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Abby grew up in a lively atmosphere of balls, parties, and plays. Opposed to religious severity, Aldrich spoiled his children with presents and seldom disciplined them. At the Aldrich mansion at 110 Benevolent Street in Providence, the senator liked to play bridge or even poker with Abby. (In later years, Junior would not join the game but sat quietly with a book, unable to break that taboo.) A self-taught aesthete with a highly cultivated taste for books and art, the senator had an excellent library of antique books, frequented auctions for furniture, rugs, and art, and so thoroughly schooled Abby in European museums that she knew their paintings by heart. As a teenager, she dipped into the novels of Dickens, Trollope, Hawthorne, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson W. Aldrich · Providence · Aldrich mansion · Dickens, Trollope · Hawthorne · Jane Austen · George Eliot · Benevolent Street
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Junior’s romance with Abby played itself out amid a whirl of college dances, football games, tandem-bike rides, and canoe trips, as well as church services on Sundays. When they strolled along, Junior carried graham crackers in his pocket, and Abby freely reached in and helped herself. As Junior said, “She was so gay and young and so in love with everything.” By the spring of junior year, Junior was a regular visitor at Benevolent Street. One Sunday, he mentioned in passing to the senator his summer plans to cruise the Norwegian fjords with his sister Alta. The senator must have warmed to the idea of Abby marrying young Rockefeller, for a few weeks later he bought tickets for himself, his wife, and two daughters on the same ship, and they dined together during the cruise. Back in Providence in the fall, Junior saw Abby so frequently that people began to speculate when they would marry. But Junior approached the matter with the same soul-searching and nervous energy that he brought to every major decision, and he vacillated through four years of tortured introspection. It was perhaps apparent to everybody in Providence except him that he would someday marry Abby.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Providence · Benevolent Street
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Certainly the size of his projected inheritance made the choice of wife a momentous decision. Junior idealized his father, and yet he had to deal with a mounting drumbeat of criticism against him. Abby seemed tailor-made to help him with this predicament, for they were both the children of public pariahs. Junior must have admired her ability to be the loyal daughter of a controversial senator while clinging to her own liberal beliefs. She lived in a way that betrayed neither her father nor herself and thereby pointed a path for Junior.
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As he approached graduation, Junior still engaged in hero worship of Senior. His glorified image of his father was inextricably bound up with his lowly image of himself. On his son’s twenty-first birthday, Senior sent him twenty-one dollars, along with a tender note. “We are grateful beyond measure for your promise and for the confidence your life inspires in us, not only, but in all your friends and acquaintances and this is of more value than all earthly possessions.” To this, Junior replied, “People talk about sons being better than their fathers, but if I can be half as generous, half as unselfish, half as kindly affectionate to my fellow men as you have been, I shall not feel that my life has been in vain.” As Junior contemplated the duties that awaited him after college, the prospect only magnified his sense of inadequacy. Shortly before graduation, he was invited to join the board of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. When he asked his father’s advice, Junior made clear that “my first duty as well as my pleasure after this year would be to help you in whatever capacity or position you might see fit.” He never wavered in this decision to subordinate his life to his father’s.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · American Baptist Home Mission Society
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As graduation neared, Junior grew wistful about his years at Brown and the relaxed camaraderie it had allowed him. He would shortly emerge into the spotlight of public attention, which would burn brightly for the rest of his life. As he thought of following in his father’s footsteps, his courage failed him, and he told his mother soon after graduation, “I feel but little confidence in my ability to fill the position which is before me, but know that I am not afraid to work or do whatever is required of me, and with God’s help I will do my best.” “The future is glowing with possibilities of service for God and man,” Cettie wrote back. “May the Holy Spirit take possession of your entire being, and guide you into all truth.” By making him view life so loftily, by encouraging him to see himself as a valiant Christian soldier, she might have inadvertently exacerbated his anxieties. This transcendent perspective seemed to allow little room for normal human failure. Junior’s father, meanwhile, remained inscrutably silent about Junior’s forthcoming role at 26 Broadway, which could only have deepened his dread of the unknown.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Brown University · 26 Broadway
