by Ron Chernow
If Ivy Lee enjoyed excellent rapport with Rockefeller, it was because he understood his operating style. He saw Rockefeller as a man of superior judgment who was far more adept in reacting to ideas than in initiating them. Whenever Lee laid any proposal before Rockefeller, he was required to list all opposing arguments. Faced with two sides of any question, according to Lee, Rockefeller had an unerring ability to make the right choice.
Encouraged by their ability to shape public opinion after Ludlow, Junior and Lee dusted off the long-dormant idea of an authorized biography of Senior. For Junior, refurbishing the family image was complicated by the fact that he did not know what had happened at Standard Oil and took his father’s integrity as an article of faith. When talking about the infamous South Improvement Company, Rockefeller made this startling confession in the 1910s: “Most of what my son knows of this situation is his memory of what he has read in [Ida Tarbell’s] book, with only here and there a statement of fact by me.” 18 That Junior had been kept ignorant of such critical matters might have been one reason that Rockefeller agreed to undertake the three-year interview with William O. Inglis. As Rockefeller told Inglis, “I have gone into it because my son, very conscientious, has heard all this talk and cannot answer it himself and wants to have all the facts at hand.” 19 The Rockefeller family had long been riddled by strange silences, especially about Standard Oil. Among other things, Inglis asked Rockefeller all the sensitive questions that Junior had never dared to pose himself.
With Rockefeller serenely confident about his place in history, Junior and Lee knew they would have to ease him by imperceptible degrees into any biographical project. In early 1915, Lee approached his old friend Inglis, a genial New York World editor who often golfed with celebrities and then published appreciative profiles about them. The Brooklyn-born Inglis wrote sports and feature stories, had an agile style, and was sufficiently malleable to toe the Rockefeller line. At first, Rockefeller refused to golf with him, even though Lee assured him that “you can be sure that anything he writes will be absolutely friendly.”20 When this gambit did not work, Lee wrote to Rockefeller later in the year, “He would print nothing at all that he did not let us see in advance of publication.” 21 Rockefeller at last acquiesced, and Inglis produced, as expected, an admiring story.
In May 1917, a month after the U.S. entry into World War I, Rockefeller invited the newsman to golf at Forest Hill but did not commit himself to a biography. Inglis found him a bit more stooped and wrinkled but sunburned and radiating an air of command. He was amazed when Rockefeller announced out of the blue, “We shall not take up anything controversial. A great deal of mud has been thrown at me in the past. Much of it has dried and fallen off since then. To take up those questions now would only revive bitter controversy.” 22 For the next six weeks, Rockefeller golfed with Inglis and recounted innocent boyhood memories in a noncommittal fashion. At the end of this probationary period, Rockefeller agreed to sit for an unprecedented, open-ended private interview. “You have won the old gentleman’s confidence by keeping quiet,” Lee told Inglis, “and now you can go down to Lakewood and ask him any questions you like.”23 If Flagler had not died in 1913 and Archbold in December 1916, Rockefeller might well have declined this chance to talk, for the proposed biography would violate their policy of never responding to critics. As Rockefeller told Inglis, “If my old associates, Mr. Flagler and others, were here, they’d say, ‘Why, John, what’s come over you?—wasting your time like this!’ ”24
Between November 1, 1917, and December 13, 1920, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, Inglis interviewed Rockefeller for approximately an hour each day, usually before breakfast or golf. (At one point, Rockefeller cooled on the project, which lapsed from July 1919 to November 1920.) Trailing Rockefeller from estate to estate, Inglis extracted a verbatim transcript of 480,000 words from his taciturn subject. His method was quite unusual. He would read aloud portions from Lloyd and Tarbell—both of whom Rockefeller professed never to have read—then record Rockefeller’s responses. With his usual conservation of energy, Rockefeller often reclined on a lounge, shut his eyes, and seemed inert as Inglis read a passage; just when Inglis thought he was fast asleep, his eyes would pop open and he would deliver an exact response to the selection. Inglis also roamed about upstate New York and Cleveland, gathering anecdotes about Rockefeller from his boyhood haunts of Richford, Moravia, Owego, Strongsville, and Cleveland.
