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John D. Rockefeller: The Principles Behind The Greatest Fortune in History
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Every year on September 26, an old man flew a flag. He put on his good clothes, played around a golf and received visitors at his estate. And if you asked him exactly what he was celebrating, his voice might even crack when he told you September 26th wasn't his birthday. It wasn't even his wedding anniversary. September 26th was a day a merchant in Cleveland, Ohio, back in 1855 looked down at a desperate 16 year old in a dark suit who'd been pounding the pavement for weeks and said to him, we'll give you a chance. From then on, he called it Job Day. And he celebrated it every single year for the rest of his life. That first job paid just 50 cents a day. A few days after he started, the boy walked into a shop and bought a small red notebook for 10 cents. In it, he recorded every penny he earned, every penny he spent, and every penny he gave away. He called it ledger A and would keep it in his safety deposit box for the rest of his life like it was a birth certificate or a deed to something sacred. He would later say that's where it all started, with a 10 cent notebook. Decades later, when he was the richest man on the planet, he still called Cleveland home. His mother was a Baptist. Devout, unyielding and iron willed, she ran her household like a fortress. To survive her husband's long absences, she kept her own strict ledger, teaching her five children that every single dollar must be accounted for down to the very last penny. His father was a traveling snake oil salesman who sometimes went under different aliases from town to town, selling fraudulent remedies to desperate people. At home. His philosophy of fatherhood, announced loud and proud, was I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make em sharp. That was the home he grew up in. And somehow, out of that home came a man who would one day control roughly nine out of every 10 barrels of oil refined in the United States. A man who would be vilified as the most hated corporate monster in his country, only to become, just a few decades later, its most generous. A man whose company the Supreme Court would eventually take nine years to break apart, and who would get richer when they finally did. At the peak of his power, his company employed tens of thousands of people. His net worth, adjusted for the size of the economy he operated in, has likely never been matched before or since. He sat at a desk at 26 Broadway in Manhattan, and the men who came through his door knew he could end their business with a single word. Sometimes he did. This was the same man that got down on his knees every night and prayed. He taught Sunday school at the same church for decades. He tithed from his very first paycheck. When he was making a dollar a day, he was giving away pennies. When he was making more, he gave away more. A lot more. He. He built universities and medical laboratories with the same intensity that he built an entire industry in his old age. He walked around with a pocket full of dimes and handed them out to everyone he met. Caddies, porters, waiters, children on the street. Here, a dime from the richest man in the world. Over the course of his life, he gave away something like 30,000 dimes. People today still leave dimes on his grave. Who was this man? That's what this episode is all about. And I want to warn you, we're not going to answer that question with a simple, tidy narrative. Because he was not a simple man. He was the young clerk with a 10 cent notebook who through focus and determination, became the most powerful private citizen the United States has ever produced. He was a man who loved Cleveland until the city turned on him and yet chose to be buried there anyways. And he was a man whose philanthropy has improved the quality of life of most people on the entire planet. He was born in 1839. He died in 1937. He lived almost a century. And now, nearly a hundred years after his death, the question of who. Who he really was is still very much open. This is Outliers. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. And this is the story of John D. Rockefeller. You might think you know his story, but you don't. John D. Rockefeller's family had been moving his entire childhood, drifting from town to town across New York before heading down into Ohio. It was an unstable existence of shifting addresses. Finally, in the fall of 1853, the 14 year old boy arrived in downtown Cleveland. His father dropped him off at a boarding house near the Erie Street Baptist Church, opened a small bank account for him and left him to fend for himself and disappeared. Cleveland in the 1850s was a boom town of 25,000 people. Situated on the south side of Lake Erie, it sat at the perfect convergence of water and rail, making it an ideal base for commerce of all kinds. The city boasted three daily newspapers, a library association and even a small university. But none of it could really disguise Cleveland for what it truly was. A young muddy city just a single generation removed from the frontier. Filled with people hustling in every direct at once. And young John Dee, this quiet, serious, thin lipped boy, was on his Own in the middle of it, he didn't fit in. At Central High School, he was the country boy among the children of Cleveland's wealthiest merchants and professionals. He hid his upbringing and avoided making close friends. One classmate later remembered him as the best debater in the whole class, but noted he spoke so quietly that most people didn't even notice him. He didn't play sports with the other boys and instead kept score on the sidelines with a notch stick. If he noticed anyone in those years, it was a girl who would later be their class valedictorian, a composed, serious girl named Laura Spellman. And we're going to come back to her. The only place where the young Rockefeller truly fit was the Erie Street Baptist Church. Singing hymns beside the city's working class, he found something his father had never provided solid ground. He was baptized there by immersion in 1854 and began attending services twice a day on Sundays and prayer meetings on Friday nights. That church was where his mother's distinct habits found a home in his adult life. How well I remembered then, as I remember now, he once said the words of my dear mother, willful waste makes woeful want. That was one of his favorite sayings, and he had gotten it directly from her. His mother, Eliza Davidson Rockefeller, ran her household with the rigid efficiency of an army under siege. With her husband constantly on the road with no indication of when or if he would return, she was left entirely alone to manage. She lived in houses she didn't choose and in towns she didn't pick, and yet the heavy work of the homestead happened regardless. The meals were always on the table, the accounts stayed light, and the clothes were meticulously mended. Big Bill, John D's father, was the family's sole volatile source of income. When he vanished, the household finances were limited to whatever cash he had chosen to leave behind, which was often dangerously little. Eliza stretched every penny out of sheer necessity. In her household, careful money management was not a personal preference. It was an absolute survival mechanism. She was a devout Baptist who always tithed her household income, no matter how small, and expected her children to do the same. She kept her own ledger, and she taught her children that every dollar was held in trust, whether anyone was watching or not. John Dee would tell a story about her for the rest of his life. He told it to his children and to interviewers who asked. He wrote it in his memoir at age 69, when he tried to explain to the world where he had come from. His mother had started in on whipping him for something she assumed he had done. When he swore up and down that he did not, he protested loudly as she started. When she kept on with the whipping, despite his innocence, he asked her why, and she said the line that her son would repeat with affection later. Never mind. We've started in on this whipping and it will do for the next time. It was, in his telling, the right way to raise a child. The infraction will be punished this time or some other time. She had a system, and once in motion, she stuck to it. There were five children in the chaotic Rockefeller household, but John Dee absorbed these lessons earliest. As the eldest son, he spent his youth beside her, running the farm. Along the way, he picked up her mental habits, the way a child naturally adopts an accent. From her, he inherited an unbreakable internal discipline, an intense frugality, and unwavering conviction that her promise was an ironclad debt. What she gave him most was a psychological frame, a way to see the world with your daily work to be done front and center. She taught him how to view a dollar through the lens of stewardship and how a promise was supposed to weigh on a man once it was made. She left him one phrase above all, and he carried it into every negotiation of his later life. We will let it simmer, she would routinely say. It was her standing counsel against deciding anything in haste, and John D. Rockefeller would use those exact words to outmaneuver and outweigh Wall street tycoons and independent refiners for the next 70 years. Before he was anyone's father, Big Bill was a traveling con artist, and one of his favorite routines was to work a town as a deaf mute peddler. He hung a small slate around his neck with I am deaf and dumb chalked across it, and with it he went door to door selling cheap trinkets, scribbling his half of every conversation. People spoke freely in front of a man they thought couldn't hear. He later boasted that the act let him flesh out every secret in town. It was while running some version of this con that he first turned up at the farmhouse of a prosperous Baptist named John Davidson. Davidson had a daughter named Eliza, who was devout, sheltered, and altogether unprepared for a man like Big Bill. She was taken with him before she ever learned the truth. I'd marry that man, she said out loud, if he were not deaf and dumb. He could hear her perfectly well. Eliza's father saw straight through the act and tried to wave his daughter off the match. But she married him anyway, in 1837, and in the Towns they passed through. After that, people came up with their own name for the charming stranger she'd chosen. They'd call him Devil Bill. After marriage and the children came, Big Bill continued to be a snake oil salesman, peddling fraudulent miracle cures to the vulnerable and hopeful. He'd be gone from family for long stretches without much accounting for it. What he did on those trips was not always what he told his family. When homey came to his sons with lessons and platitudes of his own, he told them to keep clear of crowds. He told them to tend to their own business. He drilled them on the sanctity of a contract. And more than anything else, he taught them to be, in his words, sharp. I cheat my boys every chance I get, he said to one neighbor. I want to make them sharp. I trade with the boys and I just beat them. To be sharp traders. He taught his sons by example. He loaned them money at the going rate of interest, showing them that they could do it, too. But then, after they absorbed that lesson and tried it out for themselves, he'd go one step farther and call in his loans to them suddenly, when they least expected it, just to see how they would react. He treated parenting as a series of small, unannounced examinations. He taught distrust as a physical lesson, too. When John D. Was small, Big Bill would stand him on a high chair and hold out his arms, coaxing the boy to jump. John Dee would jump, and Big Bill would catch him. But then one day, when John D. Was a little older, Big Bill let his arms drop and let his son crash to the floor. Remember, he told him, never trust anyone completely, not even me in old age. John had this to say about his father. I confess that this little discipline should have done me good, and perhaps it did. But I was not particularly pleased with his application of tests. By the age of 8, John D. Could milk a cow and drive a horse and buggy on his own. Before he was a teenager, he had saved enough money to buy candy by the pound and then sell it piece by piece to his siblings at marked up prices, keeping his profits in a little box on the mantel. It was safe there, he said. He added with some pride, that he had loaned out money and got interest on it before he was 14 years old. And I knew well how to make out a note. My father taught me these things. These lessons culminated in the first little red notebook for John D. Which he remembered fondly, writing from early boyhood. I kept a little book, which I remember I called Ledger A, containing my Receipts and expenditures, as well as an account of small sums that was taught to give away regularly. The entire architecture of his life sits within that single sentence, recording the receipts, balancing the expenditures, and on the exact same page, accounting for the sums that he gave away. He learned the earning of money from his father and the giving it from his mother. And before he was an adult, he had both running on the same page. Back in Cleveland, those two inheritances were about to collide. The Erie Street Baptist congregation, where young John D. Felt most at home, was small. Its members were not wealthy, each giving only what they could. But the church building carried a mortgage of $2,000, for which John D. Discovered they had no realistic plan for paying off. When the note came due and the church could not pay, the individual that held it began to prepare for foreclosure. The minister sadly told his congregation that the doors would soon close if the mortgage was not paid. So the congregation began to scrape. They took up pledges and counted what they thought they could give, but it was soon clear that it would not be enough. The problem was that many of the pledges that had been made were not, in the end, being paid. What the church needed was someone who would stand at the door after the service ended and not let anyone forget what they had promised to give. John Dee stepped up to the task. He was still a teenager, but. But he took to the work as if the building belonged to him. He stationed himself at the church door and spoke to each member as they went out, asking for pledges from each and every one. And then he wrote each pledge down in a book of his own. He told the people who had pledged that he would be back next Sunday to ask after it. And the next Sunday, of course, he was there for both services. He chased the small sums and nickels and dimes and quarters from people who had little to spare. And then he chased the larger ones at their places of business. During the week. He did not stop for anything, and he did not take no for an answer. This campaign went on for weeks, and as a result, the full sum was raised, the mortgage got paid, and the church, the place John D. Felt the most comfortable, did not close. That same congregation would, in the prosperous years to come, follow Cleveland's money eastward and be reborn as the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, a new address for the same families and John Dee's spiritual home for the rest of his life. In his memoir decades later, he set down what the experience had done to him. In one line. My first ambition to earn more money was Aroused by this, he had contributed what little money he could and regretted that he could not give more. Somewhere in those years, a minister handed him the sentence that he would build his life on. Get money, get it honestly, the man preached, and then give it away wisely. I wrote that down in a little book, john D. Said. When he finished at Central High School, he didn't even bother to attend graduation or pick up his diploma. Instead, he paid $40 for a course at Folsom's Commercial College. The course was mostly accounting and bookkeeping, and he took to it like a fish to water. It was fascinating, he said later, to know at all times the resources and the liabilities to keep an ex record of just how a business stood. He completed the course in mid summer of 1855. Soon after, he turned 16 and he started looking for work. I did not guess what it would be. He reminisced about that summer's plans to find work. But I was after something big. What followed was six weeks of pounding the pavement. He took down a copy of the Cleveland city directory and made a list of every firm in town that he felt would was worth approaching. Then he put on his best clothes and after breakfast each morning, started walking. He had no letters of introduction and did not know a single person of consequence in the city. He walked into banks and railroad offices and commission houses and shipping firms, and at each one he asked to see whoever was in charge. He stayed at it until the offices closed for the day. He did this six days a week that summer. When he reached the bottom of his list and he still had no job, he went back to the top and worked his way down it a second time. He could have landed a clerkship or a messenger position. Other young boys did, but he would not lower his standards. He had told himself that the right beginning mattered more than an easy one, and he was not going to give up just because he was tired. I was not discouraged, he later said. He refused to count those weeks as idle. I was working every day at my business, he said. The business of looking for work. I put in my full time at this every day. But the strain must have begun to show because at some point in those early weeks, his father offered him a way out. It's all right, John. You go out to the country and I'll take care of you. The thought of staying dependent on his father, John Dee later said, sent a cold chill down his spine. So he continued his search. On September 26, 1855, he stopped again at a commission house called Hewitt and Tuttle. The junior partner, Henry Tuttle, interviewed him. Come back after dinner, tuttle said after speaking with him. We may have a chance for you. Then John Dee composed himself and left the office, walking until he was out of sight of the windows. Then, with no one watching, he began to skip with joy. Six weeks of serious composure had finally given out. He returned later and met the senior partner, Isaac Hewitt. Hewitt looked at a sample of his handwriting, which was, of course excellent, and delivered the verdict. We'll give you a chance in old age. John D. Set the moment down in his own words. This was September 26, 1855. I joyfully went to work. The memory never lost its charge. Even as an old man, he would go quiet over it all. My future seemed to hinge on that day, he said, and I often tremble when I ask myself the question, what if I had not got the job? For the rest of his life, every September 26, a flag flew over his house. Job Day. The sponsor of this show is coinchares. While most of the industry was still arguing about whether digital assets were legitimate, Coinsares was quietly building the infrastructure to invest in them properly. They now manage over 6 billion in assets and have stayed profitable through every market cycle, fully regulated with the kind of transparency and governance that serious