Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People
Dirt Nap City is the podcast about history's most interesting dead people. In each episode, Alex and Kelly dive into the life of a famous person that you have heard of, but probably don't know much about. Our stories are about actors, entrepreneurs, politicians, musicians, inventors, explorers and more! We also cover things that used to be popular but have fallen out of favor. Things like pet rocks, drive in theaters, Jolt Cola, and many other trends of yesterday make up our "dead ends". But whether we are talking about interesting historical figures or past trends, the show is funny, light-hearted, entertaining, informative and educational. You will definitely learn something new and probably have some laughs along the way. Everyone will eventually move to Dirt Nap City, so why not go ahead and meet the neighbors?
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Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People
Who Was John D. Rockefeller?
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When it comes to titans of industry, it is difficult to imagine someone more influential than John D Rockefeller. At one point he was the richest man in the world and held almost 3% of the American GDP. From a humble beginning, John was a hard worker who happened to be in the right place when oil was discovered in western Pennsylvania. His company, Standard Oil, became the predecessor to many famous oil and gasoline companies that are still going strong today.
A deeply religious man, John D Rockefeller was conflicted between his will to win at business and his desire to do good in the world. He was often criticized for his hard-ball business tactics, but did that mean he was an evil monopolist?
In this episode, we take a look at an American icon - from his youth as the son of a con man - to his life as the richest man in the world - to his pioneering techniques in the world of philanthropy.
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Dirt Nap City is the podcast about the most interesting dead people in history.
Subscribe and listen to learn about people you've heard of, but don't know much about.
Someday we'll all live in Dirt Nap City, so you should probably go ahead and meet the neighbors!
Hey everyone, welcome to Dirt Snap City, the show about interesting dead people. And I'm here today sitting in blazing hot Austin, Texas, where I think it's supposed to hit like 105 today. Alex, what's the temperature in your world?
SPEAKER_01I think it's about 102 with maybe a heat index of 111. It's toasty.
SPEAKER_00Now, Alex, um, it's it's summertime. You and I recently took a trip to Cleveland, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was beautiful weather there.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm going to give you a your first hint about this person. This person was actually very much associated with Cleveland and sort of made his name in Cleveland in business. Um, he was born in 1839 in upstate New York, died in Florida in 1937, but became uh famous through his work in Cleveland. Any any thoughts on that? Right out of the gate? Cleveland, are you ready to rock?
SPEAKER_01Wow, no, no, I need I need more hints.
SPEAKER_00Originally, while he was in Cleveland, he was a his his very first job actually was as a bookkeeper. He bookkept for a small um firm and he eventually started selling wholesale groceries, but then uh there was oil discovered in Pennsylvania and Ohio, um, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and he kind of hopped on the oil wagon early on um and sort of built his reputation and his business on oil.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00He was the world's first billionaire. Okay. He um was sort of vilified by a lot of people and had some very uh unflattering articles written about him, but he also was a very giving man and ended up really changing the world through his charitable giving later in life.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I know the family, it's like a family of rich people, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. But we're talking about the OG in this family.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and people used to the name is escaping me. Who do you think I who do you think I am?
SPEAKER_00Uh well I'll I'll tell you, I'll tell you who it's not. It's not uh Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. No, it's not Vanderbilt, it's not Henry Ford. These are these are some of his um some of his peers. It's not um uh JP Morgan, it's not Andrew Carnegie or Carnegie.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, those are some of the names that were floating through my head, but there's another one, I man, it's just on the tip of my tongue. Like, who do you think who do you think we are? The uh I mean, as soon as you say the name, it's gonna bug me.
SPEAKER_00Well, let's just say if if you spilled something in the basement, you might have to mop a cellar.
SPEAKER_01Rockefeller. Who do you think we are? The Rockefellers? Yeah, yeah. John D. Rockefeller.
SPEAKER_00Rockefeller, yes. We're gonna talk about him. Did you know he was the world's first billionaire?
SPEAKER_01It makes sense. I did I didn't know the Cleveland connection.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you remember. We actually walked down uh Euclid Avenue or we rode scooters down Euclid Avenue and he lived on Euclid Avenue on that same road where that uh fancy grocery store was that we went to.
SPEAKER_01Oh, really? Really? No, I didn't know that.
SPEAKER_00We went past a building as we were getting back to the bridge um to go over to that river over that river. Um, what was the name of that river?
SPEAKER_01The Yokohoga River.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um there was a there's a Rockefeller builder building right there uh on the edge of the Cuyahoga, and the Cuyahoga, incidentally, used to catch fire because of the oil refineries down there. Well, guess who owned the oil refineries? Rockefeller. He he was he was certainly one of the people responsible for that. And you know, the reason I don't know if if we talked about this, but the reason that the river would catch fire is because gasoline or a a non-pure version of gasoline was a byproduct when they refined oil for kerosene, and they would just pour it into the river. And so there got to be so much of it that you know, if somebody was using a steamship with coal, threw a hot coal over the side, boom, it would go up.
SPEAKER_01Wow. You know, Jay-Z's record company, his first record company was called Rock Offella.
SPEAKER_00He was born in uh upstate New York, as I said, in 1839, July 8th. Very, very uh modest family, but his family was actually uh interestingly, his mother, Eliza Davidson, was an extremely religious, very pious, very um kind of uh waste not want not kind of person, was married to a man named uh Devil Bill, is what they called him. Um he was a very, very well, he was a con artist.
SPEAKER_01His name was You said Devil Bill?
SPEAKER_00Devil Devil Bill, yeah. He had he had a reputation as being a con artist, and he sold botanical uh elixir that were supposed to cure cancer and do all kinds of things like that. Like he he basically um went around selling these things and bilking people out of money because they didn't actually do what they were supposed to do.
