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Later on, Rockefeller was peculiarly reluctant to divulge to his children details of his courtship, referring to the delicacy of the situation. One gathers that another man, more practiced in the arts of love, was after Laura and that by March 1864 John feared his rival might best him. The time had come to force the situation. As one person who heard the story secondhand remembered, “John D. wanted to marry her, so he went to her one day and proposed in a business-like way, just like he would make a business proposition. She accepted him in the same business-like way.” One imagines the two of them smiling shyly with relief. Shortly afterward, the ascetic Rockefeller did something wholly out of character, spending a shocking $118 for a diamond engagement ring. The splurge, one suspects, had a point: He wished to telegraph to the Spelmans that he was no longer a callow country boy but a rising young businessman who could support them in a style to which they were accustomed.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura · John
EPUB paragraph 66 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
After a discreet, six-month engagement, on September 8, 1864, hard on the heels of Sherman’s march into Atlanta, John D. Rockefeller, twenty-five, married Laura Celestia Spelman, twenty-four, in the living room of the Spelman home on Huron Street. It was a small, private affair attended only by the two families. Like many things in Rockefeller’s life, it was carried out in secrecy, and the Cleveland papers printed no notice of it—very odd given the Spelmans’ prominence. It is unlikely that Big Bill attended, and John might have worried that his absence would spark curiosity about him. Having established his financial wherewithal, Rockefeller now reverted to type and spent just $15.75 on the wedding ring, which was duly recorded in Ledger B under the rubric “Sundry Expenses.” In a denominational compromise, the pastors from Laura’s Plymouth Congregational Church and John’s Erie Street Baptist Mission Church jointly officiated, though Laura henceforth switched her allegiance to the Baptists.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Spelman Seminary · Erie Street Baptist Mission Church · Cleveland · Atlanta · Laura · Sherman · Huron Street · Ledger B · Plymouth Congregational Church · John
EPUB paragraph 67 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Refusing to deviate from routine, John worked the morning of his wedding day, visiting both his downtown office and the cooperage at the refinery. He had arranged a special luncheon for twenty-six employees, without disclosing at first the reason for the celebration. When the jovial bridegroom left for the wedding, he told the foreman facetiously, “Treat them well, but see that they work.” With the Swiss precision that governed his life, Rockefeller allotted exactly one month—September 8 to October 8, 1864—for a honeymoon that traced a conventional itinerary. The newlyweds started off at Niagara Falls, followed by a stay at the Saint Lawrence Hall Hotel in Montreal and the Summit House in Mount Washington, New Hampshire. On the way home, they stopped off at Oread Collegiate Institute and met two new teachers, Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles, who would play important roles in their future.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Sophia B. Packard · Harriet E. Giles · Oread Collegiate Institute · Niagara Falls · Montreal · Saint Lawrence Hall Hotel · Summit House · Mount Washington · New Hampshire · John
EPUB paragraph 68 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Prior to his honeymoon, Rockefeller’s travels had been limited, and the provincial young man in the tall silk hat exhibited voracious curiosity throughout the trip. While touring Niagara Falls, he peppered the guide with so many questions that the man grew distracted, ran the buggy into a ditch, and smashed a wheel. At another point, they met an old man in the roadway whom John so sedulously drained of local lore that the latter finally pleaded with weary resignation, “For God’s sake if you will go with me over to that barn yonder, I will start and tell you everything I ever knew.” This was the same monotonously inquisitive young man who was known as “the Sponge” in the Oil Regions.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Oil Regions · Niagara Falls · John
EPUB paragraph 69 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
For the first six months of their marriage, John and Laura lived with Eliza at 33 Cheshire Street; then they moved into a dignified, two-story brick house at 29 Cheshire Street. Surrounded by a white picket fence, the house had tall, graceful windows but was disfigured by an ugly portico. Even though Rockefeller now operated and partially owned the largest refinery in Cleveland, he and Laura lived frugally without house servants. Rockefeller always cherished the chaste simplicity of this early period and preserved their first set of dishes, which stirred him to wistful reflections in later years. Thus, by the end of the Civil War, John D. Rockefeller had established the foundations of his personal and professional life and was set to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities beckoning him in postwar America. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Cleveland · Cheshire Street · United States · Laura · Civil War · John
EPUB paragraph 70 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
