CHAPTER 3
Bound to Be Rich

s a roving salesman, William Avery Rockefeller was fast becoming a relic of an earlier America when markets were extended not by new methods of communication or transportation but by the salesman simply covering more ground. A magnetic pull lured Big Bill even farther west, away from the burgeoning cities and industries of the eastern seaboard and toward remote hamlets on the American frontier. In early 1853, the Rockefellers were again uprooted and swept along in the whirlwind of Bill's life when he took them by train to a prairie town in Ohio called Strongsville, about a dozen miles southwest of Cleveland. At this juncture, Bill quietly began to distance himself from his dazed family, having formed a new romantic attachment that proved far deeper than earlier infidelities and that finally severed his familial ties.

Where Eliza and the children had at least enjoyed their own homes in Richford, Moravia, and Owego, retaining some modicum of dignity, Bill now dumped them at the home of his sister and brother-in-law, Sara Ann and William Humiston, paying his relatives three hundred dollars a year to board his clan. To his hapless family, this must have seemed, after all their wanderings, terribly unfair. Their lives had always been uncommonly restless, but now they were castoffs, pariahs in a strange new Ohio town, tumbling back down the social ladder they had so arduously climbed.

The six Rockefellers were squashed into a small house with six or seven Humistons, even though Bill seems to have been flush with cash at the time. Years later, Billy Humiston insisted that Devil Bill was considered rich, that he gave out loans at hefty rates, kept three or four fine guns, stocked a rich wardrobe, and sported diamond rings and a gold watch—all of which suggested that the abrupt move to Ohio was less a matter of financial stringency than of personal convenience. ¹ The Humistons greatly admired Eliza for her excellent business head and thrifty money management, but enormous tension was bottled up in the overcrowded Humiston household. Billy junior later portrayed his cousins William and Frank as very rowdy and John as a prig. “John was just such a boy as he is a man—sanctimonious and precise.” ² Fortunately for all concerned, the Rockefellers soon moved out and took up residence on a small farm at the edge of Strongsville.

By now Big Bill had relinquished all interest in lumber and other settled trades and had permanently assumed the persona of the rambling doctor or “botanic physician,” as he was soon listed in the Cleveland directory. In the first year after he deposited his family in Strongsville, Bill returned only three or four times, but, by a curious fluke, the townspeople learned a good deal about his fraudulent activities on the road. One day, a Strongsville resident, Joe Webster, checked into a hotel in Richfield, Ohio, and was stunned to see a sign in the lobby trumpeting the news, “Dr. William A. Rockefeller, the Celebrated Cancer Specialist, Here for One Day Only. All cases of cancer cured unless too far gone and then can be greatly benefited.” Soon after, with the smooth vaudevillian patter employed by so many patent-medicine vendors, Bill collected a crowd outside the hotel. Standing up in his buggy, his sign propped against the wheels, a showman in a silk hat, black frock coat, and dark red beard, he presented himself as Doc Rockefeller and offered full-fledged cancer cures for the extremely steep price of twenty-five dollars; those strapped for cash could purchase cheaper bottles of medicine. When Webster approached him afterward, Bill wasn't abashed and bragged that he had lately been “doctoring” as far afield as Iowa and was buying up land there. After Webster returned to Strongsville and told of his startling discovery, word quickly got around town and everybody thereafter referred to their shadowy, footloose neighbor as Doc Rockefeller—doubtless with some mirth. The moniker stuck.

In the fall of 1853, after eight months in Strongsville, Big Bill decided that the time had come for John and William to resume their educations, so he drove them into Cleveland and settled them as boarders with a Mrs. Woodin on Erie Street, where they paid a dollar a week for room and board. John was penalized by the Cleveland schools because his family had moved around so much. In the sole extant reference to the matter, he wrote in 1923, “I had just come from New York State and recall my humiliation in being obliged to remain one term in the old Clinton Street School—I had been for several years in the Owego Academy　...　and supposed I should go at once into the High School instead of the Grammar School.” ³ For this proud boy, the demotion must have been one of many small but wounding indignities suffered during these anxious years.

When John finally entered high school (later called Central High School) in 1854 at the age of fifteen, it was still a modest, one-story affair, shaded by trees and standing behind a clean white picket fence; it would receive a much fancier new building in 1856. Operating on the progressive theory of free education for boys and girls, the school enjoyed a superb reputation. Since it stressed composition, John had to submit essays on four topics to advance to the next grade: “Education,” “Freedom,” “The Character of St. Patrick,” and “Recollections of the Past.” At a time when America was deeply split over the question of extending slavery to new territories—the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in May 1854—these writings exhibit Rockefeller as a young democrat and confirmed abolitionist. In “Freedom,” he branded it a “violation of the laws of our country and the laws of our God that man should hold his fellow man in bondage.” Unless slavery was curbed speedily, he prophesied, it “will end in the ruin of our country.” ⁴ America would only progress, he believed, with an educated citizenry. “In former times when learning was confined to the monks and priests, then it was that the world stood still, and it was not until the people were educated and began to think for themselves that it progressed.” ⁵ Such views on abolitionism and universal literacy echoed those of northern Baptist evangelicals who scorned political no less than ecclesiastical despotism. As a self-made man, Rockefeller would always deplore aristocracies and priesthoods as effete, reactionary foes of true progress, defenders of privilege against enterprising commoners.

Rockefeller expressed himself with great clarity and precision. (Schoolmates called him “John D.” because he signed his essays this way.) He also excelled as a debater, demonstrating that beneath his reserved manner he could articulate his thoughts forcefully. He began one speech with the line “I'm pleased although I'm sad,” and this gambit so tickled his fellow students that they nicknamed him “Old Pleased-Although-I'm-Sad.” ⁶ He bore another, equally doleful nickname, “the Deacon,” and it says much about his preferences that he actually liked this sobriquet. As his future sister-in-law, Lucy Spelman, said, “He was a studious boy, grave, reserved, never noisy or given to boisterous play.” ⁷ Rockefeller frequently hugged his slate to his chest, a pose that hinted at his guarded nature.

However private or solitary, John D. always had his quota of friends. One close chum was Mark Hanna, the descendant of well-to-do grocers and commodity brokers and later a U.S. senator and Republican Party boss. Another friend, Darwin Jones, who formed a boyhood triumvirate with them, recalled the sharply etched contrast between Hanna and Rockefeller. “Mark was of the virile type, always active and took part in almost all forms of athletics, while John Rockefeller was reserved, studious, though always pleasant. No matter what the excitement, John retained his quietude and smiled on all occasions.” ⁸ In future years, Rockefeller cringed when Mark Hanna was quoted posthumously as describing him as “sane in every respect save one—he is money mad!” ⁹ As at Owego Academy, classmates in Cleveland remembered Rockefeller voicing the fervent wish to be worth a hundred thousand dollars someday.

John's boyhood gravity pleased many adults but unsettled others, who found something queer and unnatural about him. One high-school teacher described him, with patent distaste, as “the coldest blooded, the quietest and most deliberate chap.” ¹⁰ Even as a teenager, Rockefeller demanded to be treated with adult dignity. In recollecting the school principal, Dr. Emerson E. White, Rockefeller mentioned only his behavior toward him: “Mr. White was a gentleman. He treated me like a gentleman—and treated all the boys so.” ¹¹ Rockefeller was sensitive about adults who behaved in a high-handed fashion toward him. Having assumed so much responsibility at home, he now thought of himself as a mature person. Bill had set him up with his own bank account, and his life was far more independent than those of his classmates.

