by Ron Chernow
The tainted-money controversy elicited a splendid piece of satire from Mark Twain who, having befriended the Rockefellers and Henry Rogers, knew that rapacious businessmen could be kindhearted benefactors. In Harper’s Weekly, he published an open letter from Satan in which he chastised readers, “Let us have done with this frivolous talk. The American Board accepts contributions from me every year; then why shouldn’t it from Mr. Rockefeller? In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience-money, as my books will show; then what becomes of the sting when that term is applied to Mr. Rockefeller’s gift?”65
As always, the public preferred to picture Rockefeller as crestfallen over the tainted-money hubbub. One newspaper said that he “sits by the hour under the trees that surround his costly home, brooding over the emphatic opposition public opinion has made against him. He speaks to no one save those who call upon most urgent matters.”66 The truth was that Rockefeller did not waver or buckle under the torrent of bad publicity, though he was sobered by it. In July 1905, he turned up at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church in an excellent mood, if slightly worn out, and chatted jovially with old friends. He even allowed himself some drollery at the end of his Sunday-school speech. Pulling out his watch, he told the crowd, his eyes twinkling mischievously, “I’ve talked too long, I’m afraid. There are others here who wished to talk. I don’t want you to think I’m a selfish monopolist!”67 The congregation responded with hearty applause.
CHAPTER 25
The Codger
By the close of the Tarbell series in 1905, Rockefeller’s infamy as a businessman still overshadowed his budding philanthropic fame. He continued to cherish Forest Hill and Pocantico Hills as peaceful oases, sealed off from the outer world. But where he had once let the public roam the outer grounds of these estates, he could no longer sustain this policy for safety reasons. In 1906, a forbidding iron fence, eight feet tall and topped by wire netting, suddenly rose around Forest Hill, closing off sections to the public. This caution was now warranted, since Rockefeller was inundated with death threats and hired Pinkerton detectives to protect himself. After the McClure’s series, he kept a revolver on his bedside table. He almost never attended public ceremonies, and Cettie was so rattled by a sense of menace that she advised him to stop public speaking altogether.
Yet however many would-be assassins squatted in the shadows, Rockefeller moved through his days with equanimity. He was not the icy man of myth, and his geniality grew more pronounced with age. If more subdued during the publication of the Tarbell articles, Rockefeller began to lighten up around 1906 and relish his retirement. His health was excellent, he had cast off the excruciating burden of business, and he had put together a superb management team for his charities and outside investments. Now past sixty, he saw his first play, The Music Master, as well as William Gillette playing Sherlock Holmes. The Rockefellers subscribed to the Philharmonic and even sampled brother William’s gilded box at the opera. For this abstemious Baptist couple, such behavior came perilously close to paganism.
Cheerful and jaunty, Rockefeller cultivated the sly asides, sage apothegms, and cornball humor of a codger. As a businessman, he had preferred dark, monochromatic suits, but now his wardrobe became dapper and eccentrically bright, like that of a retired stage actor. One favorite outfit consisted of a long yellow silk coat over a Japanese paper vest, a straw hat (likened by one periodical to “the headpiece of a rickshaw man”) or a pith helmet, and a pair of goggles.1 This sartorial change started with his alopecia, which made him experiment with skullcaps and wigs and then with a funny assortment of golf and driving hats, many of them with goofy flaps dangling over his ears. With the goggles especially, they made him look like an elderly visitor from outer space. “When he went driving he also wore round black goggles,” wrote his gardener, Tom Pyle. “With his thin face and thin slash of mouth, the curious costume gave him an eerily cadaverous appearance.”2 During his digestive troubles of the 1890s, Rockefeller had grown gaunt. Now, under the care of his German physician, Dr. Moeller, he put on more weight, his face grew rounder, and his tall, rangy frame again seemed muscular, if slightly bloated at the waist. Reporters who met him found him amazingly spry—his gaze keen, his step vigorous, his handshake firm.
