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For one passenger, twenty-seven-year-old John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the trip kindled a fuse that would glow brightly for the rest of his life. Struggling with ethical quandaries at Standard Oil, he must have hungered for the purity of social activism. Having led a circumscribed life, bounded by private schools, estates, and 26 Broadway, Junior welcomed this firsthand exposure to urgent social problems. The train rolled through a South pervaded by Jim Crow laws and riled by repeated outbreaks of racial violence. Literacy statistics conveyed a dismal story of derelict schools. While only 4.6 percent of the American population was illiterate, the figure soared to 12 percent for southern whites and 50 percent for southern blacks. Educational reform had scarcely penetrated the rural hinterlands and bayous of black communities, and their impoverished schools scandalized northern educators. Kentucky was the sole southern state with compulsory school-attendance laws, which were then all but universal in the North. Yet as the rich philanthropists alighted at the celebrated showcases of black education—Hampton Institute in Virginia, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, the Rockefellers’ own Spelman Seminary in Atlanta—the trip had its share of inspirational interludes. “The trip has been a constant revelation to me,” Junior told newspaper reporters upon his return. “Tuskegee was especially interesting. Mr. [Booker T.] Washington is a truly remarkable man. His school is doing a wonderful work for the race. I’m glad I made the trip.” Junior described the journey to Ogden as “the most instructive experience of my life.” In an elated mood, he sat down and wrote an enthusiastic report about it to his father.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Standard Oil · Spelman Seminary · Rockefeller family · Atlanta · 26 Broadway · South · Virginia · North · Kentucky · Alabama · Ogden · Hampton Institute · Jim Crow · Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute · Tuskegee · [Booker T.]
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Senior’s interest in southern black education antedated this junket by two decades, going back to 1882 when Spelman Seminary was still operating from a leaky church basement. In his own travels through the South, he often attended black Baptist churches on Sunday mornings. Each of his children had been matched to a black scholarship student whose education was paid for by the family, and for several years Junior corresponded with his “adopted” black student at Hampton Institute. In 1900, the Rockefeller family had virtually made over the Spelman campus, paying for a new hospital, two dormitories, a dining hall and kitchen, a power plant, and a residence for the school president. During the 1901 train tour, Junior addressed students in the Spelman chapel and was feted with gospel music. Noting the new buildings bequeathed by the Rockefellers, the school’s annual report that year rang with resounding hosannas for the family: “The Lord gives us all these wonderful blessings through the generous hand of Hon. John D. Rockefeller.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Spelman Seminary · Rockefeller family · South · Hampton Institute
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Before the 1901 trip, Senior had toyed with establishing a trust fund for black education instead of funneling all his money through the American Baptist Education Society—part of his evolution away from the limitations of sectarian giving. That the 1901 trip might be the prelude to some big benefaction was hinted at when Junior told Ogden, “For several years the question of colored education has been much in our minds and in our thoughts. We have endeavored to arrive at some plan which might help in working out this great question.” For all the noble sentiments behind the Millionaires’ Special, black education remained an inflammatory issue among southern whites, who feared it might weaken segregation. As the chartered train circled back toward New York, the missionary spirit of the passengers suffered a jarring clash with political realities when Henry St. George Tucker, the president of Washington and Lee University, boarded the train in Virginia to deliver a rebuke to the prevailing euphoria:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · New York · Henry St. George Tucker · Washington · Virginia · Ogden · American Baptist Education Society · Millionaires’ Special · Lee University
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If it is your idea to educate the Negro you must have the white of the South with you. If the poor white sees the son of a Negro neighbor enjoying through your munificence benefits denied to his boy, it raises in him a feeling that will render futile all your work. You must lift up the “poor white” and the Negro together if you would ever approach success.
Names: South
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Perhaps because his auditors did not fully fathom the implications of this admonition, it was lustily applauded. If it tempered naive talk with a gritty touch of political realism, it also opened the way for some egregious concessions to the more bigoted southern whites.
