John Rockfeller.

JOHN ROCKFELLER. 

John Rockfeller, Jr was best known as a businessman and as a major philanthropist. He donated over $537 millions in many philanthropic causes and he was known to be the only financier of a 14 building real estate complex in the geographical center of Manhattan, the Rockfeller Center. He is also interested in natural conservations and donated land to the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoning and the Acadia National Park in Maine.

John Rockfeller was born on the 29^th January 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio in the United States. He was the last and fifth child of the renowned businessman and Standard Oil industrialist, John Rockfeller and his wife Laura Celestia Spelman. John Junior used to attend the Park Avenue Baptist Church and he studies in Browning School which was in a brownstone owned by the powerful family of Rockfellers. The young man wanted to attend Yale Universoty but was discouraged to do so  by William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, who persuaded him into entering the Baptist-oriented Brown university.

At that time, John Junior was being taught a bible class and his extremem consciousness actually differentiated him from the other students who were most of the time spoilt. In 1897, he graduated from the university with a degree of Bachelor of Arts. During his years of education, John Junior had studies several courses in social studies and he was also elected the Phi Beta Kappa in the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.

After his graduation from university, John Junior started working in his father’s business on the 1^st October 1897. He was working as one of the directors from the office at Standard Oil’s headquarters at 26 Broadway. After a scandal which onvolved the head of Standard Oil, John Dustin Archbold, and bribes to congressmen, John Junior decided to resign from both companies in 1910. He wanted to sho that his philanthropy was free from commercial and financial interests. In April 1914, there was a massacre which occurred at a coal mining company, CFI. John Junior, who had controlling stocks in the company, was the only one absent that day while twenty people there died in the massacre. The American businessman had to present a testimony following the massacre before the US Commission on Industrial Relations on January 1915 and was later advised by William Lyon MacKenzie King and Ivy Lee to meet the union organizer and to admit his fault in the testimony. This was believed by MacKenzie to be the turning point of Rockfeller Jr’s life and il helped to restore the reputation of the Rockfeller family.

During the Great Depression, Rockfeller Junior developed and stood out to be one of the largest real estate holders in New York City. He was the lone financier of the Rockfeller Centre and his influential status invited several blue chip companies to be tenants in the complex  in 1921, Rockfeller Junior was given 10% of the shares of the Equitable Truct Company form his father and thus became the bank’s largest shareholder. In 1930, the Equitable Trust Company merged with Chase National Bank and with JP Morgan Chase and thus became the largest bank in the world.  Rockfeller Junior later founded the Dunbar National Bank in Harlem in the late 1920s. This bank was a unique financial institutions in the city because of the employment of African Americans as tellers, clerks, bookkeepers and in important management positions. Unfortunately the bank was after a few years closed down.

Rockfeller Junior was however mostly remembered for his philanthropic works as he donated over $537 million to numerous important causes. One great example is that in 1900, he gave over his family money in order to fund the construction of a medical laboratory on the campus of Cornell Medical Center. The latter became a Memorial Hospital and decades later became the worldly renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

The life of this great businessman and major philanthropist ended on the 11^th May 1960 when he was 86 because of pneumonia.