investors actually expect. Whether it's crypto ETFs, active strategies or Bitcoin mining ETF exposure, you can access all of it through your existing brokerage account, Coinshares. The adults have arrived. Learn more@coinshares.com this is not investment advice. The work itself was bookkeeping, and the stereotypical picture of the profession was a man on a high stool hunched over a ledger, doing tedious work. John Dee didn't argue with the picture, but he did argue with the idea that the work was tedious. He called the work simply delightful. It wasn't a job. It was a position. More than that, he called it a gentleman's position. In a small firm like Hewitt and Tuttle, the title of bookkeeper was misleading. He was soon doing a lot more than just posting the books. A commission house bought and sold goods on commission. Grain, beef, granite, pork. It didn't matter. Whatever was moving through the Great Lakes that month was on their table, and the business was made possible mostly by two specific tools, the railroad and the telegraph. The telegraph gave the merchant news of price changes in distant markets, and the railroad let them chase those prices before the swing closed. Hewitt and Tuttle was small enough that John Dee, now 17 years old, could touch and understand all of it within a Year, his boss, Tuttle left the business. So John D. Started running the office and and posting the books. And soon he was handling the cash, collecting debts, and even writing the checks. People along the waterfront started to call him Mr. Rockefeller. While just a clerk, he worked as though he owned the firm. I scrutinized every bill, he said later. If it had so many items, I went over each one, verified it, and carefully added the totals. The bill had to be accurate in every detail before I okayed it to be paid. The reason he gave for strictness was striking. Coming from a teenager, he had trained himself to understand that his check on a bill was the Executive act, which released my employer's money from the till. The release of the funds to him was almost sacred. Every penny was to be watched, tracked, and accounted for. One day, a schooner captain came in with a bill that did not match the cargo the man had unloaded, and Rockefeller would not approve it. Now look here, Captain, he told the man. I can't make out the bill for that amount. It just doesn't tally with the actual cargo. Come, come, young man. You make it out the way I say, no one's ever going to know why. Everybody allows a margin like that. I'm sorry to say no, but if the weight and price are a certain amount, I must make my entries accordingly. If I'm going to do right by you, I can't begin by doing wrong for someone else, can I? If I did, you would soon be afraid that I would cheat you, too. Isn't that so? Nonsense. You're too strict. The captain exclaimed. That strictness held to the end of his life. Decades later, as an old man with yearly income well past $3 million or more than $50 million today, Rockefeller caught an error of $10.08 in a railroad's payment to him. He had his secretary write a letter asking for the missing payment. A week later, he turned up an error in the opposite direction, where a payee had shortchanged himself by $8. He sent the $8 back right away. Everything had to balance in the ledger. Nothing more, nothing less. There's a story he told about those years behind the ledger that explains something about all the years that came after. One day, his employer took in a banknote for $4,000, an unimaginable sum to a young man earning 50 cents a day. He showed it to him and then locked it in the safe. The moment the man left the office, Rockefeller opened the safe back up. He lifted the note out and just stared at it. He said, with open eyes and mouth, and then locked it away again. He couldn't leave it alone. Many times during the day, he remembered, did I open that safe to gaze longingly at the note. Around the same time, he got hold of a book, the published diary of a New England merchant named Amos Lawrence, who had given away more than $100,000 in his life. John Dee read it the way other boys read adventure stories. What stayed with him wasn't the size of the fortune, it was the giving crisp bills. He said, I could see and hear them. I made up my mind that if I could manage it, someday I would give away crisp bills, too. He learned one lesson in particular at the commission house that he tucked away for later, very quietly. The official bill on a railroad shipment always showed a fixed rate, the same rate the railroad printed on the public schedule for everyone to see. And what Rockefeller assumed at first everyone would pay. But the right kind of shipper, after he had moved enough volume across months, could receive a rebate at the end of the month against that fixed public rate. The size of that rebate could be substantial. The posted rate was the public rate. The real rate, the one that applied to the men whose volume the railroad needed was agreed to behind closed doors. In 1857, a sharp depression hit the country and nearly took Hewitt's firm with it. The doors stayed open, but, as Rockefeller would later put it, they were bankrupt. Hewitt was carrying on too many things at once, giving more time and attention to land deals and lawsuits than to the commission business that it was supposed to be funding at all. Hewitt sent Rockefeller out to collect on their bad debts, and he learned to deal with each defaulter as if he were an opponent across a chessboard. One of the names on his collection list was a man named Whelan. When Rockefeller arrived, Whelan opened with the line. You always heard from someone who didn't want to pay you come around next month. That's what you always say, Mr. Whelan. I still insist that we settle today. It won't hurt Hewitt to wait a little longer. The man's reply. But you know very well Mr. Hewitt has been waiting a long time already. I simply can't go back to him without the money. Worn down, Whelan eventually pushed the money across the table and told Rockefeller he had never met such a pestering collector. Rockefeller was just 19 years old. In the spring of 1859, Hewitt raised Rockefeller's salary to $700 a year. Rockefeller pressed for 800, and Hewitt said he would think about it. Time passed, and Hewitt did Nothing. So, without a fuss, Rockefeller resigned. The next month, three months short of his 20th birthday, he opened a commission house of his own. He partnered with a man he had known since the bookkeeping course, a 28 year old English man named Maurice Clark. As the older man, they put Clark's name first on the door. But they were equal partners. The firm became known as Clark and Rockefeller. In its first year, they did nearly half a million dollars in revenue and netted $4,400. In the second year, it was $17,000. Rockefeller was now 20. He was thrilled to be his own boss. It was a great thing to be my own employer, he remembered. Mentally, I swelled with pride. A partner in a firm with $4,000 in capital. That first night he went home, knelt on the floor and asked God to bless the new firm. A Clark and Rockefeller circular went out across the Midwestern states in their second year of business. It said the firm was prepared to make liberal advances on consignments of produce, etc. The most important word in that line is liberal. In the 1850s, Midwest farmers were desperate for cash. They only got paid when they harvested their crops, which meant borrowing money the rest of the year. This is where commission houses came in, giving cash advances to farmers and taking delivery of product later on. But farming was a risky business, and most firms only gave small advances. So Clark and Rockefeller began offering larger advances, and earlier in the year, than others. This set them apart. But to make those advances, the firm had to borrow heavily. Rockefeller's father, Big Bill, initially helped, but his purse didn't even begin to meet his son's growing needs. And those needs were growing fast. The gap between what they had and what they needed was enormous. Every bushel of grain sitting in a warehouse was waiting for a buyer. Every shipment on a canal boat that hadn't reached its destination, every advance they'd made to a farmer who hadn't paid them back yet. All of it was capital tied up, and the faster the business worked, the more money it consumed. There seemed as though there was no end to the money needed, Rockefeller said later. He did not say it with complaint. He had already figured out that if the return on borrowed money exceeded the cost of the loan, then the rational move was to borrow more. Interest was just the price of growth, and the more you grew, the more you could borrow again. That logic would carry him a very long way. So Rockefeller went to the banks. He passed over the smaller banks, of course, and went straight to the most prominent banker in the city, a man named Truman P. Handy. Handy was president of the Commercial Branch bank and its principal stockholder. He had arrived in Cleveland from Buffalo in 1832 and in the decades since had built himself up to be the center of civic and cultural life in Cleveland. In those years, an endorsement from Truman P. Handy was a passport to borrowing from anyone. And Rockefeller, of course, knew this. That's why he picked him. If Handy said yes, every other door in the city would open. He knocked on Handy's office door one morning, sat across from him and laid out the particulars of his business in his usual simple and forthright way. He then asked for a loan. How much do you want? Handy asked. $2,000. All right, Mr. Rockefeller, you can have it. Just give me your warehouse receipts. They're good enough for me. Rockefeller never forgot how that felt. Just think of it, he said. A bank had trusted me for $2,000. I felt that I was now a man of importance in the community. It looked from the outside like the easiest thing in the world. A 20 year old walks into the office of the most important banker in Cleveland and walks out with $2,000. But Handy hadn't made that decision on instinct alone. It was years in the making. Handy was active in the Young Man's Christian Association. Recently, so had been John D. Rockefeller. And as a member of the Board of school managers, Handy had taken to visiting nearby Central High School to observe the progress of its pupils. Rockefeller had been one of them just four years earlier, and for the past couple of years, Handy had watched the young man walk into his bank at regular intervals to make deposits into a savings account. Always small amounts, but put away steadily month after month. So when Rockefeller sat down that morning and asked for a loan, Handy already knew who he was lending to. In those days in Cleveland, Rockefeller later observed, everybody knew almost everybody else. After that morning, the doors of Cleveland's banks were open to him, but not always as warmly as Handy's. Rockefeller was younger than any of the men he was asking, and he asked with a directness that many found grating. He was often told no. What if the president of a bank refused to make me a loan? He said later that was nothing. He might lecture me on the folly of making a loan for the purpose of which I was seeking it. That made no difference to me, simply meant that I must look elsewhere until I got what I wanted. Like many outliers, John D. Refused to quit after someone said no. Next, he began pressing the railroads for more cars during peak shipping season to handle the growing amounts of inventory he was buying. They, too would rebuff him. But Rockefeller kept pressing. That was where the firm was. At the end of August 1859, Rockefeller was still just 20 years old, but already you can start to see something is different about him. That very same month, in a township in western Pennsylvania, a man named Edwin Drake struck oil. Drake had been hired by a small group of New Haven, Connecticut, that suspected there were large amounts of crude petroleum in the rock under the Pennsylvania creeks. They wondered if drilling for it, like they did for water, might just work. It turned out they were right. Drake's well, the first commercial oil well in the United states, hit at 69 and a half feet underground. By the next morning, a barrel and a half of crude sat in a tub at the foot of the well. That's when the chaos started. In a short time, it seemed like every man with a horse and shovel and a bit of money to risk became a wildcatter. Butchers became drillers. Bankers became drillers. Land that had been worth a dollar an acre was changing hands. Now thousands. Wells were going in along the creeks faster than anyone could count them. Prices for crude spiked and then crashed and then spiked again. Fortunes were made and lost inside of a week, and John D. Rockefeller was watching from a desk in nearby Cleveland. He was 20 years old. He owned half a commission house that handled produce from one of the most productive farm regions in North America. He had a reputation along the waterfront for paying his bills. He had a banker who had lent him money on a growing pile of warehouse receipts. And he had a partner who was beginning to grow nervous about all of that borrowing. And he was watching an infant oil industry that had no idea where it was going or what was coming next. Rockefeller watched the oil frenzy for three years and didn't move. He saw the pattern. Drillers would punch holes in the ground and pray. When or if they hit, they flooded the market and the price of crude oil collapsed. Many of the men who had to borrow to drill then went broke. A few months later, the survivors and any newcomer started the whole cycle all over again. But the refining of oil was a different beast. A refiner bought crude oil at the market price and turned it into kerosene, a product people needed to light their homes. When crude was cheap, the refiner's margins got better. The refiner was a step removed from the chaos. They didn't gamble on geology. The refiner had control. Sitting at the chokepoint between the raw material and the customer, Rockefeller observed and thought this was the best place to get in. The man who helped him get There was named Samuel Andrews. Andrews was a chemist that Rockefeller had come to know from the Erie Street Baptist Church, the church he still attended and had been baptized at a decade earlier. Andrews had learned to refine crude oil into kerosene, better and cheaper than almost anyone else in Cleveland. And he was convinced that this cheap kerosene would soon light the world. Rockefeller heard him out. The numbers were incredible. Crude averaged $2 a barrel while refined kerosene sold for 13. And a refinery could be built for $1,000 and run with just a handful of men. He soon made his decision to enter. In 1863, him and his partner Clark formed a new firm with a new name, Andrews Clark and Company. Samuel Andrews would run the refinery and Rockefeller and Maurice Clark would handle the money. 24 year old Rockefeller called this a little bit of a side hustle to their main commodity business. It would not remain this way. They found a three acre site in Cleveland along the river, right where the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad met the waterway. The rails could bring crude oil from the oil regions in Pennsylvania and water or rail could bring the oil they refined to the eastern markets of New York. The location proved to be of critical importance because they could play one transportation method against the other. The refinery was called Excelsior Works. Anders ran the equipment, Rockefeller would run everything else. He threw himself into it. And his own family got a daily view of the obsession. In the pre dawn dark, Samuel Adams and a growing group of men would gather at the Rockefeller house and wait in the dining room while John ate his breakfast. At night John would nudge his brother William awake in the room they shared and say, I've been thinking out a plan to do so and so now what do you think of this scheme? Keep your ideas till morning. William would groan at him. I want to sleep. His schemes kept coming anyway. The year was 1863 and all of this was happening during the middle of the Civil War. The war was terrible for the country, but good for many of its businesses. Union soldiers wrote letters home by the light of kerosene lamps. General Grant was drafting his dispatches by one in his tent. Demand for kerosene kept climbing even as prices swung wildly. And through all of it, the drills in Pennsylvania rarely stopped. They paused exactly once, only when General Lee invaded the state and the oil men put down their tools briefly to help defend it. The new firm made money in refining every single year of the war. This only seemed to accelerate Rockefeller's appetite for growth. But Clark, his original partner, began to get cold feet. When Clark looked at the same numbers that Rockefeller did. He only saw the risk. And he wasn't alone. Many people thought the Pennsylvania oil fields were a fluke. They would give out soon, they said, just like so many gold mines did out west. It took two years, but the tension between Rockefeller and Clark finally came to a head. We have been asking too many loans in order to extend this oil business, Clark told Rockefeller one morning. Altogether, we have borrowed $100,000, Rockefeller replied calmly, and not for the first time. We should borrow whenever we can, safely extend the business by doing so. If that's the way you want to do business, we better dissolve and let you run your own affairs to suit yourself, clark said, walking out. It was not the first time he said this, nor would it be the last time. But Rockefeller had had enough of the disagreements. Their other partner, Samuel Andrews, walked in, and Rockefeller put it to him straight. Sam, we are prospering. We have a future before us, a big future. Will you come in with me? Yes, said Andrews. So Rockefeller calculated he had Andrews on his side. It was 1865, and the Civil War was now winding down. This would likely end the wartime buying that had been propping up their commodity business. But new oil wells were still coming in across Pennsylvania, making the crude supply look safe for now. The demand for kerosene seemed instatiable. Last, he checked his credit with the banks, and then he baited Maurice Clark. They met one evening in February. Clark, assuming that Samuel Andrews was on his side, called for a dissolution of the business, and Rockefeller agreed. Then he ran a notice in the Cleveland press the next day announcing the news. By the time Clark learned that Andrews was actually with Rockefeller, it was too late. They had agreed to auction the oil business between them. The bidding opened at $500 and climbed past 10,000, past 50,000. Clark said 72,000, and Rockefeller counted again, with no sign of stopping. The business is yours, Clark told him. Rockefeller was now 25. He owned the majority of a refining business in a city he had arrived at at the age of 14, with almost nothing. It was one of about 30 refineries in Cleveland at the time. Two months after the auction, Robert E Lee surrendered, ending the Civil War. On a spring morning that April, the funeral train carrying Abraham Lincoln's body stopped in Cleveland, Ohio. Then the country put down its grief and turned with an almost guilty hunger to the business of getting rich. One banker later said of the years that followed, it was such a period