by Gerard Colby
The conquest of the American West and Standard Oil’s expansion into the West, carving up territories among its subsidiaries, was accompanied by Rockefeller support for northern Baptist Christian missions.
Source: (top) Standard Oil Company, 1899, in Continental Oil Company, Conoco: The First One Hundred Years (New York: Dell, 1975); (above) Interchurch World Movement, World Survey, American Volume (New York: Interchurch Press, 1920).
By 1924, when Nelson and his brothers arrived in the Southwest, a forest of Grandfather’s derricks covered Indian reservation lands in Oklahoma. Standard Oil’s drills were also boring into the Navajo reservation in New Mexico that Junior and the boys visited before coming to Taos. Just the previous October, BIA Commissioner Charles Burke had auctioned off twenty-two Navajo oil tracts. One oil structure, called Rattlesnake Dome, near Shiprock, New Mexico, was sold for $1,000 to friends of the BIA’s new commissioner for the Navajo, only to be resold for $4 million to Continental Oil, a spinoff of the old Standard Oil Trust, in which the Rockefellers had a substantial holding. In 1926, when Continental Oil completed a pipeline from Shiprock south to the railroad junction at Gallup for shipments of oil to Standard Oil’s refineries in New Jersey, Junior would drive along its route with Abby and the younger children, having incorporated Shiprock into his tour of the Navajo Reservation. To keep his vacation as productive as possible, he would also include Bartlett Ranch north of Taos Pueblo, a coal-rich miniempire that had been proposed as an investment.8
As the Rockefeller caravan sped away from Taos, Nelson only vaguely comprehended his elders’ capacity to turn a profit on the Indians’ desperation. He did witness his father purchasing old Navajo blankets, a rug, and silver objets d’art as well as Yaqui blanket-rugs and 100-year-old Chimayó blankets at BIA-sponsored shops in Santa Fe and Grand Canyon National Park, but he had no notion of the BIA-sponsored oppression that was behind these shops. Instead, “primitive art” caught his fancy. And just as Nelson at an impressionable age had watched his father finger the Indian artifacts with more than casual intent, so his own future son, Michael, would also embrace the trade. In Michael’s case, however, his hunger for primitive art would consume not just his interest, but his life.
THE RECKONING
From Taos and more Indian dances in the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde canyon, Junior took the boys north into the rugged foothills of southern Colorado for their first tour of an underground mine. Donning coveralls and miners’ caps with headlamps, they plunged wide eyed into the bowels of CF&I’s Walsenburg mine. As their coal cars raced beneath timbers holding up tons of rock, the boys were fascinated by the eerie lights and the tough miners with mineral-blackened faces.
But the dark caverns held poignant memories for their father. It was just twenty-five miles south of here, at the CF&I mines in Ludlow only ten years earlier, that forty striking miners were killed and countless wounded by company gunmen and state militiamen shooting machine guns. When the miners’ families picked through the smoldering ruins of their camp the next morning, they found more horror: Eleven children and two women, trying to hide from the bullets, had taken refuge in their tent’s dugout; the bullets had set fire to the tent above, suffocating them.
Ludlow had threatened to bring as much disgrace to the second generation of Rockefellers as Standard Oil’s competitive ruthlessness had brought to the first. Junior saw the killings and the public hearings that followed as “one of the most important things that ever happened to the Rockefeller family”9 forcing their first fledgling steps toward corporate liberalism.
Junior was trying to build a new image of the Rockefellers in the public eye. He was seen visiting the CF&I hospital with the boys and meeting members of the company union that he had set up for the miners. Later he and the boys would climb aboard a private Pullman and speed to Montana for the boys’ final treat: camping and horseback riding in Glacier National Park and meeting more Indians. Junior’s struggle between corporate liberalism and Baptist conservatism had already been tested by the Pueblos. In that case, he resolved the conflict by withdrawing support from a cause tainted by the reputed radicalism of the Indian Defense Association. For the rest of the century, the Rockefellers would shun extremes of either side. With the Blackfeet in Montana, Junior would avoid controversy by simply exposing his sons to Indian ways without committing himself one way or the other. Even this was an act ahead of its time, however. Except for Indian agents and missionaries, few white men would be seen mingling their families with “redskins.”
