www.teachingcleveland.org
Documentary #1
The History of Oil
Decent overview of the History of Oil which offers context for the world of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil Company. Parts 1, 2 and 3 covers and pre Standard Oil period, the creation of Standard Oil and the period of greatest dominance. Parts 4 and 5 involve more recent periods, after the break up of the Standard Oil Trust
1. Documentary about Flora Stone Mather written and produced by Gladys Haddad for Case Western Reserve University, College of Arts and Sciences.
2. Speech given by Gladys Haddad in 2007 author of “Flora Stone Mather: Daughter of Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue and Ohio’s Western Reserve”
ohio historical society
Mark Hanna: The Clevelander Who Made a President
By Joe Frolik
If Marcus Alonzo Hanna, the 19th Century Cleveland entrepreneur who made his fortune in the Gilded Age and then turned his attention, energy and prolific talents for innovation and fundraising to Republican politics, wandered into the Boston campaign headquarters of 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, he might feel surprisingly at home with the mechanics of electing a president.
That’s because his fingerprints are all over the way the GOP – or any other political party – spreads its message. But it’s the ideological message of so many modern Republicans that might seem out of date to the man who helped reinvent the party more than a century ago. Hanna, for all of his political and business sophistication, was at heart a pragmatic Midwestern guy who, according to biographer Thomas Beer, served his many guests the finest champagne, but drank water himself. His approach to campaigning ran down the middle of the road because that’s the route he thought led to victory.
And winning, in business or politics, was what mattered to Mark Hanna.
Hanna worked his campaign magic without the aid of computers or the Internet or broadcast media, of course. Yet many of the practices that still define campaigning in the age of social media and micro-targeting were introduced or refined by Hanna during his political tour de force: the 1896 campaign to put William McKinley, his friend and fellow Ohioan, in the White House.
He used polling techniques, albeit primitive ones, to monitor the pulse of the campaign, especially in states he thought could swing either way. He ordered the production of 200 million pamphlets, newspaper inserts and other pieces of literature – at a time when there were barely 14 million voters in the United States. Much of it was issue-oriented and targeted particular market segments such as German-Americans or “colored” voters. He dispatched 1,400 surrogate speakers to spread a unified GOP message, some of them toting new-fangled devices to enthrall audiences with grainy moving pictures of McKinley.
When McKinley turned down Hanna’s suggestion to imitate Democratic rival William Jennings Bryan and take his campaign to the country in person, the resourceful manager arranged to bring the country to McKinley. Between mid-summer and Election Day 1896, some 750,000 people traveled to William and Ida McKinley’s modest home on Market Street in Canton to hear a few words from the former congressman and governor of Ohio. Many came by train, taking advantage of special deep-discount fares that Hanna had negotiated with the railroad barons who shared his antipathy for Bryan’s populism. The pro-Democrat Cleveland Plain Dealer acidly observed that thanks to Hanna’s deal-making with the railroads, going to Canton was “cheaper than staying home.’’
All of this innovation required boatloads of cash, and Hanna excelled at raising it. Before 1896, most presidential campaigns were run through the political parties and relied on tithes from patronage workers. Hanna had broken into politics in Cleveland by raising cash from his fellow businessmen to help elect President James Garfield in 1880, and 16 years later, he took the art of the ask national. He tapped not just the railroaders, but tycoons of every stripe, by stoking their fears of financial catastrophe if Bryan and his “free silver” platform prevailed. The result was a war chest that has been estimated at between $3.5 million and $10 million, in an era when newspapers sold for a penny. One of Hanna’s Cleveland Central High School classmates — a rather successful oilman named John D. Rockefeller – reportedly kicked in $250,000.
But Hanna did more than invent the modern political campaign in 1896 – though give some credit for that to Bryan, too. The Democrat took to “the stump” out of economic necessity, ended up traveling 18,000 miles to give hundreds of speeches and along the way changed American expectations of those who seek the presidency.
Along with the equally pragmatic and more politically savvy McKinley, Hanna basically reinvented the Republican Party. The coalition they forged made the GOP America’s dominant party from 1896 until Wall Street collapsed in 1929. The only Democrat to break the Republican hammerlock on the White House in those years was Woodrow Wilson. He did it twice, the first in 1912 when the GOP split along personality and ideological lines. But even as an incumbent who had kept the U.S. out of the horrific war in Europe, Wilson barely eked out a second term in 1916. When Warren Harding, another Ohio governor, ran for president in 1920, he spoke of returning the country to “normalcy,’’ a response to war, of course, but also an appeal to recall the good times associated with the Republican era ushered in by McKinley and Hanna.
The Ohioans has seen a nation that was being changed by immigration, urbanization and industrialization and sought to invite this new America into the Republican fold. In its own way, that was a pretty radical idea.
For three decades, the GOP had looked backwards. Its leaders played up their ties to Lincoln and Grant and the heroes of the Civil War. They made little effort to attract the newcomers pouring into America’s cities. On one of the great hot-button issues of the age, they often tilted toward the prohibitionists whose movement had a decidedly anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-city undercurrent. Nor did they show much sympathy for the emerging labor movement which was also rooted in America’s fast-growing cities.
McKinley and Hanna set out to change that.
“1896 was the year that McKinley and Hanna tried to redefine the Republican Party,’’ GOP strategist Marshall Wittman told the Washington Post’s David Von Drehle in a 1999 interview. “Instead of rehashing Reconstruction and the Civil War, McKinley offered an appealing image to new immigrants, rising entrepreneurs and working folks.’’
The country was gripped by a ravaging depression as the campaign began, so McKinley hardly needed to demonize the Democrats who controlled the White House (incumbent Grover Cleveland was not seeking a third term). But that wasn’t his nature anyway. McKinley was, like Ronald Reagan, a natural optimist. He billed himself as “an advance agent for prosperity.’’ His central pitch was a call for high tariffs to protect American industries from foreign – which in those days meant European – competition. Strong domestic producers, he argued, would pay better wages and lift all boats.
McKinley and Hanna used that prospect to appeal to urban working class voters. They had little use for divisive, social issues such as immigration, temperance or union bashing. Make no mistake. They were conservatives and very pro-business, especially Hanna who thought government, capitalists and labor should work hand-in hand.
But they were also “Big Tent” Republicans, more interested in who they could bring into the fold than in ideological purity. They sowed the seeds of the center-right Main Street Republicanism that – despite frequent and often bitter internecine battles with harder-edged conservatives – defined the party for most of the 20th Century.
To Hanna, a lifelong friend of the original Rockefeller Republican, that might not sound like cause for celebration.
Hanna had been born in Ohio’s Columbiana County in 1837. His father Leonard was a doctor and his mother Samantha had been a schoolteacher. The Hannas were an entrepreneurial bunch. Leonard and his brothers ran a successful grocery in what’s now the city of Lisbon, and before Mark’s birth, they had invested heavily in a canal they hoped would link the community to the Ohio River. The effort failed, leaving Lisbon economically isolated. Poorer, but undaunted, the Hannas started a grocery business in burgeoning Cleveland, and Leonard moved his family there in 1852.
Mark graduated from Central and enrolled at Western Reserve College, but was soon booted out for bad conduct. He went to work in the family business – the Hannas were expanding from a wholesale grocery to a freight-hauling firm – and never looked back. Because the Hannas were outspoken Republicans and Lincoln supporters, Mark wanted to enlist along with many of his friends when the Civil War began. But his mother, correctly sensing that Leonard Hanna was in declining health – he would die in 1862 — persuaded her oldest not to go. Younger brother Howard enlisted instead. Mark stayed behind to run the business and, according to Beer in his 1929 book “Hanna,’’ to become a one-man entertainment committee whenever friends returned home on leave.
He could afford it because the war was good for the Hannas’ company and for cities such as Cleveland. Factories expanded overnight There was constant, growing demand for food and raw materials from the West. “It was a boom,’’ wrote Beer, “timed to the pulsations of cannons and rifles on the Virginia border.’’ Cleveland’s population grew by 155 percent during the 1860s, and it became a major link between the resources of the Great Lakes and the still-dominant consumer base of the East Coast.
Hanna set aside commerce briefly in 1864 when his National Guard regiment was summoned to active duty to help defend Washington against a rumored Confederate attack. The Perry Light Infantry saw action that July when Gen. Jubal Early drove 10,000 rebels to the outskirts of the capital. Hanna missed the fighting because he was escorting the body of dead soldier back in Ohio. The unit was mustered out of service in August, and a month later, Hanna married Charlotte Augusta Rhodes, the daughter of another Cleveland merchant clan. One big difference between the Rhodes family and the Hannas: Charlotte’s people were ardent Democrats.