This tough, self-possessed boy had no tincture of rebellion in his makeup. Seeing his education solely in utilitarian terms, he studied hard but showed no intellectual playfulness. “I was very sedate and earnest,” he said, “preparing to meet the responsibilities of life.” ¹² Once again, he displayed a fantastic mind for numbers. “Arithmetical problems most attracted him,” said Lucy Spelman, “for he had been taught at home to keep accurate account of his gains and losses.” ¹³

Perhaps the most surprising dimension of John D.'s early adolescence was his deep absorption in music. He even briefly aspired to be a musician and practiced the piano for up to six hours a day, driving Eliza mad with the racket while they still lived in Owego. The piano was then the symbol of a decorous middle-class home and his playing might have hinted at his genteel aspirations. For a man who would distrust other art forms as vaguely subversive, encouraging ungovernable emotions and pagan sensuality, music provided him with an artistic medium that he could wholeheartedly enjoy with church approval.

For the teenage boy, Mrs. Woodin's boardinghouse was an education in itself. Her daughter, Martha, was several years older than John and William, and they engaged in lively, heated discussions on many topics, with the bright, outspoken Mrs. Woodin often joining in. The most controversial topic was lending money at interest. In an extremely peculiar arrangement, John, age fifteen, was already lending small sums to his father at interest; never sentimental when it came to business, he simply charged his father what the traffic would bear—a practice Bill probably applauded enthusiastically. According to Rockefeller, Mrs. Woodin was “violently opposed to loaners obtaining high rates of interest, and we had frequent and earnest arguments on the subject.” ¹⁴ It was typical of Rockefeller that this question of business method and morality occupied his attention far more than the esoteric matters found in schoolbooks.

As if embarrassed by his peripatetic family life, Rockefeller tended to oversimplify the chronology of his early years, especially when speaking of his adolescence. After a year in Strongsville, John claimed, his family moved to Parma, about seven miles south of Cleveland, then into their own house in Cleveland proper. In fact, he omitted a critical two-step Cleveland detour before the shift to Parma, as can be gleaned from a revealing anecdote told by his school principal, Dr. White: “One day in 1854 a tall, angular boy came to me and said that his widowed mother and two sisters were coming to Cleveland to live and he wished my help in finding a temporary home for them.” The good-natured White invited the Rockefellers to move in with him and his new bride, and John “liked the idea and always insisted that it was a happy time for his mother.” ¹⁵

Two words leap from the story— widowed mother . It seems of some psychological significance that the first recorded instance of Rockefeller's capacity to lie came in an effort to hush up his father's existence—in fact, to bury him alive. Since Bill popped up in Cleveland three or four times a year, it took a certain cheek for his son to invent this story. The small episode acquires added interest when one notes that more than thirty years later, when Eliza died before Bill did, John instructed the preacher to describe her as a widow at the funeral. Further, despite the principal's gracious response, it must have been perfectly dreadful for John, as a teenager, to go on a begging mission to find temporary lodgings for his family.

When Bill reappeared, he moved his family to a house on Perry Street in downtown Cleveland, rented from a Mr. O. J. Hodge, who remembered John as “an unassuming youth who showed none of the hilarity often seen in boys of that age. Usually he sat quietly in his chair listening to what was being said.” ¹⁶ As had been true since the Richford days, Bill was scrupulous about making timely rent payments. “Never was rent—$200 for a year—paid more promptly, nor did I have in all respects a better tenant,” said the landlord. ¹⁷ Before the year was out, Bill had resettled his family on a ten-acre, creek-side farm in Parma while John returned to Mrs. Woodin, who had relocated first to Saint Clair Street and then to Hamilton Street.

A contemporary photo of John with his two sisters and two brothers, all of them unsmiling, is again drenched in a mortuary gloom. Now a tall, thin boy who weighed about 140 pounds, John had tidily brushed light brown hair and clothes that were always clean and presentable. He later laughed at his solemn boyhood demeanor: “From fourteen years of age to twenty-five I was much more dignified than I am now,” he said with truth in his seventies. ¹⁸ In Strongsville and Parma, Eliza fretted about the ubiquitous taverns in town and worked hard to shield her children from illicit entertainments. She must have been especially alarmed as her eldest son approached that perilous rite of passage, first love. Interestingly, John D. reenacted his father's penchant for dalliances with the domestic help. In Strongsville, Eliza hired a household assistant, a pretty young farmer's daughter named Melinda Miller, who did chores for the family and shared their meals. When the Rockefellers moved to Parma, Melinda resumed working for them, and John, a year younger than she, often came out from Cleveland to take walks with her. Rumors soon drifted about town that John had taken away the girl's virginity. Whatever the truth, the Millers raised an unholy ruckus about the romance. 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. According to legend, one of Melinda's parents came to fetch her by buggy to break up the liaison. Eventually, she married young Joe Webster, whose father had discovered Big Bill's doctor act. ¹⁹ From the standpoint of Rockefeller's career, the failure of this relationship was fortunate, for he ended up with a woman of much greater social standing and intellectual attainment, who would provide him with the strong, stable home life and religious certitude that he craved.

At this point, we need to sketch in some events in William Avery Rockefeller's life in the early 1850s, for his behavior began to shade over from the eccentric to the quasi-pathological. A man of multiple disguises, he had always been fond of assuming names; even when he first arrived in Richford, he had told some people that his name was Rockafellow. During the Owego years, Bill occasionally appeared in surrounding towns and presented himself as an eye-and-ear specialist named Dr. William Levingston. We know now that by the time he transplanted his family to Ohio, he was leading a full-blown double life as both Dr. William A. Rockefeller and Dr. William Levingston, the latter name appropriated from the town of his father's birth, Livingston, New York. While this second name probably began as a simple alias to shield his family from his shady practices, it hardened in the early 1850s into a separate identity away from home. Bill's traveling partner in his later years attributed Bill's use of the pseudonym to the fact that he was practicing medicine without a license or diploma and always feared retribution from indignant local doctors, who instigated legal proceedings against him on several occasions. ²⁰

In the last gasp of his lumber career, Bill had ventured north into Canada in the early 1850s, buying up fine walnut and ash and selling it at a handsome profit to timber mills. After he moved to the town of Niagara, Ontario (almost certainly without his family's knowledge), he began to canvass the surrounding countryside as a traveling doctor. “Dr. Levingston” was a blatant quack, but he partially believed his own bombast and had enough success stories to deceive his patients and perhaps even himself. As his future partner said, “He had not studied medicine in any college. But he was a natural healer and had great skill. He had great fame in Canada and northern New York.” ²¹

Devil Bill had an unerring instinct for spotting those pretty, docile, long-suffering women who would patiently endure his escapades. Around 1852, with his oblivious family still in Owego, he met a lovely, gentle teenage girl in Norwich, Ontario, named Margaret Allen. Bill was then forty-two and Margaret about seventeen, or only four years older than John D. By a small oversight, Dr. Levingston neglected to mention his other life as Doc Rockefeller, to say nothing of his wife and five children, and he wooed Margaret like a lusty bachelor. Bill was an expert confidence man, and Margaret's trusting family was totally fooled. “He was a steady, temperate man of good habits, kind hearted, sociable and well liked by everybody,” said Margaret's sister of this jolly wooer. “He was a famous marksman and loved to hunt. He was fond of a good story.” ²² Doc Levingston was clearly more popular with the Allens than Doc Rockefeller had been with the Davisons, and Bill was tempted to start afresh with an adoring, innocent young woman, supported by a friendly family. On June 12, 1855, he married Margaret Allen in Nichols, New York, just south of Owego, and started a clandestine life as a bigamist that would persist for the rest of his days.

