by Ron Chernow
Cettie Rockefeller never entirely relaxed her militance about this pastime. During his senior year, Junior wanted to repay his classmates for their kindness to him and asked his parents to host a dance in Providence. Striking a compromise, John and Cettie agreed to have a musical evening of Mendelssohn, Bach, Chopin, and Liszt, followed by informal dancing. When they mailed out the invitations, the infernal word dancing appeared in small, almost apologetic lettering in the lower left-hand corner of the card. Yet when the evening arrived, Cettie developed a headache and took refuge in her hotel room. As a result, Senior, resplendent in tails and white gloves, stood alone on the receiving line, cordially greeting three hundred guests. Cettie’s behavior on this and other occasions supports the thesis that she retreated to her bed as an escape from threatening realities.
Before Brown, Junior had known little about sports: The Rockefellers were more interested in exercise, which stressed health, than in sports, which stressed pleasure. When he became a manager of the football team his senior year, Junior endured endless ribbing when he referred to the center as “the middle.” He was so much his thrifty father’s son that when one husky lineman asked for new shoestrings, Junior retorted, “What did you do with the pair I gave you last week?”16 Because of his son’s position, Senior, who had never been to a football game, attended one in New York between Brown and the Carlisle Indians. He started out in the stands, calmly surveying the spectacle, then grew so excited that he rushed down to the field in his tall silk hat and began to race up and down the sidelines with the coaches. The captain of the team assigned a lineman to explain the fine points of the game to him, and with his exceptional mind for tactical maneuvers John D. Rockefeller gave the impression that he had mastered the game, with all its subtleties, within five minutes.
Junior needed somebody who would release him from the suffocating prudery of his upbringing, and that liberating figure was Abby Aldrich. She was a confident girl who did not need his money and was not awed by his name. Something about the socially maladroit Junior appealed to the maternal instincts of this sophisticated young lady with the gracious manners and erect carriage of a senator’s daughter. One of eight children, she had often hosted her father’s Washington receptions and had met everyone from General Ambrose Burnside to William McKinley to Custer’s widow. Tall, voluptuous, and somewhat matronly in appearance, she was handsome rather than pretty. She liked to wear broad-brimmed, eccentric hats, a symbol of her outgoing personality. She seemed to give Junior the faith in himself that his parents couldn’t foster. As he said of their meeting sophomore year, “She treated me as if I had all the savoir faire in the world and her confidence did me a lot of good.”17 Through Abby, Junior made a startling discovery that had been artfully concealed from him: Life could be fun.
Abby came from old New England stock on her mother’s side and was descended from Elder William Brewster, a passenger on the Mayflower. Though the son of a mill hand, Senator Aldrich claimed Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island colony, as an ancestor. Tall and virile, with thick mustache and side-whiskers, the unflappable Senator Aldrich had escaped from poverty, but he never lost his dread of it. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1881 and held that seat for the next thirty years, winding up as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. A confirmed protectionist and devoted servant of the trusts, he used public office to feather his own nest. Bolstered by a $5 million loan from the American Sugar Refining Company—the so-called sugar trust—he invested in four Providence street-railway companies while also representing the New Haven Railroad. Senator Aldrich turned public service into such a lucrative racket that he amassed $16 million by his death. As if he were a mogul, not a public servant, he built a 99-room château at Warwick Neck on Narragansett Bay and sailed a 200-foot yacht, equipped with 8 staterooms and a crew of 27. He bore a host of pejoratives, most notably those conferred by Lincoln Steffens, who referred to him in McClure’s Magazine as the “political boss of the United States, the power behind the throne, the general manager of the U.S.”18 Too entrenched to be ruffled by such journalistic pinpricks, Senator Aldrich stuck by his policy of “Deny nothing, explain nothing.”19
Abby grew up in a lively atmosphere of balls, parties, and plays. Opposed to religious severity, Aldrich spoiled his children with presents and seldom disciplined them. At the Aldrich mansion at 110 Benevolent Street in Providence, the senator liked to play bridge or even poker with Abby. (In later years, Junior would not join the game but sat quietly with a book, unable to break that taboo.) A self-taught aesthete with a highly cultivated taste for books and art, the senator had an excellent library of antique books, frequented auctions for furniture, rugs, and art, and so thoroughly schooled Abby in European museums that she knew their paintings by heart. As a teenager, she dipped into the novels of Dickens, Trollope, Hawthorne, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.
