1853–1929 · Baptist minister; Rockefeller's principal philanthropic adviser and chairman of the General Education Board
A Baptist clergyman who pastored in Minneapolis before becoming John D. Rockefeller’s principal business and philanthropic adviser from 1891 to 1923, Gates is the figure who turned Rockefeller’s giving away from personal handouts and into large expert-run foundations. In 1913 he published The Country School of To-morrow for the General Education Board, a fifteen-page pamphlet whose deliberately dreamlike central passage — about not trying to make rural children into philosophers or poets — is almost certainly what the Rockefeller “quote” is a garbled memory of. He did not write the popular line, and no one has ever claimed he did; he is here because he is the only documented text anywhere near it.