Titan

by Ron Chernow

  In her 1905 character study, Tarbell stressed Rockefeller’s fidgety behavior, the way he craned his neck and scanned the room, as if searching for assassins. “My two hours study of Mr. Rockefeller aroused a feeling I had not expected, which time has intensified. I was sorry for him. I know no companion so terrible as fear. Mr. Rockefeller, for all the conscious power written in face and voice and figure, was afraid, I told myself, afraid of his own kind.”94 It did not occur to her that she had contributed to that fear. This edgy behavior was vitally important for Tarbell because it suggested that Rockefeller had a guilt-ridden conscience, that God was torturing him, that he could not enjoy his ill-gotten wealth; the ordinary reader could find no more satisfying fantasy. “For what good this undoubted power of achievement, for what good this towering wealth, if one must be forever peering to see what is behind!”95 It certainly never occurred to Tarbell that Rockefeller might be searching the congregation for charity recipients.

  Despite her fears, Tarbell and her associates evaded detection at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church that Sunday morning. It was the only time that Tarbell ever actually stood in Rockefeller’s presence. Ironically, he never knowingly set eyes on the woman who did more than any other person to transmogrify his image.

  By the end of her nineteen-part series, Tarbell had come to regard Rockefeller as the embodiment of evil. She had largely maintained a clinical tone, despite many shrill digressions, but in the poisonous two-part character study of July and August 1905, she allowed her vengeful feelings to blossom. Throwing off any pose of objectivity, she found in Rockefeller “concentration, craftiness, cruelty, and something indefinably repulsive.” She described him as a “living mummy,” hideous and diseased, leprous and reptilian, his physiognomy blighted by moral degeneracy. The pious, churchgoing image that Rockefeller projected was only a “hypocritical facade brilliantly created by the predatory businessman.”

  The disease which in the last three or four years has swept Mr. Rockefeller’s head bare of hair, stripped away even eyelashes and eyebrows, has revealed all the strength of his great head. . . . The big cheeks are puffy, bulging unpleasantly under the eyes, and the skin which covers them has a curiously unhealthy pallor. It is this puffiness, this unclean flesh, which repels, as the thin slit of a mouth terrifies. . . . Mr. Rockefeller may have made himself the richest man in the world, but he has paid. Nothing but paying ever ploughs such lines in a man’s face, ever sets his lips to such a melancholy angle.96

  Rockefeller could brush off Tarbell’s critique of his business methods as biased, but he was deeply pained by the character study. He was furious that Tarbell converted his alopecia, which had produced so much suffering, into a sign of moral turpitude. He was no less upset by her charge that he was ill at ease in his church, for this struck at the heart of his lifelong faith. As he said later, he was not fearful in church “because there was no place where I felt more at home in a public assembly than in this old church, where I had been since a boy of fourteen years of age and my friends were all about me.”97 The patent cruelty of the character study steeled Rockefeller against Tarbell’s valid strictures about his business methods. For Rockefeller, this malice was the final proof he needed of Ida Tarbell’s bias against him.

  As legions of Rockefeller enemies sought interviews with Tarbell, she was bound to encounter the most vituperative foe, his brother Frank. Refusing to forgive John after the Corrigan affair, Frank still popped up in the press from time to time to deliver flaming imprecations against John. During the McClure’s series, he was quoted by a Washington paper as saying that “the fear of kidnapping [had] become a mania” with his brother and that “armed men accompany him everywhere ready to repel any effort to capture him.” 98 In fact, Frank had not set eyes on his brother in years and could only parrot gossip.