as seldom occurs and hardly ever more than once in anyone's lifetime. Returning soldiers wanted what the young Businessmen at home had gotten. Everyone, it seemed, was chasing a fortune all at once. Shortly before he took over the oil business from Maurice Clark, Rockefeller got married. Her name was Laura Celestia Spellman, and she was a schoolteacher. He called her seti. They had met years before as students at Cleveland Central High School, where Seti was the valedictorian of their class. She stood out to Rockefeller then, and later when they met again while taking similar commercial courses upon their high school graduation. The title of her address to the class tells you most of what you need to know about her. I can paddle my own canoe. She came from an abolitionist household, and not the quiet kind. Her father had run a station on the Underground Railroad, hiding men and women fleeing north and helping them on towards Canada. And her mother gave herself over to the temperance cause, advocating for complete abstinence from alcohol. Theirs was a home where faith meant action. At 22, Seti was an assistant principal, real authority for a woman of her time. Even though the Spelman family was a rung above the Rockefellers economically, in Cleveland, they valued a young man with ambition and sound Christian character. And SETI was, above all else, practical. She saw something in Rockefeller earlier than almost anyone else, a friend of hers put it this way. She saw that he was ambitious, and she thought that he was honest, which probably appealed to her more than anything else. She was short and slender, with a round face, dark brown eyes and chestnut hair parted down the middle. Like Rockefeller, she was soft in voice and manner, but that softness sat on top of something hard. Her own sister called her gentle and lovely, but resolute with an indomitable will. She was never known to lose her temper, something she shared with the man she would marry. She'd be more than just a spouse, though. She would be a silent partner in everything he did. They were two quiet people, each with a core of iron. His courtship started in high school, where he'd walk her home at the day's end, when he started his own commodity house. He'd come by her house and describe his business to her, and she'd listen with delight. He recorded everything in his ledger. The bouquets of flowers he bought her, the lectures they attended together, and in April 1864, he recorded a diamond ring. That fall, they were married. Rockefeller was 25. They were a perfect match of temperament. Both were convinced that life was for duty rather than enjoyment. In those first years of marriage, Rockefeller carried the company's books home at night and went over all the figures with Seti at the table. She came to know the state of business almost as well as his partners did from the start. She studied his career and even began to coach it. With Maurice Clark gone, Rockefeller did exactly what his ex partner had feared. He borrowed and he grew, plowing every dollar of profit back into oil. The schemes he had once tested on a half asleep William now had real money behind them. Rockefeller wasn't just borrowing to buy more crude oil. He was borrowing to save on costs, building a shop right next to the refinery to make their own barrels. Barrels were one of the biggest costs in the trade. With other refiners paying $3 a barrel, Rockefeller was soon building his own for $1.50. Then he hired a plumber by the month instead of calling one for each repair job. These were small things, but as they grew their business, they compounded. The borrowing carried a private cost, though, that few ever knew about. Rockefeller often went to bed worrying about how he would ever repay the loans. And. And then he woke up in the morning, refreshed by his sleep, determined to borrow even more. It was in these years that he began a habit that he would keep for the rest of his life. At night, head on his pillow, he would deliver little sermons to himself. The subject was usually the same, reminding himself to stay the course. You've got a fair fortune. You have a good property now. But suppose the oil fields gave out? At the office he never showed a flicker of doubt. But on the pillow he would rehearse disaster nightly. The best known example of his cost obsession came a few years later on a plant inspection. Rockefeller stopped at a line where men were sealing kerosene cans with solder and he asked how many drops it took to seal one. 40, he was told. Have you tried 38? The men tried 38. A few cans leaked, they tried 39, none leaked. 39 drops became the standard across every plant the company owned. One drop of solder multiplied across what was eventually millions of cans easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. His partner Andrews kept improving the refining process and soon they were squeezing more kerosene out of each barrel of crude than anyone in Cleveland. And then they started working on how to sell those byproducts that other refiners just threw away. That instinct to use what everyone else threw away had always been a habit of Rockefeller's and it pulled the company towards something. The oil men distrusted science. The first men in oil worked by smell and luck. Rockefeller hired chemists instead and would in time put a working laboratory inside every refinery he built and owned. The patient, measured application of science became an Integral part of how they grew. Within a year of the Clark auction, their profits founded a secondary refinery, which they simply called standard work. Rockefeller's brother William was put in charge of it. Rockefeller was 26 years old, running two refineries and still hungry for capital. What he needed next was a partner with access to real money. Aside from his wife, Rockefeller was closest to his brother William and to one other man, Henry Flagler. The two of them went back to the grain trade before there was any oil between them. They'd met when Flagler shipped carloads of wheat through Rockefeller's commission house. He had gotten rich doing so and then moved into the salt trade and lost it all. He came back to Cleveland broke and looking for the next big thing. Oil looked to be that thing. He took an office in the same building as Rockefeller and an old acquaintance soon turned into something closer. Flagler was eight years older than Rockefeller, and he was everything Clark as a business partner had not been. He was as bold as he was impatient. He was a born dealmaker who could talk a railroad president into almost anything. His motto, do unto others as they would do unto you, and do it first. Flagler brought to the table a network of wealthy connections, and with their money, he joined the firm, which was now named Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler. Overnight, they were able to outspend every other refiner in Cleveland. Rockefeller and Flagler lived just a few doors apart from one another and began walking to work side by side each morning, then home again for lunch and back to the office, and then home again at night. They did their thinking and planning on those walks, and by the time they'd reached the office, the thing was usually decided. One historian called it the partnership's parliament of two. At the office, their desks sat back to back. Letters would pass between them and again and again until the wording was exact. And Flagler, Rockefeller remembered, drew particularly all of our contracts. Rockefeller was the systems man, bringing relentless cost discipline, patience mixed with a willingness to act and a temperament to bring everyone in line. Flagler, on the other hand, was, as Rockefeller remembers, always on the active side of every question. He fought the railroads constantly and pushed to always build bigger and more permanent. Flagler put it this way. A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than our business founded on friendship. That was their partnership in a nutshell. With Flagler, they took one profitable oil refinery and rebuilt it as a business vehicle for swallowing up their Cleveland rivals. And later, once Flagler drew up the legal forms and the incorporations that would allow them to become the Standard Oil Trust. They were able to reach across state lines and do the swallowing of other business entities. Whole years later, when asked who designed the structure of the early Standard Oil, Rockefeller did not hesitate. No, sir. I wish I had the brains to think of it. It was Mr. Henry M. Flegler. Rockefeller was Baptist, down to the bone, watchful and suspicious of anything that announced wealth too loudly. Flagler started out that way, but drifted the other way, toward the bold and expansive. And finally, the gilded Standard Oil was an exhibit of both at once Rockefeller's economy of self command and Flagler's hunger to build something grand and visible. Their friendship, Rockefeller said, ran a lifetime without a single interruption. Later in life, Flagler ordered his Standard Oil correspondence burned. Almost everything he wrote in the company's early years went up in smoke. What survives comes mostly from other men's letters and from testimony he gave under oath. He was trying to disappear. And it worked. Ask anyone today who built Standard Oil and people will say Rockefeller. They should say Rockefeller and Flagler. The company could not have grown nearly as large without both of them. On paper, Cleveland didn't look like the best place to refine oil. The raw crude came from Pennsylvania, 100 miles to the southeast. A city like Pittsburgh made sense as it was closer to the oil, and then New York City was closer to the customers and the ships that could bring the refined product to the world. For these reasons, many thought Cleveland would have a short life as a refining town. But Cleveland had something water. It sat on Lake Erie, with the Erie Canal feeding east and the Great Lakes opening west. And water freight was cheap, far cheaper than rail. When the canal and the lake were open, Rockefeller could float his oil to market for something close to half of what a railroad charged, and the railroads knew it. So when they quoted Rockefeller a rate, they were really quoting against the water. Rockefeller had first learned this at his job at the Commission house. Rockefeller played them both against each other. When the water was open, they shipped more by boat and let their railroads watch their traffic float away. When the winter came, the canal iced over and the lake went to a gray slab. They moved everything onto rail, and the railroads, who had spent months hungry for traffic, were glad to have the business back. When one road dropped its rate, the firm shifted its cars to it. When the others matched, they shifted again. They built themselves into a position where they could not be pinned down by anyone. A competing refiner in Pittsburgh, on the other hand, had only one the Pennsylvania Railroad. They had no other way to move their oil, so they paid Whatever rate the railroad set, and they shipped only when the railroad said so. Rockefeller never wanted to be at the mercy of others. He and his partner, sitting in Cleveland in what was supposed to be one of the worst of the three refining locations, had the most options of anyone in the trade. And the more they grew, the more each carrier valued them as a customer and the harder they competed to keep them. Flagler turned that logistical advantage into a weaponized system. He used a piece of knowledge Rockefeller had learned from his teenage days at the commission house, that the posted railroad rates were a fiction. The real rate for shippers with enough volume was negotiated behind closed doors. Flagler went to the railroads and negotiated rebates their smaller competitors couldn't get. And the more Standard Oil shipped, the bigger that rebate grew, which meant more reinvested into their business, which meant lower costs, more capacity to refine. That made it easier to undercut competitors, which brought in more customers, which meant more volume, which meant a bigger rebate than next time. It was a flywheel, and once Flagler set it spinning, it was almost impossible for anyone outside of it to compete. It might sound unfair, but it's not. If I wanted to ship one case of soda from the east to the west coast, I'm going to pay more per case than if I wanted to ship 10,000 cases. The new balance of power showed in how Rockefeller carried himself in 1868. He was 29. In that year, the richest man in America was Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was 74. Vanderbilt owned many of the railroads and one day Vanderbilt sent word that he wanted a meeting with this up and coming Cleveland refiner. Rockefeller didn't go. He wrote to his wife about this. We were sent for by Mr. Vanderbilt yesterday at 12 o' clock and did not go. He's anxious to get our business. We sent our card by messenger that Vanderbilt might know where to find our office later. The emperor of the railroads could come to him. By the late 1860s, Rockefellers Anders and Flagler were well on their way to becoming the largest oil refining operation in the world. It had happened in just a few years of borrowing, building, vertically integrating and squeezing costs out of every link in the chain. They made their own sulfuric acid, ran their own wagons. They were building massive storage tanks to buy up crude cheap and hold it and wait out depressed prices. And Rockefeller read his success the way he read everything, through his faith. A few days before Christmas in 1867, he had missed a train that later wrecked and killed many of its passengers. He wrote to his wife at once I do regard the thing as Providence of God. The Lord, he was increasingly sure, was watching over his enterprise and approving. And yet, in 1869, for the first time since entering oil, Rockefeller was afraid. A disaster had arrived, just not the one he had been rehearsing on his pillow. The oil fields had not given out. In fact, the opposite had happened. Refining had become so profitable that new people kept piling in exactly the way drillers had once when oil was struck a decade before. In came the tinkerers and the tailors and the boys who followed the plow, Rockefeller reminisced decades later, all eager for this large profit. By 1870, the country's refineries actually had the capacity to process three times more crude oil than was being pumped out of the ground. And this made the price of kerosene sink so low that, by Rockefeller's estimate, nine out of 10 refineries in the country were actually losing money. His own brother saw it firsthand. Refined, cheaper than crude. William wrote to him one day from New York, meaning he'd seen the price of kerosene fall below the price of crude oil. It was made from refiners sold at a loss just to keep their plants running and service their debts. And this is where Rockefeller arrived at the idea that would drive everything he did for the rest of his life. He had built one of the most efficient refiners in the world, but saw that it wouldn't save him, because the very industry he was in was now broken. The way he saw it, every man struggling hard to get all the business brought nothing but disaster to himself and everyone else. To Rockefeller, the solution was cooperation. Bring the refiners under one roof, he reasoned. Cut down the excess capacity, steady the prices, and run the whole system the way he'd run his business. He gave the idea the grandest possible framing. It was the battle of the new idea of cooperation against competition. He watched the chaos eat the industry and concluded that he personally should be the one to organize it. This was the momentous shift. He stopped thinking of himself as an individual refiner competing in a market and started thinking of the entire oil industry as one giant interrelated machine, a machine that one person, him, needed to run. There was a problem, though. Buying up refineries on that scale would require an enormous amount of money, and he and Flagler did not want to give up control to get it. The solution was to incorporate. On January 10, 1870, the partnership became the Standard Oil Company of Ohio. The name was chosen to advertise kerosene of A uniform, standard quality. The new company had a million dollars in Capital and 10,000 shares. Rockefeller held the largest allotment. He was 30 years old. Older businessmen told him the scheme was reckless. One called it a rope of sand that would collapse like attempts before it had. But Rockefeller didn't bat an eye around Cleveland. He began telling people exactly what he intended. The Standard Oil Company will someday refine all of the oil and make all of the barrels. Almost nobody took him literally. In the last days of November 1871, Rockefeller checked into a hotel in New York City and disappeared into a series of meetings with the most powerful railroad men in America. He was 32 years old at the time, and he would be gone for weeks. He wrote home to his wife almost daily. The letters show a man who knew he was walking a line. A man who succeeds in life, he wrote to her, must sometimes go against the current. Here's what was being drawn up behind those closed doors. There were three railroad lines now carrying oil east. They were the Pennsylvania, the Erie and the New York Central, and they could not stand each other. They were forever at war over rates, each cutting prices to steal the other's traffic. Sometimes one would haul freight at a loss, just to keep a rival from getting it. Then, exhausted and broke, they would all shake hands and agree to hold rates steady, dividing the traffic evenly. But soon after, someone would always cheat and the war would start again. A railroad has enormous fixed costs. Track and cars must be paid for whether they run full or empty. And this is why guaranteeing volumes was so important to them. What the railroads needed was one customer big enough to hand them each an agreed share of the oil traffic month after month, and make the piece stick. No customer had ever been large enough to make that work. Standard Oil, though, had now grown big enough to be that customer. So the railroad men proposed a scheme, and it came with a shell company that had a deliberately boring name. They called it the South Improvement Company. A handful of the biggest refiners would join. Standard Oil would be by far the dominant member, with Rockefeller and his circle holding the largest block of the new company stock. The members would agree to guarantee the railroad's steady traffic, and in exchange, the railroads would grant the refiners three things. First, they would give them rebates. The railroads would publicly double all of their freight rates. But then they would secretly hand the members half the rate back. Only companies not in the South Improvement Co Would pay retail. Second, and this was the real innovation, something called drawbacks. The railroads would also pay members an additional cut of what their competitors paid in freight on one route. For example, Standard Oil would collect as a rebate $0.40 for every barrel it shipped. And then they'd receive another 40 cents for every barrel its competitors shipped. Rivals would partly be funding the war chest of the very company crushing them. And the biggest rivals would be funding them the most. Third, it gave them information. The railroads would also report the members competitor shipments. Every shipper, every barrel, every destination would be reported almost in real time. This information was something Rockefeller valued more than money. If he knew his rival's numbers, he wouldn't really be competing with them anymore. He would basically be managing them and it would make buying them a whole lot easier. All members were sworn to secrecy. You can hear Rockefeller talk himself into the scheme in the letters home to his wife. The project grows on me, he wrote to her. He was stuck in New York and he hated it. The city was full of sham flattery and deceptions, he wrote, while at home was a haven of rest and freedom. He missed her badly. One night the homesickness followed him into sleep. I dreamed last night of the girl Celestia Spellman, he wrote, calling her by her maiden name. They had been married for seven years. So here was the shape of his days. By daylight, he sat in a closed room with a handful of men drawing up a secret plan to bend the entire oil industry to their will. And by night he lay in a hotel bed and dreamed of his high school sweetheart. When the talks dragged into January and he was desperate to get home, the other men would not let him leave. They knew how badly they needed him. They are nervous and lean on me, he wrote his wife. I feel like a caged lion and would roar if it would do any good. The plan was for the new raids to take effect quietly on the industry. But Instead, in late February 1872, a railroad freight agent, not knowing the new rates were to be kept secret for the present, posted them. Early the next morning, the people of the Pennsylvania oil regions woke up to read that freight rates had doubled overnight. The region exploded. 