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This tough, self-possessed boy had no tincture of rebellion in his makeup. Seeing his education solely in utilitarian terms, he studied hard but showed no intellectual playfulness. “I was very sedate and earnest,” he said, “preparing to meet the responsibilities of life.” Once again, he displayed a fantastic mind for numbers. “Arithmetical problems most attracted him,” said Lucy Spelman, “for he had been taught at home to keep accurate account of his gains and losses.”
Names: Lucy Spelman
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Perhaps the most surprising dimension of John D.’s early adolescence was his deep absorption in music. He even briefly aspired to be a musician and practiced the piano for up to six hours a day, driving Eliza mad with the racket while they still lived in Owego. The piano was then the symbol of a decorous middle-class home and his playing might have hinted at his genteel aspirations. For a man who would distrust other art forms as vaguely subversive, encouraging ungovernable emotions and pagan sensuality, music provided him with an artistic medium that he could wholeheartedly enjoy with church approval.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Owego
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For the teenage boy, Mrs. Woodin’s boardinghouse was an education in itself. Her daughter, Martha, was several years older than John and William, and they engaged in lively, heated discussions on many topics, with the bright, outspoken Mrs. Woodin often joining in. The most controversial topic was lending money at interest. In an extremely peculiar arrangement, John, age fifteen, was already lending small sums to his father at interest; never sentimental when it came to business, he simply charged his father what the traffic would bear—a practice Bill probably applauded enthusiastically. According to Rockefeller, Mrs. Woodin was “violently opposed to loaners obtaining high rates of interest, and we had frequent and earnest arguments on the subject.” It was typical of Rockefeller that this question of business method and morality occupied his attention far more than the esoteric matters found in schoolbooks.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Martha Woodin · Martha · Uncle William · John
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As if embarrassed by his peripatetic family life, Rockefeller tended to oversimplify the chronology of his early years, especially when speaking of his adolescence. After a year in Strongsville, John claimed, his family moved to Parma, about seven miles south of Cleveland, then into their own house in Cleveland proper. In fact, he omitted a critical two-step Cleveland detour before the shift to Parma, as can be gleaned from a revealing anecdote told by his school principal, Dr. White: “One day in 1854 a tall, angular boy came to me and said that his widowed mother and two sisters were coming to Cleveland to live and he wished my help in finding a temporary home for them.” The good-natured White invited the Rockefellers to move in with him and his new bride, and John “liked the idea and always insisted that it was a happy time for his mother.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Rockefeller family · Strongsville · Cleveland · Parma · White · John
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Two words leap from the story—widowed mother. It seems of some psychological significance that the first recorded instance of Rockefeller’s capacity to lie came in an effort to hush up his father’s existence—in fact, to bury him alive. Since Bill popped up in Cleveland three or four times a year, it took a certain cheek for his son to invent this story. The small episode acquires added interest when one notes that more than thirty years later, when Eliza died before Bill did, John instructed the preacher to describe her as a widow at the funeral. Further, despite the principal’s gracious response, it must have been perfectly dreadful for John, as a teenager, to go on a begging mission to find temporary lodgings for his family.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Cleveland · John
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When Bill reappeared, he moved his family to a house on Perry Street in downtown Cleveland, rented from a Mr. O. J. Hodge, who remembered John as “an unassuming youth who showed none of the hilarity often seen in boys of that age. Usually he sat quietly in his chair listening to what was being said.”As had been true since the Richford days, Bill was scrupulous about making timely rent payments. “Never was rent—$200 for a year—paid more promptly, nor did I have in all respects a better tenant,” said the landlord. Before the year was out, Bill had resettled his family on a ten-acre, creek-side farm in Parma while John returned to Mrs. Woodin, who had relocated first to Saint Clair Street and then to Hamilton Street.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Richford · Cleveland · O. J. Hodge · Parma · Martha Woodin · Perry Street · Saint Clair Street · Hamilton Street · John