As he carefully plotted his moves in order to live to one hundred, Rockefeller placed great store in following the same daily schedule down to the second.3 Whether in prayer or in wholesome recreation, he still had the Puritan’s need to employ every hour profitably. Rising at 6 A.M., he read the newspaper for an hour, then strolled through house and garden from 7 to 8, giving a dime to each new employee and a nickel to each veteran. He then breakfasted at 8, followed at 8:45 by a game of numerica, which gave him time to digest his food properly. From 9:15 to 10:15 he worked on his correspondence, mostly devoted to his philanthropy and investments. (As many as 2,000 letters now arrived daily at Pocantico, most of them solicitations for money.) From 10:15 to 12 he golfed, from 12:15 to 1 P.M. he bathed and then rested. Then came lunch and another round of numerica from 1 to 2:30. From 2:30 to 3 he reclined on the sofa and had mail read to him; from 3:15 to 5:15 he motored, from 5:30 to 6:30 he again rested, while 7 to 9 was given over to a formal dinner, followed by more rounds of numerica. From 9 to 10 he listened to music and chatted with guests, then slept from 10:30 P.M. to 6 A.M.—when the whole merry-go-round started up again. He did not deviate from this routine by one jot, regardless of the weather. William O. Inglis, who observed this diurnal rhythm at close range, found “something bordering on the superhuman—perhaps the inhuman—in this unbroken, mathematical perfection of schedule. It was uncanny.”4
By the spring of 1905, Cettie had recuperated from the attacks that had leveled her a year earlier and again took daily drives with John in a two-seat buckboard. By now, she was a chronic patient, however, and her respite was short-lived: In 1906, she was again confined to bed for a month with “grippe pneumonia.” Oddly enough, for all his gallant devotion to his wife, Rockefeller refused to alter his seasonal house rotation, even though Cettie could no longer follow him. For health reasons and to indulge his golf mania, he began to repair each winter to the Hotel Bon Air in Augusta, Georgia. He headed north to Lakewood for the early spring, followed by Pocantico in late spring, then Forest Hill in the summer, returning to Pocantico in October and staying there till he headed south for the winter. He adhered rigidly to this routine even though Cettie was bedridden for most of 1907; for one ten-month stretch she did not attend church or even breakfast in the parlor with her family. By the following year, suffering from emphysema, she had nurses attending her around the clock. Then, in 1909, serious congestion developed in her lungs, clumps of hair fell from her head, and she could not so much as walk across the bedroom. As she remained at Forest Hill, John was away for months at a time— remarkable for a man who had been inseparable from his wife. He must have felt that his own health would be jeopardized if he varied his rituals. He was also uncomfortable around illness, which served as an unpleasant reminder of his own mortality.
Rockefeller, arm in arm with an unidentified Pinkerton detective and accompanied by a favorite grandson, eleven-year-old Fowler McCormick, marches in the Easter Parade on April 19, 1908. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Rockefeller’s life struck many observers as strangely cramped, given his gargantuan wealth: He had an annual untaxed income of $58 million in 1902— several times larger than contemporary press estimates—or about a billion dollars in tax-free income per annum in today’s money. One editorial writer pictured Rockefeller this way: “When that gentleman is seated in his office coin rattles down upon him at the rate of $1.90 per second. He needs a steam shovel to keep himself from suffocation.”5 Nevertheless, Rockefeller spent only $439,000 on household expenses that year.
Rockefeller engaged in strenuous rituals of austerity, and he grimly sought to simplify his life and reduce his wants. He liked to say that “a man’s wealth must be determined by
the relation of his desires and expenditures to his income. If he feels rich on ten dollars, and has everything else he desires, he really is rich.”6 He and Cettie took pains to show they were not squandering money and made a point of exchanging modest gifts. In 1905, for instance, John gave Cettie $500 for her birthday and $500 for Christmas, even though her personal portfolio of railroad and gas-company bonds was now worth more than $1 million. For holidays, the Rockefellers exchanged token gifts— pens, ties, handkerchiefs, gloves—then wrote elaborate thank-you notes about how beautiful they were. In the spring of 1913, Rockefeller sent vegetables to his son at his home at 13 West Fifty-fourth Street and at Abeyton Lodge, his house in Pocantico, prompting the following outpouring from the ecstatic recipient: “As I glance at the weekly vegetable report from Pocantico Hills and see that last week $11.10 worth of asparagus went to Abeyton Lodge and $5.40 worth to No. 13. . . . I am constrained to express Abby’s and my warmest thanks for your kindness in allowing us to share with you the products of the garden.” 7 In this manner, the Rockefellers inhabited two worlds: a real but unspoken world of unimaginable wealth and a make-believe world of modest gifts intended to show that they were not spoiled. Since money meant nothing to them, they had to stress the sentimental value of gifts. The main thing was to prove that you were not taking your good fortune for granted. In January 1905, Cettie wrote to Junior at Forest Hill: “I am looking for snow to try our new sleigh, which is on springs and has four runners so as to turn like a carriage. Is not this luxury?”8 When one thinks of the ornate Newport “cottages” and giant steam yachts then in vogue among the rich, it is hard not to find Cettie’s conception of “luxury” poignant.
