Category: Industrial Revolution 1865-1900

On a bitter, cold February day in 1851, a brightly polished new locomotive pulled into Cleveland packed with passengers from Columbus and Cincinnati to celebrate the completion of the city’s first railroad, the Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati Co.

Among the officials who greeted the out-of-towners on the courthouse steps were the mayor, William Case, and the superintendent of the railroad, Amasa Stone, who not only had stock in the line, but a salary of $4,000 a year to run it.

These two were to clash in later years, and their mutual dislike and competitiveness would strongly affect higher education in Cleveland.

The famous and accomplished Case family: father, Leonard, and sons, Leonard Jr., and William, were unquestionably the first big names in 19th century Cleveland education, starting with the Cleveland Medical College in 1843. They also made several tries to create a Cleveland university, but came up short in the money department each time.

When Leonard Case Jr. died in 1880, he accomplished by his bequest of $1 million in land and money what he couldn’t manage while alive: a successful new school of higher education – the Case School of Applied Science, on Rockwell Ave. It was the first independent school of technology west of the Alleghenies.

The Cases were doing their business friends a favor because industry had become complicated; special skills were needed, and the idea was that sons of middle-class families could afford to give up working for wages while they studied for better jobs. As for the sons and daughters of Cleveland’s elite, they would continue to be taught liberal arts at tiny Western Reserve University in Hudson, Ohio.

But that school was practically broke, and so the trustees were perhaps more than willing to be lured away to University Circle in Cleveland by that man whose personality was as flinty as his name – Amasa Stone.

Stone’s arrogance had made him unpopular even in his own top-drawer society circle. But it also drove him as a philanthropist to do things for which only he would get the credit – and that included competing with the Cases by bankrolling a successful university in Cleveland.

Stone had made a phenomenal climb to wealth and power since those early railroad days. From banking to contracting, from a rolling mill to screw manufacturing, even to a trotting track in Glenville, Amasa Stone was in the thick of it. He gave the Home for the Aged Protestant Gentlewomen to the YWCA, saw his two daughters married extremely well – Clara to John Hay, a famous diplomat, writer and secretary to Abraham Lincoln; and Flora to industrialist Samuel Mather.

But tragedy dogged him: his son, Adelbert, was drowned in a swimming accident at Yale. He lost his reputation when a train on one of his own lines plunged into the Ashtabula gorge during a snowstorm in December 1876, killing 92 passengers and injuring more. The main arch of the bridge had caved in – a wooden bridge, designed, patented, and built by Stone himself, against the advice of his own engineer who wanted a new stone or iron bridge to span the gorge.

His physical and psychological health was already bad by 1880, when his business empire began to collapse; only philanthropy relieved some of the pressure.

Stone offered the little Hudson college $500,000 if it would move to what is now the University Circle area. There were conditions: he wanted the school named for himself, (but had to settle for Adelbert College of Western Reserve University); wanted to design and construct the buildings; Cleveland citizens had to provide the land for the site; and the site had to be built next to the new Case School, which had bought some farmland east of Euclid Ave. and E. 107th St.

Leonard Case Jr. may have been dead, but Amasa Stone was still competing with the family name. The little Hudson school lunged at the offer. As a local writer put it, according to historian William G. Rose, they “hitched their educational wagon to the new star of progress and threw old-fashioned prudence to the wind.”

A depressed Amasa Stone commited suicide in 1883, but his youngest daughter Flora and her husband, Samuel Mather, would help more than 30 religious, charitable and educational institutions in their time, including establishing the women’s undergraduate school at Western Reserve.

And Florence and sister Clara were able to honor their autocratic father with the Amasa Stone Chapel.

There was one thing he wanted that he didn’t get: a demand that the two schools exist side-by-side “in close proximity and harmony.” The two institutions promptly built a fence between them.

The tragic death of President James Garfield (CBS News 7/1/2012)

News feature from CBS news.

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Was Euclid Avenue a Neighborhood?