  Tarbell was always coy about how she met Frank Rockefeller, but her papers tell a startling tale. Although Siddall’s brother had been one of Frank’s attorneys, this had not helped him to line up an interview. Then a breakthrough occurred in January 1904, when Siddall learned that the Tarbell series had won two unexpected admirers: Frank’s daughter and son-in-law, Helen and Walter Bowler. Using Mr. Bowler as a go-between, Frank stipulated his conditions for a tête-à-tête with Tarbell: “I want no member of my family to know of this interview. Nobody is ever to know of it. I shall see Miss Tarbell in my Garfield Building office. No one is to be present. No clerk is to know who Miss T is.”99

  Following instructions, Tarbell even donned a disguise. It would be one of the most disturbing interviews of her long career. Though Frank seemed candid, he chewed tobacco and talked incontinently, spewing forth bile against his brother. At moments, his self-pitying harangues suggested a deranged man. Afterward, Tarbell jotted down impressions, including his off-the-record statements, for her files:

  He seemed dimly conscious that it was unnatural and monstrous to talk to me, and yet to be so bitter that he could not restrain himself. He began to talk of his brother by referring to him as “that individual.” “I have nothing to do with that individual,” he said. “I never want to see him. I have not seen him but once for eight years, and that was by accident. He has ruined my life. Nearly drove my wife insane. Two years ago I had to put her in a sanitarium, where she stayed for nearly a year, and this entirely came of this man’s vindictive feeling of me.” He says, “I have read every one of your articles. Some of them I have read two or three times. I have never known of any literary subject which interested me so much, or interested the people with whom I came in contact so much.” 100

  Unaware of the stormy history between the two brothers, Tarbell confessed that Frank was the last person she had expected to volunteer as a source. A brisk, businesslike journalist, she was appalled by the ugly emotions he betrayed, however much she welcomed his information. Predictably, Frank dragged out his self-serving version of the Corrigan case. He portrayed John as a sadist who took pleasure in lending people money then seizing their collateral and destroying them when they did not repay: “Cleveland could be paved with the mortgages that he has foreclosed on people who were in a tight place.”101 Though Tarbell came to believe that John D. had acted in an ethical manner with Corrigan, she quoted so freely from the original lawsuit against Rockefeller as to obscure that she was siding with him.

  Aside from the Corrigan case, Frank contributed few facts and preferred to vent his spleen. He told Tarbell that John had only two ambitions, to be very rich and very old, and he even chastised Cettie, calling her a “narrow-minded, stingy and pious” woman, whose greatest goal was “to be known as a good Christian, and to impress the world with the piety and domestic harmony of the family.”102 According to Frank, Cettie was a crafty, avaricious hypocrite who ensured that John’s charities were widely publicized and tinged with the proper religious coloring. Touching up this gruesome portrait, Frank later told one of Tarbell’s assistants: “[John] has the delusion that God has appointed him to administer all the wealth in the world, and in his efforts to do this he has destroyed men right and left. I tell you that when you publish this story the people will arise and stone him out of the community. . . . He is a monster.”103

  Frank had two other shockers for Tarbell. First, he told her that “the real reason that I have sent for you is that I want some day to write the life of my brother. I cannot write. You can do the kind of thing I want, and I want to know if you will do it using my material.”104 Tarbell did not quite picture herself as Frank Rockefeller’s ghostwriter. On the other hand, she did not wish to alienate him and mumbled something about helping him if her editorial work allowed the time. Then Frank came up with a remarkable finale to his ravings about his brother: “I know you think I am bitter and that it is unnatural, but this man has ruined my life. Why I have not killed him I do not understand. It must be that there is a God who prevented me doing such a thing, for there have been a hundred times when, if I had met him on the street, I know that I should have shot him.”105


  Tarbell did not quote these background statements and preserved Frank’s anonymity. But such lunacy should have told her to exercise extreme care in dealing with the Corrigan case. Instead, in a lapse in judgment, she used Frank’s material in such a slipshod, misleading manner that Rockefeller justly accused her of slanting the story.

  Perhaps the main reason that Frank did not blow out his brother’s brains was that he did not want to murder one of his main bankers. Unable to curb his speculative appetite, Frank took another emergency loan of $184,000 from William during the 1907 panic. What Frank did not know—but surely must have suspected—was that John had guaranteed half the loan, secured by eight hundred head of cattle and one hundred mules on Frank’s Kansas ranch. In fact, John D. carried this debt until Frank died, though a moment came in early 1912 when Frank again sounded off about his brother to reporters and John dispatched a lawyer to inform his ungrateful brother about the true source of the money that had so long sustained him.