Despite that barrier – the way partisanship spills into every walk of life is another element of contemporary American life that Hanna might find familiar– his father-in-law Daniel Rhodes eventually came to admire Hanna’s drive to succeed. Not that everything he touched turned to gold. Right after the war, Hanna bought a refinery and a steamship. In short order, the refinery burned and the ship sank; neither reportedly were insured. Hanna was nearly broke. Biographer Herbert Croly observed that all he had gained during his first decade in business was experience.
That changed dramatically, after Daniel Rhodes invited him into his family’s business in 1867. Hanna the dynamic salesman rushed all around the Great Lakes, using advertising – the copywriter was often Hanna’s brother-in-law, historian James Ford Rhodes — to push its products. Rhodes and Co. prospered, even during difficult economic times in post-war America. Its primary holdings were in steel, iron and coal, and it was through those mining interests that Hanna met William McKinley.
The Panic of 1873 – a global financial crisis triggered by overextended investment banks – hammered the soft coal mines of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Hanna organized many of the mine operators and urged them to meet with the nascent association of miners. Beer reports that Hanna “had no fancy name for his scheme, but he believed in what is now called collective bargaining.’’ Hanna thought strikes were inherently destructive, but he also felt it was foolish for industrialists to pay poor wages and sow discontent. Besides, he believed in his own innate ability to out-bargain workers, customers or anyone else.
By 1876, prices for coal had sunk to a new low. Hanna’s fellow operators slashed wages despite his objections (and refusal to follow suit). The workers then went on strike, also against his advice. One of his partners insisted on bringing in scabs from Cleveland. There was the predictable bloody fight. Ohio Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes – who would wind up in the White House after that fall’s disputed presidential election – dispatched the militia. Shots were fired and a man was killed. Twenty-three miners were arrested for rioting.
Over the objections of his political advisers, McKinley – who in 1871 had been defeated after a single term as Stark County prosecutor, but was eyeing a race for Congress – agreed to defend the miners pro bono. Although some of the strikers initially doubted that this handsome, well-dressed Republican could really be anything but a company spy, he became their savior. Only one miner was convicted. Hanna was not thrilled with the outcome, but he had been thoroughly impressed by McKinley’s skill and integrity.
After the trial, Hanna attended the Republican Convention in Cincinnati that nominated Hayes for president. The future power broker was then little more than an interested observer. He had begun dabbling in politics back home in Cleveland, a pastime that many of his business friends found puzzling. To them, politics was a dirty game to be avoided at all cost. Hanna tried to change their minds, arguing that the conditions in their hometown were as important as their personal fortunes. But he often found himself frustrated by the willingness of local Republican leaders to engage in vote-buying and petty corruption. In 1873, he had even helped a reform-minded Democrat get elected mayor.
It’s worth noting that Hanna did not limit his civic-mindedness to political matters, especially in his adopted hometown. Biographer Herbert Croly reports that in the early 1880s, Hanna was walking along Euclid Avenue, headed for lunch at the Union Club, when a colleague informed him that the Cleveland Opera House was – at that very moment — up for a sheriff’s sale. Hanna excused himself, walked into the theater and joined the bidding. By the time he sat down for lunch, he was $40,000 poorer and the owner of Cleveland’s most luxurious theater.
Hanna brought in new management, insisted on high-quality productions and eventually made the Opera House a profitable enterprise. But Croly writes in “Marcus Alonzo Hanna: His Life and Work,’’ that what Hanna liked most about the Opera House was the performers who worked there. They were energetic big dreamers, larger than life personalities, qualities to which Hanna could relate in business, the arts or politics. Besides, Croly notes, Hanna loved to have a good time.
“Throughout the whole of his life, Mr. Hanna was intensely and inveterately social. His favorite recreation consisted in companionship with other people; and even during his years of closest business preoccupation, he rarely sat down to table without a certain number of guests. On Sundays and holidays, he liked to have the house full. Moreover, he wanted to entertain, not merely his friends and business associates, but (as his mother did before him) prominent and interesting people who visited Cleveland.’’
The wartime entertainment committee had graduated to a bigger stage as his wealth allowed. Good thing, because Hanna’s political endeavors, at least close to home, yielded less cause for celebration.
For all his interest in politics – he even owned the staunchly Republican Cleveland Herald for several years – Hanna never quite mastered the art as practiced in Cleveland. He certainly never controlled the levers of powers here as he would on the national stage. Nor did he play the game as naturally as young Tom L. Johnson did within months of hitting town.
When their paths first crossed in 1879, Hanna owned one of the eight street railway systems that served the city. Johnson – a wunderkind who had run a Louisville railway at age 17, made a fortune by inventing the world’s first coin fare box and then turned a floundering Indianapolis line into a moneymaker – was looking to crack the Cleveland market. According to George E. Condon Sr. in his 1981 book “Cleveland: The Best Kept Secret,” Johnson was just 25 when he bid for a new franchise on the city’s West Side. Hanna pursued it, too. Condon says Johnson proposed the better deal, but that Hanna won on a technicality: the bid specifications included a preference for existing operators.
Johnson refused to stay beaten. He purchased a rail line on what is now West 25th Street. It ended just a few blocks shy of the municipally owned tracks that linked Ohio City to downtown. The final connecting spur was owned by Hanna and his partner Elias Simms. When Johnson asked to use the Hanna-Simms tracks, they told him to get lost. So he hired horse-drawn carriages to ferry his passengers from the terminus of his tracks to the center of downtown. He also launched a public relations campaign against Hanna and Simms. City Council, even though it was generously stocked with their supporters, caved. Hanna and Simms were told to give access to Johnson or lose their franchise.
The rubber match between the two came soon after. Johnson wanted a franchise to build rail lines on the East Side. He envisioned a streetcar network uniting the city and allowing passengers for the first time to go across town for a single fare. Hanna was having none of it. He had ousted Simms from their partnership after the first defeat and had reached out to Johnson, suggesting that they combine forces. Hanna pointed out that he knew the bankers and the pols, while Johnson knew the rail business. Johnson rejected the offer because, he wrote in his autobiography, “We were too much alike.’’ Besides, Cleveland’s future mayor hardly needed Hanna to be his political guide.
When they squared off over Johnson’s bid for an East Side franchise, Hanna appeared at first to have the upper hand, given his deeper roots and his willingness to spread cash to favored officeholders. But Johnson again rallied public support – and he got a little help behind the scenes. Condon says Simms flipped two crucial votes against his estranged partner.
About this time, Beer writes, Hanna was called a “rich busybody” at a meeting of local reformers. Frustrated and maybe a bit embarrassed at being shown up by the new kid in town, Hanna turned his attention to different political stages. He had learned that, as Beer put it, “one might quietly rule in politics without being a politician. One might be an engineer.’’
In 1880, Hanna created a businessman’s club that raised money to cover Garfield’s personal expenses during the presidential campaign and also traveled Ohio raising money for Garfield. The role suited him well. Four years later – after Garfield had been assassinated – Hanna went all out trying to get win the GOP nomination for another Ohioan, Sen. John Sherman. That effort failed, but at the convention, Hanna shared an apartment with McKinley who was chairing the platform committee and being touted as a rising star. Their partnership was cemented four years later, when both were again leading the charge for Sherman.
With the 1888 convention deadlocked, a group of delegates from other states tried to persuade McKinley to seek the nomination. He said no without a moment’s hesitation, reiterating his support for Sherman. That act, by almost all accounts, sealed the deal for Hanna, who admired loyalty above all else. By contrast, Ohio Gov. Joseph Foraker briefly abandoned Sherman in favor of James Blaine. To Hanna, who had been an ally of Foraker until then, that was an act of treachery that could not be forgiven. The two remained at odds until Hanna died.
Finally in 1896, it was McKinley’s turn. Hanna — who had largely set aside his vast business interests in what had become the M.A. Hanna Co. to devote himself to this race – left no stone unturned to help his friend succeed. Ironically perhaps, his devotion became one of the big issues in the campaign and for many years after, a burden on McKinley’s political legacy.
Bryan’s populism scared off many usually Democratic editors, but not William Randolph Hearst, whose silver mines would skyrocket in value if “bimetalism” prevailed. Hearst realized that to elevate Bryan, he had to bring down McKinley. That was no easy task given the Ohioan’s squeaky-clean reputation. But Hearst and his papers saw in Hanna the perfect surrogate target.
Cartoonist Homer Davenport famously depicted Hanna as “Dollar Mark,’’ a bloated character dressed in a suit covered with dollar signs. McKinley was drawn much smaller, as almost a child – or a puppet – under the sway of Hanna. Others depicted him – resurrecting a moniker coined by Edwin Cowles, a Republican rival in Cleveland during the 1880s when they owned competing newspapers – as a gluttonous Roman nobleman: Marcus Aurelius Hanna.
