Titan

by Ron Chernow

  Edith became positively clothes crazy, displaying a craving for fashionable outfits and jewelry in defiance of her parents’ values.

  By avoiding talk of money as unbecoming, Rockefeller concealed from his children the magnitude of his fortune. When Bessie enrolled at Vassar in the mid-1880s—she was the only daughter to attend college—she went on a shopping expedition with some classmates to purchase a Christmas present for a favorite teacher. At a Manhattan store, they found the perfect gift: a $100 desk. Since Bessie and her companions had only $75, they asked the merchant if he could wait a few days for the remaining $25. He agreed to do so if a New York businessman would vouch for them. “My father is in business,” Bessie offered meekly. “He will vouch for us.” Who is your father? asked the man. “His name is Mr. Rockefeller,” she said. “John D. Rockefeller; he is in the oil business.” The merchant gasped. “John D. Rockefeller your father!” When he agreed to ship the furniture, Bessie imagined he had merely changed his mind to please them.49

  When it came time for Junior to dispense with private tutors, he went to the New York School of Languages, followed by a school run by C. N. Douglass, and then the tony Cutler School, whose student body included Albert Milbank, Cornelius N. Bliss, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Junior trudged the pavement to school each morning while he watched poorer classmates rolling by in fine carriages. Though he belittled his own intelligence, this bright, dutiful boy always scored high grades and led a purposeful life that allowed small time for leisure. When not doing homework, he often practiced his violin, and for eight years he took lessons from Richard Arnold, first violinist of the Philharmonic Orchestra. Though never spanked or punished, Junior had to put up with unremitting religious indoctrination from Cettie.50 By comparison, Father was almost playful. Eager to please his parents and other adult authority figures, Junior took things too seriously and was petrified of making a mistake.

  It is a small miracle that, with so much duty so regularly dinned into their heads, the Rockefeller children didn’t go batty. They did, however, erupt in a mass of psychosomatic symptoms. During his first year at Cutler, at age thirteen, Junior racked up a 98.1 grade average only to succumb to some sort of nervous collapse from overwork.51 Too much expectation had been heaped on this frail vessel, and he buckled beneath the weight. His father ordered the staple Victorian cure of hard outdoors work. In late 1887, Junior and his mother wintered at Forest Hill, where he furiously chopped wood (fifteen cents a cord), broke stones, burned brush, and raked leaves, working the nervous tension from his system. Junior enjoyed this fleeting monopoly on his mother’s affections and the respite from his regimented New York life. His letters to his father evoke the melancholy beauty of a snowbound winter, with moonlit sleigh rides and afternoons skating on the frozen lake as he pushed Cettie before him in a wooden chair.

  Reinvigorated by his stay, Junior completed a second year at Cutler before being transferred to a school custom-made for him. John and William Rockefeller conferred with a talented instructor, John A. Browning, who created the tiny Browning School with just two classes: one built around Junior, the other around William’s son Percy. A Rockefeller operation from the outset, it was set up in a family-owned brownstone on West Fifty-fifth Street, with John and William paying Browning’s salary and reserving the right to screen applicants. From the beginning, the school emphasized manual crafts as well as classical studies and was animated by an egalitarian spirit. Nettie Fowler McCormick of the Chicago reaper clan sent her two sons, Harold and Stanley, and the student body of twenty-five also included two sons of William’s estate superintendent in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Browning School was yet another attempt by John D. to prevent his children from putting on airs or slipping into idle dissipation.

