EPUB paragraph 44 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
The scandal ended whatever tentative truce Bill had struck with John Davison, who had long rued the day when Bill Rockefeller first bewitched his sensible daughter. During the Moravia period, Davison had patched up relations with Bill and lent him almost $1,000 in two installments, one in August 1845, the other in October 1846. Now the rape indictment shattered their still tenuous relationship—lending greater credence to the charge. When Bill informed Davison of the accusation and asked him to post bail, Davison gruffly replied that he was “too old a man to go bail for anyone.” Taken aback, Bill replied bitterly that he would leave the county and never see him again. Worried about his two outstanding loans, Davison went straight to court, claimed his son-in-law planned to defraud his creditors, and sued him for $1,210.75. For Eliza and her offspring, it must have been a thoroughly humiliating moment when the sheriff and two neighbors came to appraise their property and attached all their movable goods in the name of John Davison. Davison also modified his will, placing Eliza’s inheritance in the hands of trustees, in all likelihood to keep it safely beyond the eager grasp of his son-in-law.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · John Davison · Moravia · Davison
EPUB paragraph 45 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
During the second half of 1849, Bill abandoned his family and gadded about the countryside to reconnoiter new towns. In the spring of 1850, the same year Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, Bill resettled his family in Owego, near the Pennsylvania border. As a fugitive from justice, he might have wanted to be near the state line whenever trouble loomed. Though only ten at the time and probably ignorant of what had happened—it’s hard to imagine Eliza confiding such scandalous things to a young boy—John later ridiculed the rape charge and mocked the idea of his father fleeing justice. “If [my father] left ‘under compulsion’ … I should have known something about it. There was nothing of the sort. We moved over to Owego, and if he were fleeing from justice that wasn’t very far away.” John’s later tendency to minimize the disgrace probably had several causes, ranging from filial piety to shrewd public relations; he knew people bent upon proving his own immorality wanted to buttress their case by first tarnishing his father. One must also note his penchant for denial, his potent capacity to filter out uncomfortable thoughts, especially about his father, just as he later deflected criticism of his questionable business behavior. John D. Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one’s resolve in the face of enemies.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Owego · Nathaniel Hawthorne · Pennsylvania · John
EPUB paragraph 46 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
At some point in his boyhood, however, possibly after the flight from Moravia, John’s reverence for his father did begin to be intermingled with more hostile, unexpressed feelings. (One writer of a wildly psychoanalytic bent has even suggested that Rockefeller’s icy self-control was a reaction to repressed fantasies of murdering his father.) In later years, scores of John D.’s friends and associates noted that Big Bill was a taboo topic that they broached at their peril, one on which John maintained a thoroughgoing silence. As one early biographer remarked, “From the beginning to the end of his career, he has made secrecy respecting his father and stealth respecting paternal visits a matter of religious observance.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Moravia · John
EPUB paragraph 47 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
We cannot tell when Rockefeller first felt shame about his father, but this emotion was so consequential for his entire development that we must pause briefly to consider it. In the towns of John’s boyhood, Bill was an engaging but notorious character who prompted interminable speculation about his travels and sources of income. A boy with such a father needed to screen out malicious gossip and cultivate a brazen indifference to community opinion. This bred in him a reflexive habit of secrecy, a fear of the crowd, a deep contempt for idle chatter and loose tongues that lasted a lifetime. He learned to cultivate a secretive style and a defiant attitude toward strangers. Perhaps out of a self-protective instinct, Bill taught his children to be wary of strangers and even of himself. When John was a child, Bill would urge him to leap from his high chair into his waiting arms. One day, he dropped his arms, letting his astonished son crash to the floor. “Remember,” Bill lectured him, “never trust anyone completely, not even me.” Somewhat later, walking with his boys through Cleveland, he warned them to ignore the pell-mell rush of people to fires and parades. “Never mind the crowd,” he told them. “Keep away from it. Attend to your own business.” Eliza also must have inoculated the children’s minds against talebearers and told them not to discuss family matters with other people. The boy who faced down the vicious talk of neighbors would be extremely well prepared to walk unscathed and even defiant through the turbulent controversies that later surrounded his life.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Cleveland · John
