John D. Rockefeller

His father sold elixirs and called himself a botanic physician. Locals in upstate New York called him Big Bill and Devil Bill. He vanished for long stretches, fathered two daughters by the family housekeeper, kept a bigamous second household with a woman named Margaret Allen, and walked out for good around 1855. He also told people, cheerfully, that he cheated his boys every chance he got in order to make them sharp. What held the house together was Eliza Davison, a Baptist who taught her son that willful waste makes woeful want. The family moved four times in eight years. At 16 he took a stool at a Cleveland produce firm as assistant bookkeeper for 16 dollars a month, and began recording what he gave to charity.

Standard Oil of Ohio was incorporated on January 10, 1870, out of a partnership he had already run for five years, and everything after that followed with the regularity of arithmetic. Pennsylvania indicted him in 1879 for monopolizing the oil trade. Federal prosecutors, state legislatures and one very patient magazine journalist then spent 30 years on him. He won, and won, and finally lost, and came out of the loss worth more. That whole record — the company, the methods and the court that dismantled it — belongs to BriefHistory. This page is about the man inside the arrangement.

He bought control of Colorado Fuel and Iron in 1902 and handed it to his son in 1911. On April 20, 1914, National Guardsmen and company guards attacked a tent colony of striking miners at Ludlow, Colorado, and killed about 21 people, most of them miners' wives and children. Testifying to a federal commission the following year, Rockefeller said that even knowing guards in his pay had committed atrocities against the strikers, he "would have taken no action" to stop them. He had sat out the Civil War the same way, with money. "I wanted to go in the army and do my part," he said afterward. "But it was simply out of the question. There was no one to take my place."

As a young man he said he meant to make 100,000 dollars and live to 100. He cleared the first easily and missed the second by seven weeks, dying of arteriosclerosis on May 23, 1937 at his Florida winter house and going into the ground at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. The rehabilitation had already happened while he was alive. After Ludlow his son hired Ivy Lee, who told the family to stop hiding — go to Colorado, meet the miners, listen, be photographed doing it. Reporters treated it as a conversion. That campaign is the ancestor of modern corporate public relations, and the name it rescued now reads to most Americans as a synonym for giving money away.

John D. Rockefeller's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Standard Oil of Ohio company
  Incorporated January 10 out of Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler 1870
• Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research company
  Now Rockefeller University 1901
• General Education Board company
  Funded the recommendations of the Flexner Report on medical schools 1903
• Rockefeller Sanitary Commission company
  Set up to eradicate hookworm in the South and closed in 1915 1909
• Random Reminiscences of Men and Events book
  His only memoir, and short 1909
• Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial company
  Funded social science and was later folded into the Rockefeller Foundation 1918

• July 8, 1839 aged 0 Born at Richford, New York, second of six children
• 1853 aged ~14 The family moves to Ohio and he enters Cleveland Central High School A ten-week bookkeeping course at Folsom's Commercial College followed.
• September 1855 aged 16 Hired as assistant bookkeeper at Hewitt & Tuttle Sixteen dollars a month, rising to 58 by his final year.
• 1859 aged ~20 Goes into produce commission with 1,000 dollars borrowed from his father at 10 percent
• January 10, 1870 aged 30 Incorporates Standard Oil of Ohio
• 1879 aged ~40 Pennsylvania indicts him for monopolizing the oil trade Other states followed, and the practices became a national argument.
• 1901 aged ~62 Begins wearing toupees after alopecia takes his hair The mustache was gone by 1902 and nothing grew back.
• April 20, 1914 aged 74 About 21 people die at the Ludlow tent colony in Colorado The company was Colorado Fuel and Iron, which he had bought in 1902 and given to his son in 1911.
• September 28, 1916 aged 77 Becomes the country's first billionaire

• Ida Tarbell 1857–1944
  Investigative journalist whose serial history of Standard Oil contributed to the company's antitrust breakup. investigated by
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. prosecuted by
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. rival in giving
• J. P. Morgan 1837–1913
  Banking titan who stabilized the economy during the Panic of 1907 and shaped modern finance. banker and rival
• Mother Jones 1837–1930
  Organizer whose militant campaigns for miners and against child labor made her an icon of American labor. organized against him in Colorado
• Henry Ford 1863–1947
  Industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line and made automobiles affordable. successor as richest American