  For nearly three years, from November 1902 to August 1905, Ida Tarbell fired projectiles at Rockefeller and Standard Oil without taking fire in return. As one newspaper wondered aloud, “Is the Pen Mightier than the Money-Bag. . . . Is Ida M. Tarbell, weak woman, more potent than John D. Rockefeller millionaire?”106 As the Tarbell series demonstrated, the new media possessed a power that rivaled that of the business institutions they covered. Paradoxically, the more Tarbell invoked the malevolent power of Standard Oil, the more she proved the reverse. At moments, Tarbell herself was startled by the kid-glove treatment. She wrote to Siddall in February 1903, “It is very interesting to note now, that the thing is well under way, and I have not been kidnapped or sued for libel as some of my friends prophesied, people are willing to talk freely to me.” 107

  From today’s perspective, when corporations have teams of publicists who swing into action at the first whiff of trouble, Standard Oil’s muted reaction appears to be a perplexing miscalculation. Tarbell got enough wrong that a modern public-relations expert could have dented her credibility and shaken Samuel McClure with the threat of a libel suit. Rockefeller could, for instance, have exposed the hoax of the Widow Backus story. In the spring of 1905, he contemplated a lawsuit against Tarbell for alleging that he had perjured himself by denying knowledge of a Southern Improvement Company when his interrogator had garbled the name of the South Improvement Company. After Tarbell published her character study of Rockefeller, he authorized Virgil Kline to contest her treatment of the Corrigan case. Kline pointed out that Tarbell’s fallacious account was drawn largely from the original petition filed against Rockefeller, not the exculpatory testimony that followed in the case. “Mr. Kline says I used charges made in the petition instead of in the testimony,” Tarbell wrote, unfazed, in an internal memo at the time. “I did, and I see no reason why I should not have done so.” 108 Tough challenges from Rockefeller might have blunted Tarbell’s confidence and made readers question her sources.

  The McClure’s series showed that the public-be-damned attitude that had served industrial barons well in the nineteenth century now made them easy prey for investigative journalists who fed a public famished for revelations of misconduct. The schizoid American worship of millionaires was shot through with envy and a desire to see these demigods punished and desecrated. So why did Rockefeller stick to his self-defeating silence? One side of him simply did not want to be bothered by libel suits. “Life is short,” he wrote to Parmalee Prentice, “and we have not time to heed the reports of foolish and unprincipled men.”109 He was also afraid that if he sued for libel, it would dignify the charges against him and only prolong the controversy. Strolling about Forest Hill one day, a friend suggested that he respond to the Tarbell slanders. At that moment, he spotted a worm crawling across their path. “If I step on that worm I will call attention to it,” he said. “If I ignore it, it will disappear.”110 In certain instances, he was muzzled from responding because of his involvement in ongoing court cases.

  But the main reason for Rockefeller’s silence was that he couldn’t dispute just a few of Tarbell’s assertions without admitting the truth of many others, and a hard core of truth did lie behind the scattered errors. When Gates urged him to rebut Tarbell on the Backus affair and the SIC perjury charge, Rockefeller agreed he could do so but that “going further than the Backus and the South Improvement Company cases may involve the necessity of going thoroughly into the whole book”—and he did not wish to do that.111 Two months later, Tarbell herself reached a similar conclusion in McClure’s: “His self-control has been masterful—he knows, nobody better, that to answer is to invite discussion, to answer is to call attention to the facts in the case.” 112

  Rockefeller claimed that he had not even deigned to glance at McClure’s, a claim inadvertently refuted by Adella Prentiss Hughes, Cettie’s nurse and companion, who traveled with the Rockefellers on a western train trip in the spring of 1903. “He liked to have things read to him, and during these months I read aloud Ida Tarbell’s diatribes,” she recalled. “He listened musingly, with keen interest and no resentment.”113 He tossed out wisecracks about “his lady friend” or “Miss Tarbarrel” but would not be drawn into serious discussion about her. “Not a word,” he said. “Not a word about that misguided woman.”114 His office, however, kept him well apprised of her allegations as they appeared.