SPEAKER_01Snake oil salesman.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. That was that was Devil Bill, and it really kind of was an interesting situation because uh John D was very much a pleaser, he was very much uh religious kid because he was taught to, as a matter of fact, he stated this was a quote from he said, from the beginning, I was trained to work, to save, and to give. But then his uh father was quoted as saying, I cheated my boys every chance I got to make them sharp. And so he he uh not only was Devil Bill um a snake oil salesman, but he also was uh bigamist. He was married to a woman in Canada and he spent much of the time with his Canadian family. Um he and in addition to addition to being married to a second wife in Canada, he also had a mistress that lived with the family in Canada. So his maid, a woman who cleaned his house named Nancy Brown, was uh the mother of several of his children, of Devil Bill's children.
SPEAKER_01I feel like that would definitely shape your upbringing. Yes. Now, did he name himself Devil? Like, was that a was that a term that he came up with, or is that what his enemies called him?
SPEAKER_00No, that's really what the community called him because he was known, he was known as that. Um he was also known as Big Bill. He was a very tall man. Uh he lived to be 96, I believe. So he had a long, long life. Um, but he called himself Dr. Levingston. In his uh bigamous marriage to the Canadian woman, um, he was actually known as Dr. William Levingston. So he had um pseudonyms, he traveled around the country selling the snake oil and uh went back and forth between Cleveland and Canada to visit his two different families and kind of kept them separated, like they didn't know about each other until much later in his life.
SPEAKER_01So I've always been fascinated with people with double lives. Um, it seems like so much work. If you lead a double life, you should email us.
SPEAKER_00You know, it takes a fast car lady to lead a double life.
SPEAKER_01You you really need to email us, and we won't tell anybody, I promise. Just tell us a little bit of what it's like.
SPEAKER_00Maybe we could have you on as a guest.
SPEAKER_01But we'll have to garble your voice and all that. But uh I yeah, I think double lives are are fascinating.
SPEAKER_00So basically, he had yeah, it's like you said, it really shaped his upbringing. He had this very religious, very pious mother, um, good-hearted woman, Eliza, and a very fast-talking, um, sort of snakewale father who was absent most of the time. As as they got older, the kids, the family, he had um, he had two brothers and a sister. They moved to Cleveland. And when he was 16 years old, he got a job as a bookkeeper for a produce company called Hewitt and Tuttle. Isn't that a very 19 or 1800s 19th century um name, Hewitt and Tuttle?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but it's better than what we have now with just nonsensical words like Google and Yahoo and and and words that are misspelled on purpose like flicker.
SPEAKER_00He ended up working for them for a couple of years and realized he was kind of a protege with numbers and decided that he could do it better. He started his own wholesale food um grocery business trading in Cleveland and started off with that, and then the opportunity to be involved in the wholesale selling, buying and selling of oil came to be. He got into involved in oil, but at that time he realized because oil was real hit or miss, whether or not we were gonna hit it. Now, one of the biggest oil fields discovered that was first discovered, you know where it was? I mean, I said it earlier. Oh, you did say it earlier, Western Pennsylvania, earlier eastern Ohio. This is the comprehension section of the it wasn't it wasn't Texas, it wasn't California, it wasn't the Middle East. Um, the first place to really find oil was a place in um Western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, and these uh these um derricks, oil derricks, drillers started popping up everywhere, drilling companies forming all over. It was a mad rush. And during that time, and this was in the 1870s, 1860s, 1870s, um, during that time, people were starting to um worry a little bit about whether or not that field was going to stay, whether you know they were going to be able to eventually pull all the oil out. Now, at first, they used oil for things like they actually put crude oil on to cuts and used it as a medical bomb. It was put on to people to help them with things like that. But eventually the big the killer app for it was kerosene. So once they figured out how to refine and make kerosene, before that, if you think about this, in the early 1800s, early to mid-1800s, when the sun went down, it just got dark. There was no flashlights, there was no electricity, there were no gas lamps, there were no kerosene lamps. You could build a fire, but that was all you could do with logs and timber or coal or something like that.
SPEAKER_01You think people went to bed at like six o'clock? Absolutely. In the wintertime?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely they did. Yes. That was much more, you know, bed with the to bed when the sun goes down and rise when the sun comes up, a lot more back then. So they realized that kerosene was going to be a huge thing. And that's when Rockefeller, rather than getting into drilling, decided to get into refining. And he he realized that refining was, you know, drillers could hit or miss, but they all still had to have their product refined in order to sell it. So that was the birth of. Do you know the name of the company he founded that was pretty famous?
SPEAKER_01Was it Sohio?
SPEAKER_00No, Standard Oil.
SPEAKER_01Standard Oil.
SPEAKER_00Standard Oil. Standard Oil Company was was his company that he founded, and it became a behemoth of a company. I mean, it just over over time it was uh a behemoth. Part of the reason was because Rockefeller was initially successful. He was one of the first people to set up a refinery that could actually um increase the safety and the quality of the kerosene. And the name was a double meaning. It was supposed to standardize kerosene, but also become the industry standard. So he he meant it as a double meaning, kind of inadvertently good marketing that he did with that. Um, so when he was first starting out, Standard Oil was kind of struggling. They were making kerosene, they were you know shipping maybe 30 barrels a day or 40 barrels a day or something like that. Not a whole lot, but he had the opportunity to meet with Cornelius Vanderbilt. Now, um Vanderbilt was actually initially big in the train and railroad and transportation, shipping in general, like he shipped stuff from place to place, and they called him the Commodore because because he was uh a shipper. Vanderbilt invited John D. Rockefeller to come to New York City from Cleveland and meet with him about an agreement to ship um his product, his kerosene, in Vanderbilt's trains, right? So um ironically, John D. Rockefeller was going to take a train from Cleveland and get a connection in Buffalo, and then from Buffalo he was gonna take the train to New York City. Well, he left he left his home a little too late, missed the train from Cleveland's Union Station to Buffalo, and guess what happened? The train derailed that he was supposed to be on and killed almost um everyone on it, about 50 people uh died. It was called the horror, one of the biggest train accidents in the again, the 19th century, 1800s. This was in 1867. And if John had been on that train, he would have most likely died. Wow. But he he missed the train. And John always had this thing that he believed, because he was a very religious person, he believed that he was destined to make money and that he was destined to help the world with that money. And after that accident, he actually said, I do regard the thing as the providence of God. And what he meant by that was that he missed the train for a reason. God had instructed him to miss that train or made him miss that train so he could fulfill his destiny.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I've met people in situations like that where they've escaped death or they've they've had something happen where they were spared. And there is something that happens to you, I believe, where you you you have this different perspective on life where you thought, well, um either I'm destined for greatness or if that didn't touch me, nothing will. And you kind of have that, uh, but it's have you ever met anybody that's that's had that kind of experience where they um it kind of just had a near miss?
