What kind of person was rockefeller

The 19th century was a period of great change and rapid industrialization. The iron and steel industry spawned new construction materials, the railroads connected the country and the discovery of oil provided a new source of fuel. The discovery of the Spindletop geyser in Franklin D. With the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt immediately acted to restore public confidence, proclaiming a bank holiday and John Adams was a leader of the American Revolution and served as the second U.

The Massachusetts-born, Harvard-educated Adams began his career as a lawyer. Intelligent, patriotic, opinionated and blunt, Adams became a critic of Great On January 10, , an enormous geyser of oil exploded from a drilling site at Spindletop Hill, a mound created by an underground salt deposit located near Beaumont in Jefferson County, southeastern Texas.

Reaching a height of more than feet and producing close to , Jay served as the key Unlike many anti-slavery activists, he was not a pacifist and believed in aggressive action against slaveholders and any government officials who enabled them. An entrepreneur who ran Taken prisoner after his plane was shot down, he suffered five and a half years of torture and confinement before his release in In , he began his long tenure as the U.

Live TV. It was a short logical step to extend those pipelines directly to refineries. Vandergrift into the Standard management. Two large refineries in Titusville joined the Standard and John Archbold later the President of Standard Oil was brought into the management.

The Standard expanded into Philadelphia by buying the largest refinery. In , the Standard bought more pipelines and firms in the oil buying business and merged them all into the United Pipe Lines in In , Johnson N.

Camden later a senator from West Virginia came into the Standard secretly and moved to buy up all the West Virginia oil supply to squeeze the Pittsburgh independents. By Camden gained control of most of the West Virginia refineries. In , Standard bought the Columbia Conduit Co. The Pennsylvania Railroad used armed guards to prevent them from laying a pipeline under its right-of-way north of Pittsburgh.

The Standard gained control of most of the property of the Empire Transportation Company -- a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad that had its own fleet of tank cars, pipelines, lake steamers, and terminals in New York harbor. The Empire had briefly threatened the Standard, but Rockefeller built new tank cars, cut prices, and cancelled all his shipments over the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The railroad capitulated and sold Rockefeller the Empire's assets. In , the Standard forced the railroads to pay a drawback of cents a barrel of crude oil shipped by any other party. In effect, this was a tax levied by the Standard upon its competitors. This combination of rebates and "taxes" some authors dub this a "drawback" -- but that term is also used to refer to a specific type of rebate is what forced the remaining independent refiners to capitulate to the Standard.

Production increased in the Pennsylvania Oil Regions because of a large discovery in the Bradford area. Standard was forced to frantically build as many large holding tanks as possible to hold the market glut of oil. By , the Standard Oil Company did about 90 percent of the refining in the United States, with almost 70 percent being exported overseas.

The business had become so large and so complex that Rockefeller only dealt with the major problems and the larger outlines of his affairs. Rockefeller was only 40 years old. It took Rockefeller by surprise and succeeded in building a pipeline from the Oil Regions east across northern Pennsylvania to Williamsport, where the oil was transferred to the Reading Railroad. Attorney Samuel Dodd came up with the idea of a trust. A Board of Trustees was set up and all the Standard properties were placed in its hands.

Every stockholder received 20 Trust certificates for each share of Standard Oil stock, and all the profits of the component companies were sent to the nine trustees who determined the dividends. The nine trustees elected the directors and officers of all the component companies. The nine Trustees controlled 23, of the 35, shares with J.

Rockefeller holding 9, shares. Rockefeller, at age 43, was the leader of the Trust because he was "primus inter pares" first among his peers , not a dictator. As such, he could not dictate policy even when he felt strongly that he was right. An example of this was the Lima Oil field in Ohio. The field had been discovered in the early s. The problem was that the oil was "sour" -- that is, it had a very high sulfur content so it smelled like rotten eggs.

Even worse, when it was refined into kerosene and used in lamps it produced too much soot, which coated the lamp chimneys. Rockefeller wanted to buy up as much of the oil as possible and worry about solving the sulfur problem later. The other directors were unenthusiastic about this policy and John Archbold began quietly selling some of his Trust shares in the Standard.

By , the Standard owned 40,, barrels of the Lima oil, which were stored in huge tank farms at the fields. Rockefeller hired a great chemist, Herman Frasch, who, with the aid of talented Standard engineers, devised a process using copper oxides to remove the sulfur from the oil. By , The Standard had set up an elaborate nationwide distribution system that reached nearly every American town.

The Standard was aggressive in its marketing practices and tried to force all grocery and hardware stores that sold kerosene and lubricants to sell only Standard products.

