Titan

by Ron Chernow

  Eager to expose Rockefeller as a tasteless vulgarian, Ida Tarbell mocked the Forest Hill house as “a monument of cheap ugliness,” and other satirical critics rushed to pile on equally insulting epithets. 1 This much-maligned house was, in fact, John D.’s favorite hideaway. “Oh, I like Forest Hill much better than any other home!” he proclaimed. 2 It enjoyed an excellent location, standing on the brow of a sharply sloping hill, with wonderful views of Lake Erie; it reminded Rockefeller of his boyhood home in Moravia, poised above Owasco Lake. This ungainly Victorian confection was a wilderness of porches and gables, turrets and bay windows, covered with gingerbread detail. Rockefeller loved the large, spacious rooms with their unobstructed views. Fond of light and air, he stripped away the curtains and wall hangings and flooded the house with sunshine, adding a glassed-in porch. He even had a huge pipe organ installed in one parlor.

  Those who accurately faulted Rockefeller’s taste missed a deeper point, however: At a time when moguls vied to impress people with their possessions, Rockefeller preferred comfort to refinement. His house was bare of hunting trophies, shelves of richly bound but unread books, or other signs of conspicuous consumption. Rockefeller molded his house for his own use, not to awe strangers. As he wrote of the Forest Hill fireplaces in 1877: “I have seen a good many fireplaces here [and] don’t think the character of our rooms will warrant going into the expenditures for fancy tiling and all that sort of thing that we find in some of the extravagant houses here. What we want is a sensible, plain arrangement in keeping with our rooms.”3

  It took time for the family to adjust to Forest Hill. The house had been built as a hotel, and it showed: It had an office to the left of the front door, a dining room with small tables straight ahead, upstairs corridors lined with cubicle-sized rooms, and porches wrapped around each floor. The verandas, also decorated in resort style, were cluttered with bamboo furniture. It was perhaps this arrangement that tempted John and Cettie to run Forest Hill as a paying club for friends, and they got a dozen to come and stay during the summer of 1877. This venture proved no less of a debacle than the proposed sanatorium. As “club guests,” many visitors expected Cettie to function as their unlikely hostess. Some didn’t know they were in a commercial establishment and were shocked upon returning home to receive bills for their stay. The Rockefeller children were no less bemused and disoriented as they found themselves eating in a big dining room, attended by a troop of gentlemanly black waiters. After a year, Rockefeller scrapped this misbegotten venture, fired the waiters, and began to convert the large warren of tiny upstairs rooms into suites and master bedrooms.

  From 1877 to 1883, the Rockefellers retained the Euclid Avenue house as their primary residence while spending summers at Forest Hill. Gradually, the stays at Forest Hill lengthened, the estate itself expanding to more than seven hundred acres and the number of employees eventually rising to as high as 136. After a time, the family spent only brief spring and autumn stints at Euclid Avenue. They still went there every Sunday, however, bringing in a cold lunch from Forest Hill when they attended the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. After late 1883, when the Rockefellers moved to New York, they turned Forest Hill into their exclusive Cleveland residence but never renounced a sentimental attachment to 424 Euclid Avenue. They kept the old house in constant repair, always ready to receive family members, even though they never went there and it slowly lapsed into an honored, deserted monument to bygone days. Plans to turn it into a convalescent home for crippled children or aged couples never materialized. “It seemed too sacred for common use, we all loved it so,” Cettie later said.4

  Laura Spelman Rockefeller, who seldom wore anything fancier than this dress. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)

  Despite its considerable distance from his office, Rockefeller, clad in goggles and duster, drove downtown each morning from Forest Hill, seated in a little two-seat surrey behind a pair of fast-trotting horses. He was still passionate about trotting horses and now had a dozen of them. He constructed his own half-mile racetrack at Forest Hill, shaded by maples planted by his son, and bought Welsh and Shetland ponies for each child. By the mid-1870s, he often returned home from the office for lunch then spent the rest of the afternoon en famille in a constant flurry of outdoor activity. He dammed a stream to make two artificial lakes, one for boating, the other for swimming, and on sultry days often swam the mile-long circuit, a straw hat perched on his head to guard his fair skin from the sun. After becoming a biking enthusiast, he smoothed out many dangerously curving paths and rewarded visitors who learned to ride with free bikes. He took unusual delight in ice skating and frequently as many as fifty people—many of them strangers from the neighborhood—skated on the Rockefeller pond on a frosty day. Since he wouldn’t allow the pond to be flooded on the Sabbath, Rockefeller sometimes rose after midnight on a freezing Sunday night to direct the workmen in preparing for the next day’s skating.

