God’s Gold

 

PART TWO BUSSINESS AND RELIGION

CHAPTER I. NEW CONNECTICUT

THE ROCKEFELLER caravan did not stop at Cleveland. It moved on to a small village a little to the southwest called Strongville. There Bill Rockefeller established his family in a good house—the best it had yet lived in. Apparently Big Bill was doing fairly well, though he was certainly not a man of means. He was lavish enough with his money when he had it, but like all knights of the grip there were seasons when he had to pinch a little. He still spent most of his time away from home and he kept pretty quiet about what he did, save that he sold medicines.

II

JOHN did not remain long in Strongville. He was old enough now for high school and his father arranged for him to live in Cleveland and become a pupil at the Central High.

In 1854 this youth, then fourteen years of age, but well able to take care of himself and with a tidy sum saved over many years, bade good-by to his mother and made his first entry into the great world alone.

Cleveland at this time was a sprawling little town huddled around the flats on the Cuyahoga River running out to Lake Erie. The first railroad had entered Cleveland just two years before when the first train on the Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati Railroad, bearing the governor and almost the entire legislature, made its inaugural run amid a general holiday. The population had now grown beyond 17,000. A Board of Trade was busy pushing the name of the town far and wide. The first iron ore destined to add so much to the city’s wealth was brought in that year. There was already a medical school and two hospitals. The Lake fleet was becoming famous and prosperous. The stagecoaches were busy bringing in new settlers, visitors, and traveling men. Little Cleveland was getting to be known for its manufactures. But as yet it depended chiefly on two industries—the receipt of produce from the many small farms all around and its shipment to the East and the handling of the stream of travelers which flowed incessantly from all parts of the Northeast, converged on Cleveland and then moved West. Many stopped. Ohio was filled with former newcomers from Connecticut and eastern and southern New York. That is why it was called New Connecticut and the American New England Association in Cleveland was as important and active as the Iowa Association in Los Angeles today.

Young John Rockefeller took a room in a boarding house in Erie Street and began at once attendance at the Central High School.

III

HE WAS not there long before he made two acquaintances who were to play important parts in his life. One of these was a round, hardy boy named Mark Hanna. Rockefeller had come almost directly from the Owego Academy where he was a fellow student of Tom Platt to the Central High School of Cleveland where he found himself a class below Mark Hanna. One of these would become the boss of New York State, the other the boss of Ohio and both occupy commanding positions of leadership in the nation at a time when Rockefeller was to find himself in frequent collision not only with the national government but with the governments of New York and Ohio.

Another friendship even more important than these was established at this time. There was an old gardener living in Cleveland at this time named Alexander Sked, known for years as Deacon Sked. Sked was a deacon in the newly formed Erie Street Baptist Church Chapel at the corner of Erie and Ohio streets, not far from where Rockefeller lived. The church itself, destined to fame because of Rockefeller’s membership in it and known later as the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, had been set up only about three years before with Rev. J. Hyatt Smith as pastor. Rockefeller met Sked and the old deacon brought him into the church. He was baptized in 1854 and immediately became a regular and faithful attendant at Sunday School. The church was just beginning to flourish in a small way. It had a library and three hundred students in the Sunday School. And it was in this Sunday School rather than at the Central High that Rockefeller was to make most of his friends.

IV

ONE FRIEND he was to find at the High School in the class preceding his. This was Laura Celestia Spelman. She was the daughter of a gentleman of some means and of some importance in Cleveland at the time. Though the same age as himself she was yet a full year more advanced. There were some differences between them. She was a good student. He was an indifferent one, though there is no doubt about his earnest attention to his studies. She was interested in books and music. He was not. She was an Episcopalian and went to the fashionable church of the city. He worshiped in the humble little chapel of one of the poorest churches. He lived in a cheap boarding house on Erie Street and was a simple, unpolished, grave, and a little awkward country boy, whose clothes and manner marked him as such. She lived in a fine house and counted her friends among the best people in Cleveland. Some of the old students have said they were friends. Others insist they were merely acquaintances and that the friendship which ripened into their marriage began later. At least one very intimate friend of Laura Spelman was very much astonished in later years when she heared the two were engaged.

In Central High School Rockefeller was known as a serious boy who had no girl friends and went in very little for fun. He was known as a plodding student in mathematics but in nothing else. There are three brief essays on Education, Freedom, and St. Patrick still extant written by him as exercises at this time which reveal that composed, orderly, deliberate habit of thought which shone out in his very few statements and letters in after years. Rockefeller has always possessed the faculty for expressing himself with great clearness and accuracy and with a certain quaint, homely, yet rounded and formal conciseness and this method of mind is already apparent in these essays which are marked by an intelligent simplicity a little unusual in so young a person.

At school all the students were required to recite—that ancient Friday afternoon practice of all the old schoolhouses. John’s usual contribution when called upon was a lugubrious piece which began “I’m pleased although I’m sad.” The line fitted him well and many of the pupils, particularly the girls, quick to spot the weakness in another’s armor, used to speak of him as Old Pleased-Although-I’m Sad.

