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As Ledger A confirms, Rockefeller was now self-supporting and entirely free of his father, spending half his income for his lodging with Mrs. Woodin and for a washerwoman. He took pride in memories of this threadbare adolescence. “I could not secure the most fashionable cut of clothing. I remember I bought mine then from a cheap clothier. He sold me clothing cheap such as I could pay for and it was a great deal better than buying clothes I could not pay for.” He was long puzzled by one lapse from strict economy: He bought a pair of fur gloves for $2.50 to replace his customary woolen mittens and, at age ninety, was still clucking his tongue over this shocking extravagance. “No, I can’t say to this day what caused me to waste that $2.50 on regular gloves.” Another expense pregnant with interest for the mature Rockefeller was his purchase of an illuminant called camphene for eighty-eight cents per gallon. Thanks to massive economies of scale, Standard Oil eventually sold a superior illuminant, kerosene, for five cents a gallon—something Rockefeller was wont to recall when people later accused him of gouging the populace.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Martha Woodin · Ledger A
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In one critical respect, Rockefeller didn’t exaggerate the value of Ledger A, for it spoke authoritatively to the question of whether he was a rapacious man who later misused charity to cleanse a “tainted” fortune. Here Ledger A speaks with a firm and unequivocal voice: Rockefeller was fantastically charitable from boyhood. During his first year on the job, the young clerk donated about 6 percent of his wages to charity, some weeks much more. “I have my earliest ledger and when I was only making a dollar a day I was giving five, ten, or twenty-five cents to all these objects,” he observed. He gave to the Five Points Mission in a notorious lower Manhattan slum, as well as to “a poor man in church” and “a poor woman in church.” By 1859, when he was twenty, his charitable giving surpassed the 10 percent mark. Despite a pronounced tilt toward Baptist causes, he gave early hints of an ecumenical bent, contributing money to a black man in Cincinnati in 1859 so he could buy his wife out of slavery. The next year, he gave to a black church, a Methodist church, and a Catholic orphanage.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Manhattan · Cincinnati · Ledger A
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The clerk’s philanthropic gifts were as salient as his business talents. It testifies to Rockefeller’s deeply paradoxical nature that he was smitten by a $4,000 banknote but equally entranced by an 1855 book entitled Extracts from the Diary and Correspondence of the Late Amos Lawrence. A wealthy New England textile manufacturer, Lawrence gave away more than $100,000 in a planned, thoughtful fashion. “I remember how fascinated I was with his letters,” said Rockefeller, who might have gotten from Lawrence his later habit of handing out freshly minted money to people. “Crisp bills! I could see and hear them. I made up my mind that, if I could manage it, some day I would give away crisp bills, too.” However rare and admirable such thoughts are in a teenage boy, we must note that it was again a case of money exerting a magical effect upon his mind. He saw that money could bring majesty in the moral as well as secular sphere, which excited him more than fancy estates or clothes.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · New England · Amos Lawrence
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As if he knew he would someday be rich and had to prepare for the appointed hour, the assistant bookkeeper became a perceptive observer of the businessmen around the port and noted their avoidance of ostentation. For instance, he tremendously admired a shipping merchant named L. R. Morris and was struck “by the way he walked, the way he looked, quite unaffected by his great riches. I saw other wealthy men, and I was glad to see that they went about their business without any display of power or money. Later I saw some who wore rich jewels and luxurious clothes. It seemed unfortunate that they were led into such lavish style.” If Rockefeller kept to a Quakerish sobriety of dress and later resisted the vulgar display of the Vanderbilts and other Gilded Age moguls, with their elaborate mansions and yachts, it had something to do with his Baptist beliefs, but also with the plain, understated style of the wealthy Cleveland businessmen he studied so attentively at a formative stage of his life.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland · L. R. Morris · Gilded Age · Vanderbilts
EPUB paragraph 46 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
Like innumerable young people before him, Rockefeller turned to the church for all-encompassing answers to intractable family problems. He possessed a sense of calling in both religion and business, with Christianity and capitalism forming the twin pillars of his life. While Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species began to chip away at many people’s faith after it was published in 1859, Rockefeller’s religion remained of the simple, undeviating sort. When challenges to orthodoxy arose in later decades, he stuck by the spiritual certainties of his boyhood. Because of his father’s often unscrupulous behavior, the young clerk was ripe for fiery denunciations of sin and the talk of personal salvation and moral reformation that were then staples of Baptist discourse. From the beginning, his Baptist faith served as a powerful instrument to control forbidden feelings and check his father’s unruly nature within him. After the constant flux of his childhood, he yearned to be rooted in a church that would act as his substitute family but without the shameful aspects of his real one.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Charles Darwin · Origin of Species
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While John and William boarded with Mrs. Woodin and her daughter, Martha, the four of them began to attend a poor, struggling church nearby called the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. Organized three years earlier by the well-heeled First Baptist Church, the mission church was a spare white building with a belfry and tall narrow windows, standing in a flat, treeless space. Several religious revivals had rolled through Cleveland in the 1850s, and the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church was created in the aftermath of a revival meeting that lasted 150 consecutive nights.