Rockefeller never lost his ingrained sense of thrift. When Junior, defying custom, gave him a fur coat and cap for Christmas in 1908, it elicited the following humorous reply: “I thank you a thousand times for the fur coat and cap and mittens. I did not feel I could afford such luxuries, and am grateful for a son who is able to buy them for me.”9 As his son should have known, Rockefeller would never strut around in this plutocrat’s costume, and he returned it to Junior, who wore it instead.
Breathtakingly generous in his philanthropy, Rockefeller could also be stingy—appallingly so. Whereas most other tycoons hired subordinates to oversee personal expenditures, Rockefeller supervised every detail, and in small matters he tended to be an incorrigible skinflint. The account books of his estates were all sent to 26 Broadway and audited to the last dollar. The estates were all melded together into their own internal market system, and when Pocantico “sold” trees to Lakewood, Pocantico was credited and Lakewood debited. “We are our own best customers,” Rockefeller observed archly in his memoirs, “and we make a small fortune out of ourselves by selling to our New Jersey place at $1.50 or $2.00 each, trees which originally cost us only five or ten cents at Pocantico.” 10 He had studies performed to compute the cost of per-capita food consumption at his various houses and chided the housekeeper at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street for “table board” that ranged as high as $13.35 per person compared to $7.80 for Pocantico and $6.62 for Forest Hill.
Rockefeller spent a ridiculous amount of time protesting bills both large and small and scrutinized the smallest bills from grocers and butchers. Somewhat paranoid to begin with, he assumed every tradesman was an extortion artist, or at least was padding the rich man’s bills. Even while walking on his estate, he tried to spot shirkers. “I have noticed of late several instances of idling,” he told one superintendent, “and in one or two cases have stopped my automobile and waited to see if the men would resume their work.”11 For a time, he tipped porters by holding out a handful of change and asking them to take what they deserved; when they took him at his word, he was shocked and renounced the policy, resorting to a strict 10 percent policy.
Rockefeller was notably suspicious when it came to the medical profession. In an extraordinary number of cases, he imagined that he was being gouged by physicians and threatened lawsuits. In 1909, Dr. Paul Allen treated Rockefeller at Hot Springs, West Virginia, and brought in a consulting physician, a Dr. Smith. When Rockefeller received a $3,000 bill from Dr. Smith, he complained to Dr. Allen that he could have gotten other reputable physicians for between $500 and $1,000. “I prefer to adjust this matter with Dr. Smith without litigation, but I am in no state of mind to submit to what I regard as extortion,” he warned Dr. Allen.12 After Rockefeller threatened legal action, Dr. Smith settled for $500. Then Rockefeller received a bill from Dr. Allen himself of $350 per diem for 21 days of treatment at Hot Springs, and he again flew into a rage, refusing to pay more than $160 a day—an amount he dropped to $75 after canvassing doctor friends and examining local compensation levels. Once again, he hinted at litigation. When Junior noted that Dr. Allen had sacrificed four families as patients because of this extended West Virginia stay, Senior countered that “the prestige of his going to Hot Springs for twenty-one days as our family physician . . . might be worth a great deal more to him than this loss of patients.” Calling the doctor’s charges “extortionate,” Senior concluded, “I believe it my duty to a good many people who have been blackmailed by doctors to stand a trial.”13 For Rockefeller, it was dogma that prices should reflect true market values, not the buyer’s ability to pay, and nothing upset him more than the notion that a rich man should pay a premium on his hard-earned wealth.