Article by John J. Grabowski presented at the Western Reserve Studies Symposium in 1991

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Responses here
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Cleveland’s Settlement Houses from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

Written by Dr. John J. Grabowski

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SETTLEMENT HOUSES – The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

SETTLEMENT HOUSES. Cleveland, along with Chicago, Boston, and New York, was one of the centers of the U.S. settlement-house movement. Local settlement work began in the late 1890s, and within a decade a half-dozen settlements operated in Cleveland neighborhoods. Several of the city’s settlement houses achieved national recognition; for example, KARAMU HOUSE, one of the centers of African American theater in the U.S., and the CLEVELAND MUSIC SCHOOL SETTLEMENT, with its model music training programs. The settlement movement began in England in 1884 when a group of Oxford Univ. students established Toynbee Hall, a residence in a London slum. Sharing knowledge and skills with area residents, they strove to understand and solve urban problems. The urban village concept was foremost, attempting to replicate in city neighborhoods the network of mutual aid common to a small village. New York City’s Neighborhood Guild (1885) and Jane Addams’ Hull House (Chicago, 1888) marked the importation of settlement houses to the U.S.; over 100 existed in America by 1900. The settlement movement grew in response to the overcrowding, impoverishment, corruption, and disease caused by rapid industrialization and urbanization. One of the most enduring reform movements, it uniquely attempted to change problem neighborhoods from within.

Hiram House float in the 1919 Community Fund Parade. WRHS.

Social settlements addressed Progressive Era concerns: education (with adult classes, kindergartens, and vocational training); citizenship; recreation; health (with visiting-nurse networks and health inspections); labor, unions, and working standards; and living conditions (establishing housing codes). Many programs became standard to education and government. Early settlement house support came through an independent board of directors or a particular religious or educational affiliation. While supporters and settlement workers were generally native-born, Protestant and middle- or upper-middle-class, clients in the early years were mostly Catholic or Jewish working-class immigrants. This difference between the settlement worker and neighborhood resident clearly distinguished the American settlement movement.

The first settlement house established in Cleveland was HIRAM HOUSE (1896). By World War I, many other settlements served Cleveland neighborhoods. While Hiram House served JEWS & JUDAISM (later ITALIANS and thenAFRICAN AMERICANS) along lower Woodland Ave., ALTA HOUSE (1900) served the Italians of LITTLE ITALY. EAST END NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSE (1907) worked with HUNGARIANS and SLOVAKS in the BUCKEYE-WOODLAND-Woodhill district, and Goodrich House (1897, see GOODRICH-GANNETT NEIGHBORHOOD CENTER) served South Slavic groups residing along St. Clair Ave. By the 1920s, other local settlements included the WEST SIDE COMMUNITY HOUSE (1922), MERRICK HOUSE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT(1919), the RAINEY INSTITUTE (1904), UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT (1922), the Playhouse Settlement (1915, later Karamu House), the Council Educational Alliance (1899, forerunner of the JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER), the FRIENDLY INN SOCIAL SETTLEMENT (1897), and the Cleveland Music School Settlement (1912). The 1920s and 1930s saw tremendous nationwide changes in settlement operation, especially the hiring of trained social workers and the emphasis on a more scientific methodology and program. National and local organizations, such as the National Federation of Settlements (est. 1911), the Cleveland Settlement Union, and, later, the GREATER CLEVELAND NEIGHBORHOOD CENTERS ASSN., fostered such change.

Following World War I, the increased centralization of urban social work and PHILANTHROPY affected settlement houses. While they had previously enjoyed autonomy in fundraising and allocation, many settlements came to depend on centralized welfare campaigns by 1930. Funding agencies frequently dictated areas in which a settlement could spend monies received from general solicitations, often hampering program development. In Cleveland, the Federation for Charity and Philanthropy, and later the Welfare Federation (predecessors ofUNITED WAY SERVICES), solicited and allocated charitable funds. Despite the loss of autonomy, the curtailment of immigration, and the general decline of urban populations, many settlement houses established during the Progressive Era endured in 1993, such as Alta House, Goodrich-Gannett, Karamu, and the Cleveland Music School Settlement. A new neighborhood emphasis by various city, state, and federal funding programs during the 1970s renewed vitality in some institutions.

John J. Grabowski

Western Reserve Historical Society

Bond, Robert L. Focus on Neighborhoods: A History of Responses by Cleveland’s Settlement Houses and Neighborhood Centers to Changing Human Needs (1990).

See also specific institutions and reformers.

Last Modified: 21 Nov 2009 01:54:41 PM

John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study by Ida M. Tarbell

McClure’s Magazine.

July, 1905.

John D. Rockefeller A character study

by Ida M. Tarbell

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When Ink Trumped Oil. Muckraking Writer Ida Tarbell’s Expose Outraged America and Helped Break Up the Monopoly Power of John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust. Plain Dealer 12/12/2004

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When ink trumped oil. Muckraking writer Ida Tarbell’s expose outraged America and helped break up the monopoly power of John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust.