3,000 people stormed the Titusville Opera House, waving banners that read down with the conspirators. The producers organized overnight and refused to sell a single barrel of crude to any member of the scheme. A local paper began printing the conspirators names every day on its front page in a black box like a death notice. Mobs defaced standards blue barrels with skulls and crossbones. Men tore up railroad tracks and raided tank cars and spilled the oil into the dirt. And it was Here, in these furious weeks that the wider world first learned the name John D. Rockefeller, the boycott was no joke. It starved his refineries of crude oil and he had to temporarily lay off 90% of his workers. Along Oil Creek, mothers took to scolding their children with his name, like a boogeyman. Run, children, or Rockefeller will get you back. In Cleveland, he had to start posting policemen outside of his office and his home. He even began keeping a revolver by his bed. But he said nothing publicly, not one word in his own defense. He believed that his silence would look like confidence, but instead, many assumed the silence meant guilt. It was a mistake he would repeat again and again for the next 40 years. He summed up his attitude in a single line. You can abuse me, you can strike me, so long as you let me have my own way. Years later, he would regret his silence. The letters home show what he was telling himself through these. We will do the right thing and not be troubled about what the papers say, he wrote to SETI in the middle of the boycott. I want to act perfectly, conscientiously and fearlessly in the matter and feel confident of good results. A week later he wrote again. We know a few things that people generally may not. At all events, we know our own intentions and they are right, and only so. In a town along Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, a 14 year old girl watched her father, an oil producer, come home one night with a grim look on his face. He had signed a pledge, he told his family, that he would not sell out to the Cleveland ogre known as Standard Oil. Her name was Ida Tarbell and hers was a name that Rockefeller would come to know very well in a few decades. Because of the public outcry, the South Improvement Company died before it ever started. Despite what was happening, Rockefeller was steadfast. But the railroad, sensing the political winds, caved within weeks and canceled all the contracts. The Pennsylvania legislature next revoked the company's charter. A congressional committee branded the whole thing as the most gigantic and daring conspiracy ever to confront a free nation. By April 1872, the South Improvement Company was officially dead and Rockefeller himself wired the other producers to say all the contracts were void. For the rest of his life he protested that the company had never done any business at all. There was never a shipment made or a rebate or a drawback collected under the South Improvement Plan. And all of that was completely true. It was also besides the point, because Rockefeller and Standard Oil hadn't actually needed this scheme to succeed as a business to prove valuable. The idea that it existed put fear into the heart of every refiner in Cleveland. The independent refiners of Cleveland had spent that winter hearing a variety of rumors. Rumors that Standard Oil and the railroads were cooking up some secret pact that refiners outside of it would be cut off from crude entirely, that any resistance to this would mean their ruin. 1871 had already been a terrible year for all the refiners in the city, as kerosene prices, already low, dropped another 25%. And now this hung over them. Think about what it was like to be one of those refiners. You've been in the business five or 10 years, maybe you've made money in the early good years and scraped through the recent bad ones. But now a quiet young man in a dark suit arrives, offering to buy your business. Rockefeller came to see them all, one by one, and he brought his books with him. He showed them Standard Oil's finances and exactly why the industry had to consolidate. We went to one concern at a time, he recalled, and finished with them before we took up the next. He started with the largest and deepest pocketed firm in the city. Rockefeller invited its lending partner, who happened to be an old high school classmate of his, to the parlor of a downtown bank and made his pitch for an oil industry under Standard Oil's control. The man listened and then wanted to see Standard's books. Examining the ledgers, he was thunderstruck by the profits. Let us get the appraisers in, he finally said, and see what the plant is worth. They negotiated and soon sold out to standard for $400,000. Rockefeller felt that he had overpaid, but couldn't resist, as the deal would make it easier to acquire the others. His pitch to the rest of the refiners, pierced together afterward from sworn testimony of some of the men who heard it, went like this. This scheme is bound to work. It means an absolute control by us of the oil business. There's no chance for anyone outside of it, but we're going to give everybody a chance to come in. You are to turn over your refinery to my appraisers, and I will give you Standard Oil Company stock or cash, as you prefer, for the value we put on it. I advise you to take the stock. Frank Rockefeller, Rockefeller's own brother, later told Congress that the hard version sounded like, if you don't sell your property to us, it will be valueless because we've got advantages with the railroads. Among the men who came to him was Isaac Hewitt, who is now one of the partners in a rival refinery. Hewitt Remember was the man who gave John D. Rockefeller his first position as a bookkeeper. And now he came to his former clerk's house on Euslid Avenue, hat in hand, to plead for his business. Together they strolled down the avenue where Rockefeller told his old boss bluntly that his firm would not survive, that he should take the deal. Then Rockefeller added a sentence that entered Rockefeller folklore. I have ways of making money you know nothing about. And he was right. Another refinery, John Heisel, claimed that he got the same pitch. But after he heard it, he told Rockefeller that he wasn't afraid of him. To which Rockefeller responded, you may not be afraid to have your hand cut off, but your body will suffer. In four weeks between mid February and mid March 1872, Standard Oil bought out 22 of Cleveland's 26 refineries. During one 48 hour stretch in early March, they bought six. Historians would call it the Cleveland Massacre. Each refiner was offered cash or Standard Oil stock. Rockefeller recommended that they take the stock. Most took the cash. The few who took stock and held it would become some of the wealthiest men Cleland had ever known. Rockefeller understood exactly why most of them took the cash instead of the stock. He explained it himself years later, and the explanation has lost none of its edge. They knew that the oil business, under the existing conditions was doomed. But they lacked faith in me. They didn't believe I could succeed in what I was undertaking. So when I offered them either spot cash outright for their property or stock in the new company, they took my money and laughed in their sleeves at my folly. They didn't see how I could succeed. They believed I was doomed to failure. So they took my money and scorned the stock. Later, when the company did succeed and the stock which I had offered them and they declined to accept, took a value vastly greater than the money I had paid them. They heaped censure upon me for their shortsightedness and accused me of having tricked them. These were not strangers. These were his fellow Clevelanders. Some sat in the same church as him and had for decades. He had known these men and their families and he absorbed their businesses anyway. Rockefeller didn't see a contradiction. To him, it was simple. The industry was overbuilt. He was offering them a way out of the failing businesses, the only way out as he saw it. He later described Standard Oil in biblical terms as an angel of mercy reaching down from the sky and inviting the struggling refiners into the ark he had built. All of these purchases of refineries, he wrote in his memoir were conducted with the utmost fairness and good faith on our part. Decades later, when he was no longer in the business, Rockefeller was asked to reflect on those moments. He had no regrets. It was right, he said. I knew it as a matter of conscience. It was right before me. And my God, if I had to do it tomorrow, I would do it again in the same way. Do it a hundred times. The interviewer next asked him an obvious question. With all of Standard Oil's advantages, why bother taking in the weak firms it competed with? Why not just let them fail? His answer is the plainest account he ever gave of his own logic and reveals something about competition that a lot of people miss. It is to be remembered that oftentimes the most difficult competition comes not from the strong, intelligent, conservative competitor, but from the man who is holding on by the eyelid, is ignorant of his costs, and anyway has got to keep running or bust. Ofttimes, if a man is doing business to his disadvantages, were to close down his works and throw up his hands, it would be a notice to his bankers and other creditors that he could not do business anymore at a profit. He must keep up or they would close in on him. He would lose all if he stops, and he will probably lose all anyhow. Rockefeller wanted to eliminate irrational competition. It was the same idea that he had formed in 1869, watching refined oil sell for less than crude. But now the idea was fully grown and tested in battle. He had bet everything he had on cooperation beating competition. And in Cleveland, in just four weeks, it had. Late in his life, he compressed the whole philosophy into two sentences that could stand as the epitaph of the era he created. The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return. The refiners who had refused Standard's offer found out what happened next. With the additional scale, Standard's cost advantages widened. As a result, Standard could easily lower their prices and force the others to lower theirs to compete. Most of the holdouts went broke within 18 months. And then, after absorbing a competitor, Standard would keep the old company's name on the door, the exact same sign, as if nothing at all had changed. A man who wanted to sell his oil to an independent Cleveland refiner could walk into a building and negotiate what he thought was a good deal. Standard Oil would have no part of and never know he was still selling to Standard Oil. Standard Oil did this deliberately. They were designed to be invisible. And at night, after a day of buying up refineries and assembling what was becoming the Largest industrial operation in the country. Rockefeller still got into bed and gave himself a nightly sermon. He'd been preaching to that pillow for years. But the text had changed. The man who now owned Cleveland warned himself about something else now. A little success. Soon you will fall down, soon you will be overthrown. Look out, go steady. He was warning himself against complacency and pride. The same man who had absorbed 22 refineries in just six weeks was telling himself every night to keep going. Steady. He wasn't even close to being done yet. While the oil regions were starting to burn his name and tear up railroad tracks, Rockefeller went home each night, usually at the same hour, but now to a brick house at 424 Euclid Avenue. Euclid Avenue had become Cleveland's showpiece. It was a wide street under a canopy of elm trees that locals had started calling Millionaires Row. The new fortunes in oil as well as iron and the railroads had built mansions there that looked like castles. The Rockefeller house looked like none of them. It was solid, two stories tall, but deliberately plain. A pedestrian walking past might have guessed its owner was a moderately successful dry goods merchant. And that was precisely the impression that Rockefeller wanted to give. I hate frills, he later said. Useful things, beautiful things, are admirable. But frills, affectations, more pretenses of being something very fine, bore me very much. Inside that plain house, a family was growing. Bessie had come first in 1866, and then came the second daughter, Alice, born in 1869. Sadly, she lived just a year. And then Alta in 1871, and Edith in the summer of 1872, just months after the Cleveland massacre vaulted Standard into being the largest oil refiner on the planet. And then, On a January morning, 1874, Rockefeller arrived at the Standard Oil office and told Henry Flager the news. With tears in his eyes. Seti had given birth to a boy. They had named him John Junior. The family would call him Junior all of his life. How glad we were that that baby was a boy, Seti wrote, and that he was perfectly formed. So picture the household of the most hated man in the oil regions in the mid-1870s. Three little girls and now a baby boy. They'd say morning prayers before breakfast where a latecomer would have to pay a $0.01 fine. As the children grew, they developed a homemade economy that ran on daily chores. Rockefeller faced a problem his own parents had never had. How do you raise children atop a growing fortune without ruining them? His answer was to hide the fortune. The children never once visited his office or the refineries. They wore hand me Downs. John Jr. Would wear his sister's dresses for years. And at home, Rockefeller had built a make believe market where Seti was the general manager. He had each child keep an account book of their own tiny replica of the ledger a he had kept since he was a boy. They would tally their income and expenses. They could earn 2 cents for killing flies or 10 cents for sharpening pencils. In the summer, they'd be paid a penny for every 10 weeds pulled from the vegetable garden. Throughout the year. He'd pay them 2 cents a day for abstaining from candy, with a bonus for each consecutive day of abstinence. The children of the now richest man in Cleveland grew up with about the same creature comforts their father had known. Seti went even a step farther than her husband. When the children got old enough to want bicycles, Rockefeller suggested buying one for each of them. No, said Seti, we will buy just one for all of them. But my dear, Rockefeller protested, tricycles do not cost much. That is true, she replied. It's not the cost. But if they have just one, they will learn to give up to one another. So the four children shared a single bicycle. Seti also ran the moral side of the house, and she ran it with a firmness that could take your breath away. She once told a neighbor, I am so glad my son has told me what he wants for Christmas, so now it can be denied him. But her economy was hardest on herself. She wore patches on her clothes her whole life and once shocked an acquaintance by insisting that a young woman needed just two dresses in her wardrobe. She did much of the housework herself, along with two maids, when the household could have afforded an army of servants. With the children, she was hardest on John Jr. Because he was the most like her obedient, dutiful, and almost too eager to please. When people complimented Rockefeller on his son, he protested truthfully, it was his mother who developed him. She developed Rockefeller too. Later in life, he said a thing about her he never quite said about anyone else. Her judgment was always better than mine. Without her keen advice, I would be a poor man. He did not deal in overstatement, so from him that was the highest kind of praise possible. And she may well have been the reason he could do what he did all day and still sleep at night. When it came to money, Seti's focus was on how it was used. The way it was made, she left to her husband. Rockefeller himself was by every account the gentle one. Junior could not recall a single instance of his father's anger, not one in his entire childhood. He was a beloved companion, Junior said. He had a genius with children. He never told us what to do or what not to do. He was one with us. It turns out the famously cold, silent man in public was at home a performer. He balanced fine china plates on the tip of his nose. At dinner, he played blind man's bluff with his kids with real cunning, with feints and sudden turns and always whooping around the room if he want. He taught the children to swim and skate and ride horses. He had a telegraph wire run between his office and his house so he could spend three or four afternoons a week at home planting trees and playing with his kids. All the while he kept one of the largest companies on earth, Hummingbird along down the road. It was a warm home, but an insulated one. The children had no school friends because there was no school, only governesses. Visitors were the carefully screened children of fellow church families. The Rockefeller children were being raised inside a fortress of certainty, and the world outside its walls was depicted as a place of saloons, card games and sen. Two more figures completed the household picture. The first was Rockefeller's mother, Eliza, who spent her summers with the family. The woman who had once held the farm together while her husband vanished for months now sat next to her son at the table, and Rockefeller would hold her hand lovingly throughout the meal. Grandmother trusted father absolutely, Junior remembered. The second figure appeared less often and without warning. Once or twice a year, an old man with a red beard and a diamond stick pen would turn up behind a fine team of horses and ride grandly up Euclid