Junior arranged day-long visits to the Blackfoot reservation. The Indians, led by a former tribal judge, Wolf Plume, “received us in their war paint and beaded clothes with great ceremony,” Junior noted in his diary, “and were most friendly.”10 The Indians gave each of the Rockefellers a Blackfoot name. Junior was named “Little Dog”; John, “Buffalo Teeth”; and Laurance, “Rider-of-a-Sorrel Horse.” Nelsons name had a prophetic charm: Sikiopio-Kitope, “Rider-of-a-White Horse.”
This was Nelson’s last childhood experience with Indians, and one that would influence his political life in more ways than he ever guessed.
THE PRIMING STING
Back in New York, Nelson returned to school and the joys of owning his first car, a hiccuping old Ford roadster. His relations with his father did not improve any more than did his grades. Increasing his studies to two hours a day and cutting off the radio and phonograph during the week did not help fend off Junior’s steady barrage of criticisms. Authoritarianism, not liberalism, ruled the Rockefeller household.
Nelson’s problems with school stemmed mostly from dyslexia, a developmental anomaly in the cerebral cortex of the brain that transposes the order of numbers, letters, and words when reading. Junior only aggravated this condition by trying to force the boy’s left-handedness into the right-handed standards of society. Junior’s remedy was pain. Each night, Nelson was forced to sit at the family dinner table with an elastic band around his wrist. Attached to the band was a string that led to the head of the table. When the boy instinctively raised his left hand to eat, Junior jerked the string, snapping the elastic band against Nelson’s wrist with a sharp sting.
“My father didn’t believe in people being left-handed,” Nelson confided years later to interviewer David Frost.11
From the time Nelson could count, he learned that Junior dispensed emotional rewards as meagerly as Junior’s own father had allowed waste. When Junior did show fatherly affections, they were as strictly rationed as the twenty-five-cent allowances he distributed to the children each week, minus five-cent fines levied on Nelson for his perennially poor bookkeeping.
Lincoln School, an experiment of Columbia University’s Teachers College, was Abby’s one opportunity to provide an escape for her son. It proved to be a godsend. It allowed each student to progress at an individual pace. True to founder John Dewey’s theories about the importance of education in preparing a citizenry for democracy, Lincoln rejected Latin and the classics favored by educators of the previous century and emphasized instead the sciences, history, and modern topics. It also prepared the mostly upper-class heirs for their future social responsibilities by exposing them to ethnic and class diversity through a democratic sprinkling of immigrant children from New York City’s vast working class.
Abby’s troubled teenager flourished in his newfound freedom. The family’s life soon revolved around shuttling the youngest boys, Laurance, David, and Winthrop, between Lincoln and Junior’s Fifty-fourth Street town house, Abby’s top-hat-shaped electric-powered “box car” eventually replaced by the watchful limousine that dutifully followed the roller-skating children to and from school. Junior once again had to concede that in the raising of his sons—as in his religious, philanthropic, and labor policies—his Baptist authoritarianism had to give way to a science-based liberalism if order and respect were to be maintained. But his bond with Nelson was never to be intimate.
Conversely, Nelson’s admiration for Grandfather was unbounded. Juni
or and Senior were studies in contrast. Whereas Junior was cautious to the extreme, Senior in his younger days had been legendary in Cleveland for his readiness to crack a whip over his horses for a buggy race with any neighbor who dared challenge him.