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) – Sunday, December 12, 2004

Author: Jennifer Scott Cimperman, Plain Dealer Reporter

As influential as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, as famous as businessman-turned-TV star Donald Trump, as ethical as former Enron chief Kenneth Lay. That was John D. Rockefeller – at least the one serialized in the pages of McClure’s Magazine beginning in late fall 1902.

Readers devoured journalist Ida M. Tarbell’s tales of secretive late-night contracts, lies told under oath, strong-arm tactics meant to drive out competitors of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. He even cheated a widow. The public was outraged. So, too, was the U.S. Supreme Court, which eventually forced the company’s breakup after declaring it a monopoly.

Even 100 years after publishers converted Tarbell’s serial into a two-volume book, “The History of the Standard Oil Co.,” in November 1904, the work’s significance remains, say academics, authors and consumer advocates. It highlighted unethical – yet, at the time, largely legal – business practices. It prompted government scrutiny of monopolies. It elevated business journalists to the role of watchdogs and celebrities. It brought the boardroom to the public’s living rooms.

It’s not a perfect work. Tarbell’s research, while impressive in scope, sometimes makes for clunky prose. Long passages quote prices down to the penny when describing railroad rebates afforded “the Standard.” And some historians say Tarbell was plain wrong about some of the book’s most incendiary incidents, including the story of the cheated widow.

Flaws aside, the work still garners praise. Longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader first read it in high school.

“It was really inspiring,” Nader said. In the days before the Securities and Exchange Commission, “she showed you could really piece together a lot of information. . . . You have hundreds of [business] books today, and they don’t have the effect that book had.”

Ron Chernow, author of “Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr.,” said Tarbell’s work represented “a new maturity for American journalism.”

“Everyone from President Roosevelt on down was reading the series and cheering Ida Tarbell on,” Chernow said.

Tarbell “writes the series with a tone of throbbing moral indignation. It’s very hard to read the book to this day without getting very angry at Rockefeller and Standard Oil.”

Cleveland was hub

The first commercially viable oil well was successfully drilled in Titusville, Pa., in 1859. Within a decade, the nation’s refining capital was Cleveland. Lured by well-connected railways and Lake Erie — both ideal for shipping to the nation’s Northeast — about 50 refineries called the city home.

Rockefeller invested $4,000 with his partner in a fledgling refinery owned by Samuel Andrews. Within three years, Rockefeller sold his share of his previous business and started the oil firm Rockefeller and Andrews. The firm quickly opened another refinery, then a sales office in New York.

In June 1870, Rockefeller combined those ventures and others into a new company, Standard Oil. As the area’s largest refinery, it quickly won favorable shipping rates from local railroads — rates that enabled it to beat even its most nimble competitors.

It didn’t stop there, though. Within years, it had a stranglehold on refining, production, pipelines, virtually all aspects of the industry.

Tarbell exposed the company’s practice of hiring “spies” — railroad clerks who wrote down competitors’ shipments, businessmen who gleaned gossip about Standard foes, even employees of competitors who exchanged loyalty for cash.

She exposed its back-room partnerships with shippers, pipeline companies and others who, to the world, appeared independent.

She hammered Standard’s practice of withholding oil deliveries to small companies, which eventually withered to the point that Standard could buy them for a song.

One such company, lubricants maker Morehouse and Freeman, built a plant on encouragement from Standard, which agreed to supply Morehouse 85 barrels of oil byproduct daily. After the plant was built, Standard cut its shipments to 12 barrels and raised prices.

The plant had cost $41,000 to construct. It was sold to Standard for $15,000.

Resist and suffer

Tarbell came by such detail through a web of professional and family connections.

She was raised near Titusville, center of a 50-mile strip in northwest Pennsylvania known as the “Oil Regions.” Her father, a carpenter and teacher, found economic security building oil barrels. When barrels were replaced by iron tanks, the elder Tarbell moved to refining.

His success was short-lived — due, in part, to Rockefeller’s South Improvement Co., a secret 1872 scheme to consolidate several refiners and shippers, then secure special freight rates and kill off small independent producers that tried to compete.

The consolidation died quickly, victim of public outrage and oil producers’ outcries, but Standard continued to swallow smaller companies.

“The people who agreed to throw in their success with him often stayed in their positions and managed their companies,” said Barbara Zolli, director of the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, which is home to Ida Tarbell’s Standard Oil papers. “People who resisted the buyout . . . many people suffered.” Those included Tarbell’s father and brother.