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When John D. Rockefeller, Jr., started work on October 1, 1897, he was entering 26 Broadway not long after Senior had left it. He was installed at an oak rolltop desk on the austere and slightly shabby ninth floor, in an office suite dedicated to his father’s outside investments and philanthropies. He worked cheek by jowl with Frederick T. Gates, George Rogers, and a telegrapher, Mrs. Tuttle, who had the dubious honor of opening Rockefeller’s crank mail—and “there was a great deal of it,” said Junior. Though he worked in the Standard Oil building, Junior was uninvolved in its management, and he belonged instead to the incipient Rockefeller family office. If his $6,000 annual salary, paid by father, seemed generous, it was a disguised allowance that kept Junior in a state of childlike dependence.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Frederick T. Gates · Standard Oil · George D. Rogers · Henry B. Tuttle · Rockefeller family · 26 Broadway
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Junior turned aside suggestions that he go to law school or treat himself to an around-the-world trip. “I felt that I had no time for either, that if I was going to learn to help Father in the care of his affairs, the sooner my apprenticeship under his guidance began, the better.” Junior was again living at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street and had ample opportunity to sound him out, yet the taciturn Senior provided no clues about what he expected of his son, leaving him in limbo. “Father never said a word to me about what I was to do in the office before I began work there, nor has he ever since. Moreover, he did not say anything on the subject to anyone else in the office, so far as I have ever learned. Apparently he intended that I should make my own way.” Junior never admitted to being bothered by this tight-lipped approach. Like God, father’s ways were mysterious but, it was always assumed, benevolent in the end. As a stout believer in self-reliance, Senior probably wanted to test his son’s aptitude for business and let him find his own way without coaching.
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Rockefeller had numerous channels of intelligence, and Junior marveled at his knowledge of everything that went on at 26 Broadway. At a certain point during dinner, Rockefeller would apologize to guests for changing the subject and query Junior about his day’s work, displaying seeming omniscience about affairs downtown. Rockefeller’s gentle, probing questions were the closest Junior came to a business education from him. Father and son disagreed more than they publicly acknowledged, and Rockefeller was once heard to grumble, “You know, boys go to college and come back knowing everything about business and everything else.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · 26 Broadway
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At work, Junior had no formal place in the hierarchy and had to guess at his powers. He performed some menial tasks, such as filling inkwells. Never given his father’s power of attorney, he began to sign papers for him, unsure whether father would object; when he did not, Junior took this for a sign of approval and continued the practice. The first major task that Senior assigned his son was a ghoulish one: to supervise the design and transport of a soaring granite obelisk for the family burial plot in Cleveland, a shaft so huge it took up two freight cars. The young Brown graduate also picked out wallpaper for the family houses, sold worn-out buckboards and carriages, and managed Rockefeller real estate in Cleveland. One observer called it an “anxious and troubled” time for Junior, who felt that his performance was wanting, that he was not earning his keep, and that he was unequal to his appointed destiny.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Brown University · Cleveland
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If Junior did not feel totally adrift in these years, the credit must go to Frederick T. Gates, who gave him the guidance he sorely missed from his father. Together, they toured iron ranges in Minnesota and timberlands in the Pacific Northwest, often playing violins together in their private railroad car. Gates invited Junior to audit business meetings, and he responded with everlasting gratitude. Under Gates’s tutelage, Junior began to assume his rightful place in the Rockefeller firmament and joined the University of Chicago board just three months after starting work. While still in his twenties, he became a director of U.S. Steel, National City Bank, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, and, of course, Standard Oil.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Frederick T. Gates · Standard Oil · University of Chicago · National City Bank · U.S. Steel · Minnesota · Pacific Northwest · Western Railroad · Delaware · Lackawanna
