(3 of 4)
These mighty benefactions, as everyone knows, came from oil—oil of a day when a businessman had to be crude to be successful. And yet. the methods of that day fathered the modern corporation. Much ethical refining has been done, to be sure, as witness the demand of earnest John D. Rockefeller Jr. for the resignation of Robert W. Stewart as chairman of the board of the Standard Oil Co. of Indiana (see p. 38).
But with old John D. it was different; he was out to develop an infant industry; caveat emptor was the bust ess standard of that time. He heard there was gold in oil when he was 22, and a year later he was in the oil business with an Englishman named M. B. Clark and a mechanical wizard named Samuel Andrews. Bargaining and borrowing was Mr. Rockefeller's prime task. Once he told a Clevelander that he wanted to invest $10,000 before he hit that same Clevelander for a loan of $5,000. So it is easy to understand how the Standard Oil Co. was formed with a capital of $1,000,000 in 1870 when Mr. Rockefeller was barely 31.*
Muckrakers† have made much of the way Mr. Rockefeller bought out competitors. According to Miss Tarbell, he would go to a refiner and say: "You see, this scheme is bound to work. It means an absolute control by us of the oil business. There is no chance for anyone outside. But we are going to give everybody a chance to come in. You are to turn over your refinery to my appraisers, and I will give you Standard Oil Co. stock or cash, as you prefer, for the value we put upon it. I advise you to take the stock. It will be for your good."
That was only one of the methods by which Mr. Rockefeller is said to have built the "trust" that the Supreme Court of Ohio ordered dissolved in 1892. The others were the most efficient production methods that had been developed before Henry Ford.
In the early '90's, Mr. Rockefeller put his philanthropies on a wholesale scale. He had always been a devout Baptist, a Sunday school teacher since he was 20. When a comparatively poor man, in 1870, he gave $20,000 to help build the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church in Cleveland. His first huge gift was for a Baptist-affiliated institution of learning—the University of Chicago (founded 1892). He plunged into the giving business as systematically as he had into oil. He trained John D. Jr. to succeed him in both. And then, in 1911,** he entered the business of pleasure. . . .
Last week was not strikingly different from a hundred preceding weeks of Mr. Rockefeller. He was at his home in Lakewood, N.J. He had spent the winter and early spring at Ormond Beach, Fla. Soon he will go to his favorite estate — 6,000-acre Pocantico Hills, with grottoes, pergolas, cascades, Greek statues, near Tarrytown, N. Y. He travels with the seasons, so that they will not interfere with his schedule.
A specimen day:
Arises at 7 a. m., takes needle shower, carefully chooses clothes from large wardrobe.
Appears at breakfast table promptly at 8, sips orange juice and coffee, eats a fair amount of oatmeal, nibbles bits of toast, rolls, eggs, bacon; gives new dimes or nickels to servants and guests. He has distributed some 22,000 of these gleaming coins in the last two decades. To those he sees every day, he usually gives nickels; to others, dimes.