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10 The Passionate Steward By Margaret Bond Frederick T. Gates, Class of 1877, chose a UR education out of respect for the high moral philosophy of i.ts president, Martin B. Anderson. It was this same high moral philosophyleavened with gusto and fortified by a superb business sense-that guided him in the philanthropic distribution of John D. Rockefeller's awesome riches. I n 1923, toward the end of his life, Frederick T. Gates retired from the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, which he had served for many years in his capacity as "confidential adviser" to John D . Rockefeller, known to practically everyone as "the richest man in the world." Flaunting his still magnificent head of white hair and shaking his fist at a somewhat startled but respectfully attentive board, Gates thundered his farewell message to his fellow directors: "When you die and come to approach the judgment of almighty God . . . what do you think he will demand of you? Do you for an instant presume that he will inquire into your petty failures and your trivial virtues? "Will he ask, 'How did you do as a husband for your loving and dutiful wife?' "As a captain of industry, 'How did you discharge your duties to stockholders and employees?' "Or to those of you who serve in the noble profession of medicine, 'How did you carry out your sacred obligations to the lame, the halt, and the dying?' "No! No indeed! He will brush all these matters to one side and he will
ask but one question: 'How did you do as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation?' " This story, recounted in 1974 by Robert Swain Morison in the first Gates Lecture at the University, summarizes the style in which Frederick T. Gates, "the architect of modern American philanthropy," supervised the charitable distribution of untold millions of Rockefeller money. A man of vivid personality, enviable self-confidence, and a highly developed sense of moral duty (fortified by an equally highly developed sense of practicality), Gates worked closely with Rockefeller for over a generation. As his confidential adviser, Gates introduced into the Rockefeller charities what he called "the principle of scientific giving," effectively transforming private philanthropy from haphazard "retail" benevolences into a system of planned, "wholesale" giving. It was largely through Gates's vision that the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) came into being. With another Rochester alumnus, Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed, Class of 1863, Gates was instrumental also in founding the present University of Chicago. Brought up in a farming community in Upstate N ew York, a preacher who had followed his father into the Ba:ptist ministry, Gates would seem an unworldly candidate to engineer the scientific disposal of hundreds of millions ofturn-of-the-century dollars. (Once asked how much money Rockefeller and his son John D. ,J r. had given away, Gates allowed cautiously that it might be as much as "a thousand million.") What attracted Rockefeller to the younger man was, as he later conceded, Gates's "great store of common sense. " The two men shared, in addition, a common adherence to many of the sterner aspects of a nineteenth-century Baptist upbringing, and complemented each other in their contrasting modes of expressing it: Gates with the gusto of passionate eloquence and Rockefeller with the gelidity of taciturn stoicism. (The voluble Gates once summed up the Rockefeller turn of expression this way: "Ifhe was very nice and precise in his choice of words, he was also nice and accurate in his choice of silences. ") Their extraordinary partnership originated when Gates, as corresponding secretary of the newly formed American Baptist Education Society, had occasion to ask Rockefeller for a contribution to the proposed new university in Chicago. "To this end," The New York Times reported in Gates's 1929 obituary, "he called on Mr. Rockefeller early on a May morning of 1889 at the old-fashioned private house of the oil man at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street. After breakfast the host and his visitor walked up and down on the sidewalk outside. "The proposition discussed was what proportion of the needed sum of $1,000,000 for the projected University of Chicago would be contributed by Mr. Rockefeller. The amount offered was $400,000; the amount asked for, politely and insistently, was $600,000. When Mr. Rockefeller finally yielded, it brought Mr. Gates' a thrill that I shall never forget.' " Apparently impressed by the acumen of a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it, Rockefeller began asking Gates to look in on some of his farflung personal business enterprises whenever Gates's travels for the Baptists took him into their vicinity. By 1893 Gates had moved to New York and joined Rockefeller's private office staff, serving eventually as president of thirteen different Rockefeller corporations that operated in areas other than the oil industry. (In the autobiography he wrote for his children, Gates recalled with relish the trips he made to visit these companies, traveling "luxuriously" in Rockefeller's private railway car.) It is not, however, for his considerable success in business but for his work as Rockefeller's representative in the field of charity that Gates is remembered today. "In this he combined the roles of spiritual adviser and practical man of affairs with the sagacity of a secretary confessor to a Renaissance prince," Robert Morison observed in his Gates Lecture. "Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche," Gates would UR senior picture: Gates taught himself Greek, studying sixteen hours a day over a period of three months, in order to qualify for admission. As an undergraduate, he was most impressed by the character and teachings of Martin Brewer Anderson, whom he referred to in his autobiography as "the prince of college presidents." thunder at his patron. "You must keep up with it. You must distribute it faster than it grows. If you do not, it will crush you and your children, and your children's children." Assigned to review the Rockefeller charities, Gates was appalled by the multitude of personal appeals for money to which Rockefeller was subjected, "hounded almost like a wild animal," in his home, at his office, and even "in the aisles of his church." Reviewing the flood of petitions (he once counted 15,000 received within a single week), Gates observed that the great bulk of these pleas for sums of cash "Mr. Rockefeller would never feel" were either immediately discernible as unworthy ("often for luxuries such as pianos ... and wedding trousseaux") or, at best, undocumented appeals from splinters of local charities "wholly without endorsement or recommendation, or proof of need. " He proposed, sweepingly, that Rockefeller divest himself of his private 11
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