The Millionaire and the Bard

by Andrea Mays

  In 1911, Standard Oil transported eighty percent of all oil produced in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. It refined more than seventy-five percent of all crude produced in the United States. It owned more than half of all tank cars. It marketed more than eighty percent of all kerosene sold in the United States and exported more than eighty percent of the kerosene that went abroad. It sold to the railroads more than ninety percent of their lubricating oils, and owned seventy-eight steamships and nineteen other sailing vessels.19

  Henry Folger rejected the flawed economic rationale underpinning the Supreme Court’s opinion. “My own observation, which has been close, and has covered a long series of years,” Folger wrote, “has satisfied me that the aim of the organization is to do its business in a straightforward and strictly upright manner. It of course strives to build up its trade, and in doing so has to meet competition, but it has always both built up the trade and met competition in an honorable, business-like way.” Folger had the insight that inefficient firms manipulated antitrust law to cripple their more efficient and successful rivals, thus serving their own interests, not those of consumers. Folger argued that government officials hoped to advance their careers by taking Standard’s scalp: “Of course . . . the attacks [against us] have been largely occasioned by the ambitions of politicians, who hoped to gain favor in this way, and then by unsuccessful competitors who strive to cover up their lack of success by charging unfair methods by the Standard.”20

  Rockefeller was confronted with the most difficult business problem of his life. How could he slice his company into pieces in a way that did the least possible harm and still comply with the Court’s order? Folger, with his vast knowledge of all aspects of Standard’s far-flung operations, was an important voice, second only to Rockefeller’s, in determining how the company should be split up into thirty-four new ones. The dissolution of the Standard Oil Company, an embarrassing disaster for Rockefeller, presented a great opportunity for Folger. In a time of crisis, Henry Folger proved himself calm and indispensable. Henry Folger signed the announcement of the breakup on July 28. Later that year, he was appointed president of the second largest of the new companies, the Standard Oil Company of New York.

  Acting as Rockefeller’s cat’s paw and funded with a loan from Standard Oil, Henry Folger, acting in concert with other Standard officers, acquired controlling interests in Texas refining firms including the Navarro Refining and Magnolia Petroleum companies. The purpose of these acquisitions was to circumvent scrutiny by a federal grand jury and the state attorney general of Texas of Standard’s activities in Texas oil country. Through a convoluted series of complex legal and financial transactions designed to conceal this activity, Folger and Standard were able, at least temporarily, to shield the company from liability. As a result, Folger reaped a windfall: earning more than $650,000 per year in Magnolia dividends, and even more in capital gains when, in 1918, Standard began to acquire Magnolia stock from Folger. Eventually, an indictment was handed down, seeking to prohibit Magnolia from doing business in Texas and seeking damages, including $8.15 million from Folger. Ultimately, Henry walked away from the scheme without suffering any harm, and having netted hundreds of thousands in dividends, and even more in capital gains, all of which he deployed to finance his collection.

  The monumental events of 1911 did not dampen Henry Folger’s Foliomania. The only disruption to his collecting seems to have involved his annual summertime pilgrimage to England. On July 17, in a letter to Captain Robinson, he revealed, “We have had to give up our usual trip to London, as I did not wish to be away in view of the work to be done on the Standard Oil [matter].”21 He still managed to buy five First Folios that year.

