As early as 1891, at the age of fifty-two, Mr. Rockefeller, Senior, was contemplating retirement from active business, having then, as he told me not long afterwards, all the money he wanted, and feeling the need of permanent relief and quiet. The increasing monetary stringency and the panic of ‘93 kept him unwillingly in the harness, however, for two or three years more. Thenceforward he conducted his private interests by letter or telegraph or telephone, occasionally inviting conference with members of his staff at his house. A year or two later he associated his son, John D. Rockefeller, Junior, with him and his office force in the management of his investments and philanthropy. The organization of the Standard Oil Trust had then been complete and efficient for perhaps a quarter of a century. On his retirement from active business he maintained an advisory relation only with the Standard Oil Trust until, a few years later, his official relations ceased altogether. None of Mr. Rockefeller’s personal staff, not even his son, was associated in the management of the Standard Oil Trust.
John D. Rockefeller, Junior, had been graduated from Brown University in 1897, at the age of twenty-three. He had been a diligent student, winning Phi Beta Kappa, was a good mixer; his classmates liked him personally and took no offense at his rigid morals and his earnest Christian work, often personal but always considerate.
He now came into his father’s office, endowed with great energy, a large capacity for work, and with such theoretical knowledge of business and philanthropy as he had derived from the study of economics and the table talks of his father. These informal talks and discussions on finance and philanthropy had always had an accepted place in the daily home training of the Rockefeller children. On returning from college and entering his father’s office, the young graduate again lived at home and could confer with his father in person on all questions that came up in the daily routine. Thus in his early business years, while he was familiarizing himself with affairs on a wide and varied scale, he was under the daily tuition of his father. No school could have been better. By 1901, when he married and established a home of his own, he may fairly be said to have completed a post-graduate course in business and benevolence. In his wife he was most fortunate. He called her twenty years later, in a public speech, “the best wife in the world.” To those who knew her, this praise was entirely deserved as well as sincere. A more charming, unspoiled, sensible, able, cultivated, generous woman, wife, and mother it would be impossible to find, of all women the best of helpmeets for a man of Mr. Rockefeller’s position, character, and responsibilities. We know that in Senator Aldrich she had a great father, but she must also have had a great mother.
Rigidly guarded throughout the formative period of childhood and youth as few are, the younger Rockefeller was the exclusive product of home influences. He was an only son. He was never sent to the public schools, but was trained for college by tutors. He had few boy companions of his own age, and while he suffered the loss in athletic sports and other advantages which such companionships give, he was at least protected from possible evil influences. He was home-made and hand-trained. But the training in the Rockefeller home was in many ways ideal and the remarkable product has in this case fully justified the process. It was deficient only in not being shared by several brothers.
In the minor morals, habits, and manners, the son takes after his father. It is no mere coincidence that neither father nor son has ever used tobacco or touched wine, played cards, made a bet, uttered an oath, or a by-word, or, so far as I recall, a word of slang, except in anecdote with quotation marks, that each is always courteous in conversation, but can be reserved, cool, self-reliant, and circumspect. I should not quarrel with any who would deny that these characteristics are perhaps matters of taste and training chiefly. The Rockefellers would doubtless say they had not formed the usual habits in early life, did not now care for them, and that probably they owe their immunity to the tactful, dominant influences of the wife and mother in the Rockefeller home.
The boy John’s pocket money was got in part at least, perhaps wholly, by his own labor and self-denial. He was given cash for odd jobs about the home, for sawing wood by the cord, at prices current, for turning off needless electric lights. Also the margin between his modest allowances for clothing, and what he could save by skillful or self-denying purchase, went into his own pocket. The Rockefellers could give away millions, but they taught their children that waste is sin and enlisted them in the virtues of frugality, while training them in the arts of benevolence. Mr. Rockefeller, Junior, in recent years, has shown himself genuinely sympathetic with the toils and the deprivations of labor, and I have often wondered if unconsciously to himself these sympathies are not traceable in part to the wholesome disciplines of his boyhood. It is noticeable that he is training his own family with the ideals and precepts of his father and mother.
In young John’s boyhood the father was fond of fine horses and at one time drove for his airings one of the fastest pairs in the country. The boy, of course, acquired the father’s taste for horses, and today his best recreation is driving.
The son belongs to the family of his mother, however, rather than of his father. He is a Spelman rather than a Rockefeller. Mrs. Laura Spelman Rockefeller was one of the sweetest and noblest of women. Gentle, tolerant, gracious, this wife of the richest of men never swerved from the ideals of life and conduct handed down to her girlhood from the Pilgrim mothers that stepped foot on Plymouth Rock. She never departed in later life from the sweet simplicity of her parental home in the Western Reserve, the home of a Congregational deacon in a country church. She declined throughout her life to accept the social incense or the prestige of great wealth; she cared for money only for its good uses. She realized her responsibilities, subjecting herself to a fixed daily regimen of duties, dividing her day off methodically into hours and minutes for each, that no moment might be misspent and no duty neglected. Her life was built on the spirit and precepts of the New Testament, in unquestioning personal devotion. As in mother, so the hidden springs in the life and character of this son, notwithstanding his riches, are to be found in the spirit and precepts of Christ. I have known no man who entered life more absolutely dominated by his sense of duty, more diligent in the quest of the right path, more eager to follow it at any sacrifice. This spirit, observable from the first, increased with years and the realization of great responsibility. He would have preferred, he once said publicly, to cut loose from his father’s fortune, and make for himself like other men a wholly independent career. But he was an only son, the heir of colossal wealth, dedicated from his birth to overwhelming burdens not to be evaded. He accepted his destiny with such results as the world sees.
The years have made his guiding principles very clear. He has wisely conceived his job to be not to increase the great accumulations, and so he has made business secondary to philanthropy. The meaning of his life, as it has interpreted itself to me, is to disburse in vast sums the fortune already accumulated, as rapidly as it can be done with wisdom and safety, and over an area as wide as the love and providence of the Father of all. He has had much to do with the organization and the choice of the personnel of all the great Rockefeller boards of philanthropy. He has himself been an officer and directing member of each, while careful to avoid the appearance of personal control which his birth and position suggest. He has acquired great personal influence in these boards, not only because he is the son of his father, but also because his counsels have been wise, far-seeing, disinterested, and singularly broad and free from prejudices.
Undoubtedly the moving causes of the successive stupendous gifts of the Rockefellers, father and son, have been the astonishing services and unparalleled achievements of the great Rockefeller boards in alleviating human misery and in promoting human happiness. The credit of originating and directing these greatly successful policies belongs to many wise and thoughtful men, consulting and acting together. But the making of the gifts themselves so frequent, so well directed, so timely, has been in later years, with rare exceptions, the spontaneous act of father and son, in disinterested collaboration. No voice could be so potent with the father as that of his son and heir. It has been delightful to see the eagerness and enthusiasm with which the son has sought and shared these great gifts, and the filial devotion with which the son has so planned that his aged father in his retirement should himself have, while he lives, the credit which intelligent people accord to the distribution of his great fortune, and that he himself with his own eyes shall behold in some part, while he lives, the choice fruit of his philanthropies.
Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller have conferred and could have conferred no greater gift on mankind than the gift of the remarkable son they brought into the world and so admirably trained for the colossal responsibilities the Rockefeller fortune has placed upon his shoulders.
Next Section:
Chapters In My Life 