EPUB paragraph 48 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
At bottom, Rockefeller must have been genuinely alarmed by the impending criminal prosecution, for he decided to placate the producers and cut a political deal. On the day before Christmas 1879, Standard Oil rescinded the immediate-shipment policy and agreed to meet with producers at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. In a historic agreement, Standard Oil renounced—or seemed to renounce—the use of secret rebates and drawbacks and consented to publicly posted freight rates; its United Pipe Lines would no longer discriminate among shippers and would transport all oil within reasonable limits. In return, the criminal and civil cases against Standard Oil in Pennsylvania were scuttled. In time, it emerged that Standard’s pledge to repudiate rebates was largely a rhetorical flourish to settle the cases.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · New York · Pennsylvania · United Pipe Lines · Fifth Avenue Hotel
EPUB paragraph 49 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
Aware that Standard Oil’s fate was now being thrashed out in the political arena, Rockefeller reversed a long-standing prejudice and took shares in two Cleveland newspapers, investing $5,000 in the Herald and $10,000 in the Leader, explaining to Colonel Oliver Payne that since “Mr. Flagler felt perhaps we had given too little heed to influences of this kind, I decided best to do it.” While Rockefeller’s official policy remained one of obdurate silence, he now had more avenues of press access than he admitted. Payne, meanwhile, believed that Standard Oil should move from bribing politicians to controlling them directly, telling Rockefeller, apropos of the Ohio legislature, “I wish to say that I have got through with sentiment in politics.… We must see hereafter that there is one man in the Legislature from this County that has brains, influence and is our man.” Rockefeller told Payne to do “all that is necessary.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry M. Flagler · Oliver H. Payne · Standard Oil · Cleveland · Ohio · Payne · Herald · Legislature · Leader
EPUB paragraph 50 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
Around this time, Rockefeller recruited to the Standard legal staff Roger Sherman, who had masterminded the producers’ case against him. For years a champion of Oil Creek, Sherman had fought valiantly to imprison Rockefeller. Now Rockefeller was wily enough to offer him a job, and Sherman was naive enough—or original enough—to accept it. Always proud of his persuasive powers, Rockefeller took special pleasure in wooing opponents whom he had learned to appreciate by tracking their ploys against him. When a lawyer named Virgil Kline won two lawsuits against him in the 1880s, Rockefeller invited him to his office. “Mr. Kline,” he said, “you have given us a good licking. Now I would like to have you come and work for me.” Kline agreed and became a long-standing member of the Standard Oil legal staff.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Oil Creek · Virgil Kline · Roger Sherman · Sherman
EPUB paragraph 51 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
Things worked out differently for Roger Sherman, who realized after a strangely inactive year on the payroll that Rockefeller had given him a five-year contract expressly to neutralize him. When he tried to wriggle free of the contract, he was able only to strike a compromise that allowed him to resume his general practice in western Pennsylvania while remaining on retainer to Standard Oil. When he later returned to the crusade against Rockefeller, the independents were too disenchanted by his flirtation with Standard to deal with him. True to his wishes, Rockefeller had tarnished Sherman, separating him from his onetime admirers.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Roger Sherman · Pennsylvania · Sherman
EPUB paragraph 52 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
Ever since his boyhood as the son of the town pariah, Rockefeller had evinced more than a trace of paranoia. Now, embattled in courts and legislative chambers, he was convinced that evildoers were plotting against him and complained to one colleague about “this iniquitous proceeding of getting the United States out with a drag-net for the Standard Oil Co.” As chief instigator of his misery, he cited George Rice, an independent refiner, who would pursue him with the tenacity of a harpy for decades.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · George Rice · Standard Oil · United States
EPUB paragraph 53 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
Rockefeller’s movements in 1879 were governed largely by the need to duck subpoenas. In July, the New York State Assembly held hearings, chaired by Alonzo Barton Hepburn, to probe clandestine relations between the railroads and various industries. While the panel examined flour millers, meatpackers, and salt makers, it zeroed in on Standard Oil as the most notorious beneficiary of back-scratching with the railroads. That summer, Rockefeller stayed at Forest Hill, safely beyond the committee’s reach.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Forest Hill · Alonzo Barton Hepburn · New York State Assembly
EPUB paragraph 54 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
As was true of many exposés of Rockefeller, the Hepburn hearings fueled public indignation against him while it also inadvertently enhanced his mystique as an invulnerable genius. The committee trotted out William H. Vanderbilt, who paid resounding tribute to the disciplined craft of the Standard Oil executives. “Long ago I said if the thing kept on the oil people would own the roads.… These men are smarter than I am a great deal. They are very enterprising and smart men. I never came into contact with any class of men so smart and able as they are in their business.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William H. Vanderbilt · Standard Oil · Alonzo Barton Hepburn
EPUB paragraph 55 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
John D. Archbold’s testimony previewed the manner—flippant, arrogant, glib, and high-handed—in which he disposed of future legal challenges to Standard Oil’s authority. Asked about his functions as a director, Archbold retorted, “I am a clamorer for dividends. That is the only function I have in connection with the Standard Oil Company.” He blatantly perjured himself when he said that Standard didn’t control Acme Oil Company. When chairman Hepburn asked him to return for further questioning the next day, Archbold dismissed the committee, instead of the other way around. “I have given today to the matter,” he told them. “It will be impossible for me to be with you again.” For the most part, Standard officers dodged questions with the ritual evasion, “I refuse to answer on the advice of counsel.”
