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Among the intrigued was Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, who had inveighed against Standard Oil as the most pitiless trust. Pulitzer served his readers an incongruous mix of scabrous stories and lofty crusades against corporate abuse. “Money is the great power of today,” he declared. “Men sell their souls for it. Women sell their bodies for it.” He wished to purge capitalism of its vulgar excesses so that a more enlightened capitalism might flourish, and he evinced a special animus toward Rockefeller, whom he christened “the father of trusts, the king of monopolists, the czar of the oil business,” a man who “relentlessly crushes all competitors.” Hence the story of Doc Rockefeller—uniting, as it did, the spice of family scandal with Standard Oil’s notoriety—was a godsend. Stirring the pot, Pulitzer offered eight thousand dollars to anyone who could provide information about Rockefeller’s father, a reward that set off a nationwide manhunt.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Joseph Pulitzer · Standard Oil · World
EPUB paragraph 139 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
It is a credit to Bill’s matchless duplicity that teams of reporters were immediately stymied in this search. There was also a fair bit of luck involved. When McClure’s printed a picture of Rockefeller’s father to accompany the character sketch, many Freeport, Illinois, residents were shocked to see Dr. William Levingston staring out at them. Many traits that Tarbell attributed to Doc Rockefeller sounded oddly reminiscent of their queer local resident. The editor of the Freeport Daily Bulletin contacted McClure’s to inform them that they might have mistakenly printed a picture of Dr. William Levingston. Indignant at this insinuation—and totally oblivious of the revelation implicit in the Freeport editor’s query—McClure’s wrote back and assured the editor that the photo of Rockefeller’s father was indeed authentic. Amazingly enough, the national press corps never picked up on all the rumors buzzing around Freeport, Illinois.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Freeport · Illinois · Freeport Daily Bulletin
EPUB paragraph 140 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
An impatient Pulitzer dispatched one of his star reporters, J. W. Slaght, to Cleveland, hoping for a quick solution, but two weeks later Slaght slogged back to New York, weary and dispirited. In a despairing memo to Pulitzer, he stressed the inordinate effort required to track down Rockefeller’s father and hinted that it would be thankless drudgery. He hoped that the matter would end there. “In just about time enough for the report to have reached Mr. Pulitzer I was ordered to take up the search and stay on it until I found Mr. Rockefeller, regardless of time or expense,” Slaght revealed to William O. Inglis a decade later. “It seems that the story fascinated Mr. Pulitzer—the disappearance of the father of the richest man in the world, a thrilling mystery that would interest people everywhere.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Joseph Pulitzer · William O. Inglis · Cleveland · New York · J. W. Slaght
EPUB paragraph 141 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
So thoroughly had Doc Rockefeller erased his tracks that Slaght had only one tenuous clue. During the reunion a few years earlier at Forest Hill, Big Bill had slyly told his buddies that he resided somewhere out West and shot “shirt-tail swans” in a nearby lake. Slaght consulted a naturalist who said that a wild goose nicknamed the “shirt-tail swan” abounded in parts of Alaska. Setting forth with this sketchy information and a photo of Doc Rockefeller, the miserable Slaght trekked through Alaska, tramping from lake to lake. Once he had exhausted this terrain, he heard that Bill had been sighted in Indiana and was off on another wild-goose chase. For a time, he peddled razors door-to-door, trying to pry information loose from suspicious German farmers. “I’ll bet I shaved myself ten or fifteen times a day, till my face was sore, selling the blamed razors.” Even clean shaven, Slaght again came up empty-handed.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Forest Hill · Indiana · West · J. W. Slaght · Alaska
EPUB paragraph 142 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Desperate, he turned to Frank Rockefeller, the only person in direct communication with the phantom. Bribing Frank’s secretary with candy and theater tickets, Slaght gained access to Frank, who was no less protective of his father than John was. He was quite upset by Slaght’s quest and offered a straightforward deal: If Slaght called off the search, Frank would repay him with sensational findings about his brother. To enhance the deal’s allure, Frank exhumed from his drawer an impressive manuscript, thick as a telephone directory.
