by Ron Chernow
For Lloyd, the essence of Standard Oil power resided in its secret alliances with the railroads, which had fostered the growth of many trusts. While conceding the “legitimate greatness” of Standard Oil, he said that it only made its ethical shortcuts the more reprehensible. “Their great business capacity would have insured the managers of the Standard success, but the means by which they achieved monopoly were by conspiracy with the railroads.”74 A vociferous critic of William H. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Tom Scott, and Collis Huntington, Lloyd incorporated his critique of Standard Oil into a comprehensive crusade for railroad reform. He also fastened public attention on John D. Rockefeller as the trust’s embodiment, speculating that only William H. Vanderbilt had earned more money the previous year.
Lloyd was a slipshod reporter, and his account is marred by many inaccuracies. At one point, he says that Rockefeller had owned a Cleveland flour store. Yet he wrote lapidary prose and showed a keen political and cultural understanding. In a cunning stroke, he converted the piece into a consumer story, stating at the outset, “Very few of the forty millions of people who burn kerosene know that its production, manufacture, and export, its price at home and abroad, have been controlled for years by a single corporation—the Standard Oil Company.”75 For Lloyd, the octopus—he helped to popularize the nickname—did more than threaten free competition and fair play; it jeopardized American democracy itself. He charged that Standard Oil controlled two U.S. senators and had engaged in so much corruption in Harrisburg that it had “done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature except to refine it.”76 A superb phrasemaker, Lloyd declared in a rousing finale that “America has the proud satisfaction of having furnished the world with the greatest, wisest, and meanest monopoly known to history.”77
The article introduced Rockefeller to a national audience and fixed antitrust legislation high on the reform agenda. In proposing a federal agency to ensure uniform railroad rates, Lloyd anticipated the Interstate Commerce Act by six years. If his attack was a harbinger of things to come, so was Rockefeller’s total silence. Confident that posterity would vindicate him, the latter would later explain, “I was concentrated upon extending and developing and perfecting our business, rather than on stopping by the wayside to squabble with slanderers.”78
In common with many contemporary moguls—including J. P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, James Stillman, Henry Clay Frick, and George F. Baker— Rockefeller resented the press, and his ferocious allegiance to his concern transcended other claims on his conscience. One of his favorite refrains was “The Standard Oil Company’s business was that of saying nothing and sawing wood.” 79 During the antitrust furor of 1888, he told one minister, “We have gone upon the principle it were better to attend to our business and pay no attention to the newspapers, with the idea that if we were right they could not permanently injure us, and if we were wrong all their comments, though favorable, would not make it right.”80 Rockefeller asserted that he was less afraid of exposing misbehavior by talking to the press than of inadvertently spilling trade secrets. “What could we say,” he asked rhetorically, “without telling the world just how we were making our success?”81
Those few intrepid reporters who tried to penetrate Standard Oil often gave up in despair. When the New York Sun dispatched a reporter to Cleveland in 1882 to investigate Rockefeller, he could not get near the mogul and was stunned by the layers of secrecy that surrounded him. He was further impressed by the silence of hundreds of Standard Oil employees he buttonholed, all schooled in Rockefeller’s philosophy. Even with friendly journalists, Rockefeller would not supply a photo of himself in an oil field or refinery and banned photographers from his home for even the most innocuous magazine spreads. Of course, this invisibility only piqued the public’s interest. That silence came so easily to Rockefeller should not surprise us. As an inner-directed man, he required no approbation from others and was much too circumspect to toss out opinions in a newspaper interview.
By the mid-1880s, facing severe political assaults, Standard Oil could no longer decline all press contact. In 1885, the Oil City Derrick— long a heated critic of the trust—was bought by an intimate of Captain Vandergrift, who installed Patrick Boyle, a Standard Oil adherent, as its editor. Around 1887, Standard Oil hired a press bureau called the Jennings Publishing Company to place favorable ads, disguised as independent articles, in Ohio newspapers. Soon the Standard cooperated selectively with other periodicals. When Harper’s Weekly profiled Rockefeller in 1889, the article was first thoroughly vetted by Archbold. On those odd occasions where Rockefeller sat for interviews, he came across as unfailingly dignified and courteous. In 1890, a reporter for the World described him as a man “with an intelligent and pleasant countenance, fair complexion, sandy hair and mustache intermixed with gray, a somewhat prominent nose, mild gray eyes, and an agreeably expressive mouth.”82 The next year, another reporter, braced for a bloody ogre, said of Rockefeller, “He is modest, retiring, gentle-mannered, and without the human vanities which we associate with great millionaires.”83 This favorable coverage should have alerted Rockefeller to two critical facts: that even hostile reporters could be swayed and that he had a flair for public relations no less pronounced than his gift for making money.
Some of the most pungent criticism came from within Standard Oil’s own ranks, from isolated subordinates who thought that the trust’s muscular tactics offended Christian principle. In the 1870s, Rockefeller recruited a stout, bewhiskered young man, William Jay Cooke, a grandnephew of Jay Cooke, whom he had befriended at the Cleveland YMCA. A former wholesale milliner, Cooke prospered at Standard and was soon elevated to a manager’s post in Toledo. After three years, he suddenly quit, unable to reconcile the trust’s sales tactics with his Christian faith. As a history of Standard of Ohio notes tactfully, “He didn’t see eye to eye with Mr. Rockefeller in the manner of eliminating competitors.”84 Unfortunately, we don’t know how Rockefeller reacted to this defection by a devout protégé.