Names: John D. Archbold · Standard Oil · Alonzo Barton Hepburn · Acme Oil Company
EPUB paragraph 56 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
When the Hepburn report was issued, it lent credence to what might otherwise have seemed fantastic conjecture, documenting a pattern of pervasive railroad favoritism toward large shippers. The New York Central alone enforced six thousand secret contracts, while the Erie’s business was equally honeycombed with privileged arrangements. The committee assailed Standard Oil as “a mysterious organization whose business and transactions are of such a character that its members decline giving a history or description of it lest this testimony be used to convict them of a crime.”
Names: Standard Oil · New York Central · Alonzo Barton Hepburn · Erie
EPUB paragraph 57 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
For years, refiners had debated whether railroads were unregulated enterprises, free to strike what bargains they pleased, or common carriers, committed to treat all alike. The Hepburn report buttressed the latter view, saying that railroad bias toward Standard Oil was “the most shameless perversion of the duties of a common carrier to private ends … in the history of the world.” To remedy this, the New York legislature set up a railroad commission to regulate rates in a fair, uniform manner. The Hepburn report, however, was both belated and insufficient in hobbling Rockefeller’s triumphant march, for by this time he had parlayed his secret railroad contracts into preeminence in oil. More important, his firm had now advanced far beyond the railroads to more efficient pipelines. In fact, a cynic might argue that the advent of the Hepburn hearings was incontestable proof that the railroads no longer mattered.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · New York · Alonzo Barton Hepburn
EPUB paragraph 58 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
The growing agitation over railway reform hardened Rockefeller’s determination to bring the Tidewater pipeline to bay, and he began to harass his competitor with a bewildering array of challenges. He tried to throttle the pipeline’s access to crude oil and explored the purchase of several New York refineries before they could become Tidewater clients. At one point, he reduced rates on Standard Oil pipelines while the railroads dropped prices to such risible levels that one freight agent said that they scarcely covered the wheel grease. This relentless price war forced Tidewater to operate at half capacity.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Tidewater Pipe Line Company · New York
EPUB paragraph 59 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
It turned out that Rockefeller’s adversary, Byron Benson, was no more enamored of free markets than Rockefeller was and had created the pipeline to join in the feast. In March 1880, Daniel O’Day chanced to meet Benson on a train traveling from Oil City to Bradford and was shocked by his rival’s words. As O’Day reported to Rockefeller, “[Benson] told me that he wanted to ‘let the bars down,’ as he expressed it, for any overtures that might be made to his company, with a view of an adjustment of the pipe line questions. He said that he felt that the time had about come when the companies should work together with a view of preventing other companies from engaging in the business.” Benson’s solution suited Rockefeller just fine: Tidewater, instead of cutting rates to compete with the railroads, would collude with them to raise rates. Thus, within a year of its completion, the pipeline that was supposed to emancipate independents from Standard Oil bondage was drawn into a railroad pool supervised by John D. Rockefeller. In 1882, when Byron Benson decided to borrow two million dollars to expand Tidewater, it prompted vigorous opposition from a group of minority shareholders. Exploiting this dissension, parties friendly to Standard Oil bought the minority stake, enabling Rockefeller to strike a bargain with Tidewater the following year. Under this pact, Standard Oil divided the pipeline business in Pennsylvania, taking 88.5 percent of the trade and leaving just 11.5 percent to Tidewater.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Daniel O’Day · Byron Benson · Standard Oil · Tidewater Pipe Line Company · Oil City · Bradford · Pennsylvania
EPUB paragraph 60 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
It was now abundantly clear to Rockefeller that the railroads represented a fading order. For a long time, he had resisted an irreversible shift to pipes for fear of antagonizing the railroads, but this concern had lost its force. When Standard Oil constructed four pipelines from western Pennsylvania to Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and Buffalo, he pressured the railroads to grant it right-of-way concessions, even though the pipelines signaled their doom.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Cleveland · New York · Philadelphia · Buffalo · Pennsylvania
EPUB paragraph 61 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
When Standard Oil subdued Tidewater, it again demoralized the independents and suggested that all opposition to the behemoth was a foolish, chimerical dream. While a band of intrepid reformers continued to joust with Standard Oil in courthouses and legislatures, most producers now surrendered hope of any improvement in their plight. They knew they would either have to quit the business or swallow their pride and make peace with the oil giant. With the passing of Tidewater’s complete independence, they could no longer ship oil from Pennsylvania without paying tribute to the all-powerful Mr. Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Tidewater Pipe Line Company · Pennsylvania