SPEAKER_00I I don't know if you're if you're teeing me up or if I've ever told you this, or maybe I've told you and you forgot. Um, I was supposed to be in the World Trade Center on September 11th.
SPEAKER_01I don't think I know this.
SPEAKER_00So uh I worked for a software company and we were doing a product launch, and the product launch was kind of a whole thing where in the morning there were press briefings, and then in the afternoon and evening there was uh uh like a launch, you know, where they would actually demo the product and then a reception in Times Square that night. And the press briefing was supposed to be at Windows on the World, and I was the multimedia guy. I had produced a bunch of videos that were going to play at the press briefing, and I was in charge of making them all play, and it got changed at the last minute to a different venue.
SPEAKER_01Wow. That's amazing. I never knew that.
SPEAKER_00I was in New York on September 11th, and so I always kind of considered that my my uh close call.
SPEAKER_01So did your did you kind of have that change and or perspective? Did things change for you, at least in the short term?
SPEAKER_00I I think I think for me it was not just not just the fact that I would have been up there had and and most likely died had we had that press briefing and it hadn't changed. Um it was just being in New York when that happened was a very surreal experience and very much um made me super kind of re reflective and you know, reevaluate what am I doing with my life, you know, am I if I died tomorrow, would I feel like I had um fulfilled what I wanted to fulfill? Would I be the kind of person that people would remember in a good way, all that sort of thing. So I think it did in a maybe short term, you know, but I've I've never felt like I was on the wrong path or anything like that. So it wasn't like I I felt like I had to make major course corrections after that, but it it it definitely emotionally and sort of spiritually impacted me, yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, and you could see how it might have affected Rockefeller too.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, yeah. So so he goes, he ends up later going to um New York to meet with uh Vanderbilt, and he and Vanderbilt strike up a deal where he's going to provide the oil to ship on Vanderbilt's trains, and Vanderbilt is going to give him a discount. So he's you know, he's promising to ship a certain amount. Well, he overpromised more than he could actually that more than he was actually making at the time. So that was a little bit of a problem. But he goes back to Cleveland, ramps up production, uh, ends up getting the deal with Vanderbilt, eventually and very quickly outgrows it. You know, this is when everybody's getting uh kerosene lamps. And guess what they would do? They actually had people originally that would deliver kerosene in horse-drawn carriages, either in barrels or in big tankers that they would fill up at people's houses, and they would give people free kerosene lamps, kerosene lanterns, but guess what you had to buy? You had to buy the kerosene. Yeah, just like the Razor companies, right?
SPEAKER_01Sure. And and and the first cell phone companies were like that too. The phone was free, you had to pay for the minutes, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So, so they they um he ended up uh outgrowing Vanderbilt and met a guy named Tom Scott, who was the president of uh the Pennsylvania Railroad. It's it's really interesting too because in listening to all these railroad names, they were all straight out of the game Monopoly, like the Reading Railroad and the Pennsylvania. BNO. Yeah, the BO BH. BH is a camera store. BO. Anyway, um he in 1871. So he had originally made this deal with um Vanderbilt in 1867. In 1871, he meets this guy named Tom Scott, who, by the way, is the boss of Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Andrew Carnegie works for Tom Scott, and they um he Andrew Carnegie's still up and coming at this time, as is uh Rockefeller. They meet and they form this um company or group, it's kind of a secret group called the South Improvement Company, and it was basically an alliance between um Tom Scott's railroads, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Standard Oil. And the way it worked is the Pennsylvania uh railroad agreed to raise their prices across the board, but then give discounts to Standard Oil. And so what this effectively did was if you were transporting your uh oil or your kerosene by train and you weren't standard oil, you had to pay much higher shipping costs or or um you know transportation costs, and it drove a lot of other um uh refineries and producers out of business. Essentially, one of the first things that he did that was monopolistic in in his uh career, this South Improvement Company this was eventually uh caught onto by a few people, and he actually had to go speak in front of Congress, and there was a whole thing about it where he got into trouble. He was never remorseful about it. He always felt like he was just he was just making deals and and doing business. And at the time, there wasn't really anything around antitrust or anti-monopoly laws. This was all new territory, like no companies had grown this big. Well, because of what he did, because the Southern improved or the South Improvement Company had uh gone so well, a lot of companies ended up having to shut down. Guess what Rockefeller did? He went and bought them all out really cheap. Some of the ones he bought out, he paid and kept running. Some of the ones he bought out, he paid and shut down just so they wouldn't be there anymore. And this was called the Cleveland Massacre. So he actually got this reputation for being really um ruthless by creating this um false competition by teaming up with Tom Scott at the railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad, and then by driving his competitors out of business because he had so much less shipping costs that he was able to run his business much more effectively.