One can plausibly argue that every time Bill moved his family to another town, it related to his secret philandering, and that he probably relocated his family in Cleveland because Ontario lay just across Lake Erie. True to his earlier behavior, Bill didn't take up permanent residence with Margaret at first. To initiate her into his capricious ways, he started out by visiting her in Ontario once a year and staying with her credulous family. He didn't plan, at the outset, to desert his original family, and for a time in the 1850s Bill continued to tread a tightrope between his old and new wives, neither of whom knew of the existence of the other.

It seems likely that Bill's second marriage had immediate repercussions in the life of his oldest son. All along John had planned to attend college, with Eliza fortifying his resolve in the hope that he would someday become a Baptist minister. Then he received a letter from his father that dispelled his dreams. As he recalled, “My father　...　conveyed an intimation that I was not to go [to college]. I felt at once that I must get to work, find a situation somewhere.” ²³ Rockefeller never clarified why he dropped out of high school around May 1855, just two months shy of commencement exercises on July 16, but Bill's second marriage on June 12 supplies the missing piece of the puzzle. About to enter into his second marriage, Bill must have been drastically scaling back on first-family expenditures, albeit without disclosing the reason for the sudden urgency. As John said, “There were younger brothers and sisters to educate and it seemed wise for me to go into business.” ²⁴ Bill was eager to groom his eldest son as the surrogate father who would care for Eliza during his longer absences.

Never a great believer in book learning, Bill probably derided a college degree as a costly indulgence at a time when people didn't equate it with enhanced income. Young men on the make were more likely to attend so-called business colleges or to take correspondence courses to supplement their education. Following his father's suggestion, John paid forty dollars for a three-month course of study at E. G. Folsom's Commercial College, a chain college with branches in seven cities. The Cleveland branch occupied the top floor of the Rouse Building, the town's premier office building, which overlooked the Public Square. It taught double-entry bookkeeping, clear penmanship, and the essentials of banking, exchange, and commercial law—the sort of purposeful courses that appealed to John. By the time his studies ended in the summer of 1855, he had turned sixteen and was ready to flee the traumas of his family life by focusing his energies on a promising business situation.

Perhaps no job search in American history has been so mythologized as that begun by sixteen-year-old John D. Rockefeller in the sweltering Cleveland of August 1855. Although he was a rural boy, his family hadn't been full-time farmers, and this must have made it easier for him to escape from his small-town, agricultural past and enter the new market economy. Though times were tough, the boy set out with no modest ambition as he pored over the city directory, identifying those establishments with high credit ratings. Already endowed with instinctive respect for big business, he knew exactly what he wanted. “I went to the railroads, to the banks, to the wholesale merchants,” he later said. “I did not go to any small establishments. I did not guess what it would be, but I was after something big.” ²⁵ Most of the businesses he visited lay in a bustling area known as the Flats, where the Cuyahoga River twisted through a clanging, roaring landscape of lumber mills, iron foundries, warehouses, and shipyards before emptying into Lake Erie, which was crowded with side-wheel steamboats and schooners. His quest had a touch of callow grandiosity. At each firm, he asked to speak to the top man—who was usually unavailable—then got straight to the point with an assistant: “I understand bookkeeping, and I'd like to get work.” ²⁶

Despite incessant disappointment, he doggedly pursued a position. Each morning, he left his boardinghouse at eight o'clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his rounds of appointed firms. This grimly determined trek went on each day—six days a week for six consecutive weeks—until late in the afternoon. The streets were so hot and hard that he grew footsore from pacing them. His perseverance surely owed something to his desire to end his reliance upon his fickle father. At one point, Bill suggested that if John didn't find work he might have to return to the country; the thought of such dependence upon his father made “a cold chill” run down his spine, Rockefeller later said. ²⁷ Because he approached his job hunt devoid of any doubt or self-pity, he could stare down all discouragement. “I was working every day at my business—the business of looking for work. I put in my full time at this every day.” ²⁸ He was a confirmed exponent of positive thinking.

With almost thirty thousand inhabitants, Cleveland was a boomtown that would have thrilled any young man avid for business experience. It had drawn many transplants from New England who had brought along the Puritan mores and Yankee trading culture of their old hometowns. While the streets were largely unpaved and the town lacked a sewage system, Cleveland was expanding rapidly, with immigrants pouring in from Germany and England as well as the eastern seaboard. The plenty of the Midwest passed through this commercial crossroads of the Western Reserve: coal from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, iron ore from around Lake Superior, salt from Michigan, grain and corn from the plains states. As a port on Lake Erie and the Ohio Canal, Cleveland was a natural hub for transportation networks. When the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad arrived in 1851, it created excellent opportunities for transport by both water and rail, and nobody would more brilliantly exploit these options than John D. Rockefeller.

For all the thriving waterfront commerce, the job prospects were momentarily bleak. “No one wanted a boy, and very few showed any overwhelming anxiety to talk with me on the subject,” said Rockefeller. ²⁹ When he exhausted his list, he simply started over from the top and visited several firms two or three times. Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.

Then, on the morning of September 26, 1855, he walked into the offices of Hewitt and Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers on Merwin Street. He was interviewed by Henry B. Tuttle, the junior partner, who needed help with the books and asked him to return after lunch. Ecstatic, Rockefeller walked with restraint from the office, but when he got downstairs and rounded the corner, he skipped down the street with pure joy. Even as an elderly man, he saw the moment as endowed with high drama: “All my future seemed to hinge on that day; and I often tremble when I ask myself the question: ‘What if I had not got the job?’　” ³⁰ In a “fever of anxiety,” Rockefeller waited until the noonday meal was over, then returned to the office, where he was interviewed by senior partner Isaac L. Hewitt. Owner of a good deal of Cleveland real estate and a founder of the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, Hewitt must have seemed a mighty capitalist indeed. After scrutinizing the boy's penmanship, he declared, “We'll give you a chance.” ³¹ They were evidently in urgent need of an assistant bookkeeper, since they told Rockefeller to hang up his coat and go straight to work, without any mention of wages. In those days, it wasn't unusual for an adolescent to serve an unpaid apprenticeship, and it was three months before John received his first humble, retroactive pay. For the rest of his life, he would honor September 26 as “Job Day” and celebrate it with more genuine brio than his birthday. One is tempted to say that his real life began on that day, that he was born again in business as he would be in the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. All the latent dynamism that had been dormant during his country youth would now quicken into robust, startling life in the business world. He was finally liberated from Big Bill, the endless flight from town to town, the whole crazy upside-down world of his boyhood.