EPUB paragraph 62 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c12_r1.htm
Harriet E. Giles (left) and Sophia B. Packard, the founders of Spelman Seminary, later Spelman College, who recruited Rockefeller as the school’s major donor in the early 1880s. (Courtesy of the Spelman College Archives)
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Sophia B. Packard · Harriet E. Giles · Spelman Seminary
EPUB paragraph 1 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
hen John D. Rockefeller turned forty on July 8, 1879, he was already numbered among America’s twenty richest men, yet he was likely the most obscure of the pantheon. While this resulted largely from his aversion to publicity, it also stemmed from his residing in Cleveland. As one chronicler said of the town, “Its rich folk were not scandalous or showy; its politics had not the violent quality essential to American fame.” In other words, it was an ideal place for a reclusive magnate. Throughout his career, Rockefeller pooh-poohed “exaggerated” press estimates of his wealth, yet they often understated his true worth. In the late 1870s, one newspaper pegged his wealth at more than $5 million, when his Standard Oil stock alone was by then worth $18 million, or $265 million in 1996 dollars. By comparison, when America’s richest citizen, Commodore Vanderbilt, died in 1877, he left an estate valued at nearly $100 million.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cornelius Vanderbilt · Standard Oil · Cleveland · United States
EPUB paragraph 2 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
Photos of Rockefeller from this period show two contrasting faces. In his serious mode, his expression seemed grim and unsmiling, with tremendous force in his gaze but no softness or joy. Yet when photographed in leisure hours in the sanctuary of Forest Hill, he looked trim and whimsical, surprisingly boyish for such a powerful man. Gone were the old side-whiskers, but he still had a full red mustache and sandy brown hair. In a period when moguls prided themselves on their embonpoint, Rockefeller was as lean as a greyhound. And at a time when top hats and watch chains were de rigueur for any self-respecting plutocrat, Rockefeller generally conformed to the requisite style, but his family constantly had to remind him to buy a new suit when his current one got too shiny.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Forest Hill
EPUB paragraph 3 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
If Rockefeller generally enjoyed excellent health, there were early warning symptoms of the toll taken by the excruciating pressures of Standard Oil. In 1878, he wrote to Eliza, “I am eating celery which I understand to be very good for nervous difficulty.” Colleagues plied him with advice to take more vacations and spend more time away from business, even though Rockefeller later said he was almost semiretired at this point. He tried to spend as many afternoons as possible at Forest Hill in “the bracing air of Lake Erie.” He displayed a strong interest in herbal medicines and other folk remedies, advising one associate that he could dispense more easily with tobacco if he had an orange peel before breakfast every day. Big Bill’s interest in medicine, conventional and otherwise, began to surface in his son and became more pronounced with time.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Standard Oil · Forest Hill · Lake Erie
EPUB paragraph 4 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
Now that Rockefeller headed almost all of America’s oil refineries and pipelines, the press belatedly awakened to his existence, acknowledging him as a new deity in the industrial firmament. In November 1878, he sat for his first full-length newspaper profile in the New York Sun. The article disclosed the scope of an ambition that Rockefeller took pains to deny: “The people of Cleveland say that it is his ambition to become the richest man in Ohio and one of the ten richest men in the United States.… He is in a fair way of being able to count on his fingers the men in the country who are richer than he is.” This first sketch, which portrayed him as quiet, reserved, and methodical, was shot through with ambivalence. Of Rockefeller’s business ability, the reporter rhapsodized: “Business men in Cleveland, in the oil regions and in New York who know him or know of him, regard him as one of the great commercial intellects of the country.” Yet the article concluded that his Olympian success arose from a strange, unsavory bargain with the railroads—a pact that people surmised but could never quite prove. Within a year, the Hepburn hearings began to document what had long been mooted about Rockefeller’s dealings with the railroads, and by the early 1880s he had moved a considerable distance from his former anonymity to something closer to universal notoriety.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland · New York · United States · Alonzo Barton Hepburn · Ohio · New York Sun
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
In late 1883, Rockefeller’s life assumed a marginally higher profile when he moved to New York. Eighteen eighty-four would prove to be a pivotal year for the country, marked by bank failures and panics and the demise of General Grant’s brokerage firm, Grant and Ward. The Democratic reformer Grover Cleveland triumphed in the presidential election over the corrupt Republican candidate, James G. Blaine, installing a Democrat in the White House for the first time in many years.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · New York · Grover Cleveland · White House · Grant · James G. Blaine · Grant and Ward
