EPUB paragraph 33 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
If their differences had been chiefly a clash of personalities, Rockefeller’s partnership with Maurice Clark might have lasted years, but they had sharply divergent views about oil’s future and the desirable pace of expansion. Despite the Civil War, the drills never stopped in Pennsylvania, except when General Lee invaded the state and producers had to defend it. As the export business in kerosene widened, Andrews, Clark banked solid profits in refining during every year of the war. Yet prices remained as volatile as the war itself, with the supply-demand equation shifting radically each time a single spouter or gusher came in. Amid the ruthlessly competitive conditions, it was never clear where prices would settle or what constituted a normal price. The price fluctuations in a single year were staggering, veering between 10¢ and $10 a barrel in 1861 and $4 and $12 in 1864. Undeterred by these extreme gyrations, both Rockefeller and Andrews wanted to borrow heavily and expand, while Clark favored a more circumspect approach.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Maurice B. Clark · Pennsylvania · Clark · Lee · Civil War
EPUB paragraph 34 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
What likely clinched Rockefeller’s decision to break from the three Clarks was that they had the votes to override him and Andrews and didn’t hesitate to use their majority in a high-handed way. In later reminiscences, Rockefeller disclosed an incident that casts light on his relations with the Clarks: “[Maurice Clark] was very angry when I borrowed money to extend our business of refining oil. ‘Why, you have borrowed $100,000,’ he exclaimed, as if that were some sort of offense.” Rockefeller’s amazement seems somewhat disingenuous: It was a stupendous sum, but all Rockefeller could see was that Maurice Clark lacked his audacity. “Clark was an old grandmother and was scared to death because we owed money at the banks.” One can forgive the Clarks if they found something overbearing about this bumptious young man who would risk all their capital, evidently without notifying them. Significantly, the Clarks were irked by both Rockefeller’s frugality and his prodigality—his tight-fisted control of details and advocacy of unbridled expansion. Daring in design, cautious in execution—it was a formula he made his own throughout his career.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Maurice B. Clark · Clark · Clarks
EPUB paragraph 35 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
By 1865, Rockefeller, age twenty-five, decided it was time for a showdown with the Clarks. He wasn’t the sort to persist in a flawed situation, and he was now prepared to clear away the encumbrances that had thwarted his early career.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Clarks
EPUB paragraph 36 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
For Rockefeller, success in the oil business required a bullish, nearly glandular faith in its future. Before deciding to enter the business on a large scale, he needed one last God-given proof that the oil wouldn’t disappear—decisive evidence that came in January 1865 at a place called Pithole Creek. The nearby rocks and chasms had always emitted sulfur gas and attracted the notice of oilmen. One day, a group of eccentric producers, waving a witch-hazel twig serving as a divining rod, drilled on the spot where the twig dipped down. When a tremendous gusher spouted up days later, another madcap chapter in the oil industry commenced, with speculators, drillers, and business agents converging on the spot. Within a few months, the sleepy frontier settlement with four log cabins was transformed into a hectic little metropolis of twelve thousand people. Overnight, fifty hotels sprang up, along with a theater that seated one hundred and was lit by crystal chandeliers. So improbable was Pithole’s rise that it seemed a phantom city, a conjurer’s trick. “It was more than a city,” says one chronicler, “it was a state of postwar euphoria.” Even by the sordid standards of the Oil Regions, it was a disreputable place. “Every other shop is a liquor saloon,” said one journalist. “It is safe to assert that there is more vile liquor drunk in this town than in any other of its size in the world.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Oil Regions · Pithole Creek · Pithole
EPUB paragraph 37 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
One eyewitness to the whole Pithole lunacy was an observant eight-year-old girl named Ida Minerva Tarbell, who lived ten miles away in Rouseville and saw hordes of eager men streaking to the boomtown. When her father built an oil-tank shop there, he made the fastest money of his life. Unfortunately, Pithole’s ebullient heyday was short-lived, and within a few years its wells were exhausted from fire and overproduction. Before the town reverted back to sylvan peace, people began to scavenge for scrap. For $600, Ida Tarbell’s father bought the fancy Bonta House hotel, constructed a few years earlier for $60,000, and carried off its lumber, doors, and windows to erect a home for the Tarbell family in Titusville. By 1874, the moment of its greatness having flickered, Pithole counted just six voters.
