Business & Finance: Last Titan

On July 8, John Davison Rockefeller would have been 98. The late Marcus Alonzo Hanna, who knew him well and served him faithfully, once said of Mr. Rockefeller: “Sane in every respect save one—he is money mad.” In the past few years, however, Mr. Rockefeller’s dominant ambition was to live to be 100. With the same serene confidence in his destiny that once made him master of the nation’s oil industry and the world’s first billionaire, he believed he would achieve his goal. But last week, as it must to all men, Death came at the low hour of 4:05 a. m. to John Davison Rockefeller at “The Casements” his winter home in Ormond Beach, Fla.*

Two days before his death, he complained of feeling tired but his physician, Dr. H. L. Merryday, did not consider him in danger. Late Saturday night he slipped into a coma, never recovered. His last words were: “Raise me up a little bit.” None of the Rockefeller family was with him. John D. Jr., his only son, was at Pocantico Hills near Tarrytown, N. Y. Mrs. Alta Rockefeller Prentice, his only living daughter, was at her estate at Williamstown, Mass. At the bedside in the air-conditioned chamber were Mrs. Fannie Evans, the cousin who acted as his hostesshousekeeper; his longtime valet-attendant, John H. Yordi, and his night nurse, Roy C. Sly. “His passing was peaceful,” said Dr. Merryday. “He had no final message. Apparently he didn’t realize he was dying.” Death was attributed to sclerotic myocarditis (hardening of the heart muscles).

As word spread throughout Ormond Beach, solemn groups gathered at the gates of the walled estate. Similar scenes occurred at his Lakewood, N. J. estate, where Mr. Rockefeller lately spent his summers, and at Pocantico Hills, where Mr. Rockefeller had bought up whole villages to create his 3,500 acre dukedom, with its 50 mi. of roads, vast landscaping, staff of hundreds, private police force. Familiar to Mr. Rockefeller’s neighbors, north and south, was his greeting: “Good day and God bless you.” Many prized one of the 20,000 dimes he had bestowed with the admonition “Save!”

From stations high & low last week eulogies poured forth for the little old man who made more money than any man has ever made in a lifetime. Yet 30 years ago in the days of Roosevelt I, John Davison Rockefeller was frequently and publicly proclaimed as the “mosthated man” in the U. S. The $29,000,000 fine imposed on Standard Oil in 1907 by Kenesaw Mountain Landis was merely a reflection of the public’s temper. Mr. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust were not viewed with the cynical distrust which Big Business enjoys in the days of Roosevelt II. At that time the public was roused to a white fury by the ruthless tactics of a predatory monopoly. What that age failed to see was that John D. Rockefeller had merely exploited an historical imperative. Standard Oil was the prototype of all modern large-scale industrial enterprises. In that very real sense John D. Rockefeller was the father of Big Business. He happened to have done it in oil. Had he been younger and living in Pittsburgh instead of Cleveland it might have been steel, or in Chicago it might have been meat, for he had what has been called “the finest organizing mind since Napoleon.”

Born in Richford in upState New York in 1839, John Rockefeller moved to Cleveland with his parents in 1853. His father, a restless, rollicking, lovable quack with dubious sources of income, including horse trading and hawking a cancer cure, was often absent from home for weeks at a time, used to cheat his sons to teach them sharpness. Where or when the father died is a secret which the Rockefellers have never divulged. The pious mother, Eliza Davison Rockefeller, brought up the moral balance.

Son John went to work as a bookkeeper in a Cleveland commission house at 16 after high school and a short turn in a commercial college. Four years later with $1,000 he had saved and another $1,000 given him by his father, he struck out for himself, forming his own commission house with a partner named Maurice B. Clark. That summer the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa., but young Rockefeller was still engrossed in produce. Thanks largely to his prodigious capacity for work, his infinite capacity for detail, the firm did a $450,000 business the first year. Like most of the men who were to rule the U. S. in the coming years of industrialization, young Rockefeller was far too busy to go to war in 1861. And out of the commission house profits the partners, a year later, were able to invest in one of the oil refineries then mushrooming in Cleveland. Sensing apparently from the very beginning the colossal future of oil, Rockefeller soon turned from food to fuel. Within seven years he controlled four-fifths of all the refineries in Cleveland, then the oil capital of the U. S. He was just 33.

