Titan

by Ron Chernow

  After a lifetime spent escaping reporters, Rockefeller now converted William Hoster into his bosom companion. They rambled through the forest, golfed, and dined together in local hotels. After teaching Hoster how to ride a bike, he took him cycling down the main street of Compiègne, along with his adored nine-year-old granddaughter, Margaret. Hoster was struck by Rockefeller’s strong populist streak, how he was intrigued by common people but indifferent to the highborn. In discussing Napoleon, Rockefeller said, “He was a human being and virile because he came direct from the ranks of the people. There was none of the stagnant blood of nobility or royalty in his veins.”41 Rockefeller was entranced by Joan of Arc. “Where did she get her wisdom, if it was not inspired of Heaven?” he asked. 42 Sight-seeing with Hoster, Rockefeller might have begun to taste, for the first time, the pleasures of confession. “They will know me better when I am dead, Mr. Hoster,” Rockefeller said one day. “There has been nothing in my life that will not bear the utmost scrutiny.” 43

  Rockefeller found it impossible during this European idyll to banish thoughts of his tribulations at home. Around the time of his departure from New York, Attorney General Moody had announced the preliminary antitrust investigation of Standard Oil. Then, in early July, Rockefeller received word that a probate court in Hancock County, Ohio, had brought an antitrust action against Standard Oil and issued a warrant for Rockefeller’s arrest. The local sheriff had bragged to reporters that he would be on the dock to greet Rockefeller when he sailed back from Europe. George Rogers relayed a message from Archbold, who called the Ohio suit frivolous but advised Rockefeller to extend his European stay. Rogers also reported a new suit in the works in Arkansas. “There seems to be a perfect wave of attacks all along the line,” he warned from New York.44 By late July, the Standard lawyers, reversing their earlier position, pressed Rockefeller to return, assuring him that the Ohio case was targeted against Standard Oil companies in the state, not individuals. As it turned out, Rockefeller was not arrested at the dock, since his lawyers had arranged for him to testify voluntarily in the Ohio case.

  Having booked return passage on the Amerika for July 20, 1906, John and Cettie yearned to take Bessie with them. Rockefeller and Charles clashed repeatedly over this question. Charles later told William James, “I had an uphill fight to prevent Mr. Rockefeller from taking his daughter back with him in defiance of expert opinion.”45 Rockefeller refused to believe that Bessie was too frail to make the crossing. In the end, somewhat reluctantly, even resentfully, he acquiesced in Charles’s decision to keep her in France. Charles might have performed one signal service for him, however. One Sunday afternoon, he read aloud an essay that he had drafted on the duties of rich men, arguing that when people accumulated wealth on a colossal scale, they should then convert that wealth into public trusts, administered by trustees for the commonweal. This essay might have strengthened Rockefeller’s wish to create a huge philanthropic foundation.

  Back in New York in August, Rockefeller tried to launch a new era in his relations with the press. In fact, reporters were so startled by his sudden, voluble friendliness that one headline declared, “Oil King Acts Like Political Candidate.”46 When Hoster published a long, flattering interview with Rockefeller, the latter applauded the “fair and square treatment” he had received.47 Deciding to combat ghoulish stories about his patient’s health, Dr. Biggar gathered reporters and said, “Mr. Rockefeller is in stronger physical health than he has been in the last fifteen years. He is as active and as light-hearted as a schoolboy. The trip has benefited him wonderfully.”48

  Though sorry to return without Bessie, the Rockefellers had been encouraged by her progress, and Rockefeller, in thanksgiving, distributed shares of stock to family members. These hopes were cruelly dashed when word came from France on November 13 that Bessie had suffered a paralytic stroke. Rockefeller wired Charles, “Love Sympathy Hope. Leave nothing undone.” He took comfort in the thought that Bessie had a good doctor, an attentive husband, and a loving daughter. But the next day came the dreadful wire from Charles: “Bessie Passed Away at Two O’Clock This Morning Without Suffering.” 49 Deeply shaken, Rockefeller replied: “We all send love. All is well with dear Bessie. Command us for any service. Father.” 50 By a ghastly coincidence, this news arrived just as the government began to prosecute Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