EPUB paragraph 48 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
For all the uncertainty of their lives, the Rockefellers, in their restless, driven odyssey across the southern tier of New York, enjoyed a sense of upward mobility as they journeyed from Richford to Moravia to Owego, with each town larger, more prosperous, and more hopeful than its predecessor. The county seat of Tioga County, located south of Richford and west of Binghamton, Owego sits astride a broad, beautiful bend of the Susquehanna River. Decidedly more cosmopolitan than anything young John D. had experienced before, it was a refined village with genteel homes along Front Street that vouchsafed glimpses of a finer life. The incorporated village of Owego had an imposing courthouse, a well-stocked library, a renowned school, and other nascent hints of culture. For a country town of seventy-two hundred people, it also boasted a disproportionate number of resident writers and artists.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Rockefeller family · Richford · Moravia · Owego · New York · Susquehanna River · Binghamton · Tioga County · Front Street
EPUB paragraph 49 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Perhaps because his sojourn there was shorter, Rockefeller never developed quite the same fond attachment to Owego as to Moravia, but he retained pleasing associations with it. “What a beautiful place Owego is!” he once exclaimed. “How fortunate we were to grow up there, in a beautiful country, with good neighbors, people of culture and refinement, kind friends.” With amusement, he recalled how Owego had exploded his provincial boyhood. “Down at the railroad station one day I saw a Frenchman! Think of that—a real, live Frenchman. And he wore a mustache—the first I ever saw.” On June 1, 1849, shortly before the Rockefellers arrived, the Erie Railroad had first puffed into Owego, thousands of spectators packing the hillsides to cheer the train as it slid into the station amid a burst of ceremonial cannonades and pealing church bells. “Railroad trains were known even when I was a boy but they were few, short and sooty,” Rockefeller said of the conveyances that would figure so largely in his own exploits. In small towns like Owego, the railroad ended isolated, self-contained economies, absorbing them into regional and national markets while also sharpening their inhabitants’ appetites for material goods and inviting them to seek their fortunes in distant cities.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Erie Railroad · Rockefeller family · Moravia · Owego
EPUB paragraph 50 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
The Rockefellers lived three miles east of town in an area of soft, bucolic meadows and riverine groves. Of the two frame houses they occupied during their time in Owego, the second was smaller, suggesting that Bill and Eliza needed to retrench as they grappled with financial problems. The second house—more a cottage than a farm—had a fine view of the winding, muddy Susquehanna, with the wooded silhouette of Big Island (later Hiawatha Island) in the foreground, ringed by a curtain of blue hills in the distance. In these snug quarters, John shared a bed with brother William. “It was a small house,” John reminisced years later, “but a dear good house.”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · Owego · Susquehanna · Big Island · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 51 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Bill might have chosen Owego because it had signal business advantages for someone who dabbled in the lumber business. During freshets, log rafts were easily floated down the Susquehanna River, and several lumber mills, in consequence, had sprung up in the town. It might also be significant that on September 27, 1849, right before the Rockefellers moved to Owego, an appalling conflagration had consumed 104 downtown buildings, the blaze sparing only three stores, a disaster that presaged a booming lumber business as the town was rebuilt. Finally, the town had a reputation as a mecca for self-styled doctors. As one Owego resident recalled, “After the Civil War, there were a dozen of them living here.”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · Owego · Susquehanna River · Civil War
EPUB paragraph 52 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
