by Ron Chernow
In all, Junior transmitted $102 million—or more than $1 billion in 1996 dollars—to his wife and children through the trusts. As he explained the operating philosophy behind them to Laurance:
They have been created in accordance with the policy which your Grandfather Rockefeller adopted with his children and which I hope your children will ultimately follow. . . . As you know, Grandfather and I have always been keenly alive to the responsibilities inherent in the possession of wealth. He believes, as I do, that these responsibilities and the opportunities which they bring for useful living and unselfish service to mankind should be shared with those of the next generation when and as soon as they have reached such an age and attained such a maturity as justifies their being entrusted with them.19
The $102 million that Junior bequeathed to his heirs was a stupendous sum, yet it represented only a fraction of the money he had inherited. Between 1917 and 1960, Junior gave away $537 million directly, plus another $540 million indirectly through organized Rockefeller philanthropies. (Junior did not leave himself a pauper. He was left with about $200 million in the 1950s, while his descendants, wisely investing their inheritances, were worth more than $6.2 billion in 1996.) He also paid $317 million in taxes to federal, state, and local governments. So whatever Rockefeller’s plunder, the great bulk of the gain was ultimately plowed back into worthwhile projects and the public purse. Such was the indignation aroused by Standard Oil, however, that perhaps only generosity on this extraordinary scale could have softened memories of the ravening monopolist.
Rockefeller inspired many premature reports of his demise, and his habitual secrecy about his medical condition kept the press on high alert. In 1934, at ninety-five, he suffered a bout of bronchial pneumonia that threatened to thwart his goal of reaching one hundred, but he managed to recover. His weight dropped below ninety pounds, and he decided to abandon Kykuit for good. He loaded up a private railroad car with fruits, vegetables, cultured milk, and oxygen canisters and traveled to The Casements, where he settled permanently. Determined to eke out five more years, he drastically restricted his routine to conserve energy. No more golf, no more afternoon larks in the car, no more garden walks. He took off his expensive silver wigs, never to don them again. As his pace slackened, the servants marched to his slower tempo, and a twilight hush seemed to descend over the Ormond Beach house. Watchful and alert, the wizened little man sat for hours on the sunporch. To maintain muscle tone in his legs, he mounted a stationary bicycle in his room every day and slowly cycled. When he reached ninety-six on July 8, 1935, his insurance company, abiding by an old custom, had to pay him five million dollars, the face value of his policy. According to contemporary actuarial tables, only one person in 100,000 lived that long.
Always ready to embrace change, the old man liked to watch Hollywood movies at home, especially those with shapely blondes, such as Jean Harlow. His life, however, still revolved around religion, and when he was too weak to go to church, he listened to sermons on a bedside radio. His thoughts turned toward eternity. When Henry Ford was leaving one day, Rockefeller said to him, “Good bye, I’ll see you in heaven,” and Ford replied, “You will if you get in.”20 Yet Rockefeller seemed to know for certain that the Lord was not a radical critic of society and would reward him in the hereafter. He started a new routine, singing hymns accompanied by a violinist who came to the house. For all his religious certitude, however, death remained the one unmentionable subject for Rockefeller. “Never did he speak of death in relation to himself; rather did he speak always of life, of activity, of accomplishment,” said Junior.21
In early 1937, as Rockefeller approached ninety-eight, his body was feeble, but his mind was lucid. “Father is very well,” Junior wrote an old friend in March 1937, “better even than for the past year or two. We are having a delightful time here with him, and the weather is beautiful.”22 He still gambled in stocks and enjoyed his unvarying comedy routine with Mrs. Evans. On Saturday, May 22, he was taking the sunlight when Evans said to him, “Mr. Rockefeller, the sun has given you some color. You look so much better.” When he just flashed a wordless smile, she added, “Mr. Rockefeller, you haven’t said anything about how I look.” In his chair, he made a chivalric bow and said, “Mrs. Evans, that is because I am never able to do the subject justice.” 23 That same day, he paid off the mortgage of the institution that had so profoundly affected him: the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church.
Before the day was over, Rockefeller had a heart attack. At 4:05 A.M. on the morning of May 23, he lapsed into a coma and died in his sleep. The official cause of death was sclerotic myocarditis, a hardening and inflammation of the heart wall, although it is probably more accurate to say that he died of old age. Rockefeller drifted off peacefully, six weeks short of his ninety-eighth birthday. His placid end disappointed critics who were still hoping for some earthly retribution.