Poised on a high stool, bent over musty ledger books at Hewitt and Tuttle, the new clerk could gaze from the window and watch the busy wharves or canal barges drifting by on the Cuyahoga River a block away. Though his day began at dawn, in an office lit dimly by whale-oil lamps, this mercantile world never struck him as arid or boring but “was delightful to me—all the method and system of the office.” ³² Work enchanted him, work liberated him, work supplied him with a new identity. “My duties were vastly more interesting than those of an office boy in a large house today,” he later said. ³³ The mature Rockefeller liked to dub himself “just a man of figures,” and he found nothing dry or soporific about the tall ledgers. ³⁴ Having helped Eliza keep the books, he enjoyed a head start. “As I began my life as a bookkeeper, I learned to have great respect for figures and facts, no matter how small they were. ... I had a passion for detail which afterward I was forced to strive to modify.” ³⁵

Business historians and sociologists have stressed the centrality of accounting to capitalist enterprise. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , Max Weber identified “rational bookkeeping” as integral to capitalism's spirit and organization. ³⁶ For Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism “turns the unit of money into a tool of rational cost-profit calculations, of which the towering monument is double-entry bookkeeping.” ³⁷ It thus seems fitting that John D. Rockefeller, the archetypal capitalist, betrayed a special affinity for accounting and an almost mystic faith in numbers. For Rockefeller, ledgers were sacred books that guided decisions and saved one from fallible emotion. They gauged performance, exposed fraud, and ferreted out hidden inefficiencies. In an imprecise world, they rooted things in a solid empirical reality. As he chided slipshod rivals, “Many of the brightest kept their books in such a way that they did not actually know when they were making money on a certain operation and when they were losing.”

When Hewitt and Tuttle assigned Rockefeller to pay the bills, he went at this task with an undisguised zeal, a precocious virtuosity, and “attended [to it] with more responsibility than the spending of my own funds.” ³⁸ He closely reviewed the bills, confirming the validity of each item and carefully adding up the totals. He pounced on errors of even a few cents and reacted with scornful amazement when the boss next door handed his clerk a lengthy, unexamined plumbing bill and blithely said, “Please pay this bill.” ³⁹ Rockefeller was appalled by such cavalier indifference, having just caught the same firm in an overcharge of several cents. One suspects that this stickler for detail taught Hewitt and Tuttle a thing or two about economy. “I recall that there was one captain who was always putting in claims for damages to shipments and I decided to investigate. I examined all the invoices, bills of lading and other documents and found this captain had presented entirely unwarranted claims. He never did it again.” ⁴⁰ In all probability, the boy's orderly nature reflected a need to govern potentially unruly emotions, an exaggerated reaction to his disorderly father and helter-skelter childhood.

Besides writing letters, keeping books, and paying bills, young Rockefeller also served as a one-man collection agency for Hewitt's rental properties. Although patient and polite, he displayed a bulldog tenacity that took people by surprise. Sitting outside in his buggy, pale and patient as an undertaker, he would wait until the debtor capitulated. He dunned people as if his life depended upon it, an experience apparently laced with considerable anxiety. “How many times I have dreamed now and then up to recent years that I was trying to collect those bills!” he marveled fifty years later. “I would wake up exclaiming: ‘I can't collect So-and-So's account!’　” ⁴¹ One explanation for his anxiety is that his flight from his distressing family life was still tenuous, and failure at work would mean reverting to reliance on his father. Another explanation is that while he was persistent, he was also extremely slow; as at school, some people thought him a rather dim-witted dolt who would never rise in the world, and he had to prove himself to naysayers.

However modest an operation, Hewitt and Tuttle was an excellent training ground for an aspiring young businessman, for it exposed Rockefeller to a broad commercial universe. Before the Civil War, most businesses still confined themselves to a single service or product. Hewitt and Tuttle, in contrast, traded a wide array of commodities on commission. Though it had started out dealing in foodstuffs, it had pioneered in importing iron ore from Lake Superior three years before Rockefeller was hired. The firm relied upon the railroad and the telegraph, the two technologies then revolutionizing the American economy. As Rockefeller remarked, “My eyes were opened to the business of transportation”—no small thing, given Standard Oil's subsequent controversial relations with the railroads. ⁴² Even a simple consignment of Vermont marble to Cleveland required complex calculations of the relative costs of railroad, canal, and lake transportation. “The cost of losses or damage had to be somehow fixed between these three different carriers, and it taxed all the ingenuity of a boy of 17 to work out this problem to the satisfaction of all concerned, including my employers.” ⁴³ No business experience was ever wasted upon Rockefeller.

On the last day of 1855, Hewitt handed Rockefeller $50 for three months of work, or slightly more than 50 cents a day. Effective immediately, Hewitt announced, the assistant bookkeeper would have his wages boosted sharply to $25 a month or $300 per year. Oddly, Rockefeller felt guilty about the raise: “I felt like a criminal.” ⁴⁴ Again, one has a hunch that he was jubilant but feared, out of religious scruples, his own greed. Accumulating money was one thing, Rockefeller knew, but outwardly coveting it was another.

In many ways, John D. Rockefeller exemplified the enterprising young businessman of his era. Thrifty, punctual, industrious, he was a fervent adherent of the gospel of success. He could have been the hero of any of the 119 inspirational tracts soon to be penned by Horatio Alger, Jr., books that bore such sonorous titles as Strive and Succeed, Luck and Pluck, Brave and Bold , and Bound to Rise . This last title, in fact, echoed Rockefeller's ecstatic boast to an older businessman one day: “I am bound to be rich—bound to be rich—BOUND TO BE RICH!” He was said to have punctuated this refrain by several smart, emphatic whacks on his companion's knee. ⁴⁵ And John D. didn't become demonstrative about too many topics.

Though Rockefeller steadfastly denied these stories of his boyhood obsession with money, he related the following story of his time at Hewitt and Tuttle:

In this story, one can almost feel the erotic charge that the banknote aroused in the boy, the way it cast a hypnotic trance over him. One is reminded of how Big Bill bundled his bills, stored them away, then enjoyed peeking at his hidden treasure. This lusting after money is the more striking in a phlegmatic young man who claimed never to struggle with disruptive impulses. “I never had a craving for tobacco, or tea and coffee,” he once stated flatly. “I never had a craving for anything.” ⁴⁷

If motivated by greed more than he ever cared to admit, Rockefeller also derived a glandular pleasure from work and never found it cheerless drudgery. In fact, the business world entranced him as a fount of inexhaustible wonders. “It is by no means for money alone that these active-minded men labor—they are engaged in a fascinating occupation,” he wrote in his memoirs, published in 1908–1909. “The zest of the work is maintained by something better than the mere accumulation of money.” ⁴⁸

Because American culture encouraged—nay, glorified—acquisitive behavior, there was always the possibility that it might be taken to extremes and people would end up enslaved by their greed. As a result, children were taught to monitor and supervise their behavior. In his posthumously published Autobiography , Benjamin Franklin describes how he drew up a little moral ledger that allowed him, at a glance, to track his virtues and vices every day. Many people in the mid–nineteenth century kept such journals to enforce thrift and also objectify their moral performance. Adolescents kept diaries larded with pep talks, exhortations, inspirations, and warnings. Andrew Carnegie wrote hortatory memos to himself, while William C. Whitney kept a small notebook of little homilies. A contradictory impulse was at work: People were spurring themselves to excel but also trying to curb their insatiable appetites in the new competitive economy.