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · Titusville · Rouseville · Bonta House · Pithole
EPUB paragraph 38 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
In hindsight, Pithole was a cautionary fable of blasted hopes and counterfeit dreams, renewing fears of the industry’s short life span. But in January 1865, it suggested that there were many undiscovered pockets of oil, and it probably acted as a catalyst that hastened Rockefeller’s break with the Clarks. This parting was vintage Rockefeller: He slowly and secretly laid the groundwork, then moved with electrifying speed to throw his adversaries off balance. That January, Maurice Clark had openly fumed when Rockefeller asked him to sign yet another note. “We have been asking too many loans in order to extend this oil business,” Clark said. Undaunted, Rockefeller shot back: “We should borrow whenever we can safely extend the business by doing so.” Trying to intimidate Rockefeller, the Clark brothers threatened to dissolve the partnership, which required the unanimous consent of all the partners.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Maurice B. Clark · Clark · Clarks · Pithole
EPUB paragraph 39 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Determined to break loose from the Clarks and the commission business, Rockefeller sounded out Sam Andrews privately and told him:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Clarks
EPUB paragraph 40 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Sam, we are prospering. We have a future before us, a big future. But I don’t like Jim Clark and his habits. He is an immoral man in more ways than one. He gambles in oil. I don’t want this business to be associated with a gambler. Suppose I take them up the next time they threaten a dissolution. Suppose I succeed in buying them out. Will you come in with me?
Names: Samuel Andrews · James Clark
EPUB paragraph 41 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
When Andrews agreed, they shook hands on the deal.
Names: Samuel Andrews
EPUB paragraph 42 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
A few weeks later, just as Rockefeller expected, he quarreled with Maurice Clark, and the latter threatened to dissolve the partnership. “If that’s the way you want to do business we’d better dissolve, and let you run your own affairs to suit yourself,” Clark warned. Moving swiftly to implement his scenario, Rockefeller invited the partners to his home on February 1, 1865, and vigorously expounded a policy of rapid refinery expansion—a policy he knew was anathema to the Clarks. Playing right into Rockefeller’s hands, James Clark tried to browbeat him. “We’d better split up,” he declared. In conformity with the partnership agreement, Rockefeller got everyone to state publicly that he favored dissolution, and the Clarks left imagining they had cowed Rockefeller. In fact, he raced to the office of the Cleveland Leader and placed a notice in the morning paper dissolving the partnership. The next morning, when the Clarks saw it, they were stunned. “Do you really mean it?” an incredulous Maurice Clark asked Rockefeller. He hadn’t realized before that Rockefeller had lined up Andrews on his side. “You really want to break it up?” “I really want to break it up,” replied Rockefeller, who had sounded out sympathetic bankers in the preceding weeks. It was agreed that the firm would be auctioned to the highest bidder.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Maurice B. Clark · James Clark · Clark · Clarks · Cleveland Leader
EPUB paragraph 43 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Even as a young man, Rockefeller was extremely composed in a crisis. In this respect, he was a natural leader: The more agitated others became, the calmer he grew. It was an index of his matchless confidence that when the auction occurred, the Clarks brought a lawyer while Rockefeller represented himself. “I thought that I could take care of so simple a transaction,” he boasted. With the Clarks’ lawyer acting as auctioneer, the bidding began at $500 and quickly rose to a few thousand dollars, then inched up slowly to about $50,000—already more than Rockefeller thought the refining business worth. Since this auction was a turning point on his road to industrial supremacy, let us quote his account of the historic moment as he related it in his memoirs:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Clarks
EPUB paragraph 44 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Finally it advanced to $60,000, and by slow stages to $70,000, and I almost feared for my ability to buy the business and have the money to pay for it. At last the other side bid $72,000. Without hesitation I said $72,500. Mr. Clark then said: “I’ll go no higher, John; the business is yours.” “Shall I give you a check for it now?” I suggested. “No,” Mr. Clark said, “I’m glad to trust you for it; settle at your convenience.”
