Copyright 2019 |Blue Sky Leadership Consulting | All rights reserved

Volume 6

Issue 38

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

By Ron Chernow

About the Author Ron Chernow won the National Book Award in 1990 for his first book, The House of Morgan, and his second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize as the Best Business Book of 1993. This biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Titan, was a national bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Other great biographies by Chernow include Alexander Hamilton, Grant, and Washington: A Life. I recommend them all!

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About the Book

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Alexander Hamilton: here is the essential, endlessly engrossing biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.—the Jekyll-and-Hyde of American capitalism. In the course of his nearly 98 years, Rockefeller was known as both a rapacious robber baron, whose Standard Oil Company rode roughshod over an industry, and a philanthropist who donated money lavishly to universities and medical centers. He was the terror of his competitors, the bogeyman of reformers, the delight of caricaturists—and an utter enigma. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rockefeller’s private papers, Chernow reconstructs his subjects’ troubled origins (his father was a swindler and a bigamist) and his single-minded pursuit of wealth. But he also uncovers the profound religiosity that drove him “to give all I could”; his devotion to his father; and the wry sense of humor that made him the country’s most colorful codger. Titan is a magnificent biography—balanced, revelatory, elegantly written.

The Book’s ONE THING

We study the lives of famous people who have impacted the world in order to better

understand our own impact on the world. Every human being is a complex enigma

containing both beauty and darkness.

207 & 208

Reviewed by Robert Schmidt

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Rockefeller Timeline

“What makes him problematic- and why he continues to inspire ambivalent reactions- is that his good side was every bit as good as his bad side was bad.

Seldom has history produced such a contradictory figure.” - Ron Chernow

Born July 8, 1839 Age Studied bookkeeping at Folsom’s Commercial College 1853 14 First job as a commission clerk Sep 26, 1855 16 Started his own commissioning firm with Maurice Clark 1858 19 Invested in first oil refinery 1863 24 Married Laura “Cettie” Spelman 1864 25 Borrowed money to buy control of the Cleveland Refinery 1865 26 Founded Standard Oil Company with his brother and several other partners 1870 31 Standard Oil Trust gained the monopoly In US oil industry w/ 90% of the nation’s refineries and pipelines 1882 43 JDR moves company headquarters to New York 1883 44 Sherman Antitrust Act 1890 51 JDR retires from Standard Oil 1895 56 The History of the Standard Oil Co published by Ida Tarbell 1904 65

US Supreme Court finds Standard Oil of New Jersey and forces it to break up into 34 different companies. 1911 71 Created the Rockefeller Foundation 1915 75 Died May 23, 1937 98

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Family & Childhood

“I am satisfied with my good American stock.” - John D Rockefeller, 1900

William Avery Rockefeller was the third of ten children born to Godfrey and Lucy Rockefeller in Granger, New York in 1810, and while it’s easy to date the birth of Rockefeller’s father, teams of reporters would exhaust themselves trying to establish the date of his death decades later. At the height of Rockefeller’s power as a businessman there began rumors that the family guarded an “embarrassing secret”, in fact Joseph Pulitzer offered an $8,000 reward for information about “Doc Bill Rockefeller”, John’s father. Bill, who was a traveling “herbal doctor”, or snake oil salesman, abandoned his family around 1855 when John was 16, but remained legally married to Eliza up to her death. He adopted the name William Levingston and married another woman, Margaret Allen, in Norwich, Ontario. He died in 1906 and his tomb was paid for by his second wife. John’s mother, Eliza Davison, was of prudent, strait-laced Baptist descent and was in many ways the antithesis of Big Bill Rockefeller. Despite the express opposition of her father, the two were married in 1837 in the home of one of Eliza’s friends. Shortly after the couple moved into their home near Richford, New York, Bill brought his former girlfriend, Nancy Brown, into the cramped house as a “housekeeper” and began having children alternately by wife and mistress. In 1838, Eliza gave birth to their first child, Lucy, followed a few months later by Nancy’s first illegitimate daughter, Clorinda. On July 8, 1839 the midwife was summoned again to deliver a boy, who came into the world in a bare front bedroom measuring eight by ten feet. This child would go on to amass a fortune valued at $409 billion (2018 dollars) that would easily place him as the wealthiest known person in modern history. As a percentage of the US GDP, no other American fortune- including those of Bill Gates or Sam Walton- would even come close. Several months after John’s birth, Nancy Brown gave birth to her second daughter, Cornelia, which meant that Bill, lord of his own harem, managed to sire four children under one roof in just two years. The fiercely moralistic John Davison Rockefeller (appropriately named after Eliza’s sober father) was sandwiched tightly between two illegitimate sisters, born into a situation steeped in sin. Eliza proved to be unexpectedly tolerant of Nancy and still loved her husband, but her brothers intervened and made Bill “put Nancy away”. After living for a while with her parents in nearby Harford Mills, Nancy married a man named Burlingame and furnished her two daughters with a respectable upbringing.