  Though he lacked interest in the homely interior of Forest Hill, Rockefeller spent hours daily out on the grounds. A tall, angular figure striding about and surveying the property, he planned new vistas, gravel paths, gardens, barns, and carriage houses. He created a fair-sized farm with sixteen cows and thousands of chickens. Serving as his own engineer and following the natural grades, Rockefeller laid out twenty miles of roadway for horse and buggy rides through stands of aspen, beech, oak, and maple trees. Supervising fifty or sixty workmen, he developed a limestone quarry on the property to service his grandiose projects and adorned the roads with picturesque bridges over streams. To secure striking vistas, he also began to relocate large trees and did this so expertly that they weren’t damaged in transition. This constant rearrangement of his domain was more than just a matter of framing pretty views or beautifying a patch of garden. It was Rockefeller’s typical way of remaking his own miniature universe and working out some vast, never-ending design.

  For the Rockefeller children, life at Forest Hill could seem melancholy as they drifted alone about the huge estate, cut off from worldly temptation by their parents. This mood of solitary yearning especially afflicted John Jr., who was tutored at home until age ten and later described his boyhood self as “shy, ill-adjusted and frail.”5

  From the start he wasn’t made of his father’s indestructible stuff. On January 29, 1874, in an unusual moment of tearful joy, Rockefeller arrived at the Standard Oil office and informed Henry Flagler and Oliver Payne that Cettie had given birth to their first son. Dr. Myra Herrick delivered the infant in an upstairs bedroom at Euclid Avenue while Rockefeller waited expectantly across the hall. “How glad all were that the baby was a boy—for there had been four girls—and that he was perfectly formed,” Cettie wrote.6 She always associated the birth of Junior—as he was known to distinguish him from John Senior— with the launch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Ohio. As a founding member, she had planned to aid her evangelical sisters with rousing prayers and biblical hymns in local saloons, and, as she later told Junior, “I might have joined them, if a wee baby boy had not claimed me.”7 She fired him with that same crusading, Christian spirit and horror of liquor.

  The baby boy was small and sickly, lacking his father’s robust energy and reflecting his mother’s more delicate constitution; for three years, his parents worried about his health. He had a cloistered childhood, insulated from a world that might contaminate his values. In later years, he could recall only a single male playmate from these early years, Harry Moore, the son of the Forest Hill housekeeper. “I had a camera and he and I took pictures and played together constantly.”8 Nevertheless, Junior found oases of enchantment on the estate and later cherished idyllic memories of summer afternoons spent rowing, swimming, and hiking. As they read aloud to one another, Junior and his sisters often lolled on a great beech tree whose limbs dipped over a creek. Even if his recollections sound highly idealized, with the shadows expunged, his boyhood letters are suffused with the warm glow of a protected childhood, secure in the love of his d
oting parents. Perhaps Junior’s boyhood wasn’t quite as lonesone as it seems from afar. Many decades later, his childhood friend Kate Strong reminisced to him, “You were quite the nicest boy that ever was in those days, so all your friends thought . . . affectionate, considerate, thoughtful and full of fun as well as wise almost beyond your years.”9 Junior was always bathed in female love, almost suffocated by it.

  Just as Standard Oil workers never remembered a cross word from John Senior, so Junior couldn’t cite a single instance of paternal anger. His father was patient and encouraging, if notably stingy with praise. As Junior said, his father was a “beloved companion. He had a genius with children. He never told us what to do or not to do. He was one with us.” 10 In contrast to Big Bill’s narcissism, John D. had an overdeveloped sense of family responsibility. John and Cettie never administered corporal punishment, and they inculcated moral principles by instruction and example. Each child was taught to listen to his or her conscience as a severely infallible guide.