Names:
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As well-meaning, paternalistic men eager to alleviate the suffering of blacks but not wanting to threaten the established order, these rich northern reformers typified their time and were perhaps unusual only in having any concern for black welfare at all. Nevertheless, their political compromises rendered them vulnerable to charges of racism, especially among purists champing at piecemeal reform. One is frankly taken aback by the views of some of these men committed to bettering black education—views often indistinguishable from those of the southern whites they criticized. When Ogden convened a group called the Southern Education Board, its executive secretary, Edgar G. Murphy, declared that the two races “must dwell apart,” “must live apart,” and “must be schooled apart.” Even Frederick T. Gates yanked his children from the Montclair, New Jersey, public schools because “some of the colored and of the foreign-born children were ill mannered, filthy, and unsanitary.” He favored vocational training for blacks, not intellectual equality with whites. “Latin, Greek and metaphysics form a kind of knowledge that I fear with our colored brethren tend even more than with us to puff up rather than to build up,” he had written ten years earlier. “The colored race is not ready it seems to me for high culture.” Such attitudes gave a foretaste of the way that the Rockefeller philanthropies would accommodate southern segregationists.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Edgar G. Murphy · New Jersey · Montclair · Ogden · Southern Education Board
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In the aftermath of the Millionaires’ Special, Junior and Senior consulted many experts on southern education, including Booker T. Washington, who joined them one Sunday night for tea on West Fifty-fourth Street. Washington, too, endorsed practical, vocational training for blacks, not exposure to abstract subjects. On February 27, 1902, flanked by Abby in an oak-paneled study of their house, Junior chaired a meeting of ten men to consider southern education. Swirling brandy snifters and warmed by a blazing fire, they talked until well after midnight, hatching plans for a new philanthropy to be launched with a one-million-dollar gift from Senior. Junior hoped to name it the Negro Education Board, but it was, tellingly, given the neutral name of the General Education Board (GEB) instead. On the same colossal scale as everything else attached to Rockefeller, it would turn into the world’s foremost educational foundation. It was an extension of the ABES with the Baptist trappings pared away.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Booker T. Washington · General Education Board · ABES · Negro Education Board · West Fifty-fourth Street · Millionaires’ Special
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With crisp efficiency, Senator Aldrich shepherded an incorporation bill through Congress in January 1903, making it the only Rockefeller philanthropy to enjoy the public endorsement of a perpetual, federal charter. Banishing the former accent on black education, the elastic charter delineated the group’s aim as “the promotion of education within the United States without distinction of race, sex or creed.” With the Tarbell series under way, Rockefeller kept a salutary distance from his new foundation. Where he hovered over the RIMR at one remove, he delegated more power in the GEB to his son and never met with its board. As Abraham Flexner later wrote of Senior’s detachment, “I recall that when in 1914 I wrote a history of the General Education Board from 1902 to 1914 we searched the files of the General Education Board in vain in order to obtain a facsimile of his signature to be placed beneath the lithograph prefaced to the text. There was not a single letter in the files of the Board which bore his signature.” Nevertheless, Junior and Gates reported regularly to Rockefeller, who, along with his son, reserved the right to designate the use of two-thirds of the money given. Rockefeller believed that certain universal principles of businesslike efficiency should apply to nonprofit ventures no less than to profit-making ones. In making his first million-dollar appropriation to the GEB, he stipulated that the money should be ladled out over ten years. He tried to influence the pace and scope of his philanthropies, not their contents, and ensure measured, fiscally responsible growth.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Nelson W. Aldrich · Frederick T. Gates · Abraham Flexner · Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research · General Education Board · United States
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For executive secretary, Gates shrewdly chose Dr. Wallace Buttrick, a fellow graduate of the Rochester Theological Seminary and an ex-Baptist preacher. Like Gates, Buttrick renounced the pulpit for philanthropy and more worldly satisfactions. It was no accident that so many ex-ministers flocked to the sanctuary of the Rockefeller philanthropies, which advanced secular causes with an evangelical spirit. An amiable, roly-poly man, blessed with an easy laugh, Buttrick brought consuming dedication to his work. When a minister inquired, “What is your idea of Heaven?” he rejoined, “My office.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Wallace Buttrick · Rochester Theological Seminary
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As a former board member of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, Buttrick had studied black mission schools in the South exhaustively. On his office wall, he had a large map, sprinkled with colored pins, showing the major American educational facilities. Where Gates was an uncompromising, table-thumping orator, Buttrick brought a statesman’s tact to the job, defusing tense situations with humor. Without offending applicants, he could deftly expose weaknesses in their projects. His intuitions were so exact that Gates said Buttrick had “cat’s whiskers; he feels objects before he gets to them.” His greatest drawback—and a real one—was that he thought it expedient to truckle to white supremacists to maintain GEB operations in the South. He told an audience of Tennessee school superintendents, “The Negro is an inferior race—the Anglo-Saxon is superior. There cannot be any question about that.”
