by Ron Chernow
Edith’s marriage to Harold McCormick brought Rockefeller under renewed scrutiny because it attached him to the reaper trust as well as the oil trust and steel trust. In August 1902, George Perkins, a J. P. Morgan partner, amalgamated McCormick Harvesting Machine, Deering Harvester, and three smaller competitors into International Harvester, a behemoth with 85 percent of the farm-equipment market. Harold McCormick was named vice president and brother Cyrus president of the company. It was a troubled merger, and the McCormicks feared that Perkins and the Deerings were secretly plotting to gain control of the company. To create a counterweight, they persuaded Rockefeller to take a five-million-dollar block of preferred stock. Never one to do things by halves, Rockefeller soon expanded his stake to between twenty-five and thirty million dollars. His loans to International Harvester later rose as high as $60 million, and he took stock in the trust as collateral.
This discreet collaboration did not thaw the icy relations between the Rockefeller family and the house of Morgan. On the contrary, the Rockefellers spied conspiracies everywhere. When Junior learned that control of International Harvester would be vested in a three-man voting-trust committee composed of Perkins, Cyrus McCormick, and one of the Deerings, he felt their worst fears were confirmed. “The object of so tying up these securities is that J.P. Morgan & Co. may be assured of the control of the business for a given period of years, and they have made every effort to make it difficult, yes well nigh impossible, for the securities to change hands,” he wrote to Senior.81 Though Rockefeller requested a board seat, George Perkins countered that this would tip the power balance toward the McCormicks and “engender feelings so strong that he could not hope to harmonize them,” as Junior told his father.82 Since the Rockefellers thought that J. P. Morgan and Company secretly exercised the Deering shares, they were not entirely surprised when their vigorous dissent came to nothing.
Equipped with a fine instinct for flattery, Harold professed the greatest admiration for Senior’s business abilities. “I have always taken you and the Standard Oil Company as my ideals in the progress of a large company,” he told him a year after the reaper trust was formed. 83 Rockefeller did not reciprocate the sentiment and grew critical of Harold’s stewardship of International Harvester. He developed a lengthy list of grievances, including Harold’s failure to notify him of upcoming earnings reports. Sounding an old refrain, he also chastised Harold for paying excessive dividends. In time, George Perkins grew adamant that the dividend should be boosted, even though the company was borrowing heavily. When Gates went to Morgan to protest, he came away convinced that the house of Morgan was milking the stock for short-term profit. “It is further highly probable,” he told Rockefeller, “that the reason why Morgan & Co. are so insistent on increasing the dividend from 4 to 6% is to enable them to sell out their stocks at a very high figure on the basis of the increased dividend. The stock has lately been manipulated upward clearly by an insider namely Mr. Perkins who knew that it was closely held and little was to be had.” 84 Senior was dismayed when Harold and Cyrus McCormick protested this only in the lamest fashion. When the voting trust expired in 1912, the McCormicks, with a majority of shares, grimly maintained control, but Rockefeller gradually sold off his position. He would not allow family sentiment to overrule his business judgment.
Unlike the nonconformist Edith, the middle daughter, Alta, was kind and obedient and always eager to please her parents. Slender and dainty, she was an anxious teenager and wrote to her brother reassuringly from the Rye Female Seminary, “Classes are not very large and I shall not be frightened.” 85 Of the three daughters, she probably felt most affectionate toward father and never strayed too far from the family fold. “No, I don’t change,” she once confessed to a friend. “I’m still wearing cotton stockings.”86 She could exhibit a touching innocence and even when married with children radiated a girlish charm. “She seemed just like the 16 years old daughter of the home,” Cettie told her diary after a visit from the forty-one-year-old Alta.87
As would happen to her brother, Alta suffered from terrible headaches. At age eight or nine, she had an attack of scarlet fever that left her partly deaf in one ear, an affliction that brought her closer to her parents. She later found significant relief with a Viennese physician, Dr. Isidor Muller, and for decades thereafter made annual pilgrimages to Karlsbad to renew this ear treatment. Alta was such a fine singer and pianist that many people did not detect the handicap, but close observers noted the quick, subtle way she flicked her good ear toward the speaker to catch his words.
