In 1864, he founded the grain and produce company, Clark, Rockefeller, & Co., with business partner, Maurice Clark (1827-1901). The company profited from the American Civil War (1861-65) and Rockefeller used his money to establish the company that made him his fortune: Standard Oil of California. With notions of the Protestant work ethic and Christian charity, Rockefeller and his employees attempted to craft an image of the family dynasty as philanthropic.
Rockefeller’s various institutes and foundations spawned other entities, including the University of Chicago, the General Education Board, and the eponymous Institute for Medical Research. But diary entries, papers, letters, and memos from the time confirm that the motive was primarily to make the public healthier and more educated in order to get them to work for the businesses in which Rockefeller had invested. By the mid-20th century, it was clear that “philanthropy” was also a massive, legal tax dodge.
Rockefeller’s
profit-making agenda included the promotion of so-called “scientific
medicine,” which has now become the norm. Although Rockefeller
personally championed natural remedies, including homeopathy, publicly
he funded allopathic medicine and was a major cog in the machine that
brought America’s medical practices up to Europe’s technological
standards. But institutions, be they religious, corporate, or national,
are not self-containing. They expand. Rockefeller’s philanthropy was de facto colonialism
in countries including China and the Philippines, where the offshoots
of his Foundation trained indigenous elites to use Western “scientific
medicines” and lessen their traditional, natural cures....<<<Read More>>>...