Names: Frederick T. Gates · Wallace Buttrick · General Education Board · South · Tennessee · American Baptist Home Mission Society
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To endow the board with a safely conservative cast, Gates preferred “successful business men who would steer the ship along traditional lines and would not be carried out of their course by any temporary breeze or even by hurricanes of sentiment.” The first chairman was William H. Baldwin, president of the Long Island Railroad, a vocal apostle for black education—so long as white people stayed on top. Of the southern black, Baldwin observed, “He will willingly fill the more menial positions, and do the heavy work, at less wages, than the American white man or any foreign race which has yet come to our shores. This will permit the Southern white laborer to perform the more expert labor, and to leave the fields, the mines, and the simpler trades for the Negro.” With such men at the helm, the GEB, for all its good works, would fall considerably short of heaven. Neither Junior nor Senior held such baldly racist sentiments, but they agreed that the board had to accommodate retrograde southern views in order to function. It is interesting to note in this context that Standard Oil of Ohio did not hire its first permanent black employee until 1906.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Frederick T. Gates · General Education Board · Standard Oil of Ohio · William H. Baldwin · Long Island Railroad
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At the beginning, the well-heeled GEB grafted its work onto that of the Southern Education Board, the shoestring operation started by Robert Ogden. Taking up its cause, the GEB campaigned in the South to improve educational standards, taking as its first major mission the creation of high schools. Before Reconstruction, no southern state except for Tennessee had tax-supported educational systems. As a legacy of this history, the four-year high school was practically nonexistent in the region, and there was not a single such school for blacks; many high schools were really extra rooms crudely tacked on to elementary schools. The GEB identified the creation of new high schools as a top priority, since their graduates would furnish teachers for lower-grade schools and also provide a bumper crop of college students, magnifying reform efforts up and down the educational ladder.
Names: General Education Board · South · Tennessee · Southern Education Board · Robert Ogden · Reconstruction
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Lacking the resources to create a complete high-school system, the GEB established a pattern mimicked by future Rockefeller philanthropies. Rather than trying to accomplish everything through its own budget, it would awaken public opinion and stimulate government action. It took on a crusading spirit, borrowed from the Baptists, and sent forth circuit riders to proselytize for the cause. Ironically, as Standard Oil took a hostile attitude toward state and federal antitrust suits, Rockefeller was forging extensive public-private partnerships for social change. The GEB paid the salaries of special professors at state universities who would roam the state, pinpoint sites for high schools, then drum up political support from local taxpayers. These professors were also affiliated with state education departments, giving a necessary political camouflage at a time when Rockefeller’s name was still anathema across America. So revolutionary was the impact of GEB money that by 1910 it had helped bring into being eight hundred southern high schools.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · General Education Board · United States
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The GEB was repeatedly blocked in its original ambition to foster black education. Submitting to racism, the foundation limited its support to a “very few” counties that could yield “the largest permanent results,” in Buttrick’s words. Only in 1914 did the organization hire rural school agents for both races in the South, and even then it tended to hire white agents for black schools and continued to encourage schools to teach blacks useful trades and ignore their minds. In the end, it came in for biting criticism from blacks such as W.E.B. Du Bois who did not want to see the school system slot blacks into menial jobs. Du Bois later excoriated the GEB in his autobiography for supporting the idea “that the races in the schools should be separated socially; that colored schools should be chiefly industrial; and that every effort should be made to conciliate southern white opinion.” While the GEB achieved remarkable things in upgrading southern education, it failed to deliver major results where it had originally wanted them most: in black education. In the end, nine-tenths of the GEB’s money went to white schools or to promote medical education—a sorry sequel for a foundation that was supposed to be called the Negro Education Board.
Names: Wallace Buttrick · General Education Board · South · W.E.B. Du Bois · Du Bois · Negro Education Board
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In 1905, the GEB extended its purview to higher education with a $10 million gift from Rockefeller, followed by another $32 million in 1907—hailed by the board as “the largest sum ever given by a man in the history of the race for any social or philanthropic purposes.” (It would be equivalent to $500 million today.) Much of this last gift was routed to the University of Chicago. As the GEB bolstered college and university endowments, it applied the rules that Rockefeller had insisted upon, often futilely, with William Rainey Harper: that gifts should stimulate matching grants; that local communities should help to take up the financial burden of their schools; that universities should be founded in population centers with thriving economic bases; and that endowment income should not cover more than half the operating expenses.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Rainey Harper · University of Chicago · General Education Board
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Not long after the GEB was started, it became woefully evident that the defects of southern education could not be remedied without stronger local economies. Gates was struck by this revelation as he and Buttrick took a train excursion through the South. He was staring out the window and ruminating when he suddenly exclaimed: “This is a favored section of the world. It has a superb climate, an abundance of fertile soil, and no end of labor. It must be enriched so that it can properly tax itself if it is to support education and public health. It is your job, Buttrick, to find out how.”