  That fall, Henry planned to be a major bidder at a Sotheby’s sale of the famous Huth collection, which included many fine lots of Shakespeariana. He and Emily combed through and annotated the thousands of pages of the auction catalogues printed for the occasion. In a masterstroke, an anonymous American intervened before the auction and made an offer for the best Shakespeare lots, an offer that proved too good for the seller to refuse. Hopeful bidders who arrived at the auction with their presale catalogues found, to their dismay, the coveted lots withdrawn. The New York Times reported the exciting news in a November 11 page-one story: “Shakespeare Rarities Sold, American May Have Bought Editions Withdrawn from Huth Auction.” The Times revealed that “the Shakespeare Folios and quartos, numbered 1,187 to 1,228 in the catalogue of the Huth Library, have been disposed of by private treaty, and consequently will not be included in the sale at auction announced for November 24.” The story teased readers with an air of mystery: “Both the name of the purchaser of the Huth Shakespeare folios and quartos and the price paid are at present a matter of speculation, but the general idea is that they will go to America.” It was a secret move worthy of Henry Folger, but Alexander Smith Cochran, not Folger, had staged the coup.22 Alexander Smith Cochran, the America’s Cup defender, had inherited thirty million dollars upon the death of his uncle, the carpet maker Warren B. Smith, allowing him to acquire his collection through the famed London book dealer Bernard Quaritch. The Huth sale continued in 1912.23 Rare book collecting was front-page news, and the papers covered the competition the way they covered horse racing on the sports pages. After Cochran bought the Huth Shakespeare lots privately, en bloc, the New York Times offered its readers not just the story but a detailed, bibliographic catalogue listing every item in the collection. Despite being beaten out at the Huth auction, Folger bought two more First Folios that December, one for $2,500 (W 109, F 51), and a copy that had been owned by Thomas Hanmer, the eighteenth-century Shakespeare editor, for $6,650 (W 74, F 16).

  In 1911, Henry’s Shakespeare mentor Horace Howard Furness tried to tease his protégé into revealing his great secret: the number of First Folios he possessed. “Tell me,” he wrote to Folger, “that I may have it in black and white, how many First Folios you have. I long to be pea-green with envy.” When the scholar learned that Folger had forty, he nicknamed his favorite collector “Forty Folio Folger.”24

  By the end of the year, Henry Folger had achieved two landmark accomplishments. As a collector, he had reached the milestone of forty First Folios. His success would have stunned the literary world and possibly given Sidney Lee heart failure. But of course he kept it secret. All of England possessed just ten more copies than Folger alone. Nineteen eleven also marked a career milestone for Folger as a businessman. Now, as president of Standard Oil of New York, he commanded an important business enterprise. He took his place onstage with the other leading magnates of the age.

  It was a time of great industrial fortunes built upon steel, oil, coal, railroads, banking, and manufacturing. When Mark Twain coined the expression “The Gilded Age” with his 1872 novel, he did not mean it as a compliment. Instead, he suggested that a paper-thin veneer of shimmering gold leaf camouflaged an underlying structure of crass, grasping corruption. It was a time of conspicuous consumption and dazzling displays of wealth. It was not enough to be rich; one had to burnish one’s wealth with class, taste, and refinement—and material possessions. And so it was a time when larger-than-life American millionaires—Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, Benjamin Guggenheim, Isaac D. Fletcher, Elbridge T. Gerry, J. Pierpont Morgan, and others—built magnificent New York City mansions, summered at palatial seacoast cottages, and ravished the European continent for her cultural treasures. But by the time of Folger’s rise, the first Gilded Age had passed, supplanted by a second era of wealth. In the 1890s, John D. Rockefeller, in a time of depressed land values, purchased four hundred acres in Pocantico Hills, a one-hour train ride north of New York City along the Hudson River. In 1893, he and his son John Jr. began to build and landscape a compound and small golf course on the property. The house, called Kykuit, Dutch for “lookout,” overlooks the Hudson. John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), known as Pierpont, founded the United States Steel Corporation and J. P. Morgan & Co. investment bankin
g institution. His son, John Pierpont Morgan Jr. (1867–1943), called J.P. or Jack, inherited the collection and made a public institution of the Morgan Library in New York.

  The castles lined Fifth Avenue. William Henry Vanderbilt constructed the grandest mansion in New York City, at Fifty-First Street and Fifth Avenue. Elbridge T. Gerry, who collected thirty thousand rare law books, hired the famed architect Richard Morris Hunt to design his French fantasy at Fifth and Sixty-First. Isaac D. Fletcher collected Rembrandts and built a French Renaissance–style mansion at Seventy-Ninth and Fifth. Andrew Carnegie, steel magnate, purchased property a mile north of most of his colleagues, where land was less expensive. There, far from the concentrated development downtown, he had the firm of Babb, Cook & Willard build him a huge Georgian-style country house with spectacular gardens. Henry G. Marquand, who collected Van Dyck paintings, Roman bronzes, and Chinese porcelains, built a château at Madison Avenue and Sixty-Eighth. Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie’s partner and supplier of coke for the steel furnaces, collected all types of European art treasures, and in a physical expression of his symbiotic, competitive, and envious relationship with Carnegie, constructed a beautiful limestone mansion at Fifth and Seventieth that he is alleged to have vowed would make the steel magnate’s home “look like a miner’s shack.”