  For this boy destined to be the world’s greatest heir, money was so omnipresent as to be invisible—something “there, like air or food or any other element, ” he later said—yet it was never easily attainable.11 As if he were a poor, rural boy, he earned pocket change by mending vases and broken fountain pens or by sharpening pencils. Aware of the rich children spoiled by their parents, Senior seized every opportunity to teach his son the value of money. Once, while Rockefeller was being shaved at Forest Hill, Junior entered with a plan to give away his Sunday-school money in one lump sum, for a fixed period, and be done with it. “Let’s figure it out first,” Rockefeller advised and made Junior run through calculations that showed he would lose eleven cents interest while the Sunday school gained nothing in return. Afterward, Rockefeller told his barber, “I don’t care about the boy giving his money in that way. I want him to give it. But I also want him to learn the lesson of being careful of the little things.”12

  When Rockefeller was complimented upon his son, he protested truthfully, “It was his mother who developed him.”13 Cettie brought up her children in her own ascetic style and tutored them in the rites of self-abnegation. She imagined that she presided with a light touch and had no idea that she could be quite overbearing. As she remarked, “I never like to interfere with the children so long as they make happy noises.” 14 A sweet, good-natured woman, Cettie nevertheless had a strong didactic side that could verge on fanaticism. As she once confessed to a neighbor, “I am so glad my son has told me what he wants for Christmas, so now it can be denied him.”15 Dutiful, eager to please his mother, Junior absorbed the full force of her piety. “How good God is to have added to our lovely daughters our only son,” Cettie later wrote. “Though the youngest, he is the strongest in courage, independence and Christian character.”16 She hemmed him in with numerous prohibitions. He was told that square dancing was promiscuous and immoral, and by age ten this little paragon had to sign a solemn oath that he would abstain from “tobacco, profanity, and the drinking of any intoxicating beverages.”17 Mother wasn’t the only earnest female drumming him full of morality; Grandma Spelman also badgered him to attend children’s temperance meetings. Thus, an extraordinary contradiction lay at the core of Junior’s life: While his father was being rebuked publicly as a corporate criminal, his mother was pumping him brimful of morality and religion. Like his father, Junior developed an upside-down worldview in which the righteous Rockefeller household was always under attack by a godless, uncomprehending world.

  With three older sisters, John grew up in largely female surroundings as a delicate boy spared the rough play and teasing of brothers. He was feminized by the experience, wearing his sisters’ cast-off dresses, learning to sew and knit, and even attending cooking classes, as if he might someday have to keep house and prepare his own sandwiches. Eight years older than Junior, Bessie was warmly attentive to her brother but inhabited a different world, and he grew up with the wilder and more willful Alta and Edith. One visitor remembered Alta as “mischievous, impulsive, the ringleader of the trio,” while Edith was “scrutinizing, calculating,” if high-spirited.18 Because the girls got less attention than their brother did, they probably had more freedom to rebel and explore. As Alta once teased him, “We girls often thought John should have been a girl and we the boys of the family.”19 Despite his sex, Junior ended up as his mother’s favorite because he was surely the most like her—obedient, crucified by duty, and almost too eager to please. The model child would struggle to become the model adult, with often painful consequences.

  Soon after the Rockefellers had moved to 424 Euclid Avenue, they were followed by the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church—soon renamed the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church—the struggling church that had exerted such a formative influence upon Rockefeller’s life. As far as fashion or convenience went, it would have behooved the Rockefellers to attend the nearby Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, where elegant couples stepped from tony carriages each Sunday morning. Instead, they drove back down Euclid Avenue to a plain brownstone church with a tall, narrow steeple and a lower-middle-class congregation. As Junior said, “There weren’t half a dozen families that were not of limited means.”20 Rockefeller felt no discomfort at being surrounded by humble people and valued this continuity with his roots. He needed the spiritual refreshment of the plain but emotional Baptist style of prayer and probably also wanted to show that he wasn’t being spoiled by wealth.