During the three Owego years, Bill’s escapades seemed even more bizarrely unpredictable than before. His appearances in town were brief and infrequent, however memorable to the gaping natives. “He was the best-dressed man for miles around,” said a close neighbor. “You never saw him without his fine silk hat.” Now in her late thirties, Eliza was losing her youthful bloom and developing the hard, thin face that told of her many trials. Many townsfolk recalled her as a sweet, fine, dignified lady who called on neighbors in the afternoon, always clad in a black silk dress that looked like widow’s weeds. Everybody commended her unsparing discipline, neat appearance, and commanding presence. For all her travails, she didn’t seem as forlorn as she had in Richford and Moravia, as if growing more accustomed to the burden that she bore and more reconciled to Bill’s absences.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Richford · Moravia · Owego
EPUB paragraph 53 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Once the swaggering, autocratic husband, Bill had now been irredeemably exposed as a scoundrel and was demoted in Eliza’s esteem. Her disillusionment with her handsome husband might have simplified matters in the household. “It was she who brought up the family,” said one observer, “for even when he was at home the father did not interfere with her discipline. And it was discipline.” Another neighbor termed her “an unusually clear-minded and capable Christian mother. Perhaps her discipline might seem very strict or even severe today, but, although she made them obey her and kept them all busily employed, the children all loved her as she loved them.” She wasn’t a mother to be trifled with. Once, while sick in bed, she discovered that John had neglected to perform a task for her, and judgment was swift: She sent him to the Susquehanna to select a willow switch. With the quiet cunning that would become a pronounced trait of his nature, he nicked the switch in several places with his knife, so it would bend and crack after the initial blows. Eliza wasn’t deceived. “Go and get another switch,” she instructed him, “and see that it is not slashed this time.”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Susquehanna · John
EPUB paragraph 54 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Eliza must have found the religious atmosphere in Owego suitably wholesome. One of John’s imperishable images of Owego was of standing behind the house and hearing the dutiful Eliza praying aloud in an upstairs bedroom. The local Baptists were enterprising evangelists, and every winter they marched scores of reformed sinners down to the frozen Susquehanna, carved out openings in the ice, and baptized them. Every Sunday, neighbors picked up Eliza and the children and drove them to a Baptist church in the village. Inspired by a Sunday-school class on forgiveness, the children initiated a custom that suggests how religion permeated their lives. Each night, when they got into bed, they turned to their siblings and said, “Do you forgive me all I have done to you today?” By the time they fell asleep, the air had been cleared of all recriminations or festering anger.
Names: Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Owego · Susquehanna · John
EPUB paragraph 55 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
In Owego, Eliza increased her dependence on John, as if training him to be everything Bill wasn’t. Like his mother, John seemed stronger without Bill, able to escape his shadow and forge a separate identity. His manifold duties habituated him to a heavy workload. When not attending school, he cut wood, milked the cow, drew well water, tended the garden, and went on shopping expeditions while also supervising his younger siblings in their mother’s absence. “I was taught to do as much business at the age of ten or eleven as it was possible for me to do,” he later noted.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Owego · John
EPUB paragraph 56 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
As the stand-in for Bill, he kept a tight rein on the family budget and learned to appraise the world shrewdly. Once he spent three days helping a local farmer dig potatoes for 37½ cents per day. This set up an instructive contrast for the frugal boy when, soon afterward, he loaned one farmer $50 at 7 percent interest and collected $3.50 at year’s end—without a stitch of work. He was thunderstruck by the happy math, which hit him with the force of a revelation. “The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good thing to let the money be my slave and not make myself a slave to money.” Brother William—a good-natured boy who pitched in with gusto and never asked too many questions—was far more popular with the local farmers, whereas the more rational John analyzed work, broke it down into component parts, and figured out how to perform it most economically.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 57 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Throughout his life, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., reacted in a vitriolic manner to accusations that he had lusted after money as a child and yearned to be fabulously rich. Doubtless embarrassed, he contested insinuations that he was motivated by greed instead of a humble desire to serve God or humanity. He preferred to portray his fortune as a pleasant accident, the unsought by-product of hard work. Yet stories surface of Rockefeller daydreaming about money in Owego when he was only in his early teens. One day, strolling by the Susquehanna with a friend, he blurted out: “Some day, sometime, when I am a man, I want to be worth a-hundred-thousand-dollars. And I’m going to be, too—some day.” Nearly identical accounts come from so many sources that one is forced to conclude he had conveniently expunged such memories. Given his father’s panting ardor for money, it would have been strange had he not been bewitched by gold.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Owego · Susquehanna