Hearst’s editorials hit relentlessly at an incident that supposedly proved McKinley was beholden to Hanna and other oligarchs: During the Panic of 1893, McKinley was presented with a bill for $100,000 to cover bad loans he had co-signed for a friend in Youngstown. Lacking anything near that kind of cash, McKinley planned to resign as governor and return to his law practice to pay the debt. When he informed Hanna, the Clevelander would have none of it. He quickly assembled a group of wealthy friends who retired the notes. McKinley and his wife put property in a trust to repay their benefactors, but no claims were ever filed.
The attacks did not prevent McKinley from winning in 1896. Although some Republicans panicked when Bryan appeared to be riding a wave of popular support after his “Cross of Gold’’ speech at the Democratic Convention, McKinley and Hanna did not. They both insisted that “silver fever’’ would run its course before November, and they were right.
For almost a century, McKinley was chronically underappreciated by historians. That’s partly because his successor, the dynamic Theodore Roosevelt, would have overshadowed almost anyone. But Hanna’s role also helped diminish McKinley. Many scholars accepted the premise that it was Hanna who pulled the strings in their relationship, Hanna who ran the campaign, Hanna who told the candidate – and later the president — what to say.
More recent accounts suggest that the two were actually a complementary pair. That Hanna by 1896 understood the mechanics of campaigning better than anyone ever had. That McKinley understood the American people, the issues of the day and the interpersonal dynamics of politics better than any of his political peers. Together they reinvented the Republican Party as a more inclusive, future-oriented coalition that looked like what America was becoming. Beer, as far back as the 1920s, insisted that Hanna, against all stereotypes, had actually been the junior partner in this endeavor, and that his affection for McKinley was so genuine that he would do whatever he thought his friend needed.
Not that the relationship was a one-way street. Once McKinley was in the White House, he helped Hanna fulfill a longtime ambition by naming the aging Sherman as secretary of state. That opened up a Senate seat from Ohio to which Gov. Ada Bushnell, reportedly under pressure from McKinley, quickly appointed Hanna. A year later, he was re-elected by the legislature – senators weren’t chosen by the vote of the people until after 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913 – after a bitter contest at the Statehouse that reignited the animosity between Foraker and Hanna. The allegations of vote-buying, arm-twisting and even kidnapping that swirled in Columbus during and after that contest only reinforced Hanna’s negative image as a ruthless political boss.
Once in Washington, Hanna remained close with McKinley. He reportedly turned down an invitation to reside in the White House while he searched for a place to live and eventually took a hotel suite near the executive mansion. When Vice President Hobart died in 1899, Hanna took over the lease on his house, just across Lafayette Square from the White House. After some back and forth about his role in the 1900 campaign – by some accounts, McKinley delayed asking Hanna to serve as manager again in order to show the public who was boss in their relationship – he ultimately led the re-election effort. This time, there was little doubt about the outcome. The theme of the re-election campaign, Hanna said, was simple: Leave well enough alone. The voters did and McKinley won easily.
It was his fellow Republicans who gave Hanna more cause for worry that year. The GOP bosses of New York state saw the vice presidential vacancy as an opportunity to rid themselves of Gov. Theodore Roosevelt, the Spanish-American War hero they despised. Hanna had opposed the war and defended McKinley’s reluctance to enter the conflict until the destruction of the battleship Maine made their position politically tenable. He distrusted Roosevelt and others he felt had been too keen to fight. The feeling was mutual. Roosevelt had famously observed of the 1896 campaign that Hanna sold McKinley “like a patent medicine.”
But when McKinley opted to let the convention to pick his running mate, the New Yorkers prevailed. Hanna, for once, had been caught off guard. He urged McKinley, by phone, to let him use patronage to shake loose enough delegates to derail Roosevelt. The president said no. Hanna reportedly lamented to other GOP heavyweights that his friend was making a terrible mistake: “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between that madman and the White House?” Upon returning to Washington, Hanna wrote a note to McKinley informing him that, “Your duty to the country is to live for four years from next March.’‘
McKinley did not. In September 1901, he was shot by an anarchist at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. His death devastated Hanna, personally and politically. And yet, to the surprise of many, he eventually built a working relationship with Roosevelt. It was Hanna who led the Senate fight to build the trans-ocean canal in Panama rather than elsewhere in Central America. And he devoted much time to his role as first president of the National Civic Federation, a reform effort that included the likes of Andrew Carnegie and Samuel Gompers. The organization sought to broker labor peace by taking disputes to mediation (Hanna had headed off a potentially incendiary coal strike just before the 1900 election) and lobbied for the passage of child labor laws and workers compensation programs.
Despite their truce, Hanna considered challenging Roosevelt for the 1904 nomination. Maybe he couldn’t get over his earlier animosity toward “that damn cowboy.’’ Maybe he wanted to show the world that he could win the big prize without McKinley But in a maneuver that would have made Tom L. Johnson proud, Roosevelt pulled a fast one on Hanna.
Working in tandem with Hanna’s old nemesis Foraker, the president arranged for a resolution supporting his reelection to be introduced at the 1903 Ohio GOP convention. Hanna was in a bind, just as TR and Foraker had hoped. If he voted for the resolution, he would effectively end his own campaign before it started. If he opposed it, he would invite the president’s wrath before he had any organization in place. When Hanna told Roosevelt that he might oppose the resolution as premature, the president assured him that he was not requesting anyone’s support. Then he twisted the knife, adding that, of course, he knew all loyal backers of his administration would surely support such a resolution anyway.
Hanna was check-mated. He voted with Foraker and for Roosevelt. Not that it mattered. There would be no insurgency. On Feb. 15, 1904, Hanna died of typhoid fever and was buried in Lakeview Cemetery.
He had made a fortune – the M.A. Hanna Co. lives on today as PolyOne – elected a president and helped create a political coalition that dominated American politics for more than three decades. Not too shabby for a kid from Cleveland.
For more on Mark Hanna, go here
In the annals of Cleveland business, no man was smarter, more controversial and made more money than John D. Rockefeller, whose vision and management style set the stage for a corporate America that became the envy of the world. Along the way, he became the wealthiest man in that world.Speech given by Gladys Haddad in 2007 author of “Flora Stone Mather: Daughter of Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue and Ohio’s Western Reserve”
FLAGLER, HENRY M. (2 Jan. 1830-20 May 1913), a developer of STANDARD OIL CO. (OHIO), was born in Hopewell, N.Y., to Elizabeth Harkness and itinerant Presbyterian minister Isaac Flagler. He attended school through the 8th grade, and at 14 went to live with his Harkness relatives in Republic, Ohio. In 1852 he joined Dan and Lamon Harkness in buying out F. C. Chapman’s interest in Chapman & Harkness, forming Harkness & Co., a distillery which made $50,000 for Flagler by 1863. During the CIVIL WAR he worked as an agent dealing in provisions. After losing $100,000 in the salt industry in Michigan, Flagler moved to Cleveland in 1866, briefly selling barrels to oil refiners, then becoming a commission merchant. By 1867 he had enough money to establish H. M. Flagler & Co.
In 1867 STEPHEN HARKNESS invested $100,000 in JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER‘s oil business, placing Flagler in charge of his investment; the firm became Rockefeller, Andrews, & Flagler. Flagler developed the idea of absorbing smaller refineries, and of replacing the partnership with a joint stock company in 1870 and with the Standard Oil trust in 1879. Flagler was secretary and treasurer of the corporation, and vice-president of Standard Oil until 1908 and a director until 1911, but ceased playing an active role after ca. 1881, when he moved to New York and began investing heavily in Florida, developing Palm Beach and Miami. Flagler married 3 times: Mary Harkness in 1853; Ida Alice Shourds in 1883 after Mary’s death; and Mary Lily Kenan in 1901 after divorcing Ida. He had 3 children: Jennie Louise, Carrie, and Harry. Flagler died in West Palm Beach and was buried in the Flagler Mausoleum in St. Augustine, Florida.
Chandler, David Leon. Henry Flagler (1986).
Akin, Edward N. Flagler (1988).
Martin, Sidney W. Florida’s Flagler (1949).
