Among the investments which Mr. Rockefeller had made with his syndicate friends was the purchase and development of several large iron ore mines. Some of these were located in Cuba, some in Wisconsin, and some in Michigan. Also Mr. Rockefeller had previously acquired a large interest in the Minnesota Iron Company with its hard ore mines in Minnesota, its railroad and steamship connections and extensive ramifications. These iron ore investments of Mr. Rockefeller totaled some Four or Five Million Dollars. It thus became my duty to acquaint myself with these properties and with the iron ore business over a wide area and on a large scale.
A great new iron field had recently been discovered in Minnesota, called the Mesabi Range. It was thought in Duluth to be of immediate and immense promise, with advantages many and great over other fields. I visited it in June, 1893, and was impressed with its importance and value, though no ore had as yet been shipped, and none of the mines had been fully developed, or even thoroughly prospected. Mr. Rockefeller was importuned to interest himself in these mines but declined, though he did subscribe for several hundred thousand dollars par value of the bonds of the railroad then under construction. This purchase proved to be the beginning of what came to be the almost exclusive ownership of the Mesabi Range, of extensive development of its mining properties, of the construction of many miles of railroad and immense docks, of the purchase or construction of an ore-carrying fleet of nearly sixty vessels, and of the mining, transportation, and sale of many millions of tons of ore. This business, from its small beginning to its culmination and sale, Mr. Rockefeller, being absorbed by many other interests, turned wholly over to me. He never visited the range while he owned it. After he had sold the properties he made a cursory visit, from curiosity, to a single mine. But he was an ideal principal.
In the development of the enterprise and in increasing his ownership, he poured in millions on millions as asked by me, with never once the slightest hesitation. He required that the plans should not be presented to him until they had been clearly thought through and were explicit and complete in detail. Such plans, when matured, he always accepted, and left them to me to carry out without amendment or suggestion.
After eight years we sold out all this aggregation of property to the United States Steel Corporation. Mr. Rockefeller’s gross profits were about Fifty-five Million Dollars, though there had been no dividends, all the profits having been put back into the development.
These eight years would form, of course, in any event an interesting and important episode in my life. But circumstances rendered it highly exciting, culminating in a trumped-up Congressional investigation ten years later. The resolution authorizing what was known as the Stanley Committee was introduced and engineered through the House by Representative Stanley of Kentucky, but the resolution was written out and placed in Stanley’s hands by a man then and later known as “The Wolf of Wall Street.” He called himself Lamar, but the name was assumed, as he afterwards confessed, to conceal earlier criminality. He has since served one or more terms of imprisonment. Of course Stanley, as mover of the resolution, was appointed chairman of the Committee of Investigation, and thenceforward became the tool of “The Wolf.” Mr. Rockefeller’s office had been forewarned of the assault and its purpose. We were several times called up by telephone by a person impersonating various members of Congress and other highly placed politicians, among them the Governor of New York and also the state leader of the Republican party. By all these persons we were informed that by the payment of some thousands of dollars only could Mr. Rockefeller escape revelations in Congress that would be highly injurious to him personally. The voices one and all emanated, as we afterwards learned, from Lamar alone. To all this, however, we paid not the slightest attention. But Stanley went to Duluth and with some difficulty, as the Merritts testified, persuaded them to make a public assault on Mr. Rockefeller in Washington before the Stanley Committee. This Stanley—or, rather, Lamar—public investigation of Mr. Rockefeller’s dealings with the Merritts proved in the sequel to be of great advantage to Mr. Rockefeller, but at the moment the country was startled, and my friends in particular were appalled by the Merritt testimony skillfully educed by Stanley.
Mr. Rockefeller’s habitual policy had been complete silence under accusation. But in this case the charges implicated me also, or even chiefly. It was my right and my duty to vindicate myself for my own and my family’s sake. I therefore took the bit in my own mouth, and without consulting Mr. Rockefeller I began in the columns of the New York newspapers a series of daily interviews showing by irrefutable documentary evidence how utterly and consciously false the Merritt testimony was, how self-contradictory in its parts, how contrary to essential facts known to every iron ore man in the country, and how these very charges, first falsely made in 1894, had been withdrawn in 1897. For the Merritts in 1897 had written out a formal document completely exonerating Mr. Rockefeller. It was signed by twenty-three of the family. It withdrew and repudiated their charges and each of them separately appended to it his individual oath. This document we had filed in the United States Circuit Court in Duluth, where the charges were originally made, and there it is today. But the Merritts had failed to tell this to Stanley. I published the facts, however; Stanley and his Committee and the Merritts disappeared from public sight, the newspapers dropped the subject, my friends everywhere congratulated me, including the press of Duluth, Montclair, and New York, the public saw that Congress had been hoaxed and had staged a farce, and the episode was forgotten. I subsequently wrote out and published under the title of “Mr. Rockefeller and the Merritts” a full and exact account of all his relations with them. The story, first published in the New York Times and subsequently as a pamphlet, had a circulation of at least a million and a half. It disclosed Mr. Rockefeller’s character to the public in a new and favorable light and measurably qualified the public judgment.
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The Origin of the Rockefeller Institute
Chapters In My Life 