CHAPTER II. TWO MEDICINE MEN

IN STRONGVILLE, as everywhere, the neighbors asked each other what Bill Rockefeller did for a living. Then one day Uncle Joe Webster, one of them, went on a trip and his journey brought him at evening into the village of Richfield, Summit County, Ohio. Inside the hotel and on the wall his eye was fixed by a small sign reading: “Dr. William A. Rockefeller, the Celebrated Cancer Specialist, Here for One Day Only. All cases of Cancer Cured unless too far gone and then they can be greatly benefited.”

Could this be Big Bill Rockefeller from Strongville? Uncle Webster did not have to wait long. For a little later a crowd gathered outside the hotel around the buggy of a big man in a long black coat and with a big dark red beard. Going outside Webster found Bill Rockefeller beginning to talk—his high pitch, as it was called then and still is. So this is what Bill Rockefeller did for a living. He was a pitch man. And he called himself Dr. Rockefeller! Uncle Joe called him Doc. And thereafter he was called Doc Rockefeller. Apparently he was doing well too, for he charged twenty-five dollars for a cancer treatment, though he sold his medicine in bottles for a smaller sum.

Here doubtless was the explanation of his move to Strongville. As the immigrant wagons passed through Cleveland and then continued the long journey over the plains Westward their road lay directly past Strongville. Here was a rich territory for the medicine man. Traveling in primitive ways, ailments were plentiful and the travelers always had some funds with which to buy remedies. And so Doc Rockefeller must have found it profitable to keep close to that incessant stream of pioneers as they headed for the new country. His attention was probably called to Strongville by the presence there of the Humistan family—distant relatives.

Webster talked with him after his show that night and the Doctor grew expansive about his operations. He said he had been traveling in ever-widening circles and had carried his doctoring into Iowa. He was spending more and more time in that state. He told Webster how he was buying up new land there. And he boasted of the devious ways in which he was getting it. He loaned money to farmers at twelve per cent. But he tried to lend farmers who couldn’t pay so he could foreclose on them and take the farms. This may be taken with a grain of salt. The good Doctor was a boastful man and he loved to tell tales about his own shrewdness. Living by his wits, in daily contact with skeptical crowds on whose minds he had to play with his old-fashioned, high-flown “med” oratory, it was natural he should come to put smartness among the cardinal virtues.

The case of Bill Rockefeller is not dismissed by calling him a quack. That word has an unpleasant connotation for us today. There was nothing so unholy about selling medicines in those days nor in peddling them. This was in the day before medical schools began grinding out doctors. There was not a doctor in every neighborhood. Moreover people did not have the fullest faith in the Doctor. There was a great fondness for nostrums. Home remedies were highly regarded and old Indian herb concoctions were looked upon with great favor. A man going about the country peddling medicines would not have been so lightly and unfavorably considered as now. It is probable that the Rockefellers kept the matter quiet because Bill had added to the sale of medicine the trade-stimulating methods of the high-pitch med man.

Of course Uncle Joe Webster carried the news back to Strongville. And after that the elder Rockefeller’s calling ceased to be a mystery.

II

BUT THERE was another medicine man abroad in those days. Young John D. Rockefeller in Cleveland is on his way home from school. He must pass the Public Square not far from where the Van Sweringen’s amazing terminal tower rises today. At one well-traveled spot a crowd is gathered around a gaudy red and gold chariot from which a man with a large voice is dilating upon the magical curative powers of a medicine which he sells in half-pint bottles. He passes out little circulars to those who do not buy. The bottles contain a “marvelous oil brought up from many hundreds of feet under the rocks. It can banish almost every form of disease. Even blind persons have been made to see by it.” On the circulars there is a bit of verse:

“The healthful balm from Nature’s secret spring,
The bloom of health and life to man will bring;
As from her depths the magic liquid flows
To calm our sufferings and assuage our woes.”

The passing youth may have felt a boy’s interest in a free show, but he had no thought of what things he himself was to do with the magic liquid in those bottles, for it was petroleum. The chariot was advertising Kier’s American Oil. This sovereign remedy for almost everything was put up by a man named Samuel Kier. Kier occupies a place of first importance in the history of petroleum. At the time he was almost the only man who was making a commercial use of petroleum, which he put up in half-pint bottles and sold as a medicine “celebrated for its curative powers,” “a natural remedy,” “procured from a well in Allegheny County Four Hundred Feet below the Earth’s Surface. Put up and sold by Samuel Kier, 363 Liberty Street, Pittsburgh, Pa.”

There was nothing new about petroleum in America. It was known as petroleum, fossil oil, rock oil, and Seneca oil. The last name came from the fact that it was supposed to have originated on the lands belonging to the Seneca Indians. As early as 1627 the French missionary, Joseph Delarock Daillon, found “a good kind of oil which the Indians called Antonontons,” drawn doubtless from Cuba, New York, the site of the first-known oil spring in America.

At first the oil was found floating on the surface of the creeks in New York and Pennsylvania. A man named Ruffner was boring one day in 1806 for salt in Virginia, near the Great Kanawha River, a short distance from what is now Charleston, West Virginia. The Ruffners bored several salt wells successfully but nearly all of them yielded a certain amount of petroleum, some, it is said, as much as 25 barrels a day. This became a common nuisance of salt wells. Oil would sometimes come up with the brine and if it continued or the oil was too abundant the salt well had to be abandoned. The salt men cursed the oil.

FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION OF CIRCULAR ISSUED BY SAMUEL M. KIER IN 1850, WHO SOLD PETROLEUM IN HALF-PINT BOTTLES AS A MEDICINE, FOR 50 CENTS A BOTTLE.

Samuel Kier’s father, Thomas Kier, was a druggist in Pittsburgh. He was a man of substance. President Buchanan was at one time his partner in a boat line on the old Pennsylvania Canal from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. Thomas Kier and his two sons, Samuel and James, looking for a new enterprise, purchased a piece of land near Tarentum, Pennsylvania, in 1847 and put down some salt wells. One of the wells was bored by the spring-pole process. And from this well poured large quantities of oil mixed with the salt. Thomas Kier could use a little in his drug store but most of it was utter waste. About 1849 Samuel Kier conceived the idea of capitalizing the Indians’ faith in the oil and putting it up in bottles as an ointment. This Kier was an extraordinary man whose services to the oil industry have been a little obscured. He had energy, dash, imagination. He evinced at once a robust and lively faith in advertising. He got drug stores to display his bottles and he provided them with all sorts of literature and novelties. Among them was a little hand-bill in the form of a $400 bank note on which was printed some facts about his oil. He proclaimed his discovery as heralding a “new era in medicine.” He printed countless testimonials. He fitted out several gilded chariots which traveled all over the country, holding street corner meetings, selling half-pint bottles of oil and distributing hand-bills. It was Kier’s chariot which young John D. Rockefeller heedlessly passed on the Public Square in Cleveland.

CHAPTER III. THE CHAIN COLLEGE

THE FAMILY plan was for John to go to college. This idea doubtless originated with his mother. But his father began to mutter about it on the score of expense. Doc Rockefeller felt that a man needed to be smart. In a world where one had to get along by his wits it was well to be shrewd. What could college do for you on this head?

John was now fifteen years old. In a sense he was a man, certainly in practical matters. He had seen and understood a little at least the strange situation which existed in his family, the mysterious comings and goings of his father. He was aware of the secretiveness about the Doctor’s business. In later life he said that he owed a great debt to his father. “He trained me in practical ways. He was engaged in different enterprises and he used to tell me about these things and he taught me the principles and methods of business.”

It is doubtful if Bill told his son of all his different enterprises. He was fond of boasting of his own smartness and how he bested people. The man had practically no moral code. He would descant on his own cunning performances for any one’s entertainment and it was undoubtedly due to his wife’s incessant caution that he did not talk more freely about his calling, about which he felt no sense of shame. He was what was later called a “slicker” and he was fond of doing what he could to be sure his sons would be “slickers” like himself. “I cheat my boys every chance I get,” he told Uncle Joe Webster. “I want to make ’em sharp. I trade with the boys and skin ’em and I just beat ’em every time I can. I want to make ’em sharp.”

Young John, however, had his own ideas about the matter of going to college, though he looked upon it chiefly as a means toward the practical end of getting along. His failure to go disappointed him a little. More than fifty years later he said:

“I think a college education is a splendid thing. I hadn’t the advantage of a college education; but I had a good mother and an excellent father and I like to feel that whatever I may have lost through failure to secure a college education I made up in my home training. . . . The home training gives him [the young man] something he cannot get in college.”

This singular statement affords some peep into Rockefeller’s idea of education. His mother’s precepts in religion and her discipline and his father’s teaching in business made up to him what he lost in college. What college can do for you is to train you in the practical problems of business. If there is any doubt about his meaning it is found in the following sentence used in his autobiography: “Better than a college education is the training that he gets in the technical schools that have sprung up all over the country.”

But at this time college seemed to him to be the place where he would get that training which would enable him to get along in the world. That very year he had written down his views on the subject in his essay on Education at Central High School:

“When we look around us and see the continual progress education is making, and also the great changes which have been constantly taking place since it began to rise, we cannot but think every one ought to endeavor to improve the great opportunities which are now offered them.

“Had Isaac Newton been an unlearned man, on seeing the apple fall to the ground, would he not rather have eaten it than inquired why it fell?”

But old Bill Rockefeller objected to his son going to college. It cost too much. Something in this sober youth recoiled from pressing the matter. “The mere thought,” he said later in a singular explanation, “of support by my father gave me a cold chill—it gives me one now to think of it.” Instead he went to B. S. Folsom’s Commercial College which was merged with Bryant and Stratton’s Business College. It has been already observed that there is little in our complex business structure today the germ of which cannot be found in an earlier era. One observes with interest then that this prophet of the modern era in business should have, long before the Civil War, gone to a college which, in the old Cleveland Leader, proudly proclaimed that it was a “Chain College,” with branches in seven cities. The school was in the Rouse Block where Marshall’s Building now stands at Superior Avenue and the Public Square. Here the youth’s chief study was the one he continued to love all his life—bookkeeping. He graduated in 1855. In the Summer of that year this prematurely matured boy, armed with his business college certificate, the practical instructions of his father, the piety and discipline of his mother, and a settled resolve to get rich set out to find his first job.

II

FOR PERHAPS a month John went home for a brief vacation. But once again the home had shifted. Doc Rockefeller had moved his family to its fifth home, from Strongville to Parma, a small village somewhat closer to Cleveland. In August the boy returned to his Erie Street boarding house and launched his hunt for work.