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A contemporary photo of John with his two sisters and two brothers, all of them unsmiling, is again drenched in a mortuary gloom. Now a tall, thin boy who weighed about 140 pounds, John had tidily brushed light brown hair and clothes that were always clean and presentable. He later laughed at his solemn boyhood demeanor: “From fourteen years of age to twenty-five I was much more dignified than I am now,” he said with truth in his seventies. In Strongsville and Parma, Eliza fretted about the ubiquitous taverns in town and worked hard to shield her children from illicit entertainments. She must have been especially alarmed as her eldest son approached that perilous rite of passage, first love. Interestingly, John D. reenacted his father’s penchant for dalliances with the domestic help. In Strongsville, Eliza hired a household assistant, a pretty young farmer’s daughter named Melinda Miller, who did chores for the family and shared their meals. When the Rockefellers moved to Parma, Melinda resumed working for them, and John, a year younger than she, often came out from Cleveland to take walks with her. Rumors soon drifted about town that John had taken away the girl’s virginity. Whatever the truth, the Millers raised an unholy ruckus about the romance. In one of the less prophetic judgments in parental history, they argued that they didn’t want their daughter to throw herself away on a young man with such poor prospects. According to legend, one of Melinda’s parents came to fetch her by buggy to break up the liaison. Eventually, she married young Joe Webster, whose father had discovered Big Bill’s doctor act. From the standpoint of Rockefeller’s career, the failure of this relationship was fortunate, for he ended up with a woman of much greater social standing and intellectual attainment, who would provide him with the strong, stable home life and religious certitude that he craved.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · Strongsville · Cleveland · Melinda Miller · Parma · Joe Webster · Melinda · Millers · John
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At this point, we need to sketch in some events in William Avery Rockefeller’s life in the early 1850s, for his behavior began to shade over from the eccentric to the quasi-pathological. A man of multiple disguises, he had always been fond of assuming names; even when he first arrived in Richford, he had told some people that his name was Rockafellow. During the Owego years, Bill occasionally appeared in surrounding towns and presented himself as an eye-and-ear specialist named Dr. William Levingston. We know now that by the time he transplanted his family to Ohio, he was leading a full-blown double life as both Dr. William A. Rockefeller and Dr. William Levingston, the latter name appropriated from the town of his father’s birth, Livingston, New York. While this second name probably began as a simple alias to shield his family from his shady practices, it hardened in the early 1850s into a separate identity away from home. Bill’s traveling partner in his later years attributed Bill’s use of the pseudonym to the fact that he was practicing medicine without a license or diploma and always feared retribution from indignant local doctors, who instigated legal proceedings against him on several occasions.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Richford · Owego · New York · Ohio · Livingston
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In the last gasp of his lumber career, Bill had ventured north into Canada in the early 1850s, buying up fine walnut and ash and selling it at a handsome profit to timber mills. After he moved to the town of Niagara, Ontario (almost certainly without his family’s knowledge), he began to canvass the surrounding countryside as a traveling doctor. “Dr. Levingston” was a blatant quack, but he partially believed his own bombast and had enough success stories to deceive his patients and perhaps even himself. As his future partner said, “He had not studied medicine in any college. But he was a natural healer and had great skill. He had great fame in Canada and northern New York.”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · New York · Canada · Ontario · Niagara
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Devil Bill had an unerring instinct for spotting those pretty, docile, long-suffering women who would patiently endure his escapades. Around 1852, with his oblivious family still in Owego, he met a lovely, gentle teenage girl in Norwich, Ontario, named Margaret Allen. Bill was then forty-two and Margaret about seventeen, or only four years older than John D. By a small oversight, Dr. Levingston neglected to mention his other life as Doc Rockefeller, to say nothing of his wife and five children, and he wooed Margaret like a lusty bachelor. Bill was an expert confidence man, and Margaret’s trusting family was totally fooled. “He was a steady, temperate man of good habits, kind hearted, sociable and well liked by everybody,” said Margaret’s sister of this jolly wooer. “He was a famous marksman and loved to hunt. He was fond of a good story.” Doc Levingston was clearly more popular with the Allens than Doc Rockefeller had been with the Davisons, and Bill was tempted to start afresh with an adoring, innocent young woman, supported by a friendly family. On June 12, 1855, he married Margaret Allen in Nichols, New York, just south of Owego, and started a clandestine life as a bigamist that would persist for the rest of his days.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Owego · New York · Margaret · Ontario · Davisons · Allens · Norwich · Nichols
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One can plausibly argue that every time Bill moved his family to another town, it related to his secret philandering, and that he probably relocated his family in Cleveland because Ontario lay just across Lake Erie. True to his earlier behavior, Bill didn’t take up permanent residence with Margaret at first. To initiate her into his capricious ways, he started out by visiting her in Ontario once a year and staying with her credulous family. He didn’t plan, at the outset, to desert his original family, and for a time in the 1850s Bill continued to tread a tightrope between his old and new wives, neither of whom knew of the existence of the other.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Cleveland · Lake Erie · Margaret · Ontario