SPEAKER_01Now you had said that he thought his mission was to make a lot of money and help people around the world. Was he did he start doing this philanthropy early, or was that always just another hundred? If I make another hundred million, then I'll start uh doing that.
SPEAKER_00No, actually, um interestingly, he did he did start doing philanthropy early. He was uh Um, very involved in the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church in Cleveland. Um, he became involved in his church also in New York City and was a financial sponsor of those churches, and he was also known known to give money to uh Baptist congregations when he would travel, and he was very much an abolitionist, you know, uh on the side of the North from uh the Civil War and was known to donate a lot to um African American, you know, the recently freed slaves. Um he actually gave money to a lot of their churches, and even early in his days, he believed in basically what I think a lot of people um who are you know church-going uh people of faith. There's tithing, and I think you know, sometimes it's said it's 10%, but he believed in one third should be saved, one third should be spent, and one third should be donated to everything. And he he instilled that in his own children. As a matter of fact, he made his own children keep a uh account book of the money that they made and what they spent it on. And every week he would have them come and he would reward them with a nickel if they kept a good, clean account book, and he would uh penalize them of a nickel if they couldn't account for all their money. So, so I guess in answer to your question, he became much more of a philanthropist a little bit later in life, like maybe around his 40s or 50s, but early on, he was always very much um, at least from the sources um that I saw. And by the way, this was a book called Titan that I read. Uh, let me get the author's name real quick. Um uh Ron Chernow was the book's author, and uh the book's called Titan. And, you know, he was one of these guys, Rockefeller, first of all, wealthiest man in the world during that time period, uh, first billionaire in the world, but he was a big target because so many saw him as ruthless and uh monopolistic and um again driving other people out of business. Now, have you ever heard of Ida Tarbell?
SPEAKER_01Ida Tarbell?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Ida Tarbell. She was a young woman during the time when uh and not by young, I mean she was a child, like teenager, during the time when the Cleveland Massacre happened, and her family was actually directly impacted. I think she belonged to a family that had um that was doing drilling, was doing, you know, acquisition of oil. And her family got run out of business. She ended up being a writer for a popular magazine called McClure's, and in 1903, she started uh a series about Rockefeller that really tarnished him. It was very popular. A lot of people loved to hate him. You know, they they thought that he was um, you know, what was wrong with the rich in the country at that time. And if you'll remember, back then, part of the reason he became the world's first billionaire, uh, and why it's so hard to replicate the amount of wealth he had today. Um, I mean, there's some people that are close, but in today's dollars, he was just extravagantly wealthy. It's because we didn't really have a tax system. We didn't have inheritance taxes, we didn't have uh we didn't have uh income taxes the way we do now. These things all started to come to be, um, especially under guess who? Our old friend, Teddy Roosevelt, um, in the early 1900s. So anyway, Idatarbell wrote a very, very um damaging to his reputation uh series about and popular series about um Standard Oil and their executives. And one of the biggest mistakes that John D. Rockefeller made, he never said anything. He was a very pious man. He, as a matter of fact, you were asking about his donations. He never actually liked to get acknowledgement. He never came out and told people when he donated something. He wanted the recipient to tell people. Like he didn't like to brag about it himself. He wanted it to be heard from the recipient, you know, that hey, uh Mr. Rockefeller donated to our church or Mr. Rockefeller donated to this cause. So he was very much a man who gave a lot because of his religious beliefs and the belief that God wanted him to do it, but he didn't always talk about it. Well, he was also very quiet and didn't really dispute any of the things that Ida Tarbell said about him. So she just kind of had a field day with accusations and with all the things he had done wrong and all the businesses he had ruined and all of that sort of thing, and kind of worked the country into an anti-Rockefeller uh fever, fervor. But you probably don't think of the Rockefellers that way, do you? No. What do you think of when you think of the name Rockefeller?
SPEAKER_01I just think of like, yeah, the like original rich, like the original rich people in the in America.
SPEAKER_00You think of uh think of their impact today. What are some things that you know about?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, probably what you were saying about uh about monopolies. I think I think of monopolies when I think of them. Uh um and then of course the um isn't his grandson, the vice president of the United States.
SPEAKER_00Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York and vice president under Henry Ford. You're correct. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But I just think of like rich rich oil executives, like you said, kind of pre-antitrust, um, just kind of making their own rules, doing whatever they want. I think of ruthless, um, kind of ruthless business. I don't think of the philanthropy stuff, although there's tons of things still named after Rockefeller. So I imagine that's what I was getting at.
SPEAKER_00That's actually what I was getting at was all the things that were named after him. There are so many other things that he didn't name after himself that he was a part of, that he that he contributed to, but didn't want his name on it. He wasn't about he wasn't about self-congratulations on the things that he donated over the years. Um, so what happened is the country kind of got negative on the Rockefellers. And then in the early 1900s, Teddy Roosevelt had what he called the trustbusters, and there were antitrust suits brought up against a number of companies, the railroads, the steel industry, uh, the oil industry, you know, all these monopolies that were coming in. And he sort of made an example out of Standard Oil. He very much thought Standard Oil was the biggest and the worst and the most egregious. And so Teddy Roosevelt decided to make uh an example out of them. For over 10 years, this was in the courts. And finally, in 1911, uh the Supreme Court found Standard Oil to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. I mean, you've probably heard that term, Sherman Antitrust Act. They were found in violation. They basically the biggest thing they did was they created these other companies and they didn't even acknowledge that they were owned by Standard Oil. So these were companies that were supposed to look like competitors, but in reality, the Rockefellers and his his group were pulling the strings. So that was the thing that kind of was their undoing. But here's the really ironic part is that after the Supreme Court handed down this antitrust legislation or verdict, they had them break um apart Standard Oil into 34 different companies. Well, ironically, what happened is those companies all became almost as successful as the original company had been and grew. It was like throwing spores off of a flower or a tree, and they all became big trees too. And so that was really it, you know, he went from being uh insanely wealthy to being just can't even unimaginably wealthy because um let me just give you some of the names of the companies that um that that they became. So they had Standard Oil of New Jersey, that became Exxon, Standard of Oil of New York became mobility Standard Oil of Indiana became Amoco, Standard Oil of California, Chevron, Atlantic Refining became Arco, which later became Sun. Continental Oil became Conoco, and then Conoco Phillips, and then Standard Oil of Ohio was actually absorbed by British Petroleum to great profit of the owners of Standard Oil of Ohio. So that's amazing.