Avenue. Rockefeller's father, Big Bill, his grandchildren adored him. He gave them rifles and taught them to shoot. He played the fiddle and told tall tales. But after a few uproarious days, he would vanish again, giving no hint of where he was going or when he would be back. The children had no idea that their jolly grandfather was now living under a false name in Illinois with his second wife, who knew nothing of their existence. Rockefeller never wrote to his father and never spoke a word publicly against him. To strangers. He described him only as a fine, upstanding man, but he had spent his whole life becoming that man's exact opposite, a husband who came home at the same hour every night to the same wife forever. Their household on Euclid Avenue, with its prayers and its penny fines and its account books, was many things, but underneath them all it could be seen as a 30 year argument with his father on a Thursday morning in September 1873, the largest bank in America failed. Jay Cook Co. Was the bank that had sold the bonds that financed the Union side of the Civil War. Most Americans considered it as solid as the US Government itself. But Cook had lately sunk enormous sums into building a second transcontinental railroad that wasn't paying off. When the money ran out, the bank had to shut its doors. And the news set off a run on all the banks. Depositors rushed to pull their savings out of every bank until those failed, too. The Stock Exchange in New York closed its doors for 10 whole days, something that had never happened before. It would become known as the panic of 1873. And that panic would become a depression that ground on for six long years. The price of crude oil sank to 48 cents a barrel, which in some towns made it cheaper than water for any of the remaining struggling oil refiners. The Depression was the end for Standard Oil. It was the clearance sales, as Rockefeller would later say, this strong feed during depressions. Standard had the largest cash reserves, the lowest costs and massive storage capacity to buy out his struggling competitors for pennies on the dollar. And seeing the news, Rockefeller even cut their dividend to pile up more cash. Refiners who had held out against him in good times simply couldn't during this slump. And when the cash did grow scarce, Standard could simply pay with its own stock. After the Cleveland massacre, the Standard Oil consortium went national. And it went fast. In the summer of 1874, Rockefeller invited two prominent oil refiners to meet him and Henry Flagler at Saratoga. The men were William Worden from Philadelphia and Charles Lockhart from Pittsburgh. They had breakfast together. Then they talked for six hours in a pavilion while resort guests strolled outside. Rockefeller laid out what he'd already done in Cleveland. In the last year alone, he told them that he'd shipped over 700,000 barrels and earned over a million dollars. He showed them his books, and then he made his pitch. Wharton and Lockhart would transfer their Philadelphia and Pittsburgh refineries to him in exchange for Standard Oil stock. They would both come work for him, and he would in turn absorbing their neighboring refineries as rapidly as persuasion or other means could bring it about. They would keep the same names on all the doors. Nobody outside that room would know. Worden and Lockhart agreed. Next, in October 1874, Standard brought in Charles Pratt Co. Of New York, the New York Oil Company. New York had the best market for oil and was the gateway to the world's exports. It was the Last major piece of the puzzle. Fully nine of ten barrels of oil refined in the United States was now passing through Standard Oil. And here's the part his enemies would never give him credit for. As Standard swallowed the chaos of the industry and squeezed the waste out of the trade, the price of kerosene fell and kept falling until the light that had once been a luxury was something almost any family could afford. And true to their name, the product had gotten safer. Kerosene had long been dangerously inconsistent with bad, over volatile batches, turning lamps into bombs that could burn a house down. A barrel that carried the word standard increasingly became a promise. This oil would burn clean and not blow up the lamp. On July 8, 1879, John D. Rockefeller turned 40. He was now one of the 20th richest men in America, and almost nobody in America knew it. And that was just the way he liked it. When a newspaper that year guessed his Fortune, it said $5 million. And he didn't correct them. He never did. But we know now that a Standard Oil stock alone at the time was worth about 18 million. The press had really only just discovered Rockefeller the year before. The New York sun ended his obscurity with the first real profile of him ever printed, exposing his monopoly. It called him one of the great commercial intellects of the country. But it also concluded that his success rested on some secret bargain with the railroads that people could sense but never quite prove. That double image of genius and suspect would follow him to the grave. The cost of building the machine was starting to show. He had been losing weight and was now lean to the point of gaunt, and his family had to remind him to buy a new suit when his old one got shiny. I'm eating celery, he wrote to his mother in 1878, which I understand to be very good for nervous difficulty. Decades later, as the richest man in the world, he admitted what those years had actually been like for him. For years on end, I never had a solid night's sleep worrying about how it was to come out. All the fortune that I have made has not served to compensate for the anxiety of that period. It, his wife said he was paying, too. In 1876, the doctors diagnosed her as consumptive, and the family began organizing itself around her fragile health, which is part of how they came to buy an estate called Forest Hill. Rockefeller had bought the land in 1873. It was 79 wooded acres on a hill east of the city of Cleveland, with ravines and gullies and a view of Lake erie. Starting in 1877, the family began spending whole summers there, partly in the hope that the lake air would do, said he good. It was a rambling house that had been built as a hotel, and critics would later mock it as a monument of cheap ugliness. Rockefeller didn't care. Oh, I like Forest Hill very much better than any other home, he remarked. Forest Hill became his favorite place in the world, the place he started spending more and more time at. One summer, he dammed a stream to make two lakes, one for boating and one for swimming. And on hot days he swam the mile long circuit with a straw hat perched on his head to keep the sun off. Then in winters, he flooded a pond for skating, and as many as 50 people, many of them strangers from the neighborhood, would skate on it. Since his faith would not allow the pond to be flooded on this Sabbath, he sometimes rose after midnight on Sunday to direct the workmen in preparing the ice for Monday. One of the richest men most Americans had never heard of, knee deep in January, supervising his skating pond at 1 in the morning. That was Rockefeller at 40 at Standard Oil. By the mid-1870s, the fight had moved out of the refineries into the oil fields again. A new threat had emerged. It was a pipe. The industry had evolved. Crude oil no longer traveled from a well to a railroad in barrels on a teamster's wagon, as it had 20 years before. Barrels were now barely even used. Crude oil now traveled through short pipelines to trains where it was loaded onto tanker cars. Standard Oil had bought and built its way into control of nearly all of these short pipelines. When a driller struck oil, a Standard Oil crew would swoop in to connect the new well to their system immediately. Almost all Pennsylvania crude now began its journey above ground in Rockefeller pipe and finished it on a railroad whose rates Rockefeller had carefully arranged. In late 1877, the desperate remaining independent refiners crowded into Titusville, Pennsylvania for what they called a petroleum parliament. They were all hunting for a way out from under the Standard Oil machine. The idea they landed on sound close to impossible. A massive pipeline designed to move crude oil long distances over a hundred miles. At the time, the longest pipeline ran just 30 miles, and nobody knew whether crude oil could be pumped over such a distance at all. The independent refiners proposed to find out. They called it the Tidewater Pipeline. The plan was audacious. It would be a 6 inch pipe running from the Pennsylvania oil fields up and over the Allegheny Mountains to a railhead owned by Philadelphia's Reading Railroad. It was one of the few railroads not yet Under Standard Oil's thumb, it would carry the oil the rest of the way. If they could do it, they wouldn't need to pay any rebates to Standard Oil. If it worked, the freight advantages Standard Oil used to control in the industry would be worth nothing. Thing inside Standard Oil, the first reaction to hearing this was laughter. One of Standard's lieutenants wrote to Rockefeller that he was greatly amused by this pipeline scheme. Rockefeller wasn't laughing, though he wrote back cautiously. They're quite likely to have some disappointments yet, he predicted, before consummating all of their plans in that direction. Then he set about manufacturing those disappointments himself. Standard Oil fought in every direction at once. They bought up massive strips of land running in straight lines across Pennsylvania. These became known as deadlines that the pipe would not be able to legally cross. Bewildered Pennsylvania farmers woke up rich as Standard Oil agents swept through their sleepy towns, paying extravagant sums for farmland that had been worth just a fraction of the sum the week before. Not being able to buy all the land, though, Standard next planted stories in local papers warning farmers that a pipeline could leak and poison their crops. Then they started offering cut rates to any refiner who was tempted to become a Tidewater Pipeline customer. Then they went even a step farther and simply bought many of the refineries that were thinking of signing on. And they also had help the railroads. The other party, greatly threatened by a pipeline, stepped in and refused the pipe permission to cross their tracks. But the pipeline was being built anyway. When it was near completion, Rockefeller quietly offered $300,000 just to buy his own stake in the project. He was refused. In May 1879, the great pumps whirred to life and the oil started its journey east. Nobody knew if it could climb the mountains. For seven full days, the whole oil world tracked its slow crawl across Pennsylv, up over the mountains. Then finally, the first oil sputtered out. At the far end. 109 miles away, the oil regions erupted in jubilation. The newspaper ranked the pipeline among the great engineering feats of the age. The damn thing worked. Inside Standard Oil, there was silence. One Standard Oil executive wrote to Rockefeller that I feel extremely satisfied that the Tidewater pipeline can be stopped and torn up if is thought best to do it. I think that the sooner the Tidewater knows this, the better. Rockefeller vetoed this idea. He had something more elegant in mind. He reached for his old playbook. Standard Oil cut its rates and the railroads cut theirs to levels. One freight agent said. Barely covered the wheel grease on the railroads. This price War soon had the new pipeline running at half capacity. And then came a twist that says more about the era than any conspiracy actually could. The men behind Tidewater Pipeline had begun discussing how they might keep anyone else from building a pipeline like it. The pipeline that was built to break the Standard Oil monopoly now wanted to protect their own monopoly. Rockefeller did what he always did when he couldn't kill a thing. He decided to absorb it as his own. If pipelines were the future, Standard Oil would own pipelines. But not just one. Standard Oil next laid four great lines of its own, from the oil fields to Cleveland, to New York to Philadelphia and finally to Buffalo. By 1881, it had folded the whole web of pipelines into one single entity. Standard now controlled the pipelines the same way it had once controlled the railroad rebates. By 1881, Rockefeller had a problem almost no businessman in America had faced before. His company had outgrown the laws of the company it operated in. Standard Oil was chartered as an Ohio corporation. But under the laws of the time, a corporation chartered in one state could not own property or stock in other companies in another state. Yet Standard Oil effectively controlled refineries in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Maryland, plus the pipelines, plus terminals and plants across the map. Legally, though, Standard Oil of Ohio wasn't allowed to own almost any of the it. For years, they had papered over this with improvisions. They had held most of their companies in secret. Properties in other states were parked in the names of various individuals from those states, men Rockefeller or Flagler trusted as caretakers. Then they used code names in correspondence. It worked, barely, but the growing empire had become a coordination nightmare. Major decisions were now scattered between partners located in Cleveland, New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and even Baltimore. The empire had outgrown its disguises. The solution, drafted with Henry Flagler's help and signed on January 2, 1882, became known as the Standard Oil Trust. The shareholders of Standard Oil of Ohio and roughly 40 other companies handed over their stock to nine men who became known as trustees. Rockefeller was chief among them. In exchange, each shareholder received trust certificates, pieces of paper entitling them to their slice of the profits of everything, the whole combined machine. The nine trustees now controlled all the companies, appointed every board, and could run them all as if they were one company across every state line in the country. Technically, the trust itself didn't exist anywhere. It couldn't sign contracts, it kept no public books, and most importantly, there was no law it violated because nothing like it had ever been done before. A now $70 million enterprise controlling nine out of every ten barrels of oil. And the public still knew nothing about the arrangement. Rockefeller held on to more than a third of it all a block of shares worth about 19 million. He was 42 at the time. The trusted something else Rockefeller cared a great deal about. For the first time, Standard Oil existed as a paper person could own. And he urged every person he knew to buy it, especially Standard Oil employees. He even made his own money available to help them do it. I would have every man a capitalist, every man, woman and child, he said. I would have everyone save his earnings, not squander it. Own the industries, own the railroads, own the telegraph lines. It worked, worked better than any loyalty oath could have. The men and families of Standard Oil were now proper shareholders, watching their certificates climb in value. As a result, many of them closed ranks around the company like a faithful around a church. And because of it all, the word trust entered the American vocabulary. Because of Standard Oil, other industries soon copied the exact same form. Think sugar, whiskey, cotton, oil. Within a decade, the trust would become shorthand for everything most Americans feared about big business, leading Congress to weaponize the legal system with a single landmark law aimed squarely at the form Standard Oil had invented. They called it the Sherman Antitrust act, and the act was designed to prohibit monopolies and promote competitive markets. Markets. The trust had one more piece of unfinished business geography. The oil trade now ran on exports, and the exports ran through the Eastern seaboard where Standard's huge new refineries sat. One of Rockefeller's partners put the problem to him bluntly. A two headed calf, he said, belonged in a circus. You can't have one head in Cleveland and another in New York. New York won. Henry Flagler had already moved to New York in late 1883. Rockefeller himself followed, and then the rest of the Standard Oil men poured east after him. They settled into the same few blocks of midtown Manhattan, with Flagler taking a house on one corner of West 54th street and Rockefeller's brother William on another. The Rockefellers, with their instinct for invisibility, skipped Fifth Avenue entirely and bought a four story brownhouse on a quiet, shady side street. At breakfast, after saying grace, Rockefeller sometimes read aloud to the family from the crank mail and threats that now swamped his office. Nobody quite knew why. Then he'd pull out a folder stuffed with begging letters and charity appeals from around the globe, and he assigned them to the children for further study. His giving nearly doubled in those years, from 61,000 in 1881 to 119,000 three years later. Later, he was practicing for something far bigger, though nobody knew it yet, including him. On May 1, 1885, Standard Oil moved into its new headquarters, a nine story granite fortress at the bottom of Broadway. The company's name appeared nowhere on the outside, just the street number, 26 Broadway. Within a few years, that address would be shorthand all over the world for the oil trust itself. One reporter called the building a cave for pirates, a den for the cutthroats of commerce. Inside, it was quiet, deliberately so. Men moved through the halls like clerks in a counting house, not employees of a company that controlled the oil supply of a continent. People who entered instinctively spoke in hushed tones, and Rockefeller sat in a back office facing the harbor. The company was run by committees. Each department had one Major decisions went to the executive committee, the nine trustees and their lieutenants, who gathered every day at noon for lunch at a long table on the top floor. The seating never changed, and Rockefeller deliberately did not sit at the head of the table. He gave that seat to the group's oldest member and took a place alongside the side among the others. It fooled no one, and he didn't need to. He didn't dictate. He listened. And then he would ask a few questions and then wait. Sometimes he stretched out on a lounge after lunchtime and appeared to doze through the continuing arguments. He might close his eyes now and then, one executive remembered, but he never missed a point. Usually the room came around to where he'd been all along and the decision got made as if it had been everyone's idea. And what of Henry Flagler? He was still there every noon at the long table, one seat from the head. But something in him was beginning to wander. In the winter of 1883, he and Rockefeller had toured Florida together, looking over Jacksonville and a drowsy old Spanish town called St. Augustine, listening to local men talk up the state's prospects. Rockefeller saw a warm place to rest. But Flagler saw something else. Within a few years, he would start pouring his Standard Oil fortune into a second empire down there. Railroads and grand hotels along the coast, the one that would put his name all over the map of Florida. The gilded streak his partners had always watched with quiet suspicion finally had somewhere to go. The Parliament of two