Character, the Foundation of Successful Business (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Character, the Foundation of Successful Busi...)
Excerpt from Character, the Foundation of Successful Business
Somehow you feel, as you drive away from one of those stations, that your old car doesn't look so badly and that, after all, the winter isn't going to be so hard. That is, you have some thing of the feeling of a man who upon inquiry at the bank learns that his balance is larger than he expected it to be.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
John Davison Rockefeller Jr. was an American financier and philanthropist.
Background
He was born to substantial wealth on January 29, 1874, in Cleveland, United States, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , was brought up in a rigorously puritanical atmosphere. The social life of the family centered in the Baptist Church, and young Rockefeller and his four sisters were taught to live upright, religious lives. His four older sisters were Elizabeth (Bessie) (1866–1906), Alice (who died an infant) (1869–1870), Alta (1871–1962), and Edith (1872–1932).
Education
Initially he had intended to go to Yale University but was encouraged by William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, among others, to enter the Baptist-oriented Brown University instead. In 1897 he graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, after taking nearly a dozen courses in the social sciences, including a study of Karl Marx's Das Kapital.
Career
After graduation from college, young Rockefeller - largely to please his father, to whom he was devoted - entered the offices of the family's Standard Oil Company in New York City to prepare himself to administer his father's vast business interests. But because of his retiring and extremely moralistic nature he disliked the bruising business world and occupied himself increasingly with managing his father's estates and philanthropic enterprises.
The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the General Education Board, and the Rockefeller Foundation were financed by the elder Rockefeller, but his son participated actively in management. The education board was concerned chiefly with improving education for African Americans in the South; the foundation became a vast holding company for hundreds of philanthropies. From 1900 to 1908 John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , became more closely involved with his father's business interests. But allegations of unfair competitive practices used by Standard Oil led him to separate himself from active policy making in his father's corporations in 1910.
In 1913, however, because of a large family stockholding in the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, he was implicated in a strike that not only shut down the company but threatened to balloon into a domestic insurrection. Although keenly hurt by accusations from liberals and labor leaders that he had helped intensify the strife by siding with an arbitrary and unsympathetic management, Rockefeller worked out a plan for worker representation in company affairs that became a model for industrial relations during the 1920. Elaborating this scheme in speeches and periodical articles, he came to be considered a leading liberal in labor affairs.
Among the best-known philanthropies occupying Rockefeller from 1915 until his death were conservation and national park projects in the West, the Cloisters art museum in New York, and the Williamsburg restoration. He also planned and constructed Rockefeller Center in New York City and donated the land upon which the United Nations building now stands. Modest, unaffected, and unostentatious, Rockefeller did much to remove the "robber baron" stigma from big business and to awaken businessmen to social responsibilities. He died on May 11, 1960, in Tucson, Ariz.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Politics
A committed internationalist, he financially supported programs of the League of Nations and crucially funded the formation and ongoing expenses of the Council on Foreign Relations and its initial headquarters building, in New York in 1921.
Views
Quotations:
"I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty".
Membership
In 1929 he was elected an honorary member of the Georgia Society of the Cincinnati.
Connections
Rockefeller married Abigail Greene "Abby" Aldrich on October 9, 1901, in what was seen at the time as the consummate marriage of capitalism and politics. She was a daughter of Senator Aldrich and Abigail Pearce Truman "Abby" Chapman. Moreover, their wedding was the major social event of its time - one of the most lavish of the Gilded Age. The couple had six children; Abby in 1903, John III in 1906, Nelson in 1908, Laurance in 1910, Winthrop in 1912, and David in 1915.
Abby died of a heart attack at the family apartment at 740 Park Avenue in April, 1948. Junior remarried in 1951, to Martha Baird (1895–1971), the widow of his old college classmate, Arthur Allen.
His sons, the five Rockefeller brothers, established an extensive network of social connections and institutional power over time, based on the foundations that Junior - and before him Senior - had laid down.