SPEAKER_01So like every major oil company today has its lineage back to Rockefeller, except for Royal Dutch Shell.
SPEAKER_00So Shell was the only one that was uh a competitor that survived and and uh you know, and again, it wasn't based in the U.S. was part of the reason. So yeah. He he really did have a monopoly at a time when that was a new thing, and he saw it kind of an ends justifying the means kind of thing. So, you know, he had real quick, I'll say he had a brother, uh, he had two brothers and a sister, and his one brother, Will, worked with him, worked for Standard Oil, um, didn't have quite the money that he had, but was still amazingly rich. Um, and then he had a brother named Frank who he was always at odds with, and he and Frank like never really got along. And as a matter of fact, Frank's one of the people that uh was a source for Ida Tarbell. She met with him and asked him questions about uh John and his personality. And uh Frank always resented the fact that John had made this much money and was in charge, and you know, he wanted to be Frank wanted to be in charge. So I think his resentment kind of drove him to talk to Ida Tarbell and you know, say a lot of the nasty things that were said. As he got older, um, you know, starting in kind of the early 1900s, and particularly after the after the company was broken up, the monopolies were broken up, he had been giving to charity, but he had been doing it very um haphazardly, sort of randomly. He decided he needed a more systematic way to give to charity. And at the time, these big foundations didn't really exist. You know, you didn't have these, or these mammoth charities like uh United Way or you know, some of these ones that that um are overarching of multiple charitable organizations. So he actually met a man named Frederick T. Gates. Now, Gates was a Baptist preacher or had been a Baptist preacher, and Gates advised him on ways to to give his money away more effectively. Now, at first, John D. Rockefeller really just wanted to give money away to Baptist causes. You know, he was very much about that. And Frederick T. Gates helped him realize that he could do that, but he could also give away uh money interdom interdenominationally, and that he also should find a niche that he could give away money to that wouldn't be as controversial. And this is especially important because he was trying to mend this uh bad reputation he had. He he pretended not to care uh about what Ida Tarbell said, but really it did, it did impact him, you know, and it impacted his family because they all heard these awful things and and uh but you know were at odds about what they thought of their father versus what was said about him, right?
SPEAKER_01So this Ida Tarbell was just a constant thorn in his side and like the kind of the the voice of the other side all the time.
SPEAKER_00So it was interesting because um even though Teddy Roosevelt prosecuted or you know pushed the the trustbusters, he also was kind of anti-um muck raking. He called Ida Tarbell a classic muckraker. It's funny because later in life um they met briefly. Um John D. Sr. met Ida Tarbell briefly, and she kind of softened on him a little bit. And she all and it was also when he had given so much of his money away, she sort of said, you know, you're not the bad guy I thought you were. But interestingly, the person who was really impacted by John D. Rockefeller's bad press was his son, uh Rockefeller Jr. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Now, Jr. was a very nervous child, didn't have a lot of self-confidence, you know, and and was uh very much a pleaser like his father had been, very much a bookkeeper, and you know, kept his kept his um books in order as as John D had when he was a child. He brought his son in to help him start with the charitable foundations and to start giving money away. And along with Frederick T. Gates, they realized that the thing they could give away the most uh money to that was not going to have any sort of or very little uh controversy was health, was public health. Right. So that was a focus of them for the first few years of their philanthropy was figuring out ways to help people be more healthy. So of course, uh the South had um just gone through the Civil War, you know, uh it had been a few years since the Civil War, but it really tore the South apart. Um, one of the things that they started focusing on was hookworm. It was something that a lot of Southerners got because they walked around barefoot. And it was something that uh would attach itself to your feet and then get in your skin and cause all kinds of problems. And it was very, very easy to alleviate, to cure, and to avoid. But most Southerners just didn't know how to do it. So that was one of the first things they did was started a foundation um giving, I think it started with like a million dollars. It was interesting though, because even that got politicized. You know, COVID's been a little bit politicized, or at least it was a few years ago. Hookworm was politicized because the Southerners didn't want this northern Yankee coming in and calling them a bunch of dumb country bumpkins, you know, like we can handle our own damn feet kind of thing. So he and uh he and Gates kind of figured out a way to change the name of it. They did a little bit of branding work on it to make sure that they could um help people with hookworm and how to avoid it. Um that was one of their big things. They just called it the General Education Board. It was originally called like the Rockefeller uh Foundation to remove and destroy hookworm in the South or something like that. But they realized that that was going to be offensive to Southerners, so they called it the General Education Board. And it was basically educating people about hygiene and how to stay healthy.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I thought you meant they changed the name of Hookworm to something more palatable.
SPEAKER_00No, no, they changed the name of their their organization to sound less preachy.
SPEAKER_01They should have changed the name of hookworm.
SPEAKER_00I don't know, hookworm's pretty if I was gonna be a worm, I think I'd hookworm is I mean, I can't think of it.
SPEAKER_01No, it's definitely descriptive for the worm.