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It seems likely that Bill’s second marriage had immediate repercussions in the life of his oldest son. All along John had planned to attend college, with Eliza fortifying his resolve in the hope that he would someday become a Baptist minister. Then he received a letter from his father that dispelled his dreams. As he recalled, “My father … conveyed an intimation that I was not to go [to college]. I felt at once that I must get to work, find a situation somewhere.” Rockefeller never clarified why he dropped out of high school around May 1855, just two months shy of commencement exercises on July 16, but Bill’s second marriage on June 12 supplies the missing piece of the puzzle. About to enter into his second marriage, Bill must have been drastically scaling back on first-family expenditures, albeit without disclosing the reason for the sudden urgency. As John said, “There were younger brothers and sisters to educate and it seemed wise for me to go into business.” Bill was eager to groom his eldest son as the surrogate father who would care for Eliza during his longer absences.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · John
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Never a great believer in book learning, Bill probably derided a college degree as a costly indulgence at a time when people didn’t equate it with enhanced income. Young men on the make were more likely to attend so-called business colleges or to take correspondence courses to supplement their education. Following his father’s suggestion, John paid forty dollars for a three-month course of study at E. G. Folsom’s Commercial College, a chain college with branches in seven cities. The Cleveland branch occupied the top floor of the Rouse Building, the town’s premier office building, which overlooked the Public Square. It taught double-entry bookkeeping, clear penmanship, and the essentials of banking, exchange, and commercial law—the sort of purposeful courses that appealed to John. By the time his studies ended in the summer of 1855, he had turned sixteen and was ready to flee the traumas of his family life by focusing his energies on a promising business situation.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Cleveland · Public Square · E. G. Folsom · Commercial College · Rouse Building · John
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Perhaps no job search in American history has been so mythologized as that begun by sixteen-year-old John D. Rockefeller in the sweltering Cleveland of August 1855. Although he was a rural boy, his family hadn’t been full-time farmers, and this must have made it easier for him to escape from his small-town, agricultural past and enter the new market economy. Though times were tough, the boy set out with no modest ambition as he pored over the city directory, identifying those establishments with high credit ratings. Already endowed with instinctive respect for big business, he knew exactly what he wanted. “I went to the railroads, to the banks, to the wholesale merchants,” he later said. “I did not go to any small establishments. I did not guess what it would be, but I was after something big.” Most of the businesses he visited lay in a bustling area known as the Flats, where the Cuyahoga River twisted through a clanging, roaring landscape of lumber mills, iron foundries, warehouses, and shipyards before emptying into Lake Erie, which was crowded with side-wheel steamboats and schooners. His quest had a touch of callow grandiosity. At each firm, he asked to speak to the top man—who was usually unavailable—then got straight to the point with an assistant: “I understand bookkeeping, and I’d like to get work.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland · Cuyahoga River · Lake Erie
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Despite incessant disappointment, he doggedly pursued a position. Each morning, he left his boardinghouse at eight o’clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his rounds of appointed firms. This grimly determined trek went on each day—six days a week for six consecutive weeks—until late in the afternoon. The streets were so hot and hard that he grew footsore from pacing them. His perseverance surely owed something to his desire to end his reliance upon his fickle father. At one point, Bill suggested that if John didn’t find work he might have to return to the country; the thought of such dependence upon his father made “a cold chill” run down his spine, Rockefeller later said. Because he approached his job hunt devoid of any doubt or self-pity, he could stare down all discouragement. “I was working every day at my business—the business of looking for work. I put in my full time at this every day.” He was a confirmed exponent of positive thinking.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · John
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With almost thirty thousand inhabitants, Cleveland was a boomtown that would have thrilled any young man avid for business experience. It had drawn many transplants from New England who had brought along the Puritan mores and Yankee trading culture of their old hometowns. While the streets were largely unpaved and the town lacked a sewage system, Cleveland was expanding rapidly, with immigrants pouring in from Germany and England as well as the eastern seaboard. The plenty of the Midwest passed through this commercial crossroads of the Western Reserve: coal from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, iron ore from around Lake Superior, salt from Michigan, grain and corn from the plains states. As a port on Lake Erie and the Ohio Canal, Cleveland was a natural hub for transportation networks. When the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad arrived in 1851, it created excellent opportunities for transport by both water and rail, and nobody would more brilliantly exploit these options than John D. Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland · Lake Erie · Lake Superior · England · Midwest · New England · Pennsylvania · West Virginia · Germany · Michigan · Columbus · Western Reserve · Ohio Canal · Cincinnati Railroad