EPUB paragraph 58 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
There was nothing unusual about Rockefeller’s boyhood dreams, for the times were feeding avaricious fantasies in millions of susceptible schoolboys. Antebellum America was a place of high adventure and unbounded opportunity for industrious young men. Following the war with Mexico, huge chunks of land—Texas, New Mexico, and upper California—were annexed to the country in early 1848. That same year, gold was discovered at John Sutter’s sawmill in California, triggering a mad westward rush of ninety thousand prospectors. Just as the Rockefellers were moving from Moravia to Owego, hordes of frantic men swarmed across the continent, sailed around South America, or slogged across the Isthmus of Panama, hell-bent to reach California. The pandemonium foreshadowed the petroleum craze in western Pennsylvania a decade later. Though the gold rush proved a snare and a delusion for most miners, the occasional success stories nonetheless inflamed the popular imagination. Mark Twain singled out the California gold rush as the watershed event that sanctified a new money worship and debased the country’s founding ideals.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mark Twain · Rockefeller family · Moravia · Owego · United States · South America · John Sutter · Pennsylvania · Texas · California · Mexico · New Mexico · Panama
EPUB paragraph 59 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Before he left Owego, John secured a first-rate education, then a rarity in rural America, where few children attended secondary school. At first, the Rockefeller children went to a schoolhouse a short walk from their house; due to the family’s straitened circumstances, a friendly neighbor purchased their textbooks. In August 1852, John and William entered Owego Academy, which had been founded in 1827 and was unquestionably the finest secondary school in that part of New York. Topped by a tall steeple, fenced in by lovely parkland, the three-story brick school building must have awed the still-rustic Rockefeller boys. Presiding over the academy was an able Scot, Dr. William Smythe, who made the students hone their verbal skills by writing fortnightly essays and delivering speeches on assigned themes; the linguistic skills mastered at Owego became evident in Rockefeller’s concise business letters. The school produced many eminent graduates, including Thomas C. Platt, later the “Easy Boss” who ran the New York Republican machine, and Washington Gladden, the preacher who issued some of the most scorching screeds directed against Standard Oil.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Owego · New York · United States · Washington Gladden · Thomas C. Platt · William Smythe · Owego Academy · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 60 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Many of the 350 pupils came from affluent urban families, and John later lauded this exposure to city boys, saying it was “bound to benefit country boys.” The school charged a steep tuition of three dollars per term, suggesting that Bill’s medical road show was finally prospering after two years in Owego. John never expressed resentment at being, by academy standards, a poor boy. When a photographer came to shoot class pictures, John and William were excluded because their suits were too shabby. Other boys might have smarted, but John always prized his daguerreotypes of his fellow scholars, later insisting, “I would not part with this collection for any money.” In Eliza Rockefeller’s household, one didn’t morbidly dwell on slights but kept one’s sights fixed on the practical goals ahead. John never aspired to popularity at the school. It was as if, after the inordinate attention that his father attracted, John wanted to be quiet and inconspicuous and blend into the crowd.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Owego · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 61 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
While many well-to-do students boarded at the school, the Rockefeller boys undertook a three-mile hike to school every morning and, like many students, wandered barefoot down the dusty lanes in warm weather. This long trek led John past fine, imposing homes with well-trimmed lawns facing the Susquehanna River. With his slow, deliberate pace, he often set out early and reflected in an unhurried manner as he walked, his eyes always fixed on the ground ahead. Not averse to taking shortcuts, however, he sometimes sat by the roadside and asked passing teamsters for a lift.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Susquehanna River · John
