Rockefeller receives an overwhelming number of applications for financial assistance, including appeals for charity. Having made charitable contributions all his working life, Rockefeller is eager to give away his money, but he also is determined to do it the right way, and he has never settled on a systematic method for doing that.

Rockefeller meets Dr. Augustus Strong, whose son Charles courts and eventually marries Rockefeller’s eldest daughter Bessie. Strong proposes building a Baptist university in New York City and aggressively pushes the idea for years. Meanwhile Charles, a good friend of the pragmatist philosopher George Santayana, experiences a crisis of faith and rejects his Baptist upbringing, gravitating instead toward secular philosophy. The elder Strong’s new family connection to the Rockefeller’s proves insufficient, as Rockefeller increasingly gravitates toward Chicago as the best location for a new Baptist university.

Rockefeller meets and befriends a young biblical scholar named William Rainey Harper, destined to become first president of the new University of Chicago. Around the same time, Rockefeller also meets a young Baptist minister named Frederick T. Gates, who will emerge over the next few decades as the leading figure in Rockefeller philanthropy. Working through the American Baptist Education Society, with Gates as its executive secretary, Rockefeller begins to make concrete plans for the university.