  Nonetheless, it is true that Rockefeller never formally sat down and read her searing indictment. “I don’t think I ever read Ida Tarbell’s book: I may have skimmed it,” he said a decade later. “I wonder what it amounts to, anyway, in the minds of people who have no animus?” 115 When William O. Inglis began to interview Rockefeller in 1917 and read aloud portions of Tarbell’s work, it grew clear that Rockefeller had only a vague familiarity with the series. It was equally clear that beneath his pose of stoic fortitude he was still angry. His private comments about her were marked by a heavy sniggering and dry mockery that he never exhibited in public. “How clever she is, compared with poor Lloyd, who was always hysterical! She makes her picture clear and attractive, no matter how unjust she is. She really could write.”116 At the same time, he was convinced that this daughter of Oil Creek was “animated more with jealousy begotten by the inability of her father and her brother and some of her neighbors to do as well as the Standard Oil Company.”117 Far from making him repent and reconsider, the Tarbell series hardened his faith in his career. How dismayed Tarbell would have been to find Rockefeller writing to Archbold in July 1905: “I never appreciated more than at present the importance of our taking care of our business—holding it and increasing it in every part of the world.”118

  Faced with Tarbell’s invective, Rockefeller was too proud to give the world the satisfaction of knowing that he was wounded. The press was rife with speculation about his reaction. “Mr. Rockefeller’s friends say that it is all cruel punishment for him, and that he writhes under these attacks,” reported one Detroit newspaper.119 A Philadelphia paper chimed in that “the richest man in the world sits by the hour at Forest Hill, his chin sunk on his breast. . . . He has lost interest in golf; he has become morose; never free in his conversation with his employees, he now speaks only when absolutely necessary, and then gives his directions tersely and absently.”120 These reports tell more about the popular thirst for revenge than about Rockefeller’s actual response. He was never tormented by guilt and went on playing golf.

  Yet he was more vulnerable to criticism than he admitted. During this period, he grew closer to his son, who became his confidant just as Cettie’s maladies made it more difficult for her to discharge that function. Junior remembered, “He used to talk to me about the criticisms to which he was exposed, and I think it eased his mind to do so, because beneath his apparent insensitiveness, he was a sensitive man, but he always ended up by saying: ‘Well, John, we have to be patient. We have been successful and these people haven’t.’ ”121 Even John D. Rockefeller, Sr., required cathartic chats in time of trouble.

  Havin
g been filled to the brim with morality and religion, Rockefeller’s children must have been disoriented to see him exposed as a corporate criminal. How did they reconcile the rapacious Rockefeller splashed across McClure’s pages with the reverent father that they knew? As a rule, they fell back upon an implicit belief in father’s integrity, which was more a matter of religious faith than anything grounded in fact.

  Senior might talk in general terms about Tarbell’s criticisms but refrained from specific rebuttals, an omission that especially tormented his son, who had taken his parents’ morality at face value. Junior had always been prey to tension-related symptoms, and they intensified with each new installment of McClure’s. By late 1904, gripped by migraine headaches and insomnia, he wavered on the edge of a breakdown. Under doctor’s orders, he, Abby, and their baby daughter Babs sailed to Cannes in December 1904 for what would extend into a yearlong absence from 26 Broadway. They toured the charming Languedoc country towns, drove through the maritime Alps, and ambled along the Promenade des Anglais. But Junior’s troubles were so intransigent that their projected one-month stay lengthened to six. Junior’s breakdown has been variously attributed to overwork, exhaustion, or an identity crisis, but he himself privately emphasized the toll of the Tarbell series, as well as two subsequent controversies: the tainted-money affair and his leadership of a Bible class.