Names: Frank Rockefeller · J. W. Slaght · John
EPUB paragraph 143 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
After a flurry of calls to New York, the World editors agreed to terminate their search for Doc Rockefeller for sixty days if they could, in return, publish Frank’s philippic against John. Having never dealt with Frank, Slaght naively trusted him. But when the time expired, Frank would not return his calls, and Slaght had no choice but to accost him on a Cleveland street and bluntly remind him that the World had fulfilled its end of the bargain; in exchange, he demanded the manuscript. “No, sir,” Frank snapped, “not one word of it.” Aghast, Slaght said the World would publish the inflammatory remarks Frank had made about John in his office. “If you publish that,” retorted Frank, “I’ll kill you.” However much he detested John, Frank must have feared that any published comments would dry up the loans from his brothers.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Frank Rockefeller · Cleveland · New York · World · J. W. Slaght · John
EPUB paragraph 144 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
In August 1907, still baffled in its search for Doc Rockefeller, the World ran the interview with Frank recorded a year and a half earlier. “My father is alive and well,” a defiant Frank was quoted as saying. “He is dependent upon no man. He would scorn the proffer of financial aid from John D. and would not take it from me. He has means of his own, ample for all his needs.” Then he openly taunted his brother for his estrangement. “Go ask John D. where our father is: tell him that I sent you and that I dare him to answer.” By this point, the Pulitzer reporters labored under insane pressure to come up with fresh leads. When William Randolph Hearst also threw reporters into the search, Pulitzer (who referred to Rockefeller as “Grasping” in internal coded messages) could not bear the thought of being beaten and offered a handsome cash bonus to any reporter who broke the story. To bolster the burned-out Slaght, he assigned another reporter, A. B. Macdonald of the St, Louis Post-Dispatch, to the chase.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Frank Rockefeller · William Randolph Hearst · Joseph Pulitzer · A. B. Macdonald · World · J. W. Slaght · Louis Post-Dispatch
EPUB paragraph 145 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Before turning to the finale of this cross-country quest, let us fill in a few blanks about Bill’s life during these past years. Too old to travel, Bill had renounced his itinerant life and mostly remained in Freeport, Illinois. As garrulous as ever, he spent his days dabbling with his guns, telling hunting stories to whoever would listen, or boasting of his big ranch and fine horses in North Dakota. When he visited Frank’s ranch, he sat on the front porch and fired at targets Frank set up for his amusement. One night in 1904, the portly, ailing Bill, then ninety-four, lowered himself into a chair but missed it. As he tried to grab something to break his fall, he broke his arm near the shoulder, an accident so severe that his survival seemed doubtful, and it became necessary to contact his next of kin. Until this time, Margaret Allen Levingston had not known that her husband was a bigamist with five children and that one of them was among the world’s richest men. A proper lady, active in the First Presbyterian Church and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she must have reeled from this revelation.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Frank Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Freeport · Illinois · First Presbyterian Church · Women’s Christian Temperance Union · North Dakota
EPUB paragraph 146 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
There is reason to suspect that John D. met Margaret Levingston at this time. The nurse who treated Bill, Mrs. J. B. Gingrich, told of the arrival of a mysterious visitor from the East who came by private railroad car, slipped into the house discreetly by a side door, and only entered Bill’s room after she and the doctor had left. She remembered the sound of this visitor pacing up and down an adjoining room as Bill lay in pain. One suspects that John D. was the spectral figure, since William would not have asked for these special security precautions. If it was John D., it would have been the first time he ever set eyes on the wife whose legitimacy he had never acknowledged.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Mrs. J. B. Gingrich · East · Uncle William
EPUB paragraph 147 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
As he recuperated, Bill was often delirious, though still talkative. “Even as sick as he was he was jovial in his rational moments and in his delirium,” said Mrs. Gingrich. “He talked of his vast business interests in the East. He sang often a ditty about a frog in a well, and he sang often a lullaby which he said his mother used to sing to him when he was a baby nearly 100 years before.” As if shedding all the accumulated artifice of his double life, Bill’s mind frequently reverted to his early days as Doc Rockefeller in upstate New York. In the feverish mental state of his final days in early 1906, he repeatedly babbled the names of the five children from his first marriage—John, William, Frank, Lucy, and Mary Ann. And he would stare at the loyal Margaret and suddenly cry out, “You are not my wife. Where is Eliza?”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Frank Rockefeller · Mary Ann Rockefeller Rudd · New York State · Mrs. J. B. Gingrich · Margaret · Lucy · East · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 148 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
