by Ron Chernow
Another tale circulating in upstate New York at the turn of the century contended that Bill had corrupted the village youth by teaching them how to gamble. One ancient resident, Hiram Alley, recalled that the village boys would pay Bill five dollars to instruct them in card tricks so they could then fleece other boys. John D. never commented on allegations against his father but, having never touched cards in his life, scoffed at this particular libel. “If my father had been a gambler, I would have known something about cards, wouldn’t I?”43
Clearly, Devil Bill had a suggestive personality that made imaginations run riot, and some of the stories about him were likely embellished. Yet one charge left behind a more convincing paper trail. Beginning with Nancy Brown in Richford, Eliza had always employed a young woman to assist with the housework, and in Moravia she had a tall, pretty young woman helper named Anne Vanderbeak. On July 26, 1849, according to papers filed at the Auburn Court House, William Avery Rockefeller was indicted for assaulting Anne Vanderbeak on May 1, 1848, and “then and there violently against her will feloniously did ravish and carnally know” her.44 The rape indictment deepens suspicions that Bill was more than just a charming, flirtatious rogue.
The aftermath of the indictment was inconclusive, and the whole affair has been obscured by a heavy fog of speculation. Bill never appeared in court, never went to trial, and was never arrested. Everybody who has examined the case has tripped over the same set of questions. Why was the indictment handed down more than a year after the supposed rape? (One feminist scholar has helpfully noted the formidable obstacles placed in the way of women pressing rape charges in those days.)45 Why did the prosecuting attorney never endorse the indictment? Why didn’t anybody set off in hot pursuit of Bill when he fled from Cayuga County? And why did Anne Vanderbeak let the matter lapse? Once again, a handful of oral histories suggest a tangled skein of local intrigue. Bill had seduced a young woman named Charlotte Hewitt, whose brothers, Earl and Lew, loathed him for it. One Hewitt brother sat on the jury that indicted Big Bill, leading some to see it as a trumped-up charge, a vendetta by the brothers. Ida Tarbell’s assistant devised another theory: “I believe the indictment was quashed, possibly on the understanding that he was to leave the county. This was not unusual procedure in those days.”46
The scandal ended whatever tentative truce Bill had struck with John Davison, who had long rued the day when Bill Rockefeller first bewitched his sensible daughter. During the Moravia period, Davison had patched up relations with Bill and lent him almost $1,000 in two installments, one in August 1845, the other in October 1846. Now the rape indictment shattered their still tenuous relationship—lending greater credence to the charge. When Bill informed Davison of the accusation and asked him to post bail, Davison gruffly replied that he was “too old a man to go bail for anyone.” Taken aback, Bill replied bitterly that he would leave the county and never see him again. Worried about his two outstanding loans, Davison went straight to court, claimed his son-in-law planned to defraud his creditors, and sued him for $1,210.75.47 For Eliza and her offspring, it must have been a thoroughly humiliating moment when the sheriff and two neighbors came to appraise their property and attached all their movable goods in the name of John Davison. Davison also modified his will, placing Eliza’s inheritance in the hands of trustees, in all likelihood to keep it safely beyond the eager grasp of his son-in-law.
During the second half of 1849, Bill abandoned his family and gadded about the countryside to reconnoiter new towns. In the spring of 1850, the same year Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, Bill resettled his family in Owego, near the Pennsylvania border. As a fugitive from justice, he might have wanted to be near the state line whenever trouble loomed. Though only ten at the time and probably ignorant of what had happened—it’s hard to imagine Eliza confiding such scandalous things to a young boy—John later ridiculed the rape charge and mocked the idea of his father fleeing justice. “If [my father] left ‘under compulsion’ . . . I should have known something about it. There was nothing of the sort. We moved over to Owego, and if he were fleeing from justice that wasn’t very far away.” 48 John’s later tendency to minimize the disgrace probably had several causes, ranging from filial piety to shrewd public relations; he knew people bent upon proving his own immorality wanted to buttress their case by first tarnishing his father. One must also note his penchant for denial, his potent capacity to filter out uncomfortable thoughts, especially about his father, just as he later deflected criticism of his questionable business behavior. John D. Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one’s resolve in the face of enemies.
