Everything John D. did was strategic, even at home. Taking the family swimming, he wore a straw hat in the water to ward off the sun. On iceskating expeditions he issued his son a long narrow board to be carried under the arm in case the ice broke. He liked blindman’s buff, and he played as he worked, for keeps, trying to trick children with complicated feints and lightning thrusts and huzzaing when he succeeded. Success in everything was important to him; when John D., Jr. became manager of the Brown football team, his loyal father attended a game between Brown and the Carlisle Indians in New York. The old man may have come out of duty, but once he was there his powerful competitive instincts were aroused. He was out of the stands before the game was over, prancing along the sidelines in his beaver and cheering the team wildly. (Brown won, 24 to 12.)
His opinions on everything of importance had been formed in childhood, and they never changed. More than any other man he underwrote modern medical science, yet when he himself was ill he relied on medicasters or smoked mullein leaves in a clay pipe. A true loner, he never needed outside stimulus—he said he never experienced a craving for tea, coffee or “for anything.” His most extravagant comment was “Pshaw!” He reserved it for extraordinary situations, such as when he was accosted by an enemy of the Standard, or had triumphed in a bitter pipeline war. He absolutely refused to deal with anyone who tried to hurry him, and he declined to honor his membership in the New York Stock Exchange by appearing on the floor because he despised the turmoil there.
Because the popular press regarded him as an ogre, there was little suggestion in it that he was human, let alone virile. Yet his family knew him as a man of considerable physical courage. One evening the house burglar-alarm rang and a frightened maid cried that there was a prowler in one of the upstairs bedrooms. John D. called for his revolver and, without waiting for it, dashed to the back door to intercept the intruder, who escaped him by sliding down a pillar. On another occasion, the dynast insisted on driving his son to Grand Central Station at a time when anarchists were threatening to kill him. John D., Jr., thought it would be prudent to take a bodyguard along, but his father wouldn’t hear of it. “I can take care of myself,” he said, adding, in a Nick Carter riposte, “If any man were foolish enough to attack me, it would go hard with him.”
His privacy became increasingly important to him. If his son wanted to communicate with him, he had to write him a letter, even though they worked in the same building. Later, when the younger Rockefeller visited his father, he was required to stay in a nearby hotel. After acquiring his 4,180-acre estate at Pocantico Hills in Westchester County, John D. built a mighty iron fence around it. John D. Jr., who worked with the architects, was lucky his father would settle for the fence; the old man had wanted to ring the estate with barbed wire. Yet there was no arrogance in him. He wanted to be known as “Neighbor John,” and always addressed his grandsons warmly as “Brother.”
To the annoyance of the family, he declined to replace clothes until they became shiny, and when his son presented him with a fancy fur coat, he wore it a couple of times, sent it to storage, and finally gave it back. He never mentioned his great wealth at home. There he remained merely the attentive father, obviously well-to-do but still a man of plain tastes. One of his favorite dishes was bread and milk, and he liked to keep a paper bag of apples on the sill outside his bedroom window and eat one each night at bedtime.
The world does not remember him as a wit, but his grandsons do. With mournful gestures and a piteous voice he would start a tragic tale, turning at the end to a grotesquerie. They heard the same jokes again and again and always laughed, especially if there was a guest present who was deceived by the solemn opening. His humor was anything but sophisticated. A typical story described a visitor’s call at an insane asylum, where he met an inmate who complained that he had been unjustly confined. In John D.’s tag line the inmate concluded, “If you can’t get me out, bring me a piece of dry toast. I’m a poached egg.” Nelson recalls how one of his brothers, forgetting where he had heard this one, retold it to John D., winding up, “Bring me a piece of toast. I’m a poached egg.”
After a grave silence his grandfather looked up.
“Dry toast, Brother,” murmured the old man, who liked to get things right.