It was to be a season full of bitter surprises for Margaret, who had been gulled by Bill’s braggadocio into thinking they were supremely wealthy. During his illness, Bill had trouble paying his medical bills and even contemplated pawning the big, gaudy diamond he had always stuck in his shirtfront. The night that Bill died, Margaret was unsure of the Rockefellers’ reaction and did not know exactly what to do. She apparently stored the body for several months at the City Cemetery, awaiting a request to have it shipped back to Cleveland. When word never came from the family, she transferred the body to the Oak Knoll section of the Oakland Cemetery. Though Bill is always said to have died on May 11, 1906, references to his estate suddenly appear in John’s papers in January 1906, suggesting that the burial may have taken place on that later date, not the death itself. Only Frank and Pierson Briggs attended the belated funeral in which Bill was entombed in a plain, unvarnished box in an unmarked grave. That Margaret was worried about her future financial state is confirmed by the fact that she paid the gravediggers three dollars, but could not afford the extra dollar for a brick vault—standard procedure at the time. It would be another five years, after Margaret’s own death, before a granite memorial bearing the Levingston name in raised lettering was finally erected on the site. Few—if any—Rockefeller descendants seem to know that William Avery Rockefeller is buried there under his assumed name.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Frank Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Pierson Briggs · Rockefeller family · Cleveland · Margaret · Oakland Cemetery · City Cemetery · Oak Knoll · John
EPUB paragraph 149 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
The tangled skein of Bill’s life finally unraveled in early 1908, two years after his death, when a druggist in Madison, Wisconsin, told A. B. Macdonald that for years a friend and fellow druggist in Freeport named George Swartz had sold medical concoctions to a Dr. William Levingston. Swartz had always wondered whether the name was a fabrication, a suspicion confirmed when he saw a picture of Dr. Levingston gazing at him from Tarbell’s series. Acting on this tip, Macdonald traveled to Freeport. When he flashed a photo of Bill Rockefeller to neighbors, everybody agreed that it was Dr. Levingston. Then he rang the doorbell of a private home on West Clark Street. A refined, elderly lady in her early seventies answered, her white hair covered by a lace cap. When the reporter disclosed his mission, Margaret Allen Levingston lifted her hands and started to sob. “I have been wondering when one of you would come,” she said, sniffling. “And I have been dreading it, for I knew the secret could not be kept forever, now that my husband is dead.” When Macdonald asked whether William Avery Rockefeller and Dr. Levingston were the same person, she replied, “Go to the other side if you want the facts.” What other side? “To John D. Rockefeller. Let him tell if he will. It is not for me to talk. I lived happily with my husband for fifty years. He was kind and true. It is all I can say or will say. I must be a true woman to the end.” She furnished pictures of both herself and her husband—in fact, over the mantel Macdonald saw a crayon version of the photo of Bill he held in his hand—then told her visitor in parting, “I wish it were possible for you to leave me alone with my dead.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Ida M. Tarbell · Freeport · A. B. Macdonald · George Swartz · Wisconsin · Madison · West Clark Street
EPUB paragraph 150 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
To retire any lingering doubt, Macdonald went to the local library and found an obituary notice, dated May 11, 1906, for Dr. William Levingston, who had died at age ninety-six and was listed as the oldest man in Freeport. The death notice listed his birthday as November 13, 1810—the same date as Doc Rockefeller’s—settling the great mystery. Greatly relieved, Macdonald was at last liberated from Pulitzer’s obsession.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Joseph Pulitzer · Freeport · A. B. Macdonald
EPUB paragraph 151 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
On February 2, 1908, the nightmare that had haunted John D. Rockefeller his whole life suddenly burst forth in bold print. On its front page, the World trumpeted the headline “Secret Double Life of Rockefeller’s Father Revealed by the World.” The story received the coverage ordinarily reserved for major elections or great natural disasters, with the single column on the front page followed by an entire page inside. Nothing in the text was quite so cogent as the proof provided by two adjoining, identical photos of William Avery Rockefeller and Dr. William Levingston. The article gave a sketchy picture of his double life, his fifty-one years as a bigamist, his footloose life as a mountebank in the Dakotas, and his burial in an unmarked grave. It was a story more bizarrely implausible than anything ever invented by the tabloid press. For Big Bill, who had always wanted to be somebody important, it was a queer sort of posthumous fulfillment.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · World
EPUB paragraph 152 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Rockefeller’s archives do not reveal a single public or private reaction to the World article. His friends never dared to elicit his response, while his family pretended that the article did not exist. There were two noteworthy public reactions. First, Frank again decided to make mischief by publicly denying that his father had been a bigamist or even that he was dead. “Like others which have preceded it, the story is an unqualified lie. The whereabouts of my father concerns no one but his immediate family and it is precisely to protect himself from being hounded by cranks and others who would break in upon the peace and quiet of his retired life that he prefers to live in such seclusion as suits his convenience.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frank Rockefeller · World
