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From this venerated volume we learn how much young Rockefeller earned back there in 1855 when he started out for himself. It was a small enough sum, $50 for the first three months; then, beginning with January 1, 1856, $25 a month. We also learn from "Ledger A" what he did with his earnings. There is no doubt but that, young as he was, he applied to the money he received those two vital principles in fortune making: Make good bargains; save your money and let it work for you. We have his own word for believing this, taken from the personal reminiscences which, from time to time, appear in his religious instructions. The first lesson he learned by buying cord-wood: "I was taught to do as much business at the age of ten or eleven as it was possible for me to do," he told the Bible class one day. "Among other things I was sent over the hills to buy cord-wood for the use of the family. I knew what cord-wood, solid beech and maple-wood, was. My father told me to select only solid wood, straight wood, and not put any limbs in it or any punky wood. That was good training for me. I did not need my father to tell me, or anybody else, how many feet it took to make a cord of wood. I did not require the presence of anybody to enable me to secure from the man who sold that wood good measure." "I know some people, especially some young men," he said in the same talk, "find it difficult to keep a little money in their pocket-book. I learned to keep money, and, as we have a way of saying, it did not burn a hole in my pocket. I was taught that it was the thing to do to keep the money and take care of it. Among the early experiences that were helpful to me that I recollect with pleasure, was one of working a few days for a neighbor digging potatoes — an enterprising and thrifty farmer who could dig a great many potatoes. I was a boy perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age, and he kept me busy from morning until night. It was a ten-hour day. "And as I was saving these little sums, I soon learned I could get as much interest for $50 loaned at seven per cent — the legal rate in the state of New York at that time for a year — as I could earn by digging potatoes ten days. The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good thing to let money be my slave and not make myself a slave to money. I have tried to remember that in every sense." It was these two principles, then, Get the worth of your money, Let your money work for you, that he applied to his income in 1855. One must live, but how frugally it can be done! Young John boarded himself, and from November 24, 1855 to April, 1856, he spent $9.09 for clothing. "It is true," Mr. Rockefeller explained to his Sunday-school in calling their attention to these figures, " I could not secure the most fashionable cut of clothing. I remember I bought mine then of a cheap clothier. He sold me clothing cheap, clothing such as I could pay for, and it was a great deal better than buying clothing that I could not pay for." Satisfactory as his expenditures in 1855 and '56 appear, on the whole, to Mr. Rockefeller, he is obliged to condemn himself to-day for one item on the little ledger, made in this first winter of his breadwinning. "I see also here another item which I am inclined to think is extravagant, because I used to wear mittens. The item is a pair of fur gloves for which I paid $2.50." The little income was not only made honorably and cheerfully to suffice for Mr. Rockefeller's support, it was stretched to cover the obligations to church and charity which the boy seems to have felt as forcibly and as early as he did the need of good bargains and of saving. In a period of four months in which his earnings were perhaps $100, he gave away, according to "Ledger A," $5.58. The items as Mr. Rockefeller once read them at a church gathering are interesting: "I begin on the 25th day of November," he said: "Missionary cause, ten cents; Mr. Downie, one of our young ministers, ten cents. . . 'Slip rent' — pew rent — one dollar. December 16th, Sabbath-school, five cents. Present for Mr. Farrar, the superintendent, twenty-five cents. Five Points Mission, New York, twelve cents. The Macedonian, a little religious paper, ten cents. Present to teacher, Deacon Sked, twenty-five cents. January 16th I had something left over for benevolence: 'Missionary cause, six cents; the poor in the church, ten cents' — all on one Sunday! February 3d I gave ten cents more to the same cause; the same day ten cents for foreign missions. March 2d, foreign missions again, ten cents more. . . Then, on the 2d day of March, ten cents for the poor of the church; March 3d, pew rent one dollar. March 6th, foreign missions, ten cents. Then I went outside of our church, and on the 21st of March gave one dollar to the Young Men's Christian Association." And so "Ledger A" goes on with a painstaking record of every cent received and expended for a period of several years. Every cent earned could be accounted for, not a loose thread in his weaving, and one cannot help but feel that each particular penny was spent only after deliberation, and