I am reading Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. right now, and it is truly a great book. It is a biography of Rockefeller (of course), but it is the most engaging, novelistic biography I’ve ever read. Ron Chernow did a wonderful job. If you want more reason to pick it up (or if you just want the nuggets), here are some of my favorite parts so far.

Quotes and Anecdotes

Rockefeller’s father decided to stop paying tuition for his high school with only a few months to go before graduation, and he was forced to drop out and find his first real job. He knew he wanted a position in the commodities trading industry — rather than as a laborer or in another trade — so he decided to simply apply to every commodities trading house in Cleveland, where he was living at the time.

Each morning, [Rockefeller] left his boardinghouse at eight o’clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his round of appointed firms. This grimly determined trek went on each day — six days a week for six consecutive weeks — until late in the afternoon. . . . Because he approached his job hunt devoid of any doubt or self-pity, [Rockefeller] could stare down all discouragement. “I was working every day at my business — the business of looking for work. I put in my full time at this every day.”

Rockefeller was dogged but also clever. In order to capture the profits of the coopers who made barrels for his oil, he decided to begin making barrels himself.

Other Cleveland coopers bought and shipped green timber to their shops, whereas Rockefeller had the oak sawed in the woods then dried in kilns, reducing its weight and slicing transportation costs in half.

This cleverness could also be used in the service of inefficiency, as shown when a competing firm attempted to build a pipeline from Oil Creek, in northwest Pennsylvania, to Williamsport, in the center of the state.

Standard Oil . . . embarked on a real-estate spree of monumental proportions, buying up strips of land or “dead lines” that ran in a straight line from the northern to the southern border of Pennsylvania, to block the [competing pipeline's] advance. Overnight, bewildered farmers became rich by selling parcels for extravagant sums to Standard oil agents who invaded their sleepy towns.

And, most unfortunately, he could be outright unethical, purchasing stakes in several newspapers in order to ensure favorable coverage and habitually bribing politicians (though, in his defense, this was common during the period). One one occasion he outdid himself, though.

Standard Oil regarded [certain legislation] with such apprehension that Henry Flagler¹ returned from Florida, where he was recuperating from poor health, to spearhead the lobbying campaign. To foster the impression of a popular groundswell against the bill, he hired lawyers to [come to the legislature and] pose as incensed farmers and landowners in favor of the status quo.

These quotes are all from the first couple hundred pages of Titan, which deal with the building of the Standard Oil empire. The rest of the book is focused more on his philanthropy and later years², and so aren’t as interesting to me³. But anyway, try just the first third or so, and don’t be put off by its length!

Additional Musings

One of the clearest messages in Chernow’s book is that Rockefeller lived two lives. His business dealings, especially in the early years, were obviously cutthroat and unchristian⁴, but, as a private, devoutly Baptist citizen, I believe he honestly was unable to see that. The boundary between his two worlds was so high and thick that he wasn’t even gripped by denial — he simply failed to see the contradictions. Although one might be concerned by this lack of objective introspection, I think it was an important contributor to Rockefeller’s success, enabling him to fortify himself with Christian self-righteousness, but at the same time to fight his competitors with a broad array of weapons. His example serves as a good reminder that extraordinary people are also abnormal — and that the traits are very often interlinked.

Another strong, and perhaps obvious, message is that though he was smart and incredibly tenacious, Rockefeller was also lucky. He started Standard Oil when its chief product was kerosene, then used primarily for illumination. Automobiles, electrical generation, and plastics were all many years away when he chose his industry. Though Rockefeller certainly would have been notable if these other products had never been developed — and, in fact, he already was in the 1880s, when they by and large hadn’t been — his legacy could not have developed to nearly the same stature. The role of luck is an important factor to keep in mind, both when praising success and criticizing failure, and one that is perhaps too often overlooked today.