  The letters Junior sent his father from Forest Hill during the winter of 1887–1888 make clear that his mother was also recuperating from a bout of ill health. He told a friend, “Although it would be pleasant to be with the rest of the family, when we think how much good it is doing mother—and she really is getting much better, she sleeps so well and feels so much better—we are perfectly happy to be separated.” 52 Always weak, Cettie was beginning to betray signs of the frailty that would convert her into an invalid. She enjoyed driving with her husband and shared his love of skating but took these activities only in small doses. “She was not strong . . . and could not endure much exercise,” said her son.53

  For the biographer of John D. Rockefeller, the most exasperating lacuna in his story is Cettie’s transformation from a bright, witty girl into a rather humorless woman, prone to a nunlike religiosity. One wonders what happened to the high-spirited, vivacious young woman who was the high-school valedictorian and literary editor at Oread Collegiate Institute. By the 1880s, when she was in her forties, her letters were suffocated by a treacly piety and endless platitudes as she grew righteous and slightly unreal. As one magazine noted, “It would be hard to find anyone who has anything to say against Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, for the reason that Mrs. Rockefeller’s life is almost wholly devoted to religious and benevolent work.”54 She uttered only noble and uplifting thoughts, constantly thanked the Lord, and never stooped to gossip or flip remarks.

  Was this the case of another smart Victorian woman who felt trapped by the few options open to her and took to bed and religion from boredom or self-defense? The social conventions of her day clearly approved of her decision to confine herself to church and home. But one also wonders whether her cloistered religiosity wasn’t a reaction to the mounting controversy surrounding Standard Oil. This gentle, brown-eyed woman adored her husband and believed implicitly in his goodness, but she was bothered by the charges hurled against him. We know from two of Rockefeller’s colleagues that Cettie sometimes wanted him to respond to attacks that he preferred to slough off and ignore. In the 1860s and early 1870s, Rockefeller wrote her confidential, highly informative letters about his business dealings, including the SIC. Starting in the 1880s, however, his letters suddenly became bland and empty, full of banalities about the weather and barren of business news.

  In general, Rockefeller kept his family apart from Standard Oil matters, with one curious exception. At the breakfast table, he sometimes read aloud samples from the reams of abusive crank mail that swamped his office. Perhaps he did this to make light of the threats or take the sting from controversy. Aside from this, he steered clear of anything even faintly controversial. Did Cettie’s religion become her impenetrable shield against the venomous criticism of her husband? And did John become more self-righteous about temperance and other social issues to assert his own virtue and assuage his conscience? These are intriguing questions, but ones avoided so sedulously by Rockefeller and his family that they left no comments that might shed any light on them. Certain aspects of Rockefeller’s married life—those critical things whispered about Standard Oil in the privacy of the bedroom at night—will likely remain a mystery forever.

  Rockefeller always took umbrage at the accusation that he was a narrow workaholic, yet he didn’t begin to travel abroad until after he had moved to New York and was well into his forties. A stubborn provincial, he didn’t hanker after the exotic, and he shunned Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other distant outposts serviced by Standard Oil. For him, the aim of travel wasn’t to submit to the charms of an alien place but to transport his culture there intact. He never traveled without a clergyman (typically Edward Judson or Augustus Strong) and a doctor (usually Hamilton Biggar) in tow to cater to his spiritual and physical needs. Although Rockefeller never owned a private railroad car, the railroads hooked one up for him, as needed, to a transcontinental train for domestic trips. These plush carriages were divided into six compartments, including a kitchen, pantry, observatory room, private room, and staterooms. Streaking across the Great Plains, the family exuberantly sang hymns, or the children practiced their musical instruments. For an hour each morning, the clergyman led a Bible session, expounding another beatitude. In mapping his itinerary,
Rockefeller ensured access to a Baptist church each Sunday, and he especially liked to drop in on black churches, often leaving a substantial donation in his wake. Most of all, he rejoiced to find a good, rousing tent meeting on the road—that was a real vacation treat for a man who always found religion an uplifting experience.

  In 1883, Rockefeller and Henry Flagler toured Jacksonville and Saint Augustine, Florida, and reviewed the state’s economic prospects with Dr. Andrew Anderson and tobacco mogul George P. Lorillard. The next year, the Rockefellers headed down to Atlanta, swung west to New Orleans, and wound up in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Two years later, they made an extended trip to Yellowstone Park and returned by way of Chicago. By this point, even Rockefeller wondered whether he would ever escape the continental United States, telling Benjamin Brewster, “I may never get to Europe with my family although we have been expecting we might go in a year or two, but I am very desirous to know more of this dear land in which we live.”55

