by Ron Chernow
To provide company, Rockefeller also bought the small Claflin Cottage at Lakewood, where Charles and Bessie stayed for three seasons. To hear William James, a frequent visitor, tell it, it was a gloomy place. When Strong’s first major book, Why the Mind Has a Body, appeared in 1903, James extolled it as “a sterling work, admirable for clearness of statement & thoroughness of discussion, luminous, and likely to be much used by students of philosophy.”61 During his stays at Lakewood, James accompanied Charles on walks around the lake and the two often paused to sit on pine needles and reflect. On such a stroll, James paid them both a high compliment when he turned to Strong and said, “I am John the Baptist and you are the Messiah.”62 Yet James was more versatile than Strong and came to dread these Lakewood trips, where he felt trapped by perpetual shoptalk. Charles could convert a pleasant weekend into an interminable seminar, and James voiced his frustrations to his wife, Alice, tempering them with his great admiration for Charles. “I never knew such an unremitting, untiring, monotonous addiction as that of his mind to truth. He goes by points, pinning each one definitely, and has, I think, the very clearest mind I ever knew. . . . I suspect that he will outgrow us all, for his rate accelerates, and he never stands still.”63
As an antidote to Charles, William James especially welcomed his Lakewood encounters with Rockefeller, who would sometimes materialize at lunch, fresh from golf. Rockefeller had only the most fleeting encounters with the intelligentsia, which makes James’s descriptions of him the more valuable. The philosopher had an uncanny knack for telescoping titanic figures into thumb-nail sketches. He was especially struck by Rockefeller’s willpower and wrote to Alice about the primordial strength that radiated from him, telling her that Rockefeller was a “very deep human being” who gave him “more impression of Urkraft [primitive or original force] than anyone I ever met.” He was also unexpectedly charmed by his genial style: “Glorious old John D. . . . [is] a most love-able person.” To round out this portrait, he marveled that Rockefeller could be “so complex, subtle, oily, fierce, strongly bad and strongly good a human being.”64
William dashed off an even more vivid description to his brother Henry:
Rockefeller, you know, is reputed the richest man in the world, and he certainly is the most powerfully suggestive personality I have ever seen. A man 10 stories deep, and to me quite unfathomable. Physionomie de Pierrot (not a spear of hair on head or face) flexible, cunning, quakerish, superficially suggestive of naught but goodness and conscientiousness, yet accused of being the greatest villain in business whom our country has produced, a hater of cities and lover of the open air (playing golf & skating all the time at Lakewood) etc.65
James wrote this while Ida Tarbell was inflaming popular opinion against Standard Oil. He urged Rockefeller to discard his policy of silence and combat the attacks by letting the public become better acquainted with him. When Rockefeller published his memoirs in book form in 1909, James applauded. “This is what I proposed to you many years ago!” he wrote to him. “Expansiveness wins a way where reserve fails!”66
In 1902, the already somber world of Charles and Bessie Strong darkened suddenly when Bessie, age thirty-six, experienced fresh medical problems. One cannot state with certainty what this ailment was, but in one letter to her brother, she refers to her “most weak and unreliable heart.” 67 We do know that her condition deteriorated dramatically in the spring of 1903, for that autumn Charles wrote to William James, “Mrs. Strong is pretty well for her, thank you; but she had an attack in the spring which gave some cause for disquietude.”68 Her granddaughter later contended that Bessie had “suffered a stroke and consequent impairments.” 69
In the few brief, cryptic references to Bessie’s illness in the press, it was always said that she had withdrawn from Lakewood society to lead a quiet life—a cover story that does not begin to capture the pathos of what happened. Overnight, the stroke or heart condition turned this pretty young woman into someone much older and frailer. The Rockefellers always suppressed the fact that it affected her mind. As Strong’s friend George Santayana wrote, “She was always, as they put it, in delicate health, which was a euphemism for not being in her right mind.”70 Turned into a semi-invalid who spent much of the day in bed, she shuffled slowly about the cottage in a gray shawl, careworn and bent. She sometimes lapsed into morbid fears of poverty, retrenching on household expenses, reworking gowns to save money, and informing friends that she could no longer afford to entertain. During these periods, Charles supplemented her spartan grocery orders with extra purchases. Even as she wondered darkly in early 1904 how she and Charles would survive, Bessie was worth $404,489.25, with an estimated annual income of $20,030. At moments, she also threw off her imaginary cares and gaily announced that they were rich.