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For all the thriving waterfront commerce, the job prospects were momentarily bleak. “No one wanted a boy, and very few showed any overwhelming anxiety to talk with me on the subject,” said Rockefeller. When he exhausted his list, he simply started over from the top and visited several firms two or three times. Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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Then, on the morning of September 26, 1855, he walked into the offices of Hewitt and Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers on Merwin Street. He was interviewed by Henry B. Tuttle, the junior partner, who needed help with the books and asked him to return after lunch. Ecstatic, Rockefeller walked with restraint from the office, but when he got downstairs and rounded the corner, he skipped down the street with pure joy. Even as an elderly man, he saw the moment as endowed with high drama: “All my future seemed to hinge on that day; and I often tremble when I ask myself the question: ‘What if I had not got the job?’ ” In a “fever of anxiety,” Rockefeller waited until the noonday meal was over, then returned to the office, where he was interviewed by senior partner Isaac L. Hewitt. Owner of a good deal of Cleveland real estate and a founder of the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, Hewitt must have seemed a mighty capitalist indeed. After scrutinizing the boy’s penmanship, he declared, “We’ll give you a chance.” They were evidently in urgent need of an assistant bookkeeper, since they told Rockefeller to hang up his coat and go straight to work, without any mention of wages. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for an adolescent to serve an unpaid apprenticeship, and it was three months before John received his first humble, retroactive pay. For the rest of his life, he would honor September 26 as “Job Day” and celebrate it with more genuine brio than his birthday. One is tempted to say that his real life began on that day, that he was born again in business as he would be in the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. All the latent dynamism that had been dormant during his country youth would now quicken into robust, startling life in the business world. He was finally liberated from Big Bill, the endless flight from town to town, the whole crazy upside-down world of his boyhood.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Isaac L. Hewitt · Henry B. Tuttle · Hewitt and Tuttle · Erie Street Baptist Mission Church · Cleveland · Merwin Street · Cleveland Iron Mining Company · John
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Poised on a high stool, bent over musty ledger books at Hewitt and Tuttle, the new clerk could gaze from the window and watch the busy wharves or canal barges drifting by on the Cuyahoga River a block away. Though his day began at dawn, in an office lit dimly by whale-oil lamps, this mercantile world never struck him as arid or boring but “was delightful to me—all the method and system of the office.” Work enchanted him, work liberated him, work supplied him with a new identity. “My duties were vastly more interesting than those of an office boy in a large house today,” he later said. The mature Rockefeller liked to dub himself “just a man of figures,” and he found nothing dry or soporific about the tall ledgers. Having helped Eliza keep the books, he enjoyed a head start. “As I began my life as a bookkeeper, I learned to have great respect for figures and facts, no matter how small they were.… I had a passion for detail which afterward I was forced to strive to modify.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Hewitt and Tuttle · Cuyahoga River
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Business historians and sociologists have stressed the centrality of accounting to capitalist enterprise. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber identified “rational bookkeeping” as integral to capitalism’s spirit and organization. For Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism “turns the unit of money into a tool of rational cost-profit calculations, of which the towering monument is double-entry bookkeeping.” It thus seems fitting that John D. Rockefeller, the archetypal capitalist, betrayed a special affinity for accounting and an almost mystic faith in numbers. For Rockefeller, ledgers were sacred books that guided decisions and saved one from fallible emotion. They gauged performance, exposed fraud, and ferreted out hidden inefficiencies. In an imprecise world, they rooted things in a solid empirical reality. As he chided slipshod rivals, “Many of the brightest kept their books in such a way that they did not actually know when they were making money on a certain operation and when they were losing.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Max Weber · Protestant Ethic · Joseph Schumpeter
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When Hewitt and Tuttle assigned Rockefeller to pay the bills, he went at this task with an undisguised zeal, a precocious virtuosity, and “attended [to it] with more responsibility than the spending of my own funds.” He closely reviewed the bills, confirming the validity of each item and carefully adding up the totals. He pounced on errors of even a few cents and reacted with scornful amazement when the boss next door handed his clerk a lengthy, unexamined plumbing bill and blithely said, “Please pay this bill.” Rockefeller was appalled by such cavalier indifference, having just caught the same firm in an overcharge of several cents. One suspects that this stickler for detail taught Hewitt and Tuttle a thing or two about economy. “I recall that there was one captain who was always putting in claims for damages to shipments and I decided to investigate. I examined all the invoices, bills of lading and other documents and found this captain had presented entirely unwarranted claims. He never did it again.” In all probability, the boy’s orderly nature reflected a need to govern potentially unruly emotions, an exaggerated reaction to his disorderly father and helter-skelter childhood.