would keep meeting for years, but its great work was done. By 1884, the company had outgrown Cleveland, its birthplace. But Rockefeller kept coming back every summer to Forest Hill, his estate in East Cleveland. The wide ground, the trees he'd planted himself, the city where his father had Dropped him off at a boarding house near the Erie Street Baptist Church, opened a small bank account and left. But he was now a visitor in the city he'd first called home. Home. The city whose refineries he had absorbed one by one until there was nothing left to absorb. He was 45 years old and he held more than a third of the largest industrial trust in the world. His kerosene now lit homes on four continents. His competitors had all been absorbed or broken. His name was on the letterhead at 26 Broadway, even if it wasn't on the building. But there was a writer who would one day aim to take it all apart. And her name was Ida Tarbell, and she was the daughter of a broken Pennsylvania oilman. And she had a score to settle. She knew the trust's greatest strength was its invisibility. And she later observed of Rockefeller's maze of shell companies, you could argue its existence from its effects, but you could not prove it it. And she thought she might be able to prove it now. In May of 1887, one of the most senior men at Standard Oil sat down and wrote John D. Rockefeller a letter. His name was William Worden. He was one of the Philadelphia refiners who had quietly folded his company into Standard Oil the decade before. He had grown richer than his wildest dreams for doing it. But he had gotten something else too, something he hadn't expected. We have met with a success unparalleled in commercial history, Warden wrote in the letter. Our name is well known all over the world, he continued, but our public character is not one to be envied. We are quoted as the representative of all that is evil, hard hearted, oppressive cruelty. He begged John Dee not to wave their dark public image away. Don't put this down or throw it to one side. Think it over and talk with Ms. Rockefeller about it. She is the salt of the earth. Near the end of his life, Rockefeller explained how he had decided to handle it. Suffice to say, he did not listen to William Worden. During all of this time of outcry against us, I determined it was useless to waste energy in denials and disputes with jealous or disappointed people. People I persuaded our partners to keep silent too. The more we progressed, yet kept on gaining success and keeping silent, the more we were abused. Mr. Flagler said to me, why, John, you must have hide like a rhinoceros. We all said nothing and went on sawing wood. And sawing wood was what he meant by sticking to their business. Doing so worked fine. While nobody looked closely, the Trouble started, though, when somebody finally did. His name was Henry Lloyd. He was a newspaperman who had married into the family that owned the Chicago Tribune, which left him rich and free to write about whatever he wanted. He chose to write about Standard oil, and in May 1881, he ran an article called the Story of a Great Monopoly. It was one of the first serious accounts of this Standard Oil Trust ever to appear in print. In it, he told 40 million kerosene burning Americans that the light in their homes was priced by a single company most of them had never heard of. He included a line built to be quoted. America has the proud satisfaction of having furnished the world with the greatest, wisest and meanest monopoly known to history. Lloyd also handed the company the nickname that stuck the Octopus. For decades after, cartoonists would draw Standard Oil as a creature with tentacles around the state houses and railroads, with one arm even reaching from the dome of the Capitol. As reporting goes, it was sloppy. Much of it rested on rumor and innuendo. And when Lloyd came back in 1894 with a whole book of it called Wealth Against Commonwealth, much of that was wrong, too. But it landed anyway, because underneath the ranting sat an idea that many Americans were ready to. Liberty produces wealth and wealth destroys liberty. Rockefeller said he never read the book. His company, he said, pay no more attention to all this nonsense than an elephant might be expected to pay to a tiny mosquito. Maybe so, but the mosquito had changed the weather. By 1888, the noise against the trust had grown loud enough that both political parties were now condemning them and legislatures were opening investigations. That February, Rockefeller had to appear before the New York State Senate Committee, where he gave the performance that became his courtroom signature. Sworn in, he kissed the Bible vehemently. Then for hours, the man with the finest memory in American business turned into a vague and forgetful fellow wandering lost in the corridors of his own company. The committee's lawyer asked whether he had ever belonged to the Southern Improvement Company. Rockefeller caught the slip at once. The man had garbled the name. The real one was the South Improvement Company, not Southern. There was such a company? The lawyer asked. I have heard of such a company. Were you not in it? I was not. Every word of it was technically true. Years later, he explained himself without a flicker of shame. While they thought they were leading me into a trap, I let them go into the trap themselves. He won the battle that day, but lost the war. The committee's report delivered the sentence that trailed the company forever. This is the original trust. It is the type of system which has spread like a disease throughout the commercial system of this country. And here's the part that gets lost. By the time the country's hatred of John D. Rockefeller reached full boil, he was barely going to work. He had been fading out of 26 Broadway since the mid-1890s, and in 1897, at age 58, he stopped coming in at all. Power passed to a man named John Archbold. He was small and quick and given to bounding down the corridors, whistling onward Christian soldiers, but with a hard temper underneath the cheer. Under Archibald, the prices crept up, the profits swelled, and the political methods got cruder. But Rockefeller never announced that he had left. His partners insisted he keep the title of president, and he agreed. But he was president by name only. He no longer attended regular meetings or drew a salary. All the while, the public went on believing he was still the man giving the orders. For the next decade and a half, he would answer personally for many decisions others were making. I suspect that because he was such a focal point for the public attention, the company was able to keep going for decades. He kept declining the magazine profiles almost weekly. One request came from a new magazine run by an editor named Samuel McClure, who was at that moment in Paris recruiting an obscure young writer from Pennsylvania. Her name was Ida Turbo. This one magazine writer did more to damage John D. Rockefeller than every senator, investigator, and ranting reporter combined. To understand why, it helps to start where she did, in the place where oil was first discovered in America, Northern Pennsylvania. Her father built wooden tanks for the oil fields, and in the winter of 1872, the south improvement Company arrived, survived. The resulting fight turned the region inside out. The talk of revolution thrilled her. She wrote later her father, who used to sing around the house and tell her funny stories from this day was now silent and grim when he returned home. The oil region had been split in two. The many who fought the Standard Oil monster and the few who quietly sold out to it. Franklin would point out the sellers to his daughter on the street in those days, she said, I looked with more contempt on the man who had gone over to Standard Oil than the one who had been in jail. Her route back to standard oil took 20 years. First she taught school and then edited a small magazine. Then she went to Paris and wrote for American newspapers, a rarity among women of the time. It was there that she picked up Henry Lloyd's book on Standard Oil wealth against Commonwealth, and rediscovered the company that had broken her father. By then, she was a rising star at McClure's magazine. One of the most read magazines in America. Its popularity came from its meticulously researched articles tackling subjects near and dear to the public's heart. Tarble had spent a decade learning how to excavate a paper trail. And standard oil, after 30 plus years of business, had left one that no one had followed to the end. As a young woman, she had dreamed of writing the great American novel with the Standard Oil Company as a backbone. And now she got to write something better. Her version of the story. In September 1901, she sat down with her publisher and laid out a plan for a three part series on the company. She privately doubted anyone would actually read such a long story of business. Nothing like it had ever been tried, even by McClures. Her father warned her off. Don't do it, Ida. They'll ruin the magazine, he told her. She did it anyway. And while she sharpened her tools, the man she was about to take apart was quietly starting to unravel himself. For most of his life, Rockefeller had paid no visible price for the way he worked or how the public was treating him and the company. But Starting at age 40, he had grown gaunt and was eating celery for what he called nervous difficulty, lying awake over a business that had never once failed him. He had kept up that pace for another decade. But by 1891, at age 51, with the public learning more and more about Standard Oil and the man behind it, it caught up with him. Influenza put him down that winter and then afterwards he had trouble breathing for weeks. Then came liver trouble and then his digestive system stopped cooperating. He was soon pale and haggard man who had subsided on milk and crackers. His doctor said it plainly. A little more of that would have killed him. Rockefeller was close to the edge of a breakdown. It was the giving as much as the empire that broke him. While the country was learning to hate him as a money hoarder, his gifts to charity were actually doubling and doubling again. From 124,000 1889 to more than a million dollars three years later later. But writing checks wasn't enough. Rockefeller took to giving the same way that he ran his company, by knowing every detail. By his own account, he worked himself almost to a nervous breakdown in groping my way without sufficient guide or chart through the ever widening field of philanthropic endeavor. So in March 1891, sick and stretched thin, he sent for a Baptist minister named Frederick, Frederick T. Gates. Gates was an ex preacher in his late 30s who had impressed Rockefeller during a recent campaign to build a Baptist university in Chicago. I am in trouble, Mr. Gates, he told him, the pressure of these appeals for gifts has become too great for endurance. These investigations are now taking more and more of my time and energy than the Standard Oil Company itself. Either I must shift part of the burden or stop giving entirely, and I cannot do the latter letter. Indeed you cannot, Mr. Rockefeller, Gates replied. Well, I must have a helper, and I have been watching you. I think you are the man. Gates took the job. For the moment, he was a clearinghouse for all the begging letters Rockefeller received. Later, he would become something much larger. The ultimate cure for Rockefeller was just rest. Under the doctor's orders, he spent eight of the next 12 months at Forest Hill. And for the first time in 21 years, his mind cleared. He worked the fields beside his own laborers, rode around on his bicycle, and joked to all that would listen that he was training to be a great concert singer. He recovered his body. He did not recover his hair. The loss of hair had a name, Alopecia, and in the end, it took all of it from him. It had started as an ordinary thing in his late 40s, but then sped up through the worst years of the 1890s and finally left nothing at all behind. His wife said he kept the record in a memo book. John's mustache began to fall out, and all the hair on his body had followed by August. His head, his eyebrows, his eyelashes, every hair on his body vanished. Doctors then and now mostly shrug at the cause, but severe stress sits on every list. And here was the cruelest part for him. The man who had spent his life controlling everything around him could not control or hide this. It was happening to his own face, and of course, he met it with a kind of quiet, almost touching effort. He tried hair restoratives, and when they failed, he bought a wig and tested it nervously at church one Sunday and was relieved when the congregation approved. And in time, he would keep a rotation of wigs cut to different lengths, which he wore in sequence over the weeks so that his hair seemed to grow longer and then be freshly trimmed. He was an aging man going through gentle, elaborate lengths just to look ordinary. The biggest cruelty of it was the timing, because his enemies had taken to calling him a literal monster. His own estranged brother, Frank, used the exact word to describe him in one of Tarbell's articles. Of course, it had been a figure of speech and taken out of context, but Tarbell never let that get in the way of her narrative. The illness, as one biographer put it, made him look like a hairless ogre stripped of all Youth, warmth, and attractiveness. The illness had given him the physical face his accusers had always insisted he wore. And the worst of it was still coming. In a few years, Ida Tarbell would point to this disease, this medical affliction, as the outward proof of the rot she said, laid inside him him. The first installment of Ida Tarbell's the History of The Standard Oil Company appeared in McClure's magazine in November 1902. Her original outline had three articles, but the public had other ideas, and the magazine's rule was to keep printing as long as the readers kept buying. It would, in the end, run 19 installments over two and a half years. What strengthened this series was that she had a man on the inside, Henry Rogers, who was a senior director of Standard Oil. Historians suggest that he was an arrogant man who reached out to her, believing he could charm her and perhaps spin this story and settle some scores. For two years, she came to the Standard Oil office, whisked in one door and out another, while Rogers reviewed her findings, and, she noticed, kept the light trained on the founder and off of himself. What made the series particularly lethal was its clinical calculation. Knowing that Standard Oil's lawyers would pounce on any emotional outbursts, Tarbell weaponized a mountain of dry public records, footnotes and court testimonials. By adopting the tone of a detached researcher. She masked her personal crusade, allowing the selected raw data to quietly dismantle the company's reputation piece by piece. And she gave the company its fair due with an entire chapter discussing its legitimate greatness. There was not a lazy bone in the organization, she wrote, not an incompetent hand, nor a stupid head. Having established that these were the best men in the world at what they did, she showed that despite all that, they had cheated anyway. Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, she concluded, and it is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 where he has run a race with a competitor and started it fair to the old defense that everybody in industry took rebate. She had a flat answer. Everybody did not do it. It is in the nature of the offense that everybody could not do it. Month after month, everything Rockefeller assumed was safely buried decades ago came back up in print. With the public crying for more, Tarbell delivered the South Improvement Company, the Cleveland Massacre. The drawbacks? She found one detail from a teenage office boy assigned to burn records at a Standard plant. While doing so, he spotted in the furnace pile the name of his own Sunday school teacher, a small independent refiner. The paper was from a Railroad, and it showed the man's shipments from that week. Standard Oil was the largest refiner in the country, but felt threatened enough by one man's business to keep tabs on him. The smallness of it was what shook Ida Tarbell the most. There was a littleness about it that seemed utterly contemptible compared to the immense genius and ability that had gone into the organization, she wrote, and Rockefeller said nothing as issue after issue was printed. Associates begged him to answer, but he refused. His response was simple. If she is right, we will not gain anything by answering. And if she is wrong, time will vindicate us. Walking alongside him at his Forest Hill estate, a friend pressed him again to respond just as a worm crossed their path. If I stepped on that worm, I will call attention to it, rockefeller told him. If I ignore it, it will disappear. The composure was a performance on a train west. A companion read to him the most recent installment aloud, and he listened with keen interest and no resentment. Then he turned away any attempt to discuss it, saying not a word, word, not a word about that misguided woman around the family. He even started to call her Ms. Tarbo. When an old Cleveland friend gently raised the subject, he shut that down, too. The world is full of socialists and anarchists. Whenever a man succeeds remarkably in any particular line of business, they jump on him and cry him down. And the crowd is always ready to help tear down a successful man. Man. He believed it in his head. There was a complete, airtight story in which every critic was simply a sore loser. The old Cleveland refiners, who had sold out to him in 1872, had taken his cash instead of stock. At the time, they laughed at his folly, but soon their laughter died, replaced with regret and jealousy as they watched the stock turn into fortunes for other men. There was one place Rockefeller could almost always be found in Cleveland, and it had been that way for more than 30 years. At church, teaching Sunday school, he had been the church's superintendent since 1872. He always came early in the morning to kindle the fire and stayed late to dim the gas lamps. Boys, do you know why I never became a drunkard? He liked to ask the room. Cause I never took the first drink. He had been covering half the church's budget out of his own pocket for decades. His faith was not a costume he put on. It was the oldest and steadiest thing within him, which is exactly why his pew had become a kind of attraction. The richest, most haunted man in the country sat in plain view of the ninth row every Sunday and The church increasingly filled with people who had not come for the sermon. They were curiosity seekers, feature writers and panhandlers and old men angling to get near his money or pry lucid tip on Standard Oil stock. Instead he gave them hymns and temperament lectures and nothing more. He and Ida Tarbell were in the same room exactly once and he never knew it. In the fall of 1903, hearing that Rockefeller would give a special talk at his Cleveland Sunday School, Tarbell decided to attend. She got there first and watch as he entered the room. She watched him take off his coat and hat and slide a black skull cap over his bald head and sit down flush against the wall where he could see the whole room. There was an awful age