EPUB paragraph 6 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
Rockefeller had long felt the gravitational pull of New York, with its lively export trade in kerosene, and routinely spent part of each winter there. Haunted by his father’s wanderings, he was loath to abandon Cettie and the children, and for two winters in the mid-1870s he lodged them at the Windsor Hotel on Fifth Avenue, where Jay Gould often plotted his corporate raids. From 1877 to 1884, Rockefeller and his family stayed at the Buckingham Hotel, a residential hotel on Fifth Avenue on the present site of the Saks department store. They had a large suite of rooms in the shadow of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, whose huge stained-glass windows loomed up dreamily outside their windows at night. (One of Junior’s early memories was of being reprimanded sharply by his mother for failing to thank a hotel waiter for bringing him food.) After Harvey Spelman’s death in 1881, Grandmother Spelman and Aunt Lute took a suite on the same floor and shared meals with them. From late spring through early fall, the entourage returned to Forest Hill, where Rockefeller stayed in touch with the New York office by sophisticated telegraphy.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Jay Gould · Lucy Spelman · Harvey Buel Spelman · Lucy Henry Spelman · New York · Forest Hill · Fifth Avenue · Buckingham Hotel · Saint Patrick · Cathedral · Windsor Hotel · Saks
EPUB paragraph 7 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
Business now dictated Rockefeller’s move to the East Coast. In an age of long-distance pipelines, huge volumes of crude oil were flowing to seaboard refineries where they fed a flourishing export traffic, relegating Cleveland and other inland centers to an inferior status. Responding to the export boom, Standard Oil established sprawling refineries in Brooklyn, Bayonne, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. A latent tension now strained relations between the Cleveland headquarters and its burgeoning New York branch. One day, Benjamin Brewster, a Standard director, told Rockefeller that a two-headed calf belonged only in the circus and that the combine needed a single head. “You can’t have one head in Cleveland and another in New York,” he told Rockefeller. “And therefore either you have got to quit Cleveland and come on here or we have got to pack up and leave New York and go out to Cleveland.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Cleveland · New York · Philadelphia · Brooklyn · Bayonne · Benjamin Brewster · Baltimore · East Coast
EPUB paragraph 8 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
By the time Rockefeller and Oliver Payne transferred to New York in late 1883 and early 1884, Henry Flagler had preceded them by two years. Though now immensely rich, John and Cettie possessed the low-key style and resolute sense of privacy of old money and searched for a house on a peaceful side street. They swapped nine parcels of Manhattan real estate, appraised at $600,000, for a four-story brownstone mansion at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street. Garlanded with ivy, flanked by lawns, the residence stood on a site that would later house the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden. If roomy and comfortable, it was extremely modest for someone of Rockefeller’s wealth and, like his Cleveland residence, subtly masked the size of his fortune. For all its social cachet, Fifth Avenue was now a busy, nerve-jangling thoroughfare, as Junior remembered with dismay: “It was paved with cobblestones and I can still hear the noise of the steel tires rumbling along the street. It was fearfully noisy.” By contrast, West Fifty-fourth Street was a shady retreat, situated north of the Elgin Botanical Gardens, which later formed part of Rockefeller Center. Opposite the Rockefeller home stood Saint Luke’s Hospital, with lawns and gardens that spread a fragrant tranquillity over the street.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Henry M. Flagler · Oliver H. Payne · Museum of Modern Art · Cleveland · New York · Rockefeller Center · Manhattan · Fifth Avenue · West Fifty-fourth Street · Elgin Botanical Gardens · Saint Luke · John
EPUB paragraph 9 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
The home that the Rockefellers bought was the opulent boudoir of the beautiful Arabella Worsham, who had tried to pass herself off as a niece of railroad mogul Collis Huntington when she was actually his mistress. When Huntington’s wife died in late 1883, he decided to marry Arabella and make an honest woman of her. The sober brownstone that had sheltered their assignations went on the market, and it is amusing to think of the Rockefellers snapping up their love nest. A frugal man, John D. followed his accustomed practice of keeping the furnishings, even if the style in this case diverged ludicrously from his own. The interior contained touches of voluptuous sensuality, such as Arabella’s exotic Moorish salon on the ground floor and the Turkish bath upstairs. The sumptuous master bedroom was artistically designed in Anglo-Japanese style, with dark ebonized woodwork, a queen-size canopied sleigh bed, and a magnificent silver and gilt chandelier. The bay window provided an intimate Turkish corner, tantalizingly glimpsed through a stained-glass screen. Doubtless as a legacy of Arabella Worsham—one can’t picture the prudish Rockefellers shopping for such things—4 West Fifty-fourth Street had paintings by Corot, Meissonier, Daubigny, and other French painters then in vogue among local parvenus. The house also had the latest conveniences, including one of the city’s first elevators in a private residence. The only thing removed by Rockefeller were the worn carpets, which he donated to the needy through a local church.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Rockefeller family · Collis Huntington · Arabella Worsham · Arabella · West Fifty-fourth Street · Huntington · Corot · Daubigny