“What do the figures show?” he used to ask his grandsons. “It’s the figures that count.” Nelson still marvels at his astonishing grasp of detail—how, rousing from a nap, John D. would beckon him over to his Morris chair and ask searching questions about Rockefeller Center, for which Nelson, then fresh out of Dartmouth, was leasing office space. In his prime he had always been able to pinpoint the exact location of Standard tankers on distant seas, and in his eighties he would exasperate golfing partners by interrupting the game to search painstakingly for lost balls. He just liked to know where things were.
His approach to golf was typical of him. He took up the game at the turn of the century, after his doctor told him that he needed more recreation. Golf was then relatively new in this country. One of the few players John D. knew was Cettie, who was getting to be pretty good. He decided that he would get to be better on the sly. According to Joe Mitchell, the pro who tutored him, he proceeded with the same methods he had employed in tackling the oil industry: secrecy, cunning and resourcefulness.
Rubbers and an umbrella were strapped to his caddie, in case it rained. Then a watch was maintained by other youths, who would call out if Cettie drew near, whereupon John D. would vanish into a clump of bushes until she had passed. Alone once more, he would hammer croquet wickets over his feet to keep them in position while a boy, hired to stand opposite him, kept repeating, “Hold your head down! Hold your head down!” Next the old man chalked the face of his club, swung back, and uncoiled. If the ball’s mark was in the center of the club he would cry, “See, see! Method, method!” If it wasn’t, he would bow his head and mutter, “Shame, shame, shame.” Finally, he hired a photographer to make a series of pictures of his stroke. Studying them, he developed fair distance. Ready at last, he strolled up to Cettie one day when she was squaring away on her first tee and remarked casually that it looked like a nice game; he might try it. To her astonishment he belted the ball 160 yards.
Until he discovered golf, the Baptist Church had provided his chief social life. As a young bookkeeper he had always rung the Sunday bell at Cleveland’s Erie Street Baptist Mission. At seventeen he was a trustee of the church, sweeping its floors and washing its windows in his spare time; at nineteen he saved it from a $2,000 mortgage; for thirty years he was a Sunday school superintendent, and when his wife was in childbed he brought foolscap to church, took notes during the sermons, and repreached them to her at home.
During the week, life for the Rockefellers revolved around the morning Bible readings (with a penny fine for those who were late), the Friday evening prayer meeting, lantern slides shown by visiting missionaries and sessions at which the head of the household would lead the others in chanting: “Five cents a glass, does anyone think/That is really the price of a drink?”
To this day, a bottle of liquor is the one thing you cannot buy in Rockefeller Center, though the family’s puritan discipline has relaxed a great deal since the days when ministers came and went in the West 54th Street home, and the rosewood sliding doors separating rooms on the first floor were thrown open to accommodate rapt congregations who sat erect on massive furniture between the dark red brocaded walls while speakers discussed charities, missions and the evils of booze, or led the group in prayer so solemn that, John D., Jr. noted in an essay written at the age of eleven, even the dog “would lie down under a chair and be very quiet until the exercises were over.”
On trips John D. always took a minister along to preach at way stations and lead the family in rollicking hymns as their private train thundered across the country. At home Cettie served cold meals Sundays because it was a sin to cook then. Much as John D. loved ice skating, he wouldn’t skate on the Sabbath or even direct workmen to
flood his yard until 12:01 Monday morning. It is worth noting that Nelson taught Sunday school through four years at Dartmouth and took his first oath as Governor of New York on Cettie’s old Bible.
On those rare occasions when reporters managed to corner John D., they would ask him to comment on Luke xviii, 25: “For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” He would quote the Scriptures back—“Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings”—or simply say of his career: “I was right. I knew it as a matter of conscience. It was right between me and my God.” Still, reconciling his piety and his great wealth wasn’t that easy, and his determination to find another way is the explanation for his extraordinary philanthropies.
