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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
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