And while she never had access to Rockefeller, acquaintance Mark Twain helped arrange a meeting with Standard Oil insider Henry Rogers, a former refiner who was brought into the Standard fold and ascended to the position of director for the entire Standard Oil Trust. The two met off and on for two years, until one of Tarbell’s articles soured the relationship. Academics surmise that Rogers’ goal was to deflect blame to Rockefeller from himself.

“Did he mislead her? Probably in some areas,” said Paula Treckel, history professor at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., Tarbell’s alma mater and home to a collection of her personal papers. “But did he supply her with some good detail? Yes, he did.”

Widow Backus

Tarbell’s connections color views of her work. On the one hand, her inside knowledge yielded rich details. On the other, it affected her objectivity.

“Today, she would never have gotten away with this,” Chernow said. Treckel’s take: “Personally, I think she despised him [Rockefeller].”

That may explain why one of her most scathing accusations proved unfounded: the infamous “Widow Backus” story.

By Tarbell’s account, Rockefeller cheated Mrs. Fred M. Backus (referred to by Tarbell simply as “Mrs. B.”). Though Rockefeller had been friendly with her late husband, once a bookkeeper at Rockefeller’s office and a Sunday school teacher at the church both attended, he paid her next to nothing for her Cleveland lubricating plant in 1878. That’s Tarbell’s version.

According to Chernow, the widow actually insisted on an inflated sum — up to $200,000 — for an outdated plant she inherited when her husband died of consumption. Rockefeller, who dealt directly with the widow due to their close connections, paid $79,000, including an additional $10,000 thrown in on top of the fair value assessed by appraisers.

Chernow called Tarbell’s book “one of the most brilliant pieces of journalism of all time,” but said, “in the last analysis, it doesn’t stand up as an enduring piece of history.”

Still, New York University Professor Richard Sylla said, the work provides a snapshot of Rockefeller and his critics.

While Sylla doesn’t recommend the book to current MBA students, “business historians would want to read it and economic historians would want to read it,” said the economist and history professor of financial institutions and markets. “It’s part of our history.”

Spying in church

Why didn’t Rockefeller challenge Tarbell’s inaccuracies? Because if he publicly defended one part of the book, he would have been forced to defend it all, Chernow said. Instead, Rockefeller said nothing.

Even after the book, Tarbell continued to follow the reclusive tycoon, even secretly attending his Euclid Avenue church one Sunday and writing a two-part character sketch for McClure’s describing his features as reptilian.

The latter bruised the reclusive Rockefeller more than the 19-month series. Yet it proved to be her parting shot. The eventual breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, prompted by Tarbell’s work, only contributed to Rockefeller’s wealth.

Instead of stock in one large enterprise, he held shares in more than two dozen, each yearning to tap the next great gusher.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: jcimperman@plaind.com, 216-999-4871

BOX

Splitting Standard Oil

In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court dissolved the Standard Oil monopoly. Here’s how some offshoots fared.

Standard Oil of Ohio: Known as Sohio. British Petroleum Co. bought 25 percent in 1970, owned all by 1987. Merged with Amoco Corp., 1998.

Standard Oil of California: Began Chevron brand in 1930s. Consolidated in 1977, changed name to Chevron USA Inc. Bought Gulf Corp. in 1985; changed name to Chevron Corp. Acquired Texaco Inc. in 2001, forming ChevronTexaco Corp.

Standard Oil of Indiana: Merged with Pan American Petroleum and Transport Co. in 1954 to form American Oil Co. (Amoco). Merged with BP in 1998.

Standard Oil of New Jersey: Known as Esso, changed name to Exxon Corp. in 1972. Merged with Mobil Oil Corp. in 1999, forming Exxon Mobil Corp.

Standard Oil of New York: Socony merged with Vacuum Oil Co. (another former Standard company) in 1931, forming Socony-Vacuum. Changed to Socony Mobil Oil Co. in 1955; to Mobil Oil Corp. a decade later. Merged with Exxon, 1999.

Atlantic Petroleum Storage Co.: Merged with Richfield Oil Corp. in 1966 to form Atlantic Richfield Co., ARCO for short. Acquired by BP in 2000.

Continental Oil and Transportation Co.: Merged with Marland Oil Co. in 1928 to form Continental Oil Co. Subsidiary of DuPont,1981 to 1998; became Conoco Inc. Merged with Phillips Petroleum Co. in 2002 to form ConocoPhillips Co.

Ohio Oil Co.: Bought Transcontinental Oil Co. in 1930, gaining Marathon brand. Changed to Marathon Oil Co., 1962. Became subsidiary of U.S. Steel Corp., 1982; spun off in 2002.