Perhaps the most extraordinary act of contrition in Standard history came in an eloquent appeal to Rockefeller written by William G. Warden on May 24, 1887. One of the trust’s most senior figures, Warden sent Rockefeller a haunting letter regretting the revulsion that the firm inspired in the popular imagination:
We have met with a success unparalleled in commercial history, our name is known all over the world, and our public character is not one to be envied. We are quoted as the representative of all that is evil, hard hearted, oppressive, cruel (we think unjustly), but men look askance at us, we are pointed at with contempt, and while some good men flatter us, it’s only for our money and we scorn them for it and it leads to a further hardness of heart. This is not pleasant to write, for I had longed for an honored position in commercial life. None of us would choose such a reputation; we all desire a place in the good will, honor & affection of honorable men.85
After advancing a profit-sharing plan that might assuage the hostility of the oil producers, Warden urged Rockefeller to ponder his letter:
Don’t put this down or throw it to one side, think over it, talk with Mrs. Rockefeller about it—She is the salt of the earth. How happy she would be to see a change in public opinion & see her husband honored & blessed. May he who’s [sic] wisdom alone can put it in our hearts to love our fellow men, guide and direct you at this time. . . . The whole world will rejoice to see such an effort made for the people, the working people.86
The Warden letter is an exceptional statement, as dramatic in its way as a deathbed confession. It also confirms that Cettie Rockefeller was extremely upset by the opprobrium heaped upon her husband. And how did Rockefeller respond to this brave, thoughtful letter? About to sail to Europe with his family, he employed his departure as an excuse to send a short, platitudinous reply: “I have not been able to write you sooner,” he wrote the following week, “nor to give a careful consideration but be assured its content will not escape me. ”87 To cool off a tense situation with a bland note was vint
age Rockefeller, and there is no evidence that he ever again communicated with Warden on the subject.
A dignified but slightly careworn John D. Rockefeller, probably then in his fifties. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
CHAPTER 15
Widow’s Funeral
As John D. Rockefeller was busy consolidating America’s largest industrial empire, his father, William Avery Rockefeller—a.k.a Dr. William Levingston—was showing his old wanderlust, peddling panaceas under his assumed name. A frontiersman in a nation where the frontier was vanishing, he gravitated to wilderness areas that provided asylum from the modern, industrial world epitomized by his son.
Huge patches of Bill’s life remained a mystery to earlier Rockefeller biographers, but a rough portrait of his later years can now be sketched from Rockefeller’s papers and some previously overlooked newspaper and magazine accounts. Bill had relatively little contact with his rich sons, John and William, but was extremely close to the envious Frank, who shared his love of fishing and hunting. (Perhaps associating these sports with his prodigal father, John never hunted or fished in later years.) After Frank bought an immense ranch in Kansas in the 1880s, his father was a frequent guest, and they hunted quail and prairie chickens together.
Much of what we know about Bill’s later years derives from his remarkable friendship with a surrogate son, Dr. Charles H. Johnston. When Charles was a baby in 1853, Dr. Levingston visited his Ontario home and cured his mother of an illness. In 1874, Charles, now a young man, encountered Bill in Wisconsin, where Bill cured him of a fever and promised to tutor him in the “art of healing.” In Freeport, Illinois, Johnston met Mrs. Margaret Allen Levingston and later called her “one of the sweetest women I ever knew.” 1
It might have been Charles Johnston’s appearance that suggested to Bill a scam tailor-made for the Indian reservations. Before meeting Johnston, Bill had fallen back on his old deaf-and-dumb peddler routine. Native Americans believed that when the gods deprived people of one sense, they granted them supernatural healing powers in return, and this made them easy targets for Bill’s act. Now he spotted a new opportunity. Charles Johnston had high cheekbones, nut-brown skin, and flowing black hair and could easily be mistaken for a Native American. Bill hired him as his assistant, decked him out in splendid feathers and war paint, and featured him as his adopted Indian son. From the back of his wagon, Bill told his spellbound audience that Johnston, an Indian prince, had learned secret medicinal formulas from his father, a great chieftain. It was testimony to Bill’s gall that Johnston had to pay him for this apprenticeship in fraud. “In spite of his friendship and liking for me,” Johnston said, “he made me pay him $1,000 for my tuition, which illustrates his shrewdness as a bargain driver and his love of money.”2 As he had once done with John, Big Bill toughened Johnston by goading and cheating him at every turn. One is left to wonder whether Bill saw in Johnston a substitute son who might fill the large emotional void left by his formerly adoring eldest son.