  Deliverance came on June 1, 1887, when Rockefeller and his family set sail for a three-month European vacation, the Standard Oil executives trailing after them on a tugboat to wave good-bye. They must have been relieved because they feared that his indefatigable exertions at Standard Oil might injure his health. It took Rockefeller time to shed his obsessive concern for Standard Oil and allow himself to be lulled by the restful sea spirit. While still 460 miles from Southampton, unable to stop wondering about oil, he broke down and wired George Rogers, “I find I already thirst for knowledge about the business.”56 A month later, he pleaded from Berlin, “Can’t you glean more of interest from Ex[ecutive] Com[mittee] for me about current business. Am anxious for every scrap of information.” 57

  After the Civil War, so many Americans flocked to Europe for vacations, presenting a cavalcade of innocents abroad, that their showy vulgarity and bumptious patriotism were frequently parodied by contemporary writers. The Rockefellers must have struck the Europeans as a dry, antiseptic family, somewhat awkward and ill at ease with foreign languages. Rockefeller made no concessions to the European milieu, which only accentuated his homespun style. In London, he booked a hotel room in Piccadilly that gave his family a front-row seat for Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and they stared agog as she whisked by in a magnificent golden carriage.

  As the party crossed to France, John D. was alert for sharp characters out to swindle him and prey upon his American innocence. Because he didn’t speak French, he knew he looked like a vulnerable rube. At one point, he suspected, correctly, that their tour guide was fleecing them. Politely firing the man, he took charge of financial matters and pored over stacks of incomprehensible bills. Junior left a splendid vignette of his father trying to decipher a French check:

  I can see him now, going over the long French bills, studying each item, many of them being unintelligible to him. “Poulets!” he would exclaim. “What are poulets, John?” Or again, “Bougies, bougies—what in the world is a bougie?” And so on down the bill. Father was never willing to pay a bill which he did not know to be correct in all its items. Such care in small things might seem penurious to some people, yet to him it was the working out of a life principle.58

  Another traveling companion remembered the Rockefellers sitting at a private dining room in a Roman hotel as the paterfamilias dissected the weekly bill, trying to ascertain whether they had really consumed two whole chickens, as these slippery foreigners alleged:

  Mr. Rockefeller listened for a while to the discussion, and then said quietly: “I can settle that very easily. John, did you have a chicken leg?” “Yes.” “Alta, did you have a chicken leg?” “Yes.” “Well, Mother, I think I remember that you had one. Is that right?” “Yes,” said the mother. “I know that I had one, and no chicken has 3 legs. The bill is correct.” I can still see the faces of that family group and hear the tone of Mr. Rockefeller’s voice as he so quietly and so uniquely settled that dispute.59

  As he grew older, Junior was deputized to handle tips and bills, which he later cited as excellent business training.

  Needless to say, Rockefeller spurned the European music halls and spent most of the trip making pilgrimages to churches or touring pretty scenery. At first, he declined an audience with the pope and yielded only when advised that it might please the Catholic workmen at Standard Oil. Still a man of exceptional fortitude, he and Junior went off for a vigorous mountain climb in Zermatt, Switzerland, and his stamina amazed his son. On this European trip, Rockefeller even found time to read and grew enraptured in Paris by Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur and by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii on a visit to Vesuvius. Yet he couldn’t disappear into a reverie for long. He was now so famous that as he went from city to city, his arrival was celebrated in the local papers and crank mail and begging letters began to follow him. So many letters piled up at hotels along the way that he finally had to purchase a big trunk just to carry them back. It was testimony to Rockefeller’s thoroughgoing sense of responsibility that he preserved each letter for review at home. For a man who had fled to Europe for a peaceful interlude, it must have been startling to realize that his fame and notoriety were now so widespread in a world dominated by Standard Oil that he could no longer find refuge anywhere from his own reputation.