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Bowed by a sense of premature failure, Junior was desperate to succeed at something and decided to try his hand at the stock market. Since his father had professed a puritan contempt for Wall Street, Junior was surprised to learn that he had played the market for years and traded actively. To teach them the art of investing, Rockefeller allowed Junior and his sister Alta to borrow from him at 6 percent and invest in equities. During his maiden year at 26 Broadway, Junior made several thousand dollars in the market and, like all giddy novices, began to take more risks and place ever-larger bets.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · 26 Broadway · Wall Street
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Meanwhile, a Wall Street operator named David Lamar—later styled the Wolf of Wall Street—began to cultivate George Rogers, Senior’s private secretary. In the fall of 1899, Rogers served as the gullible go-between for a scam. Transmitting information from Lamar, Rogers informed Junior that James R. Keene, a celebrated stock trader, had taken a big position in U.S. Leather and suggested that Junior join the buying. Led to believe that he was acting in concert with Keene, Junior took a gigantic stake in the stock. Upon learning that George Rogers was meeting secretly with Lamar at lunchtime, he had a queasy intuition of foul play. Junior summoned Lamar to his office, and he arrived with a flushed, agitated air. As Junior recalled, “One look at him was enough. I knew I had been sold out.” It turned out Keene knew nothing of the affair and that Lamar was liquidating leather stock as fast as Junior bid it up. The unthinkable had happened: The meek Junior had dropped nearly a million dollars—equal to more than $17 million today—of father’s money in the market. He knew the situation was unforgivable: He had never asked to meet Keene, had done no research, and had thrown away a fortune on a wild tip.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · George D. Rogers · United States · James R. Keene · David Lamar · Rogers · Lamar · Wolf · Wall Street
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One can only guess Junior’s emotional turmoil when he broke this astonishing news to father, a harrowing meeting that was forever seared into his memory. “Never shall I forget my shame and humiliation as I went up to report the affair to Father. I hadn’t the money to meet the loss; there was nothing else to do.” Senior listened quietly and conducted a calm but thorough inquiry, investigating every detail of the transaction—all without a syllable of reproach. At the end, he simply said, “All right, I’ll take care of it, John.” Junior waited for some criticism, some outburst, some paternal homily about future behavior. But nothing further was said. It was a vintage Rockefeller performance: The true lesson lay in what he did not say and what he did not do. Rockefeller sensed that his insecure son had castigated himself so unmercifully that bitter reproaches were superfluous. By showing generosity, he enlisted his son’s loyalty forever. The incident must have reinforced Junior’s innate conservatism, for the one time he had entered into a rash, immoderate scheme he had been severely punished.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · John
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Working for months without a break, Junior began to carry a lot of pent-up tension. To purge this nervous energy, he went after work to the West Fifty-fifth Street stable, where his father’s horses exercised in bad weather, and furiously chopped firewood from twenty-foot logs. Over lunch one day with Henry E. Cooper, a former Brown classmate, Junior brooded about his own inadequacy. Startled by the personality change, Cooper followed up with a letter of friendly advice. “You are altogether too grumpy, too morose and gloomy, John.… I truly think it would do you good, for instance, to take up smoking an occasional cigarette, or something of that sort. I am not joking. Just try being a shade more reckless or careless as to whether or not you reach perfection within five years, and see if you don’t find more happiness.” Pathetically eager to please, Junior noted in his ledger a few days later, “pack of cigarettes—10 cents.” It was the last time he ever smoked.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Brown University · Henry E. Cooper · West · Cooper · John
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Trapped on a treadmill of work, duty, and prayer, Junior found it hard to squeeze in time for Abby Aldrich. Sometimes on weekends, he took the train to Providence after work, dined with her, then grabbed the midnight train back to New York. In Manhattan, Junior often attended dances and parties with Alta, who was also living at home. She developed such an excessive attachment to her brother that she treated Abby as a rival and tried to undermine her. Alta’s adamant opposition could only have prolonged Junior’s doubts about marrying Abby.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · New York · Manhattan · Providence