in his face, she wrote afterwards of 64 year old Rockefeller. The oldest man I had ever seen, I thought, but what power. She studied him for the two hour service, watching him crane his neck and scan the crowd, and decided for her son himself that he was afraid. She wrote, I was sorry for him. I know no companion, no terrible as fear. It did not occur to her she was maybe part of what he was scanning for. Nor did she know that he also searched congregations for another reason, to slip envelopes of cash to needy members after the service. But her verdict was the one that stuck in the minds of the public. She ran wrote, they had never played fair and that ruined the greatness for me. Tarbell's articles on Standard Oil were much more accurate than Lloyd's ones from earlier, better researched and documented. But they also had their misses One of the most famous stories in her whole series was called the widow Backus affair. Ms. Fred Backus was the widow of one of Rockefeller's old Sunday school friends. She had sold her late husband's small lubricating works to standard oil in 1878 and then spent the rest of her life tell telling anyone who would listen that Rockefeller had robbed her blind. And Tarble told this story as gospel, but the records tell it very differently. The plant was obsolete and she asked for as much as 200,000 for it. Standards appraisers came in and assessed it as worth far below that. But Rockefeller, out of personal regard for her, directed that $10,000 be added to the assessment. She was then paid $79,000. Then he offered her in writing to undo the entire sale if she wished it. She took the money and proceeded to put it into Cleveland real estate, dying years later worth more than $300,000. Her own brother in law later wrote to Rockefeller, I know that you paid three times the value of the property. And I know that all that ever saved our company from ruin was the sale of its property to you. Rockefeller biographer Ron Chernew, writing a century later with these papers in front of him, Judge Tarbell's series, one of the great demonstrations of what a single journalist can do against seemingly invincible power. But he also concluded that it does not stand up as an enduring piece of history. In 1905, Tarbell published a two part character study of Rockefeller himself. She described his alopecia as the outward sign of moral rot. The puffy flesh and his thin lips of a living mummy. He could shrug off attacks on his business methods, but this personal attack hit a nerve. This same study dragged his father into the open. It revealed that the richest man on earth had a parent still alive out West. A traveling medicine man living under an assumed name. Name. This was a secret Rockefeller had spent his whole life burying. Sixteen years earlier, in 1889, his mother, Eliza had died at age 67, never knowing that the husband, who had drifted away from the family for decades, was living as a bigamist under a false name. The day before her funeral, Rockefeller went to the minister who would deliver the eulogy and arrange for one detail to be added. Added that his mother had died a widow, faithful to the memory of her dead husband. The death certificate recorded the same fiction. At his mother's funeral, at least for the official record, Rockefeller had killed the old man off himself. But now Tarbell was digging the old man back up. As a result, for years, reporters hunted Big Bill Rockefeller. They were too late. He died in 1906 at 69 years old, buried under the name Livingston in an unmarked grave. The family absorbed the rest while the Tarbell series ran. His wife, Seti, suffered a stroke that left her half paralyzed for two years. Bessie, their eldest daughter, sank into a dementia she never came out of. And another daughter, Edith, fled to Europe depressed. Junior, gripped by migraines and insomnia, broke down entirely in late 1904 and spent most of a year recovering in France. And all of this stayed hidden from the public. It was in these years that the father began confiding in the son. He used to talk to me about the criticisms, Junior remembered, and I think it eased his mind to do so. But he always ended up by saying, well, John, we have to be patient. We have been successful and these people haven't. Tarbell set out to make him answer for all of it, but he never answered her. Her. His focus always remained on staying out of the spotlight and concentrating only on what he could control. In July 1905, with Tarbell's final installment on the stands, he wrote to Archibald, the man running Standard Oil now, I never appreciated more than at present the importance of our taking care of our business, holding it and increasing it in every part of the world. The armor cracked. Once in his late 70s, Rockefeller sat sat for a run of interviews with a writer named William Hoster. Hoster had been a newspaper man and one day worked up the nerve to ask whether Mr. Rockefeller had ever considered that he might be partly responsible for how the papers treated him. Rockefeller was dumbfounded at such a suggestion. And then Hoster admitted that he himself had once written absurd stories about Rockefeller's failing health. Health. He explained that he had done so because when his editor sent him to check the facts, nobody would let him within 100ft of the man. The secrecy itself had become the story because reporters like him had nothing else to go on. Rockefeller stood in silence a full minute before murmuring, so it's all my fault. Then, after a long pause, he went on. I suppose there may be something in what you say, though I had never thought of it that way before. The public verdict was one reckoning, the law was another. And it had been grinding towards Standard Oil for decades. Congress had moved first. In 1890, the Sherman antitrust act became law, written in large part in response to what Standard Oil had built. But then, for a decade, almost nothing happened. The law was vague and barely enforced. It was so full of loopholes that people took to calling it the Swiss Cheese Act. Standard Oil lost no sleep or money over over it. The trust was simply very good at not being caught. Every time a court came close, the company would change shape. When Ohio's courts ruled that their present arrangement was illegal, the partners dissolved it on Paper into 20 separate companies, but then continued to run all 20 from the same office. When the state next pressed for Standard Oil's books, 16 boxes of records turned up, conveniently burned. And in 1899, the empire slipped into its final and cleverest disguise. New Jersey had just made a new kind of company legal. It was termed a holding company, and its only job was to own other companies. So the entire empire reorganized under a single entity, Standard Oil of New Jersey. It had now held 41 firms that operated from coast to coast. If the government wanted to dismantle the machine now, it would have to sue a single massive corporation. And win. It would take a president willing to try. In September of 1901, an anarchist shot President McKinley and a young man named Theodore Roosevelt took the Oath of office. This new president drew a line between the good trusts and the bad ones and put Standard Oil at the top of the naughty list. And in November 1906, his government sued under the Sherman act to dissolve Standard Oil of New New Jersey. By the following summer, seven federal and six state suits were also opened and running at once against Standard Oil. The main case became the largest antitrust proceeding the country had ever seen. Over 400 witnesses, 11 million words of testimony and 12,000 pages. It would take almost five years. And on May 15, 1911, the end finally arrived in a sleepy Supreme Court chamber. Chief Justice Edward White read the opinion aloud in a voice so low the other justices leaned over and asked him to speak up. The verdict inside the mumble. Standard Oil was deemed an unlawful monopoly. They gave it six months to break itself into 34 separate companies forbidden ever to recombine. Rockefeller was on the golf course that afternoon, playing with a Catholic priest from the nearby village when the word arrived. He took the news in, then turned to his partner, Father Lennon. Have you some money? The priest said no, and then asked him why. He responded with three words. Buy Standard Oil. To his old partners, he sent a wry note. Dearly beloved, we must obey the Supreme Court. Our splendid, happy family must scatter. The opinion itself, the one that broke up his life's work, work he refused to read. Wall street soon saw what the government had missed. JP Morgan asked the obvious question. How the hell is any court going to compel a man to compete with himself? When the 34 orphan companies began trading that December on the stock exchange, investors soon discovered that each one was stuffed with hidden assets. The shares soon went for article, propelled by each company being free to do what was in their best interests. And the arrival of the automobile. Just a year earlier in 1910, gasoline, once near a worthless byproduct routinely dumped into rivers, had outsold kerosene for the very first time. Now every Ford Model T rolling off the assembly line was burning it, turning the 34 spun off companies into a network of insurance instant gold mines. Rockefeller owned roughly a quarter of every new company, worth about 300 million. The day the court ruled, his fortune skyrocketed to nearly 900 million just two years later. It's worth noting the entire federal budget of the United States at the time was just 715 million. Roosevelt fumed from his retirement. No wonder that Wall Street's prayers now oh, merciful Providence, give us another disillusion. The pieces took up names. Americans would spend the next century buying gas from ExxonMobil Chevron and the man who had preached for 40 years that corporate monopolies had come to stay made more money from the dismemberment of his company than he ever made running it. The government had finally won, but Rockefeller had not lost. Strangely enough, the five plus years the government spent trying to take Standard Oil appropriate part were the same years John D. Rockefeller really started trying to give it all away. By the time he was sick in 1891, the checks alone had grown past a million dollars a year. And the appeals were starting to bury him. Which is why he had hired Gates, the Baptist minister in the first place. For the first few years, Gates was just a filter. He read the begging letter so Rockefeller didn't have to. But then Gates began to do what Rockefeller had always done with new businesses. He studied it. He went looking for the structure underneath. And in the summer of 1897, Gates sat down and read a dry medical textbook, Osler's Principles and Practice of Medicine. He read it cover to cover and came away unsettled. Most diseases, he had realized, had no known cure, and almost no one in America was trying to find one. Here was a whole field nobody had had organized. A great open territory of human suffering with no organization on it yet. It was the chaotic oil regions all over again, and Gates knew exactly who to bring to it. So together they built a foundation the way Rockefeller had built the oil refinery. Hire the best people alive and then leave them alone. Build the system and measure the results. The first piece was a University. In 1889, even while Ohio's lawyers had started circling, Rockefeller had begun pouring money into a new university in Chicago. It opened in October 1892, in the thick of the Standard Oil legal battle, with no ceremony. It did not have the Rockefeller name all over the door, and that was on purpose. What it did have was a faculty so strong that the school entered the front rank of American university cities on its very first morning. He would end up putting $35 million into the university of Chicago over his lifetime. The students knew exactly who their silent founder was. They sang a song on campus that began, there was a man sent from God whose name was John. The next piece was the body. In 1901, he founded the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, the first American institution devoted purely to discovering the causes of diseases. It was the answer to the open field Gates had found in the textbook the year after more education, in 1902, came the general Education Board, founded with a million dollars of seed money and aimed at schools of the American South. Within eight years, its money had helped bring 800 Southern high schools into existence. He also funded Spelman, the Atlanta school for black women that carried his wife's family name game. He had started funding it in 1882 when it ran out of a leaky church basement. And he kept funding black colleges for decades after. Soon the giving machine would be running at full power. In 1902, a government scientist discovered that hookworm had infested the American South. Hookworm is a parasite that enters bare feet children through the soles of their feet and slowly drains them of energy. Energy. By some estimates, two of every five southern children at the time carried it. The cure it was discovered, cost just 50 cents. Rockefeller handed the problem a million dollars and an organization and had Gates run it the way Standard Oil would have run a new territory. The money was levered to get state governments moving rather than to replace them. State health boards were the ones getting the credit and the Rockefeller name was kept deliberately quiet. Young doctors were paid to fan out across rural counties, with public dispensaries expanding from two southern counties to more than 200 in three years. In five years, roughly half a million people were treated and a regional curse fell to a minor infection. Some southerners, sure there had to be an angle, decided that the wealthy Rockefeller was secretly getting into the shoe business. The final and largest piece took the longest, and it was the purest version of the idea. It was designed to be a permanent, professionally managed fund so massive that its administration would be a public trust itself. In 1906, Gates wrote Rockefeller a letter that set the terms. Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche. You must keep up with it. You must distribute it faster than it grows. If you do not, it will crush you and your children and your children's children. Asking Congress to charter such a fund, produce a national spectrum. Because the federal government was prosecuting Standard Oil as an illegal monopoly, a fearful Congress balked on the conundrum for three years until the Rockefeller family gave up. The family finally bypassed Washington entirely. In 1913, New York State quietly chartered the Rockefeller foundation with a deliberately limitless mandate designed to outlive its founders to promote the well being of mankind throughout the world. World. Rockefeller endowed it with a hundred million dollars. This new foundation took the hookworm fight worldwide to 52 countries, bankrolled the campaign that all but eradicated yellow fever from the Americas and built modern schools of public health from Baltimore to Calcutta. By the time the dust settled, Rockefeller's systematic giving eclipsed even the legendary lifetime benchmarks set By Andrew Kernel Carnegie. None of it surprised the people who really knew him. I do not believe a man has a right to hoard money, he loved to say. He would repeatedly say that he had been begging for good causes since boyhood and that he had first been tasked with raising money to clear the debt of the Erie Street Baptist Church. A reporter once told him that he wanted to write about how the richest man in the world played following orders from his newspaper paper. Stop. Rockefeller snapped at the man. If we are to get along, you will have to find some other designation. For me, wealth isn't a distinction. If I have no other achievement to my credit than the accumulation of wealth, then I have made a poor success of my life. To Rockefeller, philanthropy was never a late career, change of heart or a desperate washing of his family name. Regardless of how it looked to a cynical public, he genuinely believed that the exact same God who had engineered his corporate portrait fortune was now supervising him. As he handed the keys back, he passed the same philosophy on to his only son, John Jr. Who reported for work at 26 Broadway on October 1, 1897. The same year his father quietly stopped coming in. Junior was given no title and no instructions. Father never said a word to me about what I was to do in the office before I began work there, he remembered. Nor has he ever since. So on that first day, he filled inkwells and walked around trying to be useful. Two years in came his first real test. A Wall street con artist had tricked the earnest young heir into a fraudulent stock deal, swallowing nearly a million dollars of his father's money. Terrified, Junior went to report the disaster. The elder Rockefeller listened calmly. Family audited the figures without a single word of reproach and said, all right, John, I'll take care of it. The mistake was never mentioned again. What Junior was never handed was the truth about how the massive fortune had been made. He had taken his parents morality entirely on faith, and his father left it that way. Most of what my son knows of this situation, Rockefeller once admitted of the South Improvement Company Company, is his memory of what he read in Tarbell's book, discovering his family's history from a woman determined to destroy them. Half broke the air. His migraines and the year he spent in France recuperating, were the cost of defending a record he'd never been allowed to really see, let alone understand. In 1910, Junior made his decision and resigned from the board of Standard Oil and stepped away from the business side for good. Could his real life's work would be the other machine, the giving one. Over the next half century, he moved more than a billion dollars of his father's fortune out into the world, but even so, the weight of it never lifted. He carried these headaches for decades. As Gates observed, Junior desperately wanted to escape his father's shadow and forge an independent career. But he was dedicated from birth to the overwhelming burden not to be evaded. He never stopped revering his father, though. Years later, before a visit to his father, he wired ahead a single sentence that explains their whole relationship. I'm not coming because I think you need me, but because I know I need you. His mother Seti's health had been failing for years. By the time the worst of the tarball storm had passed, she was confined to a wheelchair. She spent most of her time in bed, worn down by a list of ailments no doctor could quite name. Her husband cared for her with a tenderness that startled those who knew only one side of him. At dinner, he would slip a flower off the table, climb the stairs, and carry it up to her. On their 50th anniversary in September 1914, he set a brass band on the lawn at their New York estate and had her carried out. Out to the wedding March. He had said the truest thing about her years earlier from a pew in the old Cleveland church, looking up at her pale face. The best thing I ever accomplished and the thing that has given me the greatest happiness was to win Seti Spelman. I have had but one sweetheart and am thankful to say I still have her. She died in 1915. Unfortunately, when she