Names: Frederick T. Gates · Wallace Buttrick · General Education Board · South
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Nobody ever accused Gates of thinking small. If education depended upon healthy tax rolls, then they would lift the entire tax base of the South. And if that meant enhancing the productivity of southern agriculture, well, so be it. Such was the godlike perspective, if not the mortal hubris, made possible by great wealth. Where other philanthropic executives could only tinker, the Rockefeller proconsuls were urged to indulge more spacious fantasies.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · South
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In the spring of 1906, Gates and Buttrick traveled to Washington to meet with a pioneering scientist at the Department of Agriculture, Dr. Seaman A. Knapp, a former teacher, editor, and gospel preacher. In his experimental farmwork, Knapp had striven toward something analogous to Rockefeller’s work in medicine: He tried to bring a scientific spirit to a business bogged down in ancient folklore. Three years earlier, Knapp had gained legendary status when he saved Texas from a boll-weevil infestation that threatened to destroy its cotton industry; farms were deserted and counties depopulated as panicky people despaired of ever again profiting from the crop. If this situation was duplicated in the cotton-dependent South, it would presage disaster. By establishing a demonstration farm in Terrell, Texas, Knapp showed how the boll-weevil plague could be contained through the careful selection of seeds accompanied by intensive farming. From that time, Knapp kept an eye out for private money to enlarge his project. Now, the seventy-three-year-old Knapp and Agriculture Secretary James Wilson met with Gates and Buttrick, who gratified Knapp’s dreams by calling for the sort of public-private partnership that was fast becoming a GEB trademark. If the Agriculture Department drew up plans and supervised the farm-demonstration projects, the project would be greased with monthly checks from the GEB.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Wallace Buttrick · General Education Board · South · James Wilson · Washington · Texas · Knapp · Department of Agriculture · Seaman A. Knapp · Terrell · Agriculture Department
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In the following years, Rockefeller money helped stamp out boll weevils and improve the yield of southern crops and livestock, swelling the tax base to support public schools. By 1912, more than 100,000 farms had altered the way they cultivated cotton and other crops as a direct result of demonstration work done jointly by the GEB and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · General Education Board · U.S. Department of Agriculture
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Emboldened by such feats, the Rockefeller philanthropies steadily expanded their southern programs, among which the most successful was the campaign to eradicate hookworm. As had happened with Dr. Knapp, this odyssey started out with the dispiriting quest of a frustrated dreamer on the federal payroll, Dr. Charles Wardell Stiles.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Charles Wardell Stiles · Knapp
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When the United States acquired Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War, an army surgeon named Dr. Ashford made a startling discovery: Many poor islanders thought to suffer from malaria were actually infected with hookworm. The son of a Methodist minister, Stiles had crisscrossed the South for years for the U.S. Public Health Service. Based on Ashford’s work, he was seized by the wild surmise that the poor whites of the South—infamous in popular myth for their indolent, sluggish lives—might be suffering from hookworm. In September 1902, outfitted with just a microscope, Dr. Stiles journeyed through the South examining human feces, and, sure enough, he found hookworm eggs everywhere. It was an exhilarating discovery, since hookworm could be cured with fifty cents’ worth of salts and thymol.
Names: Charles Wardell Stiles · United States · South · Puerto Rico · Ashford · U.S. Public Health Service
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When Dr. Stiles reported these results at a Washington, D.C., medical convention that December, he stated that southerners long considered lazy were simply enervated by hookworm. His remarks were greeted with both profound outrage and mocking amusement. The next day, the New York Sun published the lecture under the whimsical headline, “Germ of Laziness Found?” Stiles was aghast: He was being turned into a figure of fun, his great finding trivialized by interminable hookworm jokes. As a zoologist—and therefore presumed ignorant of the human body—he fared no better among physicians: Dr. William Osler went so far as to deny hookworm’s existence in America. Few doctors were prepared to accept that the chronic anemia or continuous malaria commonly attributed to poor whites was, in fact, caused by hookworm, contracted by barefoot people through their soles.