They had been having hard times in the West. Conditions had really improved, but as is always the case the improvement goes far before people begin to realize it. It was a sweltering Summer. The business section of Cleveland was down in the flats along the Cuyahoga River where the hot, humid air was almost stifling. As he started, this boy had a plan. He passed all retail stores and small shops. He went only to banks, railroad offices, wholesale merchandising offices. He called only on the head men. The hot Summer wore on and he kept up his rounds from morning until night getting refusals everywhere. He broke the day by walking to his Erie Street room for dinner. Then he continued his search until the last place had closed. When he was discouraged the vision of his father arose. “I didn’t think of discouragement,” he told friends afterwards. “What I thought of was getting that job. I simply had to get work for father said if I could not find anything to do I might go back to the country.”

By the end of September he had visited every place in the small business section of Cleveland. But he decided to make one more try along the docks. He went to the office of Hewitt and Tuttle, produce commission merchants in Merwin Street. He saw Hewitt and told him he understood bookkeeping. The junior partner, Tuttle, acted as bookkeeper but needed help. Hewitt told him they thought they might give him a chance and to report back after dinner. Curiously he did not ask what the pay would be and Hewitt did not name it. It is possible they did not have a regular place open; that they yielded to a little persuasion; that he went to work very much on trial, for he was working for three full months before anything was said about money.

As he left the office all that Hewitt saw was the serious-faced boy as he walked out with an almost measured slow step. He walked to the corner, without a smile and with calm deliberateness as long as he might be in view of the Hewitt establishment. As he turned the corner he started skipping down the street without further restraint.

The calendar of the Rockefeller family is marked by certain festal days—days observed by the family with formal celebration—days when the flag is sent up to the top of the estate flag-pole. Of course, the first of these days is July 8th, the feast of John D.’s birth. Next in order is September 26th, 1855, the date of his first job. It may be questioned if there is any day quite so important as this one. As the years passed Rockefeller himself kindled a kind of religious and sentimental glamor about it. One day in 1905 a large delegation from the Chamber of Commerce of Cleveland called at the beautiful Forest Hill home of the millionaire John D. Rockefeller to welcome him on his return to Cleveland. In replying to the chairman’s speech Rockefeller said:

“This is a great day in our family. You have noticed the flag flying from the staff. The flag is in honor of a day away back that will always be remembered by me and my family.” It was the twenty-sixth day of September. One evening in 1908 he was driving over the new viaduct in Cleveland with a companion. Suddenly Rockefeller rose in the open carriage. “Look! Look!” he cried in a surge of emotion. “Look at that rectangular building! I commenced my career there at four dollars a week.”

III

IN THE afternoon on September 26th after dinner the newly hired clerk started out to work. The streets were hot with dust after a long dry spell, the thermometer stood at eighty-two and the warm mist, like spent steam, drifted up from the lake and the river. The boy hurried on, not heeding the heat. He gave not a glance as he passed the Cleveland Theatre to the alluring poster which announced that Miss Kimberly would appear that night in “Camille.” Nor did he give a thought to the poster in front of the Athenaeum which promised at that more popular playhouse “The Robber’s Wife and Woman’s Rights One Hundred Years Hence.” The stage had no lure for the pious Baptist youth, nor has it had since. When he reached the docks every one was excited over the gale of the night before. Captain Wilkins had come in a little way down from Hewitt’s with the steamer Queen City minus her rudder. There were ominous stories about the Baltimore, sunk in the storm that night. Her passengers had been brought in, some by Captain Wilkins, some in the Steamer Sun.

The new clerk was waiting at Hewitt and Tuttle’s when his employers got back from dinner. The building faced on Merwin Street, its rear gave on the river wharf. Merwin Street is still there, but the great river bridge passes over the spot where the building stood.

Young Rockefeller, in his job-hunting, had been hearing much of hard times. On the high desk of the office he saw a copy of the morning’s issue of the old Cleveland Leader. There he read the produce report of the day. It furnished an auspicious note for the beginning of this business career. He read:

“Compared with last year we are even now rich and getting richer. Business of all kinds is brisk j enterprise has received a healthy impetus all over the country. Gold is flowing in from California and but little is flowing out. With this state of things and with an immense surplus of produce to export at good prices how can we do otherwise than look the future in the face with a smiling countenance and be thankful for the rich blessings of the year.”

How indeed! That night before he went to bed he read from his Bible with more than his wonted devoutness. Surely God was in His heaven. He had begun His great experiment with this useful servant. The boy could not see then what vast plans God had for him. But he was sure then, as always he has been sure since, that the hand of God was in it. He put out his candle and turned to bed. He was weary with the excitement of the day. He muttered to himself. “Fine! Fine! Everything is coming on. John. But be careful now! Careful!” And thus he fell asleep.

IV

ALL OVER the country at this moment the cast of characters for the coming gaudy drama of American business was forming. Close by in Ohio was Mark Hanna, eighteen years old, a student in Western Reserve College. Andrew Carnegie, barely twenty, was getting thirty-five dollars a month as secretary to Tom Scott, then in the telegraph department of the Pennsylvania Road in Pittsburgh. Thomas Edison, a boy of eight, was getting his lessons in the village school of Port Huron, Mich. Two politicians who were to play a leading role in the drama, were in Ohio—William McKinley, just twelve years old, a student at Union Seminary in Poland, and John Sherman, whose law was to smite Rockefeller’s great trust, was a Whig Congressman at thirty-two from an Ohio district. John D. Archbold, a boy of six, was at school in Leesburg, Ohio.