  When Bessie Strong died, so little was known about this reclusive heiress that the newspapers strained to pad out their obituaries, admitting that she was known only to a small circle of family intimates. In late November, Charles and Margaret brought the body back for burial in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown. Having lost Bessie, the Rockefellers wanted Charles to settle in America, but he was now a permanent expatriate. As he told William James, “I have never been especially proud of being an American.” 51 Fluent in German, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and French, he wanted to return to Europe, seeing it as the fountainhead of culture. For Rockefeller, American to the marrow, convinced that European society was decadent, such an attitude was incomprehensible. Around this time, when reporters asked whether he might ever retire to Europe, he replied, “The United States can’t develop enough drawbacks to make me lose the feeling that there is no place like home.”52

  To Rockefeller’s immense chagrin, Charles took Margaret to England, where she went to school in Sussex and then to Newnham College, Cambridge. During the next thirty years, Charles took an apartment in Paris and a villa in Fiesole near Bernard Berenson’s I Tatti, living the life of a solitary, melancholy widower. Rockefeller kept renewing his earnest plea that Margaret be educated in New York City, and it became a sore point with him that Charles refused to oblige him. A year after Bessie’s death, Rockefeller discontinued all further gifts to his son-in-law, though not to Margaret. He feared that Margaret would become isolated from the rest of the family and was haunted by fears that she would be seduced by a continental fortune hunter. As he bemoaned to Edith, “[Margaret] is a dear girl. How much we wish she were at school in this country, where we could see her oftener; and when she gets all through with the English school, where are the American acquaintances to come from? I am talking this to her and Charles plainly, but without any encouraging response.”53

  Rockefeller worried that Charles was exposing his granddaughter to too many radical, secular ideas. That Charles deplored capitalism, advocated trade unions, and favored taxes to rectify inequalities of income—these things Rockefeller could tolerate. But he could not condone that Charles led his daughter away from the church and deprived her of religious instruction. In 1908, Charles told Junior that he had dismissed Margaret’s beloved Irish governess, a Miss Lawrenson, for introducing religion into their household. “I find that, quite without her fault, Margaret was imbibing Catholic ideas, and there was nothing for it but to make a change, greatly as I regretted letting Miss L. go.”54 Every time that Charles and Margaret visited New York, the Rockefellers tried to lure them back to church—a strategy that probably backfired and fortified their resolve to stay away. During one such visit in 1909, Junior wrote to his mother, “Charles and Margaret took supper with us again last Sunday night and went with us to church as far as the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street. Whether we ever get any nearer or not time only will tell.” 55 More than a decade after Bessie’s death, Rockefeller was still jockeying to get Margaret back, asking his son-in-law Harold McCormick if he and Edith could use their “united influence to get Charles and Margaret to come over here when it is possible to do so. We want to have Margaret live with us.”56

  Before considering the particulars of the antitrust case against Standard Oil, it is worth pursuing for a moment Rockefeller’s metamorphosis into a master of public relations. Back at Forest Hill that autumn, Rockefeller did something unexpected: He received—in a suitably jolly mood—a delegation from the American Press Humorists, who were so charmed by his wit that they elected him an honorary member and then cheerfully boasted that they now had the hi
ghest per-capita income of any such society in the world. For a long time, Starr Murphy and other aides had argued that if only reporters would meet Rockefeller and see him as a father, friend, and neighbor, he would not be so grotesquely misrepresented in the press. Joe Clarke invited more reporters to golf with the titan, and these festive outings, full of gags and banter, invariably produced favorable articles. “I have as my constant companions at golf, magazine writers and newspaper men,” Rockefeller wrote to Harold McCormick in September 1906. “They say they did not know me before, and seem entirely friendly and well disposed.” 57

  As he abandoned his fearful attitude toward the press, he loosened up, as if liberated by the change. It formed part of a general development away from the more severe manner of his business years. Leslie’s Weekly reported the following year, “At the age of sixty-seven he is growing out of his chrysalis. For the first years of his life he is beginning to enjoy himself. Two years ago he dodged newspaper men. Now he courts them.” 58 Virtually every reporter who profiled Rockefeller was surprised to discover a courteous, lighthearted old gentleman. “Never have I known anyone who could approach Mr. Rockefeller in thoughtful little attentions,” one impressed reporter wrote. “This is the testimony of all his guests. His worst enemy would succumb to this treatment.”59 In response to this friendlier press treatment, Edith started giving her father giant scrapbooks, stuffed with the hundreds of articles about him that appeared around the world each year.