The rakish young Henry Morrison Flagler. (Courtesy of the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum)
Names: Henry M. Flagler · Museum
EPUB paragraph 1 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
he period after the Civil War was the most fertile in American history for schemers and dreamers, sharp-elbowed men and fast-talking hucksters, charlatans and swindlers. A perfect mania for patents and inventions swept America, as everybody tinkered with some new contrivance. It was a time of bombastic rhetoric and outsize dreams. As always during a protracted war, millions of people postponed their lives until the ghastly bloodshed was over, then they turned to private life with newfound zeal. The sudden wealth of young businessmen such as Rockefeller fed envy among returning soldiers, who wished to emulate their good fortune. The money fever was, in part, the reaction to a war that had appealed to both the worst and the best in the national character, for Lincoln’s high-minded crusade had often been debased by profiteering contractors operating behind patriotic façades. For many in the North, the high drama of preserving the union and emancipating the slaves had exhausted their capacity for altruism, leaving a residual contagion of greed.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · United States · Lincoln · North · Civil War
EPUB paragraph 2 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
As the banker Thomas Mellon observed of these years of unfettered growth,
Names: Thomas Mellon
EPUB paragraph 3 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
It was such a period as seldom occurs, and hardly ever more than once in anyone’s lifetime. The period between 1863 and 1873 was one in which it was easy to grow rich. There was a steady increase in the value of property and commodities, and an active market all the time. One had only to buy anything and wait, to sell at a profit; sometimes, as in real estate for instance, at a very large profit in a short time.
Names:
EPUB paragraph 4 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
A new cult of opportunity sprang up, producing a generation of business leaders for whom work was the greatest adventure life afforded. As Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote in The Gilded Age, “To the young American … the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open; there is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.” Or as one character in William Dean Howells’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham phrased it, “There’s no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age.” Self-made businessmen were the new demigods, and a copious self-help literature sermonized that young men who worked hard and saved could enter the millionaires’ pantheon. This new industrial boom downgraded the power of the old gentry and rural elites, substituting a new species of self-made men: economic marauders too busy making money to be overly concerned with tradition. The era of the Great Barbecue—the felicitous name coined by literary historian Vernon Parrington—was dominated by arrogant, enterprising men in railroads, shipping, and stock manipulation: Jay Cooke, Commodore Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, Jim Fisk, and many others. The age was presided over by an inept president, General Ulysses S. Grant, a small-town businessman before the war, who was enamored of the rich, no matter how frequently they tried to fleece him.
Names: Jay Gould · Cornelius Vanderbilt · Mark Twain · Ulysses S. Grant · William Dean Howells · Charles Dudley Warner · Jay Cooke · Daniel Drew · Jim Fisk · Vernon Parrington · The Rise of Silas Lapham · Gilded Age
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
The public was divided about these colossal developments. The appetite for gain fostered new fortunes and built up the industrial infrastructure, setting the stage for American industrial preeminence, but it also unsettled people with a sense of something frightening, gigantic, and poorly understood that was drastically transforming their innocent country. The Civil War invited people to repudiate their pasts as they staked out new lives. As Grant phrased it in his memoirs, “The war begot a spirit of independence and enterprise. The feeling now is, that a youth must cut loose from his old surroundings to enable him to get up in the world.” As people took unethical shortcuts to success, the universal race for riches threatened to overthrow existing moral systems and subvert the authority of church and state.
EPUB paragraph 6 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
The triumph of the North meant the ascendancy of urbanization, immigration, industrial capitalism, and wage labor over an agrarian southern economy doomed to stagnate for decades. The war markedly accelerated the timetable of economic development, promoting the growth of factories, mills, and railroads. By stimulating technological innovation and standardized products, it ushered in a more regimented economy. The world of small farmers and businessmen began to fade, upstaged by a gargantuan new world of mass consumption and production. As railroad expansion gained momentum, populating the West and culminating in completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, it spawned an accompanying mania in land deals, stock promotions, and mining developments. People rushed to exploit millions of acres of natural resources that could be economically brought to market for the first time.