John D. Rockefeller took such internal monitoring to an advanced stage. Like a good Puritan, he scrutinized his daily activities and regulated his desires, hoping to banish spontaneity and unpredictability from his life. Whenever his ambition was about to devour him, his conscience urged restraint. Since he worked a long day at Hewitt and Tuttle, business threatened to become an overwhelming compulsion. Starting work each day at 6:30 A.M. , he brought a box lunch to the office and often returned after dinner, staying late. One day he decided to throttle this obsession. “I have this day covenanted with myself not to be seen in [the office] after 10 o'clock P.M. within 30 days,” he wrote to himself. ⁴⁹ It is telling that the young man made such a pledge to himself and equally revealing that he found it impossible to obey.

No less than his business life, Rockefeller's private life was ruled by bookkeeping entries. Since he found numbers so clean and soothing in their simplicity, he applied the business principles of Hewitt and Tuttle to his own personal economy. When he started working in September 1855, he paid a dime for a small red book, anointed Ledger A, in which he minutely recorded his receipts and expenditures. Many of his young contemporaries kept such record books but seldom with such exacting care. For the remainder of his life, Rockefeller treated Ledger A as his most sacred relic. Producing it before Bible classes more than fifty years later, he became almost tearful and trembled as he thumbed its pages, so potent were the emotions it evoked. At a Bible class of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in 1897, a deeply moved Rockefeller held the book aloft and intoned, “I haven't seen this book for twenty-five years. You couldn't get it from me for all the modern ledgers in New York and what they all would bring in.” ⁵⁰ The book rested in a safety-deposit vault, like some priceless heirloom.

As Ledger A confirms, Rockefeller was now self-supporting and entirely free of his father, spending half his income for his lodging with Mrs. Woodin and for a washerwoman. He took pride in memories of this threadbare adolescence. “I could not secure the most fashionable cut of clothing. I remember I bought mine then from a cheap clothier. He sold me clothing cheap such as I could pay for and it was a great deal better than buying clothes I could not pay for.” ⁵¹ He was long puzzled by one lapse from strict economy: He bought a pair of fur gloves for $2.50 to replace his customary woolen mittens and, at age ninety, was still clucking his tongue over this shocking extravagance. “No, I can't say to this day what caused me to waste that $2.50 on regular gloves.” ⁵² Another expense pregnant with interest for the mature Rockefeller was his purchase of an illuminant called camphene for eighty-eight cents per gallon. Thanks to massive economies of scale, Standard Oil eventually sold a superior illuminant, kerosene, for five cents a gallon—something Rockefeller was wont to recall when people later accused him of gouging the populace.

In one critical respect, Rockefeller didn't exaggerate the value of Ledger A, for it spoke authoritatively to the question of whether he was a rapacious man who later misused charity to cleanse a “tainted” fortune. Here Ledger A speaks with a firm and unequivocal voice: Rockefeller was fantastically charitable from boyhood. During his first year on the job, the young clerk donated about 6 percent of his wages to charity, some weeks much more. “I have my earliest ledger and when I was only making a dollar a day I was giving five, ten, or twenty-five cents to all these objects,” he observed. ⁵³ He gave to the Five Points Mission in a notorious lower Manhattan slum, as well as to “a poor man in church” and “a poor woman in church.” ⁵⁴ By 1859, when he was twenty, his charitable giving surpassed the 10 percent mark. Despite a pronounced tilt toward Baptist causes, he gave early hints of an ecumenical bent, contributing money to a black man in Cincinnati in 1859 so he could buy his wife out of slavery. The next year, he gave to a black church, a Methodist church, and a Catholic orphanage.

The clerk's philanthropic gifts were as salient as his business talents. It testifies to Rockefeller's deeply paradoxical nature that he was smitten by a $4,000 banknote but equally entranced by an 1855 book entitled Extracts from the Diary and Correspondence of the Late Amos Lawrence . A wealthy New England textile manufacturer, Lawrence gave away more than $100,000 in a planned, thoughtful fashion. “I remember how fascinated I was with his letters,” said Rockefeller, who might have gotten from Lawrence his later habit of handing out freshly minted money to people. “Crisp bills! I could see and hear them. I made up my mind that, if I could manage it, some day I would give away crisp bills, too.” ⁵⁵ However rare and admirable such thoughts are in a teenage boy, we must note that it was again a case of money exerting a magical effect upon his mind. He saw that money could bring majesty in the moral as well as secular sphere, which excited him more than fancy estates or clothes.

As if he knew he would someday be rich and had to prepare for the appointed hour, the assistant bookkeeper became a perceptive observer of the businessmen around the port and noted their avoidance of ostentation. For instance, he tremendously admired a shipping merchant named L. R. Morris and was struck “by the way he walked, the way he looked, quite unaffected by his great riches. I saw other wealthy men, and I was glad to see that they went about their business without any display of power or money. Later I saw some who wore rich jewels and luxurious clothes. It seemed unfortunate that they were led into such lavish style.” If Rockefeller kept to a Quakerish sobriety of dress and later resisted the vulgar display of the Vanderbilts and other Gilded Age moguls, with their elaborate mansions and yachts, it had something to do with his Baptist beliefs, but also with the plain, understated style of the wealthy Cleveland businessmen he studied so attentively at a formative stage of his life.

Like innumerable young people before him, Rockefeller turned to the church for all-encompassing answers to intractable family problems. He possessed a sense of calling in both religion and business, with Christianity and capitalism forming the twin pillars of his life. While Charles Darwin's Origin of Species began to chip away at many people's faith after it was published in 1859, Rockefeller's religion remained of the simple, undeviating sort. When challenges to orthodoxy arose in later decades, he stuck by the spiritual certainties of his boyhood. Because of his father's often unscrupulous behavior, the young clerk was ripe for fiery denunciations of sin and the talk of personal salvation and moral reformation that were then staples of Baptist discourse. From the beginning, his Baptist faith served as a powerful instrument to control forbidden feelings and check his father's unruly nature within him. After the constant flux of his childhood, he yearned to be rooted in a church that would act as his substitute family but without the shameful aspects of his real one.

While John and William boarded with Mrs. Woodin and her daughter, Martha, the four of them began to attend a poor, struggling church nearby called the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. Organized three years earlier by the well-heeled First Baptist Church, the mission church was a spare white building with a belfry and tall narrow windows, standing in a flat, treeless space. Several religious revivals had rolled through Cleveland in the 1850s, and the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church was created in the aftermath of a revival meeting that lasted 150 consecutive nights.