At first, Rockefeller regarded the interview as a private record for the family archive, but he was galvanized as he articulated, for the first time, his own defense. By March 1918, Inglis reported this change to Lee: “He says that he now feels it his duty, no less to his family than to himself, to put on record the truth about so many incidents which have been falsely reported.”25 The daily exploration transported Rockefeller back to his glory days. One morning, he told Inglis of a dream he had had: “I was back again in the harness, desperately in earnest and hard at work in the endeavor to meet embarrassing situations, to overcome the difficulties.”26
Junior was relieved by his father’s enthusiasm. “I had never even dreamed of your pursuing the matter with the persistence and continuity of which Mr. Inglis writes,” Junior told his father. “I thank you a thousand times for what you are doing.”27 It tells much about Junior’s underlying motivation and insecurity that he specifically asked Inglis to quiz Senior about Ida Tarbell. “To be able to take the words out of her own mouth and prove the case against her is of the utmost value,” Junior instructed him.28 In responding to Tarbell, Rockefeller alternated between biting criticism and his express desire to avoid unpleasantness. “But let us avoid anything controversial,” he told Inglis. “We don’t want to start another set of Tarbells and such people with their slanders.”29 The Rockefeller that emerges from this transcript is alternately wry and genial, fiery and sardonic. An articulate man, he had worked out elaborate justifications for his actions that he had never shared with anyone, the vital inner reflections in which he reconciled his business and religious beliefs. The interview shows the extraordinary energy he invested in rationalizing those actions and forging exculpatory positions. If he felt no need to explain himself to the public, he had a powerful need to justify his behavior to himself. With Inglis, Rockefeller delivered an extended defense of trusts probably unique among those who created them. Yet even in this confession-box setting, Rockefeller was often voluble rather than candid; the habit of secrecy was too deeply ingrained. He voiced no regrets about his anticompetitive practices and seemed incapable of true self-criticism. To hear Rockefeller tell it, Standard Oil was now a beloved organization, worshiped by the masses for bringing them cheap oil. “It is conceded today that the whole performance from beginning to end was one of the most remarkable, if not indeed the most remarkable, in the annals of commercial undertakings of all times.”30 Never once in the three-year interview did Rockefeller refer to the 1911 dismemberment, and he bizarrely talked of Standard Oil as if the trust still existed. When Inglis volunteered to read aloud the 1911 Supreme Court opinion, Rockefeller declined. “No; I have never heard the decision read. I shirked it; left it to the lawyers.” 31
Throughout the interview, Rockefeller contended that cooperation had triumphed over competition in American life—which might sound odd coming so soon after both the 1914 passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act—which outlawed unfair trade practices, such as interlocking directorates—and the 1915 creation of the Federal Trade Commission, which policed anticompetitive measures and enshrined competition as the central tenet of American economic life. But lest it seem that Rockefeller had succumbed entirely to self-delusion, we must recall that the Inglis interview commenced shortly after the United States entered World War I. In a reversal of past antitrust policy, the government urged the Standard Oil companies to pool their efforts, leading Rockefeller to gloat that “the Government itself has adopted the views [that the Standard Oil leaders] have held all these years, and notwithstanding the Sherman law and a