After a while, transported into a dreamworld, Bessie started to babble in childlike French. William James arrived in Lakewood one day and was thunderstruck by Bessie’s condition. To his wife, he reported Bessie’s words as follows:
“M. James, cela me fait de joie de voir votre bonne figure, vous avez un coeur généreux comme mon papa. Nous sommes tres riches maintenant. Mais Papa me donne tout ce que je lui demande pour le donner a ceux qui ont besoin. Mois aussi j’ai un bon coeur.” (Translation: “Mr. James, it gives me joy to see your nice face, you have a generous heart like my papa. We are very rich now. But Papa gives me everything I ask him for, to give to those who are in need. I too have a good heart.”)
A flabbergasted James said afterward, “It was just like a fairy-tale.” 71 It was an indescribably sad fate for the one Rockefeller daughter who had gone to college.
It was also a bitter irony for Charles Strong, with his overpowering intellect, to become a nursemaid for the blighted, demented Bessie. Solitary and emotionally blocked, he soon grew bored with any conversation that did not revolve around philosophic disputation. His letters to William James contain few personal asides or mundane details, and they read like philosophic abstracts. For such a man to have ended up the caretaker of a wife spouting gibberish must have been an intolerable strain. In the spring of 1904, nervous and rundown, Charles took a leave of absence from Columbia and sailed for Europe with Bessie. He planned to consult with French specialists in nervous diseases and hoped that his wife might be helped by the warm climate of southern France. It might also have been for Charles a chance to escape from both his overbearing father and father-in-law.
Like Bessie, the Rockefeller’s youngest daughter, Edith, was beset by nervous troubles throughout her life. Unlike Bessie, her maladies led her on an odyssey of sustained introspection unique in Rockefeller annals. She experimented with psychology and other spheres alien to the rest of the family, subjecting the Rockefeller verities to the cold test of modern skepticism and threatening her relationship with her father along the way.
Among the four children, Edith seemed the family changeling. Where her siblings had been submissive children, Edith was recalcitrant, headstrong, and outspoken. Once, as an adolescent, she greeted Grandma Spelman with a hug so fierce that she cracked one of her ribs. She read voraciously and by an early age entertained religious doubts. In a smart but not reflective family, Edith had intellectual aspirations. “Reading has always been more important to me than eating,” she confessed to a newspaper reporter late in life. “Except in a case of dire starvation, if a bottle of milk and a book were placed on the table, I would reach for the book, because I must feed my mind more than my body.”72 Such a person might well find something antiseptic about the Rockefeller life.
In 1893, twenty-seven-year-old Bessie and twenty-one-year-old Edith went to Philadelphia for a rest cure at the Hospital for Orthopedic and Nervous Diseases, run by the patrician neurologist-cum-novelist, S. Weir Mitchell. A specialist in female nervous disorders, Mitchell separated his patients from their quotidian world, banning casual visits or even mail from relatives. Rockefeller visited his daughters only once, in February 1894, and would have heartily endorsed their program of re
laxation, massage, good food, and electrical stimulation of muscles. Bessie responded better than Edith, who required an extended follow-up rest in a cottage at Saranac Lake in upstate New York.
In November 1895, hard on the heels of her recovery, Edith married Harold McCormick of Chicago, who had just graduated from Princeton. He was the son of Cyrus McCormick, the developer of the mechanical reaper and founder of what became International Harvester. Junior had befriended Harold at the Browning School and was the inadvertent matchmaker. During the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, he, Cettie, and his three sisters traveled west to Chicago by private railroad car and stayed with Nettie Fowler McCormick, Cyrus’s indomitable widow, at her Rush Street mansion. Devout Presbyterians and generous donors to missionary work, the McCormicks resembled the Rockefeller family in many respects. They had raised their children strictly, giving them small allowances and urging them to donate to the poor. There was also a streak of mental instability among the McCormick children that would be far more pernicious than that among the Rockefeller offspring.