EPUB paragraph 45 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Rockefeller knew the moment was fraught with consequences. “It was the day that determined my career. I felt the bigness of it, but I was as calm as I am talking to you now,” he told William O. Inglis. He paid a lofty price for his freedom, surrendering to Clark his half interest in the commission business along with the $72,500. (The purchase price would be equivalent to $652,000 today.) Yet he had captured a tremendous prize. At age twenty-five, he had won control of Cleveland’s largest refinery, which could treat five hundred barrels of crude oil daily—twice the capacity of its nearest local rival—and ranked as one of the world’s largest facilities. On February 15, 1865, the Cleveland Leader printed the following item: “Copartnership Notice—The undersigned, having purchased the entire interest of Andrews, Clark & Co. in the ‘Excelsior Oil Works,’ and all the stock of barrels, oil, etc., will continue the business of the late firm under the name of Rockefeller & Andrews.” Rockefeller savored his revenge against the Clarks, who were shocked that their junior partner had lined up, on the sly, financing for such a large deal, and Rockefeller gloated at the older men’s complacent naïveté. “Then [the Clark brothers] woke up and saw for the first time that my mind had not been idle while they were talking so big and loud.” All of Rockefeller’s Baptist contempt for vanity, show, and loose talk is condensed in that single observation. On March 2, 1865, Clark and Rockefeller was also dissolved, and Rockefeller eliminated the three fractious Clark brothers from his life forever.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · William O. Inglis · Cleveland · Clark · Clarks · Cleveland Leader · Rockefeller & Andrews · Copartnership Notice · Clark & Co. · Excelsior
EPUB paragraph 46 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
For Rockefeller, the harrowing memory of the Clarks stayed with him, and he talked as if he had survived a nightmare. “The sufferings I went through in those years, the humiliation and the anguish, I have not words to describe. And I ever point to the day when I separated myself from them by paying this large bonus as the beginning of the success I have made in my life.” It’s hard to know whether Rockefeller exaggerated the Clarks’ haughtiness, but the important points are that he was proud and sensitive and that their barbed words reverberated deeply in his mind. Having emerged as his own boss, he would never again feel his advancement blocked by shortsighted, mediocre men.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Clarks
EPUB paragraph 47 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
The demise of Clark and Rockefeller unfolded against the waning days of the Civil War. By December 1864, General Sherman had reached Savannah and swung north through the Carolinas. About two months after Rockefeller won the refining business, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. As a town that had sheltered many runaway slaves before the war, Cleveland was especially grieved by the subsequent news of Lincoln’s assassination. On April 27, the funeral train brought his body to lie in state for several hours in a special mortuary pavilion, with women in spotless white robes gathering by the railroad tracks to sing choral dirges to the slain president.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland · Ulysses S. Grant · Robert E. Lee · Clark · Sherman · Lincoln · Savannah · Carolinas · Appomattox · Civil War
EPUB paragraph 48 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
By this point, the new firm of Rockefeller and Andrews had been installed on the second floor of a brick building on Superior Street, several blocks from the Cuyahoga River, in an office complex known as the Sexton Block. From his new command post, the young entrepreneur could stare out the window and follow the progress of barges drifting by laden with oil barrels from his refinery. Already a mature businessman, he relied on Andrews only as a technician and assumed control of all other aspects of the business. Having discarded several older partners, the young man had no real business mentors, heroes, or role models and was beholden to no one. John D. Rockefeller was not only self-made but self-invented and already had unyielding faith in his own judgment.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Samuel Andrews · Cuyahoga River · Sexton Block · Superior Street
EPUB paragraph 49 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
For all his resoluteness as a young businessman, Rockefeller tarried in settling his private life. Yet he had already fathomed his own needs and sought a woman who would be pious and loving, dedicated to the church, and strongly supportive of his career. Because of his easy, affectionate way with his mother, Rockefeller felt comfortable with women, took genuine pleasure in their company, and, unlike the caddish Bill, treated them with respect.
EPUB paragraph 50 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
During his brief period at Central High School, Rockefeller had befriended two bright, literate sisters, Lucy and Laura Celestia Spelman, and taken a special fancy to Laura, or “Cettie,” as she was called. Though he still had an awkward manner with girls, the sisters saw a warm, likable side to him. Unlike most other girls at the school, the practical-minded Cettie was taking commercial courses to master business principles, and she applauded John in his storied 1855 job search. As a friend of Cettie’s later noted, “She saw that he was ambitious, and she thought that he was honest, which probably appealed to her more than anything else.” Clearly, she transmitted to John the message that his chances of winning her would be materially enhanced if his economic prospects improved.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Lucy · Laura · Central High School · John
EPUB paragraph 51 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
There seems little doubt that in courting Cettie, John was held back by the disparity in their socioeconomic status, which accounts for the nine-year hiatus between their first meeting in high school and their 1864 marriage. The Spelmans were high-toned people, a blue-ribbon family living in a fine house. A friend of Laura’s recalled, “Perhaps Cettie wasn’t exactly rich and beautiful, but her father was as well off as any of the girls in our class, a member of the Ohio legislature, and somewhat known for his philanthropic work, so—you know how those things are among children—we thought that it was strange for her to rather show a leaning toward Johnny.” It’s easy to see what drew John to Laura aside from patent compatibility, for the Spelmans signified the respectability that had so frustratingly eluded his own family.