As news of Rockefeller’s death spread, crowds gathered outside his compound and the sexton of the Union Baptist Church tolled the steeple bell. After a private funeral at Ormond Beach for staff and friends, a motorcycle guard accompanied the casket to the railroad station, where it was placed on a private car for the northward journey to Pocantico. When the train arrived at Tarrytown, Junior and his five sons were waiting on the platform in identical homburgs. On May 25, the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick delivered a brief, touching eulogy at the Pocantico funeral while Dr. Archer Gibson played the Kykuit pipe organ. As a reminder that the deceased had never lacked detractors, state troopers scoured Pocantico Hills for trespassers as the service progressed. Around the world, employees in the offices of all Standard Oil successor firms observed five minutes of silence. On May 27, Rockefeller’s body returned to Cleveland and was lowered into the earth between the two Baptist women who had so devotedly believed in him, Eliza and Cettie. Because of fears that vandals might desecrate the grave, Rockefeller’s casket was placed in a bombproof tomb, sealed by heavy slabs of stone.
Having given away most of his money, Rockefeller left behind an estate of $26.4 million, showing that he had recouped his stock-market losses after the 1929 crash. Most of his estate took the form of U.S. Treasury notes, though he had retained, for sentimental reasons, one share of Standard Oil of California marked “Certificate No. 1.” The fabulous oil wealth of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would be tapped within a year of Rockefeller’s death, ensuring the preeminent place of petroleum in the twentieth-century economy. Sixty years after their founder’s death, four of the Standard Oil successor firms—Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and Chevron—numbered among the fifty largest companies on earth.
To an extent that would have seemed inconceivable in Ida Tarbell’s heyday, the newspaper obituaries dwelled on Rockefeller the benign philanthropist, not Rockefeller the ferocious trust king. He was “the world’s greatest philanthropist and organizer in the science of giving,” said one editorial. 24 Most striking was that the laudatory comments emanated from across the political spectrum and included those who had jousted with him in the past. Attorney Samuel Untermyer issued this paean to the elusive witness he had interrogated: “Next to our beloved President, he was our country’s biggest citizen. It was he who visualized as did no other man the use to which great wealth could wisely be put. Because of him the world is a better place in which to live. Blessed be the memory of World Citizen No. 1.” 25
In truth, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., had left behind a contradictory legacy. An amalgam of godliness and greed, compassion and fiendish cunning, he personified the ambiguous heritage of America’s Puritan ancestors, who had encouraged thrift and enterprise but had also spurred overly acquisitive instincts. He had extracted mixed messages from his religious training as well as from his incongruously matched parents. Not surprisingly, he had served as an emblem of both corporate greed and philanthropic enlightenment.
Starting in the 1870s, Rockefeller’s stewardship of Standard Oil had signaled a new era in American life that had both inspired and alarmed the populace. His unequaled brill
iance and rapacity as a businessman had squarely confronted the country with troubling questions about the shape of the economy, the distribution of wealth, and the proper relationship between business and government. Rockefeller perfected a monopoly that indisputably demonstrated the efficiency of large-scale business. In creating new corporate forms, he charted the way for the modern multinational corporations that came to dominate economic life in the twentieth century. But in so doing he also exposed the manifold abuses that could accompany untrammeled economic power, especially in the threat to elected government. As architect of the first great industrial trust, he proved the ultimately fragile nature of free markets, forcing the government to specify the rules that would ensure competition and fair play in the future.
The fiercest robber baron had turned out to be the foremost philanthropist. Rockefeller accelerated the shift from the personal, ad hoc charity that had traditionally been the province of the rich to something both more powerful and more impersonal. He established the promotion of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, as a task no less important than giving alms to the poor or building schools, hospitals, and museums. He showed the value of expert opinion, thorough planning, and competent administration in nonprofit work, setting a benchmark for professionalism in the emerging foundation field. By the time Rockefeller died, in fact, so much good had unexpectedly flowered from so much evil that God might even have greeted him on the other side, as the titan had so confidently expected all along.
Although Junior moved into Kykuit after Rockefeller’s death, he knew that his father was inimitable, and so he decided to retain the Jr. after his name. As he was often heard to say in later years, “There was only one John D. Rockefeller.”26
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
AN—Allan Nevins Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York
CUOH–ABF—Columbia University Oral History Collection, Abraham B. Flexner interview
CUOH–PM—Columbia University Oral History Collection, Paul Manship interview
FSL—Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.
HDL—Henry Demarest Lloyd Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
IMT—Ida Minerva Tarbell Papers, Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, Drake Well Museum Collection, Titusville, Pennsylvania
RAC—Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Papers of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and other family members
RAC–CAS—Rockefeller Archive Center, Charles A. Strong Papers
RAC–FTG—Rockefeller Archive Center, Frederick T. Gates Papers
SOCMB—Standard Oil Company Minute Books, BP America, Cleveland, Ohio
UC–JDR—University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller Papers
UC–UPP—University of Chicago, University Presidents’ Papers
B = Box
F = File
FOREWORD
1. Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, p. 454.
PRELUDE: POISON TONGUE
RAC, Inglis interview, p. 1062. 2. Ibid., p. 916.
Ibid., p. 375.
Ibid., p. 962.
Ibid., p. 601.
Ibid., p. 493.
Ibid., p. 891.
Ibid., p. 1309.
RAC, III 2.H B30 F17.
RAC, III 2.H B9 F37.