The Rockefellers deplored the vogue among rich Americans of marrying off their daughters to titled Europeans and welcomed the McCormicks as an upright, God-fearing industrial family. As the heir to a fortune, Harold McCormick did not have to allay suspicions that might have shadowed another suitor for Edith’s hand, and John and Cettie found something winning about his expansive ways. He was an athletic man with luminous blue eyes and a dreamy gaze who wore jeweled cuff links and embroidered vests. Among his tightly wound in-laws, he stood out for his free and open manner. Yet he got along well with Senior and was the only son-in-law allowed to smoke in Cettie’s presence.
The only misgivings that John and Cettie had about the marriage centered on Harold’s drinking. Several times before the wedding, Rockefeller tried to extract a pledge that he would abstain from liquor, but each time Harold firmly resisted. “While I believe we hold the same general views as to the ruin wrought in the world by strong drink, and as to individual responsibility with regard to it, I am convinced that for me a life pledge is not for the best,” Harold told Rockefeller two months before the wedding. As a concession, he stopped drinking briefly. Senior was again receiving threats, and Harold closed his note by adding, “I am distressed to have the subject renewed, and just at a time, when you, and therefore we, have much anxiety and worry by reason of the cranks.”73
Edith and Harold were to be married in November 1895 at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Manhattan, but Harold got a cold and the ceremony was shifted to the Buckingham Hotel. Right before the wedding, Senior sent for his daughter, telling her that they needed to have one last confidential chat. Once they were alone, Edith recounted in a later interview, he said in his most portentous manner, “I have brought you here to make a request that lies very close to my heart and a request that has been very carefully considered.” “Yes, father,” Edith replied, “but why be so serious. . . . what is this request that stirs you so much?” “It is this daughter. I want you to promise never to serve a drink of liquor in your home. . . . Promise me that and you will never regret it.” As Edith recalled, “Unthinkingly, I said, ‘Why, of course, father,’ and immediately set off in a peal of laughter over the solemnity of what seemed such a trivial request.”74 This agreement concluded, father and daughter proceeded to the ceremony, and Edith entered on her father’s arm, wearing a tiara of diamonds and emeralds given to her by Harold. In the press coverage, Edith was labeled the “Princess of Standard Oil” and Harold the “Prince of International Harvester.” Henceforth, Edith was always known as Edith Rockefeller McCormick, signaling that she planned to retain her own identity.
With his children, Rockefeller had tried to create that most elusive thing, a self-perpetuating puritanism, but he was destined to produce at least one rebellious spendthrift and that honor fell to Edith. After an Italian honeymoon, at last emancipated from her austere past, she and Harold moved into a grand stone mansion at 1000 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. In this Gold Coast fortress, barricaded behind a high iron fence, Edith vied for social preeminence. She displayed in bold relief qualities that Rockefeller had struggled to root out of his children—vanity, ostentation, narcissism, and hedonism—but they were redeemed in part by her prolonged introspection and intellectual fearlessness. In Chicago, away from her father, Edith cultivated a separate set of interests.
All the affectations of European royal courts were displayed in Edith’s mansion, and Chicago society tattled about her “imperial complex.” 75 After being welcomed by footmen, guests were escorted into sumptuous rooms embellished with beautiful pictures and chandeliers. Edith decided that the Rockefellers were descended from the noble La Rochefoucaulds, and this accounted for a French motif throughout the house. Her dinner guests, sometimes numbering as many as two hundred, received menus and place cards printed in French and engraved with raised gilt letters. The guests dined off a gilded-silver service that had belonged to the Bonapartes and footmen stood stiffly behind every second chair. Edith had a majestic empire room that featured four of Napoleon Bonaparte’s royal chairs—two with Ns emblazoned across the back and two with Bs. Edith slept in an ornate Louis XVI bed and kept a gold box on her dressing table that had been a gift to the Empress Marie Louise from Napoleon.
