Rockefeller, John Davidson (1839-1937)

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John Davidson Rockefeller (1839-1937)

Industrialist, philanthropist

Beginnings. One of the most notorious robber barons of the late nineteenth century was born in 1839, the son of a merchant and patent—medicine salesman, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. In 1853 he moved with his family to Cleveland and entered business in 1856, at the age of sixteen, as a bookkeeper with a Cleveland mercantile firm Hewitt & Tuttle. Here Rockefeller first displayed the conservative, meticulous business instincts that would govern the rest of his career. After a few years he broke off and formed a wholesale grocery business of his own with a partner, Maurice B. Clark. Business boomed during the Civil War years, and the partners expanded into oil refining in 1863 under the name of Andrews, Clark & Company (Rockefeller preferring to keep his name out of the public eye). This business started as a sideline, but in 1865 Rockefeller bought out Clark and shifted his focus exclusively to the refinery. In 1869 Rockefeller Consolidated the several partnerships by which he ran the business, forming the Standard Oil Company. By this point Rockefeller dominated refining in the Cleveland region; in coming years he expanded his domination on a national and a global scale and, in the process, made himself an infamous figure in the public mind.

Notoriety. Rockefeller tried to keep the growth of Standard Oil quiet, but as the business grew his tactics began attracting negative publicity. The first serious attack came in 1879, in an investigation by the New York state legislature into Standard Oil’s dealings with the railroads. The investigation’s findings became notorious when they were published in an article by Henry Demarest Lloyd in the Atlantic Monthly in 1881. Thereafter, independent refiners and producers kept steady pressure on Rockefeller. As his company fended off more or less continuous assaults from state and federal agencies, both the man and his business himself became notorious as embodiments of the trends transforming the American economy.

Retirement. Rockefeller retired from daily management of Standard in 1896, at the age of fifty-six, with a personal fortune that climbed (as his company continued to grow) to an estimated $900 million in 1913. Even before he retired he had already begun donating substantial sums to charitable causes; in 1891 he hired Frederick T. Gates to manage his philanthropic ventures, and by 1892 he had given more than $1 million to colleges (notably the University of Chicago, which was founded on Rockefeller money), libraries, hospitals, and other institutions. In 1913 he founded the Rockefeller Foundation. He died in 1937.