Mature Life Features

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How Rockefeller Came to Mean Rich

By Tom Morrow

John Davison Rockefeller Sr., one of the original six moguls who built America, is considered by many to have been the world’s wealthiest man ever with an estimated worth of some $410 billion in current dollars.

He was born July 8, 1839, and, with the founding of the Standard Oil monopoly in his 20s, he controlled the American petroleum industry for most of his adult life. That made him one of the so-called “robber barons” of our nation’s history.

The company’s origins date to 1863 when he hooked up with a couple of partners in the oil-refining business in Cleveland. Seven years later, after some ownership shifts, he incorporated Standard Oil and focused on refining oil rather than drilling for it.

Oil was used throughout the country as a source for fueling lamps until the introduction of electricity and then as a fuel and lubricant with the invention of the automobile. 

As the need for kerosene and gasoline grew, his company controlled as much as 95 percent of all oil refining in the United States.

By establishing a maze of refining, marketing and affiliated companies, he also gained enormous influence over the railroad industry, which transported his oil around the country. Standard Oil became the first great business trust in the United States and, in 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it violated federal anti-trust laws and ordered it be dismantled.

It was broken up into 34 separate entities that included companies that eventually would become ExxonMobil and Chevron, among others. Individual pieces of the company were worth more than the whole and shares of these doubled and tripled in value in their early years, 

Rockefeller became the country’s first billionaire with a fortune worth nearly 2 percent of the national economy. In 1913, his peak net worth was estimated at $336 billion (in 2007 dollars). He spent the last 40 years of his life in retirement at his estate in Westchester County, NY.

His fortune was used to create the modern systematic approach of targeted philanthropy. His foundations pioneered the development of medical research and were instrumental in the near-eradication of hookworm and yellow fever in the United States.

Religion was a guiding force throughout his life and he believed it to be the source of his success. He supported many church-based institutions and was a faithful congregant of the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church, where he taught Sunday school and served as a trustee, clerk and occasional janitor. He adhered to total abstinence from alcohol and tobacco all his life

He also was considered a supporter of capitalism based on a perspective of social Darwinism and was quoted often as saying, “The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest.” 

At age 86, Rockefeller penned the following words to sum up his life: 

I was early taught to work as well as play,
My life has been one long, happy holiday;
Full of work and full of play
I dropped the worry on the way
And God was good to me every day.

(Tom Morrow’s books are available at Amazon.com and on Kindle.)