Last Modified: 16 Jul 1997 01:39:52 PM
| Henry Morrison Flagler | |
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| Born | January 2, 1830 Hopewell, New York, U.S. |
| Died | May 20, 1913 (aged 83) Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. |
| Net worth | USD $60 million at the time of his death (approximately 1/651st of USGNP)[1] |
| Children | Jennie L. (Mar 18, 1855-Mar 25, 1889) Carrie (1858-1861) Harry H. (1870-1952) |
Henry Morrison Flagler (January 2, 1830 – May 20, 1913) was an American industrialist and a founder of Standard Oil. He was also a key figure in the development of the eastern coast of Floridaalong the Atlantic Ocean and was founder of what became the Florida East Coast Railway. He is known as the father of Miami, Florida and also founded Palm Beach, Florida.[2]
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Henry Flagler was born in Hopewell, New York and was the son of Elizabeth Caldwell Morrison Harkness and the Rev. Isaac Flagler, a Presbyterian minister. His mother was the widow of Dr. David Harkness of Milan, Ohio who had been a widower when they married. Dr. David Harkness and his first wife were the parents of Stephen V. Harkness whose business success enabled him to invest substantially with Henry Flagler in the Standard Oil company.[3] Elizabeth and Dr. David Harkness had one son, Daniel M. Harkness, Henry’s half-brother.
Henry Flagler received an eighth-grade education before leaving home at 14 to join his half-brother Daniel M. Harkness to work in Daniel’s uncle’s store, Lamon G. Harkness and Company, inRepublic, Ohio at a salary of US$5 per month plus room and board. By 1849, Flagler was promoted to the sales staff of the company at a salary of $400 per month. He eventually left Republic and joined Daniel M. Harkness in Bellevue, Ohio in a new grain business started with Lamon G. Harkness in Bellevue. In 1862, Flagler left Bellevue and founded the Flagler and York Salt Company, a salt mining and production business inSaginaw, Michigan in 1862 with his brother-in-law Barney York. By 1865, the end of the American Civil War led to a drop in the demand for salt and the Flagler and York Salt Company collapsed. Heavily in debt, Flagler returned to Bellevue. He had lost his initial $50,000 investment and an additional $50,000 he borrowed from his father-in-law and Dan Harkness. Flagler felt he had learned a valuable lesson: invest in a business only after thorough investigation.[4]
After the failure of his salt business in Saginaw, Flagler returned to Bellevue and reentered the grainbusiness as a commission merchant with The Harkness Grain Company. Through this business, Flagler became acquainted with John D. Rockefeller, who worked as a commission agent with Hewitt and Tuttle for the Harkness Grain Company. By the mid-1860s, Cleveland had become the center of the oil refining industry in America and Rockefeller left the grain business to start his own oil refinery. Rockefeller worked in association with chemist and inventor Samuel Andrews.
In 1867, Rockefeller, needing capital for his new venture, approached Flagler. Flagler obtained $100,000 from family member Stephen V. Harkness on the condition that Flagler be made a partner. The Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler partnership was formed with Flagler in control of Harkness’ interest.[5] The partnership eventually grew into the Standard Oil Corporation. It was Flagler’s idea to use the rebate system to strengthen the firm’s position against competitors and the transporting enterprises alike. Though the refunds issued amounted to no more than fifteen cents on the dollar, they put Standard Oil in position to outcompete other oil refineries.[6] By 1872, it led the American oil refining industry, producing 10,000 barrels per day (1,600 m3/d). In 1885, Standard Oil moved its corporate headquarters to New York City.
Standard Oil had the same principal owners that Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler had, give or take a few business associates: one of whom was John D. Rockefeller‘s brother, William.[7] Standard Oil monopolized quickly and took America by storm.[8] Although Standard Oil was a partnership, Flagler was credited as the brain behind the booming oil refining business. According to Edwin Lefevre, in “Flagler and Florida” fromEverybody’s Magazine, XXII (February, 1910) p. 183, “When John D. Rockefeller was asked if the Standard Oil company was the result of his thinking, he answered, “No, sir. I wish I had the brains to think of it. It was Henry M. Flagler.”[9]
Henry Flagler dabbled in various businesses aside from building up infrastructure in Florida. When he envisioned successes in the oil industry, he and Rockefeller started building their fortune in refining oil in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland became very well known for oil refining, as, “More and more crude oil was shipped from the oil regions to Cleveland for the refining process because of transportation facilities and the aggressiveness of the refiners there. It was due largely to the efforts of Henry M. Flagler and John D. Rockefeller.”[10] Flagler and Rockefeller worked hard for their company to achieve such prominence. Henry explained: “We worked night and day, making good oil as cheaply as possible and selling it for all we could get.”[11] Not only did Flagler and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company become well known in Ohio, they expanded to other states, as well as gained additional capital in purchasing smaller oil refining companies across the nation.[11] According to Allan Nevins, in John D. Rockefeller (p 292), “Standard Oil was born as a big enterprise, it had cut its teeth as a partnership and was now ready to plunge forward into a period of greater expansion and development. It soon was doing one tenth of all the petroleum business in the United States. Besides its two refineries and a barrel plant in Cleveland, it possessed a fleet of tank cars and warehouses in the oil regions as well as warehouses and tanks in New York.”[12]
By 1892, Standard Oil had a monopoly over all oil refineries in the United States. In an overall calculation of America’s oil refineries’ assets and capital, Standard Oil surpassed all.[13] Standard Oil’s combined assets equalled approximately $42,882,650.00 (U.S) from: Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York and Ohio. As well as the highest capitalization, totaling $26,000,000 (U.S).[13] The history of American oil refining begins with Henry Morrison Flagler, and his business associate and friend, John D. Rockefeller, as they built the biggest, most prosperous and monopolizing oil empire of their time: Standard Oil.
In 1876 on the advice of his physician, Flagler traveled to Jacksonville for the winter with his first wife, Mary (née Harkness) Flagler, who was quite ill. Two years after she died in 1881, he married again. Ida Alice (née Shourds) Flagler had been a caregiver for Mary Flagler. After their wedding, the couple traveled to Saint Augustine. Flagler found the city charming, but the hotel facilities and transportation systems inadequate.Franklin W. Smith had just finished building Villa Zorayda and Flagler offered to buy it for his honeymoon. Smith would not sell, but he planted the seed of St. Augustine’s and Florida’s future in Flagler’s mind.[14]
Although Flagler remained on the board of directors of Standard Oil, he gave up his day-to-day involvement in the corporation to pursue his interests in Florida. He returned to St. Augustine in 1885 and made Smith an offer. If Smith could raise $50,000, Flagler would invest $150,000 and they would build a hotel together. Perhaps fortunately for Smith, he couldn’t come up with the funds,[15] so Flagler began construction of the 540-room Ponce de León Hotel by himself, but spent several times his original estimate. Smith helped train the masons on the mixing and pouring techniques he used on Zorayda.[16]
Realizing the need for a sound transportation system to support his hotel ventures, Flagler purchased short line railroads in what would later become known as the Florida East Coast Railway.
The Ponce de León Hotel, now part of Flagler College, opened on January 10, 1888 and was an instant success.
This project sparked Flagler’s interest in creating a new “American Riviera.” Two years later, Flagler expanded his Florida holdings. He built a railroad bridge across theSt. Johns River to gain access to the southern half of the state and purchased the Hotel Ormond, just north of Daytona. He also built the Alcazar hotel as an overflow hotel for the Ponce de León Hotel. The Alcazar stands today as the Lightner Museum next to the Casa Monica Hotel in St. Augustine that Flager bought from Franklin W. Smith. His personal dedication to the state of Florida was demonstrated when he began construction on his private residence, Kirkside, in St. Augustine.
Flagler completed the 1,100-room Royal Poinciana Hotel on the shores of Lake Worth in Palm Beach and extended his railroad to its service town, West Palm Beach, by 1894, founding Palm Beach and West Palm Beach.[2] The Royal Poinciana Hotel was at the time the largest wooden structure in the world. Two years later, Flagler built the Palm Beach Inn (renamed Breakers Hotel Complex in 1901) overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach.
Flagler originally intended West Palm Beach to be the terminus of his railroad system, but in 1894 and 1895, severe freezes hit the area, causing Flagler to rethink his original decision. Sixty miles south, the town today known as Miami was reportedly unharmed by the freeze. To further convince Flagler to continue the railroad to Miami, he was offered land in exchange for laying rail tracks from private landowners, including Julia Tuttle, whom he had met in Cleveland, Ohio and who ran a trading post on the Miami River, the Florida East Coast Canal and Transportation Company, and the Boston and Florida Atlantic Coast Land Company.
Such incentive led to the development of Miami, which was an unincorporated area at the time. Flagler encouraged fruit farming and settlement along his railway line and made many gifts to build hospitals, churches, and schools in Florida.
Flagler’s railroad, the Florida East Coast Railway, reached Biscayne Bay by 1896. Flagler dredged a channel, built streets, instituted the first water and power systems, and financed the city’s first newspaper, The Metropolis. When the city was incorporated in 1896, its citizens wanted to honor the man responsible for its growth by naming it “Flagler”. He declined the honor, persuading them to use an old Indian name, “Mayaimi“. However, an artificial island was constructed in Biscayne Bay called Flagler Monument Island to honor Flagler. In 1897, Flagler opened the exclusive Royal Palm Hotel there. He became known as the Father of Miami, Florida.