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Besides writing letters, keeping books, and paying bills, young Rockefeller also served as a one-man collection agency for Hewitt’s rental properties. Although patient and polite, he displayed a bulldog tenacity that took people by surprise. Sitting outside in his buggy, pale and patient as an undertaker, he would wait until the debtor capitulated. He dunned people as if his life depended upon it, an experience apparently laced with considerable anxiety. “How many times I have dreamed now and then up to recent years that I was trying to collect those bills!” he marveled fifty years later. “I would wake up exclaiming: ‘I can’t collect So-and-So’s account!’ ” One explanation for his anxiety is that his flight from his distressing family life was still tenuous, and failure at work would mean reverting to reliance on his father. Another explanation is that while he was persistent, he was also extremely slow; as at school, some people thought him a rather dim-witted dolt who would never rise in the world, and he had to prove himself to naysayers.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Isaac L. Hewitt
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However modest an operation, Hewitt and Tuttle was an excellent training ground for an aspiring young businessman, for it exposed Rockefeller to a broad commercial universe. Before the Civil War, most businesses still confined themselves to a single service or product. Hewitt and Tuttle, in contrast, traded a wide array of commodities on commission. Though it had started out dealing in foodstuffs, it had pioneered in importing iron ore from Lake Superior three years before Rockefeller was hired. The firm relied upon the railroad and the telegraph, the two technologies then revolutionizing the American economy. As Rockefeller remarked, “My eyes were opened to the business of transportation”—no small thing, given Standard Oil’s subsequent controversial relations with the railroads. Even a simple consignment of Vermont marble to Cleveland required complex calculations of the relative costs of railroad, canal, and lake transportation. “The cost of losses or damage had to be somehow fixed between these three different carriers, and it taxed all the ingenuity of a boy of 17 to work out this problem to the satisfaction of all concerned, including my employers.” No business experience was ever wasted upon Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Hewitt and Tuttle · Cleveland · Lake Superior · Vermont · Civil War
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On the last day of 1855, Hewitt handed Rockefeller $50 for three months of work, or slightly more than 50 cents a day. Effective immediately, Hewitt announced, the assistant bookkeeper would have his wages boosted sharply to $25 a month or $300 per year. Oddly, Rockefeller felt guilty about the raise: “I felt like a criminal.” Again, one has a hunch that he was jubilant but feared, out of religious scruples, his own greed. Accumulating money was one thing, Rockefeller knew, but outwardly coveting it was another.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Isaac L. Hewitt
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In many ways, John D. Rockefeller exemplified the enterprising young businessman of his era. Thrifty, punctual, industrious, he was a fervent adherent of the gospel of success. He could have been the hero of any of the 119 inspirational tracts soon to be penned by Horatio Alger, Jr., books that bore such sonorous titles as Strive and Succeed, Luck and Pluck, Brave and Bold, and Bound to Rise. This last title, in fact, echoed Rockefeller’s ecstatic boast to an older businessman one day: “I am bound to be rich—bound to be rich—BOUND TO BE RICH!” He was said to have punctuated this refrain by several smart, emphatic whacks on his companion’s knee. And John D. didn’t become demonstrative about too many topics.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Horatio Alger · Bound to Rise
EPUB paragraph 35 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
Though Rockefeller steadfastly denied these stories of his boyhood obsession with money, he related the following story of his time at Hewitt and Tuttle:
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I was a young man when I got my first look at a banknote of any size. I was clerking at the time down on the Flats here. One day my employer received a note from a down-State bank for $4,000. He showed it to me in the course of the day’s business, and then put it in the safe. As soon as he was gone I unlocked the safe, and taking out that note, stared at it with open eyes and mouth, and then replaced it and double-locked the safe. It seemed like an awfully large sum to me, an unheard of amount, and many times during the day did I open that safe to gaze longingly at the note.
