Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

Chapter 22, the book’s lengthiest, examines growing and powerful challenges to Standard Oil and Rockefeller’s legacy

In 1898, the now-retired Rockefeller once again testifies in an antitrust case launched by the state of Ohio. The combative John D. Archbold, Rockefeller’s successor, also testifies. Archbold regularly loses his cool, but Rockefeller maintains his composure as always. Standard Oil remains a behemoth, and the advent of the gasoline-powered automobile will help send Rockefeller’s net worth into the stratosphere, but developments at home and abroad, including the 1901 Spindletop oil strike in Texas, are already beginning to erode the trust’s monopoly. The new president, Theodore Roosevelt, hopes to control the trusts rather than destroy them, but he is also “[f]iercely self-righteous” (434) and has singled out Standard Oil as a target for federal antitrust actions.

In this political context, investigative journalist Ida Minerva Tarbell of McClure’s Magazine publishes a 19-part exposé of Standard Oil’s business practices. The exposé then appears in book form as The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904). Chernow calls it “the most impressive thing ever written about Standard Oil” (443). Tarbell grew up in Titusville, Pennsylvania, at the center of the Oil Regions, where her father, Franklin Tarbell, owned a barrel shop and regularly railed against Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Samuel McClure, the magazine editor, recognized Tarbell’s courage and lured the talented young freelance writer out of semi-poverty in Paris with an offer to join him on the editorial staff. In the course of her research on Standard Oil, Tarbell pored over mountains of documents, talked with Henry Demarest Lloyd, and even enjoyed regular meetings with Henry H. Rogers, the Standard Oil insider.

Chernow notes that Tarbell, like Lloyd, made a number of mistakes, but she also wrote with remarkable clarity, unraveled the inner workings of a corporation that pioneered monopolistic practices, and actually underestimated the extent of Standard’s involvement in political corruption. Chernow debunks the infamous “Widow Backus” story—that Rockefeller supposedly cheated a grieving Cleveland widow out of her late husband’s lubricating company—repeated by Tarbell yet refuted by surviving evidence. Tarbell never interviewed Rockefeller himself and only glimpsed him once in public, but the glimpse served as fodder for a “poisonous two-part character study” (453) of the titan that appears in the summer of 1905. Even Frank Rockefeller came out of the woodwork to encourage Tarbell’s attacks against his brother.

Standard Oil largely remains silent in the face of Tarbell’s criticism, not from haughty contempt for an insignificant adversary as was so often the case, but because Tarbell got far more right than she got wrong, and her work is shaping public opinion. Junior suffers a nervous breakdown in 1904 due to the impact of the Tarbell series. Tarbell also attacks the character of Rockefeller’s father, so Chernow concludes the chapter with a narrative of Bill’s final years, which feature journalists frenetically searching nationwide for Bill’s location, a search that alerts Margaret Allen Levingston to the fact that her husband of five decades is a bigamist. Bill dies in early 1906.

Prodded, no doubt, by the intense criticism of his business practices, Rockefeller turns his attention once again to philanthropy. He does not believe in social welfare. Instead, he prefers to donate to organizations that address the root problems of social ills. Gates steers him toward medical research, a badly neglected field that also would raise no political objections. Under Gates’s leadership, the New York-based Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research is born in 1901. Simon Flexner, a talented young pathologist and capable administrator in the Rockefeller mold, serves as its first president. Although Rockefeller remains personally aloof from the Institute—he is as reluctant to visit it in person as he was the University of Chicago—he is delighted with the results. After the RIMR achieves a breakthrough in research on cerebrospinal meningitis, Rockefeller donates another $8 million for a new hospital and isolation pavilion. As Flexner recruits talented doctors from across the world, Rockefeller’s name increasingly becomes associated with medical research.

A train tour through the South in 1901—dubbed “The Millionaires’ Special” after its well-heeled passengers—rekindles Rockefeller’s interest in education, specifically “the backward state of southern schools” (481). Recalling his decades-long support for Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, Rockefeller hopes to increase his support of “southern black education” (482). After consulting with Booker T. Washington, Junior creates a new organization called the “Negro Education Board,” though the name is changed to the General Education Board in deference to Southern whites who hope to get in on the Rockefeller spoils while relegating their Black neighbors to permanent, second-class citizenship. Thus the General Education Board, by deferring to segregationists, tacitly endorses the South’s racial caste system.

The GEB does succeed in building high schools and even in funding medical research, but it does little for those Rockefeller originally intended to help; what’s worse, it thereby unintentionally perpetuates injustice. Through the GEB, Rockefeller also funds research on hookworm, a common affliction in the South, and he contributes a grand total of $78 million to broader scientific research in the medical field, producing “nothing less than a revolution in medical education” (493). In the midst of these philanthropic successes, the untimely death of 50-year-old William Rainey Harper in 1906 leaves Rockefeller shaken. He once again turns his attention to the University of Chicago. At Gates’s urging, Rockefeller makes one final donation, a $10 million gift in 1910, and then leaves the institution to stand on its own. Critics accuse Rockefeller of trying to buy good publicity, never knowing that Rockefeller began contributing to charity long before he became the titan of Standard Oil.