William & Eliza Rockefeller

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It is impossible to know if John ever knew of the existence of his two illegitimate half-sisters since he closely guarded any information about his father’s dalliances. Rockefeller’s earliest memories always edited out his absentee father and inebriated grandfather while retaining the strong, enduring mother and grandmother. He continued to possess an unusual, self-protective capacity to suppress unpleasant memories and keep alive those things that fortified his resolve. Even as a boy John seemed a perfect specimen of homo economicus. He often bought candy by the pound, divided it into small portions, then sold it at a tidy profit to his siblings. His first business coup came at age seven when he shadowed a turkey hen into the woods, raided its nest, and raised the chicks for sale. Even as an old man Rockefeller said, “To this day, I enjoy the sight of a flock of turkeys, and never miss the opportunity of studying them.”

Early Career

“Oh how blessed the young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and a beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years of

apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all the way along.” - John D. Rockefeller to a grandson at age 95

Like innumerable young people before him, Rockefeller turned to the church for all-encompassing answers to intractable family problems. He possessed a sense of calling in both religion and business, with Christianity and capitalism forming the twin pillars of his life. While Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species began to chip away at many people’s faith after it was published in 1859, Rockefeller’s religion remained of the simple, undeviating sort. In preparation for a business career, John paid forty dollars for a three-month course of study at E. G. Folsom’s Commercial College, a chain college with branches in seven cities. The Cleveland branch occupied the top floor of the Rouse Building, the town ’s premier office building, which overlooked the Public Square. It taught double-entry bookkeeping, clear penmanship, and the essentials of banking, exchange, and commercial law. Upon completion of these studies John began looking for a job as a bookkeeper, and on the morning of September 26, 1855 he walked into the offices of Hewitt & Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers. Henry B. Tuttle asked him to return after lunch to interview with the senior partner, Isaac L. Hewitt. After scrutinizing the boy’s penmanship, he declared, “We’ll give you a chance.” They told Rockefeller to hang up his coat and go straight to work, without any mention of wages. It was three months before John received his first humble, retroactive pay. For the rest of his life, he would honor September 26 as “Job Day” and celebrate it with more genuine gusto than his birthday. In many ways, John D. Rockefeller exemplified the enterprising young businessman of his era. Thrifty, punctual, industrious, he was a fervent adherent of the gospel of success. Though Rockefeller steadfastly denied stories of his boyhood obsession with money, he related the following story of his time at Hewitt and Tuttle:

“I was a young man when I got my first look at a banknote of any size. I was clerking at the time down on the Flats here. One day my employer received a note from a down-State bank for $4,000. He showed it to me in the course of the day’s business, and then put it in the safe. As soon as he was gone, I unlocked the safe, and taking out that note,

John D. Rockefeller

in his early 20’s

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stared at it with open eyes and mouth, and then replaced it and double-locked the safe. It seemed like an awfully large sum to me, an unheard of amount, and many times during the day did I open that safe to gaze longingly at the note.”

If motivated by greed more than he ever cared to admit, Rockefeller also derived a glandular pleasure from work and never found it cheerless drudgery. In fact, the business world entranced him as a fount of inexhaustible wonders. “It is by no means for money alone that these active-minded men labor—they are engaged in a fascinating occupation,” he wrote in his memoirs, published in 1908–1909. “The zest of the work is maintained by something better than the mere accumulation of money.” At 19 years of age Rockefeller partnered with Maurice Clark to start their own commissioning house, Clark & Rockefeller.

From Produce Commissioning to the Oil Business

John D. Rockefeller saw a large and providential design in the discovery of Pennsylvania oil, stating that “these vast stores of wealth were the gifts of the great Creator, the bountiful gifts of the great Creator.” He expressed his gratitude that “Colonel Drake and the Standard Oil Company and all others connected w ith this industry had the opportunity for useful work in preparing and distributing this valuable product to supply the wants of the world.” Rockefeller always viewed the industry through this rose-tinted spiritual lens, and it materially aided his success, for his conviction that God had given kerosene to suffering mankind gave him unswerving faith in the industry’s future, enabling him to persist where less confident men stumbled and faltered. Samuel Andrews, an Englishman from Maurice Clark’s hometown in Wiltshire, drew Rockefeller into the business. A hearty, rubicund man with a broad face and genial manner, Andrews was a self-taught chemist, a born tinkerer, and an enterprising mechanic who distilled the first oil-based kerosene manufactured in Cleveland. The secret of “cleansing” oil with sulfuric acid—what we now term refining—was then a high mystery, zealously guarded by a local priesthood of practical chemists, and many curious businessmen beat a path to Andrews’s door. An expert on illuminants enthralled by the unique properties of kerosene, Andrews was convinced it would outshine and outsell other sources of light. He was correct.