  Though he had spurned many chances to respond to Ida Tarbell and declined offers to write his life, Rockefeller now decided to publish his memoirs in Tarbell-like monthly installments in The World’s Work. The magazine was an especially safe, attractive forum since its editor, Walter H. Page, was a member of the General Education Board. In February 1908, Rockefeller began to play golf daily in Augusta, Georgia, with the publisher, Frank N. Doubleday. Their talks resulted in a string of seven articles published under the title “Random Reminiscences of Men and Events” starting in October 1908. These quaint, superficial pieces were ghostwritten by Doubleday, assisted by Starr Murphy. After Doubleday, Page published them in book form in 1909, the volume was released simultaneously in England, Germany, France, and Italy. Rockefeller thought this due penance from publishers who were trying to undo past harm “when they supposed they were serving the cause of righteousness,” as he told Edith.60

  For legal reasons, editing the series required great tact. Rockefeller knew that the attorney general would be scanning the series for his antitrust suit and Standard’s lawyers rigorously combed every word. At first, Rockefeller wanted to trim the Widow Backus section, citing the petty sums at stake, but Gates rejoined that it was precisely the minute sums that had given the story its hold over the popular imagination. “I doubt if any single libel against you or the company has done more harm,” Gates said bluntly. “If a man or a company could do such things to a poor and defenceless widow and for a small sum of money, how relentless must be its spirit and its methods!” 61 Bowing to Gates’s reasoning, the titan devoted more pages to Backus than to any of his mighty industrial ventures.

  For the most part, Rockefeller eschewed controversy in his book. Doubleday wanted to replace the image of the forbidding Rockefeller with that of the easygoing man he had come to know. In the series, Rockefeller struck an avuncular note, presenting himself as an avid gardener and sportsman, telling the reader at the outset, “On a rainy morning like this, when golf is out of the question, I am tempted to become a garrulous old man.” 62 He was just plain John, the next-door neighbor. Of his current life, he said, “I live like a farmer away from active happenings in business, playing golf, planting trees; and yet I am so busy that no day is long enough.” 63 As always, he tried to seem a model of Christian forbearance, turning the other cheek to unfair attacks against him. “I have had at least my full share of adverse criticism, but I can truly say that it has not embittered me, nor left me with any harsh feeling against a living soul.” 64

  In Random Reminiscences, Rockefeller described a fair world where strong, hardworking people were rewarded, and lazy folks punished; no admixture of tragedy clouded his vision. Despite the swelling tide of antitrust suits, Rockefeller reiterated his faith that cooperation, not competition, advanced the general welfare. “Probably the greatest single obstacle to the progress and happiness of the American people,” he intoned, “lies in the willingness of so many men to invest their time and money in multiplying competitive industries instead of opening up new fields, and putting their money into lines of industry and development that are needed.” 65

  Though Rockefeller’s memoirs received mixed reviews, they helped to humanize his image. Everyone, of course, was eager for Ida Tarbell’s reaction, and she duly delivered a booming cannonade of criticism to a Chicago newspaper: Listen: There is the Mr. Rockefeller of his autobiography, for whom I have a real, a great admiration. He is admirable—there is no other word—in his quietly wise discussions of the proper setting out of Japanese quinces and blue firs, of the arrangements of geraniums and roses. . . . And then there is the other Mr. Rockefeller. . . . Utterly and almost as impersonally ruthless as a whirlwind or a torrent, he has swept through the country a conquering Hun, regardless of all save winning for himself. No, he’s not a Hun: the destructive force of him is too intelligent. He is more like Bernard Shaw’s Napoleon— great, because for himself he suspended the ordinary laws of conventionality and morality while keeping them in operation for other people. He is a mastodon of mental machinery. And would you ask a steam plow for pity? Would you look for scruples in an electric dynamo?66

  Clearly, the lady had not mellowed.

