Titan

by Ron Chernow

  In a grave misstep, Rockefeller never publicly announced his retirement and retained the titular presidency of Standard Oil of New Jersey. As a result, he remained an inviting target for critics and was personally held liable for many of the questionable judgments made by Archbold, who was nominally vice president of New Jersey Standard.

  In our age of an assertive business press, when corporate secrets are readily ferreted out by reporters, it is scarcely conceivable that the world’s richest man, running the world’s largest business, could have drifted away from business without public knowledge. Yet much of the press—to Rockefeller’s later chagrin—swallowed the cover story whole. While some reporters knew that he no longer reported to work, they doubted that he had really surrendered supervisory power. The misconception was understandable. He owned nearly 30 percent of Standard Oil stock—far more than anyone else—and did not hesitate to proffer advice as the urge seized him. Small groups of company lawyers and executives periodically briefed him, and Archbold made regular weekend pilgrimages to consult him at his Westchester estate. As trustbusters took dead aim at the company, Rockefeller was driven to develop a common defense with current executives, pulling him back into the past even as he tried to move on to new pursuits.

  Rockefeller entered retirement just at the birth of the American automobile industry. As he noted, “When I retired from business . . . we had just begun to hope that some day [autos] would be practical.” 38 That year, Frank and Charles Duryea produced thirteen two-cylinder runabouts in Springfield, Massachusetts—the first time a car company had produced several cars from a standardized model—and Henry Ford put the finishing touches to the quadri-cycle, his first horseless carriage. The automobile would make John D. Rockefeller far richer in retirement than at work. When he stepped down from Standard Oil, he was probably worth about $200 million—$3.5 billion today—whereas, thanks to the internal-combustion engine, his fortune soared to $1 billion by 1913—surely history’s most lucrative retirement, and one that must have softened the sting of press vituperation.

  In 1897, Joseph Pulitzer’s World showcased John D. Rockefeller and Henry M. Flagler as two of the five chief overlords of the Standard Oil trust, yet Flagler had now ranged even farther afield than Rockefeller. A man with many cronies but few close friends, Rockefeller reserved warm praise for Flagler. “You and I have been associated in business upwards of thirty-five years,” Rockefeller wrote to him in 1902, “and while there have been times when we have not agreed on questions of policy I do not know that one unkind word has ever passed or unkind thought existed between us. . . . I feel that my pecuniary success is due to my association with you, if I have contributed anything to yours I am thankful.”39 Flagler repaid the compliment, telling one Baptist preacher that “if he would spend the remainder of his life in praising Mr. Rockefeller he could not say too much nor more than was actually deserved.”40

  But these high-flown, touching tributes masked a certain froideur that had crept into their relationship as they neared retirement. Although Rockefeller never said so outright, one senses that he thought Flagler had become a slave to fashion and ostentation, a traitor to the austere puritanical creed that had united them. Though his hair and mustache were now dusted with gray, Flagler had a lean, handsome face and was highly susceptible to female charm. He had suffered many personal misfortunes in marriage and exercised woefully bad judgment. His consumptive first wife, Mary, had become a professional invalid. When doctors recommended an extended winter stay for her in 1878, Henry joined her in Florida, but, itching to get back to Standard Oil, he bolted for New York after a few weeks. Unwilling to stay alone, Mary followed him back instead of taking time to recuperate properly. When she died in May 1881, Henry felt profoundly guilty. At that point, he took stock of his life and decided he had sacrificed too much to business, telling one reporter, “I have been giving all my days to the Lord hitherto, and now I’m taking one for myself.”41 During the winter of 1882–1883, he was hospitalized with a liver ailment and began to pore over newspaper articles about Florida land deals. In 1883, at age fifty-three, Flagler married Ida Alice Shourds, thirty-five, a former actress who had nursed Mary during her illness. A short woman with red hair, electric blue eyes, and an incendiary temper, Ida Alice seemed determined to run through Flagler’s money, gathering an expensive wardrobe and trying to buy her way into New York high society.