Names: Charles Wardell Stiles · United States · William Osler · Washington · New York Sun
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For several years, Dr. Stiles persevered in his crusade to locate private money to apply his theory, and he found an unexpected champion in 1908 when President Roosevelt appointed him to a commission on country life. While touring the South that November, he told another member of the commission, Walter Hines Page, a North Carolina native, that a shuffling, misshapen man on a train platform was suffering from hookworm, not laziness or congenital idiocy. “Fifty cents worth of drugs would make that man a useful citizen in a few weeks,” he said flatly. He explained to Page that thymol pried the hookworms loose from the intestine walls—some victims harbored up to five thousand in their systems—and then epsom salts flushed them from the body. As a board member of the Rockefeller Institute, Page was the perfect ambassador to bring Stiles to Rockefeller’s attention.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Theodore Roosevelt · Charles Wardell Stiles · Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research · Walter Hines Page · South · North Carolina · Page
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At the end of their tour, Stiles and Page stopped at Cornell University for a reception, where Stiles met a round, jovial man who had already been briefed by Page: Wallace Buttrick. The two men went back to Buttrick’s hotel room and “talked hookworm almost all night.” After years of useless speeches, Stiles was now dazed by the dreamlike speed of events. Back in Washington, he got a telegram summoning him to a New York meeting with Gates and Simon Flexner of the RIMR. After delivering a monologue and showing slides for forty minutes, Gates interrupted him to bring Starr Murphy into the meeting. “This is the biggest proposition ever put up to the Rockefeller office,” Gates told Murphy. “Listen to what Dr. Stiles has to say. Now, Doctor, start from the beginning again and tell Mr. Murphy what you have told me.” These sessions lasted for two days, and by the end Gates and his fellows were sold on a mass-mobilization program to eradicate hookworm from the South. It was an ideal opportunity for large-scale philanthropy: Here was a condition that could be easily diagnosed and cheaply cured, with an estimated two million victims in the South. The results would be rapid and visible, giving the program more populist appeal than the rarefied work of the medical-research institute. It would, in short, simultaneously serve the overlapping objectives of science, philanthropy, and Rockefeller public relations.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Wallace Buttrick · Simon Flexner · Charles Wardell Stiles · Starr J. Murphy · Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research · Cornell University · New York · South · Washington · Page
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Junior was deputed, as was so often the case, to sell his father on the need for a commission to fight hookworm. Although Stiles had modestly suggested a half-million dollars, Gates fixed on one million dollars as a nice round sum that would capture the South’s attention. Since the region remained touchy about any assumption that it was riddled with listless imbeciles, Junior reassured his father that the board would recruit a southern contingent. On October 20, 1909, Junior implored him to act fast and stake out a leadership role in the hookworm fight. Two days later, Rockefeller replied: “Answering your letter 20th with reference to hook worm, it seems to me that $1,000,000 is a very large amount to promise, but I will consent to this sum, with the understanding that I shall be conferred with step by step and consent to whatever appropriations are made from time to time. This, however, need only be known to such as you choose to have know it.” Since Rockefeller had started to take winter golfing vacations at the Hotel Bon Air in Augusta, Georgia, he derived special pleasure from the gift. As he said, “It has been my pleasure of late to spend a portion of each year in the South and I have come to know and to respect greatly that part of the country and to enjoy the society and friendship of many of its warm-hearted people.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Frederick T. Gates · Charles Wardell Stiles · Augusta · South · Georgia · Hotel Bon Air
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As expected, many southern editors reacted to the hookworm campaign as a calculated affront to their honor and dignity. Originally, the effort was to be known as the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm in the South. To avoid stigmatizing the South, it was shortened to the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission or even the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Instead of being based in New York, like other Rockefeller programs, it opened in 1910 in Washington, D.C., diplomatically south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Rockefeller Sanitary Commission · New York · South · Washington · Eradication of Hookworm · U.S. Sanitary Commission · Mason-Dixon
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The executive secretary was a Tennessee native, Dr. Wickliffe Rose. Another clergyman’s son, Rose, forty-seven, was a shy, immaculate man who often wore bow ties and stared primly through wire-rimmed spectacles or pince-nez. Steeped in the writings of Kant and Hegel, grounded in the Latin and Greek classics, and fond of writing poetry in French, he had been dean of Peabody College and the University of Nashville before becoming general agent of the Peabody Education Fund, where he came to the GEB’s attention. The courtly Rose, modest and painstakingly thorough, supplied both the tact and determination that made the hookworm campaign a smashing success.