Names: Erie Street Baptist Mission Church · Cleveland · Martha Woodin · Martha · First Baptist Church · Uncle William · John
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The church gave Rockefeller the community of friends he craved and the respect and affection he needed. Having studied in Deacon Alexander Sked’s Bible class, Rockefeller was recruited to the church by Sked, a florist by trade, a poetical Scot who loved to spout psalms and prophecies and seemed to know the whole Bible by heart. Born in Scotland in 1780, Sked arrived in America in 1831 and moved to Cleveland four years later. During services, he would lift his hands in supplication to God, his face shining with fervor. This pious, elderly man served as a mentor to Rockefeller, who sought him out to report the good news when he got his job at Hewitt and Tuttle, an encounter that produced an unexpected snub that Rockefeller never forgot. “Before I went away, he remarked that he liked me pretty well, but that he had always liked my brother William better. I could never think why he said that. I did not hold it against him, but it puzzled me.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Hewitt and Tuttle · Cleveland · United States · Scotland · Alexander Sked · Uncle William
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In the fall of 1854, after making a personal confession of faith, John was immersed in the baptismal basin by Deacon Sked and became a full-fledged church member. Never a snob, Rockefeller was proud of being “brought up in a mission church.” Notwithstanding his worldly ambition, he didn’t seek social shortcuts to success by joining a prosperous congregation or a high-church denomination. As a loner and outsider, he was drawn by the warm fellowship of the faithful and liked the egalitarian atmosphere of the Erie Street church, which gave him the opportunity to associate, as he put it, with “people in the most humble of circumstances.” A central tenet of Baptism is the autonomy of individual congregations, and the mission churches, which weren’t dominated by established families, were the most democratic of all. The Erie Street church was populated by salesmen, shop assistants, railroad conductors, factory workers, clerks, artisans, and others of extremely modest means. Even in its later, fancier incarnation as the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, the membership remained more plebeian than patrician. In his later years, Rockefeller declared, with heartfelt warmth, “How grateful I am that these associations were given to me in my early boyhood, that I was contented and happy with … the work in the church, with the work in the Sunday school, with the work with good people—that was my environment, and I thank God for it!”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Euclid Avenue Baptist Church · Erie Street · Deacon Sked · John
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Instead of merely attending services, Rockefeller performed numberless tasks in the church. While still in his teens, he became a Sunday-school teacher, a trustee, and an unpaid clerk who kept the board minutes in his own hand. Free of false pride, he delighted even in menial chores, and one woman in the congregation left this vivid vignette of his ubiquitous presence:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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In those years … Rockefeller might have been found there any Sunday sweeping out the halls, building a fire, lighting the lamps, cleaning the walks, ushering the people to their seats, studying the bible, praying, singing, performing all the duties of an unselfish and thorough going church member.… He was nothing but a clerk, and had little money, and yet he gave something to every organization in the little, old church. He was always very precise about it. If he said that he would give fifteen cents, not a living soul could move him to give a penny more, or a penny less.… He studied his Bible regularly and diligently, and he knew what was in it.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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One notes his proprietary feeling about the church, how lovingly he tended it. In some respects, he acted as a volunteer janitor, sweeping the austere chapel, washing the windows, replenishing the candles in wall sconces or stoking the corner base burner with wood. On Sundays, he rang the bell to summon people to prayer and kindled the fire and then, to economize, snuffed out all the candles save one as people filed from the service. “Save when you can and not when you have to,” he instructed others and urged them to wear their good Sunday clothing to work as a sign of their Christian pride. Besides Friday evening prayer meetings, he went to services twice on Sunday and was always a conspicuous figure in a straight-backed pew, kneeling and leading the congregation in prayer. He prized the special intensity of feeling that Baptists brought to their faith, which provided an emotional release lacking elsewhere in his life. With a ripe baritone voice, refined by singing lessons at church, he boomed out hymns with deep joy. His favorite, “I’ve Found a Friend,” portrayed Jesus in tenderly familiar terms: “I’ve found a Friend; oh, such a Friend! / He bled, he died to save me.”