Armour, the packer king, was working as a miner in California. Havemeyer was a clerk in a sugar house. Theodore N. Vail, ten years old, was in school at Morristown, New Jersey. The great railroad chieftains were struggling through various kinds of boyhoods. Jay Gould, just twenty-one, was making surveys, Collis P. Huntington was in the hardware business in Sacramento, George Pullman, twenty-four, was moving warehouses on the Erie Canal, E. H. Harriman was getting ready to go to Trinity School and James J. Hill, about Rockefeller’s age, was in school in Rock wood Academy. John Pierpont Morgan, a youth of eighteen, was at school in Germany. The land was filled with obscure boys who were soon to come crowding upon the stage in the hectic and disorderly comedy of America’s amazing industrial rise.

CHAPTER IV. A BOY WHOLESALER

ISAAC HEWITT was a prosperous man. The chief business of his firm was produce, but Hewitt himself was a large owner of real estate. He had a business block, a number of dwelling houses and some small warehouses and stores. Tuttle, the junior partner, worked for a salary of $2,000 a year and looked after the books. Young Rockefeller worked under him and gradually took over the handling of the books. Moreover the new clerk began to assume one small job after another, collecting rents, attending to repairs, dealing with plumbers, carpenters, making good bargains and scrutinizing the bills. A shipment of marble came from Vermont by railroad, canal boat, and lake boat. The way-bills were complicated. There seemed to be errors—but too small to bother Mr. Hewitt. But the young bookkeeper pointed them all out to Mr. Hewitt and also found some damage to the shipment. He set about adjusting them and succeeded in settling all in favor of the firm.

One day, while Rockefeller was in a neighboring office on business, the merchant glanced hastily at a newly presented bill and bade the clerk pay it. Rockefeller looked at him in astonishment.

“Do you pay your bills without going over every item?”

The old merchant laughed.

“In our office I look at every single item,” said Rockefeller, “and it must be right before our bills are paid.”

It is not to be wondered at that ere a year this tall, gangling, solemn youth already had a reputation for great reliability, prudence, and thrift in the little business world around the docks.

The winter came on. The boy still boarded at Erie Street with the same pious, talkative, Baptist landlady. And as yet nothing was said at Hewitt’s about his pay. Boys, in those good old days, frequently worked for many months or longer without pay “while learning the business,” their pious employers meantime gathering in their services for nothing. This boy’s money was scant. He lived on his own savings, scrupulously refraining from asking help from his father. But he did not bring up the subject of salary with his employers.

Meantime he did something which has always been treasured as one of the chief events of his life. He opened a bookkeeping account of his own. He bought a little book for ten cents and wrote across it “Ledger A.” He has preached a dozen sermons at Sunday School from Ledger A. Not all the money in the world could buy this little volume, he has many times declared. Carefully, religiously, every day he set down in this small ledger every penny paid out. This book is full of meaning for those who search for secrets in the minds and hearts of rich men. The first entry in Ledger A is a gift of ten cents to the “Missionary Cause.” One wonders if John D. Rockefeller’s dime gifts today are dictated by a sentimental reverence for this first ten-cent philanthropy. Very quickly follow other sums—ten cents to “Mr. Downe, our young minister,” slip rent (which means pew rent), one dollar. Then come the following in December:

Sabbath School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	.05
Present for Mr. Farrar (Superintendent) . . . . . . .	.25
Five Points Mission, N. Y. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	.12
Macedonian (religious paper). . . . . . . . . . . . . .	.10
Present to Teacher, Deacon Sked . . . . . . . . . .	.25

Here was a total of sixty-two cents in one month. In November, from the twenty-fifth, when he began the book, the entries totaled $1.20. In five weeks the donations equaled $1.82. This boy had as yet received no pay. It was a bitter winter and he did not feel he could buy a good overcoat for himself. When he went to work after New Year’s Day, Mr. Tuttle called him aside and handed him $50—his pay for fourteen weeks—$3.50 a week. It will be seen his actual earnings from November 25th to the end of the year turned out to be $17.50. Thus he had given more than a tithe of his earnings though they were not yet collected, though he says he had no thought of tithes.

But Mr. Tuttle, in addition to giving him $50, also told him that henceforward his salary would be $25 a month. And so his benevolence continued. January 16th he gave six cents to the missionary cause and ten cents to the poor of the parish—“all in one Sunday” as he later commented. February 3rd he gave ten cents to the foreign missions and ten cents to some charitable cause. March 3rd the foreign missions got another ten cents; ten cents went to the poor of the parish, a dollar for pew rent and before the week was out another ten cents to the missions. Later in the month he gave a dollar to the Young Men’s Christian Association.

In the four months from November 25th to the end of March he earned $67.50. Of this he gave $5.58 to various religious and charitable purposes. In the same month he spent $9.09 for clothing.

“I could not secure the most fashionable cut of clothing,” he told his Sunday School class later. “I remember I bought mine then from a cheap clothier. He sold me clothing cheap such as I could pay for and it was a great deal better than buying clothing I could not pay for.”