As Senior disappeared behind the gates of his estates, the public spotlight was progressively cast on his son and heir, who shrank beneath its glare. “John D. Rockefeller, the greatest organizing genius in the world, and largest individual owner of the United States and its inhabitants, is the father of a young man called John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,” opined one Hearst newspaper. “John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in his own right will be richer than many entire nations. He will be worth more money than the whole of Greece was worth when the work done by the Greeks constituted the glory of the world.” 14 Nobody was more daunted by this prospect than Junior himself, who felt trapped in the iron cage of dynastic expectation. Never sure of himself, Junior plodded ahead, always wondering where he was heading.
Junior was awed by his father, whom he regarded as a marble figure on a pedestal. “To his son he had always seemed of heroic proportions—brilliant in his construction of a huge industrial empire, exacting in matters of personal integrity, disciplined in the control of his own emotions, serene in the face of public abuse, and magnanimous in his contributions toward mankind,” Gates wrote.15 Taught to regard his father in this golden light, Junior felt humble in his presence. He once told the New York Chamber of Commerce that his sole desire was to help his father and, if necessary, “to black his shoes, to pack his bag.” 16 “Of my ability I have always had a very poor opinion,” he told his father in 1902, “but I need not assure you that such as it is, it is wholly and absolutely devoted to your interests, and that now and always you can trust me as you always have.”17 Instead of bucking up his courage, Senior often let his son wallow in self-flagellation.
If Senior tried to shut out his critics, Junior was hypersensitive to insinuations about his father. As Gates observed, Junior’s “whole conduct of life is governed by the purpose, hardly at all concealed, of rehabilitating his father’s public reputation.”18 Junior’s need to vindicate his father stemmed partly from love but also from more self-interested reasons. As an ethical young man, how could he feel good about himself if he was spending blood money? To give away the Rockefeller fortune with a clear conscience, he had to convince himself that it had been earned fairly.
If Junior lacked the intestinal fortitude to spend his life facing down a hostile public, this feeling only grew as he and Abby began to create a large family. Their first child, Abby—known as Babs—was born at 13 West Fifty-fourth Street in 1903, followed by John D. Rockefeller III in 1906, whose birth elicited the headline, “Richest Baby in History.” Nelson was born in 1908 in Seal Harbor, Maine, on Senior’s birthday, which he always regarded as an omen, if not outright proof, that h
e was destined to lead the next generation of Rockefellers.
Desperately in need of guidance and emotional support, Junior re-created with his wife the close relationship he had had with his mother. He clung to Abby and depended upon her judgment, and sometimes he seemed scarcely able to live without her. When Abby and Babs went off to the Aldrich estate at Warwick, he was tormented by her absence. Abby enabled him to savor all the romanticism repressed during his upbringing. Two years after their marriage, Junior could still write to her breathlessly, “How happy you made me that night, darling, in the radiance of your young womanhood, so beautiful, so fascinating, so loving, and so long the one object of my passionate desires. . . . What a beautiful night that was, darling. We were oblivious of all except each other and our great love.”19
Cool and very shrewd in sizing up situations, Abby saw something unseemly in the demeaning tasks assigned to Junior when he started at 26 Broadway. She encouraged him to claim his rightful place as heir apparent. Junior still did not know how he would divide his time between business and philanthropy. Aware of the public-relations value of a Rockefeller heir, the Standard Oil of New Jersey chieftains were eager to use him as window dressing, and in 1904, at age thirty, he was appointed a director. Two executives, A. C. Bedford and Henry H. Rogers, took him on a whirlwind tour of the Oklahoma oil fields and discovered that this likable, unassuming young man had his own shy appeal. “Bedford and Rogers found out that I got on with the public very well and that the public was interested in seeing a live Rockefeller,” said Junior. “In other words, they began to think of me as something of an asset.”20 In 1909, he was elevated to a vice presidency.