Junior’s romance with Abby played itself out amid a whirl of college dances, football games, tandem-bike rides, and canoe trips, as well as church services on Sundays. When they strolled along, Junior carried graham crackers in his pocket, and Abby freely reached in and helped herself. As Junior said, “She was so gay and young and so in love with everything.”20 By the spring of junior year, Junior was a regular visitor at Benevolent Street. One Sunday, he mentioned in passing to the senator his summer plans to cruise the Norwegian fjords with his sister Alta. The senator must have warmed to the idea of Abby marrying young Rockefeller, for a few weeks later he bought tickets for himself, his wife, and two daughters on the same ship, and they dined together during the cruise. Back in Providence in the fall, Junior saw Abby so frequently that people began to speculate when they would marry. But Junior approached the matter with the same soul-searching and nervous energy that he brought to every major decision, and he vacillated through four years of tortured introspection. It was perhaps apparent to everybody in Providence except him that he would someday marry Abby.
Certainly the size of his projected inheritance made the choice of wife a momentous decision. Junior idealized his father, and yet he had to deal with a mounting drumbeat of criticism against him. Abby seemed tailor-made to help him with this predicament, for they were both the children of public pariahs. Junior must have admired her ability to be the loyal daughter of a controversial senator while clinging to her own liberal beliefs. She lived in a way that betrayed neither her father nor herself and thereby pointed a path for Junior.
As he approached graduation, Junior still engaged in hero worship of Senior. His glorified image of his father was inextricably bound up with his lowly image of himself. On his son’s twenty-first birthday, Senior sent him twenty-one dollars, along with a tender note. “We are grateful beyond measure for your promise and for the confidence your life inspires in us, not only, but in all your friends and acquaintances and this is of more value than all earthly possessions.” To this, Junior replied, “People talk about sons being better than their fathers, but if I can be half as generous, half as unselfish, half as kindly affectionate to my fellow men as you have been, I shall not feel that my life has been in vain.”21 As Junior contemplated the duties that awaited him after college, the prospect only magnified his sense of inadequacy. Shortly before graduation, he was invited to join the board of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. When he asked his father’s advice, Junior made clear that “my first duty as well as my pleasure after this year would be to help you in whatever capacity or position you might see fit.” 22 He never wavered in this decision to subordinate his life to his father’s.
As graduation neared, Junior grew wistful about his years at Brown and the relaxed camaraderie it had allowed him. He would shortly emerge into the spotlight of public attention, which would burn brightly for the rest of his life. As he thought of following in his father’s footsteps, his courage failed him, and he told his mother soon after graduation, “I feel but little confidence in my ability to fill the position which is before me, but know that I am not afraid to wor
k or do whatever is required of me, and with God’s help I will do my best.”23 “The future is glowing with possibilities of service for God and man,” Cettie wrote back. “May the Holy Spirit take possession of your entire being, and guide you into all truth.”24 By making him view life so loftily, by encouraging him to see himself as a valiant Christian soldier, she might have inadvertently exacerbated his anxieties. This transcendent perspective seemed to allow little room for normal human failure. Junior’s father, meanwhile, remained inscrutably silent about Junior’s forthcoming role at 26 Broadway, which could only have deepened his dread of the unknown.