  Whatever his reservations about the match, Rockefeller visited Henry and Ida Alice on their honeymoon in Saint Augustine, Florida, during the winter of 1883–1884. No less prophetic in his business hunches than at Standard Oil, Flagler had faith that Florida would someday be converted from a pestilential, mosquito-ridden jungle into a place of wonder, recreation, and exotic beauty. The next winter, when the Rockefellers and Flaglers again traveled to Saint Augustine, Henry bought several acres of orange grove as the site for the future Ponce de Leon Hotel. To cater to a less-affluent clientele, he added the Alcazar Hotel across the street, its façade patterned after the Alcazar Palace of Seville. As the resident railroad expert of Standard Oil, Flagler saw that Florida’s development had been retarded by inadequate transport, and in the late 1880s he bought two railroads that opened for settlement a coastal stretch around Ormond and Daytona beaches. Buying a large hotel on the Halifax River, he re-modeled it, grafted on an eighteen-hole golf course, and renamed it the Ormond Beach Hotel. Years later, John D. Rockefeller’s winter home, The Casements, stood directly across the street.

  Driven by his faith in Florida’s future, Flagler merged his railroads in 1892 and conceived a master plan for a railroad that would snake down the length of Florida’s Atlantic coast to Key West, with Flagler resorts dotting the route—a vision he realized in 1912. Each time Flagler pushed the railway farther south, it opened more swamp to development, triggering another land boom.

  As always when infected with development fever, Flagler ran up bills that taxed even his massive fortune. In 1890, he sold 2,500 shares of Standard Oil stock to Rockefeller for $375,000 and made further stock sales to him for several years—right on the verge of the auto boom that would send those shares soaring. Rockefeller followed Flagler’s business adventures in Florida with sympathy but at a distance. “Henry did a great job in Florida,” he said. “Think of pouring out all that money on a whim. But then Henry was always bold.”42 Yet he turned a deaf ear to his friend’s repeated entreaties to visit again. “I believe this country would be a revelation to you, if you would take a week to look into it,” Flagler pleaded with him in 1889.43 Yet Rockefeller still stayed away from the state after his 1884–1885 visit. “It is marvelous what Mr. Flagler has wrought in that southern country,” Rockefeller told William Rainey Harper in 1898, “and I regret not to have paid him a visit long ago.”44

  Why this sudden distance in so singular a friendship? When they did see each other, Rockefeller and Flagler were always nostalgic, yet they seldom contrived to meet. One suspects that John and Cettie were scandalized by the showy airs and sybaritic indulgence of Ida Alice Flagler. Bowing to his second wife, Henry had bought a private railroad car and a 160-foot yacht (both tellingly named the Alicia), and the Flaglers behaved more and more like the gaudy arrivistes the Rockefellers abhorred. Then Ida Alice began to show incipient signs of the mental illness that overtook her in later years. Out of the blue she began to chatter about her husband’s adultery—a real enough situation, but one magnified in Ida Alice’s fevered mind. In 1891, Henry became infatuated with Mary Lily Kenan, a beautiful, gifted twenty-four-year-old from a prominent North Carolina family who offered him respite from his moody, unstable wife, and Ida Alice became pathologically obsessed with this relationship.

  During the summer of 1893, Ida Alice’s manic behavior worsened when she obtained a Ouija board. Closeted in her room, she spent hours communing with astral spirits, convinced the czar of Russia had fallen madly in love with her. When she threatened to kill Flagler in October 1895 and accused him of trying to poison her, she was commi
tted to a sanatorium in Pleasantville, New York. In the spring of 1896, after the doctors declared Ida Alice cured, she returned to live with Henry at their large estate, Satan’s Toe, in Mamaroneck, New York. For a few happy weeks, they rode bikes together and read aloud to each other, suggesting a tenuous return to happier times. Then Ida Alice bribed a servant to smuggle in a Ouija board and promptly succumbed to old demons. Once back at the board, she relapsed into her paranoid dreamworld. When she flew at one doctor, wielding a pair of scissors, she was returned to the Pleasantville sanatorium in March 1897. There she renamed herself Princess Ida Alice von Schotten Tech and never saw Henry again.

