Frederick T. Gates
Frederick Taylor Gates (1853-1929) was an American Baptist clergyman, educator, and the principal business and philanthropic advisor to the major oil industrialist and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller (Senior), from 1891 to 1923.
Rockefeller adviser
The son of a Baptist minister, he was born at Maine, Broome County, New York, graduated from the University of Rochester in 1877, and from the Rochester Theological Seminary in 1880. From 1880 to 1888 he served as pastor of the Central Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He left the ministry and was appointed the secretary of the newly formed American Baptist Education Society, where he championed a Baptist university in Chicago to fill a void that existed in Baptist education. On January 21, 1889 he met the lifetime Baptist Rockefeller Senior. He proved to be central to the suggestion and subsequent design of the funding plans for the creation by Senior of the the Baptist University of Chicago; he subsequently served for many years as a trustee on its board.
Gates then became Rockefeller's key philanthropic and business adviser, working in the newly established family office in Standard Oil headquarters at 26 Broadway, where he oversaw Rockefeller's investments in a series of investments in many companies, but not in his personal stock in the Standard Oil Trust.
From 1892 onwards, faced with his ever expanding investments and real estate holdings, Senior crucially recognized the need for professional advice and so he formed a four-member committee, later including his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to manage his money, and nominated Gates as its head and as his senior business adviser. In this capacity Gates steered Rockefeller money predominantly to syndicates arranged by the investment house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and, to a lesser extent, the house of J. P. Morgan.[1]
Gates served on the boards of many companies in which Rockefeller had a majority shareholding; Rockefeller at that time held a securities portfolio of unprecedented size for a private individual. Although Gates is recognized today as a philanthropic advisor, in fact Rockefeller himself regarded him as the greatest businessman he had encountered in his life, skipping such prominent figures of the time as Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie.[2]
When he ceased being a business advisor to Rockefeller in 1912, he continued to advise him and his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on philanthropic matters, at the same time serving on many corporate boards. He also served as president of the General Education Board, which was subsequently merged into other Rockefeller family institutions.
Gates also designed the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), established in 1901, of which he was board president. He, along with Rockefeller and his son, was also crucial in the design of the prominent and influential Rockefeller Foundation, becoming a trustee upon its creation in 1913.
Further reading
- Chernow, Ron, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., London: Warner Books, 1998.
- Gates, Frederick Taylor. Chapters in my Life. New York: The Free Press, Reprint, 1977.
- General Education Board The General Education Board: An Account of Its Activities, 1902-1914 (1915).
- Nevins, Allan, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.
- Starr, Harris Elwood, "Frederick T. Gates" in Dictionary of American Biography;;, Volume 4 (1931).