EPUB paragraph 7 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
In short, by the end of the Civil War, the preconditions existed for an industrial economy of spectacular new proportions. Before the war, the federal government had only twenty thousand employees and shied away from attempts to regulate business. Unlike Europe, America had no tradition of political absolutism or ecclesiastic privilege to quench entrepreneurial spirits, and the weak, fragmented political system gave businessmen room to flourish. At the same time, America had the legal and administrative apparatus necessary to support modern industry. There was respect for private property and contracts; people could get limited corporate charters or file for bankruptcy; and bank credit, while not yet plentiful, was everywhere available in a highly fragmented banking system. In time, the government redefined the rules of the capitalist game to tame trusts and preserve competition, but as John D. Rockefeller set about building his fortune, the absence of clear-cut rules probably aided, at first, the creative vigor of the new industrial economy.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · United States · Europe · Civil War
EPUB paragraph 8 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
Perhaps no industry so beguiled the Civil War veterans with promises of overnight wealth than the oil industry. In astonishing numbers, a ragtag group of demobilized soldiers, many still in uniform and carrying knapsacks and rifles, migrated to northwest Pennsylvania. The potential money to be made was irresistible, whether in drilling or in auxiliary services; people could charge two or three times as much as they dared to ask in the city. Ida Tarbell speculated that “this little corner of Pennsylvania absorbed a larger portion of men probably than any other spot in the United States. There were lieutenants and captains and majors—even generals—scattered all over the field.” They brought with them a military sense of organization and a bellicose competitive spirit, but they were eager for quick killings and betrayed little sense of how to fashion a stable, lasting business, providing an opening for the organization-minded Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · United States · Pennsylvania · Civil War
EPUB paragraph 9 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
The war had stimulated growth in the use of kerosene by cutting off the supply of southern turpentine, which had yielded a rival illuminant called camphene. The war had also disrupted the whaling industry and led to a doubling of whale-oil prices. Moving into the vacuum, kerosene emerged as an economic staple and was primed for a furious postwar boom. This burning fluid extended the day in cities and removed much of the lonely darkness from rural life. The petroleum industry also furnished lubricants to grease the wheels of heavy industry. Though the world oil industry was squeezed into western Pennsylvania, the repercussions were felt everywhere. In 1865, Congressman James Garfield alluded to the oil craze in a letter to a former staff officer: “I have conversed on the general question of oil with a number of members who are in the business, for you know the fever has assailed Congress in no mild form.… Oil, not cotton, is King now, in the world of commerce.” Soon, John D. Rockefeller would reign as the undisputed king of that world.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Pennsylvania · King · James Garfield
EPUB paragraph 10 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
In many ways, Rockefeller seemed a finely tuned instrument of the zeitgeist, the purest embodiment of the dynamic, acquisitive spirit of the postwar era. Like other Gilded Age moguls, he was shaped by his faith in economic progress, the beneficial application of science to industry, and America’s destiny as an economic leader. He steeled himself to persevere, subordinating his every impulse to the profit motive, working to master unruly emotions and striving for an almost Buddhist detachment from his own appetites and passions. “I had a bad temper,” Rockefeller said. “I think it might be called an ugly temper when too far provoked.” So he trained himself to control this temper and tried never to be guided by ego or pique.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · United States · Gilded Age
EPUB paragraph 11 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
By the end of the Civil War, the pale, trim twenty-six-year-old with the reddish gold hair and side-whiskers carried himself like a man of importance. No sooner had he formed a new firm with Sam Andrews than he was bent on expanding it. In December 1865, he and Andrews inaugurated a second refinery, the Standard Works, with brother William appointed its nominal head. The combined Excelsior and Standard Works confirmed Rockefeller as the leading Cleveland refiner at a time when the city ranked among the top refining centers. Photos of his first refineries show an unprepossessing cluster of buildings, scarcely bigger than sheds, spaced irregularly across a hillside. With hands clasped behind his back, Rockefeller paced these works, poking his head in everywhere, a perfectionist alert to the tiniest details. When he saw somebody attending to a neglected, unswept corner, he smiled and said, “That’s right, eternal vigilance!”For foreman, he recruited a man named Ambrose McGregor who was, in Rockefeller’s description, “a precise, exacting man, honest as the day but perhaps not given to cultivating people.” An imposing, bewhiskered figure, McGregor won Rockefeller’s absolute trust on all technical matters. Since the refineries stood some distance from downtown, Rockefeller and McGregor often lunched at the boardinghouse of a Mrs. Jones; the two men in their oil-soaked boots regularly offended the nostrils of other diners and were exiled to the porch.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Standard Oil · Cleveland · Ambrose McGregor · McGregor · Jones · Standard Works · Excelsior · Civil War · Uncle William