  After the courts ruled Ida Alice Flagler insane in 1899, Henry set up a trust fund for her, stocked with $2 million in Standard Oil shares, which would appreciate to more than $15 million by her death in July 1930. Henry, meanwhile, was in a bind: New York state law would not permit divorce on grounds other than adultery, and he could not prove adultery against a woman confined to an asylum. Never deterred by restrictive laws, Flagler switched his legal residence to Florida and applied his influence with state legislators. On April 9, 1901, a special law was enacted permitting divorce on grounds of incurable insanity—a law known as the Flagler divorce law. Within two weeks, Flagler married Mary Lily Kenan. The wedding was performed in high style, Flagler bringing friends down from New York in a private railroad car, but Rockefeller did not attend. He must have felt Flagler was making a spectacle of himself, especially when he was named correspondent in a divorce suit in Syracuse, New York, one month after his marriage. That the Rockefellers had drifted away from Flagler is suggested by a note Cettie wrote her son in August 1900. “We have the announcement of Mr. Flagler’s marriage to a Miss Kenan, of N. Carolina. She is thirty-six, he, seventy-two.” 45 Cettie expresses no pleasure at the marriage, but only cites, with implicit disapproval, the difference in age. Mary Kenan was actually thirty-three at the time.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Dauphin

  When he entered college in 1893, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., seemed like the prototype of the poor little rich boy, stuck with an overdeveloped conscience and the badge of being the son of one of the world’s wealthiest men. Having had a rather solitary childhood in mansions and on estates, he did not have the social ease of other young men of his age and class. Desperately eager to please his parents, he had exhausted himself in trying to scrub sin from his soul.

  Much like his father, Junior couldn’t make decisions lightly and fretted over his choice of a college. Set to go to Yale, he passed its preliminary entrance exam and had even selected a room when reports reached him from one minister that a fast set dominated the Yale social scene. Others might have found this decidedly in Yale’s favor, but Junior decided to look elsewhere and finally selected Brown because three close friends had chosen to attend it. As he told Dr. William Rainey Harper, whom he consulted, in a tone of excruciating humility, about the choice of schools, “Being naturally somewhat retiring (I beg you to pardon personal references), I do not make friends readily, and some of those interested in my welfare fear if I go to Yale in a class wholly strange to me, I will be ‘lost in the crowd’ so to speak and remain much by myself, instead of getting the social contact I so greatly need.”1 Junior tended to discuss himself clinically, as if he were a laboratory specimen wriggling under glass, his parents, especially his mother, having taught him to probe his behavior with such antiseptic detachment.

  Junior entered Brown in September 1893, just as the industrial slump worsened, and his college years unfolded against a turbulent backdrop of radical rhetoric and labor unrest, much of it directed against his father. Founded in the eighteenth century, Brown was the oldest and best-endowed Baptist college, and its president, E. Benjamin Andrews, was a Baptist clergyman– cum–political economist. In those days, college presidents were often ordained ministers who had a profound impact on the student body in classroom and chapel alike. During the Civil War, Andrews had lost an eye in the Petersburg siege, and his glass eye endowed him with a visionary gaze. Junior admired his spiritual zeal and keen intelligence and was especially struck one day when Andrews told him, “Rockefeller, never be afraid to stand up for a position when you know you are right.” 2

  Six months before Junior arrived at Brown, Andrews had composed a flattering letter to Henry Demarest Lloyd about Wealth Against Commonwealth. “It is decidedly in my line,” he assured him, “although you are more radical than I am at some points.”3 Not averse to trusts, Andrews wanted to regulate them for the public good and distribute their benefits more equitably. When Junior took a course with him in practical ethics, Andrews gave him a finer appreciation for employer responsibility in big business. In one undergraduate essay, Junior already evinced the proclivity for corporate reform that would mark his adult life: “Who can look about upon the millions of laborers whose life is a treadmill, a continuous round of work to which they are driven by dire necessity . . . without being fired with a desire to revolutionize their condition by adopting the profit-sharing system?”4 However idolized by students, Andrews was roundly condemned by many alumni when he supported William Jennings Bryan’s presidential bid in 1896 and endorsed free coinage of silver, an episode that cost him his job. Henry Demarest Lloyd spied Rockefeller’s fine hand in the ouster, telling a friend, “One of the reasons which actuated the trustees in crowding [Andrews] out was the statement that as long as he remained, Mr. Rockefeller would never give the university any money.”5