Forever vigilant against fortune hunters with designs on his daughters, John D. worried the most about Alta, who was passionate and impressionable. Easily smitten, she was constantly falling in love with the wrong men, prompting family rescue operations. Often her crushes were mixed up with a missionary impulse to redeem her beloved from some presumed failing.
If Rockefeller had thought Alta safe in the sanctuary of the Baptist Church, he was rudely awakened in early 1891. Though the Rockefellers had moved to Manhattan, they resumed their involvement in the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church every summer when they returned to Forest Hill. As a deacon and superintendent of the Sunday school, Rockefeller still paid half the church expenses from his own pocket. While teaching in the Sunday school, Alta, nineteen, became infatuated with the forty-seven-year-old pastor, the Reverend Dr. L. A. Crandall. Despite the considerable age difference between them, Alta tried to wean him from his evil smoking habit. Though only five years younger than Rockefeller himself, Reverend Crandall was highly susceptible to Alta’s adoration. His wife had died a year and a half earlier, leaving him with a son in college, a daughter in private school, and an emotional void in his life.
Persuaded that Alta genuinely loved him, Crandall began to talk to her about marriage. When Rockefeller heard rumors of this, he refused to believe them at first, then summoned people to his home, quizzed them, and was stunned to discover the truth. Rockefeller delivered a stern ultimatum to Dr. Crandall: Either he would resign or the Rockefellers would withdraw from the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. The church would have been devastated without the Rockefeller money and torn apart by the scandal. Submitting to a superior force, Dr. Crandall left for a Chicago pastorate under the cover that he was moving there to seek a superior education for his children.
Three years later, Alta fell in love with a young minister named Robert A. Ashworth, who was in poor health. When Rockefeller got wind of his daughter’s attachment, he tried to figure out how to cure her of it without showing his hand. In late December 1894, he suddenly organized a party of young people, including Junior, Alta, and Ashworth, for a festive sledding and tobogganing trip to the Adirondack Mountains. Rockefeller chose to emphasize vigorous sports that would expose Ashworth’s frailty to Alta. “Most of the young men taken along were highly robust, and the minister in his physical weakness cut a sorry figure beside them,” said Junior’s friend Everett Colby.88 The ploy apparently worked and the problematic relationship ended a week later.
Of all the Rockefeller children, Alta was the most affected by the plight of the poor immigrant populations crowding into American cities in the late nineteenth century. Where her father exercised his benevolence at a distance, Alta rolled up her sleeves, went into the slums, and administered self-help programs for the poor. At Tenth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan, she set up a sewing school for indigent girls, drafted a corps of volunteer teachers, and enrolled 125 pupils. She also set up a small private clinic for invalid women.
Despite her managerial talents, Alta departed from her father’s penchant for building large institutions and favored small-scale charities, of which the best example was Alta House in Cleveland. In the 1890s, a local minister interested Rockefeller and his daughter in a charity, the Day Nursery and Free Kindergarten Association, serving poor Italian immigrants in the Murray Hill district, the Little Italy of Cleveland. Many working couples left their children there during the day. Rockefeller agreed t
o construct a new settlement building, Alta House, which was dedicated in February 1900 and furnished with a family laundry and medical dispensary. Although he supplied the money and covered the budget for its first twenty years, Alta did the legwork. She enjoyed direct contact with the immigrant families and took special delight in dressing up dolls for their children.