  Their foremost wealthy counterparts on the West Coast—publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, railway and real estate magnate Collis Huntington, and his nephew Henry Edwards Huntington—also built magnificent homes and joined in the chase for treasures across the ocean: art, books, culture. Many other industrialists whose names are no longer familiar to us—sons of jewelers, carpet manufacturers; Marsden Perry, for example—also quietly built magnificent libraries, including some rival Shakespeare collections. Ocean liners departed English and French ports laden with the finest objects money could buy: paintings, sculptures, tapestries, furniture, arms, armor, entire period rooms, even entire buildings—some churches—taken apart stone by stone for reassembly in the States. And, of course, rare books and manuscripts; some of the finest English book collections ever sold went up for sale in those first twenty years of the century.

  By 1911, Henry may have joined the world of the super-wealthy, but he was not like them. They built opulent Fifth Avenue mansions to advertise their success and announce their importance to the world. Folger and his wife lived modestly in a rented house in Brooklyn. They bought jaw-dropping works of art to show off their good taste and culture. Some bought rare books and built or purchased magnificent collections en bloc. Folger bought rare books that appealed not simply to the eye but to the mind. They displayed their collections in their mansions to awe their inner circle of elite guests. Folger showed off his collection to no one save his wife, and kept most of his treasures hidden—even from himself—in storage. They carried themselves larger than life. Folger went his way modestly. They reveled in their fame. Folger eschewed personal publicity. To them, amassing and displaying their hoards was the whole point of the game. To Folger, it was the beginning of a dream. They became case studies for Thorstein Veblen and his theories of conspicuous consumption and the leisure class. Folger stood apart as an outlier.

  It was also a time of social change: the invention of the wireless, the mass production of the automobile, the rise of Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive movement, and the sailing of the wonder of the age, that unsinkable luxury liner the Titanic. It was a time of fevered European nationalism, the First World War, and the explosion of American power when, for the first time in history, American armed forces set foot upon European shores to fight. And it was the time of the influenza pandemic of 1918, millions dead from war and disease, the Bolshevik revolution, labor unrest, and the triumph of industrialization in Europe, in North America, and around the world.

  Henry James, the most astute interpreter of this luxurious age, a wealthy American riding the early wave of post–Civil War transatlantic tourism, was an observer of the differences between European and American experience. In his novels he wrote about the nexus of wealth and culture, commerce and taste, consumption and display. His brother, the philosopher and psychologist William James, understood what it meant to be an accumulator of beautiful, coveted things. He theorized that the impulse began in childhood:

  In education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental, and can be appealed to in many ways. In the house, training in order and neatness begins with the arrangement of the child’s own personal possessions. In the school, ownership is particularly important in connection with one of its special forms of activity, the collecting impulse. An object possibly not very interesting in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp, or a single map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills a gap in a collection or helps to complete a series. Much of the scholarly work of the world, so far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and erudition (and this lies at the basis of all our human scholarship), would seem to owe its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies the accumulating and collecting instinct than to any special appeal which it makes to our cravings after rationality. A man wishes a complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a subject than anybody else, much as another may wish to own more dollars or more early editions or more engravings before the letter than anybody else.25