EPUB paragraph 62 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
John was a plodding, lackluster student, with no discernible trace of brilliance, and only one aspect of school life truly seemed to intrigue him. Every Saturday, the principal demonstrated the newfangled devices then revolutionizing American business, and John was riveted by displays of a telegraph instrument (invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1837), galvanic batteries, and other modern contrivances. Such things captured his mind more than the rousing social issues raised by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published in 1852 in horrified response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
Names: Samuel F. B. Morse · Harriet Beecher Stowe · Uncle Tom · John
EPUB paragraph 63 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
To the extent that the Rockefeller children had difficulties with schoolwork, it stemmed from the chaotic situation at home. For five growing, energetic children, their small cottage was noisy and cramped. Each evening, Eliza packed her brood off to a teenage neighbor named Susan La Monte, who tutored them and ensured that they completed their homework. She remembered William and Frank as typically mischievous boys, kicking and teasing each other, while John was oddly self-possessed, already a boy-man, a model of adult decorum. “I have no recollection of John excelling at anything. I do remember he worked hard at everything; not talking much, and studying with great industry.… There was nothing about him to make anybody pay especial attention to him or speculate about his future.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Frank Rockefeller · Susan La Monte · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 64 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
An 1852 photo of the Rockefeller children shows John, age thirteen, William, eleven, and Mary Ann, nine, sitting in the inky gloom of a photo studio. They are a cheerless trio as they stare blankly into the camera. Wearing a plaid suit, and with his hair neatly brushed back from a wide forehead, John has a long, impassive face, and his expression is inscrutable. William has a softer, rounder face, and his garments—including a polka-dotted vest and a watch chain—suggest his father’s more outgoing personality. Mary Ann wears the plain dress of a farm girl, her hair in pigtails and parted down the middle. Although the group portrait suggests middle-class respectability, its somber mood—which also must owe something to the slower photography of the day—discloses something less than the idyllic boyhood John liked to evoke.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mary Ann Rockefeller Rudd · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 65 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
The drudgery of daily life was often leavened by play as John had his first chances to flirt with young ladies, and he exhibited flashes of droll wit. One afternoon, at a Sunday picnic—he was perhaps twelve—he passed a group of young ladies seated before heaps of food and observed, “Remember, girls, if you eat slowly, you can eat more!” Rockefeller was intensely aware of the opposite sex yet, knowing of his father’s history, kept his impulses under tight control. Susan La Monte saw a sensitivity in the boy that escaped casual observers; she was struck by “his great admiration of beauty. There was a little girl going to school near our home, a pretty little thing named Freer, with red cheeks and bright eyes and a sweet face. In after years Mr. Rockefeller would ask for her, and when she was left a widow in distress he aided her with a modest pension.” Susan La Monte saw that the boy’s eerie self-discipline concealed a deep fund of emotion, and she remembered the ceremony of grief he went through when one of her sisters died. “On the day she died John came to our house and stretched out on the ground and would not go away. He was so sorry that he would not go away, but lay there all day.” Such stories reveal a sensitivity in Rockefeller that would always be there but that would later be studiously concealed behind the polished façade of the hard-driving businessman.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Susan La Monte · Freer · John
EPUB paragraph 66 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c02_r1.htm
Margaret Allen, who first met William Avery Rockefeller in the early 1850s, while she was still in her teens. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Rockefeller Archive Center
EPUB paragraph 1 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
s a roving salesman, William Avery Rockefeller was fast becoming a relic of an earlier America when markets were extended not by new methods of communication or transportation but by the salesman simply covering more ground. A magnetic pull lured Big Bill even farther west, away from the burgeoning cities and industries of the eastern seaboard and toward remote hamlets on the American frontier. In early 1853, the Rockefellers were again uprooted and swept along in the whirlwind of Bill’s life when he took them by train to a prairie town in Ohio called Strongsville, about a dozen miles southwest of Cleveland. At this juncture, Bill quietly began to distance himself from his dazed family, having formed a new romantic attachment that proved far deeper than earlier infidelities and that finally severed his familial ties.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · Strongsville · Cleveland · United States · Ohio
