minor but recurring theme in Henry’s life. He read and analyzed Shakespeare’s plays for education and pleasure. It would be another ten years before the obsession took hold.

  In 1880, kerosene sold for nine cents per gallon. Falling product prices are not usually an indication of an all-powerful giant flexing its muscles. Rather than raising market prices, the usual fear of politicians and lawmakers, prices fell while Standard grew. Falling prices delighted customers. However, not everyone was grateful. The prices Rockefeller charged were profitable for him but not for his competitors. The evolution of the economy from agriculture and small business to large corporations caused social upheavals and hard feelings. Many firms went under, and small-business owners blamed their failures not on their own inability to compete but on what they believed were predatory and unfair business practices by their larger rivals.

  Eighteen eighty-one was an important year for Henry Folger. Henry repaid the loan, including seven percent interest, from Charles Pratt and earned his law degree cum laude from Columbia. That year, Standard Oil operations were run by a series of committees made up of Rockefeller’s men plus former officers or owners of the firms with which Standard had merged. The most important committee at Standard Oil of New Jersey, the manufacturing committee, was chaired by H. H. Rogers. Its first statistical clerk was Henry Clay Folger Jr., protégé of domestic trade committee member Charles Pratt. On May 1, 1881, Folger, just twenty-three years old, issued the now legendary Manufacturing Book A, a precise, careful compilation and illustration of data on all phases of Standard’s processing of crude oil, “with emphasis on comparative costs and yields of various refineries in the combination.”28 The result of this publication and his myriad reports on the products Standard made was that in 1886, he was promoted to secretary of the manufacturing committee. During the 1890s, he was part of management of the Standard refinery on the East River and within five years became chairman of the manufacturing committee.

  The manufacturing committee, along with several other specialized committees, advised the company on how it might benefit from coordination and standardization, as well as integration. Centralized purchasing of supplies, for example, with a single Standard buyer, leveraged the company’s cost-cutting power.

  By 1881, Henry Folger was distilling numbers for each phase of the business, charting and explaining cost and yield statistics of all refining operations in monthly, quarterly, semiannual, and annual reports, sending them to H. H. Rogers, with a copy dutifully forwarded to Rockefeller. Folger possessed a talent for and took personal delight in presenting complex facts in a useful and comprehendible way. His exceptional mathematical ability combined with his detailed knowledge of the industry, from crude to kerosene and beyond, made him a pioneer in industrial efficiency. He continued to learn, at a prodigious rate, becoming an expert in the history and technical aspects of the refining business.

  By 1882, Lily Richardson Pratt, sister of Henry’s friend Charles M. Pratt, had played matchmaker. At a gathering of the Irving Literary Society, she introduced her Vassar classmate, Emily Clara Jordan, to Henry. Emily had grown up in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Edward Jordan, the Solicitor for the Treasury Department under Lincoln and Johnson. She had met President Lincoln when she was four years old. Her older sister, who taught at Smith College, had financed her education at Vassar. Emily had been class president, presiding over a cohort of thirty-six women. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1879, she taught school and wrote. Like Henry Folger, she had an intense interest in literature, debate, and theater. The match took: Emily and Henry were married on October 6, 1885, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The Pratts had already secured Henry’s college education, then his employment. Now they had found him a compatible wife.

  Henry and Emily began their life together living with his parents in Brooklyn. Soon they rented Brooklyn homes of their own, first at 212 Lefferts Place, then at nearby Twenty-Four Brevoort Place. In their first year of marriage, Henry bought a special gift for his new wife. It was a copy of a recently published facsimile of the First Folio, one of a wave of such editions published at the end of the nineteenth century, as Shakespeare’s popularity flourished. Henry paid $1.25 for the reduced-size facsimile, published with an introduction by English bibliophile and scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps.29 In a note to Emily presenting the volume, Henry wrote, “Here you may see Shakespeare’s plays as they were actually given to the world.” It was the first time that Henry and Emily saw what a First Folio looked like. Yes, it was just a cheap copy. And it was the wrong size—significantly smaller than the original. But it gave them a taste of the real thing. If they read the scholarly introduction, they learned that there was a wonderful history behind the making and printing of the First Folio. Now they peeked below the surface of the plays, to the lore of their creation.