He could have gotten a good coat from Mr. Isaac Isaacs, who kept a good store and advertised coats for $4. We do not know what Rockefeller paid, but we know he indulged in one extravagance. He paid $2.50 for a pair of gloves. This item puzzled him in later years for he had always worn mittens. And yet it was blizzardy on those Cuyahoga flats. And bookkeeper’s fingers must be kept nimble.

This boy was only sixteen years old. He was not then the great oil ogre, with a country howling at his heels and angry ministers declaring that he gave his millions to ease a troubled conscience—that his religion was a cloak for his malefactions. There must have been something sincere about this religion. He was very young, intensely practical and embarked with a terrible earnestness upon the business of getting along in the world. Yet the record reveals that he gave almost a tenth of what he earned. Certainly it is rare for so young a boy to be concerned at all about systematic giving.

II

THE YEAR 1857 brought trouble to Cleveland and to all the country. It was the year of one of those panics which at intervals shake the nation. The town had grown rapidly. People poured in from New England and all the East. All around the Cuyahoga River the factories were making their appearance. Cleveland had twenty-one flour mills, twenty-seven clothing factories, seventeen boot and shoe plants, thirteen furniture factories, seventeen machine factories, fifty lumber mills. The factory age was upon the nation. But save in a few industries, they were still small affairs and each community had its collection of plants which had sprung up to take the place of the numerous little handcrafts and mills which the factories supplanted. Thus Cleveland had its own furniture and clothing and shoe factories and almost every other community the same thing.

The Rockefeller family, which had been in Parma for two years, once again shifted its headquarters to Cleveland. The elder Rockefeller was doing very much better now. He was older, wiser, and better schooled in the strange business he had adopted. He moved his family into a house at Number 33 Cedar Street, and the character of this house indicates the improved circumstances of the Rockefellers. It still stands and is in every respect a good house. In those days it must have been looked upon as a very good one with its twelve rooms, including a bathroom, which has the appearance of having been built into the house originally.

This year the name of Rockefeller’s father appears in the Cleveland directory and strangely enough his occupation is given as “Physician.” This designation is explained partly in the classified section of the directory where William Rockefeller’s name appears among the physicians. But after it in parentheses is inscribed the illuminating word “Botanic.” Big Bill was now openly a herb doctor. But he did not practice his herb medicine in Cleveland. He was still on the go, still known for his long absences and sudden re-appearances.

John D.’s name appears this year in the directory at 33 Cedar Street. He was still at Hewitt and Tuttle’s, rolling up a reputation for thrift and sagacity. William, Jr., was also at work; Frank was at school.

III

NEITHER as a boy nor man was Rockefeller a reader. At Hewitt and Tuttle’s however he found and read a book—“The Life and Letters of Amos Lawrence” by his son. Lawrence was the great founder of the New England textile industry, one of our first millionaires and perhaps our first millionaire philanthropist. The youthful bookkeeper liked that book. He read how the rich Lawrence wrote to his secretary to bring him several hundred dollars, admonishing him to have it in nice new crisp one and five and ten dollar bills, for, he observed, “though I cannot go out I will doubtless have some visits from my friends.” The sober-faced boy thought “how nice that was” and how, when he was rich, he would like to be able to give out nice crisp new bills. He remembered this book and this portion in after life and spoke of it.

Cleveland newspapers printed daily reports of produce prices and movements. A reporter visited Hewitt’s office daily for news. One day the reporter came in almost dragging behind him another. He introduced his shuffling, stuttering companion to Mr. Hewitt and announced he was to be the new man on that beat. His name was Charles Browne. After that young Rockefeller came to know Charles Browne. Later still the world came to know him under the name of Artemus Ward. And Rockefeller became a reader of Artemus Ward’s books and liked them.

IV

JOHN’S salary at Hewitt and Tuttle’s was $400 during 1856 and very little more in the following year. He was eighteen years old, but he had not been a boy for years. Tuttle had left the firm and this youth was doing all and more than Tuttle had done. He thought he was worth more than he was getting and told Mr. Hewitt so. Hewitt agreed his clerk should have more and offered him $700 a year. But John thought he ought to have $800. He said so. Hewitt replied he would consider the matter. The weeks went by and Hewitt, like an old-fashioned business man, put off the decision. He probably was not thinking about the subject at all. But John was. He was thinking about that and a good many other things besides.

A little way down the street, working for Otis and Company, was a young Englishman named Maurice B. Clark. Clark had left England ten years before and landed friendless and penniless in Boston amidst the Bunker Hill celebration. He had moved about a good deal—a farm hand in Massachusetts, chopping wood and teaming in Lorain County and then to Cleveland and a job with Hussy and Sinclair. Though well in his twenties he had gone to Folsom’s Business College and there doubtless had met Rockefeller. In 1857 he was with Otis and Company, produce merchants. He had saved $2,000 and he had been looking at the merchants in Merwin Street and River Street and had concluded he was as able as they to manage his own business. All he lacked was capital. He was twenty-eight years old and he went to eighteen-year-old John D. Rockefeller and proposed that they form a partnership and go into business for themselves. Clark’s proposition was that each one put up $2,000. The plan appealed to Rockefeller. But he had only $800, which he had saved over the course of many years, beginning with that little blue bowl back in Moravia. He could scrape together another $200. And so he went to his father and asked for a loan of $1,000.