SPEAKER_00Well, ultimately, this guy Gates really helped him understand that there were better ways of giving, and their collaboration came to fruition in 1913 where they founded the Rockefeller Foundation, and this became a very, very big giving organization. Now, a foundation actually has to be approved by Congress. This had to go through Congress, and of course, there was still a lot of bad press about um John D and a lot of bad press about Standard Oil. John D had actually stepped away from Standard Oil before the antitrust thing happened. He he had realized uh it was affecting his health because he had some health issues earlier. Um, he realized it was affecting his relationship with his family, and he had gotten to be where he was still the president of the company, but somebody else was running it. So a lot of the things also that were said about him and his uh, you know, about Standard Oil weren't under his watch. But the thing is, he knew these things were happening and he let them happen, and he would often just feign, you know, uh, you know, Alex is running Dirt Knap City. I don't know what he said. I can't control that guy, you know. And so there was there was some culpability there. As a matter of fact, um, there was a thing that happened called the Ludau Massacre. Have you ever heard of the Ludau Massacre?
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_00So in 1913, there was a strike at a steel uh coal and steel mine in Colorado, and basically the unions and the and the workers uh got into a pretty nasty um arms race. They both were bringing in guns, bringing in strike busters, you know, scabs, bringing in um thugs to keep the order. And these tents got set up around the mines by the miners who were striking because they didn't want the scabs to come in or the strike butt sprite breakers to come in. And they kind of escalated and escalated. And during this time, John D. Rockefeller and his son, uh Rockefeller Jr. were both being told what was going on, but they were being told a sanitized version of it. And they were being told, yeah, it's all under control, don't worry about it. They were very anti-union. They didn't like the idea of unions. Of course, they owned a big business, right? That kind of makes sense that they wouldn't like unions. So they sat back, and what ended up happening is the uh National Guards and some of these guys who had been deputized on the spot came in and opened fire uh with weapons and lit fire to the tents that these uh strikers were staying in and ended up killing like 15 women and children um who had been hiding in in these tents. Oh, wow. Yeah, and it was kind of a turning moment for uh John D. Rockefeller Jr. Now his father never really accepted responsibility for that. His father kind of said, Well, you know, I wasn't there, I didn't I didn't order them to do that, uh, but he he let it happen. But for uh John D. Rockefeller Jr., he kind of realized that he should have been more responsible. I mean, the you know, he was one of the owners of this company uh and and had had a say in how this was gonna go down, and he ended up uh going to Colorado, visiting the site, meeting with the uh strikers, meeting with the unions, um, trying to improve things, you know, seeing the the conditions that they lived in and actually going down into the mine. And that was really a huge thing for him because he had never had a lot of confidence before that. And it was a point where his father said that he really handled it well. Even though his father wouldn't accept responsibility by the fact that his son said, you know what, we could have we could have done better by these people who are working in our mines at the um you know, at the Colorado Fuel and Iron, it was called CF and I. Um, he actually kind of said me a culpa, and a lot of people respected that.
SPEAKER_01It's probably very easy to forget the what the average person goes through when you're up where the Rockefellers are. It's probably very easy to forget about the common man.
SPEAKER_00Well, what's interesting about what you just said is that Junior never lived like the common man. Junior was born into great wealth, right? And so he never even knew, and yet he's the one that ended up taking a more conciliatory and apologetic tone and going in and talking to them, meeting with them, taking the trip to Colorado, which he didn't have to do. His father, who had been born poor and grown up in a, you know, more in that situation, his father wouldn't wouldn't admit to any wrongdoing.
SPEAKER_01You know who's responsible a lot of times for that is the nanny or the housekeeper or the the help. You know, sometimes they can get in your ear and uh and and let you know what what's going on out there. Of course, Senior didn't have that because his nanny was also his father's mistress, right?
SPEAKER_00Right, right. Well, no, the the mistress lived with the other family that he didn't live with. So so he he yeah, it was he had a messed up situation and he had to become a man at a very young age and take care of his family when he was very young. It was also very much a different time, you know, the early 1900s. If you think about like the roaring twenties that we came into, um, you know, the the Titanic and the moving pictures and airplanes and automobiles and all the things that started happening during that time were such a big departure from where Senior had lived, where John D. Rockefeller Sr. had lived in the you know mid to late 1800s. But for sure.
SPEAKER_01It's probably like similar to like the 1990s where that things were change was just happening super fast.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So so ultimately, um, this was kind of a big step for John Jr., who who actually kind of realized if he was going to be a leader, he had to take more responsibility. But he really found his passion in the philanthropic side of what the Rockefellers did. At this point, John D. Rockefeller's wealth was so great that he, because remember, he had gone from owning a majority stake in one company to owning a majority stake in 34 companies when they split it up. And these companies, guess what? When Standard Oil of Cleveland and Standard Oil of Ohio and Standard Oil of California and Standard Oil of, you know, all these ones that became Exxon and Chevron, et cetera, when they were all made, it was right around the time the automobile came out. So cars were just getting popular and they learned how to refine gasoline. And so it just skyrocketed. And, you know, they still basically had single ownership or a concentrated ownership among all these companies. Now, eventually, these companies did become rivals. They started to compete with each other, but it took a long time for that to happen. And interestingly, during World War One, um it was actually requested by the government that these companies work together closely to increase output, like more like a monopoly. They kind of they they broke up the monopoly, and then they said during World War I, wait a minute, we need as much fuel as you guys can provide, and as much oil and as much efficiency. So even though you're different companies now, behave like a monopoly. So all of this worked in John D's favor, and he became a shareholder in so many companies that were making so much money with so many dividends that he actually was not able to give the money away fast enough. Like he he almost couldn't spend, he was getting buried by the amount of money that was being made at this time. And remember, you know, 900 million dollars was the top of his wealth in 19 uh no, sorry, in 1913. That is that was at the time 3% of US GDP. 39 billion was GDP in 1913, and so one billion of that almost was belonged to John D. Rockefeller, and the um money would be worth like 26 billion or 27 billion today. So crazy amount of money. And nobody nobody had that kind of money. There weren't Jeff Bezos and you know, there weren't there weren't these crazy, crazy billionaires.