He had begun to tithe as a boy. While still a poor bookkeeper he bought a cheap ledger to record his contributions one by one (“Method, method!”) and the ledger, which is extant, reveals that his first gift to the poor, wrung from his slender hoard during a winter when he himself was too poor to afford an overcoat was, symbolically, a dime. At the same time, he began contributing to the Underground Railroad. Belief in racial equality was a thread that ran through his entire life. It is significant that at the end of his life, he was the only white parishioner in a Negro church. Nelson points out that Spelman College in Atlanta, founded by John D. in 1881, was almost unique: “It’s marvelous now to think of Grandfather giving money to a college for black women when higher education for either blacks or women was unheard of.”
For the most part he gave as he earned, secretly. He liked to sit in church and scan the congregation for needy brethren; before leaving he would furtively press cash into deserving hands. They had to be deserving. He had to be sure that the money would do some good. His idea of bad charity was the annual dinner given for tramps by Cleveland’s Five Points House of Industry. He did not want handouts, but results. As long as his largess was limited to the church, he could be sure he was getting them, but checking up became harder as his bounty grew. In 1891 he took the plunge into what Gates called wholesale philanthropy by establishing a big Baptist university in Chicago. Its grateful students sang: “John D. Rockefeller, wonderful man is he/Gives all his spare change to the U. of C.”
“The good Lord gave me the money,” he said, “and how could I withhold it from the University of Chicago?” That was always his attitude. He called his fortune “God’s gold,” and once he refused to get out of his car at the dedication of a project he had endowed because, he said, he hadn’t had much to do with it; he had just given the money. Altogether he donated $600 million to various causes, and John D., Jr., dispensed another $400 million, which comes to an even billion.
One of the difficulties in appraising John D.’s personality is that he often comes through as a caricature of himself. There is an explanation for this. Essentially a loner, he was hounded, decade after decade, by journalists and politicians who believed that the public had a right to know more about a man possessed of such power than this man was willing to divulge. They had a point, but he was never willing to concede it. Hence his camouflages, disguises and masquerades, John D.’s approach to public relations was, quite simply, to ignore the public.
Nevertheless, he had two Achilles’ heels: his piety and his love of his family. Like many another industrialist, he longed to see his son succeed him in the corridors of power. But John D., Jr., Nelson’s father, was cut from a different bolt of cloth. Deeply troubled by the arrogance of his father’s lieutenants and sympathetic to the nascent labor movement, the son decided that he wanted a different career. He felt that he could best honor the Christian principles his father had taught him by devoting his life to almsgiving. And John D., always the shrewdest member of the family, understood and approved.
John D.’s influence on John D., Jr.’s, children is more diffuse, largely because the age gap is so great. The oldest of the titan’s grandsons, John D. 3d, was five years old when the Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil Trust. Nelson was born on his grandfather’s sixty-ninth birthday. Understandably, their memories of him are hazy. But they are all firmly convinced that their civic activities are a contemporary expression of his Baptist faith. Like the sons of Joseph P. Kennedy, they were told early that they must justify their wealth by public service. The difference is that Rockefeller wealth is much greater than that of the Kennedys, and Rockefeller eleemosynary activities are consequently far more conspicuous.
The family’s philanthropies include the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, five national parks, Colonial Williamsburg and countless other endowments whose beneficiaries are often unaware of where the money came from. Sociologists pore over the Lynds’ “Middletown,” birth control advocates over the work of Margaret Sanger and physicists over the studies of Fermi and Oppenheimer, unaware that Rockefeller money was behind each. Few librarians know of Rockefeller gifts to bibliothecae in Geneva and Tokyo, let alone the Library of Congress, and hardly any prostitutes are aware that John D. Jr. established the laboratory of social hygiene at the New York State Reformatory for Women.
At the end of his life the titan was baffled by the Depression. In 1894 he had stopped a panic with a European draft for $10 million dollars. After the 1929 crash, he placed a dramatic bid for a million shares of Jersey Standard at $50, tried to buck up confidence by saying that he and his son were buying common stocks, and gave $2 million for emergency relief in New York. It wasn’t enough. In 1932 all he could say was, “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.”