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Ohio · Laura · Johnny · John
EPUB paragraph 52 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Civic-minded, stirred to action by social injustice, the Spelmans offered more than entrée into the local gentry and were a family of genuine substance. Born in Massachusetts, Harvey Buel Spelman, a direct descendant of the Puritans, and Lucy Henry met in Ohio and were married in 1835, giving birth to Laura Celestia on September 9, 1839. When they moved to Akron in 1841, they lived humbly at first, with Mrs. Spelman taking in washing to extend their income; Cettie, as a little girl, sometimes yanked a small red wagon around town to deliver laundry. Even when Harvey Spelman opened a dry-goods store and amassed considerable wealth, he and Lucy didn’t retreat into private pleasures but redoubled their militant reform efforts. As a member of the local board of education, Harvey Spelman spearheaded the creation of a progressive public-school system, a crusade that propelled him into the Ohio state legislature in 1849. Also busy in church causes, the Spelmans helped to found a Congregational church in Akron. Their religious beliefs buttressed their secular activism, and they were pledged to root out evil as part of both their religious and political agendas.
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Spelman Seminary · Harvey Buel Spelman · Lucy Henry Spelman · Ohio · Lucy · Massachusetts · Congregational · Akron
EPUB paragraph 53 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
With his broad forehead, tufty brows, and pugnacious beard, Harvey Buel Spelman was a man of burning fundamentalist convictions and apocalyptic musings. He frequently discerned God’s hand smiting the American people for their wicked extravagance, and he issued flaming diatribes against demon rum: “The widespread and excessive use of rum is the tinder which inflames the worst passions in human nature, fosters riots, Communism and strikes, promotes ignorance, vice and crime, and more than any other cause, threatens the stability of our free institutions,” he said in 1879. Lucy Henry, his dignified, industrious wife, enjoyed singing hymns and had little time for small talk, though she could be jolly with her daughters. “At any reference to the Bible, to temperance, to education, to the widening sphere of women, her eyes flashed with old-time fire, and her face was aglow with conviction,” a preacher said, with pardonable hyperbole, at her funeral.
Names: Harvey Buel Spelman · Lucy Henry Spelman
EPUB paragraph 54 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
As an outgrowth of their church involvement—and this was true of many evangelicals after the Second Great Awakening—Harvey and Lucy were uncompromising abolitionists and temperance activists. With their home serving as a station on the Underground Railroad, they shepherded many slaves from Tennessee and Kentucky to freedom, and Sojourner Truth, the former slave, abolitionist, and itinerant preacher, spent several days with them. According to Cettie, the only time she ever saw her mother cooking on the Sabbath was to prepare hot meals for slaves in flight to Canada. The Spelmans felt no less ardently about drink. The crusading Mrs. Spelman not only marched in the streets but stormed the saloons, dropped to her knees in prayer, and pleaded with sinners at the bar stools to mend their ways, while Mr. Spelman carried on a parallel campaign to shut down rum shops.