Names: Wickliffe Rose · General Education Board · Tennessee · Kant · Hegel · Peabody College · University of Nashville · Peabody Education Fund
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In mapping out his strategy, Rose adopted the GEB model of using Rockefeller money as a catalyst for government cooperation. The first order of business was a detailed survey to identify the centers of hookworm infestation. Once again, the states were urged to hire sanitation directors to educate the public about the menace. State medical boards sent young doctors into rural areas, their salaries paid by Rockefeller money. These campaigns were often carried out under the auspices of state health boards, thus providing political protection. As Gates privately explained this decision, “To put Mr. Rockefeller’s name prominently forward … would impair the usefulness of the work.” This was doubly necessary since many southern communities saw the Sanitary Commission’s work as a degrading new form of northern carpetbagging. Yet for all the efforts to shroud Rockefeller’s involvement, many southerners knew the program’s real sponsorship and devised preposterous theories to explain it. One was that Rockefeller was entering the shoe business and financed the hookworm campaign to accustom southerners to wearing shoes year-round, instead of only during the winter months.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Wickliffe Rose · General Education Board · Sanitary Commission
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The campaign relied on extensive publicity and showy gimmicks, and it sent out “health trains” with traveling exhibitions on modern sanitation. Perhaps the single most important factor in its success was the introduction of dispensaries for public-health work. In 1910, only two southern counties had such dispensaries. That number burgeoned to 208 counties within three years, thanks to Rockefeller money. To coax crowds into these dispensaries, the field workers (in a manner oddly reminiscent of Doc Rockefeller) distributed handbills saying, “See the hookworms and the various intestinal parasites that man is heir to.” In the rousing spirit of tent revival meetings, rural people formed long lines and gaped at hookworm eggs through microscopes or examined them squirming in bottles. Because infected people were cured swiftly, it seemed no less miraculous than faith healing to many people, and the throngs often erupted into singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” In a single day in 1911, 454 people were cured of the disease. One field director in Kentucky wrote, “I have never seen the people at any place so wrought up and so full of interest and enthusiasm.” Except for Florida, every southern state joined in the program.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Florida · Kentucky
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Pretty soon, the gentle, decorous Wickliffe Rose ran an operation of military scope. During the first year of work, 102,000 people were examined in nine southern states, and 43,000 were identified with hookworm. At the end of five years, Gates reported to Rockefeller that nearly half a million people had been cured. While the disease had not been extirpated completely, it had been reduced drastically. “Hookworm disease has not only been recognized, bounded and limited,” Gates boasted to Rockefeller, “it has been reduced to one of the minor infections of the south, perhaps the most easily and universally recognized and cured of all.” Most important, the states had set up machinery to perpetuate the work and avert backsliding. Lauding the campaign as “well planned and well executed,” Rockefeller especially praised its deft diplomatic touch in dealing with a politically charged situation. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was a landmark in epidemiology and preventive medicine, as Charles W. Eliot recognized when he called it “the most effective campaign against a widespread disabling disease which medical science and philanthropy have ever combined to conduct.” In 1913, the newly formed Rockefeller Foundation asked Wickliffe Rose to take the hookworm campaign abroad, extending the fight to fifty-two countries on six continents and freeing millions of people from this worldwide scourge.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Wickliffe Rose · Rockefeller Foundation · Rockefeller Sanitary Commission · Charles Eliot
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By 1910, medicine and education had emerged as the top priorities of the Rockefeller philanthropies, and that year the two trends fruitfully dovetailed. The stimulus was a report with the deceptively bland title Medical Education in the United States and Canada. Its author, Abraham Flexner, was the brother of RIMR director Simon. Where Simon was precise and conciliatory, Abe was a combative iconoclast who relished a good intellectual brawl. After graduating from Johns Hopkins, he started a small, innovative private school in Louisville that won a fine reputation among Ivy League colleges. He had the maverick’s talent for casting a fresh, critical eye on practices sanctified by custom, and he provoked a national debate when he proposed that students should graduate college in three years.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Abraham Flexner · Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research · United States · Johns Hopkins · Canada · Louisville · Abe · Medical Education · David Simon
EPUB paragraph 33 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c24_r1.htm
When the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching invited him to survey American and Canadian medical schools, Abe pleaded ignorance, but with typical zealousness he visited all 155 schools and came away appalled by the experience. Like his brother, he took the Johns Hopkins Medical School as his model of a competent school. “Without this pattern in the back of my head,” he admitted later, “I could have accomplished little.” By contrast, the majority of schools he visited seemed to be dreary, haphazard affairs, run negligently by local doctors to supplement their income from private practice.
Names: Johns Hopkins Medical School · Abe · Carnegie Foundation · Advancement of Teaching
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