Between 1865, the year after he married Laura Spelman, a Cleveland schoolteacher, and 1872, he evolved and put into prompt practice the basic principle on which Standard Oil achieved its power— buy out competitors at pistol point or destroy them if they refuse to sell. Monopoly of oil was his objective almost from the start. The pistol he used was the secret rebate, the notorious device by which a shipper got a refund on his railroad freight, enabling him to undersell competitors. Rockefeller carried this one step further by bludgeoning the railroads into giving him not only a rebate on his own shipments but also a cash kickback from the freight paid by competitors. Thus if the rate was, say $2 per bbl. from Cleveland to New York, Standard Oil would not only get back 50¢ in rebate, it would also get 5¢ for each barrel shipped by competitors. All this was wrathfully exposed time & again but after each outburst of public indignation, Rockefeller quietly worked out new and more devious arrangements with the railroads, tumbling more competitors into his lap.

The same persistence was demonstrated in price cuttings. In the end, of course, Standard Oil became such a stench in the public’s nostrils that it was ordered dissolved into its 34 component parts in 1911, about 15 years after Mr. Rockefeller retired from active direction at 57, his health broken, his nerves shattered, his skull entirely bald. Even if Standard Oil had not felt the ax of the trustbusters, the near-monopoly would probably have been curbed in time by the independent oil companies, then riding to power on the automobile. For the vast fortune with which Mr. Rockefeller retired was founded on kerosene. He lived on to see that fortune effortlessly multiplied by gasoline. In his day kerosene for household lamps was a utility, and public resentment of its monopoly closely paralleled the later hatred of the Power Trust. But Mr. Rockefeller was never accused of writing up assets or watering stock. When the “splinters” of old Standard Oil filtered into the stockmarket after the Trust’s dissolution, they were whooped skyward on the sudden realization that the value of the operating properties had been understated by hundreds of millions. As an efficient, consistent money-making machine, the Standard Oil organization has never had a peer.

Predecessor and unconscious mentor of most of the 19th-Century industrial titans, Mr. Rockefeller outlived them all. Hill. Harriman, Morgan, Frick, Carnegie carved their careers in the middle Rockefeller years. Mr. Rockefeller never heard of Henry Ford until his late 60s. The great group of Rockefeller partners and executives—Flagler, Rogers, Andrews, Brewster, Pratt, Archbold, Bedford, Moffett— has been gone for years.* But at no time by either word or gesture did Rockefeller ever indicate any regret for anything he ever did. Apparently there was a sharp and impenetrable wall between his conceptions of business and private morality.

But John D. Rockefeller, the sinister master of old Standard Oil, has long since been replaced in the public mind by John D. Rockefeller, the gentle oldster who gave away more money than any man who ever lived. For that astonishing handspring in public opinion, John Rockefeller could thank in large measure the late famed Ivy Ledbetter Lee, his longtime pressagent.

Without Ivy Lee’s subtle guidance the Rockefeller giving might have been interpreted as a miser’s attempt to ease his conscience—as indeed his early philanthropies were interpreted. The organization of philanthropy along strictly business lines, however, was a typical Rockefeller touch. Apart from any of his son’s gifts, Mr.

Rockefeller in his lifetime gave away no less than $530,000,000. The Baptist Church was the most consistent beneficiary, but the biggest sums went to the Rockefeller Foundation ($182,000,000), the General Education Board ($129,000,000), the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial ($73,000,000), the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research ($59,000,000) and the University of Chicago ($35,000,000).

The rest of his wealth, including his estates, was transferred to his heirs, principally John D. Jr. At the time of death John D. Rockefeller was probably worth only a few million.

Incredibly wrinkled, wasted to less than 100 lb., old Mr. Rockefeller was alert to the end. His hearing was unimpaired, his sight good, most of his teeth sound. He liked to chat on the latest in finance or politics, kept in touch with oil business almost daily. About the only thing he refused to discuss was Rockefeller Center. He thought his son’s Manhattan pile was close to sheer folly.

His body was to be brought by private railroad car to Pocantico Hills for private funeral services. Then he would be buried in Cleveland where he got his start and where he buried his wife more than 20 years ago, his life having spanned three entire generations and the industrialization of a continent.

*By an arrangement effected years ago, the press stood no death watch on Rockefeller as it does on other aged and ailing celebrities. Instead, his Manhattan public relations counsel, T. J. Ross (successor to Ivy Lee), telephoned the news to major press agencies at 6:45 a.m.

*Even John L. McKinney, 94, one of the first oil pioneers of Titusville and a founder of American Radiator Co., died last week two days before Rockefeller.