EPUB paragraph 153 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Second, the article brought an emotional response from Dr. Charles Johnston, Bill’s handsome, dark-skinned young disciple and traveling companion in the Dakota years. When he read the World exposé, Johnston was petrified that he would lose his license to practice medicine if it was shown that he and Bill had sold patent medicines illegally. Released from his pledge of secrecy by Bill’s death, he told the World, “For years I have wondered why the secret was kept so safely. For twenty-five years the secret has been locked in my breast, but it was well known to others, and I have wondered when it would become known.” To protect his professional status, he portrayed Bill sympathetically as a “natural healer,” not as a cunning mountebank. Years later, when he no longer feared legal reprisals, he gave a less sanitized history of their scams. Perhaps more than Bill’s real children, Charles Johnston retained a tender spot for him, telling the World that he still cherished the violin that Bill had given him when he was too old and gouty to play. And he made a public plea that the Rockefeller family should posthumously forgive this fallible man. “I think it’s time that John D. Rockefeller and his brother should acknowledge him as their father, because all the world knows it now.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Charles W. Johnston · Rockefeller family · World · Dakota
EPUB paragraph 154 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Deaf to Johnston’s plea, Rockefeller probably never forgave the father whose erratic ways had likely set him off on his exaggerated quest for money, power, and respectability. Bill’s body was never brought back to Cleveland and his granite tombstone was paid for from Margaret Levingston’s meager estate.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Charles W. Johnston · Cleveland
EPUB paragraph 155 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c22_r1.htm
Frederick T. Gates, seated, with Dr. Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: Frederick T. Gates · Simon Flexner · Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research · Rockefeller Archive Center
EPUB paragraph 1 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
ad John D. Rockefeller died in 1902, at the outset of the Tarbell series, he would be known today almost exclusively as a narrow man of swashbuckling brilliance in business, a man who personified the acquisitive spirit of late-nineteenth-century American industry. But just as the muckrakers were teaching the public that Rockefeller was the devil incarnate, he was turning increasingly to philanthropy. What makes him so problematic—and why he continues to inspire such ambivalent reactions—is that his good side was every bit as good as his bad side was bad. Seldom has history produced such a contradictory figure. We are almost forced to posit, in helpless confusion, at least two Rockefellers: the good, religious man and the renegade businessman, driven by baser motives. Complicating this puzzle is the fact that Rockefeller experienced no sense of discontinuity as he passed from being the brains of Standard Oil to being the monarch of a charitable empire. He did not see himself in retirement as atoning for his sins, and he would have agreed emphatically with Winston Churchill’s later judgment: “The founder of the Standard Oil Company would not have felt the need of paying hush money to heaven.” He was also insistent that his massive philanthropy paled in importance beside the good he had done in creating jobs and furnishing affordable kerosene at Standard Oil.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil · Rockefeller family · Winston Churchill
EPUB paragraph 2 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
As his fortune grew big enough to beggar the imagination, John D. retained his mystic faith that God had given him money for mankind’s benefit. Obviously, God disagreed with Miss Tarbell, or else why had He lavished such bounty on him? Rockefeller regarded his fortune as a public trust, not as a private indulgence, and the pressure to dispose of it grew imperative in the early 1900s as his Standard Oil stock and other investments appreciated fantastically. In the pre-Gates era, Rockefeller had found it difficult to expand his giving in proportion to his wealth—a strain that had pushed him steadily toward a psychic precipice. Tarbell stressed that Rockefeller had given away only a small fraction of his total wealth: between thirty-five and forty million dollars, or the equivalent of three years of Standard Oil dividends. (In fact, he had already given away several times that amount.) To parry the political attacks against him and mollify public opinion, he now had to disburse money on a much larger scale. For purely selfish reasons, he had to show that as a philanthropist he could act in a disinterested, public-spirited manner. Those commentators who see his charity as crudely furthering his economic interests miss a far more important goal: his need to prove that rich businessmen could honorably discharge the burden of wealth. The judicious disposal of his fortune might also blunt further inquiry into its origins.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Frederick T. Gates · Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 3 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
It was thus from political necessity that Rockefeller distanced himself from his philanthropies, which would be marked by a low-profile style. The muckrakers had fostered such distrust of Rockefeller that he needed to counter suspicions that his charity was just another trick, a way to burnish his public image in the wake of investigations. The Rockefeller philanthropies would be constrained by a fundamental paradox: While extremely powerful, they were also inhibited in exercising that power. In explaining why members of the Rockefeller boards never gave interviews, Gates once said that if they extolled their benefactions, it would “inevitably lend color to the suspicion that [Rockefeller’s] gifts are not free from the taint of self-seeking.”