Names: Jesus
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In a world full of snares to entrap the unsuspecting pilgrim, Rockefeller tried hard to insulate himself from all temptation. As he later saw it, “a boy must ever be careful to avoid the temptations which beset him, to select carefully his associates and give attention as well to his spiritual and … mental and material interests.” Since evangelicals abstained from dancing, cards, and theater, Rockefeller restricted his private life to church socials and picnics, where he could play blindman’s buff and engage in other innocent pastimes. As a model Baptist, he was sought after by the young ladies. “The girls all liked John immensely,” said one congregant. “Some of them came dangerously near to being in love with him. He was not especially attractive in his person and his clothes were strenuously plain and well worn. He was thought much of by these spiritual minded young women because of his goodness, his religious fervor, his earnestness and willingness in the church, and his apparent sincerity and honesty of purpose.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Pilgrim · John
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Over lemonade and cake at church socials, Rockefeller developed a close attachment to a pretty young woman named Emma Saunders, who chafed that John wouldn’t broaden his social activities and insisted upon confining their dating to the church. For Rockefeller, the church was more than a set of theological positions: It was a fellowship of virtuous, like-minded people, and he always hesitated to stray too far from its protective embrace.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Emma Saunders · John
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Though generally reserved, Rockefeller developed convivial habits in church that lingered for life, and it bothered him when people marched off right after the Sunday service. “There ought to be something that makes the church homelike,” he insisted. “Friends should be glad to see each other and to greet strangers.” Even in later years, when huge swarms of people congregated at the church door to glimpse the world’s richest man, he would still clasp people’s hands and bask in the glow of familial warmth. The handshake acquired symbolic meaning for him, for it was “the friendly hand extended to the man who doesn’t know that he is wanted [that] brings many a one into the church. This early feeling about handshaking has stayed with me. All my life, I have enjoyed this thing that says: ‘I am your friend.’ ”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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Just as Rockefeller was sensitive to condescending treatment in the business world, he couldn’t stand it in the religious realm either. Since mission churches weren’t self-financing, Rockefeller and other trustees had to submit to patronizing advice from the mother church. “This strengthened our resolve to show them that we could paddle our own canoe.” While Rockefeller’s religious faith ran strong, he was most involved in the temporal affairs of the church, which he thought should be run like a tidy business. He soon had a chance to defend the church’s solvency when it fell behind on interest payments on a $2,000 mortgage held by a deacon. One Sunday, the pastor announced from the pulpit that this creditor threatened to foreclose on the church and that they had to raise $2,000 very fast to survive. As the stunned congregation filed out, they found Rockefeller stationed at the door, buttonholing people and asking them to pledge specific amounts. “I pleaded, urged, and almost threatened. As each one promised, I put his name and the amount down in my little book, and continued to solicit from every possible subscriber.” Perhaps nothing in his early life so foreshadowed his unswerving pursuit of business goals. “The plan absorbed me,” he admitted. “I contributed what I could, and my first ambition to earn money was aroused by this and similar undertakings in which I was constantly engaged.” In a matter of months, he had raised $2,000 and saved the church. By age twenty, he had emerged as the second most important member of the congregation, surpassed only by the preacher.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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With a mostly spartan country education and scant exposure to big-city culture, John D. Rockefeller’s mind was largely furnished with precepts and phrases from his Baptist fundamentalist church. Throughout his life, he extracted from Christianity practical lessons for living and emphasized the utility of religion as a guide in mundane affairs. Over time, the American public would wonder how he squared his predatory bent with his religion, yet much that was preached in the church of his youth—at least as Rockefeller saw it—encouraged his moneymaking predilections. Far from placing obstacles in his path, the religion he encountered seemed to applaud him in his course, and he very much embodied the sometimes uneasy symbiosis between church and business that defined the emerging ethos of the post–Civil War American economy.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Civil War