At some point in his boyhood, however, possibly after the flight from Moravia, John’s reverence for his father did begin to be intermingled with more hostile, unexpressed feelings. (One writer of a wildly psychoanalytic bent has even suggested that Rockefeller’s icy self-control was a reaction to repressed fantasies of murdering his father.)49 In later years, scores of John D.’s friends and associates noted that Big Bill was a taboo topic that they broached at their peril, one on which John maintained a thoroughgoing silence. As one early biographer remarked, “From the beginning to the end of his career, he has made secrecy respecting his father and stealth respecting paternal visits a matter of religious observance.” 50
We cannot tell when Rockefeller first felt shame about his father, but this emotion was so consequential for his entire development that we must pause briefly to consider it. In the towns of John’s boyhood, Bill was an engaging but notorious character who prompted interminable speculation about his travels and sources of income. A boy with such a father needed to screen out malicious gossip and cultivate a brazen indifference to community opinion. This bred in him a reflexive habit of secrecy, a fear of the crowd, a deep contempt for idle chatter and loose tongues that lasted a lifetime. He learned to cultivate a secretive style and a defiant attitude toward strangers. Perhaps out of a self-protective instinct, Bill taught his children to be wary of strangers and even of himself. When John was a child, Bill would urge him to leap from his high chair into his waiting arms. One day, he dropped his arms, letting his astonished son crash to the floor. “Remember,” Bill lectured him, “never trust anyone completely, not even me.” Somewhat later, walking with his boys through Cleveland, he warned them to ignore the pell-mell rush of people to fires and parades. “Never mind the crowd,” he told them. “Keep away from it. Attend to your own business.”51 Eliza also must have inoculated the children’s minds against talebearers and told them not to discuss family matters with other people. The boy who faced down the vicious talk of neighbors would be extremely well prepared to walk unscathed and even defiant through the turbulent controversies that later surrounded his life.
For all the uncertainty of their lives, the Rockefellers, in their restless, driven odyssey across the southern tier of New York, enjoyed a sense of upward mobility as they journeyed from Richford to Moravia to Owego, with each town larger, more prosperous, and more hopeful than its predecessor. The county seat of Tioga County, located south of Richford and west of Binghamton, Owego sits astride a broad, beautiful bend of the Susquehanna River. Decidedly more cosmopolitan than anything young John D. had experienced before, it was a refined village with genteel homes along Front Street that vouchsafed glimpses of a finer life. The incorporated village of Owego had an imposing courthouse, a well-stocked library, a renowned school, and other nascent hints of culture. For a country town of seventy-two hundred people, it also boasted a disproportionate number of resident writers and artists.
Perhaps because his sojourn there was shorter, Rockefeller never developed quite the same fond attachment to Owego as to Moravia, but he retained pleasing associations with it. “What a beautiful place Owego is!” he once exclaimed. “How fortunate we were to grow up there, in a beautiful country, with good neighbors, people of culture and refinement, kind friends.�
�� 52 With amusement, he recalled how Owego had exploded his provincial boyhood. “Down at the railroad station one day I saw a Frenchman! Think of that—a real, live Frenchman. And he wore a mustache—the first I ever saw.”53 On June 1, 1849, shortly before the Rockefellers arrived, the Erie Railroad had first puffed into Owego, thousands of spectators packing the hillsides to cheer the train as it slid into the station amid a burst of ceremonial cannonades and pealing church bells. “Railroad trains were known even when I was a boy but they were few, short and sooty,” Rockefeller said of the conveyances that would figure so largely in his own exploits.54 In small towns like Owego, the railroad ended isolated, self-contained economies, absorbing them into regional and national markets while also sharpening their inhabitants’ appetites for material goods and inviting them to seek their fortunes in distant cities.