SPEAKER_01No, yeah, just him and Vanderbilt had all the money.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So um and Carnegie. Although he was still richer than he was richer than both those guys. He ended up exceeding Vanderbilt. So all of that said, um his son kind of took over his philanthropic era. He gave to a university that was uh specifically for black women, and that was something that was very, very uncommon back there for black women to go to college, and um he ended up giving giving to that university and helping actually um get it off the ground and to build an endowment for it. He gave to what later became uh Chicago University was originally the uh first Baptist university they gave to. So he was very big on education. He was very big on education among black people, former slaves. And there was actually a lot of debate back then between people as to whether it was better to educate former slaves in the same way that whites were educated, or to teach them trades, you know, to teach them to be manage horses or take care of trades, you know, more of a more of a uh blue-collar kind of work. And Rockefeller was very much on the side of educating black people the same way that you educated white people. You know, he felt like they should. It didn't matter your gender, your age, or your race. So that was pretty admirable. So Rockefeller did in the 1920s start to suffer some digestive problems, a little bit of depression. Um, he had alopecia. Do you know what that is?
SPEAKER_01That's where you lose your hair.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So he started losing his hair in actually the early 1900s and uh lost his mustache and ended up being a big wearer of toupees. You were mentioning toupees earlier. He he had quite a few toupees. When his wife finally died, um, his wife is named Laura, but they all called her Seti. She was a very, very um pious and um temperate woman. She very much didn't like to flaunt their wealth, she very much didn't like to um overdress or to seem put on any sort of airs. As a matter of fact, it was said that when Seti died, her wardrobe was very underwhelming, was what the paper said about it, because she never bought anything fancy, you know. And when she died, um, John D actually started to become more a little bit more uh uh risque. For example, they never went to plays or movies. Um, it kind of went against their religious beliefs. They never played cards, they never drank or gambled, and he never did drink or gamble. That was something he just wouldn't do. As a matter of fact, they gave money to the originally to the um temperance movement, you know, for the uh 18th Amendment, um, which eventually they supported repealing the 18th Amendment because they saw it wasn't working, but he didn't drink, but he did end up playing cards, he did end up playing the stock market, which which his son considered gambling. He did end up starting to buy more clothes and to take an interest in uh cars, like he he loved cars because you know he'd made his money on oil, so why shouldn't he? And he was kind of famous when he got older. He ended up spending a lot of time in Florida. He would go to um go out in the community and he would hand out dimes to adults who did him a favor, or if he just met somebody and wanted to make an impression, he would give them a dime and nickels to children. And he kind of saw it as his that was sort of his signature.
SPEAKER_01I don't I mean that's it sounds generous, I suppose, for a guy worth billions. Well, it's cool. It's I mean, he's the money bags guy, right?
SPEAKER_00He is the money bags guy, and you know, maybe a little bit of Monty Burns in there, you know, if from from The Simpsons.
SPEAKER_01I don't I don't I can't picture him. Did he look kind of like Mr. Monopoly or did he look like a rich like did he wear a monocle and a top hat and all that? Where does that trope come from?
SPEAKER_00So he did he did wear a top hat and he did not wear a monocle, but because of his alopecia, he did have sort of this gaunt look. Like he did kind of look like a corpse, especially later in life. A lot of people said he he um he he took up golf and he ended up playing a lot of golf. And this again is all after his wife died, because uh when she was alive, he sort of didn't do didn't have a lot of fun. Like he he kind of learned how to have fun. As a matter of fact, in the book they talked about him aging backwards. He became a little bit of a flirt when he was older, and even some women reported him as being kind of grabby as he was older, um, which you know wouldn't wouldn't fly today, but uh he was the richest man in the world, and he I think most older rich people are grabby today. Yeah. Today, still? Yeah. I there's actually one word that was used again and again in the book that I thought was really interesting. It's the word farthing. Do you know what that means?
SPEAKER_01No, but it sounds like an old old timey word.
SPEAKER_00So a farthing is a monetary unit in the UK, like uh Well right, yeah, farthing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think Dickens writes about a farthing.
SPEAKER_00So it's the smallest amount, it's like a quarter of a penny, like you know, one fourth of one penny. And so so if you s he would uh Rockefeller would often say, I don't give a farthing about that woman, or I don't give a farthing about what they think. And and uh meant, you know, I I could not care less. Like one farthing is the smallest amount you can care. I don't care at all. But yeah, his son ended up inheriting much of his wealth. He did not give as much to his daughters. Um, number one, because of the times, you know, it was just you gave it to your son, you didn't give it to your daughters. Uh, but number two, his son was very much the one who had always been by him and pleased him and was a lot like him in terms of his uh piety and his um his religious beliefs and his conservatism and his you know bookkeeping, even um, his daughters were certainly a little more liberal, a little more with it with the women's lib movement and the flappers of the 1920s. Uh he had one daughter that lived in Europe and and uh really wouldn't come see him, and she was very much uh involved with sort of spiritualists and and psychologist uh Jung, I think the guy you heard of Jung? Carl Jung. Carl Jung, yeah. She was involved with him. And uh anyway, he I mean he still left him like 22 million dollars, the daughters, but he gave his son like half a billion or something. So um his son ended up investing pretty well. They did, they did get hit pretty hard during the depression in in the late 1800s. There was a depression, and then again in the uh 1930s, uh, of course. Um, but his son made it back up, and now you know Rockefeller is synonymous with so many things, so many medical schools, so many colleges, so many, uh, again, uh a women's uh black women's historically black women's college, um, with Rockefeller Center. I mean, I think 30 Rock is named after uh after that. And a lot of that was his son later in life. His son's uh main job was to give away his father's money to these um charitable organizations. And you know, it's easy to for us to think, well, if I had all that money, I could give it away. I wouldn't have any problem. The thing was that uh John D. Rockefeller and his son were both very, very uh intentional and thoughtful about who they gave their money to. They got lots of requests. You can imagine the letters. They said that thousands of letters would come into him weekly.