EPUB paragraph 10 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
Though West Fifty-fourth Street was a tree-lined oasis, the Rockefellers had chosen the most sybaritic precinct of New York society in the Gilded Age. Much of the wealth amassed in what Mark Twain called the “raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century” had now settled in Manhattan. The old New York aristocracy, huddled around Washington Square and Gramercy Park, shuddered at the pretentious uptown mansions, which paid tribute to postwar fortunes in railroads, steel, and oil. Along Fifth Avenue near the Rockefeller home, the palaces of the rich—notably the fantastic, turreted confections of William K. Vanderbilt at Fifty-first Street and Cornelius Vanderbilt II at Fifty-eighth Street—stretched uptown in gaudy profusion.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mark Twain · Rockefeller family · New York · Manhattan · Gilded Age · Fifth Avenue · Washington Square · Gramercy Park · William K. Vanderbilt · West Fifty-fourth Street · Cornelius Vanderbilt II
EPUB paragraph 11 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
With Standard Oil moving its headquarters to New York, the neighborhood was becoming a colony of company directors. At one point in this corporate relocation, twenty-eight Standard Oil executives arrived in a single Pullman car from Cleveland and were taken straight to the Saint James Hotel, where William presided over their first breakfast and John their first dinner. The latter liked to greet new arrivals at the train station and help them to find houses. Soon, the Fifth Avenue strip near Rockefeller’s home was thickly populated with Standard Oil men, Henry Flagler occupying the southeast corner of Fifty-fourth Street and William Rockefeller the northeast corner, with Benjamin Brewster next door to William. William departed from his brother’s ascetic style and raised his children in a looser, freer atmosphere, causing envious pangs among John’s children. As Junior said, “We children didn’t have what those children had and we used to notice the difference. They had a gay kind of social life, with many parties which we used to wish we could have.” Since William refused to take on debt to build his house, he sold $50,000 of Standard Oil stock to John despite his brother’s heartfelt plea to retain the stock. William’s imprudent decision figured importantly in the enormous disparity in wealth that developed between the two brothers.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · William Rockefeller · Henry M. Flagler · Standard Oil · Cleveland · New York · Benjamin Brewster · Fifth Avenue · Saint James Hotel · Pullman · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 12 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
In New York, John D. did not acquire cosmopolitan interests but stuck with his old Cleveland pastimes, creating a large ice-skating rink every winter in a space adjoining his house. Each morning, curious pedestrians could glimpse the chief of the American oil industry, dressed in overcoat and top hat, ice skates strapped to his patent-leather boots, as he glided placidly around the horseshoe-shaped area. A great enthusiast for the sport, he created rows of shelves in his house on which dozens of guests could store their skates.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland · New York
EPUB paragraph 13 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
Though Rockefeller resisted the yacht-owning fad that swept New York society in the 1880s and owned neither a boat nor private railroad car, he spared no expense for fast-trotting horses in his large, heated stable at 21 West Fifty-fifth Street. Every afternoon after work, he took out his black gelding trotters and mingled with the pageant of fashionable carriages thronging Central Park, often racing against his brother William, with an excited Junior seated at his side. So keenly did Rockefeller relish trotting that at one point he told his son, “I drove four times yesterday making an aggregate in the two days of about eighty miles. Don’t you think I am an enthusiastic youth?” Junior left a description of his father’s racing style that seems a metaphor for his assertive but careful stewardship of Standard Oil:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Standard Oil · New York · West · Central Park · Uncle William
EPUB paragraph 14 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
Other drivers would often lose their tempers when a horse broke gait or pulled hard; Father never. If a horse was excitable or difficult he always kept his temper, and patiently, quietly worked with the animal until he steadied it. Frequently I have seen him driving at a very rapid pace through Central Park; in the middle of the roadway through two streams of traffic, pushing always a little to the left, as he explained to me, so as to open his way through, but keeping margin enough on the right so that if the approaching traffic did not swing over in time, he would still have room enough to pass.