The church gave Rockefeller the community of friends he craved and the respect and affection he needed. Having studied in Deacon Alexander Sked's Bible class, Rockefeller was recruited to the church by Sked, a florist by trade, a poetical Scot who loved to spout psalms and prophecies and seemed to know the whole Bible by heart. Born in Scotland in 1780, Sked arrived in America in 1831 and moved to Cleveland four years later. During services, he would lift his hands in supplication to God, his face shining with fervor. This pious, elderly man served as a mentor to Rockefeller, who sought him out to report the good news when he got his job at Hewitt and Tuttle, an encounter that produced an unexpected snub that Rockefeller never forgot. “Before I went away, he remarked that he liked me pretty well, but that he had always liked my brother William better. I could never think why he said that. I did not hold it against him, but it puzzled me.” ⁵⁶

In the fall of 1854, after making a personal confession of faith, John was immersed in the baptismal basin by Deacon Sked and became a full-fledged church member. Never a snob, Rockefeller was proud of being “brought up in a mission church.” ⁵⁷ Notwithstanding his worldly ambition, he didn't seek social shortcuts to success by joining a prosperous congregation or a high-church denomination. As a loner and outsider, he was drawn by the warm fellowship of the faithful and liked the egalitarian atmosphere of the Erie Street church, which gave him the opportunity to associate, as he put it, with “people in the most humble of circumstances.” ⁵⁸ A central tenet of Baptism is the autonomy of individual congregations, and the mission churches, which weren't dominated by established families, were the most democratic of all. The Erie Street church was populated by salesmen, shop assistants, railroad conductors, factory workers, clerks, artisans, and others of extremely modest means. Even in its later, fancier incarnation as the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, the membership remained more plebeian than patrician. In his later years, Rockefeller declared, with heartfelt warmth, “How grateful I am that these associations were given to me in my early boyhood, that I was contented and happy with　...　the work in the church, with the work in the Sunday school, with the work with good people—that was my environment, and I thank God for it!” ⁵⁹

Instead of merely attending services, Rockefeller performed numberless tasks in the church. While still in his teens, he became a Sunday-school teacher, a trustee, and an unpaid clerk who kept the board minutes in his own hand. Free of false pride, he delighted even in menial chores, and one woman in the congregation left this vivid vignette of his ubiquitous presence:

One notes his proprietary feeling about the church, how lovingly he tended it. In some respects, he acted as a volunteer janitor, sweeping the austere chapel, washing the windows, replenishing the candles in wall sconces or stoking the corner base burner with wood. On Sundays, he rang the bell to summon people to prayer and kindled the fire and then, to economize, snuffed out all the candles save one as people filed from the service. “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. ⁶¹ 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. With a ripe baritone voice, refined by singing lessons at church, he boomed out hymns with deep joy. His favorite, “I've Found a Friend,” portrayed Jesus in tenderly familiar terms: “I've found a Friend; oh, such a Friend! / He bled, he died to save me.” ⁶²

In a world full of snares to entrap the unsuspecting pilgrim, Rockefeller tried hard to insulate himself from all temptation. As he later saw it, “a boy must ever be careful to avoid the temptations which beset him, to select carefully his associates and give attention as well to his spiritual and　...　mental and material interests.” ⁶³ Since evangelicals abstained from dancing, cards, and theater, Rockefeller restricted his private life to church socials and picnics, where he could play blindman's buff and engage in other innocent pastimes. As a model Baptist, he was sought after by the young ladies. “The girls all liked John immensely,” said one congregant. “Some of them came dangerously near to being in love with him. He was not especially attractive in his person and his clothes were strenuously plain and well worn. He was thought much of by these spiritual minded young women because of his goodness, his religious fervor, his earnestness and willingness in the church, and his apparent sincerity and honesty of purpose.” ⁶⁴

Over lemonade and cake at church socials, Rockefeller developed a close attachment to a pretty young woman named Emma Saunders, who chafed that John wouldn't broaden his social activities and insisted upon confining their dating to the church. For Rockefeller, the church was more than a set of theological positions: It was a fellowship of virtuous, like-minded people, and he always hesitated to stray too far from its protective embrace.

Though generally reserved, Rockefeller developed convivial habits in church that lingered for life, and it bothered him when people marched off right after the Sunday service. “There ought to be something that makes the church homelike,” he insisted. “Friends should be glad to see each other and to greet strangers.” ⁶⁵ Even in later years, when huge swarms of people congregated at the church door to glimpse the world's richest man, he would still clasp people's hands and bask in the glow of familial warmth. The handshake acquired symbolic meaning for him, for it was “the friendly hand extended to the man who doesn't know that he is wanted [that] brings many a one into the church. This early feeling about handshaking has stayed with me. All my life, I have enjoyed this thing that says: ‘I am your friend.’　” ⁶⁶

Just as Rockefeller was sensitive to condescending treatment in the business world, he couldn't stand it in the religious realm either. Since mission churches weren't self-financing, Rockefeller and other trustees had to submit to patronizing advice from the mother church. “This strengthened our resolve to show them that we could paddle our own canoe.” ⁶⁷ While Rockefeller's religious faith ran strong, he was most involved in the temporal affairs of the church, which he thought should be run like a tidy business. He soon had a chance to defend the church's solvency when it fell behind on interest payments on a $2,000 mortgage held by a deacon. One Sunday, the pastor announced from the pulpit that this creditor threatened to foreclose on the church and that they had to raise $2,000 very fast to survive. As the stunned congregation filed out, they found Rockefeller stationed at the door, buttonholing people and asking them to pledge specific amounts. “I pleaded, urged, and almost threatened. As each one promised, I put his name and the amount down in my little book, and continued to solicit from every possible subscriber.” ⁶⁸ Perhaps nothing in his early life so foreshadowed his unswerving pursuit of business goals. “The plan absorbed me,” he admitted. “I contributed what I could, and my first ambition to earn money was aroused by this and similar undertakings in which I was constantly engaged.” ⁶⁹ In a matter of months, he had raised $2,000 and saved the church. By age twenty, he had emerged as the second most important member of the congregation, surpassed only by the preacher.

With a mostly spartan country education and scant exposure to big-city culture, John D. Rockefeller's mind was largely furnished with precepts and phrases from his Baptist fundamentalist church. Throughout his life, he extracted from Christianity practical lessons for living and emphasized the utility of religion as a guide in mundane affairs. Over time, the American public would wonder how he squared his predatory bent with his religion, yet much that was preached in the church of his youth—at least as Rockefeller saw it—encouraged his moneymaking predilections. Far from placing obstacles in his path, the religion he encountered seemed to applaud him in his course, and he very much embodied the sometimes uneasy symbiosis between church and business that defined the emerging ethos of the post–Civil War American economy.

Rockefeller never wavered in his belief that his career was divinely favored and asserted bluntly, “God gave me my money.” ⁷⁰ During the decades that he taught Sunday-school classes, he found plenty of scriptural evidence to buttress this claim. (Of course, his critics would cite many contrary quotations, warning of the pernicious influence of wealth.) When Benjamin Franklin was a boy, his father had pounded into his head the proverb “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings,” and Rockefeller often presented this text to his class. Martin Luther had exhorted his congregation, “Even though [your work] seems very trivial and contemptible, make sure you regard it as great and precious, not on account of your worthiness, but because it has its place within that jewel and holy treasure, the Word and Commandment of God.” ⁷¹ Many eminent nineteenth-century theologians took the Calvinist view that wealth was a sign of God's grace and poverty a telltale sign of heavenly disfavor. Henry Ward Beecher, calling poverty the fault of the poor, proclaimed in a sermon that “generally the proposition is true, that where you find the most religion you find the most worldly prosperity.” ⁷²

As to why God had singled out John D. Rockefeller for such spectacular bounty, Rockefeller always adverted to his own adherence to the doctrine of stewardship—the notion of the wealthy man as a mere instrument of God, a temporary trustee of his money, who devoted it to good causes. “It has seemed as if I was favored and got increase because the Lord knew that I was going to turn around and give it back.” ⁷³ Rockefeller said this in his late seventies, and one wonders whether the equation between moneymaking and money giving only entered his mind later. Yet even as a teenager, he took palpable pleasure in distributing money for charitable purposes, and he insisted that from an early date he discerned the intimate spiritual link between earning and dispensing money. “I remember clearly when the financial plan—if I may call it so—of my life was formed. It was out in Ohio, under the ministration of a dear old minister, who preached, ‘Get money; get it honestly and then give it wisely.’ I wrote that down in a little book.” ⁷⁴ This echoed John Wesley's dictum, “If those who ‘gain all they can’ and ‘save all they can,’ will likewise ‘give all they can,’ then the more they will grow in grace.” ⁷⁵ Rockefeller operated by such spiritual double-entry bookkeeping, with his charity serving, in time, as incontestable proof of his fortune's purity. It might well be that his early commitment to charity gave him some inner license needed to pursue wealth with unparalleled—and at times unprincipled—vigor.