McClure’s Magazine, July 1905.
RAC, Inglis interview, p. 1648.
Ibid., p. 1650.
CHAPTER 1: THE FLIMFLAM MAN
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.12, “Hoster Manuscript.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, vol. I, p. 141.
Rugoff, America’s Gilded Age, p. 97.
The World, November 1, 1903.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 151.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Richford.”
RAC, Inglis interview, p. 1665.
The World, November 3, 1903.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Interview with Mrs. John Wilcox.”
Ibid.
Ibid., “Interview with S. H. Steele.”
IMT, B 4/14 T-293, “Report on Rockefeller Family.”
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Richford.”
Ibid.
Ibid., “S. H. Steele.”
The World, November 1, 1903.
Cosmopolitan, November 1908.
The World, November 1, 1903.
William H. Allen, Rockefeller: Giant, Dwarf, Symbol, p. 233.
The World, November 1, 1903.
RAC, III 2.H B3 F15, letter from William O. Inglis to Ivy Lee, June 24, 1922.
The World, November 1, 1903.
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 30.
CHAPTER 2: FIRES OF REVIVAL
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Moravia.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, vol. I, p. 48.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.10, “Tours to Owego and Moravia.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, pp. 34–35.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Interview with Peter Brown.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 39.
The World, February 2, 1908.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.9, “Early Training.”
John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences, p. 42.
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 40.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.13, “Interview Conversations—1929.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 46.
RAC, III 2.Z B21, “Miss Spelman’s Recollections.”
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.11, “Mrs. William C. Rudd.”
RAC, Inglis interview, p. 1665.
William H. Allen, Rockefeller: Giant, Dwarf, Symbol, p. 47.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.11, “Mrs. William C. Rudd.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 41.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.9, “On Mother’s Discipline.”
John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences, p. 42.
Winkler, John D.: A Portrait in Oils, p. 139.
RAC, Inglis interview, p. 503.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.9, “Mr. Rockefeller and the Indigestion Myth.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 92.
RAC, III 2.2 B21, “Antecedents and Childhood.”
Nevins, Study in Power, vol. I, p. 31.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.9, “Early Training.”
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.12, “Hoster Manuscript,” p. 20.
The World, March 1, 1908.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “David Dennis.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 37.
Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, vol. I, p. 40.
RAC, Inglis interview, p. 124.
Ibid., p. 390.
Ibid., p. 1651.
Russell, Freedom Versus Organization, p. 316.
Brutcher, Joshua, p. 10.
Ibid., p. 95.
Ibid., p. 138.
IMT, B 4/14 T-293, “Report on Rockefeller Family.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 50.
IMT, B 4/14 T-293, “Report on Rockefeller Family.”
RAC, Inglis interview, p. 1649.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, 3.1.1, “William Avery Rockefeller Court Records.
Stasz, The Rockefeller Women, p. 19.
IMT, B 4/14 T-293, “Report on Rockefeller Family.”
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, 3.1.1, “William Avery Rockefeller Court Records.
RAC, Inglis interview, pp. 1648–49.
Lundberg, The Rockefeller Syndrome, p. 104.
William H. Allen, Rockefeller, p. 238.
Nevins, Study in Power, vol. I, p. 9.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Owego.”
Ibid.
William H. Allen, Rockefeller, p. 44.
AN, B110 F15, letter to Eliza Rockefeller, July 18, 1885.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “William A. Smyth.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 78.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “C. M. La Monte.”
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Mrs. S. J. Life.”
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 65.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.9, “Childish Customs.”
McClure’s Magazine, July 1905.
Tarbell, History of the Standard Oil Company, vol. I, p. 40.
Human Life, April 1905.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Owego.”
AN, B126, letter to J. O. Lacey, January 9, 1899.
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, vol. I, p. 73.
Nevins, Study in Power, vol. I, p. 71.
RAC, Inglis notes, 4.8, “Mrs. S. J. Life.”
Ibid.
CHAPTER 3: BOUND TO BE RICH
IMT, B 1/14, letter from J. M. Siddall to Ida Tarbell, November 3, 1903.
Ibid.
AN, B126, letter to Mr. Spalding, August 16, 1923.
William H. Allen, Rockefeller: Giant, Dwarf, Symbol, p. 104.
Ibid., p. 102.
Flynn, God’s Gold, p. 52.
RAC, III 2.Z B21, “Miss Spelman’s Recollections.”
The Atlanta Georgia, February 12, 1922.
Winkler, John D.: A Portrait in Oils, p. 131.
IMT, B II, letter from J. M. Siddall to Ida Tarbell, December 10, 1903.
Nevins, Study in Power, vol. I, p. 51.
Ibid., p. 61.
RAC, III 2.Z B21, “Miss Spelman’s Recollections.”
John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences, p. 51.
William H. Allen, Rockefeller, p. 74.
Goulder, John D. Rockefeller, p. 10.
Ibid.
Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, vol. I, p. 83.
