Apprehensive as I had been, I soon discovered that I had by no means fully measured the difficulties of the new duties to which Mr. Rockefeller had called me from Chicago to New York. Neither in the privacy of his home nor at his table, nor in the aisles of his church, nor on his trips to and from his office, nor during his business hours, nor anywhere else, was Mr. Rockefeller secure from insistent appeal. Nor if asked to write were solicitors willing to do so. If in New York, they demanded personal interviews. Mr. Rockefeller was constantly hunted, stalked, and hounded almost like a wild animal. In calling me from the West for his partial relief he had not exaggerated his trials and annoyances. But he had determined on escape. He meant what he said. And so nearly all comers, near or remote, friend or guest, high or low, were blandly sent by his ushers to my office at Temple Court. I did my best to soothe ruffled feelings, to listen fully to every plea, and to weigh fairly the merits of every cause. I found not a few of Mr. Rockefeller’s habitual charities to be worthless and practically fraudulent. But on the other hand I gradually developed and introduced into all his charities the principles of scientific giving, and he found himself in no long time laying aside retail giving almost wholly, and entering safely and pleasurably into the field of wholesale philanthropy.
For illustration: Mr. Rockefeller had been receiving numberless letters from Baptist churches all over the land, from pastors, and from zealous church members, male or female, begging for money for their church edifices, church debts, church equipment, church adornment, and even church expenses. He had been in the habit of contributing small sums in a doubtful way to such of these appeals as seemed on their face to have merit, or were supported by endorsement. I reported adversely on these requests, one and all, for Baptists had denominational organizations officially covering all these fields. These were conducted by responsible men, under suitable rules carefully thought out, the result of experience. In every case the aid was fixed in amount and character by judicious local men thoroughly conversant with the conditions in question. Those cases only had come to Mr. Rockefeller, which had failed to get relief from the local boards, because unworthy. In cutting off all these appeals I advocated and secured the multiplication of Mr. Rockefeller’s annual contribution to the state and national organizations. I tried to make sure that there should be nowhere any needy church unaided, by seeing that the central boards had enough money for every legitimate purpose.
This practice of distribution through official denominational agencies was applied also to the churches in the cities of Mr. Rockefeller’s residence, New York and Cleveland. He had been in the habit of doling out sums annually to a great number of Baptist churches in these cities of his residence, as also in Brooklyn. These churches, once on his list, found excuses year by year for remaining there, however temporary the exigency that first sought his aid. It was a long time before I was able to rescue him from these begging churches. We had a City Mission Organization, but none of the churches liked to depend on the City Mission Society, in part because that involved submitting their claim to the test of disinterested inquiry and of comparative merit. But we strengthened the City Mission Society by multiplying Mr. Rockefeller’s annual subscription, and at length by declining to give directly to local churches at all, and referring all applicants to the City Mission Organization.
Mr. Rockefeller had been accustomed to give a few thousand dollars annually to the Baptist Foreign Mission Society. But, quite outside this, he had conducted a small foreign mission society, if I may so call it, of his own, necessarily without adequate knowledge of the field. He was in daily receipt of appeals from individual Baptist missionaries in every region of Baptist missionary endeavor: France, Germany, Russia, Africa, China, Japan, and other nations of the distant East. They asked small sums and great, for educational institutions, hospitals, edifices, compounds, equipment, evangelization. His office, his home, his table were beset with returned missionaries, each comparatively ignorant of all fields but his own, and eager for the largest possible aid for his personal field, irrespective of comparative needs. Of course this was all wrong. It meant chaos in missionary activity and was subversive of discipline and effectiveness. But the missionary board was, or seemed to be, helpless to prevent these private, often selfish, and relatively unjust appeals. We cut off every one of these private missionary appeals. We referred every applicant straight back to the missionary executives in Boston. We could do this because every year I went over the entire budget of the Society in advance, enlarging it extensively to cover equipment and buildings everywhere, and what-ever else was really needed and imperative. Mr. Rockefeller then gave not thousands, as formerly, but hundreds of thousands, every dollar of which was expended by the experienced Board, with due reference to the relative needs of every field and every department of the work.
So we kept in the closest personal touch with all these national and international state or municipal agencies, going over, with their executive officers, the program or budget of each at least once each year, becoming thoroughly acquainted with their secretaries, discussing their policies, devising ways and means of increasing the gifts of the churches, and of making their work in the highest degree effective. In these ways Mr. Rockefeller’s business sagacity was satisfied, and he came to have hardly less pleasure in the organization of his philanthropy than in the efficiency of his business.
In saying that I introduced the principle of giving wholesale through approved public agencies, and excluded retail gifts to individuals and local charities in detail, I do not mean to say that Mr. Rockefeller never gave money to individuals. He always had his private list. His Christmas list I have never seen, but it was a long one and covered a wide range of individuals and families, besides his personal employees. And he always had a long list of private friends of his childhood and youth, distant relatives, and needy neighbors to whom it had been his pleasure to make annual gifts. This list I never saw, and I was rarely consulted on any individual case.
The bulk of the begging letters that Mr. Rockefeller received were personal appeals for money for the writers themselves, though entire strangers and wholly without endorsement or recommendation, or proof of need. These appeals came in multitudes from every part of the United States and, after Mr. Rockefeller became widely known, from nearly all foreign lands and the islands of the sea. They were generally illiterate, often written in pencil, frequently in a foreign language, and generally disclosed very limited intelligence. They usually asked for small sums of cash which Mr. Rockefeller would “never feel.” Sometimes they asked for thousands, often for luxuries, such as pianos, wedding trousseaux, a musical or art education. Often the writer wished to be set up in business, or have a troublesome mortgage removed. These freak letters form the bulk of the daily mail, I suppose, of every man of wealth, and all go, or should go at once, to the waste basket before the mail passes to the desk of any responsible person. The number of them, at times, in our office was incredible. They would come in a flood immediately after the publication of any great gift by Mr. Rockefeller. I remember that on one such occasion we kept count of them for thirty days. There were over fifteen thousand the first week, and over fifty thousand within the thirty-day period. Few were answered, but every one was opened for a glance as to its character. Our office force was swamped with them.
There were among them possibly a few cases of actual need, though such cases were, 1 think, extremely rare. My occasional perusal of a batch would disclose this. The sufficient reply to all such appeals to distant wealth is that there is no community anywhere which will permit worthy or unworthy persons, or even criminals in their own midst, to suffer unnecessarily. There is, of course, much suffering from exposure, or sickness, or lack of work but such sufferers rarely, if ever, appeal by letter to distinguished strangers of great wealth, hundreds or thousands of miles away.
In this chapter I have described only the organization of some of Mr. Rockefeller’s early, private, denominational charities. The origin, aims, and policies of his great philanthropic organizations will be briefly described in succeeding chapters.
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Chapters In My Life 