SPEAKER_01I mean, this is the life of Bill Gates and Melinda Gates today, yeah, trying to trying to give away all that money separately now. But uh, but yeah, they say it's not easy because you'd so many requests and you just want to find the and you want to find the biggest bang for the buck, too. Yes, yeah, yep. Philanthropy is an interesting topic.
SPEAKER_00That was exactly what he wanted to do, and and really, you know, this guy, Frederick Gates, really helped him pioneer early large-scale for philanthropy. He Gates and his son were two guys that really helped him kind of figure out a system to do that. He eventually didn't even read letters that came in. Gates took care of that. All he did was once they were going to make a major donation or or make some sort of a uh, you know, open a foundation or start something, um, all that John D. Rockefeller Sr. requested was veto power. You know, he wanted to hear the case for it, and in most cases he approved it, and in very then some cases he vetoed it because he didn't think it was worthwhile or well thought out. So yeah, very much a uh very much a Titan of industry, captain of industry for the time. The OG, yep, yep, uh richest man in the world. And again, as you said, Nelson Rockefeller was the governor of New York. He was the vice president of Gerald Ford. He did try to run as a Republican, but interestingly, um, he never got the nomination because he was a liberal Republican, and you know, the last time he tried was against Ronald Reagan, and Ronald Reagan was, you know, kind of more for the conservatives, appealed more to conservatives, and so Nelson Rockefeller uh ended up never getting the nomination for president.
SPEAKER_01What notable Rockefellers are there today?
SPEAKER_00Um, that's a great question. I mean, there is so a couple of things. I did I did read that book, Titan, as I mentioned earlier. There's also on the History Channel a um uh uh series about the Titans of industry, and it interviews a lot of Rockefeller's descendants. Um I couldn't tell you their names. There is a there is a John D. Rockefeller III that I believe is still alive, really. Um and was the son of John D. Rockefeller's son, John D. Rockefeller. Um, and then of course, having had two brothers and a sister, and his other brother Frank, who didn't like him, had children. His uh brother Will had children, so there's a lot of them around, uh, but I couldn't tell you any of them today. I don't know their names.
SPEAKER_01I remember when I was a kid, there was a Michael Rockefeller that disappeared. Do you remember this? No, like in Papua New Guinea, and they said he was eaten by cannibals, which you know, I was like six years old, and that was the first time I'd ever heard about cannibals.
SPEAKER_00All right. Um I'm looking it up right now. It says Rockefeller was never seen despite an intensive search, and at the time of disappearance was a major news item. His body was never found, and he was determined legally dead. Um I guess they went in a dugout canoe.
SPEAKER_01And did I make up the cannibals part?
SPEAKER_00It says it was originally reported that Rockefeller either drowned or was attacked by a shark or a saltwater crocodile. However, because headhunting and cannibalism were still present in some areas of asthmat in 1961, there's also been speculation that Rockefeller may have been killed and eaten by tribespeople from the Azmat village.
SPEAKER_01So I don't know, take your pick. Shark, alligator, headhunters, saltwater alligator.
SPEAKER_00Saltwater crocodile. Yeah. Uh I think I'd probably go with the uh shark because I feel like I would just pull you under and be done with it.
SPEAKER_01With the headhunters, at least you feel like maybe you could talk your way out of it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, no, very true. Uh yeah, no, very, very interesting. Um, I did kind of go down a bit of a rabbit hole with Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Tor Carnegie, but you know, ultimately these guys, it's interesting that they all knew each other and met each other. Some other famous people that um that Rockefeller met was, of course, Henry Ford. As a matter of fact, the last time he saw Henry Ford was when he was uh 96 years old, 97 years old. And by the way, Rockefeller always hoped to live to 100, and he died like two weeks before his 98th birthday. So he he lived a long life for especially for someone of that time period. Yeah, but he died at uh 97. He saw Henry Ford the year before, and when Ford was leaving, he said, I'll see you in heaven, Mr. Ford. And Ford said, If they let you in, John.
SPEAKER_01That's a burn.
SPEAKER_00Uh he he also um his son was also uh pretty pally with uh Mark Twain. So Mark Twain was also a guy who had a lot of influence at the time, and they sort of used him a little bit to bolster their image, you know, because of his folksiness, Twain's folksiness. As a matter of fact, they had him introduce them at a few different events, and it was said that Mark Twain really liked John D. Rockefeller because he thought he was a scoundrel. It's kind of like the people who vote for Trump because Trump shakes things up, you know. Uh Mark Twain said the same thing about Rockefeller. He's like, you know, I don't know that this guy's always doing the right thing, but he owns it, and I like that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for telling me about uh Rockefeller. That was interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully next time you're uh center court at Rockefeller Center or or uh watching 30 Rock or getting a shot for hookworm, you'll you'll think of Mr. John D. Rockefeller Sr. And um I will go look at I think it would be good to go look and see what his children are up to today. Hopefully that wealth is still causing good, but ultimately, despite him being very vilified and probably doing a lot of things he shouldn't have in business, he really did have a sincere heart when it came to giving his money away and doing good in the world. Not unlike Henry VIII, not unlike Henry VIII, although he he never he never openly chopped their heads off. So all right, my man. Well, thank you so much. Thanks everybody for tuning in. If you like this type of thing, please be sure to subscribe to Dirtnap City. If you have suggestions for episodes, hit us at not at dirtnap city. That's N O T at DirtNap City, and we'll be sure to get back to you.
SPEAKER_01Especially if you lead a double life.