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Senior saw that his son could not carry his load lightly and begged him to relax more. Cettie, however, insistently pushed him forward in his quest for moral perfection. Two days after he began at 26 Broadway, she prodded him to join the Bible class at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, telling him to be “mighty in the Scriptures. The most powerful Christians are Bible Christians.” Sometimes she made it seem that humanity’s salvation hinged upon his personal purity. In an astonishing letter of July 23, 1899, Cettie likened her husband to God and Junior to the Christ child. “You can never forget that you are a prince, the Son of the King of kings, and so you can never do what will dishonor your Father or be disloyal to the King.” Cettie’s tone is especially revealing amid the rising attacks against Standard Oil. Much like her husband, she had fashioned an alternate reality in which, instead of being a corporate villain, he was converted into an American saint. There were no shades of gray permitted in the Rockefeller household.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Standard Oil · Fifth Avenue Baptist Church · 26 Broadway · King
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Exhausted by work and beset by self-doubt, Junior pondered whether to marry Abby Aldrich and prayed daily for divine guidance for four years. “I always had a dread of marrying someone and finding out later that I loved someone else more. I knew a great many girls and I had so little confidence in my own judgment.” Things looked promising in April 1900, when Junior joined Senator Aldrich and Abby on a journey to Cuba aboard President McKinley’s yacht, the Dolphin, a senatorial trip to study conditions there following the Spanish-American War. Still, Junior hesitated, unable to suppress his doubts. In the stuffy Rockefeller household, both parents and son balked at bringing up the subject. Finally, his sister Edith, acting as intermediary, told her brother that their parents were worried about him and felt that they were being kept in the dark, at last opening the forbidden subject to discussion.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson W. Aldrich · William McKinley · Cuba
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In February 1901, Junior and Abby submitted to a six-month separation as a trial of their affections. After the time had expired, Junior was strolling by the lake at Forest Hill with Cettie when he summoned up the strength to ask her opinion of Abby Aldrich. Her hearty, laughing response was categorical. “Of course you love Miss Aldrich. Why don’t you go at once and tell her so?” Junior needed that maternal validation, that direct push. Soon afterward at West Fifty-fourth Street, he heard God’s voice in the wee hours, blessing his choice of Abby. “After many years of doubt and uncertainty, great longing and hope, there came a supreme peace of calm.” Before dawn, he dashed off a letter to Abby, asking if he could visit her. Stopping off to see Senator Aldrich on his yacht in Newport, he asked for his daughter’s hand and began to lay out his salary and financial prospects. Doubtless with some amusement, the senator brushed aside all money concerns and delivered the predictable bromide, “I am only interested in what will make my daughter happy.” An ecstatic Junior went to the Aldrich summer estate at Narragansett Bay and proposed to Abby by moonlight. “I can’t believe that it is really true that all this sacred joy … is mine.… For so long, long a time it has been the one thing in life above all others that I have yearned for,” Junior wrote his mother. Abby then had six suitors, leading Junior to observe retrospectively, “I kept wondering why she ever consented to marry a man like me.” But she never regretted her decision. As she wrote to a cousin many years later, “Don’t you think him quite the dearest man that ever was?”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson W. Aldrich · Forest Hill · Newport · Narragansett Bay · West Fifty-fourth Street · Miss Aldrich
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When the engagement was announced in August 1901, the press had a field day. “Croesus Captured,” trumpeted one paper. Many articles commented upon the odd match of the fun-loving Aldriches and the dour Rockefellers. As one paper said, “Young Mr. Rockefeller … is a Sunday-school teacher, and doesn’t believe in cards, dancing or decollete gowns, and Miss Abbie [sic] has never been able to make up her mind that she can renounce these things.” Although Senator Aldrich and Senior came in for their usual rough treatment, Abby and Junior were applauded for their more progressive views.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson W. Aldrich · Rockefeller family · Croesus Captured · Aldriches · Abbie
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The extravagant wedding at Warwick on October 9, 1901, reflected the cosmopolitan style of Senator Aldrich, who made scant concessions to his Baptist in-laws. By chartered steamer and private railway car, he transported a huge portion of the American plutocracy to the affair, which glittered with Goulds and Whitneys, McCormicks and Havemeyers. The marriage was a satirical bonanza for muckrakers. As David Graham Phillips darkly interpreted the union, “the chief exploiter of the American people is closely allied by marriage with the chief schemer in the service of their exploiters.”