This policy — though successful in the short run — made the Standard widely unpopular and simply increased its vulnerability to political attack. On March 21, the Trust was formally dissolved. The Attorney General of Ohio had brought suit against the Trust in and it lost in Each trust certificate was to be exchanged for the proportioned share of stock in the 20 component companies of the Standard. The irony is that this had no practical effect on the Combination. The same men were still in charge, only now they were simply the majority shareholders of all the component companies.

Rockefeller Exits: 7 During all the evidence suggests that Rockefeller had a partial nervous breakdown from overwork. He lost all of his hair, including his eyebrows, and suffered from ill health in the early s.

During this period Rockefeller's wealth had increased to such an extent that his major problem was what to do with it all. He solved this problem by hiring Frederick T. Gates in September of as a full-time manager of his fortune. By this time, Rockefeller was literally inundated with appeals from individuals and charities for funds. For example, by Rockefeller owned large holdings of the Missabe iron range in Minnesota, a railroad to carry the ore to Lake Superior, and a fleet of huge ore-carrying lake steamers.

In Rockefeller sold his iron ore-related business to J. Morgan added the Rockefeller properties to the U. Steel Corporation. By , Rockefeller stopped going to his office daily and in he retired, at the age of He took part in some management activity until but none to speak of thereafter. John Archbold ran Standard Oil from the mids onward. Archbold disliked prominence and asked Rockefeller to remain as the nominal president of Standard.

Not publicly announcing his retirement was a great mistake on Rockefeller's part. Rockefeller had resisted the temptation to exploit the Standard's near-monopoly position by raising prices "too" much. Rockefeller had built for them. In Ohio, as in New York, he always created a profound impression on his visits home, by his clothes, his good horse, and his crack shooting.

When William A. Rockefeller took his family to Ohio, his oldest son, John Davison, was a lad of fourteen years.

A quiet, grave boy by all accounts, doing steadily and well the thing he was set at. Up to this time his training had been that of the ordinary country boy. He had gone to a district school a few months of the year, and the rest of the time had worked and played as a boy ordinarily does in a country settlement, chopping wood, caring for a horse, milking cows, weeding garden, raising chickens and turkeys.

Nowhere does he seem to have made an impression, save by his silence and gravity. Dominated as this daughter of a prosperous farmer probably was by a spirit of narrow and stern New England conventionality, she must have come to hate the lawless and suspicious ways of this likeable sinner, this quack-doctor horse-jockey, this loose-tongued rake she had married, and all the arrogant respectability within her must have risen in a fierce effort to save appearances, and to force these children of his into good and regular standing.

There is a something in the fine, keen face of John D. That she kept her children in school and church is certain. It is quite probable that it was her influence which persuaded her husband to send John to school in Cleveland soon after the family moved to Ohio. The boy spent a quiet year in the town studying diligently, so his former schoolmaster has testified, his only outside interest being in the Baptist Church and Sunday-school — to which he had been directed by a wise landlady.

In , after a year of study, young Rockefeller left school and began to look for work. It was a hard time in the West, the year of , and it is quite possible that William A. Rockefeller had not been so successful as formerly in his wandering trade or trades, whatever they may have been, and that he felt it time for his son John to do something for himself.

At all events, in the summer of that year, John D. Rockefeller made his first attempt to get a footing in business. The struggle and discouragement of the days he spent walking the streets of Cleveland looking for work made a deep impression on Mr. Again and again in his later years he has referred to the experience in the little talks he has given at Sunday-school and church gatherings. Again and again he has expressed his lasting gratitude that finally he did find a position.

It was a modest enough one, that of a clerk in a warehouse on the Cleveland docks. He reveled in the opportunity that his church gave him to stay connected with everyday people. Rockefeller would visit his oil fields, genuinely inquiring with supervisors on their views and opinions on how the company could be improved. Not only that, but he also spoke to the men that were actually doing the drilling. In the boardroom, Rockefeller was not imposing. He chose not to sit at the head of the table and instead listened to all other opinions before offering his own.

Wealth was not the sole driving force for John Rockefeller. While he certainly wanted to make money, he found genuine enjoyment in his work. Rockefeller was intent on a few things. Firstly, he wanted to create a new model for business. Instead of thinking short-term and hoping to hit a gusher and instant wealth like others in the oil business, Rockefeller built a vision on long-term success.

In so doing, he hoped to grow not only a revolutionary company, but economic growth for his country as well. As the company became increasingly successful and profitable, Rockefeller was able to put his money back into charity and other philanthropies. This was not a new concept for Rockefeller, though. This was engrained in Rockefeller by his mother, who always encouraged him to donate even pocket change at church collections. Wealth is often a consequence of the pursuit of other goals and for Rockefeller, it was a means to an end.

Rockefeller was an extremely detail-oriented man.