Names: Central Park
EPUB paragraph 15 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
Never dazzled by New York, Rockefeller was insulated from the beau monde that threw costly dinners and costume balls and frequented the theater, opera, and clubs. He had no interest in debauchery, and it is hard to picture him milling about with portly men smoking cigars or women wearing expensive furs and jewels. The newspapers noted his total boycott of social functions. As one periodical said, “He never entertains notables, his home is never given to entertainment, and he follows the policy of self-effacement at all times and in all places.” Although he joined the Union League Club, Rockefeller did not feel comfortable with the splendor of the Astors and Vanderbilts. When Cettie asked for a new four-wheeled carriage in 1882, John stared at her, aghast, and said they could scarcely afford it unless they traded in the old one. Abiding by his daily rituals, he still enjoyed bread and milk in the morning and a paper bag of apples in the evening. Each morning before work, a barber shaved him in his dressing room before he trotted down the brownstone stoop at exactly the same hour and for a nickel took the Sixth Avenue elevated train downtown. The wheels of his mind already turning, he jotted penciled notes on his shirt cuff as the train jolted toward Wall Street. Moving with spectral stealth, as if tiptoeing on a cushion of air, he slipped into the Standard Oil building at the stroke of nine. “I never knew anyone to enter an office as quietly as Mr. Rockefeller,” said his private secretary, George Rogers. “He seemed almost to have a coat of invisibility.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Standard Oil · George D. Rogers · New York · Vanderbilts · Union League Club · Astors · Wall Street · John
EPUB paragraph 16 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
In late 1883, Standard Oil began to assemble real estate at the southern tip of Manhattan for new headquarters, destined to soar above Broadway at Bowling Green on the onetime site of Alexander Hamilton’s home. Having long outgrown William’s old offices at two different locations on Pearl Street, the firm had operated for three years from modest, unprepossessing quarters at 44 Broadway. Now, on May 1, 1885, after spending nearly one million dollars on it, Standard Oil moved into its impregnable new fortress, a massive, granite, nine-story building. The combine’s name didn’t appear outside, just the building number. Twenty-six Broadway soon became the world’s most famous business address, shorthand for the oil trust itself, evoking its mystery, power, and efficiency. Standard Oil was now America’s premier business, with a reach that ramified into a labyrinth of railroads, banks, and other businesses. The purple prose aroused by the new building perhaps owed less to its imposing neoclassical architecture than to its symbolic heft. Said one reporter: “Many worthy men are convinced that No. 26 Broadway is the most perilous shelter on earth—a cave for pirates, a den for the cutthroats of commerce.” Otherwise sober writers seemed to swoon before the saturnine grandeur of Rockefeller’s seat of power:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Broadway · 26 Broadway · United States · Manhattan · Alexander Hamilton · Pearl Street · Uncle William
EPUB paragraph 17 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c13_r1.htm
At the lower end of the greatest thoroughfare in the greatest city of the New World is a huge structure of plain gray-stone. Solid as a prison, towering as a steeple, its cold and forbidding facade seems to rebuke the heedless levity of the passing crowd, and frown on the frivolity of the stray sunbeams which in the late afternoon play around its impassive cornices. Men point to its stern portals, glance quickly up at the rows of unwinking windows, nudge each other, and hurry onward, as the Spaniards used to do when going by the offices of the Inquisition. The building is No. 26 Broadway.
Names: 26 Broadway · New World
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.