  Beleaguered by supplicants, Rockefeller tried to expand his disbursements to keep pace with his mounting income, and his donations nearly doubled from $61,000 in 1881 to $119,000 three years later. Notwithstanding his somewhat frigid image, he took a close interest in the recipients of his charity and directly monitored their progress. Even as he was being reviled as a corporate malefactor in the press, this contradictory man agonized over the judicious application of his money and found it harder to exercise scrutiny over charities than over business. In this seminal phase of Rockefeller philanthropy, the entire family judged the merits of applications, and the children sometimes audited important meetings. Once grace was said at breakfast, Rockefeller pulled out a folder stuffed with appeals from around the globe and assigned them to the children for further study. At this point, he drew no invidious distinctions among the children and involved all four equally in disposing of his fortune.

  Rockefeller’s benevolent innovations have often been credited to his extraordinary philanthropic chief, Frederick T. Gates, who arrived on the scene in the 1890s. Yet by the 1880s, Rockefeller had already formulated certain core principles for his bequests, many of them stemming from beliefs he had long entertained as a businessman. For instance, like other industrialists, he worried that charity fostered dependence and pauperized recipients. After he had escorted his family to the notorious Five Points slum of lower Manhattan on their first Thanksgiving Day in New York, he lauded a shelter for homeless men but carped at the “policy of feeding all the tramps that came. My impression is they only do it once a year. I would give them work and make them earn their food.”60

  Again, contrary to his stereotype, Rockefeller was acutely concerned about the poverty that accompanied industrialization, urbanization, and immigration in the late nineteenth century. Far from taking refuge in the world to come, he also stressed salvation in this world, prodding one clergyman to go into “the midst of the multitudes thronging up and down the Bowery or thereabouts, and settle and stay right there with them, establish a church.” 61 Starting in 1882, he underwrote the ministry of Edward Judson, who exemplified his belief that a shepherd should abide with his flock. He was the youngest son of Adoniram Judson, a saintly figure among nineteenth-century Baptists for converting the Burmese and translating the Bible into their tongue. Abandoning an affluent congregation in New Jersey, Edward Judson took over the Berea Baptist Church on Manhattan’s West Fifteenth Street to evangelize among poor Italian immigrants. As an exponent of the social gospel, which blended social work with spiritual comfort, he convinced Rockefeller to contribute to a fresh-air and cool-water fund offering poor immigrants a refreshing two-week retreat in the country each summer.

  As a regular dinner guest on Fifty-fou
rth Street, Judson won over Rockefeller to his vision of a comprehensive religious center that would unite elements of both an urban church and settlement house, ministering to both the worldly and spiritual needs of congregants, a vision spectacularly realized with construction of the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in 1892. For this imposing edifice, designed in Greco-Romanesque style by McKim, Mead and White with stained-glass windows by John La Farge, Rockefeller contributed $40,000 of the original $256,000. Both a community center and house of worship, it offered a broad spectrum of services from day nurseries to sewing classes for the poor. By this point, Rockefeller was indisputably the most powerful Baptist layman, and his largesse was already stirring fierce dissension in the ranks—not at all surprising in a denomination filled with working people. In the late 1880s, Judson told him about a convention of Baptist ministers in Philadelphia at which “some very shallow and ill-advised . . . vehement insinuations were made against the Standard Oil,” prompting another clergyman to deliver a “brave, ringing speech” in Rockefeller’s defense.62 During the next two decades, this controversy grew more obstreperous as the Baptists tried to figure out whether the munificent oil mogul had been sent to them from heaven or hell.

  The most important concept Rockefeller bequeathed to philanthropy was that of wholesale giving, as opposed to small, scattershot contributions. As Cleveland’s wealthiest philanthropist in the early 1880s, Rockefeller already felt oppressed by the appeals cascading in on him. In 1881, he apologized to Reverend George O. King of the Willson Avenue Baptist Church in Cleveland, saying, “I have been holding back [an] answer in part from the fact that I had so many obligations for benevolent objects that I was almost overwhelmed.” 63 Since for Rockefeller the imperative to make money and donate money emanated from a common religious impulse—“I am more and more satisfied no member of a church can afford not to contribute as the Lord prosper him,” he told a friend—he approached his donations with extreme gravity. 64