Flagler’s second wife, the former Ida Alice Shourds, had been institutionalized for mental illness since 1895. In 1901, Flagler successfully persuaded the Florida Legislature to pass a law that made incurable insanity grounds for divorce, opening the way for Flagler to remarry. Judge Minor S. Jones of Florida’s 7th Judicial Circuit presided over the divorce. Flagler was the only person to be divorced under the law he pushed through before it was repealed in 1905.[17] On August 24, 1901, Flagler married his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, and the couple soon moved into their new Palm Beach estate, Whitehall, a 55-room beaux arts home designed by the New York-based firm of Carrère and Hastings, which also had designed the New York Public Library and the Pan American Exposition.[18] Built in 1902 as a wedding present to Mary Lily, Whitehall (now the Flagler Museum) was a 60,000-square-foot (5,600 m²) winter retreat that established the Palm Beach “season” of approximately 8–12 weeks, for the wealthy of America’s Gilded Age.
By 1905, Flagler decided that his Florida East Coast Railway should be extended from Biscayne Bay to Key West, a point 128 miles (206 km) past the end of the Florida peninsula. At the time, Key West was Florida’s most populous city, and it was also the United States’ deep water portclosest to the canal that the U.S. government proposed to build in Panama. Flagler wanted to take advantage of additional trade with Cuba and Latin America as well as the increased trade with the west that the Panama Canal would bring. In 1912, the Florida Overseas Railroad was completed to Key West. Over thirty years, Flagler had invested about $50 million in railroad, home, and hotel construction and gave to suffering farmers after the freeze in 1894. When asked by the president of Rollins College in Winter Park about his philanthropic efforts, Flagler reportedly replied, “I believe this state is the easiest place for many men to gain a living. I do not believe any one else would develop it if I do not … but I do hope to live long enough to prove I am a good business man by getting a dividend on my investment.”[19]
In 1913, Flagler fell down a flight of marble stairs at Whitehall. He never recovered from the fall and died in Palm Beach of his injuries on May 20 at 83 years of age.[20][21] He was entombed in the Flagler family mausoleum at Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine alongside his first wife, Mary Harkness; daughter, Jenny Louise; and granddaughter, Marjorie. Only his son Harry survived of the three children by his first marriage in 1853 to Mary Harkness. A large portion of his estate was designated for a “niece” who was said actually to be a child born out of wedlock.
When looking back at Flagler’s life after his death on May 20, 1913, George W. Perkins, of J.P. Morgan & Co., reflected, “But that any man could have the genius to see of what this wilderness of waterless sand and underbrush was capable and then have the nerve to build a railroad here, is more marvelous than similar development anywhere else in the world.” [22]
Miami’s main east-west street, is named Flagler Street, and is the main shopping street in Downtown Miami. There is also a monument to him on Flagler Monument Island in Biscayne Bay in Miami; Flagler College and Flagler Hospital are named after him in St. Augustine. Flagler County, Florida, Flagler Beach, Florida and Flagler, Colorado are also named for him. Whitehall, Palm Beach, is open to the public as theHenry Morrison Flagler Museum; his private railcar No. 91 is preserved inside a Beaux Arts pavilion built to look like a 19th Century railway palace.
On February 24, 2006, a statue of Henry Flagler was unveiled in Key West near where the Over-Sea Railroad once terminated. Also, on July 28, 2006, a statue of Henry Flagler was unveiled on the southeast steps of Miami’s Dade County Courthouse, located on Miami’s Flagler Street.
The Overseas Railroad, also known as the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway, was heavily damaged and partially destroyed in the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. The Florida East Coast Railway was financially unable to rebuild the destroyed sections, so the roadbed and remaining bridges were sold to the State of Florida, which built the Overseas Highway to Key West, using much of the remaining railwayinfrastructure.
Flagler’s third wife, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler, was born in North Carolina; the top-ranked Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is named for Flagler and his wife, who was an early benefactor of UNC along with her family and descendants.[23] After Flagler’s death she married an old friend, Robert Worth Bingham, who used an inheritance from her to buy the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper. The Bingham-Flagler marriage (and questions about her death or possible murder) figured prominently in several books that appeared in the 1980s when the Bingham family sold the newspaper in the midst of great acrimony. Control of the Flagler fortune largely passed into the hands of Mary Lily Kenan’s family of sisters and brother, who survived into the 1960s.
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THE HEART OF AMASA STONE
By John Vacha
On the afternoon of May 11, 1883, the usual decorum of Cleveland’s “Millionaires’ Row” was barely disturbed by a single muffled gunshot. It came from the rococo mansion of industrialist Amasa Stone. Entering an upstairs bathroom, a servant discovered the master of the house lying partly dressed in the bathtub, a .32 revolver by his side and a bullet in his heart. There were some unforgiving souls who thought it should have been done half a dozen years earlier.
One of his contemporaries was reputed to have predicted that while Stone may have been the richest man in the city, he would have its smallest funeral. He left an estate estimated at $6 million. His family, unwilling perhaps to risk fulfilling the second half of that prophecy, restricted his burial service at Lake View Cemetary to relatives only.
Except for one tragic miscalculation, Stone by most measures left behind a lifetime of enviable achievement. He had built and run some of Ohio’s principal railroads. His business ventures in railroads, banking, and manufacturing gained him one of the great fortunes in an age of great fortunes. Cleveland had gained its preeminent institution of higher learning largely at his behest, and his two daughters enjoyed well-connected marriages.
As did so many early Clevelanders, Stone came to the Western Reserve from New England. He brought skills highly in demand for a growing city, having experience in engineering and construction. In fact, there was already a job waiting for him in the Forest City.
Amasa Stone, Jr., was born in 1818, the ninth of ten children of Massachusetts farmers. Those siblings provided him with two rungs on what a nineteenth- century Currier & Ives print depicted as “The Ladder of Fortune.” He left farm work behind when seventeen to begin an apprenticeship in construction with his older brother, Daniel. Within two years he was able to buyout his apprenticeship and set about building homes and churches on his own.
By 1840 Stone joined his brother-in-law, William Howe, inventor of a unique bridge truss designed to support heavy loads over short spans. They employed it to construct the first railroad bridge over the Connecticut River. Stone soon purchased the patent rights to the Howe truss for all New England and corrected a suspected weakness in its design. His reconstruction of a hurricane-destroyed bridge across the Connecticut River in only forty days cemented his reputation as New England’s foremost railroad contractor.
Within another year, Stone was setting his sights westward beyond New England. He formed a partnership with Frederick Harbach and Stillman Witt to
build the northern half of the Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati Railroad. It had been an ill- starred venture originally chartered in 1836 but almost immediately stunted in the cradle by the Panic of 1837. In order to keep their charter from being revoked, its directors at one point had resorted to the expedient of employing only a single worker with a shovel and wheelbarrow on the right-of-way.
Harbach, Stone, and Witt undertook to complete the troubled CC&C Railroad, taking part of their compensation in the form of stock. Because of the risk, they were able to demand a higher than normal fee, betting in effect on the road’s success and the resultant growth of Cleveland. The Cleveland to Columbus leg was opened on February 17, 1851. It proved an instant success and provided the basis of its makers’ fortunes.
“An industrial empire was in the making south of the Great Lakes; Cleveland was one of its centers; and Amasa Stone was one of the empire builders,” noted one historian. Stone was offered the position of superintendent of the CC&C at a salary of $4,000. He and his two partners then proceeded to build the Cleveland, Painesville, and Ashtabula Railroad, a job completed in 1852. Stone was a director on the boards of both roads and became president of the CP&A in 1857.
Stone had brought his family to Cleveland in the spring of 1851. With his wife, the former Julia Gleason, it included a son, Adelbert, and daughter Clara. Another daughter, Flora, was born shortly afterward. They became members of the prestigious First Presbyterian (Old Stone) Church on Public Square. In 1858 Stone manifested his position among the city’s elite by building an imposing new mansion on Euclid Avenue–one of the earliest residences on what would become nationally celebrated as “Millionaires’ Row.”
With all his construction experience, Stone naturally took a hand in the building of his own home. Underneath all the inevitable gingerbread of the Victorian era– bays and balustrades, corbels and belvederes–it rested on the Outer stolid, practical values of a self-taught engineer. Outer walls nearly two feet in width were insulated by an eight-inch hollow space between their inner and outer surfaces. A reputed 700,000 bricks went into the rearing of the structure. Running water, gas fixtures, and central heating were among its modern amenities. Stone’s library, dedicated more to business than to books, featured a fireproof recess for his desk, papers, and safe.