perhaps prayer. And all this time, as the little ledger shows, Mr. Rockefeller was saving money. He was soon to have a place for it. Two years after he took this first position, a difference arose between him and his employer on the question of salary. Mr. Rockefeller thought he ought to have $800 a year. His employer was willing to give but $700. "Meanwhile," to quote from Mr. Rockefeller himself, "the opportunity was offered to engage in business with a young man who was ten years older than myself. I had saved a little money and, accordingly on April 1st, with $800 or $900 that I had saved up and a few thousands which my father loaned me at ten per cent until I should become of age, I contributed my part of the capital, which was $4,000. "We were prosperous from the beginning. We did a business of $500,000 produce commission for the first year. Our profits were not large — I think $4,400 — but I think it was better for me than the $800 which I had asked." And so Mr. Rockefeller was doing an independent business and was making money. With each succeeding year his business and his profits grew, and these profits he handled as he had handled the money he earned as a boy chopping wood. He put them away to work for him. He spent as he had spent when his income was $25.00 a month, with minute attention to every cent. Watching what it cost to eat and drink and clothe himself, calculating what it cost to marry, estimating the proportion he could afford to give to the church and to charity — and always putting a little aside. But this was not all, he was demonstrating that he possessed other qualities even more essential than the fundamentals with which he had started out — he was showing he had the instinct for opportunities, the courage to seize them though they might be far bigger than the means at his command, the power to persuade men to lend him money — the patience to stick by enterprises until they had justified his faith. This, then, was the man in 1860 — frugal, calculating, money-bent — cautious in trade yet daring, quick to seize yet ready to wait, and withal "good —" that is a steady attendant at church and Sunday-school, serious — that is eschewing all amusements which might be called frivolous, the theater, cards, the dance. As time went on, these characteristics became more conspicuous. They led him to new lines of business — one in particular — the refining of oil — a new industry in which it was plain that there were great profits. He gave himself to this venture, body and soul one may truthfully say, working with a persistency which put day laborers to shame. He watched details with a hawk's eye — not a cent must go astray — not a pint of oil be lost — not a rivet or bung be wasted. "Pay a profit to nobody," he began to say, and it was he and his partners who, themselves, went to Oil Creek for oil, and so saved commissions; he who made his own barrels and so saved a middleman's profits; he who hauled and loaded, bought and sold. Nobody but him must make a cent on his oil, from the well to the lamp. It was combine, save, watch. A sort of mania for saving seemed to possess him. It was over this he brooded from morning to night, and it was the realization of this alone which awakened in his face, already grave with incessant reflections, a sign of joy. Indeed, the men who worked there in Cleveland at his elbow will tell you to-day that the only signs of hilarity John D. Rockefeller ever showed in those days were over a good bargain. This would make him clap his hands. Let it be a very good bargain, and he would throw up his hat — kick up his heels, hug his informant. This was joy for him, this was the satisfaction of passion — this good bargain. And as he succeeded his desire for wealth seemed, to his friends, to grow even more rapidly than his business. "I am bound to be rich, BOUND to be rich, BOUND to be rich," they report him as saying. His conviction that it was the duty of a man to get and keep all the money he could, a conviction which seems to have been born in him, was becoming a passion for wealth. By 1870 he was a rich man; his friends said he would go far. The city histories began to pay him profound respect. "He occupies a position in our business circles second to but few," said the biographer in "Cleveland Past and Present" in 1869. "Close application to one kind of business, an avoidance of all positions of honorary character that cost time, keeping everything pertaining to his business in so methodical a manner that he knows every night how he stands with the world." This was the man at thirty as he appeared to his admiring townsmen — a very logical development he appears of the boy who kept "Ledger A." But there was something going on in the head of this man of thirty, of which his Cleveland biographer did not know, or knowing discreetly passed by. It was the enlargement of his youthful faculty for driving a good bargain. It is quite probable that Mr. Rockefeller, natural trader that he was, learned early in his career that unless one has some special and exclusive advantage over rivals in business, native ability, thrift, energy, however great they may be, are never sufficient