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Born in Richford in upState New York in 1839, John Rockefeller moved to Cleveland with his parents in 1853. His father, a restless, rollicking, lovable quack with dubious sources of income, including horse trading and hawking a cancer cure, was often absent from home for weeks at a time, used to cheat his sons to teach them sharpness. Where or when the father died is a secret which the Rockefellers have never divulged. The pious mother, Eliza Davison Rockefeller, brought up the moral balance.
Son John went to work as a bookkeeper in a Cleveland commission house at 16 after high school and a short turn in a commercial college. Four years later with $1,000 he had saved and another $1,000 given him by his father, he struck out for himself, forming his own commission house with a partner named Maurice B. Clark. That summer the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa., but young Rockefeller was still engrossed in produce. Thanks largely to his prodigious capacity for work, his infinite capacity for detail, the firm did a $450,000 business the first year. Like most of the men who were to rule the U. S. in the coming years of industrialization, young Rockefeller was far too busy to go to war in 1861. And out of the commission house profits the partners, a year later, were able to invest in one of the oil refineries then mushrooming in Cleveland. Sensing apparently from the very beginning the colossal future of oil, Rockefeller soon turned from food to fuel. Within seven years he controlled four-fifths of all the refineries in Cleveland, then the oil capital of the U. S. He was just 33.
Between 1865, the year after he married Laura Spelman, a Cleveland schoolteacher, and 1872, he evolved and put into prompt practice the basic principle on which Standard Oil achieved its power— buy out competitors at pistol point or destroy them if they refuse to sell. Monopoly of oil was his objective almost from the start. The pistol he used was the secret rebate, the notorious device by which a shipper got a refund on his railroad freight, enabling him to undersell competitors. Rockefeller carried this one step further by bludgeoning the railroads into giving him not only a rebate on his own shipments but also a cash kickback from the freight paid by competitors. Thus if the rate was, say $2 per bbl. from Cleveland to New York, Standard Oil would not only get back 50¢ in rebate, it would also get 5¢ for each barrel shipped by competitors. All this was wrathfully exposed time & again but after each outburst of public indignation, Rockefeller quietly worked out new and more devious arrangements with the railroads, tumbling more competitors into his lap.