Names:
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In this story, one can almost feel the erotic charge that the banknote aroused in the boy, the way it cast a hypnotic trance over him. One is reminded of how Big Bill bundled his bills, stored them away, then enjoyed peeking at his hidden treasure. This lusting after money is the more striking in a phlegmatic young man who claimed never to struggle with disruptive impulses. “I never had a craving for tobacco, or tea and coffee,” he once stated flatly. “I never had a craving for anything.”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller
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If motivated by greed more than he ever cared to admit, Rockefeller also derived a glandular pleasure from work and never found it cheerless drudgery. In fact, the business world entranced him as a fount of inexhaustible wonders. “It is by no means for money alone that these active-minded men labor—they are engaged in a fascinating occupation,” he wrote in his memoirs, published in 1908–1909. “The zest of the work is maintained by something better than the mere accumulation of money.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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Because American culture encouraged—nay, glorified—acquisitive behavior, there was always the possibility that it might be taken to extremes and people would end up enslaved by their greed. As a result, children were taught to monitor and supervise their behavior. In his posthumously published Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin describes how he drew up a little moral ledger that allowed him, at a glance, to track his virtues and vices every day. Many people in the mid–nineteenth century kept such journals to enforce thrift and also objectify their moral performance. Adolescents kept diaries larded with pep talks, exhortations, inspirations, and warnings. Andrew Carnegie wrote hortatory memos to himself, while William C. Whitney kept a small notebook of little homilies. A contradictory impulse was at work: People were spurring themselves to excel but also trying to curb their insatiable appetites in the new competitive economy.
Names: Andrew Carnegie · Benjamin Franklin · William C. Whitney
EPUB paragraph 40 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
John D. Rockefeller took such internal monitoring to an advanced stage. Like a good Puritan, he scrutinized his daily activities and regulated his desires, hoping to banish spontaneity and unpredictability from his life. Whenever his ambition was about to devour him, his conscience urged restraint. Since he worked a long day at Hewitt and Tuttle, business threatened to become an overwhelming compulsion. Starting work each day at 6:30 A.M., he brought a box lunch to the office and often returned after dinner, staying late. One day he decided to throttle this obsession. “I have this day covenanted with myself not to be seen in [the office] after 10 o’clock P.M. within 30 days,” he wrote to himself. It is telling that the young man made such a pledge to himself and equally revealing that he found it impossible to obey.
EPUB paragraph 41 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
No less than his business life, Rockefeller’s private life was ruled by bookkeeping entries. Since he found numbers so clean and soothing in their simplicity, he applied the business principles of Hewitt and Tuttle to his own personal economy. When he started working in September 1855, he paid a dime for a small red book, anointed Ledger A, in which he minutely recorded his receipts and expenditures. Many of his young contemporaries kept such record books but seldom with such exacting care. For the remainder of his life, Rockefeller treated Ledger A as his most sacred relic. Producing it before Bible classes more than fifty years later, he became almost tearful and trembled as he thumbed its pages, so potent were the emotions it evoked. At a Bible class of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in 1897, a deeply moved Rockefeller held the book aloft and intoned, “I haven’t seen this book for twenty-five years. You couldn’t get it from me for all the modern ledgers in New York and what they all would bring in.” The book rested in a safety-deposit vault, like some priceless heirloom.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Fifth Avenue Baptist Church · Hewitt and Tuttle · New York · Ledger A
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