passed. He was a thousand miles south from her in Florida. Florida when the two telegrams reached him, the first saying she was dying and the second that she was gone. He carried the news to the breakfast table, and his son and daughter in law watched him do the thing they'd never seen him do. He wept openly. Then came the question of where to bury her, and the answer turned into one of the strangest episodes of his life. For two years, Rockefeller had been locked in a vicious tax fight with the state of Ohio. Ohio. He had been a legal resident of New York since the 1880s, when Standard Oil moved their office there. So he'd paid taxes there. But Seti's long illness had stranded him at Forest Hill, his Cleveland estate, past the February date that decided who counted as an Ohioan for tax purposes. The county had kept tabs on him and pounced on his laps, billing him a million and a half dollars. He refused to pay a cent of it, so the governor of Ohio let it be known that if Rockefeller crossed the state line, he would be served with a subpoena on the spot. Because the Spelman family plot was in Cleveland, the richest man in America could not bury his own wife without being ambushed at her gravesite. So he didn't go, at least not yet. He gave the newspaper a tender cover story, claiming he could not bear to let her come go. I want to keep her with me as long as I can. What he actually did was park her casket for four and a half months in a granite mausoleum at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York. When he finally did move her to Cleveland, he did it as a heist. On a day of pelting rain, the mausoleum guards were sent down to the cemetery gate on a 25 minute errand to fetch decorative plants. While they were gone, an undertaker backed up to the vault. Vault? They peeled back the flower covered pall and lifted Seti's casket out and slid in an empty substitute container in its place. Finally, they covered the fake box with the original flowers. The undertaker drove her out of the front gate, hidden inside a plain, rough, unmarked box and carried her to the railway station and loaded her into a baggage car. In the flashes of lightning, nobody on the train knew there was even a box body. She rode to Cleveland with the undertaker, a man who helped arrange the smuggling. Remember Rockefeller's reaction to plan and carry out the removal of the body without the papers or the public? Discovering a thing was a source of satisfaction to him. Running right alongside his genuine grief was the satisfaction of a job well done. He had beaten Ohio, outsmarted the press and moved the person he loved most across a guarded state line. And not a soul had laid a hand on it. What waited in Cleveland was small, silent and secret. To ensure he wasn't served by the Ohio courts, only a handful of people stood with him at the gravesite at Lakeview Cemetery. As Seti was lowered, she would lay beside his mother, Eliza, with a space left open between the two graves so that one day he could lie there too. That was all so beautiful, so lovely, he said it was just as Mama would have wished. He never forgave the city for the insult. Cleveland ought to be ashamed to look herself in the face when she thinks of how she treated us. The town where he had built the whole machine, refinery by absorbed refinery, had chased his wife's coffin to its grave. When they inventory Seti's wardrobe, it told its own story of their lifestyle. The wife of the richest man on earth had owned almost nothing of value the costliest thing in her closet closet was a sealskin coat appraised at $150. By the mid-1910s, the Standard Oil empire was scattered into 34 separate entities. And the money Rockefeller had made had built a giving machine that was running on rails he no longer had to touch. The public hatred had peaked and began ever so slowly to soften. What was left was the man himself. Old, bald, under shifting rotation of wigs and lighter than he had been in decades, Rockefeller turned his sights towards the one thing money could not buy. He decided he wanted to live to be a hundred years old. Sometime around 1918, a small boy in Ormond Beach, Florida called out to the old man walking past. Hello, John D. The old man was not offended. He just thought it could have been done better. Would have been nicer, he remarked afterward, if he had said, hello, neighbor John. The town heard about this and began calling him Neighbor John. And he cherished it. For many he was the most hated man in America. Builder of the octopus, the original trust. He was the living mummy of Ida Tarbell's last installment. And a Florida resort town had decided he was to be their idolized old neighbor. They thought of him as somewhere between a retired mayor and an old Sunday school teacher. Nature. Part of it was simply time. The so called crimes Tarbell had documented belonged to the 1870s and 1880s, but 40 years later they'd faded into a half remembered era. And part of it was money. The country worshiped wealth in the Roaring Twenties in a way that it never before. And John Dee was its patron saint. And part of it was the company he now kept in the public market mind. Ask an American in 1925 what the name Rockefeller meant and the answer was likely to be a university or hookworm or the yellow fever as Standard Oil. The giving machine had done slow, quiet work on his reputation and it had taken a hold of the public. And part of it was the dimes. The dimes were his own idea. For years he had carried the shiny coins to give out as he moved around. Dimes for adults and nickels for children. Each one would be delivered with small sermon. Save it, spend it, work hard and be frugal and a fortune will come. He gave them to caddies on the golf course and to children on the street or to those who told him a good story. At dinner, when somebody spilled something at his table, he would pour dimes over the stain as a tip for whoever mopped it up. Then a public relations man, Jr. Hired saw the habit and let the newspapers and cameramen find it. By the end, Rockefeller had handed out somewhere between 20 and 30,000 dimes. People started to collect them, mounting them into amulets and framing them on walls. Old newsreels show him pressing dimes into palms, murmuring, bless you, bless you. In a thin, reedy voice like a man giving a communion. A century later, visitors to his grave still leave dimes on the stone. The famous soon came to meet him, too. Henry Ford turned up one day at Ormond beach without an appointment. Appointment. He was told that Mr. Rockefeller appeared on the public golf course at exactly 12 minutes past 12. He met him there. At that precise instant, Ford studied the leathery face and the alert eyes and said afterwards, as soon as I saw his face, I knew what had made the Standard Oil Company. The humorist Will Rogers came out for a golf game, too. When Rockefeller handed him his souvenir dimensions, Rogers turned it over and said, you know, after the company this little dime has been keeping, I'm afraid it's going to be a plum lonesome in my pocket. And when Rockefeller beat him on the golf course, Rogers said, I'm glad you beat me, John. The last time you were beaten, I noticed the price of gasoline went up 2 cents a gallon. That Rogers dared to make a joke and Rockefeller threw back his head and laughed at it. Said a lot. He had become a storybook character, a certified American original, and he knew it. He was, by his own happy account, living his life backward. He had been a monument of self control through more than 60 hard working years. But as he reached his 80s, he entered a kind of late, mischievous boyhood. He now owned 60 suits and several hundred ties and sometimes changed his clothes three times a day. He'd pick up hitchhikers to keep the conversation going on afternoon drives through the country. Pulling into a country filling station one day, low on gas, he leaned forward and told the woman at the pump, my dear woman, we are on our way to heaven and we'll get there sooner or later. She looked him up and down. You're maybe on your way to heaven, whoever you are, but I'll warn you, you'll never get there on five gallons of gas. It became one of his favorite stories. What Rockefeller wanted now more than money, money, which he had largely stopped being able to spend, was time. He had settled on a number 100 years old, and he treated that project the same way that he treated everything else, as a problem of inputs and waste. He started eating a tablespoon of olive oil a day. He golfed each day in the Open air. He'd have five rest periods a day on a fixed schedule. Schedule. His doctor had long prophesied that he would indeed reach a hundred, and the two of them shook hands on a pack to play a round of golf together on July 8, 1939, his 100th birthday. His doctor did not make it, dying in the 1920s. But his patient soldiered on. He cut ways till the very end, studying the fire one evening at Ormond beach, he asked the butler how long the sticks of fire firewood were.14 inches, the butler told him. Would they do just as well at 12? He asked. The butler supposed they would. 12 inches gave enough heat and light, but at less cost. And 12 inches it became. He was now in his 90s. As his strength finally ebbed, he negotiated with it. He cut his golf game from six holes a day to four, then to two. Then, after a bad cold in 1932, finally, he gave it up for good. He took off the silver wigs he'd been wearing daily for decades and never put them on again. He now mounted a stationary bicycle in his room to keep his muscles in his legs and pedaled slowly. He was a little man now under 90 pounds, who had decided he was not done when he turned 96. His insurance company, honoring an old policy, had to pay him $5 million by the actual tables of the day. Day one out of a hundred thousand people lived as long as he had. He did not reach 100. He missed it by a little over two years. On May 22, 1937, Rockefeller ran through his usual comedy routine with Ms. Evans, his housekeeper. She fished for a compliment. Mr. Rockefeller, you haven't said anything about how I look. He made a small bow from his chair. Ms. Evans, that's because I'm never able to do this subject justice. That same day, he paid off the mortgage on the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church in Cleveland, the church whose congregation had approved of his very first wig. Before the day was over, he had had a heart attack, and soon after, he slipped into a coma and died in his sleep. Just six weeks short of his 98th birthday, his body went by private rail car to Cleveland and was lowered into the ground between the two Baptist women who had believed in him without reservation his whole life, his mother, Eliza, and his wife, Seti. So what to make of this man? Let's start with the math. Since he would have, by the time he and his son were done, his fortune had been very largely given away. He donated more than half a billion dollars in his own lifetime. Juniors spending the inheritance moved more than a billion more. They funded a university, a medical institute that would help give the world vaccines, the campaigns that broke hookworm and yellow fever, schools of public health on three continents. A great deal of human suffering ended because he had decided that hoarding money was a sin and had built a machine to get rid of it. And the machine that made money in the first place had run on rebates and spies and burned ledgers and the quiet ruin of men who had trusted his cash over stock. Both of those things are true at the same time time Tarbol got that one directionally right. And his own papers, open long after everyone involved was dead, showed it ran deeper than she had ever proved. He went to his grave certain that critics were sore losers and that God was keeping the only books that mattered. And yet history, in the end, has been kinder to the company than Tarbell was. Standard Oil rose out of an industry that was pure chaos, a frenzy of booms and busts and reckless overbuilding that ruined nearly everyone who touched it. Touched it and Rockefeller forced order onto it. He drove the price of kerosene down so far and so steadily that ordinary families could afford to light their homes. For the first time. He brought science into the trade. A test laboratory in every refinery and built the pipelines and tank cars and worldwide distribution that became the template for the modern corporation. Even the breakup made the point in its own backhanded way. The pieces turned out to be worth so much more apart than together that his own grandson, writing an economics thesis years later, sided with the court while still crediting Standard Oil for bringing order to the industry. He had kept his own books from the start. Ledger A, the little volume where the boy clerk recorded his first wages and his first gifts in the same careful hand, telling the same story. Glory all his life, the getting and the giving were one act, two columns and a single account, both of them done for the glory of God and the good of man. And he believed that completely. The country never did settle the question. It went on doing with John D. Rockefeller what it had always done, lionizing him when it admired wealth and vandalizing him when it didn't. He outlasted every. Every verdict. He was the most hated man in America and he was never John pressing dimes into the hands of children. And the strangest part is that he had not changed all that much. The country had. I want to talk about some of my reflections from all the research that the team and I have done over the past few months into John D. Rockefeller and I just wanted to mention some of the things that really stood out to me. One of the things that I noted really early on was Flagler had a way of putting this, and he said, a friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship. And that was kind of their partnership in a nutshell. And I think there's a lot of truth into that. As somebody who deals with a lot of friends in business, another thing that stood out for me was the 1857 with the sharp Depression hit the country, and it nearly took out Hewitt's firm with it. The doors sort of stayed open, but as Rockefeller later put it, they were bankrupt. And what stood out to me there was Hewitt was not focused at all on the business at the time. He was carrying on too many things at once. He was giving more time and attention to land deals and lawsuits than to the commission business that was supposed to be funding it all. And I think that was a lesson that John Dee, like, really learned. And it stuck with him for the rest of his life. Life, I think. Another thing that is massively underappreciated in the story of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil is the first site that they had in Cleveland, for the refinery was strategically chosen, and it was along a railroad route and a water route. And I suspect that John Dee had gotten this from the days of working for Hewitt and seeing how shippers were beholden to one method of transportation. If you could only ship by water, you could only ship when the lake wasn't frozen. If you could only ship by rail, the railroad dictated your rates. But when you could play them off one another, you actually got much lower rates. The other thing that is really notable about this story and a lot of success stories is how the strong feed during depressions. From the start, Rockefeller wanted their financial position to ride out the storms and take advantage of the ups and downs. He wanted to control his own circumstances and never be controlled by circumstances. And I suspect this was partly learned through the lessons of his father, when his father would loan him money and then call that loan suddenly unannounced. And at one point, Big Bill had lent Hewitt some money, and he showed up unannounced and demanded the loan be repaid. And this is when they're nearly bankrupt. And this Joe John crazy, but he never said anything about it. I also think it's worth noting that I think there's a lot of resentment between John Dee and his father, but I think that's part of what fueled him into being John D. Rockefeller. Like the person that we know, I have a much better view of him than history, than sort of Ida Tarbell did. And while I think a lot of the things he did are very shady by today's standards, at the time, I think that he was just doing what he could do and what he was allowed to do. Another thing that stands out to me is sort of his silence around things. And Biggie said it in 10 crack command, he said never to let them know your next move. And so after absorbing competitors, I found it super fascinating that they would keep their name on the door, the exact same sign, the same letterhead. They would basically, from all outside appearances, nobody would know who owned the company. Not only do I think that was a key to how quickly and fast they rolled everything up, but it probably enabled them to keep going a lot longer than they otherwise would have because it took so long to figure out what was going on. And here's another thing that I was sort of thinking about as I was doing this. Rockefeller was raising his kids with money, but he insulated them from the world. And I remember at dinner one night asking Charlie Munger about this and he said, you basically have to live the life that you want your kids to live. And so if you want your kids to grow up with a middle class life, you can't live in a mansion and then force a middle class life on them. You can't be chauffeured to work while you're telling your kid to go work at my kids McDonald's. That will just cause resentment. But what you can do is if you want them to live a middle class life, you can live a middle class life. And it was clear that SETI was living, you know, not. She didn't have a lot of luxuries in her life. It's clear that they kept all that from the kids. And if you look at Warren Buffett, they did a lot of the same things. And part of that is they just had no desire for it. And I think a lot of people, when they think of raising kids with money, these are some of the important lessons around it too. Insulated is probably bad. John D. Only had one friend as a kid. But not letting anything from the outside world, protecting them, sheltering them, probably doesn't do them a whole lot of good either. Another thing that stands out for me is sort of critics really miss the fact that the products got better, safer and cheaper. And they might not like the mechanism by how that happened, but everybody benefited from it. Everybody in the world has benefited from Rockefeller, from his medical research from his philanthropy. It's insane. I bet you 98%, 99% of people listening to this have benefited from Standard Oil and his philanthropy. But I want to end with something that I think is really important and understated. And it was SETI's impact on Rockefeller. He said it best. He said her judgment was always better than mine. Without her keen advice, I would be a poor man. I don't think it's really widely known just how much of an influence she was on him. She was going over the books in the original days. She was the steady hand at home that led him him do all the work stuff. She was the force in his life that not only was the sounding board for judgment, he was the one person he trusted completely. Thank you for listening and learning with me. I hope you loved this episode as much as I did.