EPUB paragraph 4 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
Gates helped Rockefeller to define his priorities so as to forestall political criticism. Rockefeller began to assign a lesser place to partisan or parochial concerns, such as the Anti-Saloon League or Anthony Comstock and his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, in favor of programs with broad appeal and universal support—things unarguably good that helped all classes of people and lacked any tincture of self-interest. Groups that did not meet these criteria were either relegated to Rockefeller’s small, private gifts or discarded altogether. In his memoirs, Rockefeller said that he had sought progress in six areas of life, and the choices are notable for their general, noncontroversial nature: “(1) material comforts (2) government and law (3) language and literature (4) science and philosophy (5) art and refinement (6) morality and religion.” Who could protest such emphases?
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Anthony Comstock · Anti-Saloon League · New York Society
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
The most perplexing issue for Rockefeller was how to square philanthropy with self-reliance. His constant nightmare was that he would promote dependence, sapping the Protestant work ethic. “It is a great problem,” he acknowledged, “to learn how to give without weakening the moral backbone of the beneficiary.” He dreaded the thought of armies of beggars addicted to his handouts. Back in the 1880s, when considering support for a veterans’ organization in Cleveland, he warned brother Frank that he did “not want to encourage a horde of irresponsible, adventuresome fellows to call on me at sight for money every time fancy seizes them.” He constantly reminded his son that it was easier to launch a charitable commitment than to end it.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frank Rockefeller · Cleveland
EPUB paragraph 6 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
He was also wary of upsetting the existing social hierarchy. Staunchly convinced that society meted out just deserts, he believed that the rich had been recompensed for superior intelligence and enterprise. Conversely,
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the failures that a man makes in his life are due almost always to some defect in his personality, some weakness of body, mind or character, will or temperament.… It is my personal belief that the principal cause for the economic differences between people is their difference in personality, and that it is only as we can assist in the wider distribution of those qualities that go to make up a strong personality that we can assist in the wider distribution of wealth.
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EPUB paragraph 8 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
He contributed to education and medical research, for they strengthened recipients and better prepared them for the evolutionary struggle—that is, he equipped them to compete but did not tamper with outcomes. For this reason, he never used his wealth to alleviate poverty directly and scorned any charity that smacked of social welfare. “Instead of giving alms to beggars,” Rockefeller said, “if anything can be done to remove the causes which lead to the existence of beggars, then something deeper and broader and more worthwhile will have been accomplished.” Unlike Carnegie, he did not build libraries, athletic facilities, or music halls for the recreation of ordinary people but promoted pure research that would lead to more generalized benefits.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Andrew Carnegie
EPUB paragraph 9 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
In focusing on prevention rather than relief, Rockefeller was influenced by two contemporary reform movements. By 1900, many progressives had tired of dealing with the symptoms of social ills and began to search for fundamental causes. Instead of falling back on isolated good deeds, they aspired to a systematic attack on the underpinnings of poverty. Backed by a new faith in scientific method, they drew on a burgeoning new middle class, educated by an expanding university system, and enlisted the knowledge of experts in business, labor, agriculture, and other areas. This new technical class provided a ready-made population to staff the Rockefeller philanthropies. Such “scientific reform” appealed to Rockefeller, who liked to analyze systems and probe underlying causes. After all, he himself had profited from scientific breakthroughs at Standard Oil, such as the Frasch process.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Herman Frasch · Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 10 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
Rockefeller’s work was also buttressed by the social-gospel movement, which united social reform with moral uplift and religious renewal, reaching its high point between 1900 and 1920. For both Rockefeller senior and junior, this was a perfect synthesis, a way to be politically liberal and modern while clinging to an old-fashioned aversion to gambling, prostitution, alcohol, and other vices traditionally shunned by Baptists. It also guaranteed that reform took place under the safe aegis of religious authority. The social-gospel movement provided a way that the Rockefellers could make a smooth transition from narrow denominational giving to more secular, ecumenical causes.