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Spelman Seminary · Sojourner Truth · Lucy · Canada · Tennessee · Kentucky · Harvey · Underground Railroad
EPUB paragraph 55 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
The Spelmans’ prosperous life in Akron ended in 1851 when Mr. Spelman’s business went bankrupt, the casualty of a bank panic. The family then moved to Cleveland, where Mr. Spelman’s fortunes revived, but a dark edge of economic uncertainty always shadowed the family. So while the Spelmans occupied a higher social rung than young Rockefeller, they were haunted by the prospect of economic misfortune and inclined to look favorably upon an up-and-coming suitor with a proper Christian pedigree. Cettie needed to find a husband who could safeguard her family’s security, so it is not surprising that she championed John’s career and eagerly coached him to succeed from the start.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Spelman Seminary · Cleveland · Akron · John
EPUB paragraph 56 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
It is hard to picture a young woman more perfectly suited to John D. Rockefeller’s values than the sensible, cheerful Laura Celestia Spelman, who shared his devotion to duty and thrift. They ratified each other’s views about the fundamentals of life. Two months younger than John, Cettie was short and slender, with a round face, dark brown eyes, and a wealth of chestnut hair parted down the middle and smoothly pulled back from her forehead. Rockefeller would never have tolerated a noisy woman, and Cettie was soft in voice and manner. Like John, though, her mild surface belied an adamantine determination. She was “gentle and lovely, but resolute with indomitable will,” noted her sister Lucy, better known in the family as Lute. “There was a persuasion in her touch as she laid her fingers ever so gently on your arm.” Again like John, her geniality covered a hard core of sustained willpower. “She was full of mirth and cheer, yet … rather inclined to be grave and reserved,” Lute recalled. A paragon of self-control, she never lost her temper and lacked the skittish frivolity of youth.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Lucy Spelman · Lucy · John
EPUB paragraph 57 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Early on, John and Laura must have spotted each other as kindred souls, especially when it came to religion. Cettie so unswervingly performed her duties at church and Sunday school that even her loving sister tactfully suggested that she went to extremes. “She was a religieuse. God and church came first with her. She cared little for the ‘social life,’ so called; and together she and her husband deepened and expanded their religion to cover and include every phase of life.” Even in photos, one notes a Quakerish simplicity to her appearance, her black dress and lace collar evoking her Puritan ancestors. Despite her evangelical beliefs, she never imposed her views on others and preferred to instruct by example. As one high-school classmate remembered, “She exerted a strong influence upon the rest of us. For one thing she didn’t believe in dancing and theatregoing, because she did not think it was proper for church people to engage in pursuits that she considered worldly.” For all that, Laura was no shallow philistine and had a wide range of interests in art, culture, and society. She played the piano for three hours daily and often accompanied John in duets, but she also had a taste for literature and poetry and could be an entertaining conversationalist.
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Laura · John
EPUB paragraph 58 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
An assiduous student, she was the valedictorian of her high-school class and her commencement speech, “I Can Paddle My Own Canoe,” was a ringing manifesto of female emancipation. (She graduated seven years after the first historic attempt by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott to organize women in Seneca Falls, New York.) From this speech, we can infer something of her adolescent values. “We may not tamely submit, and suffer ourselves to be led by any person or party, but have a mind of our own, and having once formed a decision ever abide by it.” This credo augured well for a woman destined to be embroiled in her future husband’s controversial career. In an outspoken statement of feminist belief, she chided men for depriving women of culture then hypocritically blaming them for their dependency. “But give woman culture—let her thread the many paths of science—allow mathematics and exact thought on all subjects to exert their influence on her mind and conventions need not trouble about her ‘proper sphere.’ ”
Names: New York · Lucretia Mott · Elizabeth Cady Stanton · Seneca Falls
EPUB paragraph 59 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
In 1856, Harvey and Lucy Spelman left Cleveland for Burlington, Iowa; the move evidently reflected renewed business hardships for Mr. Spelman, and they stayed away from Cleveland for three years. To alleviate the financial stress, Cettie and Lute stayed behind and jointly applied for teaching posts in the Cleveland public schools. Two years later, as the economic pinch eased, the two sisters spent a year at the Oread Collegiate Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. Established in 1849, this junior college was among the first institutions of higher learning open to women. Founded by abolitionist Eli Thayer, Oread stressed Christianity and the reading of the classics. Drawings show a picturesque, medieval-looking building on a hill, festooned with turrets, towers, and crenellations and surrounded by a stone wall. The cultural atmosphere, with its impassioned support for women’s rights and black welfare, must have been highly congenial to the sisters. Among other speakers, they heard inspirational lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and John Brown. A devotee of the Protestant work ethic, Cettie even approved of the school’s daily regimen, which was minutely budgeted from wake-up at 5:30 A.M. until the lights went out at 9:45 P.M. “I do not call the rules strict but am pleased with all of them,” she informed her former music teacher. At Oread, she dropped an occasional friendly note to Rockefeller, though the relationship was at this point less one of romance than of close camaraderie.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Spelman Seminary · Lucy Spelman · Cleveland · Henry Ward Beecher · John Brown · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Wendell Phillips · Eli Thayer · Massachusetts · Iowa · Harvey · Oread Collegiate Institute · Oread · Burlington · Worcester