Five years later, he died in Florida at the age of ninety-seven, hoarsely whispering to his valet, “Raise me up a little bit.” The sexton of the Union Baptist Church tolled its steeple bell and posted the twenty-third Psalm, a favorite of John D.’s. For five minutes petroleum workers around the world stood in silent tribute to his memory. Everywhere his dimes had been saved and were treasured; one admirer, a ferry tender in Nyack, N.Y., proudly exhibited four of them to passengers. Bales of unsolicited flowers preceded mourners to the Cleveland cemetery where the family laird was buried between his mother and his wife, and John D., Jr., led his five sons in decorating nearby graves with overflow blossoms.
Yet the image of the New Moloch was not dead. Even as the old man lay in state, squads of state troopers were stalking intruders in the seventy miles of private roads behind the iron fence in Pocantico Hills, and after the family had left Cleveland, two cemetery guards, alert for cranks, began a three-month vigil. The Rockefellers had learned long ago that they could never escape the legend of their wealth.
John D. accepted that, but all his life he was curiously indifferent to the symbols of his affluence. Once when his securities filled a whole suite of safe-deposit rooms, a secretary begged him to come and see them. He went, poked a couple of drawers, and excused himself. He was always more drawn by the rituals of business than by its rewards.
Yet he was always moved by the highlights of his career. Even in old age, a glimpse of the building in which he first went to work as a bookkeeper could bring him to his feet, quivering with emotion. The anniversaries of his first job and his first partnership were red-letter days for him. When they rolled around he always ordered the flag at Pocantico Hills unfurled, to snap over his estate like a festive pennant. It is still hoisted on those days. Yet nobody notices it now. Today the Pocantico flag flies all the time.
Americana
Q. If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A. Why do men go to zoos?
Thus the catechism of H. L. Mencken, who nevertheless loved American libertarianism with a passion that was as intense as it was concealed. He said to me, “Be sure to tell ’em I’ve always been a patriot”—typical Menckenian mockery, but it is significant that his national identity was never far from his thoughts. He was aggressively un-American, which made him a nonconformist and thus a true American. In the case of Luella Mundel, describe
d in these pages, President George Hand of Fairmont State College was asked in court for his definition of an American. He replied that it was “the right to be different.” Mencken was certainly different. Yet he could quote the Bill of Rights from memory. He believed in civil rights to the last limits of the endurable. He was a genuine patriot.
“Behind every great civilization,” Christopher Dawson wrote in The Dynamics of World History, “there is a vision.” In the United States it is the vision of an open society. But there is more to a nation than its psyche. In this country there are America’s institutions, her incredible vitality, her cultural pluralism, and the stunning panorama of her natural beauty, which, at present anyhow, still exists. Being more of a continent than a nation, the United States offers a breathtaking variety of countrysides. As a New Englander, I feel a special affection for my own corner of the land, but I’ve seen the rest of it, and I exult in the Grand Canyon and the Mississippi, the dogwoods of Georgia and the giant redwoods of California, the vastness of Texas and the broken sod of Illinois.
There is much that is mean in the United States, much that is ugly, and some that is shameful. The violence that runs through the American character is a national disgrace, and we shall never cleanse ourselves until we acknowledge it. What is chiefly interesting to me about the millions of words which have been published in denunciation of America, however, is that most of them have come from the pens of Americans. The United States has had plenty of critics abroad, particularly since her emergence as a superpower. But the sharpest prose, damning everything from the banalities of our small-town life and the wretched conditions in the ghettos to the CIA, has been written by citizens of the United States. The Momuses of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America find the material for their polemics in our books. It was true in the days of Mencken. It is true in the days of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. The day it ceases to be true will be the day America betrays what Lincoln called “the last, best hope of earth.”
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