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Rockefeller never wavered in his belief that his career was divinely favored and asserted bluntly, “God gave me my money.” During the decades that he taught Sunday-school classes, he found plenty of scriptural evidence to buttress this claim. (Of course, his critics would cite many contrary quotations, warning of the pernicious influence of wealth.) When Benjamin Franklin was a boy, his father had pounded into his head the proverb “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings,” and Rockefeller often presented this text to his class. Martin Luther had exhorted his congregation, “Even though [your work] seems very trivial and contemptible, make sure you regard it as great and precious, not on account of your worthiness, but because it has its place within that jewel and holy treasure, the Word and Commandment of God.” Many eminent nineteenth-century theologians took the Calvinist view that wealth was a sign of God’s grace and poverty a telltale sign of heavenly disfavor. Henry Ward Beecher, calling poverty the fault of the poor, proclaimed in a sermon that “generally the proposition is true, that where you find the most religion you find the most worldly prosperity.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Benjamin Franklin · Henry Ward Beecher · Martin Luther
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As to why God had singled out John D. Rockefeller for such spectacular bounty, Rockefeller always adverted to his own adherence to the doctrine of stewardship—the notion of the wealthy man as a mere instrument of God, a temporary trustee of his money, who devoted it to good causes. “It has seemed as if I was favored and got increase because the Lord knew that I was going to turn around and give it back.” Rockefeller said this in his late seventies, and one wonders whether the equation between moneymaking and money giving only entered his mind later. Yet even as a teenager, he took palpable pleasure in distributing money for charitable purposes, and he insisted that from an early date he discerned the intimate spiritual link between earning and dispensing money. “I remember clearly when the financial plan—if I may call it so—of my life was formed. It was out in Ohio, under the ministration of a dear old minister, who preached, ‘Get money; get it honestly and then give it wisely.’ I wrote that down in a little book.” This echoed John Wesley’s dictum, “If those who ‘gain all they can’ and ‘save all they can,’ will likewise ‘give all they can,’ then the more they will grow in grace.” Rockefeller operated by such spiritual double-entry bookkeeping, with his charity serving, in time, as incontestable proof of his fortune’s purity. It might well be that his early commitment to charity gave him some inner license needed to pursue wealth with unparalleled—and at times unprincipled—vigor.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ohio · John Wesley
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As Max Weber observed, ascetic Christianity was a matchless breeding ground for would-be businessmen. The practice of tithing, for instance, instilled habits of thrift, self-denial, and careful budgeting that were invaluable assets for any aspiring capitalist. John D. Rockefeller was the Protestant work ethic in its purest form, leading a life so consistent with Weber’s classic essay that it reads like his spiritual biography. It might be useful to note some of Weber’s aperçus that apply with especial force to Rockefeller. Weber argued that the Puritans had produced a religion that validated worldly activity, with “the making of money by acquisition as the ultimate purpose” of life. They approached business in a rational, methodical manner, banishing magic from the marketplace and reducing everything to method. Because prosperity was a sign of future salvation, the elect worked with special diligence to reassure themselves of God’s favor. Even those who amassed great wealth continued to labor, since they worked, ostensibly, for God’s glory, not for their own aggrandizement. The church didn’t want to be in the position of promoting greed, so it circumvented this problem by legitimating the pursuit of money if channeled into a calling—that is, the steady dedication to a productive task. Once a person discovered his calling, he was supposed to apply himself with all-consuming devotion, the money thus acquired being deemed a sign of God’s blessing.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Max Weber
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One by-product of the emphasis on a calling was that Puritans relegated activities outside the religious and economic sphere to a lesser order of importance. The believer wasn’t supposed to search for pleasure beyond the sheltered confines of family, church, and business, and the gravest sins were wasting time, indulging in idle chatter, and wallowing in luxurious diversions. Bent on making money, the good Puritan had to restrain his impulses instead of gratifying them. As Weber remarked, “Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less in spirit. Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.” That is, the man who would be rich must be thrifty. People had to regulate their lives, Weber argued, so that self-abnegation could bring forth plenty. A fateful contradiction lay at the heart of this Puritan culture, for the virtues of godly people made them rich, and these riches, in turn, threatened to undermine that godliness. As Cotton Mather declared of the Plymouth colony in the 1690s, “Religion begot prosperity, and the daughters devoured the mother.” This contradiction posed a central dilemma for John D. Rockefeller and his descendants, who would struggle tirelessly against the baneful effects of wealth.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Max Weber · Plymouth · Cotton Mather