  Henry’s position required him to distribute periodic charts and explanatory memoranda to the members of the manufacturing committee. He sent copies of these reports to Rockefeller. In 1885, Rockefeller responded to one of Folger’s reports, writing in appreciation of his contributions. “Let the good work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good.”30

  Four years later, in 1889, the words that Henry used when he gave Emily the facsimile of the First Folio—“Shakespeare’s plays as they were actually given to the world”—might still have been lingering in his mind. For some time, he had been adding books to his home library. Nothing fancy—just some good volumes of important literature. But he felt his holdings were good enough to report, in a letter to the historian of his Amherst class, that he had, in the decade since graduation, assembled a “modest library.”31 He was still a reader, not a collector.

  That changed the day in 1889 when Henry walked into Bang’s auction house in Manhattan. He examined the books to be sold that day. The one that caught his attention was not the most beautiful book of the lot. Many fine leather bindings adorned with decorative gold leaf were prettier than the volume that caught his eye, an unremarkable copy of Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio. Henry Folger did the bidding himself and the auctioneer hammered it down to $107.50 for him. He had spent more than he could afford to pay at that moment, but the auction house agreed to extend him credit for thirty days.

  What lured Henry Folger into the auction that day remains a mystery. He left no written account of the event. He was thirty-two years old on the day he tiptoed into the world of rare books and bought that copy of the Fourth Folio. He and Emily had been married four years. They lived in a rented brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, with rented furniture.32 His destiny as a captain of business and millionaire still lay ahead of him. Standard Oil was already an industrial giant, but no one could have imagined how large, profitable, and infamous a company it would become with Henry Folger’s help. It was good that his fortunes were linked inextricably to the rise of Standard Oil. Unless he became rich, he could never pursue the dream that was about to possess him.

  Chapter 6

  “Had I the Means, I Would Not Hesitate . . . to Buy . . .�
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  —HENRY CLAY FOLGER

  HENRY FOLGER’S purchase of the Fourth Folio did not transform him into an obsessive collector overnight. Between 1889 and 1891, he bought no important rare books. Indeed, he devoted much of the next decade to advancing himself in the oil business. The 1890s were key years for Henry and Standard Oil. As the company prospered, so did Henry’s fortunes. His intelligence, facility with numbers, and work ethic, plus his personal qualities of amiability and lack of pretention, attracted the keen interest of his superiors, including Rockefeller himself. The titan developed an affection for this young man who shared a similar, humble background and commitment to religion, and who also possessed many of his own characteristics. But as Henry rose in business, he took a series of steps—tentative at first and bolder as the decade unfolded—toward becoming a real collector.

  In 1890, in response to increasing public sentiment against the power—real or imagined—of big business, Congress passed and President Benjamin Harrison signed into law the Sherman Antitrust Act. It forbade any contract, scheme, or conspiracy “in restraint of trade.” The goal of the law was to protect competition in the marketplace, which benefited consumers through lower prices, better product quality, and greater variety of choices. The text of the act was vague and short—just over one hundred words long—and while it prohibited restraints of trade, it failed to define them. Congress abdicated to the courts the burden of interpreting the Sherman Act and wrestling with which business practices “restrained trade,” and which did not. The Sherman Act was a ticking bomb planted beneath the edifice of Standard Oil, and when it exploded years later it changed the lives of John D. Rockefeller and Henry Folger.1 That time had not yet, however, arrived. There was still time to go on with business as usual.

  In 1891, Henry and Emily went on vacation, taking the steamer Minnehaha across the Atlantic on their first trip to England. They did not book expensive tickets aboard a fast luxury liner that could make the trip quickly. Instead, they sailed on the proverbial slow boat, a “cattle boat,” on which their improvised cabin was a former officers’ mess.2 This unpretentious ship became their favorite vessel, and in the years to come they made every future crossing on it until their favorite seaman, Captain John Robinson, a fellow lover of Shakespeare, retired. Long after Folger attained the wealth and status of other men who would not dream of crossing the Atlantic without first-class tickets aboard anything but a White Star or Cunard luxury liner, he still preferred the modest pleasures of the Minnehaha. Henry and Emily enjoyed the unhurried voyage, the sea air, and their conversations with Captain Robinson. Between voyages Henry kept up an active correspondence with the captain.

  More than two and a half centuries after Peter Folger’s emigration to America, Henry returned to the land of his ancestors, and of Shakespeare. The Folgers’ itinerary from this trip is long lost, but they probably made the rounds of the London bookshops. There, at any one of the better establishments, they might have had their initial encounter with a copy of the First Folio.