EPUB paragraph 12 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
As a self-made man in a new industry, Rockefeller wasn’t stultified by precedent or tradition, which made it easier for him to innovate. He continued to value autonomy from outside suppliers. At first, he had paid small coopers up to $2.50 for white oak barrels before he showed, in an early demonstration of economies of scale, that he could manufacture dry, tight casks more cheaply himself; soon his firm made thousands of blue-painted barrels daily for less than a dollar per barrel. Other Cleveland coopers bought and shipped green timber to their shops, whereas Rockefeller had the oak sawed in the woods then dried in kilns, reducing its weight and slicing transportation costs in half. And he continually extended the market for petroleum by-products, selling benzine, paraffin, and petroleum jelly in addition to kerosene.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland
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In this early period, Rockefeller was a chronic worrier who labored under a great deal of self-imposed stress. Though not versed in the scientific side of refining, he often exercised a direct managerial role in the plant. With fluctuating market conditions, he sometimes needed to send shipments to New York with great dispatch and personally rushed down to the railroad tracks to motivate his freight handlers. “I shall never forget how hungry I was in those days. I stayed out of doors day and night; I ran up and down the tops of freight cars when necessary; I hurried up the boys.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · New York
EPUB paragraph 14 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
At the time, refiners were tormented by fears that the vapors might catch fire, sparking an uncontrollable conflagration. Fire had already taken many lives in the industry—Edwin Drake’s well, for example, was destroyed by fire in the autumn of 1859. During the Civil War, there were so many spectacularly destructive blazes along Oil Creek that producers posted signs warning, “Smokers Will Be Shot.” Mark Hanna, who later managed President McKinley’s campaign, recalled how one morning in 1867 he woke up and discovered that his Cleveland refinery had burned to the ground, wiping out his investment, and such fears kept refiners on tenterhooks around the clock. “I was always ready, night and day, for a fire alarm from the direction of our works,” said Rockefeller. “Then proceeded a dark cloud of smoke from the area, and then we dashed madly to the scene of the action. So we kept ourselves like the firemen, with their horses and hose carts always ready for immediate action.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mark Hanna · William McKinley · Edwin Drake · Cleveland · Oil Creek · Civil War
EPUB paragraph 15 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
Such was the perpetual fire menace posed by the new industry that refineries were soon banned within the Cleveland city limits, hastening the growth of Kingsbury Run. In those years, oil tanks weren’t hemmed in earthen banks as they later were, so if a fire started it quickly engulfed all neighboring tanks in a flaming inferno. Before the automobile, nobody knew what to do with the light fraction of crude oil known as gasoline, and many refiners, under cover of dark, let this waste product run into the river. “We used to burn it for fuel in distilling the oil,” said Rockefeller, “and thousands and hundreds of thousands of barrels of it floated down the creeks and rivers, and the ground was saturated with it, in the constant effort to get rid of it.” The noxious runoff made the Cuyahoga River so flammable that if steamboat captains shoveled glowing coals overboard, the water erupted in flames. Each time a black cloud billowed up in the sky, people assumed another refinery had exploded, and kerosene prices soared. At least in retrospect, Rockefeller sounded philosophic about this omnipresent danger. “In those days, when the fire bell rang, we would all go to the refinery and help put it out. When the fire was burning I would have my pencil out, making plans for the rebuilding of our works.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland · Cuyahoga River · Kingsbury Run
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Even the dread of fire paled beside recurrent worries that the Pennsylvania oil wells would dry up, with no substitute in sight. As Rockefeller noted, “It was here today and there tomorrow, and none of us knew with any certainty about the continuance of the supply, without which these investments were valueless.”Already by the late 1860s, stern prophecies were issued about the industry’s impending demise. There were two types of oilmen: those who thought the sudden boom an insubstantial mirage and who cashed in their profits as soon as possible; and those, like Rockefeller, who saw petroleum as the basis of an enduring economic revolution. During the salutary nightly sermons he gave himself in bed, Rockefeller often meditated on the transience of earthly wealth, especially oil, and admonished himself, “You’ve got a fair fortune. You have a good property—now. But suppose the oil fields gave out!” Yet the future of the oil business became an article of religious faith for him, as did the feeling that the Lord had blessed him and his enterprise. In late 1867, several days before Christmas, he just missed a train that ended up in a terrible wreck, killing many passengers, and Rockefeller at once wrote to Cettie, “I do (and did when I learned that the first train left) regard the thing as the Providence of God.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Providence · Pennsylvania
