Titan - Ron Chernow  ## Metadata - Author: **Ron Chernow** - Full Title: Titan - Category: #books - Tags: #biography ## Highlights - The life of John Davison Rockefeller, Sr., was marked to an exceptional degree by silence, mystery, and evasion. Even though he presided over the largest business and philanthropic enterprises of his day, he has remained an elusive figure. A master of disguises, he spent his life camouflaged behind multiple personae and shrouded beneath layers of mythology ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhe1bqx0vd8bp7wpsgawndjg)) - Eliza couldn’t have felt very comfortable with her in-laws. In general, the Rockefellers were a hard-drinking hillbilly clan, sociable and funny, fond of music, liquor, and uproarious good times, and adhering to a coarse frontier morality. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhgk86c304wqht388jjqhaf9)) - Despite Rockefeller’s roseate memories, early photos of him tell a much more somber tale. His face was grim, expressionless, lacking boyish joy and animation; the skin is drawn, the eyes blank and devoid of luster. To other people, he often seemed abstracted, and they remembered him with a deadpan face trudging along country roads, lost in thought, as if unraveling deep problems. “He was a quiet boy,” said one Moravia resident. “He seemed always to be thinking.”10 In many respects, John was forgettable and indistinguishable from many other boys ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhgr6ka8xz9mza5gzm362mdg)) - He was a slow learner but patient and persistent and, like J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould, exhibited a terrific head for math. “I was not an easy student, and I had to apply myself diligently to prepare my lessons,” said Rockefeller, who described himself accurately as “reliable” but not “brilliant ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhgr89tecmg9mx3n8dcm4azm)) - I know that in my own case I have been greatly helped by the confidence imposed in me since early boyhood ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhsm49jwck7kh99dc5w0hsww)) - He learned to see himself as a reluctant savior, taking charge of troubled situations that needed to be remedied. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhsm56n47zfdwf1ske87fh78)) - Of all the lessons John absorbed from his father, perhaps none surpassed in importance that of keeping meticulous accounts ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhsmq7fqmyk9svr7733v2a11)) - Bertrand Russell once said of Rockefeller, “What he said, what he thought, and what he felt, came from his mother, but what he did came from his father, with the addition of a great caution generated by early unpleasantness ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhstf8ntp0shw86sm38xek67)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhsw4f64cy0qy4j4svrtsd9v)) - There was nothing unusual about Rockefeller’s boyhood dreams, for the times were feeding avaricious fantasies in millions of susceptible schoolboys. Antebellum America was a place of high adventure and unbounded opportunity for industrious young men. Following the war with Mexico, huge chunks of land—Texas, New Mexico, and upper California—were annexed to the country in early 1848. That same year, gold was discovered at John Sutter’s sawmill in California, triggering a mad westward rush of ninety thousand prospectors. Just as the Rockefellers were moving from Moravia to Owego, hordes of frantic men swarmed across the continent, sailed around South America, or slogged across the Isthmus of Panama, hell-bent to reach California. The pandemonium foreshadowed the petroleum craze in western Pennsylvania a decade later. Though the gold rush proved a snare and a delusion for most miners, the occasional success stories nonetheless inflamed the popular imagination. Mark Twain singled out the California gold rush as the watershed event that sanctified a new money worship and debased the country’s founding ideals. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hhxr1rf18sxchs7gxg2n6bn6)) - 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 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hknp9dsmncm1p8y3165saffm)) - John’s boyhood gravity pleased many adults but unsettled others, who found something queer and unnatural about him ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hknqdhj4sf5m8k082jnxypzq)) - One high-school teacher described him, with patent distaste, as “the coldest blooded, the quietest and most deliberate chap ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hknqe4qq3e0wwq0nvrp6zbvb)) - Rockefeller was bound to clash with Gardner and Clark, for he was a Roundhead among Cavaliers and approached his work with unflagging, humorless energy. “Your future hangs on every day that passes,” he admonished himself.12 “Long before I was twenty-one men called me, ‘Mr Rockefeller,’ ” he recalled. “Life was a serious business to me when I was young.”13 The only time he showed any youthful gaiety was when sealing a lucrative deal ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hm3yhezc2b3x0axvvtep5357)) - “John,” said Gardner, “I see that there are certain things on which you and I probably will never agree. I think you like money better than anything else in the whole world, and I do not. I like to have a little fun along with business as I go through life.