The Doctor had often boasted that he would give each of his children $1,000 on coming of age.

“Yes,” said the expansive, bearded Botanic Physician. “I will let you have the thousand. As you know, John, when you are twenty-one you are to get $1,000. I will advance the $1,000 now and you can pay me interest on it until you are twenty-one when the debt will be wiped out.”

This piece of generosity pleased the son greatly. Then the doctor added with a sly smile: “But, John, the interest will be ten percent.”

On April 1, 1858, the firm of Clark and Rockefeller, Produce and Commission, opened its doors at 32 River Street. Another feast day in the Rockefeller saga had been established.

That night the young eighteen-year-old wholesale merchant went to his room to kneel and pray for guidance and success. His mind was aflame with the golden prospect which stretched out before him. He went to bed but could not sleep. He talked to himself about all this. In his Bible he had read the counsel of the Psalmist—“Commune with your own heart upon your bed and be still. Selah.” “Now a little success,” he murmured. “But soon you will fall down. Soon you will be overthrown. Because you have got a start you think you are quite a merchant. Look out! Look out or you will lose your head! Go steady”

V

THE NEW firm prospered from the start. But at the very outset the young partners realized they needed money. Times were hard and bills were seldom paid when due. Before many months the firm had reached a crisis. Rockefeller had met his first crisis by borrowing from his father. Now it was the young partner who had to take the lead. He went to Truman P. Handy, the firm’s banker. Handy was a fine old character—a grave, dignified gentleman of the old school, who had been watching this serious, methodical boy coming into the bank every day with the firm’s deposits. Without any shuffling Rockefeller asked the old banker for a loan of $2,000.

“All right, Mr. Rockefeller,” Handy replied, without hesitation. “Just give me your warehouse receipts. They’re good enough for me.”

The readiness with which the loan was made astonished the young merchant and taught him one of the great lessons of his life. He was to be, for many years, an inveterate borrower and Handy was destined to hand over many thousands to his young depositor. Rockefeller always remembered this with gratitude. Years afterwards he urged Handy to buy Standard Oil certificates. Handy didn’t have the money so Rockefeller loaned it to him.

Rockefeller didn’t limit himself to the finances. His whole soul was in every detail of the business. He went out of town on little trips to solicit business. He went to many places in Ohio and soon extended his operations to Indiana. He began to learn another lesson—that business conducted on a large scale can be operated more cheaply. So the firm began buying in carload lots, getting better prices and lower railroad rates.

One day the largest consignor of produce sent a big shipment to the firm. He followed it into the office and asked Clark to let him have an advance against the shipment before the bill of lading was received. Clark agreed to send it. When Rockefeller returned later he objected firmly. An angry argument arose between the partners. Clark was incensed at Rockefeller’s excessive caution. Rockefeller agreed to accept full responsibility and to go to the consignor and reason with him. But the consignor refused to reason. He stormed. But the quiet youth who addressed him did not storm. He talked quietly. The more unreasonable the other fellow, the more need he had to retain possession of his reasoning faculties. He explained that the request was unbusiness-like and he stuck to his guns. The advance was not made, but that consignor continued to do business with Clark and Rockefeller. Later the firm learned that an old country banker they had had occasion to ask for an accommodation had been watching the transaction and they concluded he had inspired it to make a test of them.

At the end of the first year the new firm had done a gross business of $450,000 with a net return of $4,400.

VI

THE NEED for money was a continuous thorn in the young merchant’s side. He borrowed everywhere. One source which he had to tap occasionally was his father. The loans were not large but they were essential. They were indefinite loans for no specified time. And they cost the son many a frown.

Down in River Street everything is in motion. Business is brisk, but money is tight. John is bending over his ledgers studying deeply their meaning. Suddenly he is aware of a huge bulk of a man standing in the doorway. He looks up to see his father. The Doctor’s face is solemn, his mouth set firmly over the thick bush of whiskers on his chin.

“John,” he says in almost sepulchral tones, “I’ve got to have that money.”

John tries to look unconcerned but a shadow sweeps over his face. He suppresses the stir of irritation which he feels, for he believes that his father is acting his gravity.

“Of course you shall have it,” he replies.

The demand comes at a most inopportune moment. But the next day when the Doctor calls, John hands him a roll of bills. The Doctor puts them in his wallet and goes out. John follows his father’s figure with a scowl. The old man walks solemnly to the corner, turns it and then stops to have a bit of a laugh.

“That’s the way to make him sharp,” he snickers. “That’s the way to make him hustle.” Then he adds with a touch of pride, “And he got it too.”

That pleased the old man—that his shrewd, up and coming young son John could go out and get the money.