After completion of the settlement house, Alta was desperately eager to marry. When Edith married Harold McCormick in 1895, Alta was openly envious and told her brother that “I must try to enter heartily into all her happiness.”89 Through Harold McCormick, Alta met Ezra Parmalee Prentice, then working in Chicago as general counsel for the Illinois Steel Company. Cold and smart, a rigid perfectionist, Parmalee was also an amateur scientist with a large collection of meteorological instruments. The scion of an old Albany family and a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, he underwent the same microscopic scrutiny that awaited any supplicant for Alta’s hand. As she told Junior in early 1900, “[Parmalee] gave Father the names of four of his friends who would answer any questions about him that Father might want to ask and said that he would add to this list if it were desired.”90 When Parmalee passed muster, he and Alta were married the following year, but Parmalee and Senior had a remote relationship and seldom saw each other. Parmalee penned formal letters to his father-in-law that began, “Dear Mr. Rockefeller” and were signed, “E. Parmalee Prentice.”
Unlike Edith, Alta wanted to live near her parents. Perhaps Parmalee erred by abandoning his Chicago job to practice law in New York and join a firm that would one day evolve into Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy. Surrendering his freedom by slow degrees, he allowed Junior to buy and furnish a new home for them at 5 West Fifty-third Street. A gift from Senior, this house stood behind his own home on West Fifty-fourth Street. “Uncle John did furnish that house,” one of Alta and Parmalee’s children said. “My father could not have cared less and my mother did not have the know-how. She had grown up in the same rut as Uncle John and had no one to pull her out. She was timid, spiritual like her mother, and besides, she had the idea that her brother always knew best.”91 Parmalee had a fine legal mind, authored two legal books, and argued cases before the Supreme Court. At first, Rockefeller referred legal work to him and advised other moguls to follow suit, but he never got the expected gratitude from his proud son-in-law. In 1905, when Rockefeller asked him to reorganize Colorado Fuel and Iron, he was not only outraged by the fees Parmalee charged but indignant at his high-handed treatment of the bondholder representatives. At that point, Rockefeller advised Gates to refer less business to Parmalee’s firm. Unable to compromise on business principles, Rockefeller chose to jeopardize family relations instead.
Instead of distributing money to his children at maturity, Rockefeller kept them on allowances after they married and reserved the right to oversee their finances. Junior was appointed family auditor, and this turned him, perforce, into an irritating, censorious presence in the lives of his three brothers-in-law. When Junior decided in 1904 that Alta and Parmalee were spending twice as much as their income warranted, Parmalee bristled at this intrusion into their private lives. The prodigal generosity displayed by Senior after Alta’s wedding now turned into its opposite, and she was placed in the demeaning position of having to beg him for money. After a point, she did not disguise her anger. “Ten years ago when we came into the house you were good enough to pay for all the lace curtains,” she wrote to her father. “These curtains are now worn out and I have bought new ones. . . . Would you help me out by buying the curtains. If so, I shall be greatly pleased. If not, of course it will be all right.”92 Once he had made them feel punished for earlier extravagance, Senior would relent and disburse the money. As long as the right conditions were met, this controlling father was always happy to be generous. In 1910, he offered Alta and Parmalee $250,000 to purchase a house and land, and they bought a thousand-acre farm, which they christened Mount Hope, in the Berkshire Mountains near Williamstown, Massachusetts.
It is interesting that both Alta and Bessie married cold, remote, self-absorbed men. One can speculate that they chose these men because of their resemblance to their father, yet neither Charles Strong nor Parmalee Prentice had Rockefeller’s redeeming cordiality or spontaneous interest in other people. Many observers felt that Alta had blundered in marrying the autocratic Parmalee. Priggish and straitlaced, he demanded that their three children dress formally for dinner each night, and he never allowed them to bring friends to the table. Highly cerebral, Parmalee translated Treasure Island into Latin and insisted that the children converse with him in Latin each evening. Each Sunday, he prepared an essay on a theme and led a family discussion. Parmalee was so fearsome a father that even Junior’s children felt their own home positively wild and decadent in comparison.