As Max Weber observed, ascetic Christianity was a matchless breeding ground for would-be businessmen. The practice of tithing, for instance, instilled habits of thrift, self-denial, and careful budgeting that were invaluable assets for any aspiring capitalist. John D. Rockefeller was the Protestant work ethic in its purest form, leading a life so consistent with Weber's classic essay that it reads like his spiritual biography. It might be useful to note some of Weber's aperçus that apply with especial force to Rockefeller. Weber argued that the Puritans had produced a religion that validated worldly activity, with “the making of money by acquisition as the ultimate purpose” of life. ⁷⁶ They approached business in a rational, methodical manner, banishing magic from the marketplace and reducing everything to method. Because prosperity was a sign of future salvation, the elect worked with special diligence to reassure themselves of God's favor. Even those who amassed great wealth continued to labor, since they worked, ostensibly, for God's glory, not for their own aggrandizement. The church didn't want to be in the position of promoting greed, so it circumvented this problem by legitimating the pursuit of money if channeled into a calling—that is, the steady dedication to a productive task. Once a person discovered his calling, he was supposed to apply himself with all-consuming devotion, the money thus acquired being deemed a sign of God's blessing.

One by-product of the emphasis on a calling was that Puritans relegated activities outside the religious and economic sphere to a lesser order of importance. The believer wasn't supposed to search for pleasure beyond the sheltered confines of family, church, and business, and the gravest sins were wasting time, indulging in idle chatter, and wallowing in luxurious diversions. Bent on making money, the good Puritan had to restrain his impulses instead of gratifying them. As Weber remarked, “Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less in spirit. Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.” ⁷⁷ That is, the man who would be rich must be thrifty. People had to regulate their lives, Weber argued, so that self-abnegation could bring forth plenty. A fateful contradiction lay at the heart of this Puritan culture, for the virtues of godly people made them rich, and these riches, in turn, threatened to undermine that godliness. As Cotton Mather declared of the Plymouth colony in the 1690s, “Religion begot prosperity, and the daughters devoured the mother.” ⁷⁸ This contradiction posed a central dilemma for John D. Rockefeller and his descendants, who would struggle tirelessly against the baneful effects of wealth.

Of the four principal groups of ascetic Protestants analyzed by Weber, we should note, the Baptists alone rejected predestination and therefore couldn't construe wealth as an infallible sign of God's favor. On the other hand, as Weber pointed out, certain Baptist tenets prepared its adherents to prosper in the marketplace. Abhorring religious idolatry, demoting sacraments as a means to salvation, Baptism fostered a rational outlook that was well suited to advancement in capitalist society. Rockefeller was convinced that he had a God-given talent for making money, was obligated to develop it, and was liberally rewarded by God—all compatible with Baptist doctrine. For this reason, he found religion far more of a spur than a hindrance to his ambitions. Where others saw him as an anomaly in a denomination that always welcomed working people and harbored a faint distrust of the rich, he never saw any such contradiction.

Before leaving Rockefeller's early Baptist indoctrination, we should note that the economic climate of his adolescence must have deepened his religious convictions. In 1857, while he was still at Hewitt and Tuttle, America fell into an economic slump. The proximate cause was the end of the Crimean War in 1856, which dealt a blow to American farmers who had profited from the war. On a more profound level, the crisis capped a decade of frantic speculation in railroad securities and land, stoked by heavy borrowing. As five thousand businesses failed and hundreds of thousands of workers were idled, the exuberant boosterism of the 1850s was suddenly and dramatically quelled.

As happened in the Great Depression of the 1930s, people were shocked that an effervescent economy could stall so woefully. As one contemporary observer put it, “It seems indeed strange that in the very midst of apparent health and strength　...　the whole country　...　should suddenly come to a dead stop and be unable to move forward—and that we should suddenly wake up from our dreams of wealth and happiness, and find ourselves poor and bankrupt.” ⁷⁹ A wave of hysterical breast-beating ensued, with President James Buchanan insisting that the crisis came “solely from our extravagant and vicious system of paper currency and bank credits, exciting the people to wild speculations and gambling in stocks.” ⁸⁰

Rather than blaming the business cycle, many evangelical Christians interpreted the downturn as divine punishment for a society grown lax, worldly, and dissolute. One Boston reformer descried redeeming features in the slump, hoping it would “teach good and much needed lessons　...　and will reduce all things here to a more sober, sound, and healthy condition.” ⁸¹ The mood of national self-flagellation prompted a religious upsurge known as the Businessmen's Revival. In 1857, businessmen gathered in many cities for lunchtime prayer meetings where they publicly swore off drink and other indulgences. During this massive outpouring of repentance, evangelical churches recruited tens of thousands of new members. The shift from euphoria to depression in the business sphere—mirrored by a shift from sin to salvation in the religious sphere—probably strengthened Rockefeller's innate conservatism as a fledgling businessman while bolstering his already deep-seated Baptist inclinations. As he said, “What a school—the school of adversity and stress—to train a boy in!” ⁸²

Whatever the general misery caused by the 1857 panic, William Avery Rockefeller's medical road show thrived that year, and he briefly managed to support and juggle two marriages. In the spring of 1856, Bill had surfaced again in Cleveland, rooming with John and William at Mrs. Woodin's while scouting out a permanent home for his family. He was residing intermittently with Margaret Allen's family in Ontario, posing as Dr. William Levingston, and now had to make some final disposition before he deserted his first wife and children for good. When he found a roomy brick house for rent at 35 Cedar Street, equipped with such luxuries as indoor toilet and bathroom, he brought Eliza and the children in from Parma. John and William moved out of Mrs. Woodin's place and were reunited with their family. At this point, Bill decided that John should contribute to the family upkeep and pay him the same rent he had given to Mrs. Woodin.

In 1857, Bill decided to build for his family a substantial brick house on Cheshire Street in downtown Cleveland, a farewell gift that would enable him to abscond with a clear conscience. “In 1857 my father told me to build a house,” said John D., giving the story a positive gloss. “It was a lesson in self-reliance. He handed me the money, told me the sort of house he wanted and left all the details of the business to me. I drew plans, got the material, found a builder, and built the house.” ⁸³ Did Bill regard this as some final test, a crash course in business for John, before he abandoned his family to the tender mercies of chance? As he warned his son, “I shall be away and must rely on your judgment.” ⁸⁴ Or perhaps Bill just wanted to be spared the inconvenience of doing it himself.