  Besides acting as midwife for Random Reminiscences, Doubleday made another valuable contribution to Rockefeller’s rehabilitation. As head of the Periodical Publishers’ Association, he dreamed up the idea of having Rockefeller address a luncheon of New York publishers; in a splendid coup de théâtre, the mogul would be introduced by Mark Twain, the chief satirist of the Gilded Age. As it turned out, Twain was ripe for this venture. In the summer of 1907, his dear friend Henry H. Rogers had suffered a stroke, and Twain had stayed with him in Bermuda from February 24 to April 11, 1908, easing his convalescence. Twain’s favorite daughter, Susy, had died of spinal meningitis a decade earlier at age twenty-four. When Frank Doubleday told Twain that Simon Flexner’s antimeningitis serum, developed at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, had cut the death rate from the disease from 75 to 25 percent of those afflicted, Twain was all the more eager to help.

  Always on good terms with Rockefeller, Twain thought he deserved a fair hearing from the press and was sure he would make a good impression on the publishers. Beyond his affection for Rogers, Twain recoiled at the sanctimonious tone the press often adopted in attacking the trusts. He knew all about Rockefeller’s business reputation, but some perverse, irreverent streak attracted him to anyone who was so deliciously notorious. For Twain, a man so universally hated by the American public had to have many redeeming features.

  When Doubleday asked Rockefeller to meet with the magazine publishers, Rockefeller, now an old hand at press relations, replied, “Certainly. Why not? I am willing to meet and talk with any body of men, friends or enemies.” 67 On May 20, 1908, Doubleday sat at the head of the luncheon table at the Aldine Club, surrounded by forty or fifty magazine publishers, when the rear door flew open and Mark Twain, Henry Rogers, and the two Rockefellers, junior and senior, marched single file into the room. As Twain noted of those present, “there was probably not one whose magazine had not had the habit for the past few years of abusing the Rockefellers, Henry Rogers, and the other chiefs of the Standard Oil.” 68 Since Rockefeller had avoided contact with the literati, three-fourths of the publishers, by Twain’s estimate, had never before set eyes on him.

  First Rogers and then Twain gave brief introductions before Rockefeller got up to speak. His talk, illustrated with moving anecdotes, described the work of the RIMR. Rockefeller was s
till a tall, imposing man, yet there was now a touch of melancholy in his eyes, and it was a sadder, more reflective face that stared out at the magazine publishers. The next morning, Twain, who had no equal himself on the lecture platform, jotted down this tribute:

  Mr. Rockefeller got up and talked sweetly, sanely, simply, humanly, and with astonishing effectiveness, being interrupted by bursts of applause at the end of almost every sentence; and when he sat down all those men were his friends and he had achieved one of the completest victories I have ever had any knowledge of. Then the meeting broke up, and by a common impulse the crowd moved forward and each individual of it gave the victor a hearty handshake, and along with it some hearty compliments upon his performance as an orator.69

  It was an unlikely triumph for a reclusive man who had refrained from public speaking and had fled from the press for so long. Unfortunately, he had turned this skill to advantage much too late, since the political assault against Standard Oil now headed inexorably toward its finale.

  A grim John D. Rockefeller votes in November 1908, not long after the shocking disclosure of the Archbold bribery scandal. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)

  CHAPTER 27

  Judgment Day

  On November 18, 1906, the federal government filed suit in Missouri to dissolve Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act, naming as defendants Standard Oil of New Jersey, sixty-five companies under its control, and a pantheon of chieftains, including John and William Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, Oliver Payne, John Archbold, and Henry Rogers. They were charged with monopolizing the oil industry and conspiring to restrain trade through a familiar litany of tactics: railroad rebates, the abuse of their pipeline monopoly, predatory pricing, industrial espionage, and the secret ownership of ostensible competitors. The proposed remedy was sweeping: to break up the massive combine into its component companies. As a government report documented in 1907, the Standard Oil leviathan still refined 87 percent of all kerosene, handled 87 percent of exported kerosene, marketed 89 percent of domestic kerosene, and was more than twenty times the size of its most serious competitor, Pure Oil. After the suit was filed, Standard officials tried to sound sanguine and could not subdue their now delusional sense of invincibility. In a letter marked “Strictly confidential,” Rockefeller told Archbold of reports that the Justice Department had scant confidence in its own case and that it was just a flimsy vendetta worked up by Roosevelt. “This program is the usual topic of his present day talk with friends and he shows a disposition that is vindictive. If his suit fails, he means to urge legislation, if he can have it framed, aimed at the same target.”1