EPUB paragraph 11 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
Frederick T. Gates was the tutelary spirit of the Rockefeller philanthropies. Though nearly invisible to the public at the time, he advanced large claims for his contributions in his posthumously published memoirs. Yet Gates was groomed by Rockefeller, and if he was granted a large measure of freedom, it was partly because Rockefeller had trained him as his proxy. Since he held aloof from his charitable empire, Rockefeller’s role has almost invariably been underrated, but Gates allowed that it was Rockefeller himself who furnished the idea for founding a medical-research institute. Around 1894, when William Rainey Harper first proposed a medical school for the University of Chicago, Rockefeller countered with a novel proposal for a medical department devoted mainly or exclusively to research. Gates had the courtier’s knack for delivering on his sovereign’s wishes with unmatched energy and intelligence, so when he proposed a medical-research institute three years later, he knew his words would find a sympathetic echo in Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · William Rainey Harper · University of Chicago
EPUB paragraph 12 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
On summer vacation with his family in the Catskill Mountains in 1897, Gates tackled a book of door-stopping length: Principles and Practice of Medicine, a thousand-page tome by William Osler of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, the most renowned contemporary physician. (Whereas Rockefeller scarcely ever cracked a book, except for slim volumes of sermons, Gates read exhaustively and said he had scoured more than a thousand volumes in steering the Rockefeller philanthropies.) That spring, Gates had survived a serious illness, awakening his curiosity about American medicine. Osler’s magnum opus was not light summer fare, but with a medical dictionary at his side Gates waded through its pages with mounting amazement. He confided to William Rainey Harper that he had “scarcely ever read anything more intensely interesting.” Gates was appalled by the backward state of medicine unintentionally disclosed by Osler’s book: While the author delineated the symptoms of many diseases, he seldom identified the responsible germs and presented cures for only four or five diseases. How could one respect medicine that was so strong on anecdote and description but so weak on diagnosis and treatment? Gates had a sudden, vivid sense of what could be done by a medical-research institution devoted to infectious diseases. His timing was faultless, for major strides were being made in bacteriology. For the first time, specific microorganisms were being isolated as the causes of disease, removing medicine forever from the realm of patent-medicine vendors such as Doc Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Frederick T. Gates · William Rainey Harper · William Osler · Johns Hopkins Medical School · Catskill Mountains · Practice of Medicine
EPUB paragraph 13 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
With a rush of emotion, Gates drafted a strongly worded memo to Rockefeller, advocating the establishment of such an institute and citing European precedents, including the Pasteur Institute in Paris (founded in 1888) and the Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin (1891), both of which greatly elevated the prestige of European medicine. At the time, the concept of a medical-research institute was still alien in America. The country’s medical schools were mostly commercial operations, taught by practicing doctors who picked up spare money by lecturing on the side. Standards were so abysmal that many schools did not even require a college degree for entry. Since these medical mills had no incentive to undertake serious research, medicine hovered in a twilight area between science and guesswork. Gates got Rockefeller to hire Starr Murphy to canvass medical opinion about setting up an institute. He found that many physicians were frankly skeptical that the country contained enough scientific talent to staff such an institution, and they recommended the distribution of small grants to individual labs instead.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Starr J. Murphy · Paris · United States · Berlin · Pasteur Institute · Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases
EPUB paragraph 14 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c23_r1.htm
Rockefeller responded to Gates’s memo with prolonged silence and let it marinate for a couple of years. But Rockefeller eventually realized that medical research ideally suited his needs. It would be safe, universally popular, and noncontroversial. While there was no guarantee that Rockefeller scientists would discover anything new, there was equally little chance that they would embarrass the founder. They would pick scientists associated with topflight universities and then set them to work with a free hand. Such an institution would also fill a void in the philanthropic universe. Gates told Osler, “This line of philanthropy, now almost wholly neglected in this country, is the most needed and the most promising of any field of philanthropic endeavor.” In fact, the promotion of medical science tallied so perfectly with Rockefeller’s needs that it would end up forming the common denominator of his foundations.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · William Osler
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