As he traveled with Johnston across Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas, Bill’s business methods deviated little from the methods he had honed in upstate New York. As Johnston recounted after Bill’s death: “He would drive into a town, scatter handbills in which the great Dr. Levingston asserted that he could cure all diseases and we would have a suite of rooms at the best hotel and to the doctor there would come the sick and the halt and the lame. In all cases of common ailments he could detect the cause almost at a glance.”3 To impress yokels, Bill wore a glittering diamond in his shirtfront, although when negotiating hotel rates he covered it up to get the cheapest deal. According to Johnston, he pulled in hefty profits, sometimes $200 a day, and gave the false impression that he was worth several hundred thousand dollars. As in earlier years, Bill dabbled in commodity speculations. At one point, he bought fifty thousand bushels of corn and stored them in bins, selling the lot for a steep markup when grasshoppers devoured crops the following summer. Johnston always admired this colorful, rough-hewn character with his bottomless bag of tricks. “He was all business and his mind was centered on the almighty dollar.” 4
At first, Johnston did not know that Dr. Levingston was related to the Rockefellers, though he noticed a recurring obsession with John D. Rockefeller, whom Levingston claimed to visit in Cleveland once or twice a year. “He told me he went there to look after his money invested with John D. Rockefeller, and he would tell me wonderful stories of John, his shrewdness and great wealth.” One time, a skeptical Johnston asked Bill how he knew this famous personage. “I started John D. Rockefeller in the oil business,” Bill said flatly. “I loaned him the first money he invested in it and I helped him all along.” Bill boasted that his Standard Oil investment was now worth $375,000. “He used to say that he made John D. rich and he told me if I would stay with him and do as he said he would make me rich, too.”5 At first, it never dawned on Johnston that Bill was Rockefeller’s father, for the braggadocio seemed part of his carnival-barker blarney, but when Bill began to chatter about old man Davison, Johnston recognized the name of Rockefeller’s maternal grandfather and began to wonder. He remained suspicious for several years, while Bill resolutely denied the truth, scattering hints all the while.
In 1881, John D. agreed to buy his father a 160-acre ranch in Park River, North Dakota, on a simple condition: that he never take Margaret Allen there. (Bill spent winters with her in Freeport.) Never resigned to his father’s desertion and always fearing press exposure of his bigamy, John was still trying to lure his seventy-one-year-old father back to Eliza and away from the sinful second marriage. Johnston later explained how Dr. Levingston had told him “that John D. Rockefeller early had learned that his father was a bigamist, and that the ranch in North Dakota had been taken by [him] upon the advice of John D., who, in the later years of his father’s life, wished to wean him away from his second wife and have him live alone in a secluded place. Thus, if the old man should be discovered on his ranch, there would be no second wife with him.”6
When Bill bought his first parcel of land in Park River, John allowed him to hold it under the name of Levingston. But when he purchased additional acreage in 1884, the deed was conveyed to Pierson Briggs, John’s brother-in-law and a Standard Oil purchasing agent. In all likelihood, John paid for the property, using Briggs as a blind. When the land was conveyed back to Bill in 1886, he had to sign the transfer document “William Avery Rockefeller,” though he was known locally as Levingston, and one suspects that John insisted upon this step to strip Margaret Allen of any legal claim to the property. It was this legal maneuver that later established incontrovertibly that William Levingston and William Rockefeller were the same person.
For a long time, Bill and Charles Johnston occupied adjoining properties in Park River and spent lazy summers hunting and fishing. Their secluded town, thirty miles from the nearest railroad, gave Bill exactly the protective distance from sheriffs and medical societies that he required. During the sixteen summers he spent there, Bill shunned the main roads of town and carved out paths through the wheat fields. The townsfolk found him a queer, solitary old buzzard. Now and then, unaccountably, he cashed a Standard Oil check at the local bank. If the check was for $3,000, he might throw up his hands in mock surprise and pretend he had thought it was for only $300, as if someone of his wealth could afford to be negligent with money.
Later on, when he became a physician of distinction and president of the College of Medicine and Surgery in Chicago, Charles Johnston feared legal repercussions for his earlier gypsy wanderings with Bill and sought to portray him as a genuine folk healer instead of as a bald-faced quack. But neighbors had little doubt that Doc Levingston and Johnston were first-class bunco artists. “They had a big jug full of medicine and they treated all diseases from the same jug,” one acquaintance recalled. “I have often heard them joking together about the cure-all properties of the mixture in that jug. Dr. Levingston would say, ‘Yes, sir, that medicine will cure anything, pro
viding the patient has got $5 to pay for a bottle of it.’ ”7 In this distant hamlet, Bill functioned as a medical factotum, rigging up a funny gadget that pulled an aching tooth for a buck, and he even did some horse doctoring.
Johnston might never have unearthed the startling truth about Doc Levingston had it not been for a freak accident soon after they moved to Park River. They were constructing a cattle shed together when Bill injured himself lifting a heavy bar. Gasping in agony, he feared that he had a ruptured intestine and that death might be imminent. When Johnston asked if he should notify Margaret, Bill snapped, “I don’t want the Allens to get any more of my money than I can help.”8 (Relations with the Allens were apparently no more cordial than with John Davison.) Instead, Bill blurted out a shocking confession: He was the father of John D. Rockefeller, who should be informed in case he died. “No, you notify John D. Rockefeller, but be very careful and let no one else know it.”9