  The bashful young Rockefeller, quartered in Slater Hall, was much shorter than his father but broad chested and square shouldered. Both his mother and Grandma Spelman exhorted him to be vigilant against dormitory vice. In his first letter home, he reassured them by saying that he had already attended a prayer meeting, adding, “Grandmother will be interested to know that there are three colored men in the class.”6 He also had begun teaching a Sunday-school class at a Baptist church in Providence, and his relieved father wrote him that “the moral and religious tone seem of the best.”7 During his busy freshman year, Junior joined the glee club, the mandolin club, and a string quartet with some young ladies. As he ventured timidly beyond the self-contained world of his youth, he could not just enjoy spontaneous pleasure and had to justify it in terms of self-improvement. When he joined a college operetta, he wrote his mother, “Then too appearing on the platform before people as I would do and have done in the Glee Club gives me confidence in myself, and helps me to become easy in public which I always need.”8

  Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., around the time they were married. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)

  Doggedly earnest, tenacious in his studies, Junior was a good enough student to make Phi Beta Kappa, and he especially enjoyed economics and sociology. Unlike his father, however, his self-confidence was a fragile bloom, easily crushed. “If a person scolded me,” he said, “I shut up like a clam. I wasn’t much of a scholar, but I always tried hard and I didn’t like to be reproached.”9 Everybody noticed his Baptist austerity: He did not drink, smoke, play cards, go to the theater, or even read Sunday papers. True to his temperance pledge, he plied students with crackers and hot chocolate when they came to his room, but he terribly upset Grandma Spelman when he let boys smoke there.

  Junior’s frugality was the stuff of campus legend, and everybody had a favorite anecdote: how he soaked apart two two-cent stamps that got stuck together or how he pressed his own trousers, sewed his own buttons, and mended his own dish towels. Following his father’s example, he recorded every expense in his little book—sometimes to snickers from classmates—and even recorded bouquets of flowers bought for dates. Whether putting money in the plate at church or buying a pencil from a beggar, he jotted down everything to the last decimal. “He told me that his father allowed him all the money he wanted,” said a friend, “but insisted on an exact account of every penny.”10 Another classmate recalled, “It used to be a great joke, particularly among the girls
in Providence, and they used to laugh a good deal about being treated to a soda by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and having him enter it into his book as he sat at the soda fountain.” 11

  Despite his shy formality, Junior was generally popular at Brown or, at least, highly respected. Some students were bound to see him as a hopeless prig, and one day as he was crossing the campus, one heckled him, “Here comes Johnny Rock, reeking with virtue and without one redeeming vice!” 12 For the most part, however, he became more sociable and self-assured and slowly weaned himself from the airless morality of his upbringing. He was tolerant by nature, telling Grandma Spelman in one letter, “One sees all sorts and conditions of men here viewing life, duty, pleasure and the hereafter, so differently. My ideas and opinions change I find in many ways. I would stickle less for the letter of the law, now, more for the spirit.” 13 Haltingly, he forged an identity separate from those of his forebears. He was more ecumenical, more open to the outside world, more considerate of alternate views. As president of his junior class, he got his classmates to desist from drinking alcohol at the class supper, which had traditionally been a drunken debauch. And when his class took its annual stag cruise to Newport, Junior agreed to keep kegs of beer on hand but tried to avert heavy indulgence. His parents were ecstatic. “Dear John,” his mother wrote, “you have been our pride and comfort from the day of your birth but at no time have we been more grateful for such a son as at the present moment—Tears of joy filled dear father’s eyes when your letter was read and he wants me to tell you how proud and happy it made him.” 14

  At Brown, Junior learned to savor such illicit pleasures as theater and dancing, small triumphs for a Baptist boy bred with such unrelenting morality. After his sophomore year, he took a bicycle trip through England with Everett Colby, a classmate whose father was a railroad builder. (John D. had invested in his ventures.) In London, Junior saw his first plays: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Charley’s Aunt, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As if admitting to a furtive visit to a brothel, he told his mother: “I shouldn’t have done it at home on account of the example but thought it not harmful in London, where I knew no one and had an opportunity of seeing several of Shakespeare’s plays.”15 Junior made it through his freshman year without dancing, then succumbed to this vice sophomore year by dancing all evening at a party thrown at the home of a university trustee. To practice for the event, he whirled his friend Lefferts Dashiell around his dormitory room. The whole evening, as he danced with a Miss Foster, he feared that he would crash to the floor. Holding on for dear life, he had the distinct impression that Miss Foster was propping him up. That evening, he met the vivacious Abby Aldrich, daughter of Rhode Island senator Nelson Aldrich, but could not muster the courage to dance with her. The love of dancing lasted, and by the time he graduated Junior indulged this sinful passion two or three times a week.