5,000 “Begging Letters”

Rockefeller didn’t frown on personal donations to the needy. Indeed, each Sunday the world’s richest man sat in church—the same church he had gone to as a teenager—scanning the largely blue-collar congregation for indigent people, then discretely pressing envelopes of cash into their hands as he shook hands with them at the door. But he recognized that with his colossal wealth he had to graduate beyond individual or “retail” giving, as he phrased it, and concentrate upon large-scale “wholesale” philanthropy. And where rich people had typically given away money in a sentimental or haphazard fashion to an alma mater, a local museum, or a local hospital, Rockefeller tried to apply rational systematic methods to philanthropy, much as he had so spectacularly at Standard Oil.

In many ways John D. was an American provincial who thought Europe an effete place full of decadent snobs. He didn’t make his first foray to Europe until 1887 when he was 48. As he and his family toured London, Paris, and other obligatory stops on the grand tour, his arrival was celebrated in the local papers. Crank mail and “begging letters”—Rockefeller’s term—alike began to follow him. So many letters piled up at hotels along the way that he finally had to purchase a big steamer trunk just to carry them home. It was a tribute to his sense of responsibility that he kept those letters and had them opened and evaluated when he returned to the United States.

By the time he was in his forties, Rockefeller’s name was becoming synonymous with money around the world. By the late 1880s, when he was in his late forties, the volume of mail simply began to stagger the imagination. One steamer alone brought 5,000 begging letters from Europe. After the announcement of each large gift, Rockefeller would receive on average 50,000 letters by the end of the month. He needed a staff just to sift through these mountains of mail. People wrote to Rockefeller the way that small children write to Santa Claus, expressing whatever fantasy they have about a gift. They would clip his picture from the newspaper, paste it on an envelope, not bother to write a name or address, and attach a postage stamp. Such letters invariably reached him within days. Rockefeller was very amused by this, and he always carried examples in his wallet to show off to friends.

Philanthropy as Masochism

Aside from a certain innate modesty, Rockefeller cultivated a self- effacing philanthropic style because he wanted to cool off this growing omnivorous global clamor for his cash, which was becoming uncontrollable. By the 1890s, when he was in his fifties, it seemed as if half of America wanted to incarcerate John D. Rockefeller on antitrust grounds while the other half wanted a loan from him.

His chief philanthropic advisor, Frederick Gates, left this interesting scratch: “Mr. Rockefeller was constantly hunted, stalked, and hounded almost like a wild animal. Neither in the privacy of his home, nor at his table, nor in the aisles of his church, nor during his business hours, nor anywhere else was Mr. Rockefeller secure from insistent appeal. Supplicants breakfasted with him. They rode to and from work with him on the elevated train. They dined with him in the evening and then they retired with him to the privacy of his study.”

“The good people who wanted me to help them with their good work seemed to come in crowds,” Rockefeller moaned. “They brought their trunks and lived with me.” Clergymen, incidentally, according to Rockefeller, were easily the worst offenders. “By the seventh hole at golf,” he claimed, “they would invariably break down and spring a charitable proposal on me.”

Philanthropy had been Rockefeller’s great pleasure from the time that he was a young man, but now it was turning into a hellish torment, depriving him of needed rest. “At dinner they talked to me, and after dinner when a little nap and a comfortable lounge, or a restful chair and a quiet family chat seemed about the most desirable occupations until bedtime, these good people would pull up their chairs and begin, ‘Now Mr. Rockefeller’ and then they would tell their story. There was only one of me, and they were a crowd, a crowd increasing in numbers every day. I wanted to retain personal supervision of what little I did in the way of giving, but I also wanted to avoid a breakdown.”

Instead of hobnobbing at fancy dress balls or drunken bacchanals in the Gilded Age, the terror of the oil industry, the ruthless robber baron, the ferocious monopolist, spent his evenings listening to long- winded presentations from missionaries, educators, and activists of every description. Finally the only way that he could barricade himself from the unceasing pressure was to socialize only on his home turf and by his rules. If you golfed with Rockefeller, the valet would quietly inform you that no business or philanthropic propositions could be discussed on the course. If you were then invited to stay for lunch, the valet would quietly inform you that no business or philanthropic proposals could be mentioned at lunch. After lunch, (and the lunches were long because John D. chewed everything ten times before swallowing) and just as you were finally about to broach your deal, the valet would quietly inform you that it was time for Mr. Rockefeller’s nap. Thus did the Titan build self-protective walls around himself.

Endowing Spelman College

Rockefeller never cracked under the immense strain of creating Standard Oil. People who worked with him for decades said he never hollered, he never raised his voice, he never lost his temper, and he never seemed to utter an unkind word to anybody. This globe-straddling enterprise had 100,000 employees and was so huge that when the Supreme Court dissolved it in 1911 it spun off the companies that today include Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Chevron, Conoco, Arco, BP America, Chesebrough-Ponds, and 26 other companies.

Rockefeller never once buckled under the strain of operating that gargantuan machinery. No, it was the excruciating stress of his philanthropies that brought him to the edge of nervous collapse in his early fifties, leading to his retirement at age 57. The immediate cause was his creation of the University of Chicago which opened its doors in 1892—an interesting story in itself. At the time, many businessmen thought colleges breeding grounds for anarchists and socialist agitators and directed their money elsewhere. Yet Rockefeller had already financed another college a decade earlier while he still was in his early forties.

In 1882 two prim New England spinsters, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, journeyed to a Cleveland church and made an eloquent appeal for a school they ran that educated emancipated female slaves and their daughters. They told the rapt audience how they held classes in a drafty, leaky basement in an Atlanta church with the students having to kneel to use their benches as writing desks.

When the collection plate was passed that evening, Rockefeller emptied his pockets. “Are you going to stick?” he asked the two women. “If so, I will do more for you.” He ended up creating the entire campus for what is now Spelman College, a distinguished liberal arts school that has numbered Martin Luther King’s mother and grandmother among its many prominent alumnae.

Rockefeller deliberately kept Packard and Giles in continuous suspense about his intentions. He could have relieved their anxieties forever with one large check, but he didn’t wish to foster dependency or complacency among recipients of his money. Like an adroit central banker, he was a master of creative ambiguity. He was also, from this early stage, gravitating towards large institutional structures that would both transcend and outlive him.

Yet he didn’t want Spelman to be just a monument to the vanity of John D. Rockefeller. A deeply conservative man, Rockefeller valued education because it would equip people to compete on an equal basis. He was more interested in promoting knowledge of universal benefit than in giving directly to the poor. Instead of giving alms to beggars, Rockefeller once said, “If anything can be done to remove the causes which lead to the existence of beggars, then something deeper and broader and more worthwhile will have been accomplished.”