Names: Nelson W. Aldrich · David Graham Phillips · McCormicks · Warwick · Goulds · Whitneys · Havemeyers
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The affair began with a small private wedding, limited to thirty-five guests and presided over by the Reverend J. G. Colby, who had married John and Cettie thirty-seven years before. Then a thousand people trooped gaily through a vast reception in the ballroom. Senator Aldrich refused to truckle to the temperance views of his in-laws and personally selected an array of vintage wines. This was too much for Cettie, who developed chills, asthma, and diarrhea the night before the wedding and took to her bed for spiritual safety, skipping the ceremony the next day—an exact replica of her performance at Junior’s senior-year dance at Brown. Once the stylish guests had fled, Junior and Abby spent a glorious month in seclusion at the house Senior had purchased in the Pocantico Hills of Westchester.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson W. Aldrich · Brown University · Pocantico Hills · Westchester County · J. G. Colby · John
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For the first months of married life, the newlyweds lived with John and Cettie at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street then crossed the street to a rented four-story mansion at number 13. Junior tried, with some trepidation, to initiate his free-spirited wife into the cramped, clerical ways of the Rockefellers, suggesting she might like to keep a weekly expense account. “I won’t,” Abby said bluntly, ending the matter forever. To a family muzzled by taboos, she brought a refreshing candor. When a visitor asked her, “Whatever are you going to do with this great big empty house, Abby?” she looked at him in astonishment. “Why, we shall fill it up with children!”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Rockefeller family · West Fifty-fourth Street · John
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The young Frederick T. Gates. (Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library)
Names: Frederick T. Gates · University of Chicago
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utwardly at least, Frederick T. Gates was the antithesis of his famous patron, as florid and melodramatic as Rockefeller was cool and withdrawn. With close-set eyes that looked slightly crossed, head tilted to one side with a sardonic smile, the philanthropic chief often looked as if he was skeptically sizing up the world. A tall, well-built man with a restless, energetic air, he could talk with gusto for hours at a stretch, as if delivering a fiery sermon or Shakespearean soliloquy. Capable of tremendous flashes of wrath or indignation, he was colorful in both action and speech. When he pontificated, he threw his feet up on the desk, jabbing his finger through swirling cigar smoke, or jumped up from his seat, hair tousled, tie askew, to pace the floor with lawyerly deliberation. One colleague said he had “a voice that thundered out of Sinai” and he knew no middle ground in advocating a cause. In a prose self-portrait, Gates described himself as “eager, impetuous, insistent, and withal exacting and irritable.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Sinai
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Like Rockefeller himself, Gates yoked together two separate selves—one shrewd and worldly, the other noble and high-flown. Born in upstate New York in 1853, not far from the Susquehanna River that flowed through Rockefeller’s boyhood, Gates was the son of a high-minded, impecunious Baptist minister, who had eked out a meager existence in small, impoverished towns. As a boy, Gates rebelled against the Puritan heritage that viewed earthly life as a melancholy sojourn. In his memoirs, he recalled that the “singing was pleasing, but otherwise Sunday school was a bore, as was church. I remember well my weekly relief when it was over and we could go home for dinner.” Of his twice-daily prayers, he said, “If it taught anything, it taught us thus early that prayer is a mere empty form of words.” The wonder was that the boy grew up to be a preacher.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · New York State · Susquehanna River
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When Gates was a teenager, his father went to Kansas for the American Baptist Home Mission Society, which only aggravated the family’s financial woes. Gates had to quit school at fifteen to help pay off their debt. For several years, he taught school and clerked in a dry-goods store and a bank, storing up valuable business experience. After briefly attending Highland University in Kansas, he entered the University of Rochester in 1875, where his interest in religion was rekindled. A good Baptist, he would not dance, play cards, or frequent the theater. Two years later, he entered the Rochester Theological Seminary, then under the sway of its president, Dr. Augustus H. Strong. Gates was briefly entranced by Strong’s theological system. “His instruction formed the foundation of our seminary course, and at that time it was almost wholly imaginary” was his later mordant judgment. Gates was drawn to the ministry, not as a retreat into an otherworldly life so much as a liberation from poverty and academic drudgery.