VII

IT WAS 1859. The air was full of ugly talk. Another presidential election was coming on. There was plenty of violence in the minds of the people. There was even talk of war. There were arguments of great violence and ill-feeling along River Street. Business was being forever interrupted with discussions of the fugitive slave law. Cleveland, the largest city on the Lakes, was the opening of the underground railroad through which runaway slaves were hustled into Canada. The Lake piers where they were smuggled aboard the boats were just a few blocks from Rockefeller’s place of business. All through the Summer of 1859 Cleveland was a kind of Mecca for abolitionist pilgrims and the county jail was the temple. There some thirty-seven residents of Oberlin and Wellington—all prominent citizens—were walled up awaiting trial. John Price, an escaped slave from Kentucky, had made his way to Oberlin. The college town was full of hot-blooded youths who harbored many runaways from Kentucky. Price was decoyed from Oberlin by a slave catcher from Kentucky and taken to Wellington. The whole town of Oberlin—professors, students, residents—rose en masse in pursuit. At Wellington they battered down the doors of the hotel, captured Price, rushed him to Cleveland and shipped him across Lake Erie. All of the leaders were indicted and, refusing to give bail, preferring the role of martyrs, were awaiting trial in the Cleveland jail. A great convention was held in Cleveland, outside the jail walls. Speakers talked from a raised platform so that the martyrs inside the walls might be a part of the meeting. The aroused people poured into Cleveland by trainload and wagon-load. Business in River Street was at a stand-still. Every one had gone to the great meeting outside the county jail. But Rockefeller remained at his work. He had one interest—his business. He had a secondary interest—his church. Outside of these he wasted no time. He joined no societies. He was a member of no clubs. He played no games. He went to no plays. He attended no concerts or lectures. All this fury in River Street irked him. His path lay between the house in Cedar Street, the office in River Street and the Sunday School in Erie Street. Occasional forays into the country on business were his only departure from this triangle.

A little later that year Cleveland was first shocked and then thrilled by the news that a certain John Brown had captured the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Then came the news of the hanging of John Brown. Buildings were hung with white paper bordered with black mourning strips. Bells were tolled. Business houses were closed the day old John Brown hanged. But the firm of Clark and Rockefeller went about its affairs and there twenty-year-old John D. Rockefeller, produce merchant, was industriously minding his own business.

VIII

THE ROCKEFELLER family was moving forward now. The good Doctor had attained a kind of prosperity. John was perhaps the most prosperous young man in business. William Rockefeller, Jr., had a good job and Frank was working now. There was an excellent revenue flowing into the family. Mrs. Rockefeller began to enjoy a kind of ease on the score of money. But there were still the Doctor’s long and uncertain absences. There was, too, the Doctor’s talk. He had a loose kind of ethics and he liked to tell of the smart things he had done, the people he had fooled, and the slick tricks he had played. Mrs. Rockefeller was now a regular and faithful attendant of the Baptist Church and the bad example of the adventurous and mysterious wanderer who was her husband troubled her deeply. Then there was not too much sweetness in the relations of the boys, or at least between the calm, superior John and the rather wild and passionate and undisciplined Frank.

The house in Cedar Street was considered no longer adequate for the rising young merchant. So the family built a new house in Cheshire Street. Whether this house was financed by young John or old Bill is not possible to say. Certainly the construction was superintended by the son entirely. He said in later years his father had always advised him to build a house and so he had put up this one—which leads one to suppose it was his house. The building still stands in Cheshire Street near Prospect—a substantial, large, strongly built home beyond doubt such as would be occupied only by people in very good circumstances.

A story has been told that a little before this time John became a trustee of the Erie Street Baptist Church, though his name does not appear in any of the old directories among the trustees at this time. It is certain, however, that he saved the institution from ruin. It was attended almost wholly by a very humble group of Christians. A mortgage of $2,000 was long past due and foreclosure was threatened. One day the pastor preached in a tone of great disconsolation and wound up with the distressing announcement that the little church was about to be sold over their heads. The message fell upon every soul there as a kind of doom. But upon one soul it produced a very different result. That was the very practical soul of young John D. Rockefeller. To him, nineteen years old then, perhaps more than to any other member of the congregation, that little building had been a true spiritual refuge. More than any other he found there his chief distraction from the world, the flesh, and River Street. The thought of its loss appalled him.

When the service was ended and the congregation was filing out the members found young Rockefeller at the door. He stopped the flow of the unhappy worshipers. He demanded from each man a pledge for some part of that $2,000. He buttonholed, expostulated, with every one. When all had left he felt reasonably sure of averting the disaster. Then he called at the homes of every member until he had gotten a pledge from each. In a few months he had collected the entire $2,000 and paid off the debt. For this, it is said, he was made a trustee of the church.

IX

THUS this youth of twenty moved toward mature manhood, already matured far beyond his years. It was dawning on everybody that this young man was well able to take care of himself, that he had a cool head on his shoulders. That was it—his head was cool. Other men got angry, stormed, argued. He remained cool and smiled. He was a good-looking young man, with a calm, serious, dignified air. The eyes were small and a little close together. But they were unwavering and brilliant and the whole face had the open, frank, pleasant appearance we are accustomed to see in young ministers. The forehead was high and the face long, but with wide, rolling jaws, broad chin, and full mouth. Everywhere, in his home, in his store, things had a way of being as he wished them. Thus he rose to be looked upon already as one of the most successful merchants of the town, deepening his hold upon his religious membership at the Baptist Church, the family growing in prosperity and respectability save for the old cancer doctor who came and went mysteriously, while the country itself moved with the stride of Fate toward war. But young Rockefeller paid no heed to all the strange, mighty forces which were moving around him.

Meantime, in another part of the country, Fate was preparing an event which was to have a profound influence upon the fortunes of the whole world but chiefly upon the fortunes of the young produce merchant in River Street.