  The Euclid Avenue Baptist Church was celebrated as the Rockefeller church and with good reason: By the early 1880s, he was covering half its annual budget, even pledging weekly money from his children and stipulating that “the 20 cents from each child will be earned by the sweat of their brows, pulling weeds, etc.”21 Avoiding clubs, theaters, and other such wicked haunts, Rockefeller was seen publicly only at church, a fixture in his ninth-row pew, his presence generating a growing army of oglers: curiosity seekers, feature writers, panhandlers, and idlers. He loved the bold, joyous, militant spirit of the Baptists and contributed openhandedly to their local charities. His foremost beneficiaries included the celebrated one-armed “Brother” J. D. Jones, who proselytized from a derelict barge moored to a Cleveland dock; the Ragged School, which taught the Bible and trade skills to vagabond teenagers; and the Cleveland Bethel Union, which preached temperance and Christianity to hard-drinking sailors and where Rockefeller himself often stopped by at lunchtime to mingle anonymously with the seamen.

  Religion was a form of sustenance for Rockefeller, a necessary complement to his buttoned-up business life. Praising the ministry’s role, he once said he needed “good preaching to wind me up, like an old clock, once or twice every week.”22 His life records no crises of faith, no agonizing skepticism toward the inherited orthodoxy of his youth. He believed that good works had to accompany faith, and even during the service his eyes darted around the room as he selected needy recipients of his charity. Taking small envelopes from his pocket, he slipped in some money, wrote the congregants’ names on top, then unobtrusively pressed these gifts into their palms as they shook hands and said goodbye. He and Cettie also faithfully attended Friday night prayer meetings and were said to have seldom missed a gathering when in Cleveland over a forty-year period.

  From 1872 until 1905, Rockefeller served as superintendent of the Sunday school—for a small portion of time he was seconded to a poor mission school— while Cettie headed the infant department. She liked to audit his classes and stare admiringly at him as he talked. He arrived early to kindle a fire then dimmed the gas lights at the close. In autumn, in an oddly poetic touch, he gathered up bushels of leaves and distributed them to the children. Many of his talks rang variations on the commonplaces of the temperance movement. “Boys, do you know why I never became a drunkard?” Rockefeller asked, scanning the room. “Because I never took the first drink.”23 To drive home his message, he told them not to be too free or easy or drink just to please the crowd. “Now I can’t be a good fellow,” he said sarcasticall
y. “I haven’t taken my first drink yet.”24 Each summer, he invited the Sunday-school teachers to a nonalcoholic picnic at Forest Hill, which was probably the most festive day on his annual calendar.

  As word circulated that Rockefeller sometimes recruited Standard Oil employees from his Bible class, its size swelled enormously. He made any talk of business taboo, a lesson that one assistant superintendent, to his chagrin, belatedly learned. The man had bought oil at $1.09 a barrel and tried to solicit Rockefeller’s advice about whether to sell. The reaction, recalled by one member of the class, was swift and eloquent:

  Mr. Rockefeller immediately changed the expression of his face. He crossed his knees and then uncrossed them. He bent his body forward and proceeded to cross his knees again. But he never said a word. The assistant superintendent grew restless and a little embarrassed. . . . Finally the assistant superintendent asked: “If you were me, what would you do?” Rockefeller replied: “I would do what I thought best.”25

  A fidgety silence was always Rockefeller’s harshest expression of scorn.

  While Rockefeller resented being pumped for advice, he himself mingled business and religion and converted the church into a powerful platform for espousing capitalism. He had no interest in theological disputation or in discussing otherworldly matters. To Sunday-school classes, he frequently reiterated his motto, “I believe it is a religious duty to get all the money you can, fairly and honestly; to keep all you can, and to give away all you can.”26 When he met his secretary out riding one Sunday, he advised her to save for a rainy day. “By way of apology for talking business on a Sunday,” the secretary reported, “he said that there was a great deal of religion in good business.” 27 The widening income inequality that accompanied industrialization didn’t faze him because it formed part of the divine plan. By this stage of his career, Rockefeller’s material success must have undergirded his faith. That he had earned so much surely signaled divine favor, a grace so awesome as to suggest that God had chosen him for some special mission—or else why had He favored him with such bounty? The usual picture of the Gilded Age is that greed eroded religious values, whereas for Rockefeller, his golden heaps seemed like so many tokens of heavenly support.