When John D. Rockefeller, Jr., started work on October 1, 1897, he was entering 26 Broadway not long after Senior had left it. He was installed at an oak rolltop desk on the austere and slightly shabby ninth floor, in an office suite dedicated to his father’s outside investments and philanthropies. He worked cheek by jowl with Frederick T. Gates, George Rogers, and a telegrapher, Mrs. Tuttle, who had the dubious honor of opening Rockefeller’s crank mail—and “there was a great deal of it,” said Junior.25 Though he worked in the Standard Oil building, Junior was uninvolved in its management, and he belonged instead to the incipient Rockefeller family office. If his $6,000 annual salary, paid by father, seemed generous, it was a disguised allowance that kept Junior in a state of childlike dependence.
Junior turned aside suggestions that he go to law school or treat himself to an around-the-world trip. “I felt that I had no time for either, that if I was going to learn to help Father in the care of his affairs, the sooner my apprenticeship under his guidance began, the better.” 26 Junior was again living at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street and had ample opportunity to sound him out, yet the taciturn Senior provided no clues about what he expected of his son, leaving him in limbo. “Father never said a word to me about what I was to do in the office before I began work there, nor has he ever since. Moreover, he did not say anything on the subject to anyone else in the office, so far as I have ever learned. Apparently he intended that I should make my own way.”27 Junior never admitted to being bothered by this tight-lipped approach. Like God, father’s ways were mysterious but, it was always assumed, benevolent in the end. As a stout believer in self-reliance, Senior probably wanted to test his son’s aptitude for business and let him find his own way without coaching.
Rockefeller had numerous channels of intelligence, and Junior marveled at his knowledge of everything that went on at 26 Broadway. At a certain point during dinner, Rockefeller would apologize to guests for changing the subject and query Junior about his day’s work, displaying seeming omniscience about affairs downtown. Rockefeller’s gentle, probing questions were the closest Junior came to a business education from him. Father and son disagreed more than they publicly acknowledged, and Rockefeller was once heard to grumble, “You know, boys go to college and come back knowing everything about business and everything else.”28
At work, Junior had no formal place in the hierarchy and had to guess at his powers. He performed some menial tasks, such as filling inkwells. Never given his father’s power of attorney, he began to sign papers for him, unsure whether father would object; when he did not, Junior took this for a sign of approval and continued the practice. The first major task that Senior assigned his son was a ghoulish one: to supervise the design and transport of a soaring granite obelisk for the family burial plot in Cleveland, a shaft so huge it took up two freight cars. The young Brown graduate also picked out wallpaper for the family houses, sold worn-out buckboards and carriages, and managed Rockefeller real estate in Cleveland. One observer called it an “anxious and troubled” time for Junior, who felt that his performance was wanting, that he was not earning his keep, and that he was unequal to his appointed destiny.29
If Junior did not feel totally adrift in these years, the credit must go to Frederick T. Gates, who gave him the guidance he sorely missed from his father. Together, they toured iron ranges in Minnesota and timberlands in the Pacific Northwest, often playing violins together in their private railroad car. Gates invited Junior to audit business meetings, and he responded with everlasting gratitude. Under Gates’s tutelage, Junior began to assume his rightful place in the Rockefeller firmament and joined the University of Chicago board just three months after starting work. While still in his twenties, he became a director of U.S. Steel, National City Bank, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, and, of course, Standard Oil.
Bowed by a sense of premature failure, Junior was desperate to succeed at something and decided to try his hand at the stock market. Since his father had professed a puritan contempt for Wall Street, Junior was surprised to learn that he had played the market for years and traded actively. To teach them the art of investing, Rockefeller allowed Junior and his sister Alta to borrow from him at 6 percent and invest in equities. During his maiden year at 26 Broadway, Junior made several thousand dollars in the market and, like all giddy novices, began to take more risks and place ever-larger bets.