to put an end to competition. Mr. Rockefeller certainly saw by 1868 that he had no legitimate superiority over those competing with him in Cleveland which would ever enable him to be anything more than one of the big men in his line. He must have seen clearly by this time that nothing but some advantage not given by nature or recognized by the laws of fair play in business could ever make him a dictator in the industry to which he was giving his attention. But he was beginning to see there was such an advantage to be had if one were wily and patient enough. It lay in transportation, in getting his carrying done cheaper than his neighbors could. It was a very seductive idea to a man with a passion for wealth. There were difficulties in the way. Men generally held then, as now, that it was not fair for the railroads to allow one shipper a better rate than another. The common law was known to disapprove the practice. The theory that the railroad held its right of way from the people, and therefore must be just to the people, treating them without discrimination, was familiar enough, so familiar that the railroads never dared show favoritism save secretly. But under threats of loss of business, under promise of larger or more regular shipments, under chances of sharing in the profits of the enterprises they favored, they did do it secretly. That is, rebate giving then, as now, was regarded as one of those lower business practices which characterize commerce at all periods, and against which men of honor struggle, and of which men of greed take advantage. Naturally, one would expect Mr. Rockefeller to spurn such an advantage. The one thing for which he was conspicuous outside of his zeal for business was his devotion to the church, one of whose cardinal teachings is "whatsoever ye would that men do to you do ye even so to them." Naturally, one demands a man of his profession to be keenly alive to degrading business practices and keen to overthrow them. But, although Mr. Rockefeller no doubt heard weekly from the pulpit that the "law and the prophets" were all summed up in doing as you would be done by, it is quite probable he had never seen any connection between the doctrine and railroad rebates. He was not an educated man. He had evidently never thought seriously of anything but making money. His religious training seems to have been purely formal, awakening him merely to the duty of attending to devotional exercises and giving to the church. So, when he realized that the rebate was the means by which he could gain control of the oil industry in Cleveland, he went after it, ignorant of, or indifferent to the ethical quality of the act. His beginnings in discrimination seem to have been small — but their effect in increasing his business and in decreasing that of his rivals was large — and as Mr. Rockefeller saw in increased profits the effect of the advantages gained, he became eager to increase these advantages, eager to secure them by permanent contracts. The question became one of the chief concerns of his business life. Finally he and certain of his friends whose ambitions were similar to his own, and who appreciated as he did the power the railroad rebate had to destroy a competitor's property, hit on a scheme familiar to readers of this magazine, but repeated here because so vital in the development of Mr. Rockefeller's character. These gentlemen proposed to certain high railroad dignitaries, W. H. Vanderbilt, Thomas Scott, Jay Gould, H. W. Clarke, and General McClellan, to allow them a rebate on all the freight they shipped and to allow nobody else one. They proposed not only that they be allowed to ship cheaper than anybody else, but that the extra money their rivals paid to the railroads be not kept by the roads but paid over to them! They also asked to be allowed to examine weekly the shipping books of the transportation lines that they might know how much and to whom their competitors shipped. It was a strong scheme even for the strong stomachs of the men to whom it was presented. Old Commodore Vanderbilt told "Billy," as he called his son, to let it alone. Even Tom Scott balked at it from the first. But the men who had devised the Southern (or South) Improvement Company, as the plan was called, were in earnest. They knew that if they could get the contracts they asked, they could control one of the richest industries of the country, and they turned their whole force to overcome the objections raised by the railroad presidents. And to do it they hesitated at no misrepresentation, found no falsehood too big to swallow. "This makes you a monopoly," the railroads objected. "It will ruin everybody outside of your combination." "But we have already the great bulk of the business and we are going to take all in," which was untrue. The gentlemen had in their company only about one-tenth of the manufacturing end of the industry they aimed to control. "It puts the producer at your mercy," objected Mr. Scott. "But the producers want the business regulated and are going to join." Again untrue, for the producers knew nothing of what was afoot. |
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