  In 1912, Folger purchased two more First Folios. In February, for $7,500, he acquired a copy from Alexander Smith Cochran that contained a rare proof page from Henry IV with corrections (W 108, F 50). That April, the sinking of the Titanic claimed one of Folger’s competitors, Harry Elkins Widener, but not in time to prevent Widener from buying New York stockbroker William C. Van Antwerp’s choice, complete, tall copy of the First Folio. Widener had engaged the famous Philadelphia collector, scholar, and dealer in books and manuscripts Dr. A. S. W. (Abraham Simon Wolf) Rosenbach to purchase the First Folio for him at Sotheby’s on March 22, 1907. Rosenbach, aboard ship en route to the sale in London, had eliminated the competition posed by dealer Bernard Quaritch by engaging him to bid on Rosenbach’s behalf, up to £5,000 ($25,000) for the volume.26 Quaritch purchased it for £3,600 ($18,000) and Rosenbach sold it to Widener for $20,000.27 After the Titanic went down on April 15, 1912, Widener’s bereaved mother donated her son’s literature collection, including the First Folio, to the Harvard Library.

  A few months later, in July, Folger purchased a noteworthy First Folio for $13,750 (W 60, F 2). This fine copy contains the Droeshout portrait in state one, one of only three surviving examples in the world of that variant. It also has the last page of Romeo and Juliet crossed out by the printer. In 1913, Folger purchased four First Folios. In March, for $4,970, he bought a copy with a provenance dating back to the seventeenth century (W 110, F 52). In April, he acquired one that Sidney Lee described as “shabby, unrepaired” (W 81, F 23). Folger had first seen this copy at Pickering & Chatto booksellers in London in August 1907. In a letter, Henry expressed doubt about the authenticity of two leaves, but was in the end reassured by Pickering, and he bought the volume six years later for $4,850. On July 15, 1913, a copy sold at auction at Christie’s for £273 and Folger bought it later that month for $3,950 (W 112, F 54).28 In December, he bought a cheap copy for $255 (W 117, F 59), lacking the play Troilus and Cressida. The copy has a Plymouth Public Library bookplate in it with the handwritten note “7 days” crossed out and “not to circulate” in its place, implying that even as late as 1829 the library did not think the volume so valuable that it could not be checked out by readers.29

  In the summer of 1914, a month before the outbreak of the First World War, the New York Times published a boastful headline: “England’s Rarest Books Being Bought by Americans.” The New World was maturing, and was stripping England—indeed, all of Europe—of its heritage. The culture that Europeans believed Americans were incapable of creating, they were buying. Wealthy American women, daughters of industrialists, were marrying titled but penniless princes and counts. One by one the best English private libraries—the fourth Earl
of Ashburnham’s, Henry Huth’s, and so on—fell to the Americans. “The cream of those great English libraries dispersed within the last twenty years has come to this country,” reported the New York Times.30 European culture was for sale, and Americans were stocking up. Henry Folger continued to take advantage of the situation.

  Throughout his time as an employee at Standard, Henry continued to buy the company’s stock, which paid generous dividends. But that was often not enough. To finance his purchases, Henry frequently borrowed money from Charles M. Pratt, from John D. Rockefeller, and from numerous banks that Standard Oil did business with. The Folgers did not use these loans to support an extravagant lifestyle. They lived a frugal life in their rented Brooklyn home. A visitor there found it modest, but filled with “books, books, books!” They disliked crowds and turned down most social invitations and public events. But the Folgers were not recluses from their own families. Twice a year, Thanksgiving and New Year’s, they held a kind of open house for extended family members. Henry had great affection for his siblings and, over time, arranged employment for three of his brothers at Standard Oil.

  Henry Folger did not have the field of collecting Shakespeare to himself. And he was not the wealthiest collector—Henry E. Huntington and J. Pierpont Morgan, who spent a million dollars a year each on rare books, were far richer. But Henry Folger was single-minded in his pursuit of Shakespeariana. Other millionaires might want a high spot or two—a fine First Folio, a collection of the First through Fourth Folios, a group of trophy quartos—but Folger wanted it all, and related to Shakespeare only. Folger was not the richest, but he was the most single-mindedly Shakespearian, and he and his like-minded wife, Emily, were the only collectors who sought to dominate the First Folio trade. Folger’s chief rivals were Huntington, Cochran, and, until he quit the game, Perry. When Huntington’s agent, George D. Smith, bought most of the Earl of Pembroke’s library at auction in London, it was a tough blow for Folger.