Names: Frederick T. Gates · Augustus H. Strong · Strong · Kansas · American Baptist Home Mission Society · Rochester Theological Seminary · Highland University · University of Rochester
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After graduating from the seminary in 1880, Gates was assigned his first pastorate in Minnesota. When his young bride, Lucia Fowler Perkins, dropped dead from a massive internal hemorrhage after sixteen months of marriage, the novice pastor not only suffered an erosion of faith but began to question the competence of American doctors—a skepticism that later had far-reaching ramifications for Rockefeller’s philanthropies. A period photo shows a handsome young man with a long, lean face, a handlebar mustache, and a somewhat wistful air. After launching into “a zealous campaign to convert sinners,” Gates soon lightened up, scrapping much of the scholastic baggage he had picked up in the seminary. To succeed as a pastor, he decided that he had to study the economic, intellectual, and social forces of his time. A biblical modernist, he employed science, history, and reason to explicate sacred texts. He also worked to retire the church’s debt and wrote essays for the Minneapolis Tribune.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Minnesota · Lucia Fowler Perkins · Minneapolis Tribune
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After eight years in Minnesota, Gates, thin and emaciated, seemed destined for a career as threadbare as his father’s. Then one day in 1888, heaven sent relief in the shape of a rich man, George A. Pillsbury, a founder of the flour fortune, the state’s wealthiest Baptist, and then the mayor of Minneapolis. He told Gates in confidence that he suffered from an incurable disease and needed advice about making a $200,000 bequest to a local Baptist academy. Gates advised Pillsbury to start out by giving the academy $50,000, contingent on the Baptists raising an equal sum—what we would today call a matching grant—then leave the remaining $150,000 in his will. Gates was subsequently drafted to drum up the $50,000, which he did so superlatively well that he threw up the ministry for good and became executive secretary of the new American Baptist Education Society. His contact with Rockefeller and involvement in the University of Chicago followed soon thereafter.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · University of Chicago · George A. Pillsbury · Minnesota · American Baptist Education Society · Minneapolis
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Those Baptists who thought they had slipped an advocate into Rockefeller’s inner sanctum were grievously disappointed. At first, Rockefeller still gave disproportionately to Baptist causes, as missionaries from every continent descended upon Gates’s office in droves. But despite his fondness for Baptist clergy, Rockefeller was also exposed to many greedy, calculating pastors and began to retreat from the sectarian spirit that had guided his giving. As Gates said, “I think his greatest trouble was with ministers because he had a natural liking for them and they were always trying to get money out of him.” By 1895, Rockefeller told Gates that he wanted to give to the five main Protestant denominations. This delighted the lapsed minister, who had grown so dismayed by the Baptist church in his town of Montclair, New Jersey, that he had switched to the local Congregational church. He was increasingly convinced “that Christ neither founded nor intended to found the Baptist Church, nor any church.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · New Jersey · Baptist Church · Congregational · Montclair
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For someone like Gates, torn between heaven and earth, serving as Rockefeller’s chief philanthropic adviser was an ideal synthesis. When they started working together in 1891, Rockefeller was fifty-two and Gates thirty-eight. In spite of his uncommon intelligence, Gates often felt self-conscious under Rockefeller’s icy scrutiny. As he grew more comfortable in his presence, he developed a powerful loyalty to him. “I will do my best to serve in any business capacity,” Gates humbly told him early on, “but I beg you not to place any confidence in me (I have little in myself) and to begin with matters in which I could not possibly do much harm.” He ended by saying, “No one but my father has been so kind to me.” Having long chafed at a minister’s salary, Gates could now indulge his ripest fantasies of wealth. Where his father had made less than $400 a year, Gates started with Rockefeller at $4,000 a year, his salary rising to $32,000 by 1902.
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What Gates gave to his boss was no less vital. Rockefeller desperately needed intelligent assistance in donating his money at a time when he could not draw on a profession of philanthropic experts. Painstakingly thorough, Gates combined moral passion with great intellect. He spent his evenings bent over tomes of medicine, economics, history, and sociology, trying to improve himself and find clues on how best to govern philanthropy. Skeptical by nature, Gates saw a world crawling with quacks and frauds, and he enjoyed grilling people with trenchant questions to test their sincerity. Outspoken, uncompromising, he never hesitated to speak his piece to Rockefeller and was a peerless troubleshooter.
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Gates believed implicitly in Rockefeller’s goodness and wisdom. “If he were placed in a group of say twenty of the greatest men of affairs of today,” he once remarked in a speech, “before these giants had been with him for long, the most self-confident, self-assertive of them would be coming to him in private for his counsel.” Having known many rich people, Gates was impressed that Rockefeller had no private yachts or railroad cars. He was always quick to defend Rockefeller, sometimes wittily. When a man complained to him that Rockefeller in his Cleveland years cared only for money, Gates retorted, “In heaven’s name, what else could he do in that city!” In a typical utterance, Gates said, “The Rockefellers have done incomparably more to permanently enrich the commonwealth than any other family since the founding of the republic.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Rockefeller family · Cleveland
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.