Nelson grew up sheltered from his grandfather’s antics in the early oil wars. Never once, in all the Sundays that he and his brothers and sister were bundled up and driven to their grandfather’s mansion for dinner, had Nelson ever heard the old man speak of Standard Oil. And Senior certainly did not cut a figure that suggested great power. The world’s titan of oil was by then cadaverously thin and bony, and he had lost all his hair to alopecia. Where eyebrows once fixed a penetrating gaze over a handsome face sporting a thick brown mustache, now only scars remained like etching on dried parchment.
Nelson, in the requisite Eton collar, coat, and pin-striped pants, was awed. He noted the great respect his father showed the old man and considered himself special for having been born on Grandfather’s birthday. Every sabbath, when Senior was in residence at Pocantico, the patriarch would preside at the head of the long table in his ornate dining hall, spinning tales. Senior would often spring up from his chair to act out scenes, joking in his dry midwestern humor. Despite his advanced years, his disdain for reading, and his penchant for idle gossip, there was an unsettling sharpness in his mockery of the idiosyncrasies of his associates. Beneath his white wig, which was often askew, startlingly clear blue eyes peered out from sunken sockets, betraying the intelligence that still worked feverishly behind them, formulating plans and mapping strategies as seriously as it did forty years before.
And now, as Junior tried to protect his father’s traditional influence in the northern Baptist church and its missionary programs, the whole Fundamentalist movement among missionaries fell under the old man’s steady gaze.
2
THE FUNDAMENTALIST CONTROVERSY
THE FUNDAMENTALIST CHALLENGE
At eighty-five, Senior was still playing eighteen holes of golf and capable of dancing a jig after sinking a twenty-foot putt. He had retired long ago from any official role in the Standard Oil Trust, but not from keeping a watchful eye on the thirty-nine companies it spawned or on his other holdings. He retained his seat on the New York Stock Exchange, dabbling with a $20 to $30 million kitty he had taken out of his $1 billion fortune.
He still made headlines as easily as he made money. Ivy Lee, the father of corporate public relations, had been generously paid to convert Rockefeller’s image from the black-caped mustached villain with a top hat who tied young women tenants to rails in front of approaching trains. The tycoon was now photographed as a smiling gentle old soul who handed out dimes to curious bystanders and tens of millions to educators, healers, and scientists.
But even the wizardry of Ivy Lee could not control the deeper forces that pulsed beneath the glittering skin of the prosperous 1920s, powers of an earlier rural age that resented the Industrial Revolution that finally had conquered America. Since the first decade after the Civil War, John D. Rockefeller had symbolized this revolution. His ruthlessness in the new oil business that fueled this revolution had earned him the fear of small businessmen across the nation. The rebates he forced on railroads, accounting for at least some of the higher freight charges the railroads imposed as compensation on everything from grain to furniture, had stirred the ire of populist farmers for over half a century. From these farmers had come the greatest political challenge to the new eastern wealth Rockefeller represented, a giant rural movement led by Nebraska’s Senator William Jennings Bryan, the hero of the breadbasket states and their marrying priesthood, the Fundamentalist preachers of the literal Bible.
Hardly a season passed during his adolescence when Nelson did not read newspaper accounts of Fundamentalists attacking his family. In the midst of Nelson’s junior year at Lincoln, in December 1924, Dr. John Roach Stratton, a leader of the Baptist Bible Union, and pastor of Manhattan’s Calvary Baptist Church, delivered a scathing assault on Nelson’s father.
“Conditions today are appalling,” he said of the hedonistic roaring twenties, “and are enough to awaken even a self-complacent and somnolent Modernist like John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The Rockefeller money is the greatest curse that rests upon the Baptist denomination. Through the infidel University of Chicago and the unbelieving Union Theological Seminary of this city, it is doing more to blight us and blast us than all other forces combined.”1
Behind these ravings was an economic and political conflict unknown to Nelson, but not to Senior or Junior.
