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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part III: The Good We Do
Daniel Gross
02/02/2004
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By the 1890s, with the giant Standard Oil throwing off massive dividends, Rockefeller, who had essentially retired from management of the megalithic trust in his early 50s, devoted his time to dissipating his fortune. In 1892 alone he gave away $1.35 million.
At first, Rockefeller would parcel out requests to his children for evaluation. As biographer Ron Chernow writes: "In this seminal phase of Rockefeller philanthropy, the entire family judged the merits of applications, and the children sometimes audited important meetings."
He enlisted his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr.—known universally as Junior—to work with him full time, then, as giving became more and more an enterprise unto itself, he hired Frederick T. Gates to advise him. Just as he had systematized the chaotic early oil industry, Rockefeller set out to rationalize large-scale philanthropy. As Gates put it: Rockefeller "came to have hardly less pleasure in the organization of his philanthropy than in the efficiency of his business."
Rather than give funds to individuals or to individual organizations, he tended to establish new ones. In 1882, he backed the formation of Spelman College, a school for black women in Atlanta. A decade later, he created the University of Chicago. And in 1901, Rockefeller brought into being the New York-based Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (later Rockefeller University), donating $61 million to create a self-
sustaining research center.
A key tenet of Rockefeller’s efforts—and one that would carry down through the generations—was that philanthropy should attack the origins of social problems rather than treat their symptoms. And so another Rockefeller charity, the General Education Board, incorporated in 1903 to help schools in the South, focused on eradicating the boll weevil from cotton crops and improving medical education. In 30 years, the board gave out $130 million.
The more John D. Rockefeller gave—between 1856 and 1909 he would distribute $157.5 million—the more it seemed he needed to give, for the dividends from Standard Oil continued to gush in as fast as he could find worthy causes.
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