Discipline was harsh and exacting: When students misbehaved, the teacher menacingly held a slate over their heads. If Rockefeller didn’t excel in class, it might have been in part because he lacked the bright boy’s exhibitionism, the yearning for gold stars; always inner-directed and indifferent to the approval of others, he was therefore free of a certain boyish vanity.
One must also note his penchant for denial, his potent capacity to filter out uncomfortable thoughts, especially about his father, just as he later deflected criticism of his questionable business behavior. John D. Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one’s resolve in the face of enemies.
As a selfmade man, Rockefeller would always deplore aristocracies.
In one of the less prophetic judgments in parental history, they argued that they didn’t want their daughter to throw herself away on a young man with such poor prospects
Save when you can and not when you have to,” he instructed others and urged them to wear their good Sunday clothing to work as a sign of their Christian pride. 6 1 Besides Friday evening prayer meetings, he went to services twice on Sunday and was always a conspicuous figure in a straight-backed pew, kneeling and leading the congregation in prayer. He prized the special intensity of feeling that Baptists brought to their faith, which provided an emotional release lacking elsewhere in his life.
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.”
“I would go into an office and present my card and say to the man that I supposed his business connections were satisfactory, and that I did not wish to intrude upon him, but that I had a proposition that I myself believed in and believed it would be to his advantage, that I did not expect him to decide off hand but asked him to think it over and I would see him again about it. ” Orders to handle commodity trades poured in almost faster than he could handle them. “I found that old men had confidence in me right away, and after I stayed a few weeks in the country, I returned home and the consignments came in and our business was increased and it opened up a new world for me.
John had abiding faith in two things—the Baptist creed and oil.” This very old, very young man found boyish pleasure in doing business, and when he captured a large contract, he strutted and whooped with a buoyant step or cut a small comic caper”.
The only time I ever saw John Rockefeller enthusiastic was when a report came in from the creek that his buyer had secured a cargo of oil at a figure much below the market price. He bounded from his chair with a shout of joy, danced up and down, hugged me, threw up his hat, acted so like a madman that I have never forgotten it.
Rockefeller represented the second, more rational stage of capitalist development, when the colorful daredevils and pioneering speculators give way, as Max Weber wrote, to the “men who had grown up in the hard school of life, calculating and daring at the same time, above all temperate and reliable, shrewd and completely devoted to their business, with strictly bourgeois opinions and principles.
If their differences had been chiefly a clash of personalities, Rockefeller’s partnership with Maurice Clark might have lasted years, but they had sharply divergent views about oil’s future and the desirable pace of expansion. Despite the Civil War, the drills never stopped in Pennsylvania, except when General Lee invaded the state and producers had to defend it. As the export business in kerosene widened, Andrews, Clark banked solid profits in refining during every year of the war. Yet prices remained as volatile as the war itself, with the supply-demand equation shifting radically each time a single spouter or gusher came in. Amid the ruthlessly competitive conditions, it was never clear where prices would settle or what constituted a normal price. The price fluctuations in a single year were staggering, veering between 10¢ and $10 a barrel in 1861 and $4 and $12 in 1864. Undeterred by these extreme gyrations, both Rockefeller and Andrews wanted to borrow heavily and expand, while Clark favored a more circumspect approach. What likely clinched Rockefeller’s decision to break from the three Clarks was that they had the votes to override him and Andrews and didn’t hesitate to use their majority in a high-handed way. In later reminiscences, Rockefeller disclosed an incident that casts light on his relations with the Clarks: “[Maurice Clark] was very angry when I borrowed money to extend our business of refining oil. ‘Why, you have borrowed $100,000,’ he exclaimed, as if that were some sort of offense.” 3 7 Rockefeller’s amazement seems somewhat disingenuous: It was a stupendous sum, but all Rockefeller could see was that Maurice Clark lacked his audacity. “Clark was an old grandmother and was scared to death because we owed money at the banks.”
One can forgive the Clarks if they found something overbearing about this bumptious young man who would risk all their capital, evidently without notifying them. Significantly, the Clarks were irked by both Rockefeller’s frugality and his prodigality—his tightfisted control of details and advocacy of unbridled expansion. Daring in design, cautious in execution—it was a formula he made his own throughout his career. By 1865, Rockefeller, age twenty-five, decided it was time for a showdown with the Clarks.
All of Rockefeller’s Baptist contempt for vanity, show, and loose talk is condensed in that single observation. On March 2, 1865, Clark and Rockefeller was also dissolved, and Rockefeller eliminated the three fractious Clark brothers from his life forever.
Rockefeller would never have tolerated a noisy woman, and Cettie was soft in voice and manner. Like John, though, her mild surface belied an adamantine determination. She was “gentle and lovely, but resolute with indomitable will,” noted her sister Lucy, better known in the family as Lute. “There was a persuasion in her touch as she laid her fingers ever so gently on your arm.” Again like John, her geniality covered a hard core of sustained willpower. “She was full of mirth and cheer, yet . . . rather inclined to be grave and reserved,” Lute recalled. A paragon of self-control, she never lost her temper and lacked the skittish frivolity of youth.
Twenty-nine-year-old John D. Rockefeller demanded that seventyfour-year-old Commodore Vanderbilt, the emperor of the railroad world, come to him. This refusal to truckle, bend, or bow to others, this insistence on dealing with other people on his own terms, time, and turf, distinguished Rockefeller throughout his career.
“Club life did not appeal to me,” said Rockefeller. “I was meeting all the people I needed to meet in my day’s work.
To explain his extraordinary longevity, he later said, doubtless overstating the matter, “I’m here because I shirked: did less work, lived more in the open air, enjoyed the open air, sunshine and exercise.” By his mid-thirties, he had installed a telegraph wire between home and office so that he could spend three or four afternoons each week at home, planting trees, gardening, and enjoying the sunshine. Rockefeller didn’t do this in a purely recreational spirit but mingled work and rest to pace himself and improve his productivity. In time, he became something of an evangelist on health-related issues. “It is remarkable how much we all could do if we avoid hustling, and go along at an even pace and keep from attempting too much.
Cettie turned Sunday into a day for serious reflection, asking the children to reflect upon such weighty maxims as “He who conquers self is the greatest victor” or “The secret of sensible living is simplicity.” Leading the children in an hour-long “home talk,” she asked each child to select a “besetting sin” and then prayed with the child, asking for God’s help in combating the sin. The implicit Baptist message was that people were inherently flawed but—with prayer, willpower, and God’s grace—infinitely capable of improvement.
The small batch of letters he wrote to Cettie at this time—among his few early, surviving letters to her—betray a surprisingly romantic sensibility, as if seven years of marriage hadn’t dimmed his ardor. Amid negotiations, he told her, “I dreamed last night of the girl Celestia Spelman and awoke to realize she was my ‘Laura.’ ” 2 9 Repeatedly, Rockefeller complained about how lonely he felt in New York—“like a wandering Jew”—and reiterated his yearning to be at home. Far from being beguiled by the money, fashion, and power of New York, his Baptist soul recoiled from it. “The world is full of Sham, Flattery, and Deceptions,” he wrote, “and home is a haven of rest and freedom.” 30 At this stage, Rockefeller still found his wealth wonderful and slightly unreal, telling Cettie that “we have been so prospered and placed in independent circumstances, it seems a fabulous dream but I assure you it is a solid and comforting fact— how different our condition from the multitudes, let us be thankful.”
He had a great general’s ability to focus on his goals and brush aside obstacles as petty distractions. “You can abuse me, you can strike me,” Rockefeller said, “so long as you let me have my own way”