  Sometime between 1891 and 1893, he bought one (W 113, F 55).3 More than a century later, it remains his most mysterious acquisition. Its price and source are unknown. Some scholars suggest that he bought it in 1893, but that date is no more than an educated guess. The Folgers might have purchased it as early as 1891 during their trip to England, or perhaps they saw one there and ordered it by mail after their return to America. In any case, it was not an auspicious purchase. Henry and Emily’s first First Folio was a second-rate specimen, suffering from various flaws. This copy was missing two of the nine preliminaries, and of the ones that remained most were mutilated badly enough to affect the text. One play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, was made up completely from pages taken from another First Folio. In an uncharacteristic lapse, Henry failed to record for posterity the price he paid. Given its condition, and the state of the rare book market at the time, it is doubtful that they paid more than one thousand dollars for it.

  In the early 1890s, Folger was a member of the management team of the Standard Oil Works on the East River of New York. In 1895, he argued that Standard Oil benefited consumers through cost cutting, innovative management, and superior refining techniques. His article, “Petroleum: Its Production and Products,” appeared as a chapter in the massive, two-volume book One Hundred Years of American Commerce, 1795–1895, and provided a reasoned exposition of the history, economics, and evolving technology of the industry. He wrote with admiration about the “capital and energy required to establish an industry of such magnitude.” He called attention to the size of the growing retail market: “Wherever commerce has made its way it has found a welcome. It is carried wherever a wheel can roll or a camel’s foot be planted. The caravans on the Desert of Sahara go laden with Astral oil, and elephants in India carry cases of Standard White.”

  In 1895, Folger had the opportunity to purchase through a London book dealer a large collection of many volumes of Shakespeariana. The prospect of a bulk purchase excited him. He coveted the material, but its cost was beyond his means. Although he could not buy it himself, he could not bear to let the collection go. Better, he reasoned, to control where it went, so he could enjoy future access to it. In a bold move, he tried to persuade Rockefeller, not known as a bibliophile, to buy the collection. Believing it was reasonably priced, and a good investment, Folger encouraged Rockefeller to purchase the entire grouping as the nucleus for a world-class library at the new University of Chicago, which the titan had endowed in 1892. Perhaps hoping to tweak Rockefeller’s pride, he mentioned that “the Astor, Lenox, Harvard, and Boston libraries have valuable Shakespearian collections to which they are adding at every opportunity.” Henry described some choice items: “early portraits, artistic illustrations, original contemporaneous documents” relating to Shakespeare and the Hathaways, “deeds, etc.” related to the properties Shakespeare owned in Blackfriars and at New Place.4 Henry proposed that Rockefeller purchase the collection, and then recover some of the cost by publishing and selling reproductions of the most important items. “[H]ad I the means,” Henry vowed, “I would not hesitate as a businessman to buy the collection with the expectation that the profit on . . . reproductions and the money for the originals if sold at auction would net a handsome margin on the investment.”5 And Henry, of course, would volunteer his expertise to help examine the library and select the best items to publish.

  For a man of Folger’s customary caution and risk aversion, it bordered on a hare-brained scheme. The idea that one of the richest men in the country would divert his attention from an empire of crude oil and kerosene to publish and peddle small-print-run facsimiles of obscure Shakespeare texts seems absurd. Perhaps the newfound zeal of the novice collector’s passion clouded Folger’s judgment. The fact that Henry even dared to make this unusual request suggests that by 1895 he had cemented a close relationship with Rockefeller. But Rockefeller declined to make the purchase. The collection was sold to Marsden Perry, a Providence, Rhode Island, banker, industrialist, and Shakespeare collector who would soon become one of Folger’s chief rivals.6

  In 1896, Folger visited Los Angeles to prepare an analysis of California crude oil, concluding in a discouraging report that the yields and quality of the kerosene were not up to Standard’s requirements.7 That year, Rockefeller, not yet sixty, retired from running the day-to-day operations of the company, though he retained his title of president, and continued to take an interest in the business. Standard Oil would not go in any direction that he did not steer it. Key executives, including Folger, still treated him as the mastermind behind the operation.

  Henry licked his wounds from losing out on the first collection of Shakespeare books he had tried to purchase. The next time he had the chance to buy a major collection, he would be ready. In the meantime, he assuaged his disappointment by buying, in 1896, a second copy of the First Folio (W 72, F 14). It had been three years since he had bought the first. This time he paid more and did better. For $4,500, he purchas
ed a fine example. Called the Pope-Hoe copy after two of its former New York owners, it contained all original leaves, though some had been patched, repaired, and touched up with hand-drawn facsimiles.8 It was the most expensive thing he had ever bought in his life.9 In today’s dollars, he had spent the equivalent of more than $40,000 for a single book.