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Not yet the bête noire of oil producers, Rockefeller frequently donned his shabby oil suit and traveled to Franklin, Pennsylvania, where he kept an office that purchased oil, saving on the cost of middlemen. The oil fever was so infectious in the Oil Regions that these trips always silenced any fugitive doubts he might have entertained about the industry’s survival. As one traveler reported after visiting Oil Creek in 1866, “Men think of oil, talk of oil, dream of oil, the smell and taste of oil predominate in all they eat and drink.” These trips energized Rockefeller, who returned to Cleveland with renewed faith. As a friend recalled, “When he came back he would always have great tales to tell, and his eyes would snap as he would speak of his desires to succeed.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland · Oil Creek · Oil Regions · Franklin · Pennsylvania
EPUB paragraph 18 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
In the 1860s, nobody knew if significant oil deposits existed outside the rugged terrain of northwest Pennsylvania, so the industry had immediately taken on global proportions. Within a year of Drake’s discovery, his backers were marketing oil in London and Paris, and Europe emerged rapidly as the foremost market for American kerosene, importing hundreds of thousands of barrels yearly during the Civil War. Perhaps no other American industry had such an export outlook from its inception. By 1866, fully two-thirds of Cleveland kerosene was flowing overseas, most of it routed through New York, which became the export entrepôt for oil. At once, Rockefeller saw that he had to look beyond American shores to soak up excess production: “It seemed absolutely necessary to extend the market for oil by exporting to foreign countries, which required a large and most difficult development.” To accomplish this, he dispatched brother William to New York City in 1866 to launch the firm of Rockefeller and Company, which would oversee the exports of their Cleveland refineries.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edwin Drake · Cleveland · New York City · New York · Paris · London · Europe · Pennsylvania · Civil War · Uncle William
EPUB paragraph 19 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
If William wasn’t much younger than John—“My brother is one year, one month and eight days younger than I am,” John specified with comic exactitude—he certainly had a younger brother’s deference and mentality. Already settled by this time, William had gotten married in May 1864 to Almira (“Mira”) Geraldine Goodsell, who came from a well-heeled Cleveland family with Yankee antecedents. The photos of William in his early twenties reveal a young man with thick muttonchop whiskers, clear eyes, and a broad, smooth forehead who looks more placid and less driven than his elder brother. Throughout their lives, despite their antithetical temperaments—William was bluff and friendly and freer than John in morals and manners—the brothers remained warm companions and close colleagues. William was a natural salesman who easily charmed people. Even in Pennsylvania, he was a popular figure who swapped tales with oil producers while John held himself aloof. “William always judges everything by intuition and instinct,” said John, tacitly contrasting his brother with himself. “He doesn’t act on analysis.” But those instincts were sound, and, while William took things seriously, he didn’t puff them up into grand moral crusades the way his brother did.
Names: Almira Geraldine Goodsell Rockefeller · Cleveland · Pennsylvania · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 20 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
As a novice businessman, William had been precocious like his brother. After joining John as a bookkeeper at Hewitt and Tuttle, he was spirited away by a local miller and ended up at a produce-commission house, making partner after just one year. By age twenty, he was already earning $1,000 a year—“much more than I got,” noted John wryly—and winning his older brother’s confidence. “My brother was a young, active and efficient, and successful, businessman.” The quality that most endeared William to John was sheer dependability. In later years, John repeated the anecdote of how his brother, as a young bookkeeper, awoke in the night and realized that he had made an error in a bill of lading. He was so disturbed that he couldn’t wait till morning to correct it and marched down to the lakefront warehouse during the night so that the ship could sail on time with proper paperwork. In September 1865, William left the produce house of Hughes, Davis and Rockefeller to join his brother’s oil-refining business, and, when the Standard Works was organized that December, it bore the name of William Rockefeller and Company.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Rockefeller · Standard Oil · Hewitt and Tuttle · Hughes · Davis · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 21 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