To all outward appearances, the Stone mansion conformed to the Italianate Villa style dominant along early Millionaires’ Row. A grand central hallway divided the formal from the family rooms, all finished with paneled ceilings, rosewood or oak doors, and fireplace mantels of Vermont marble. All was unveiled to the city’s fashionable set, and “old settlers” as well, at a housewarming hosted by the Stones early in 1859.
Stone meanwhile was broadening his business ventures in railroads and other fields. He built the Michigan Southern road, which was later linked with the CP&A as the Lakeshore Railroad. Together with several other business leaders he built the short but vital Cleveland and Newburgh line to service Cleveland’s burgeoning industrial valley. One of those nascent industries was the Cleveland Rolling Mill, in which Amasa was an investor and his brother Andros president. Amasa Stone also invested in the Western Union Telegraph Company being organized by Clevelander Jeptha Wade. He was a director of several banks and president of the Second National Bank, giving him an influential voice in the growth of the region’s industries.
By the time of the Civil War, Stone was clearly one of his city’s movers and shakers. Abolitionist in sentiment, he had supported the nomination of Abraham Lincoln by the Republicans in 1860. When Lincoln stopped in Cleveland on his way to Washington the following year, eight-year-old Flora Stone greeted the President- elect with a bouquet of flowers. With the coming of war, Lincoln turned to her father for assistance with problems of military supply and transportation.
On the home front in Cleveland, Stone joined a committee to distribute relief funds for the families of local Union volunteers. When recruiting fell off later in the war, he recommended that another committee be formed to raise $60,000 for bounties to encourage volunteers and thus spare Cuyahoga County from subjection to the military draft. He was an active supporter of Union candidate John Brough for governor in 1863, ensuring Ohio’s continued support for the war.
About the only thing Stone begrudged the Union cause was the service of his only son. Described as personable and unassuming, Adelbert Stone was an ardent Republican in sentiment with a strong desire to enlist in the Union Army. His father was grooming him for better things than cannon fodder, however, and decreed that “Dell” should go to Yale instead to study engineering. Weeks after the last guns of the Civil War were silenced, a telegram from Yale informed Stone of the death of his son. While on a geological field trip, he had drowned in the Connecticut River, scene of his father’s early exploits.
Of heavyset build, with a straight, well-formed nose and full mustache and beard trimmed to medium length, Stone projected an appearance that brooked no opposition. His eyes were deeply set under heavy brows and a receding hairline. “Stone was never constitutionally fit to accept domination for he considered dominion to be his own prerogative,” wrote his biographer. As president of the Lakeshore Railroad, he had insisted on using an iron Howe truss manufactured by the Cleveland Rolling Mill, to replace the bridge at Ashtabula. When advised by an engineer that the beams were inadequate for the length of the span, he got a new engineer and did it his way.
Stone’s leadership was evident in Cleveland’s civic as well as business affairs. He presided at the banquet to celebrate the opening of a new Union Depot on the lakefront, which he had helped design and build. He and Wade led in the incorporation of the Northern Ohio Fair Association to promote agriculture, industry, and, incidentally, trotting races. He joined other investors in the founding of the Union Steel Screw Company, which pioneered in the manufacture of wood screws from Bessemer steel. One of his principal charitable projects was the establishment of the Home for Aged Protestant Gentlewomen.
With the marriage in 1874 of his older daughter Clara, Stone acquired a son-in- law to compensate in part for the loss of his natural son. John Hay had already distinguished himself as a writer, diplomat, and secretary to Abraham Lincoln. Stone built a mansion for Clara and her husband next door to his own on Millionaires’ Row, telling neighbors with heavy-handed jocularity that he was “building a barn for his Hay.” Later Hay would employ the gift to host a celebrated reception for Ohio-born writer William Dean Howells, inviting his father-in-law to mix with such luminaries as President Rutherford Hayes and General James Garfield. Stone’s younger daughter Flora did as well as her sister, marrying the rising Cleveland industrialist Samuel Mather. Stone seemed to have scant social life outside of family and business, however. For the most part it consisted of quiet dinners and evenings with such neighbors and business associates as John and Antoinette Devereux.
Outside that close circle of family and friends, Stone cut a far from popular image in Gilded Age Cleveland. “Almost everybody feared Stone’s arbitrary ways, his harsh temper, and his biting tongue,” wrote the historian on Case Western Reserve University, who provided a possibly apocryphal but nonetheless revealing illustration. No love was lost between the sponsors of the originally separate institutions, Stone and Leonard Case, Jr. A single tract of land was to be divided between Case School of Applied Science and Stone’s legatee, Western Reserve College. Case preferred the western half, but knowing his antagonist, let out that he wanted the eastern section. The ploy worked: Stone insisted on the eastern half for Western Reserve, and Case thus acquired his real if unspoken preference.
One local businessman who managed to resist the habitual command of Stone was young John D. Rockefeller. Stone had been an early investor in Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and a director of the Lakeshore Railroad when it granted Rockefeller secret rebates, which led to Standard’s dominance in the fledgling oil industry. As a member of Standard’s board, however, Stone assumed elder statesman airs which Rockefeller, twenty years his junior, found irksome. When Stone asked for an extension after letting an option to buy additional stock expire, Rockefeller refused to grant the favor. Thus affronted, Stone sold off his previous holdings; Standard survived and prospered nonetheless.
On top of that private rebuff, Stone suffered an even greater public humiliation. During a raging blizzard on the night of December 29, 1876, a westbound Lakeshore train approached the bridge over the Ashtabula Creek gorge — the same one Stone had built against the advice of his engineer. Only the lead locomotive made it to the other side. As the span collapsed, the second locomotive and eleven cars with 164 passengers and crewmen plunged seventy feet into what one newspaper headlined as “The Valley of Death!” Those not killed in the fall were exposed to fires started by the stoves in the passenger cars. Only eight escaped injury, and the death toll reached eighty-nine.
There were numerous post-mortems on the disaster. An Ashtabula County coroner’s jury, while paying lip service to his good intentions, placed primary responsibility directly on Stone. Also held responsible, for failure to adequately inspect the bridge, the Lakeshore Railroad was assessed for damages of more than half a million dollars. Another investigation was undertaken by a joint committee of the Ohio General Assembly. In consideration of Stone’s health, they questioned him in his personal library. Against at least one eyewitness account, Stone maintained that the bridge’s failure was due to the train’s derailment. The committee was less easy on the road’s chief engineer, Charles Collins, who had deferred to Stone on the bridge’s construction but admitted under intense questioning that he had never closely inspected the structure afterwards. Only hours after the hearing, the distraught Collins took a revolver and committed suicide. (It was the right thing to do, concluded many, but the wrong man had done it.) Stone, an object of general vilification, sought refuge in a trip to Europe.
Some believed that Stone had never recovered from the death of his son; most certainly, he never recovered from the opprobrium of the Ashtabula Bridge disaster. In addition to those afflictions, he was also plagued by business worries. Nationwide strikes broke out while he was in Europe, including employees of his Lakeshore Railroad. He couldn’t have been reassured by news from his son-in- law John Hay in Cleveland that “Since last week the country has been at the mercy of the mob. The town is full of thieves and tramps waiting and hoping for a riot, but not daring to begin it themselves.”
Following his return, Stone embarked on the principal benefaction of his civic career. In 1880 he offered half a million dollars to Western Reserve College in nearby Hudson, Ohio, on condition that the college relocate to Cleveland. He also called upon other Clevelanders to provide grounds for the campus. As a memorial to his son, he specified that the school should alter its name to Adelbert College of Western Reserve University, although the university historian, C.H. Cramer, speculated that the underlying real reason for the gift was “the necessity for some kind of propitiation” for the Ashtabula Bridge tragedy. Together with the simultaneous establishment of the Case School of Applied Science, Stone’s gift provided the foundation for what ultimately became known as University Circle.
Undoubtedly, the memorialization of his son was the last bit of satisfaction Stone was able to squeeze out of life. He had resigned from the board of the Lakeshore Railroad following its absorption by the Vanderbilt railroad interests, unable, as his biographer put it, to “withstand the transfer of major command decisions from Cleveland to the Vanderbilt offices in New York City.” Strikes had broken out at the Cleveland Rolling Mill in 1882, and several midwestern steel companies in which he was involved had failed. His health broke down completely under these stresses and whatever internal demons tormented him.
“I have not been to my office for some time,” Stone wrote to Hay, who was in Europe himself at the time. “Nervous frustration seemed to be my first misfortune and sleeplessness has followed.” Two weeks later, following yet another night of insomnia, he took his revolver into the bathroom and finally was able to find rest.