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Of the four principal groups of ascetic Protestants analyzed by Weber, we should note, the Baptists alone rejected predestination and therefore couldn’t construe wealth as an infallible sign of God’s favor. On the other hand, as Weber pointed out, certain Baptist tenets prepared its adherents to prosper in the marketplace. Abhorring religious idolatry, demoting sacraments as a means to salvation, Baptism fostered a rational outlook that was well suited to advancement in capitalist society. Rockefeller was convinced that he had a God-given talent for making money, was obligated to develop it, and was liberally rewarded by God—all compatible with Baptist doctrine. For this reason, he found religion far more of a spur than a hindrance to his ambitions. Where others saw him as an anomaly in a denomination that always welcomed working people and harbored a faint distrust of the rich, he never saw any such contradiction.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Max Weber
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Before leaving Rockefeller’s early Baptist indoctrination, we should note that the economic climate of his adolescence must have deepened his religious convictions. In 1857, while he was still at Hewitt and Tuttle, America fell into an economic slump. The proximate cause was the end of the Crimean War in 1856, which dealt a blow to American farmers who had profited from the war. On a more profound level, the crisis capped a decade of frantic speculation in railroad securities and land, stoked by heavy borrowing. As five thousand businesses failed and hundreds of thousands of workers were idled, the exuberant boosterism of the 1850s was suddenly and dramatically quelled.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Hewitt and Tuttle · United States
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As happened in the Great Depression of the 1930s, people were shocked that an effervescent economy could stall so woefully. As one contemporary observer put it, “It seems indeed strange that in the very midst of apparent health and strength … the whole country … should suddenly come to a dead stop and be unable to move forward—and that we should suddenly wake up from our dreams of wealth and happiness, and find ourselves poor and bankrupt.” A wave of hysterical breast-beating ensued, with President James Buchanan insisting that the crisis came “solely from our extravagant and vicious system of paper currency and bank credits, exciting the people to wild speculations and gambling in stocks.”
Names: James Buchanan · Great Depression
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Rather than blaming the business cycle, many evangelical Christians interpreted the downturn as divine punishment for a society grown lax, worldly, and dissolute. One Boston reformer descried redeeming features in the slump, hoping it would “teach good and much needed lessons … and will reduce all things here to a more sober, sound, and healthy condition.” The mood of national self-flagellation prompted a religious upsurge known as the Businessmen’s Revival. In 1857, businessmen gathered in many cities for lunchtime prayer meetings where they publicly swore off drink and other indulgences. During this massive outpouring of repentance, evangelical churches recruited tens of thousands of new members. The shift from euphoria to depression in the business sphere—mirrored by a shift from sin to salvation in the religious sphere—probably strengthened Rockefeller’s innate conservatism as a fledgling businessman while bolstering his already deep-seated Baptist inclinations. As he said, “What a school—the school of adversity and stress—to train a boy in!”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Boston
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Whatever the general misery caused by the 1857 panic, William Avery Rockefeller’s medical road show thrived that year, and he briefly managed to support and juggle two marriages. In the spring of 1856, Bill had surfaced again in Cleveland, rooming with John and William at Mrs. Woodin’s while scouting out a permanent home for his family. He was residing intermittently with Margaret Allen’s family in Ontario, posing as Dr. William Levingston, and now had to make some final disposition before he deserted his first wife and children for good. When he found a roomy brick house for rent at 35 Cedar Street, equipped with such luxuries as indoor toilet and bathroom, he brought Eliza and the children in from Parma. John and William moved out of Mrs. Woodin’s place and were reunited with their family. At this point, Bill decided that John should contribute to the family upkeep and pay him the same rent he had given to Mrs. Woodin.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Cleveland · Parma · Martha Woodin · Ontario · Cedar Street · Uncle William · John
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In 1857, Bill decided to build for his family a substantial brick house on Cheshire Street in downtown Cleveland, a farewell gift that would enable him to abscond with a clear conscience. “In 1857 my father told me to build a house,” said John D., giving the story a positive gloss. “It was a lesson in self-reliance. He handed me the money, told me the sort of house he wanted and left all the details of the business to me. I drew plans, got the material, found a builder, and built the house.” Did Bill regard this as some final test, a crash course in business for John, before he abandoned his family to the tender mercies of chance? As he warned his son, “I shall be away and must rely on your judgment.” Or perhaps Bill just wanted to be spared the inconvenience of doing it himself.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Cleveland · Cheshire Street · John
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Rockefeller was justifiably proud of his feat of superintending this house, a bravura performance for a boy of eighteen with an already demanding schedule at Hewitt and Tuttle. As if he had been doing nothing but construction work all his life, he solicited estimates from eight contractors and selected the lowest bidder. He reviewed the plans, negotiated the contracts, and settled the bills with implicit confidence in his judgment. In fact, so closely did he supervise the contractors, so zealously did he outbargain them, that they lost money on the project. If Bill was testing his son’s ability, he passed with flying colors.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Hewitt and Tuttle