EPUB paragraph 60 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Over the years, Laura’s growing commitment to religion smothered her literary bent, but at Oread she was a veritable bluestocking, writing poetry, running the literary society, and editing the campus literary magazine. In a revealing article in the Oread Euphemia, she wrote about three aristocracies then ruling America—an aristocracy of intellect in New England, wealth in the mid-Atlantic states, and blood in the South. In view of later events, her descriptions of Boston’s intellectual preeminence or southern social decadence are less noteworthy than the vitriol she poured on the New York nouveaux riches. “In this specified portion of our glorious republic, the ‘parvenu’ lady, with a brain all guiltless of ever having developed an idea, attires her self in habiliments, whose cast (but not style) would admit of their being worn in the presence of royalty.” After lambasting the dominion of the “almighty dollar” in the mid-Atlantic aristocracy, she concluded mordantly, “The gigantic intellect of Boston must bow to Wall St. Stocks and Bonds.” Such midwestern scorn for Wall Street’s monied upstarts was certainly consonant with Rockefeller’s beliefs. Little did the two know they would one day become synonymous with the “almighty dollar” and reside in the heart of Manhattan’s swankest, most sinful precincts.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · New York · United States · South · New England · Manhattan · Boston · Laura · Atlantic · Oread · Oread Euphemia · Wall St. Stocks · Wall Street
EPUB paragraph 61 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
In the spring of 1859, the Spelman sisters returned to Cleveland and began to take French, Latin, piano, and voice lessons at the Cleveland Institute. That autumn, Cettie and Lute, who always moved in tandem, began to teach in the public schools, Cettie serving as a teacher and principal’s assistant while Lute taught boys in the same building. Later on, Laura left no doubt of her family’s straitened circumstances at the time. “I had to do [work], which was a good thing,” she later told her son, “and I loved to do it, which was another good thing.” Despite a well-merited reputation as a disciplinarian, she was a popular teacher, and on her last day on the job “all the girls in her class remained after dismissal to say good-bye to her and to cry over losing her,” said one pupil. “My! how they cried.”
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Spelman Seminary · Lucy Spelman · Cleveland · Laura · Cleveland Institute
EPUB paragraph 62 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
In the early 1860s, Laura was sufficiently pleased with work that she felt in no special rush to get married. All the while, John Rockefeller, with the dogged patience that would defeat scores of embattled competitors, waited determinedly in the wings. In April 1860, Laura wrote her former music teacher, “I seem to have no anxiety about leading a life of single-blessedness,” but she mentioned Rockefeller and said that “a gentleman told me not long ago, that he was in no particular rush to have me get married, but he hoped that in the multitude of my thoughts I would not forget the subject.” She must have been torn when contemplating a match with Rockefeller, for teachers had to remain single, and marriage would end her career.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura · John Rockefeller
EPUB paragraph 63 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
In 1862, Rockefeller, buoyed by his rising wealth in the produce business, began to woo Cettie in earnest, often appearing at her school at day’s end to take her home. The Spelmans then lived in a lovely area of apple groves and greenery called The Heights, and on weekends John and brother William often rode out there under the guise of watching Civil War recruits drill nearby. After the Spelmans moved to a new home in downtown Cleveland, John, often wearing boots spattered with oil from his new refinery, stopped by and took Cettie out for drives in his buckboard, and she heard with delight the details of his business. “Her judgment was always better than mine,” Rockefeller said. “She was a woman of great sagacity. Without her keen advice, I would be a poor man.” There was loving exaggeration here, but in the early days of their marriage, he did bring home the books and review them with her.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Cleveland · Civil War · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 64 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c05_r1.htm
Despite her constant reluctance, Rockefeller pursued her with quiet persistence; in love as in business, he had a longer time frame, a more settled will, than other people. By early 1864, with the first profits rolling in from refining, he had become a substantial person in Cleveland, cutting an impressive figure in his frock coat, silk hat, and striped trousers. He was a handsome young man, with a fine, straight nose, rather humorless mouth, and vaguely mournful visage. His mustache flowed into fluffy side-whiskers, but his hair was already receding at the temples. His eyes were steady and lucid, as if confidently scanning the horizon for business opportunities.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland
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