EPUB paragraph 2 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
Where Eliza and the children had at least enjoyed their own homes in Richford, Moravia, and Owego, retaining some modicum of dignity, Bill now dumped them at the home of his sister and brother-in-law, Sara Ann and William Humiston, paying his relatives three hundred dollars a year to board his clan. To his hapless family, this must have seemed, after all their wanderings, terribly unfair. Their lives had always been uncommonly restless, but now they were castoffs, pariahs in a strange new Ohio town, tumbling back down the social ladder they had so arduously climbed.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Richford · Moravia · Owego · William Humiston · Ohio · Sara Ann
EPUB paragraph 3 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
The six Rockefellers were squashed into a small house with six or seven Humistons, even though Bill seems to have been flush with cash at the time. Years later, Billy Humiston insisted that Devil Bill was considered rich, that he gave out loans at hefty rates, kept three or four fine guns, stocked a rich wardrobe, and sported diamond rings and a gold watch—all of which suggested that the abrupt move to Ohio was less a matter of financial stringency than of personal convenience. The Humistons greatly admired Eliza for her excellent business head and thrifty money management, but enormous tension was bottled up in the overcrowded Humiston household. Billy junior later portrayed his cousins William and Frank as very rowdy and John as a prig. “John was just such a boy as he is a man—sanctimonious and precise.” Fortunately for all concerned, the Rockefellers soon moved out and took up residence on a small farm at the edge of Strongsville.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Frank Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · Strongsville · Ohio · Humiston · Uncle Billy · Billy Humiston · Humistons · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 4 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
By now Big Bill had relinquished all interest in lumber and other settled trades and had permanently assumed the persona of the rambling doctor or “botanic physician,” as he was soon listed in the Cleveland directory. In the first year after he deposited his family in Strongsville, Bill returned only three or four times, but, by a curious fluke, the townspeople learned a good deal about his fraudulent activities on the road. One day, a Strongsville resident, Joe Webster, checked into a hotel in Richfield, Ohio, and was stunned to see a sign in the lobby trumpeting the news, “Dr. William A. Rockefeller, the Celebrated Cancer Specialist, Here for One Day Only. All cases of cancer cured unless too far gone and then can be greatly benefited.” Soon after, with the smooth vaudevillian patter employed by so many patent-medicine vendors, Bill collected a crowd outside the hotel. Standing up in his buggy, his sign propped against the wheels, a showman in a silk hat, black frock coat, and dark red beard, he presented himself as Doc Rockefeller and offered full-fledged cancer cures for the extremely steep price of twenty-five dollars; those strapped for cash could purchase cheaper bottles of medicine. When Webster approached him afterward, Bill wasn’t abashed and bragged that he had lately been “doctoring” as far afield as Iowa and was buying up land there. After Webster returned to Strongsville and told of his startling discovery, word quickly got around town and everybody thereafter referred to their shadowy, footloose neighbor as Doc Rockefeller—doubtless with some mirth. The moniker stuck.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Strongsville · Cleveland · Joe Webster · Ohio · Iowa · Richfield · Celebrated Cancer Specialist
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
In the fall of 1853, after eight months in Strongsville, Big Bill decided that the time had come for John and William to resume their educations, so he drove them into Cleveland and settled them as boarders with a Mrs. Woodin on Erie Street, where they paid a dollar a week for room and board. John was penalized by the Cleveland schools because his family had moved around so much. In the sole extant reference to the matter, he wrote in 1923, “I had just come from New York State and recall my humiliation in being obliged to remain one term in the old Clinton Street School—I had been for several years in the Owego Academy … and supposed I should go at once into the High School instead of the Grammar School.” For this proud boy, the demotion must have been one of many small but wounding indignities suffered during these anxious years.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Strongsville · Cleveland · New York State · Martha Woodin · Erie Street · Owego Academy · Clinton Street School · High School · Grammar School · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 6 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