ll the talk on the other side, the Government itself has gone further than any of these organizations dreamt of going.” 32 In February 1918, an Inter-Allied Petroleum Conference was created to coordinate oil supplies, and Standard Oil of New Jersey, which provided one-fourth of all Allied oil needs, worked closely with its bitter rival, Royal Dutch/Shell. Oil’s strategic importance was now universally recognized, and 80 percent of that oil came from American companies. When Lord Curzon, a member of the British war cabinet, rose at a postwar dinner in London and stated, “The Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil,” Rockefeller was elated, certain that his own pioneering work in the field had contributed materially to the victory.33 In all, Rockefeller gave $70 million to the war cause, including $22 million from the Rockefeller Foundation to rescue Belgium from famine after the German invasion, and his generosity elicited loud hosannas from a once wary public. For Rockefeller, Germany’s defeat signified nothing less than God’s final blessing on Standard Oil. “There must have been a Providence ruling over these aggregations of great funds which have been used with such conspicuous benefit in helping to liberate the world from the bondage of the arbitrary military power which was threatening to crush out the liberties of mankind everywhere.”34
So the general backdrop to the Inglis interview must have strengthened Rockefeller’s confidence in his own rectitude. As Inglis waded through Lloyd and Tarbell, Rockefeller pounced on many errors but also listened to many long passages in silence, tacitly acknowledging their truth. As if unable to mouth the names Lloyd and Tarbell, he would refer mockingly to “the distinguished historian” or some other scornful description. He saw Lloyd as reckless, hysterical, and inaccurate. “Tarbell is much more dangerous,” he said. “She makes a pretence of fairness, of the judicial attitude, and beneath that pretence she slips into her ‘history’ all sorts of evil and prejudicial stuff.”35 He largely responded to her charges with ad hominem attacks, dripping with a fair amount of male chauvinism. “Like some women, she distorts facts, states as facts what she must know is untrue, and utterly disregards reason.”36 At first, Rockefeller noted how Tarbell would praise him to establish the credibility of her subsequent criticism, yet as the interview progressed, he had to concede that her impartiality was not just a pose. “Say, I’m amazed at her writing, all the time!” he exclaimed at one point. “There’s so much in it favorable to the Standard Oil Company. What with all her prejudices . . . it is really surprising that she would be willing to speak so favorably and give so much credit to the Standard Oil Company and its leaders.” 37 Without citing a shred of evidence, he manufactured a cockeyed fantasy that Ida Tarbell was now tortured by guilt for having defamed him. “And if she could only cause the general public to forget what she said and the venomous way she said it, would she not live a more peaceful life, and wouldn’t she die a more peaceful death? Peace to her ashes!”38
Though Rockefeller tried to sound statesmanlike, his anger leaked out around the edges. Even though the Lloyd and Tarbell exposés had led to the breakup of Standard Oil, he insisted of these critics that “their writing fell flat and proved a boomerang to them.”39 The more he talked, the more bottled venom surfaced, until he was spewing hatred at “socialists and anarchists” who dared to attack him. “They are a stench today in the nostrils of all honest men and women. They are a poison; and I would have them go and colonize and live out their theories and eat one another up; for they produce nothing, and they subsist as suckers on what honest men, frugal and industrious, produce.”40 This was a voice that Rockefeller’s family and closest confidants never heard—the raw, uncensored Rockefeller who had been so carefully muzzled by the Christian Rockefeller. In the last analysis, the Inglis interview was a talking cure as the titan dredged up buried pain whose existence he had long denied. He was not a Christian martyr but a man with a very human vulnerability and an understandable need for catharsis.
Inglis was taken in by Rockefeller’s charade of candor. Instead of engaging in extemporaneous discussion, Inglis stuck to the safe, prescribed format of reading from Lloyd and Tarbell then recording the responses verbatim. He expressed no discernible desire to examine Standard Oil files or Rockefeller papers and lazily received most of the history through the filter of Rockefeller’s memory. Though he interviewed many relatives and business associates, they knew that he had been sent by Rockefeller, and, not surprisingly, they tended to remember him in a rosy glow.