Across the nation, rural Fundamentalist ministers reacted angrily to what they perceived to be the vice and venality of the cities and the cities’ impact on their farming congregations. Steeped in a literal Bible unencumbered by science or historical insight and unaware of its scriptural contradictions, the inhabitants of America’s closed frontiers found their most cherished institutions being destroyed by what the Rockefellers called progress. In the ensuing struggle between traditionalism and modernism for control of America’s soul—and future—one man, perhaps more than any other, stood in the middle before he, too, succumbed to the Rockefellers’ quest for new frontiers. His name was Frederick Gates.
The son of a Baptist missionary sent to the “destitute of the West,” Gates had risen to the secretaryship of the American Baptist Education Society. In 1887, Gates and other Baptist leaders had convinced the elder Rockefeller to finance the founding of the West’s first great Baptist university, the University of Chicago. The university was given the mission of influencing the religious development of the new states being carved out of lands of the defeated Indians.
But Gates was not exclusively Baptist. Taking over Rockefeller’s secondhand “retail charity” and transforming it into a prime-mover “wholesale philanthropy,” he urged the Rockefellers to break through the walls of Baptist sectarianism and donate to the missions of other denominations in the “one great preconceived plan.” These contributions included $100,000 in International Harvester bonds to the Congregationalist Foreign Missions Board in 1905. That it was rejected as “tainted money,” coming as it did on the heels of Ida Tarbell’s exposé, The History of the Standard Oil Company, did not deter the minister. Gates, sensing Junior’s crushing sense of guilt and lack of worth under the shadow of his father, convinced him to pay his moral debt by responding to the “white man’s burden” of expanding Christian civilization. By secularizing the Christian mission through corporate philanthropy and empowering it with the wonders of modern medical science, God’s work could be done for the benefit of humanity, the Rockefeller name, and Junior’s immortal soul.
Like the Brown-educated heir, Gates had studied the “higher criticism” of modernist Protestant theologians who found a literal interpretation of the Bible incompatible with history or science. He saw science as God’s light shining in a world of dark passions. “In these sacred rooms,” Gates wrote after inspecting the Rockefeller philanthropy, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, “He is whispering His secrets. To these men He is opening up the mysterious depths of His Being,”2 and, apparently, to Fundamentalist schools, His wrath. Scores of medical schools run by Protestant denominations succumbed under the competition for students posed by such science-based, Rockefeller-favored institutions as the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Yale, and St. Louis’s Washington University.
Next on Gates’s streamlining list was the General Education Board itself, formed “to promote a comprehensive system of higher education in the United States.” Gates believed that only a fourth of the country’s colleges and universities were qualified to be incorporated into the GEB’s system, which would emphasize the social and physical sciences, rather than religious interpretations of phenomena. Once again, the Fundamentalists howled.
Finally, Gates antagonized Fundamentalist southern businessmen by invading the area with Rockefeller investments. The South was being rediscovered as a new frontier of cheap labor and raw materials for no
rthern capital investments along J. P. Morgan’s reorganized Southern Railway. The GEB was, in fact, inspired by Junior’s trip on the “Millionaire’s Special,” a train tour through the cotton mill towns of the southern Piedmont. The founding of the GEB coincided with Gates’s steering Rockefeller money into the South. At least $4 million worth of stock in the Virginia-Carolina Chemical Company gave the Rockefellers a stake in one of the nation’s largest fertilizer firms, with phosphate holdings and fertilizer plants throughout the South. Other agribusiness investments included the Southern Cotton Oil Company, makers of Wesson oil, the American Agricultural Chemical Company, and the American Linseed Company, which used linseed oil as a primer in paints and varnishes, and refined Hawaiian coconut meat and peanut oil to create “Nucoa Butter” margarine. And $30 million was invested in the International Harvester Corporation, the new holding company that J. P. Morgan had organized for the Rockefellers’ McCormick in-laws.3
By 1911, the new Rockefeller interest in cash agriculture had blossomed into another secular mission for the GEB: a program of model farms across the South, designed to demonstrate the value of farm machinery, fertilizer, and scientific methods of crop rotation to fight the boll weevil’s ravages of cotton crops.