Standard Oil Trust

Established in 1870 by Rockefeller and Henry Flagler as a corporation in Ohio, Standard Oil Company was the largest oil refiner in the world of its time. Its history as one of the world's first and largest multinational corporations ended in 1911, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a landmark case, that Standard Oil Trust, which was an illegal monopoly.

Rockefeller developed an inverted worldview, accusing his critics of exactly the same sins of which they accused him. Far from seeing himself as a rascal or bully, the Standard Oil chieftain presented himself as a respectable gentleman who attempted in vain to reason with wicked independents. In his correspondence, Rockefeller betrayed a characteristic manner of referring to his

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rivals: They were selfish people forever stirring up trouble or creating annoyances, like so many mischievous children who needed a good stiff spanking from father. Never conceding any legitimacy to dissent, Rockefeller denigrated his critics as blackmailers, sharpsters, and crooks. He was now dangerously impervious to criticism. The Standard Oil trust, which held the various companies, streamlined production and logistics, lowered costs, and undercut competitors. "Trust-busting" critics accused Standard Oil of using aggressive pricing to destroy competitors and form a monopoly that threatened other businesses. Rockefeller ran the company as its chairman, until his retirement in 1897. He remained the major shareholder, and in 1911, with the dissolution of the Standard Oil trust into 34 smaller companies, Rockefeller became the richest man in America, as the initial income of these individual enterprises proved to be much bigger than that of a single larger company.

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Charity &Legacy

“Let us erect a foundation, a trust, and engage directors who will make it a life work to manage, with our personal cooperation, this business of benevolence

properly and effectively.” -John D. Rockefeller, 1901

In 1889, Rockefeller met a Baptist minister named Frederick Gates who eventually became his key business and philanthropic advisor. Gates oversaw Rockefeller’s ever-expanding investments in many companies other than Standard Oil, serving on the boards of many companies in which Rockefeller held a majority shareholding. Although Gates is recognized today as a philanthropic advisor, Rockefeller himself considered him as the greatest businessman he had encountered in his life, including such prominent figures as Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie. Gates focused exclusively on philanthropy after 1912. He moved Rockefeller from doling out retail sums to specific recipients to the wholesale process of setting up well-funded foundations that were run by experts who decided what topics of reform were ripe. In all, Gates supervised the distribution of over $500 million. After retiring from day-to-day operations in 1895, Rockefeller took up golf and eventually moved to Florida where he bought a home, The Casements, across the street from his Standard Oil partner Henry Flagler’s Ormand Beach Hotel, which had an 18-hole golf course. He often played four to five times per week and could still hit a 165-yard drive while in his 90’s and weighing less than 100 pounds. John D. Rockefeller lived to be 98 years old and, on the day before he died, he paid off the mortgage on the Euclid Avenue Baptists Church in Cleveland, the place where he made a confession of faith and was immersed in the baptismal basin by Deacon Sked in 1854. Having given away most of his money, Rockefeller left behind an estate of $26.4 million, mostly in U.S. Treasury notes, though he retained for sentimental reasons one share of Standard Oil of California stock marked “Certificate No. 1”.

Our Faculty, Sponsors and our Cause

Copyright 2019 |Blue Sky Leadership Consulting | All rights reserved

Volume 6

Issue 38

Calendar of Events

P a g e 9 | 9

A retrospective of our last ten books ONE THING

The Resilience Factor It’s not what happens to us but how we respond to what happens to us that has the greatest effect on the trajectory of our lives. Everyone Needs Resilience.

The Best of Jim Collins Life is people – life is short; Life is doing meaningful things with the ones you love; Increase simplicity; manage time and flow state; manage time with family and friends.

The Magic of Believing Your strong belief activates the subconscious and puts it to work. It will help you achieve whatever you desire.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

“Humility is the mother of all virtues” – Mother Theresa; “Humility is laced in all 7 habits” – Mark Wittig.

The Customer Comes Second

Transform an organization's leadership model and culture to focus on putting the employees first, and the results that will be created will far exceed any forecasted budget projections.

Stillness is the Key Chop wood, carry water. Let the wild horses run by.

The Method Method Sustainable human-centered business is the key to thriving in today’s reality, daring to do things not only differently but better, existing in between tensions, mashing them up for the greater good., bringing a higher purpose based on culture and design.

The School of Greatness Greatness is not reserved for an elite few, it is something inherent in each of us. It is cultivated from within. The masters of greatness became that way because they applied specific habits and tools to embrace and overcome adversity in their lives.

The Obstacle is the Way Although we don’t control external events, we can control ourselves and our responses to those events. Every obstacle poses an opportunity to improve our condition. We have the power to turn adversity into our advantage and revolutionize our lives!

Just Listen Be more INTERESTED than INTERESTING.

Let’s Pan for Some Gold What thought, or idea had the biggest impact on you today?

What is your ONE THING? What one specific action you

will take TODAY from what was discussed?