Junior soon saw that Inglis was being seduced by the easy life on the Rockefeller estates and would be tempted to prolong his work. Inglis later admitted that he had been lulled by the narcotic power of his boss’s monotonous but pleasant daily routine. Finally, in early 1924, after seven years of work, Inglis finished his biography, which presented a sanitized, adulatory version of Rockefeller’s life. Junior had the good sense to circulate it to reliable judges, including William Allen White, the Kansas newspaper editor, and George Vincent, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, both of whom delivered a damning verdict. White said it was “too toadying and reverential” and advised the Rockefellers not to publish it.41
Following a suggestion from Ivy Lee, Junior naively rushed the manuscript over to Ida Tarbell in her apartment on Gramercy Park in Manhattan. They had worked together at an industrial conference arranged by President Wilson in 1919 and developed a cordial relationship. “Personally I liked her very much,” Junior said, “although I was never much of an admirer of her book.” 42 Tarbell reciprocated this fondness, telling a friend, “I believe there is no man in public life or in business in our country who holds more closely to his ideals than does John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In fact, I will go so far as to say I do not know of any father who had given better guidance to a son than has John D. Rockefeller.”43 Over the years, Tarbell had become more conservative and sympathetic to business—in 1925, she published a laudatory biography of Judge Elbert H. Gary of U.S. Steel—yet she found the Inglis biography evasive and one-sided and recommended that it be shelved. With immense disappointment, Junior consigned the manuscript to the Rockefeller archives forever.
An unusually ebullient John D. Rockefeller, Jr., returns from Europe aboard the S. S. Mauretania, December 1925. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
CHAPTER 32
Dynastic Succession
Though heir to the throne, Junior had now waited many years to assume his rightful place, and this had made it only more difficult for him to win the respect of others. H. L. Mencken, among other skeptics, was fond of pointing out that Junior’s eminence was purely derivative. “He is attended to simply because he happens to be the son of old John, and hence heir to a large fortune. So far as the records show, he has never said anything in his life that was beyond the talents of a Rotary Club orator or a newspaper editorial writer, or done anything that would have strained an intelligent bookkeeper.”1
Despite their mutual devotion and intertwined lives, father and son were separated by a reticence that neither could overcome. They corresponded frequently, embraced warmly when they met, and enjoyed a solid rapport; when his boy was to come for dinner, John senior evinced a visible eagerness for him to arrive. Yet their relationship was also hobbled by an old-fashioned reserve, with neither of them capable of any real ease or spontaneity. “Neither Father nor I had the temperament which gives itself freely,” said Junior. “We talked about whatever we had to talk over—never discursively.” 2
One day at Ormond Beach, Inglis happened to mention to Rockefeller how much Ida Tarbell’s account supported his own version of events, and it prompted this melancholic remark: “I wish you would tell that to my son. . . . I must say that I have never had time to become really acquainted with my son. He has been very busy always.”3 When Inglis transmitted this to Junior, Junior was touched but blamed his father for their constrained relationship. “There is no subject that I have not always been happy to discuss with Father,” he explained to Inglis, “but as you yourself have observed, he is inclined less and less to di
scuss subjects which he does not himself initiate; hence our serious interchange of view is perhaps more limited than might otherwise be the case.”4 Rockefeller could not suppress his controlling nature even with the son he so dearly loved.
The tension latent in their relationship flared up when Junior displayed a serious interest in art. Enough of a Calvinist to consider artworks idolatrous, Rockefeller saw collecting as both wasteful and egotistical. Despite Abby’s prodding, Junior could not stop feeling guilty about his new hobby. “When I first began buying art objects,” he conceded, “I had a feeling that perhaps it was a little selfish. I was buying for myself instead of giving to public need.”5 Then he grew enthralled by the exquisite Chinese porcelains owned by J. P. Morgan that were being exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For Junior, they represented an ideal art form, for they were expertly crafted and devoid of any subversive themes or sensuality. After Morgan died in 1913, Joseph Duveen, the art dealer, bought the collection, put it up for sale, and offered Junior the first pick of any pieces. Junior coveted so many pieces that the total cost to buy them would have exceeded one million dollars. Like a trembling, sweaty schoolboy, he wrote to his father in January 1915 and asked to borrow the money. He tried to show that he had proceeded in the most painstaking Rockefeller style. “I have made many visits to the Museum and have studied carefully the most important pieces. I have also sought expert advice regarding them. Such an opportunity to secure the finest examples of Chinese porcelains can never occur again, and I want to avail myself of it.”6
