Shane Parrish
speaker
20,679 appearances
49 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Shane Parrish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Asking Congress to charter such a fund produced a national spectacle.
Because the federal government was prosecuting Standard Oil as an illegal monopoly, a fearful Congress balked on the conundrum for three years until the Rockefeller family gave up.
The family finally bypassed Washington entirely.
In 1913, New York State quietly chartered the Rockefeller Foundation with a deliberately limitless mandate designed to outlive its founders, to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.
Rockefeller endowed it with $100 million.
This new foundation took the hookworm fight worldwide to 52 countries, bankrolled the campaign that all but eradicated yellow fever from the Americas, and built modern schools of public health from Baltimore to Calcutta.
By the time the dust settled, Rockefeller's systematic giving eclipsed even the legendary lifetime benchmark set by Andrew Carnegie.
None of it surprised the people who really knew him.
I do not believe a man has a right to hoard money, he loved to say.
He would repeatedly say that he had been begging for good causes since boyhood and that he had first been tasked with raising money to clear the debt of the Erie Street Baptist Church.
A reporter once told him that he wanted to write about how the richest man in the world played, following orders from his newspaper.
"'Stop,' Rockefeller snapped at the man.
"'If we are to get along, you will have to find some other designation for me.
Wealth isn't a distinction.
If I have no other achievement to my credit than the accumulation of wealth, then I have made a poor success of my life.'"
To Rockefeller, philanthropy was never a late career change of heart or a desperate washing of his family name, regardless of how it looked to a cynical public.
He genuinely believed that the exact same God who had engineered his corporate fortune was now supervising him as he handed the keys back.
He passed the same philosophy on to his only son, John Jr., who reported for work at 26 Broadway on October 1, 1897, the same year his father quietly stopped coming in.
Jr.
was given no title and no instructions.
Showing 2261–2280 of 20,679 · page 114 of 1034
← Previous
Next →