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By one account, a dispute arose as to whether John would pay rent at the new house. He presumably felt that, having built the structure, he had earned the right to occupy it free of rent, but Devil Bill laid down his own arbitrary rules and overrode Eliza’s protests. “You bought your time, didn’t you?” he told John. “What you’re getting now is your own, ain’t it? Well, you have to pay me board.” Once again, one marvels at Bill’s barefaced cheek no less than his son’s fortitude in the face of repeated provocations.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · John
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Now that the Rockefellers were reconstituted in Cleveland, John was deputized as the new paterfamilias, as Bill again exited from the scene, setting up house in Philadelphia with Margaret Allen sometime in the late 1850s. For several more years, Bill was weirdly enmeshed in John’s affairs and for five decades continued to materialize, like a burly, smiling genie, at odd intervals. But from this point forward, the gap between Bill’s two lives and two wives began to widen into an unbridgeable chasm. By an exquisite (and, for Bill, surely excruciating) irony, this scheming, selfish, money-mad charlatan turned his back on his family just as his eldest son began to amass the largest fortune in history. John D. Rockefeller inhabited a stoic universe in which it was considered a sign of strength and mental health to banish your cares and forge ahead instead of morbidly dwelling on your parents’ failings. But if John nursed vengeful feelings toward Bill, it must have been secretly gratifying to him that his father left at the very dawn of his triumph and forfeited any claim to his wealth.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Rockefeller family · Cleveland · Philadelphia · John
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Eliza probably never knew that after she’d raised his five children, Bill had traded her in for a much younger woman, but she was now better equipped to withstand his loss than she had been a few years earlier. When John Davison died on June 1, 1858, he left her an annuity that lasted through 1865, when she inherited the principal. With two sons drawing income—William was now working under John as a bookkeeper at Hewitt and Tuttle—and with occasional assistance from Bill, Eliza could muddle through on her own. She especially relied upon her eldest son, the wunderkind who seemed capable of anything and who was as steady and trustworthy as her husband had been feckless and mercurial. Eliza was now in her mid-forties, and photos show a prim, sad, gaunt woman. Divorce wasn’t an option for a devout nineteenth-century woman, and her giddy fling with the handsome young peddler had left her imprisoned in a premature widowhood. Bill had been her sole chance, her crazily squandered bid to escape from rural tedium, and the misbegotten marriage left both her and her eldest son with a lifelong suspicion of volatile people and rash actions.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · John Davison · Hewitt and Tuttle · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 72 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
In his trilogy of Frank Cowperwood novels, his fictionalized version of the life of the Chicago traction magnate Charles Yerkes, Theodore Dreiser described the uncanny perspicacity about his bosses that distinguished the adolescent Cowperwood in his first job as a clerk in a grain-commission business. “He could see their weaknesses and their shortcomings as a much older man might have viewed a boy’s.” The remark aptly captures the coolly critical eye with which Rockefeller sized up his elders at Hewitt and Tuttle. He was respectful toward his superiors but never awed by them and was always aware of their shortcomings. For the record, he professed great respect for Isaac Hewitt, twenty-five years his senior, but he was much more caustic in private, referring to him as a “disgruntled” man, forever entangled in litigation.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Isaac L. Hewitt · Hewitt and Tuttle · Chicago · Theodore Dreiser · Charles Yerkes · Frank Cowperwood
EPUB paragraph 73 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c03_r1.htm
Despite his youth, Rockefeller soon came to feel that he was being underpaid. When Tuttle quit in January 1857, Rockefeller was elevated to chief bookkeeper, performing, at the age of seventeen, all the tasks formerly discharged by the departed partner. Where Tuttle had earned $2,000 a year as partner, Rockefeller was given only $500, and this vexing inequity was only slightly mitigated when Hewitt raised him to $600 a year by 1858. With the same preternatural confidence evident in his campaign to pay off the church mortgage or oversee the Cheshire Street house, the boy began to trade for his own account, making small but successful forays into flour, ham, and pork. Soon, this adolescent businessman was cutting something of a figure on the Cleveland docks, where he was always addressed as Mr. Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Isaac L. Hewitt · Henry B. Tuttle · Cleveland · Cheshire Street
Source: Ron Chernow, Titan. Names and relationships retain the full atlas’s extraction limits. Map points are references; historical sites and regions can be approximate. Open the full interactive atlas.