Edith was not shy about her self-presentation. She ran through clothes like a queen, renewing her wardrobe yearly, and always shimmered in jewels. A 1908 painting shows a demure, gray-eyed Edith gazing knowingly at the viewer in tiara and expensive décolleté gown, a boa draped over her shoulders. A short, slender woman, she daringly exposed her ankles and wore a gold ankle chain. On one social occasion, she appeared in a silver dress of such imposing weight that it was said she could scarcely breathe. She had one cape of 275 animal skins, laboriously stitched together, which all but smothered her. Doubtless to her father’s horror, Edith assembled a jewelry collection that would have made an eastern potentate blush. She had a Cartier necklace strung with ten emeralds and 1,657 tiny diamonds. For her wedding, her parents gave her a $15,000 rope of pearls, a modest gift soon overshadowed by her $2 million string of pearls. In 1908, discovering that Edith and Harold were borrowing to support this luxury, Rockefeller scolded Harold: “Since my attention was called to this subject, I have made inquiries of Alta and John as to their expenses, and find that theirs have been less than one-third of what yours have been.”76
Edith’s temperance pledge cramped her style as a hostess. Noticing that her soirées lacked a certain sparkle, she turned to Harold for an explanation. “My dear,” he said, “don’t you realize that these red-blooded young Chicagoans are used to having liquor? They simply must have their cocktails, their wine, their highballs and cordials.” 77 No child of John D. Rockefeller would flout a temperance oath made to him, so Edith had to contrive ways to compensate. “I invited the most brilliant men and women whom I met,” she told one reporter. “I gave musicales at which I presented the greatest artists of the day.” 78 She befriended artists, intellectuals, and society figures and developed into a prominent patroness of the arts, collecting antique furniture, lace, Oriental art, and fine books.
Having always loathed hymns, Edith shared Harold’s affection for the opera—she paid for the translation of several librettos into English—and they frequently threw dinner parties on opera nights. In a habit that curiously parodied her father, Edith kept a small jeweled clock at the dinner table and held the guests to a precise schedule, so that everyone arrived at the opera on time. When she pressed a button for the next course, the team of waiters whisked plates away from the startled guests, whether they were finished or not. Edith ran a hierarchical household and never addressed most of the servants directly, dealing exclusively with the top two of them.
It is easy to satirize Edith’s foibles and dismiss her as dilettante, yet she was fiercely devoted to her adopted causes. After she had five children—John, Fowler, Muriel, Editha, and Mathilde—Edith created a kindergarten for girls, with
classes held in French. Senior doted on her eldest son, John Rockefeller McCormick, known as Jack. During the winter of 1900–1901, Jack and Fowler were staying at Pocantico when both boys contracted scarlet fever. Whatever the latent tensions between them, Edith gratefully remembered her father’s behavior during Jack’s illness. “As long as I live I shall never forget the great love and the untiring effort which you put forth to save dear Jack’s life,” she wrote to him a few years later. “Absolutely forgetful of self and showing a love much like the Christ love.”79 To confine the disease, Rockefeller constructed a special staircase that allowed the children and nurses to go from the upstairs sickroom to a glass-enclosed porch without infecting other household members. Rockefeller offered one New York physician a half-million dollars to save the two boys. Little was then known about the cause or treatment of scarlet fever, and although Fowler recovered, John Rockefeller McCormick, nearly four years old, died at Pocantico on January 2, 1901. The shock was no less profound to Rockefeller than to Edith and Harold. A scurrilous rumor later circulated that Edith had learned of Jack’s death from a butler during a dinner party at her Chicago mansion, but the report was bogus. Edith happened to be at Pocantico at the time.
Jack McCormick’s death strengthened Rockefeller’s resolve to endow a medical-research institute. A year later, as a memorial to their son, Edith and Harold created the John McCormick Institution of Infectious Diseases in Chicago. Among the grants it gave out was one to researchers at Johns Hopkins, who isolated the bacterium that causes scarlet fever and set the stage for a treatment.
After Jack’s death, Harold succumbed to depression. His charm and gaiety had always veiled a deep vein of melancholy, and he now sought psychiatric help in Switzerland. In 1908, he returned as a patient to the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic outside Zurich under the care of Dr. Carl Jung. Edith had also long exhibited manic-depressive mood swings that only widened after the birth of Mathilde in April 1905. Because she had been ill during the pregnancy, Edith and Harold toured Europe by automobile that summer, leaving the baby with John and Cettie. After a fleeting improvement in her health, Edith relapsed the next spring and was belatedly diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis of the kidney. Rockefeller knew his daughter’s troubles were as much psychological as physical in origin and observed to Harold’s brother Cyrus that Edith would “require quiet and rest for some time, after all the severe strain through which she has passed in the last few years.” 80 For both Harold and Edith, the lure of Europe deepened over the years, a magnetic attraction that the provincial Rockefellers found difficult to fathom.