Stone’s widow and daughters devoted a considerable part of their inheritance towards redeeming the magnate’s reputation. Two years after his suicide, they donated John LaFarge’s Amasa Stone window to the restored sanctuary of Old Stone Church, following the fire of 1884. In 1910, the year the Stone mansion on Millionaires’ Row was torn down to make way for a Euclid Avenue department store, they provided for the erection of Amasa Stone Chapel on the campus of Western Reserve College, adjacent to the college’s Adelbert Main Building. From Stone’s old Union Depot, they salvaged a carving of Stone’s head and incorporated its stern image into the façade of the Gothic structure. They set it above the eastern portal, facing away from the old Case campus.
From the Plain Dealer December 25, 1994
ROCKEFELLER’S LEGACY JOHN D.’S RICHES HELPED BUILD CLEVELAND INDUSTRIALLY, EDUCATIONALLY, CHARITABLY AND RECREATIONALLY
Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) – Sunday, December 25, 1994
Author: JEFF HAGAN
Imagining a world that might have been, a world the same save one life, seems the stuff of fiction.
Movie director Frank Capra brought this story to the screen in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” starring Jimmy Stewart. In this movie, the moral of Capra’s musings is that even the little guys of this world have an impact. Their lives change the world in ways we may not fully imagine.
What if we imagine Cleveland without one life? What if that one life was one that made a broad mark on the city’s history?
What if we imagine Cleveland without John D. Rockefeller?
The legacy of Rockefeller in Cleveland is not easily defined. He was the richest man in America. He donated millions of dollars to causes and charity, yet how does one account for the refiners Rockefeller put out of business, or the pain and labor among those whose struggle created Rockefeller’s phenomenal wealth? Would those contributions have been necessary if his exploitation of the American economy – and its workers – had not been equally phenomenal?
Regardless of the answers to these questions, one thing is certain: For better or worse, Cleveland would not be Cleveland if Rockefeller had not lived here for three decades.
A native of New York state, Rockefeller came to Strongsville in 1853, boarded in Cleveland as a teen and graduated from Central High School.
After attending business classes, he went to work for the commission house of Tuttle & Hewitt on Merwin St. in the Flats in 1855. It was his first and last employer.
In 1859, Rockefeller entered a partnership with Maurice Clark, continuing in the wholesale business. The firm profited handsomely from its government contracts, particularly during the Civil War. With its good margins and good credit, and a new partner, Samuel Andrews, Rockefeller invested in the fledgling oil industry, eventually building a refinery where Kingsbury Run hits the Cuyahoga River and leaving the commission business altogether to devote himself to oil.
After working with various partners, Rockefeller incorporated the Standard Oil Co. in 1870 with a group of men who would make their names and fortunes with his company. Rockefeller was its largest stockholder.
John Grabowski, director of research at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, conducts a slide show about the history of Cleveland. It contains two revealing slides, shown in succession. The first is a photo of a couple of dozen men gathered at Cliff House, a Rocky River resort.
“This is a picture of the oil trade in Cleveland in the 1860s,” Grabowski says. The next slide is of John D. Rockefeller standing alone.
“This,” Grabowski says, “is a picture of the oil trade in Cleveland in the 1870s.”
That portrait depicts the entire U.S. oil industry by the 1890s. From early on in the oil business, Standard Oil tried to gain control over every aspect of the industry, attempting to sop up profits and force out competition.
Of one group of recalcitrant independent producers Rockefeller once said, “A good sweating will be healthy for them.”
To ship the refined oil more cheaply, Standard did everything from wresting low rates and rebates from the railroads to going into the barrel-making business. By 1872, Standard Oil controlled 21 of Cleveland’s 26 oil refineries; by 1882, Standard Oil controlled 90% of the nation’s refining capacity, and a few politicians as well.
Rockefeller earned the ire of independent oil producers, whose prices he ruthlessly undercut until they capitulated, either selling out to him, consolidating with Standard Oil or going out of business. In 1872, The Plain Dealer reported on Rockefeller’s early cartel, the South Improvement Co. That report turned public opinion against Standard Oil. This was followed by an 1881 muckraking piece in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Story of a Great Monopoly.”
Still, the company’s monopolistic practices continued until the federal government finally stepped in and, finding the company had violated antitrust laws, broke up the company in 1911.
By then, John D. Rockefeller was already in semi-retirement, a state he reached at age 36. Rockefeller had moved his headquarters to New York in 1884, having outgrown the financial capacity of Cleveland, though he continued to summer at the family’s Forest Hill estate east of Cleveland until his wife died in 1915, after which he seldom visited. (Rockefeller last visited Cleveland in 1917.) He died in 1937 at age 97. He and his wife, Laura, are buried in Lake View Cemetery, where his 71-foot obelisk monument is among the most popular attractions for visitors.
Rockefeller, a devout Baptist who remained pious even while his company was its most ruthless (perhaps adding to the public distaste for the man), never felt he had done anything immoral, and he even liked to say his riches came from heaven.The fact that the latter half of his life was devoted to giving away large portions of the money he made in the first half have led some to conclude he did have an eye toward better public relations.
However, Rockefeller had created a strong pattern of giving long before his patterns of getting made him so very rich. He kept detailed ledgers in which he recorded his net worth and donations (along with just about every other expenditure he ever made). The ledgers reveal contributions made to a variety of organizations even when his paycheck was a pittance. Still, at least one minister called a Rockefeller contribution to his organization “tainted money” because of the capitalist’s sullied reputation. The check was nonetheless cashed by other officers of the church.
If Rockefeller merely wanted good publicity, or even to be remembered well, he could have shown, as other philanthropists of his day did, a propensity to attach his name to the buildings, parks and institutions he helped make possible. Names connected with Rockefeller are still visible on a handful of landmarks in Cleveland and the other cities his generosity reached, but not nearly as many as there could be, and not as many as his contemporaries, like Andrew Carnegie, left behind.
“This goes against the grain of a lot of 19th-century philanthropy,” says Darwin Stapleton, a former Case Western Reserve University professor who is now director of the Rockefeller Archive Center in North Tarrytown, N.Y.
Rockefeller’s presence in Cleveland is still felt strongly today, if not always recognized. But it doesn’t take Frank Capra, who imagined the life of a town with one important person removed in his movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” to understand Rockefeller’s legacy in Cleveland. It just takes a little looking around town.
The Rockefeller Buildings
More than one Clevelander has remarked that if John D. Rockefeller hadn’t moved to New York, the world-famous Rockefeller Center would be located here in Cleveland. Maybe. But Rockefeller’s vast financial empire required the big banks of the big city, and when he built, he built according to scale. That’s why Cleveland’s Rockefeller Building, on Superior Ave. at W. 6th, stands 17 stories high.
But it wasn’t always the Rockefeller Building. For a time, it was the Kirby Building.
It was built by Rockefeller between 1903 and 1905 for a million dollars. Reluctantly, and after a lawsuit forced him to, he sold it to Josiah Kirby, a shady businessman who ran insurance and mortgage businesses in the building. Kirby changed the name of the building to his own and put the name in lights atop the structure, which is said to have angered Rockefeller. The name even stuck after Kirby sold the building, so Rockefeller had his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., buy the building for nearly $3 million and rename it the Rockefeller Building. When he sold it later, part of the deal was that the name was to stay attached to the building forever.
The Heights Rockefeller Building stands on the corner of Mayfield and Lee Rds. in Cleveland Heights, on the edge of the old Forest Hill estate. The charming brick structure was at one time the entry building to John Jr.’s real-estate development at Forest Hill. Junior had planned to develop his family’s former estate by building 600 homes for the burgeoning class of white-collar workers, but the economy collapsed and only 81 were built. These French Norman-style homes – simply called “Rockefellers” – can still be seen in the Forest Hill area, contrasting to the modern and less stately homes that surround them.
“These were houses built for the ages,” says Grabowski.
While there is wild speculation that Rockefeller stayed away from the early antecedents of Case Western Reserve University (Case School of Applied Science and Western Reserve University) because of a rivalry with the schools’ main patrons, the Mathers, Rockefeller did eventually grant large contributions to the Cleveland institution. His name can be found atop the school’s physics lab, one of the two buildings he financed on the campus to the tune of $200,000. (The other was demolished.) He also earlier gave $2,500 to help buy joint property for the two schools. All told, Western Reserve University received nearly $1.6 million from Rockefeller, his General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation by the time he died in 1937.
The BP Building, owned by British Petroleum which bought Standard Oil of Ohio (Sohio), is a few steps away from the early Standard offices when John D. Rockefeller first incorporated on Euclid Ave. Rising 45 stories, it was completed in 1985. If Rockefeller had not been in Cleveland, certainly the BP Building would not.
“That’s perhaps the ultimate legacy, right here on Public Square,” says Grabowski.