When John finally entered high school (later called Central High School) in 1854 at the age of fifteen, it was still a modest, one-story affair, shaded by trees and standing behind a clean white picket fence; it would receive a much fancier new building in 1856. Operating on the progressive theory of free education for boys and girls, the school enjoyed a superb reputation. Since it stressed composition, John had to submit essays on four topics to advance to the next grade: “Education,” “Freedom,” “The Character of St. Patrick,” and “Recollections of the Past.” At a time when America was deeply split over the question of extending slavery to new territories—the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in May 1854—these writings exhibit Rockefeller as a young democrat and confirmed abolitionist. In “Freedom,” he branded it a “violation of the laws of our country and the laws of our God that man should hold his fellow man in bondage.” Unless slavery was curbed speedily, he prophesied, it “will end in the ruin of our country.” America would only progress, he believed, with an educated citizenry. “In former times when learning was confined to the monks and priests, then it was that the world stood still, and it was not until the people were educated and began to think for themselves that it progressed.” Such views on abolitionism and universal literacy echoed those of northern Baptist evangelicals who scorned political no less than ecclesiastical despotism. As a self-made man, Rockefeller would always deplore aristocracies and priesthoods as effete, reactionary foes of true progress, defenders of privilege against enterprising commoners.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · United States · Central High School · Kansas-Nebraska Act · John
EPUB paragraph 7 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
Rockefeller expressed himself with great clarity and precision. (Schoolmates called him “John D.” because he signed his essays this way.) He also excelled as a debater, demonstrating that beneath his reserved manner he could articulate his thoughts forcefully. He began one speech with the line “I’m pleased although I’m sad,” and this gambit so tickled his fellow students that they nicknamed him “Old Pleased-Although-I’m-Sad.” He bore another, equally doleful nickname, “the Deacon,” and it says much about his preferences that he actually liked this sobriquet. As his future sister-in-law, Lucy Spelman, said, “He was a studious boy, grave, reserved, never noisy or given to boisterous play.” Rockefeller frequently hugged his slate to his chest, a pose that hinted at his guarded nature.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Lucy Spelman
EPUB paragraph 8 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
However private or solitary, John D. always had his quota of friends. One close chum was Mark Hanna, the descendant of well-to-do grocers and commodity brokers and later a U.S. senator and Republican Party boss. Another friend, Darwin Jones, who formed a boyhood triumvirate with them, recalled the sharply etched contrast between Hanna and Rockefeller. “Mark was of the virile type, always active and took part in almost all forms of athletics, while John Rockefeller was reserved, studious, though always pleasant. No matter what the excitement, John retained his quietude and smiled on all occasions.”In future years, Rockefeller cringed when Mark Hanna was quoted posthumously as describing him as “sane in every respect save one—he is money mad!” As at Owego Academy, classmates in Cleveland remembered Rockefeller voicing the fervent wish to be worth a hundred thousand dollars someday.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mark Hanna · Cleveland · United States · Darwin Jones · John Rockefeller · Republican Party · Mark · Owego Academy · John
EPUB paragraph 9 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
John’s boyhood gravity pleased many adults but unsettled others, who found something queer and unnatural about him. One high-school teacher described him, with patent distaste, as “the coldest blooded, the quietest and most deliberate chap.” Even as a teenager, Rockefeller demanded to be treated with adult dignity. In recollecting the school principal, Dr. Emerson E. White, Rockefeller mentioned only his behavior toward him: “Mr. White was a gentleman. He treated me like a gentleman—and treated all the boys so.” Rockefeller was sensitive about adults who behaved in a high-handed fashion toward him. Having assumed so much responsibility at home, he now thought of himself as a mature person. Bill had set him up with his own bank account, and his life was far more independent than those of his classmates.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · White · Emerson E. White · John
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