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hm2165k33yab9xrehh1fc3v1)) - Later on, Rockefeller learned to camouflage his business anxiety behind a studied calm, but during these years it was often graphically displayed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hm216b1za9re9nr82c68y2yq)) - Rockefeller’s overwhelming influence on the oil industry stemmed from the conflict between his overmastering need for order and the turbulent, unruly nature of the infant industry ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hmdhds23jzze7sy0hytws8ba)) - Rockefeller succeeded because he believed in the long-term prospects of the business and never treated it as a mirage that would soon fade ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hme47g9j04hj62n0qt1tpb3f)) - Daring in design, cautious in execution—it was a formula he made his own throughout his career. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hmfymwpjynzs6jxh48mwpzax)) - I Can Paddle My Own Canoe ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hmjfx9x13qbvdxx5zkng8d0x)) - in love as in business, he had a longer time frame, a more settled will, than other people ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hmjh7384h5099mw2bhdcvb1y)) - In this early period, Rockefeller was a chronic worrier who labored under a great deal of self-imposed stress ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hmqredv776f8n62fyv1bcyxg)) - Obliging but never fawning, he knew how to soothe jittery creditors, and one of his cardinal rules was never to seem too eager to borrow. With amusement, he recalled how one day he was walking down the street, trying to figure out how to find an urgently needed $15,000 loan, when a local banker pulled up in a buggy and serendipitously asked, “Do you think you could use $50,000, Mr. Rockefeller?” Rockefeller, gifted with more than a touch of his father’s showmanship, studied the man’s face for a long time then drawled, “Well-l-l, can you give me twenty-four hours to think it over?” By stalling, Rockefeller believed, he pinned down the deal on the most favorable terms ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hmsw8wkd40stv4e50vfgbjwf)) - For all his self-assurance, Rockefeller needed one associate who would share his daydreams, endorse his plans, and stiffen his resolve, and that indispensable alter ego was Henry Morrison Flagler. Nine years older than Rockefeller, with roguish good looks, Flagler was a dashing figure with luminous blue eyes, smooth black hair, and a handlebar mustache ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hmsyt88qwme176ytavwehmj4)) - Rockefeller loved Flagler’s dictum that a friendship founded on business was superior to a business founded on friendship, and for several decades they worked together in an almost seamless fashion ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hmtae6khs2vcccx9p2s8ypd4)) - On his desk, Flagler kept a quote from a popular novel, *David Harum,* which said, “Do unto others as they would do unto you—and do it first.”48 What makes Flagler’s ethics consequential for Rockefeller’s career was that he was the mastermind of many negotiations with the railroads—the single most controversial aspect of Standard Oil history ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hmwn8074ba8yvkejz17xevxe)) - From that moment, the railroads acquired a vested interest in the creation of a gigantic oil monopoly that would lower their costs, boost their profits, and generally simplify their lives. As in other industries, the railroads developed a stake in the growth of big businesses whose economies of scale permitted them to operate more efficiently—an ominous fact for small, struggling refiners who were gradually weeded out in the savage competitive strife. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hmww79ttkztz3j9d8pf94w6a)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hn74j7b3jaf0qx6p5zp6akt0)) - Much like Jay Gould—who didn’t drink, smoke, or gallivant with women—Rockefeller’s harsh business tactics were counterbalanced by exemplary behavior at home where he was a sweet, respectful Victorian husband. To borrow a line from Flaubert, to be fiercely revolutionary in business, he needed to be utterly conventional at home ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnbpcv67p9hdet23e2ebvgpy)) - Rockefeller bridled at the notion that he was a business-obsessed drudge, a slave to the office. “I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the waking hours of the day to making money for money’s sake,” he recorded in his memoirs ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnbphb317t8aqb1a6fg7f0qe)) - 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 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnbpjrbjjvg9dks8ff7xmz6m)) - There was a clockwork regularity about Rockefeller’s life that made it seem mechanical to outsiders but that he found soothing. He didn’t seem to require time to indulge normal human idleness, much less illicit passion. In his rigidly compartmentalized life, each hour was tightly budgeted, whether for business, religion, family, or exercise ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnbsfg64n8nxeww3dbemrnqf)) - He fretted endlessly about his company and, below the surface, was constantly on edge. In one of his few admissions of weakness, he recalled that “for years on end I never had a solid night’s sleep, worrying about how it was to come out. . . . I tossed about in bed night after night worrying over the outcome. . . . All the fortune that I have made has not served to compensate for the anxiety of that period. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnbshbcyxvfp210qjdc3z9y2)) - At home, Rockefeller created a make-believe market economy, calling Cettie the “general manager” and requiring the children to keep careful account books.16 They earned pocket money by performing chores and received two cents for killing flies, ten cents for sharpening pencils, five cents per hour for practicing their musical instruments, and a dollar for repairing vases. They were given two cents per day for abstaining from candy and a dime bonus for each consecutive day of abstinence. Each toiled in a separate patch of the vegetable garden, earning a penny for every ten weeds they pulled up. John Jr. got fifteen cents an hour for chopping wood and ten cents per day for superintending paths ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnbt24hsf9rmc9815mfy6wm7)) - One afternoon, little Alta tattled on her younger sister Edith for having eaten *two* pieces of cheese, and Rockefeller professed shock at this epicurean indulgence ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnbvpqr41a2msjd3qq40nc9g)) - As Rockefeller said tartly, the spoiled refiners “were disappointed if they did not make one hundred percent profit in a year—sometimes in six months.”1 With sky-high profits and ridiculously low start-up costs, the field had soon grown overcrowded. “In came the tinkers and the tailors and the boys who followed the plow, all eager for this large profit,” said Rockefeller.2 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnd668dbxx5eaarrh7n17kkn)) - Worse, the oil market wasn’t correcting itself according to the self-regulating mechanism dear to neoclassical economists. Producers and refiners didn’t shut down operations in the expected numbers, causing Rockefeller to doubt the workings of Adam Smith’s theoretical invisible hand: “So many wells were flowing that the price of oil kept falling, yet they went right on drilling.”3 The industry was trapped in a full-blown crisis of overproduction with no relief in sight ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnd6c0h4p6fztq8c6bxw1whb)) - Rich investors did not line up to invest in Standard Oil, among other reasons because it was an inauspicious time for new ventures. On September 24, 1869—the infamous Black Friday—Jay Gould and Jim Fisk’s scheme to corner the gold market by manipulating President Grant’s monetary policy collapsed, fomenting financial panic and ruining more than a dozen Wall Street houses ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnd7kvhvdy8j3304rcxr7ghh)) - For his admirers, 1872 was the annus mirabilis of John D. Rockefeller’s life, while for his critics it constituted the darkest chapter. The year revealed both his finest and most problematic qualities as a businessman: his visionary leadership, his courageous persistence, his capacity to think in strategic terms, but also his lust for domination, his messianic self-righteousness, and his contempt for those shortsighted mortals who made the mistake of standing in his way. What rivals saw as a naked power grab, Rockefeller regarded as a heroic act of salvation, nothing less than the rescue of the oil business ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnd7sgqd12y7m86kbbdt68mz)) - One of Rockefeller’s strengths in bargaining situations was that he figured out what he wanted *and* what the other party wanted and then crafted mutually advantageous terms. Instead of ruining the railroads, Rockefeller tried to help them prosper, albeit in a way that fortified his own position. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hngdxdjjmj99gv1q1taetnz4)) - A man who succeeds in life must sometimes go against the current ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hngnn9jhshn2trm2qd9814xw)) - 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.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hngedrdgk9gq40g33253dmvf)) - Like all revolutionaries, he saw himself as an instrument of higher purpose, endowed with a visionary faith. He knew that his actions would at first be resisted and misunderstood by the myopic crowd, but he believed that the force and truth of his ideas would triumph in the end ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnk7shxv2mbat71dr9xbv8zp)) - One must also remember that Rockefeller was in the anomalous position of taking over many plants not to operate them but to shut them down and eliminate excess capacity. He ridiculed many of the refineries he bought as “old junk, fit only for the scrap heap. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnr5fq9h6r2p1s6fsdxxfm8n)) - Like the Marxists, he believed that the competitive free-for -all eventually gave way to monopoly and that large industrial-planning units were the most sensible way to manage an economy ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnra46n14jxpbt385ykrq9y4)) - Rockefeller himself felt no such discontinuity and always insisted that his private and commercial activities should be judged by the same exacting standards ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnsfkrh9pknvpn0eef2qge5x)) - It is too glib to say that Rockefeller was a hypocrite who used his piety as a cloak for greed. The voice that reverberated in his ears was one of burning zeal, not low, devious cunning. He was a sincere if highly self-serving churchgoer and, however deluded, extremely devout. From an early age, he had learned both to use and to abuse religion, to interpret and to misinterpret Christian doctrine to suit his purposes. The church provided him with a stock of images and ideas that, instead of checking him, enabled him to proceed with a clear conscience. Religion validated his business misdeeds no less than his charitable bequests, buttressing his strongest impulses. If religion made him great, it also armed him with theological justification for his actions and may have blinded him to their brutal consequences. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnsfp065gbsd056jxw61ym28)) - To reiterate an earlier point, John D. regarded God as an ally, a sort of honorary shareholder of Standard Oil who had richly blessed his fortunes ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnsfpj9twzqaq9zcp2xt2yfa)) - I believe the power to make money is a gift from God—just as are the instincts for art, music, literature, the doctor’s talent, the nurse’s, yours—to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnsfq9f3c8zb58dtyg5e87cj)) - What’s most striking, both in the extensive Inglis interview and elsewhere, is that every time Rockefeller explained the rationale for Standard Oil, he resorted to patently religious imagery. “The Standard was an angel of mercy, reaching down from the sky, and saying, ‘Get into the ark. Put in your old junk. We’ll take all the risks!’ ”96 He referred to Standard Oil as “the Moses who delivered them [the refiners] from their folly which had wrought such havoc in their fortunes.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnt11a82pqd0xy9hz1qq1nwy)) - As will be seen, Rockefeller was capable of extraordinary ferocity in compelling submission from competitors. He might starve out obdurate firms by buying all available barrels on the market or monopolize local tank cars to paralyze their operations ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnxfdqp7djc2rgenxkat2wy6)) - During the Saratoga meeting, he impressed the Standard men because he listened attentively but hardly breathed a syllable, which elicited Rockefeller’s highest praise: “That’s the kind of man I’d like to have go fishing with me ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnxftpher1qws25dz6e63vrv)) - Rockefeller established various taboos on the course, including that no business or charitable bequests should ever be discussed. People who flouted these rules were never invited back, and Rockefeller was extremely uncompromising on the subject ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrbwkf4tanty5v7cnfswy0f8)) - Rockefeller seemed to believe that he could keep death at bay if he adhered to his fixed rules. Extremely finicky about diet, rest, and exercise, he reduced everything to a routine and repeated the same daily schedule, forcing other people to fall in step with his timetable. In a letter to his son, Rockefeller credited his longevity to his willingness to reject social demands. “I attribute my good condition to my almost reckless independence in determining for myself what to do and the rigid adhering to regulations which give me the maximum of rest and quiet and leisure, and I am being richly paid for it every day ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrfzbpeba86z5skbg6t01164)) - Food was fuel for Rockefeller, not a source of sensual pleasure. “He could not understand why anyone would eat a piece of candy, if that piece of candy were not good for him, just because that person liked candy,” Junior explained ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrfzrryk1dkxmtk1pgtcwsz6)) - He was especially struck by Rockefeller’s willpower and wrote to Alice about the primordial strength that radiated from him, telling her that Rockefeller was a “very *deep* human being” who gave him “more impression of *Urkraft* [primitive or original force] than anyone I ever met.” He was also unexpectedly charmed by his genial style: “Glorious old John D. . . . [is] a most love-able person.” To round out this portrait, he marveled that Rockefeller could be “so complex, subtle, oily, fierce, strongly bad and strongly good a human being.”64 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrgzwd1w0q83s8rjzbbkx812)) - Rockefeller, you know, is reputed the richest man in the world, and he certainly is the most powerfully suggestive personality I have ever seen. A man 10 stories deep, and to me quite unfathomable. Physionomie de Pierrot (not a spear of hair on head or face) flexible, cunning, quakerish, superficially suggestive of naught but goodness and conscientiousness, yet accused of being the greatest villain in business whom our country has produced, a hater of cities and lover of the open air (playing golf & skating all the time at Lakewood) etc ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrgzzb2pvzd4a7fz0yxm30db)) - Reading has always been more important to me than eating,” she confessed to a newspaper reporter late in life. “Except in a case of dire starvation, if a bottle of milk and a book were placed on the table, I would reach for the book, because I must feed my mind more than my body ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrmc73p5q49yk6s02qfhckbt)) - As the *World* dryly observed, “The virtue of forgetting, which is one of the most valuable virtues that a monopolist can have under cross-examination, is possessed by Mr. Rockefeller in its highest degree ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrqp8mgm0r33c2kc3fqtsrvr)) - After years of harrowing prophecies that the industry might vanish, the business outlook had never looked brighter, despite the growing use of electricity ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrww1tbr2tc7fjdwbd2ydxmb)) - When the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk in 1903, their flight was powered by gasoline brought to the beach by Standard Oil salesmen. These new petroleum applications more than offset the dwindling kerosene business ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrww66ehzxetpk0y2rk4dq87)) - Without consulting Wall Street, he launched an antitrust suit against the Northern Securities Company, a holding company created by J. P. Morgan to consolidate railroads in the Pacific Northwest. Stunned businessmen sold stocks on the news. However aggrieved, J. P. Morgan did not declare open warfare on Roosevelt and later in the year helped him arbitrate an end to the anthracite coal strike. As Roosevelt turned the presidency into an honest broker between capital and labor, Morgan, unlike the more myopic Rockefeller, saw that Roosevelt stood ready to make concessions to cooperative businessmen ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hwdt5cjt9nfnsnqrm26pn9kj))