Whatever her frustrations, Alta put the best face on the marriage. “Parmalee is beautiful in his thoughts for me and his consideration of me, and if he had his way nothing would ever be allowed to fret me nor disturb me for one single minute,” she wrote to her father. “He makes my life one long, glad song.” While Parmalee had rather cool relations with his children, Alta insisted to her father that they “love him as dearly and respect him so much that they cannot bear to see even the slightest shadow cross his face.”93 The compliment can also be read to connote a certain fear that the children had of him.
After purchasing the farm, Alta and her husband increasingly inhabited a rural world, tramping about the muddy fields and growing corn, oats, potatoes, buckwheat, and McIntosh apples. Alta’s letters abound in talk of plowing, threshing, and manure. Prompted by an interest in Gregor Mendel’s genetic theories, Parmalee began to experiment with scientific agriculture and studied ways to boost the output of their potato crop, dairy herd, and hens. Visitors to Mount Hope were far more likely to meet geneticists from Williams College than society figures. When Parmalee organized an experiment to cross black and white mice, Alta had to photograph a thousand mice. Where Edith had ventured out into the world, Alta—who had little contact with her sister— stuck to a simple life that revolved around her husband, children, farm, and horses.
Senior wanted all three sons-in-law, along with Junior, to be involved in the Rockefeller philanthropies; for reasons discussed later, he skipped over his three daughters. Senior and Junior made intermittent efforts to interest Parmalee, but he habitually declined their offers. At one point, Harold McCormick tried to relieve tensions between Junior and Parmalee. While admitting to Senior that Parmalee had “a proud and perhaps even haughty spirit,” Harold maintained that he was a good-hearted man who suffered from a “feeling on the part of the harsh world . . . that he is discredited by his family or even viewed with indifference.” Citing the hostility between Junior and Parmalee, Harold added, “Alta is torn almost in two in her love.”94 Apparently, Senior was not convinced. Soon after Harold’s plea, he complained to Edith that Junior was overburdened with charitable work and explicitly blamed his sons-in-law: “I could wish that Harold and Parmalee, with their broad shoulders, were heart and soul in this work with us.”95 Yet it was never clear how they could do that without subordinating their identities to Rockefeller, who never understood their need for freedom from his domineering presence.
While Parmalee craved distance from Senior, he did not renounce the financial rewards that came with the relationship. In 1912, Rockefeller guaranteed him a $30,000 annual income from his legal work; if he failed to reach that level, Rockefeller would make up the difference. Whether Parmalee suddenly grew lazy or suffered a sharp downturn in business is unclear, but two years later Rockefeller had to pay $26,000 of his salary. Two years after that, he doubled Parmalee’s annual guaranteed salary to $60,000. Meanwhile, Alta’s annual allowance was boosted to $50,000 in 1914. By transferring more money to Alta and Parmalee and giving them the means to pay their own bills, Rockefeller hoped to end the constant tussles between them and Junior over money— something that he should have done in the
first place.
CHAPTER 22
Avenging Angel
The relief that washed through Standard Oil after William McKinley’s 1896 election had proved short-lived. Despite a sudden upsurge of prosperity, the electorate remained wary of the new monopolies and the muscular arrivistes who had created them. The crusade to curtail the trusts was very much alive, if temporarily shunted to the state level. Once again, the first salvo against Standard Oil was fired in Ohio. The state attorney general, Frank Monnett—successor to the crusading David K. Watson—was the son of a Methodist preacher, a former railroad attorney, and a hardworking public servant. In 1897, he received a visit from the maverick refiner George Rice, who persuaded him that Standard Oil had never complied with the 1892 decision to sever Ohio Standard from the trust. To check up on his adversaries, Rice had bought six shares of Standard Oil trust certificates. When he tried to redeem them for fractional shares in the twenty constituent companies spun off by the 1892 decision, the liquidating trustees—including Rockefeller—procrastinated for four years. Now, five years after the verdict, $27 million in trust certificates remained unredeemed. On November 9, 1897, Monnett charged that Standard of Ohio had never seriously planned to leave the trust and was in contempt of court. It had all been a charade to pacify trustbusters.