The Rockefellers lived three miles east of town in an area of soft, bucolic meadows and riverine groves. Of the two frame houses they occupied during their time in Owego, the second was smaller, suggesting that Bill and Eliza needed to retrench as they grappled with financial problems. The second house—more a cottage than a farm—had a fine view of the winding, muddy Susquehanna, with the wooded silhouette of Big Island (later Hiawatha Island) in the foreground, ringed by a curtain of blue hills in the distance. In these snug quarters, John shared a bed with brother William. “It was a small house,” John reminisced years later, “but a dear good house.”55
Bill might have chosen Owego because it had signal business advantages for someone who dabbled in the lumber business. During freshets, log rafts were easily floated down the Susquehanna River, and several lumber mills, in consequence, had sprung up in the town. It might also be significant that on September 27, 1849, right before the Rockefellers moved to Owego, an appalling conflagration had consumed 104 downtown buildings, the blaze sparing only three stores, a disaster that presaged a booming lumber business as the town was rebuilt. Finally, the town had a reputation as a mecca for self-styled doctors. As one Owego resident recalled, “After the Civil War, there were a dozen of them living here.”56
During the three Owego years, Bill’s escapades seemed even more bizarrely unpredictable than before. His appearances in town were brief and infrequent, however memorable to the gaping natives. “He was the best-dressed man for miles around,” said a close neighbor. “You never saw him without his fine silk hat.”57 Now in her late thirties, Eliza was losing her youthful bloom and developing the hard, thin face that told of her many trials. Many townsfolk recalled her as a sweet, fine, dignified lady who called on neighbors in the afternoon, always clad in a black silk dress that looked like widow’s weeds. Everybody commended her unsparing discipline, neat appearance, and commanding presence. For all her travails, she didn’t seem as forlorn as she had in Richford and Moravia, as if growing more accustomed to the burden that she bore and more reconciled to Bill’s absences.
Once the swaggering, autocratic husband, Bill had now been irredeemably exposed as a scoundrel and was demoted in Eliza’s esteem. Her disillusionment with her handsome husband might have simplified matters in the household. “It was she who brought up the family,” said one observer, “for even when he was at home the father did not interfere with her discipline. And it was discipline.”58 Another neighbor termed her “an unusually clear-minded and capable Christian mother. Perhaps her discipline might seem very strict or even severe today, but, although she made them obey her and kept them all busily employed, the children all loved her as she loved them.”59 She wasn’t a mother to be trifled with. Once, while sick in bed, she discovered that John had neglected to perform a task for her, and judgment was swift: She sent him to the Susquehanna to select a willow switch. With the quiet cunning that would become a pronounced trait of his nature, he nicked the switch in several places with his knife, so it would bend and crack after the initial blows. Eliza wasn’t deceived. “Go and get another switch,” she instructed him, “and see that it is not slashed this time.”60
Eliza must have found the religious atmosphere in Owego suitably wholesome. One of John’s imperishable images of Owego was of standing behind the house and hearing the dutiful Eliza praying aloud in an upstairs bedroom. The local Baptists were enterprising evangelists, and every winter they marched scores of reformed sinners down to the frozen Susquehanna, carved out openings in the ice, and baptized them. Every Sunday, neighbors picked up Eliza and the children and drove them to a Baptist church in the village. Inspired by a Sunday-school class on forgiveness, the children initiated a custom that suggests how religion permeated their lives. Each night, when they got into bed, they turned to their siblings and said, “Do you forgive me all I have done to you today?”61 By the time they fell asleep, the air had been cleared of all recriminations or festering anger.