Rockefeller was justifiably proud of his feat of superintending this house, a bravura performance for a boy of eighteen with an already demanding schedule at Hewitt and Tuttle. As if he had been doing nothing but construction work all his life, he solicited estimates from eight contractors and selected the lowest bidder. He reviewed the plans, negotiated the contracts, and settled the bills with implicit confidence in his judgment. In fact, so closely did he supervise the contractors, so zealously did he outbargain them, that they lost money on the project. If Bill was testing his son's ability, he passed with flying colors.

By one account, a dispute arose as to whether John would pay rent at the new house. He presumably felt that, having built the structure, he had earned the right to occupy it free of rent, but Devil Bill laid down his own arbitrary rules and overrode Eliza's protests. “You bought your time, didn't you?” he told John. “What you're getting now is your own, ain't it? Well, you have to pay me board.” ⁸⁵ Once again, one marvels at Bill's barefaced cheek no less than his son's fortitude in the face of repeated provocations.

Now that the Rockefellers were reconstituted in Cleveland, John was deputized as the new paterfamilias, as Bill again exited from the scene, setting up house in Philadelphia with Margaret Allen sometime in the late 1850s. For several more years, Bill was weirdly enmeshed in John's affairs and for five decades continued to materialize, like a burly, smiling genie, at odd intervals. But from this point forward, the gap between Bill's two lives and two wives began to widen into an unbridgeable chasm. By an exquisite (and, for Bill, surely excruciating) irony, this scheming, selfish, money-mad charlatan turned his back on his family just as his eldest son began to amass the largest fortune in history. John D. Rockefeller inhabited a stoic universe in which it was considered a sign of strength and mental health to banish your cares and forge ahead instead of morbidly dwelling on your parents’ failings. But if John nursed vengeful feelings toward Bill, it must have been secretly gratifying to him that his father left at the very dawn of his triumph and forfeited any claim to his wealth.

Eliza probably never knew that after she'd raised his five children, Bill had traded her in for a much younger woman, but she was now better equipped to withstand his loss than she had been a few years earlier. When John Davison died on June 1, 1858, he left her an annuity that lasted through 1865, when she inherited the principal. With two sons drawing income—William was now working under John as a bookkeeper at Hewitt and Tuttle—and with occasional assistance from Bill, Eliza could muddle through on her own. She especially relied upon her eldest son, the wunderkind who seemed capable of anything and who was as steady and trustworthy as her husband had been feckless and mercurial. Eliza was now in her mid-forties, and photos show a prim, sad, gaunt woman. Divorce wasn't an option for a devout nineteenth-century woman, and her giddy fling with the handsome young peddler had left her imprisoned in a premature widowhood. Bill had been her sole chance, her crazily squandered bid to escape from rural tedium, and the misbegotten marriage left both her and her eldest son with a lifelong suspicion of volatile people and rash actions.

In his trilogy of Frank Cowperwood novels, his fictionalized version of the life of the Chicago traction magnate Charles Yerkes, Theodore Dreiser described the uncanny perspicacity about his bosses that distinguished the adolescent Cowperwood in his first job as a clerk in a grain-commission business. “He could see their weaknesses and their shortcomings as a much older man might have viewed a boy's.” ⁸⁶ The remark aptly captures the coolly critical eye with which Rockefeller sized up his elders at Hewitt and Tuttle. He was respectful toward his superiors but never awed by them and was always aware of their shortcomings. For the record, he professed great respect for Isaac Hewitt, twenty-five years his senior, but he was much more caustic in private, referring to him as a “disgruntled” man, forever entangled in litigation.

Despite his youth, Rockefeller soon came to feel that he was being underpaid. When Tuttle quit in January 1857, Rockefeller was elevated to chief bookkeeper, performing, at the age of seventeen, all the tasks formerly discharged by the departed partner. Where Tuttle had earned $2,000 a year as partner, Rockefeller was given only $500, and this vexing inequity was only slightly mitigated when Hewitt raised him to $600 a year by 1858. With the same preternatural confidence evident in his campaign to pay off the church mortgage or oversee the Cheshire Street house, the boy began to trade for his own account, making small but successful forays into flour, ham, and pork. Soon, this adolescent businessman was cutting something of a figure on the Cleveland docks, where he was always addressed as Mr. Rockefeller.

A variety of factors conspired to bring about his departure from Hewitt's firm. Though his salary grated on him, he waited until the economy snapped back from the 1857 downturn before making his move. In charge of the books, he could see that the firm had nearly been bankrupted by the slump and faced a bleak future—a suspicion confirmed by the fact that Hewitt shrewdly kept his extensive real-estate holdings segregated from his stake in the commission house. Big Bill, who always liked to play the freelance banker, had given a thousand-dollar loan to Hewitt, and when John informed him of the concern's precarious state, he barged into the office and demanded (and got) immediate repayment from Hewitt.

John D. Rockefeller wasn't one to dawdle in an unprofitable concern. His career had few wasted steps, and he never vacillated when the moment ripened for advancement. When he asked Hewitt for an $800 salary, his cash-strapped boss dithered for weeks before deciding he could go no higher than $700. Later, Rockefeller claimed he would have stayed if Hewitt had matched his demand, but added, “even then I was preparing, getting ready for something big.” ⁸⁷ While he and Hewitt were bickering in early 1858, an attractive opportunity arose that settled the issue. Rockefeller had befriended a young Englishman, twenty-eight-year-old Maurice B. Clark, who worked down the street at a produce house called Otis, Brownell. They had been classmates at E. G. Folsom's Commercial College and were also neighbors on Cheshire Street. According to Clark, Rockefeller already had “the reputation of being a young bookkeeper of more than ordinary ability and reliability,” and Clark proposed that they form a new partnership for buying and selling produce, with each partner investing an initial $2,000—an amount equal to $36,000 in 1996 dollars. ⁸⁸ Amazingly enough, Rockefeller had saved $800, equivalent to a year's salary, in less than three years on the job, but he still fell considerably short of Clark's figure.

As he brooded over how to raise the money, he was informed by his father that he had always intended to give each of his children $1,000 at age twenty-one, and he now offered to advance John the money. “But, John,” he added, lest his son expect miracles, “the rate is ten.” ⁸⁹ Having just retrieved a thousand dollars from Hewitt, Bill might have been looking for a high return on these idle funds. John knew his father far too well to plead for a gift and accepted the 10 percent loan, which was higher than the prevailing rate. So on April 1, 1858, backed up by this borrowed money, John D. Rockefeller left Isaac Hewitt and joined the new partnership of Clark and Rockefeller at 32 River Street. At eighteen, he was catapulted to a partner's rank in a commission house. “It was a great thing to be my own employer,” said Rockefeller. “Mentally I swelled with pride—a partner in a firm with $4,000 capital!” ⁹⁰ The moment was fraught with meaning for him, and after his first day at work he went back to the Cheshire Street house, fell to his knees, and implored the Lord to bless his new enterprise.

Rockefeller never regretted his apprenticeship at Hewitt and Tuttle and, like many self-made men, lavished a retrospective tenderness on his early years. If anything, he drenched the whole experience in a sentimental syrup that only grew thicker and sweeter with time. Even in 1934, at age ninety-five, Rockefeller tried to rally one grandson with tales of his heroic initiation at Hewitt and Tuttle, his stirring baptism in business. “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.”