Before long, John D. Rockefeller was cast by critics as the omnipotent wizard of the oil market, setting prices as the whim seized him, but by sending William to New York he acknowledged that the export market decisively influenced oil prices. Whenever news of a Pennsylvania gusher reached New York, the French and German buyers, anticipating lower prices, simply stopped buying, and this made them the ultimate arbiters of price. “They sat there like a lot of vultures,” said Rockefeller. “They wouldn’t buy until the price of refined had fallen very low on account of the flood of crude oil in the market.” One of William’s tasks in New York was to apprise the firm’s buyers in the Oil Regions of sudden drops in export prices so that they could temporarily curtail crude-oil purchases.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · New York · Oil Regions · Pennsylvania · Uncle William
EPUB paragraph 22 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
When William arrived in New York, he set up unadorned offices at 181 Pearl Street, and the proximity to Wall Street was critical. To implement their audacious schemes, the Rockefellers needed massive capital but encountered two problems that seemed insuperable. The elite Wall Street bankers preferred to finance railroads and government and regarded oil refining as a risky, untested business, nothing short of outright gambling. Mindful of the extreme fire hazards and the specter of the oil running dry, only a few intrepid souls dared to wager on it. At the same time, John D.’s insatiable need for money outstripped the meager resources of Cleveland banks, forcing him to widen his search to New York, where he could secure credit at more advantageous rates. “And my dear brother, William, being located in the metropolis, where the opportunities were better for securing money, had upon him this financial burden, and he showed marked ability in keeping a steady nerve and presenting our case very well to the bankers.” As a result of John’s foresight in assigning him to New York, William’s career became closely intertwined with that of Wall Street—to an uncomfortable extent, from John’s later perspective.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Rockefeller family · Cleveland · New York · Pearl Street · Wall Street · Uncle William · John
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As a gray eminence of the business world in his retirement, John D. betrayed a deep suspicion of financiers, boasted that he never borrowed, and was celebrated for his financial conservatism. Yet at this stage of his career, he turned inescapably to bankers. “One can hardly recognize how difficult it was to get capital for active business enterprises at that time,” he admitted. If Rockefeller ever came close to groveling, it was in his eternal appeals to bankers. “In the beginning we had to go to the banks—almost on our knees—to get money and credit.” When dealing with the banks, he vacillated between caution and daring: He often went to bed worrying how he would repay his large volume of loans, then awoke in the morning, refreshed by a night’s sleep and determined to borrow even more.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
EPUB paragraph 24 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
The Civil War introduced a new greenback currency and national banking system that generously stoked the postwar economy with credit. Many people grew rich with borrowed funds, creating a false flush of prosperity. Rockefeller was very much a product of this new credit-based society and owed a great deal to Truman Handy and other Cleveland bankers who identified him as a young businessman of exceptional promise. He cleverly projected the image of a rising star whom bankers spurned at their peril. One day, he ran into a banker, William Otis, who had allowed Rockefeller to borrow up to his credit limit; some directors were now expressing misgivings. Could Rockefeller stop by to discuss the loans? “I shall be very glad to demonstrate the strength of my credit at any time,” replied Rockefeller. “Next week I shall need more money. I would like to give my business to your bank. Soon I shall have a great deal of money to invest.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland · William Otis · Truman Handy · Civil War
EPUB paragraph 25 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
Obliging but never fawning, he knew how to soothe jittery creditors, and one of his cardinal rules was never to seem too eager to borrow. With amusement, he recalled how one day he was walking down the street, trying to figure out how to find an urgently needed $15,000 loan, when a local banker pulled up in a buggy and serendipitously asked, “Do you think you could use $50,000, Mr. Rockefeller?” Rockefeller, gifted with more than a touch of his father’s showmanship, studied the man’s face for a long time then drawled, “Well-l-l, can you give me twenty-four hours to think it over?” By stalling, Rockefeller believed, he pinned down the deal on the most favorable terms.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
EPUB paragraph 26 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c06_r1.htm
Aside from his reputation for exemplary character, especially among Baptist business executives, Rockefeller had several other traits that inspired passionate allegiance from bankers. He was a stickler for the truth in presenting facts, never fudged or equivocated in discussing problems, and promptly repaid loans. At numerous points in his early career, he was rescued by bankers from crises that might have capsized his business. At one bank, the directors balked at extending him further credit after he suffered a refinery fire and hadn’t yet been compensated by insurers. Stepping into the breach, director Stillman Witt asked a clerk to fetch his own strongbox and announced with a flourish, “Here, gentlemen, these young men are all O.K., and if they want to borrow more money I want to see this bank advance it without hesitation, and if you want more security, here it is; take what you want.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Stillman Witt
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