Meanwhile, a Wall Street operator named David Lamar—later styled the Wolf of Wall Street—began to cultivate George Rogers, Senior’s private secretary. In the fall of 1899, Rogers served as the gullible go-between for a scam. Transmitting information from Lamar, Rogers informed Junior that James R. Keene, a celebrated stock trader, had taken a big position in U.S. Leather and suggested that Junior join the buying. Led to believe that he was acting in concert with Keene, Junior took a gigantic stake in the stock. Upon learning that George Rogers was meeting secretly with Lamar at lunchtime, he had a queasy intuition of foul play. Junior summoned Lamar to his office, and he arrived with a flushed, agitated air. As Junior recalled, “One look at him was enough. I knew I had been sold out.”30 It turned out Keene knew nothing of the affair and that Lamar was liquidating leather stock as fast as Junior bid it up. The unthinkable had happened: The meek Junior had dropped nearly a million dollars—equal to more than $17 million today—of father’s money in the market. He knew the situation was unforgivable: He had never asked to meet Keene, had done no research, and had thrown away a fortune on a wild tip.
One can only guess Junior’s emotional turmoil when he broke this astonishing news to father, a harrowing meeting that was forever seared into his memory. “Never shall I forget my shame and humiliation as I went up to report the affair to Father. I hadn’t the money to meet the loss; there was nothing else to do.”31 Senior listened quietly and conducted a calm but thorough inquiry, investigating every detail of the transaction—all without a syllable of reproach. At the end, he simply said, “All right, I’ll take care of it, John.”32 Junior waited for some criticism, some outburst, some paternal homily about future behavior. But nothing further was said. It was a vintage Rockefeller performance: The true lesson lay in what he did not say and what he did not do. Rockefeller sensed that his insecure son had castigated himself so unmercifully that bitter reproaches were superfluous. By showing generosity, he enlisted his son’s loyalty forever. The incident must have reinforced Junior’s innate conservatism, for the one time he had entered into a rash, immoderate scheme he had been severely punished.
Working for months without a break, Junior began to carry a lot of pent-up tension. To purge this nervous energy, he went after work to the West Fifty-fifth Street stable, where his father’s horses exercised in bad weather, and furiously chopped firewood from twenty-foot logs. Over lunch one day with Henry E. Cooper, a former Brown classmate, Junior brooded about his own inadequacy. Startled by the personality change, Cooper followed up with a letter of friendly advice. “You are altogether too grumpy, too morose and gloomy, John. . . . I truly think it would do you good, for instance, to take up smoking an occasional cigarette, or something of that sort. I am not joking. Just try being a shade more reckless or careless as to whether or not you reach perfection within five years, and see if you don’t find more happiness.”33 Pathetically eager to please, Junior noted in his ledger a few days later, “pack of cigarettes— 10 cents.” It was the la
st time he ever smoked.
Trapped on a treadmill of work, duty, and prayer, Junior found it hard to squeeze in time for Abby Aldrich. Sometimes on weekends, he took the train to Providence after work, dined with her, then grabbed the midnight train back to New York. In Manhattan, Junior often attended dances and parties with Alta, who was also living at home. She developed such an excessive attachment to her brother that she treated Abby as a rival and tried to undermine her. Alta’s adamant opposition could only have prolonged Junior’s doubts about marrying Abby.
Senior saw that his son could not carry his load lightly and begged him to relax more. Cettie, however, insistently pushed him forward in his quest for moral perfection. Two days after he began at 26 Broadway, she prodded him to join the Bible class at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, telling him to be “mighty in the Scriptures. The most powerful Christians are Bible Christians.”34 Sometimes she made it seem that humanity’s salvation hinged upon his personal purity. In an astonishing letter of July 23, 1899, Cettie likened her husband to God and Junior to the Christ child. “You can never forget that you are a prince, the Son of the King of kings, and so you can never do what will dishonor your Father or be disloyal to the King.” 35 Cettie’s tone is especially revealing amid the rising attacks against Standard Oil. Much like her husband, she had fashioned an alternate reality in which, instead of being a corporate villain, he was converted into an American saint. There were no shades of gray permitted in the Rockefeller household.