Rockefeller’s legacy is felt elsewhere around the square. An early member and supporter of the Western Reserve Historical Society who was made a lifetime honorary vice president, Rockefeller supplied the organization with one-quarter of the $40,000 purchase price for the Society for Savings Building – the largest of the gifts given. The building still sits across the northeast quadrant of the square. Rockefeller also is reported to have chipped in $50 for the $4,500 statue of Moses Cleaveland.
Another building that Rockefeller is in part responsible for is the Arcade, in which he was a major investor. The head of the company that built the Arcade in 1890 was Stephen V. Harkness, a Standard Oil partner of Rockefeller’s.
The Rockefeller Parks
The most widely known of the park land donated by Rockefeller is, of course, Rockefeller Park, the meandering green blur one passes while ignoring the 25 mph signs on Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. The city of Cleveland bought this section of land along Doan Brook to link Wade Park with the lakefront Gordon Park, and, at the celebration of the city’s centennial, it was announced Rockefeller was reimbursing the city the $300,000 it paid for the land. Rockefeller then gave $100,000 for a bridge to carry Superior Ave. over the Doan Brook valley, on the condition that more money be raised locally. One source, a book by Grace Goulder called “John D. Rockefeller: The Cleveland Years,” says the Rockefeller family also donated an additional 278-acre stretch near the Shaker Lakes to the city.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated nearly a third of the family’s Forest Hill estate, which the family no longer used as a summer home, to create Forest Hill Park. It is set on rolling, wooded hills in East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights.
All told, it is estimated in the family archive center that the Rockefellers gave gifts worth more than $865,000 in land or cash to buy and maintain parks.
Rockefeller also donated land for private use.
The Rockefeller Charities
At the Rockefeller Archive Center, 56 million pages of documents deal with the family’s personal philanthropy. By the time Rockefeller died, he had given away $530 million, and by the time his son died, he had given $561 million away, through personal donations or to charities set up by the family. Some of these contributions came at important times to an institution, allowing it to buy a building or create an endowment at a key juncture. Though Rockefeller’s gifts touched 88 countries, many of his early contributions were of great benefit to Cleveland institutions and individuals.
Beginning in the 1890s, Rockefeller had a staff sort through the requests and evaluate their worthiness, which sometimes turned off the spigot to a group.
“He was looking for places that had a good structure in place for management,” says Kenneth Rose, assistant to the director of the Rockefeller Archive Center, who studied the exhaustive manner in which Rockefeller investigated a charity’s effectiveness.
According to Darwin Stapleton, the center’s director, Rockefeller pioneered two kinds of philanthropy that took root in Cleveland and spread around the country: the general purpose foundation and the community foundation. After Rockefeller created the General Education Board in 1902 and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, he continued to be generous with his old hometown. “Cleveland is overrepresented in the giving of these two organizations up until about the ’50s,” says Stapleton.
Rockefeller gave important early support to the Cleveland Home for Aged Colored People, which today exists as the Eliza Bryant Center on Wade Park Ave. He also helped to fund the Children’s Aid Society and served on its board of trustees. The organization eventually concentrated its efforts on a Detroit Ave. school and farm, which had been donated by Eliza Jennings. The society today provides services to emotionally disturbed children and their families at the same Detroit Ave. site. While Rockefeller was extremely generous to the YMCA and YWCA, donating large portions of construction costs for new buildings, these organizations would likely have gone on, owing to the broad base of support they enjoyed in the city.
Rockefellergave matching funds to purchase a home on Prospect Ave. to create the Baptist Home of Northeast Ohio for aging and lonely Baptists, which was started by members of his Euclid Ave. Baptist Church. This eventually grew into the Judson Retirement Community, still operating today with Judson Manor and Judson Park, two East Side residential facilities.
Alta House, named for Rockefeller’s daughter, began as a day nursery serving the Mayfield Rd. and Murray Hill neighborhoods, and is one of the city’s oldest settlement houses. Rockefeller built and expanded buildings, including a pool and gymnasium, and donated substantial sums to support operations, until 1922, when the family was relieved of its role by the Cleveland Community Fund, a forerunner of United Way. Alta House now operates youth programs and senior citizens services out of the former gymnasium building.
Shiloh Baptist Church and Antioch Baptist Church, two important African-American congregations in the city, both received significant gifts from Rockefeller, including matching funds for new buildings. Although the structures he funded have since been torn down, his timely contributions may have helped, along with the congregations and African-American leaders, to keep these churches together. Similarly, Rockefeller made a challenge grant to the Western Reserve School of Medicine at which Stapleton calls a hinge point, taking it from a regional to a national medical school.
John L. Severance, the son of one-time Standard Oil treasurer Louis Severance, and once a Standard employee himself, pledged $1 million to build Severance Hall on the condition that twice that amount be raised for a permanent endowment. John D. Rockefeller Jr. kicked in $250,000 for the fund.
“The great gifts of our Hall [Severance] and the endowments that largely support the Cleveland Orchestra today were made possible by the Standard Oil fortunes … inherited by the Severances, the Blossoms and the Boltons,” said Adella Hughes, founder and manager of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1947. BP America, son of Standard Oil, has continued to support the orchestra, including funding national radio broadcasts and recordings for the world-class institution. Severance Hall, therefore, could be seen in part as yet another Rockefeller building in Cleveland.
Rockefeller’s influence in the world of philanthropy sometimes takes on a more abstract character. For instance, Frederick Goff, Rockefeller’s attorney until 1908, and the man who represented him during the antitrust litigation, may have been influenced by Rockefeller’s example when he created the Cleveland Foundation in 1914.
Rockefeller And Associates
Rockefeller’s practice of gobbling up competitors and controlling all ends of an industry’s operations presaged modern corporate forms of consolidation and standardization, a legacy felt in other industries here in Cleveland and elsewhere.
“Rockefeller in one sense monopolized the oil industry,” says John Grabowski. “In another sense, he rationalized it.” Most importantly, he did it here in Cleveland.
“It was not the natural center of the petroleum industry,” says Stapleton. “He, by the sheer power of his vision, directed the petroleum industry’s product primarily to Cleveland.”
The buildup of infrastructure and other businesses, everything from barrel-making to banking, was in part a result of such a large corporation maintaining a headquarters here, a point that could arguably apply to Standard Oil’s descendant, BP America. Among Rockefeller’s legacies then, says Stapleton, are “the drawing of capital to the city, the creation of jobs, the petroleum business, transportation, allied chemical business, manufacturers` products associated with petroleum,’ along with the budding telegraph industry.
Stapleton adds it is no accident that Western Union came to Cleveland, where Rockefeller needed such instantaneous contact with markets and refiners in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York.
Rockefeller also pulled together teams of bright people who showed promise and made many of them very wealthy. These people have left their own formidable legacies to the city, forever wedded to that of Rockefeller.
Samuel Andrews, an early partner, helped build the Brooks Military School, out of which eventually grew Hathaway Brown, and was a trustee to Adelbert College. Stephen Harkness provided important financial support to the forerunner of Standard Oil and joined when the company incorporated. Besides joining Rockefeller in contributing to the Central Friendly Inn (now just called the Friendly Inn), Harkness helped to bring Western Reserve University into Cleveland from Hudson.
Another associate, Oliver H. Payne, made his money by consolidating his firm and joining Standard Oil. He, too, made large contributions to Western Reserve University, as well as St. Vincent Charity and Lakeside hospitals. John Huntington installed fireproof roofing for a Standard Oil building and was offered stock or cash for payment. He took the stock, became extremely wealthy, and left bequests including the John Huntington Benevolent Trust for charities and the funds to help found the Cleveland Museum of Art. His summer home in Bay Village was acquired by the Cleveland Metroparks and was named Huntington Reservation in his honor.
Among those influenced by Rockefeller was Cyrus Eaton, a young boy who worked summers at Forest Hill and whose early business ventures Rockefeller supported. It was at his summer job that Eaton became friends with Dr. William Harper, president of the Rockefeller-founded University of Chicago, and his son, Sam. The Harpers had traveled to Baptist missions in Russia, and kindled Eaton’s interest in the nation, eventually bringing him to a leadership role in promoting good U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War, while Eaton was a major industrialist with Republic Steel.
Eaton donated land to the forerunner of the Metroparks, was a founder and trustee of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, helped to create Fenn College from the YMCA night school and was a benefactor of Case School of Applied Science.
The presence of John D. Rockefeller can be felt in far-ranging areas, from his large role in making Cleveland a national center for industry to mentoring other budding industrialists, developing new forms of corporate organization and creating institutions that continue to serve cultural and material needs decades after they were founded.
He may never have intended to make his presence felt so long after his death, but his was one life that the city of Cleveland can never imagine itself without.
Written by Dr. John J. Grabowski
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 of UNITED 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.
