The story behind Write It Down
Who was John D. Rockefeller?
The son of a traveling con man who went to work at 16 as a bookkeeper for $16 a month, built Standard Oil until it refined over 90% of America's oil, was often called the country's first billionaire, and then gave away about $530 million. He wrote every cent down, the money in and the money out, from his first job to the end.
Why should you care?
The monopoly rulebook
The 1911 Supreme Court case that broke up Standard Oil set the way American courts still judge a monopoly under the 1890 Sherman Act, the same law the government uses against today's tech giants.
Your gas station
Exxon, Mobil and Chevron all come from the 34 pieces of his company. ExxonMobil is two of them put back together.
Modern philanthropy
He turned giving into an institution: the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), the Rockefeller Foundation. Big-money foundations today still run on the model he and his adviser Frederick Gates built.
The first great exposé
Ida Tarbell's 19-part magazine series on Standard Oil, a book in 1904, is a founding work of investigative journalism, and it is credited with hastening the breakup.
And a number to hold on to: in 1913 his fortune, about $900 million, was about 2.3% of the whole U.S. economy.
Timeline · tap a year
The contradiction
The bookkeeper who gave
He tithed from his first wages and recorded his giving in his own ledger. Later he paid for a university, a medical institute, an education board and a foundation, about $530 million in all. He called the University of Chicago the best investment he ever made.
The monopolist
He used secret railroad rebates to squeeze rivals until they sold to him: 22 of 26 Cleveland refiners in under four months of 1872. In 1914, at a Colorado coal company his family controlled, guards and militia attacked a strikers' tent colony at Ludlow; about 21 people died, most of them women and children.
“But they had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me.”
Ida Tarbell, on Standard Oil
How much of the oil did he control?
Tap a year. Standard Oil's share, as the Standard Oil history records it.
Quick quiz
The album
Write It Down by SizzleC is a 12-song dramatization of this story, each song told by one person who stood close to him. Each song starts in a sound of its year and drops into a modern one at the minute mark. The songs are fiction built on history: the cooper, the mill girl, the clerk and the caddie are invented, characters speak lines no one recorded, and the album takes sides the way songs do. The name “Ledger A” and the preacher's “avalanche” come from his biographies, not from the record checked here. The facts on this page are the history.
Listen to Write It Down →