In Owego, Eliza increased her dependence on John, as if training him to be everything Bill wasn’t. Like his mother, John seemed stronger without Bill, able to escape his shadow and forge a separate identity. His manifold duties habituated him to a heavy workload. When not attending school, he cut wood, milked the cow, drew well water, tended the garden, and went on shopping expeditions while also supervising his younger siblings in their mother’s absence. “I was taught to do as much business at the age of ten or eleven as it was possible for me to do,” he later noted.62
As the stand-in for Bill, he kept a tight rein on the family budget and learned to appraise the world shrewdly. Once he spent three days helping a local farmer dig potatoes for 37
Throughout his life, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., reacted in a vitriolic manner to accusations that he had lusted after money as a child and yearned to be fabulously rich. Doubtless embarrassed, he contested insinuations that he was motivated by greed instead of a humble desire to serve God or humanity. He preferred to portray his fortune as a pleasant accident, the unsought by-product of hard work. Yet stories surface of Rockefeller daydreaming about money in Owego when he was only in his early teens. One day, strolling by the Susquehanna with a friend, he blurted out: “Some day, sometime, when I am a man, I want to be worth a-hundred-thousand-dollars. And I’m going to be, too—some day.”64 Nearly identical accounts come from so many sources that one is forced to conclude he had conveniently expunged such memories. Given his father’s panting ardor for money, it would have been strange had he not been bewitched by gold.
There was nothing unusual about Rockefeller’s boyhood dreams, for the times were feeding avaricious fantasies in millions of susceptible schoolboys. Antebellum America was a place of high adventure and unbounded opportunity for industrious young men. Following the war with Mexico, huge chunks of land—Texas, New Mexico, and upper California—were annexed to the country in early 1848. That same year, gold was discovered at John Sutter’s sawmill in California, triggering a mad westward rush of ninety thousand prospectors. Just as the Rockefellers were moving from Moravia to Owego, hordes of frantic men swarmed across the continent, sailed around South America, or slogged across the Isthmus of Panama, hell-bent to reach California. The pandemonium foreshadowed the petroleum craze in western Pennsylvania a decade later. Though the gold rush proved a snare and a delusion for most miners, the occasional success stories nonetheless inflamed the popular imagination. Mark Twain singled out the California gold rush as the watershed event that sanctified a new money worship and debased the country’s founding ideals.
Before he left Owego, John secured a first-rate education, then a rarity in rural America, where few children attended secondary school. At first, the Rockefeller children went to a schoolhouse a short walk from their house; due to the family’s straitened circumstances, a friendly neighbor purchased their textbooks. In August 1852, John and William entered Owego Academy, which had been founded in 1827 and was unquestionably the finest secondary school in that part of New York. Topped by a tall steeple, fenced in by lovely parkland, the three-story brick school building must have awed the still-rustic Rockefeller boys. Presiding over the academy was an able Sc
ot, Dr. William Smythe, who made the students hone their verbal skills by writing fortnightly essays and delivering speeches on assigned themes; the linguistic skills mastered at Owego became evident in Rockefeller’s concise business letters. The school produced many eminent graduates, including Thomas C. Platt, later the “Easy Boss” who ran the New York Republican machine, and Washington Gladden, the preacher who issued some of the most scorching screeds directed against Standard Oil.
Many of the 350 pupils came from affluent urban families, and John later lauded this exposure to city boys, saying it was “bound to benefit country boys.”65 The school charged a steep tuition of three dollars per term, suggesting that Bill’s medical road show was finally prospering after two years in Owego. John never expressed resentment at being, by academy standards, a poor boy. When a photographer came to shoot class pictures, John and William were excluded because their suits were too shabby. Other boys might have smarted, but John always prized his daguerreotypes of his fellow scholars, later insisting, “I would not part with this collection for any money. ”66 In Eliza Rockefeller’s household, one didn’t morbidly dwell on slights but kept one’s sights fixed on the practical goals ahead. John never aspired to popularity at the school. It was as if, after the inordinate attention that his father attracted, John wanted to be quiet and inconspicuous and blend into the crowd.