by Ron Chernow
A neophyte in business, the product of a sheltered upbringing, Junior was bound to be shocked by the moral squalor of Standard Oil under John D. Archbold. The quick-witted, combative Archbold knew how to use his violent temper to bully people into submission. Since Archbold lived in Tarrytown, he stopped by Pocantico each Saturday morning to present a bright red apple to Rockefeller and to consult with his largest shareholder. Commuting to work by speedboat each morning, Archbold often invited Junior along, and they had breakfast as they raced down the Hudson River. On these occasions, Junior often quizzed Archbold about a matter that greatly upset him: the secret political payoffs—legal but seamy—routinely made by Standard Oil. As Junior explained, “The party bosses would come to the back door and it seemed to the management of the company wise to favor them. . . . I gradually became sensitive to usages and actions for which as a member of the board and an officer I felt responsible but which as a single individual I had little voice in determining.”21 The money traffic was blatant: At campaign time, Mark Hanna, Cornelius N. Bliss, and other party bosses hung around, as Junior put it, “at the back door, hat in hand.” Yet when Junior protested, Archbold airily dismissed it as a matter of survival and said that all big corporations did it.22 Did Junior ever wonder why his father, whom he considered a paragon of virtue, had groomed Archbold as his protégé?
On several occasions, Junior was asked to lobby Senator Aldrich for Standard Oil. In 1903, for instance, Junior prodded his father-in-law to appoint Senator Boies Penrose to the Senate Finance Committee because he “has for some years been a friend of certain gentlemen in our company and has usually shown himself friendly toward the company.”23 In later years, Junior must have regretted these actions, one of the few times when his ethical compass failed him. Having gotten a hint of the moral atmosphere at Standard Oil, Junior began to distance himself from its management and attended only about a third of the board meetings. While he feigned affection for Archbold—“We were all very fond of him, he was so witty and jolly”—he made a point of having less contact with him.24
Of course, as Junior struggled with his dawning awareness of corruption at Standard Oil, Ida Tarbell was exhuming its unsavory past, and the two overlapping events probably pushed him into his nervous breakdown in late 1904. The press did not help matters. In the gauche young heir, reporters spotted a far more vulnerable target than his father, and they ridiculed him as weak, fumbling, prudish, and neurasthenic. This coverage made Junior even more self-conscious than before, and he was pilloried no matter what he did. If he did not give tips, he was mocked, but when he gave his barber a nickel, the coin was posted on the barber’s wall and reproduced in the newspapers. “He rarely spends more than 50 cents for his midday lunches,” the New York Daily News reported. “He drinks no intoxicating liquors, uses tobacco moderately, and his tailors’ bill in a year is not as heavy as that of a prosperous clerk in a Wall Street office.”25 Junior fidgeted under the attention. “It was rather expected of me that having inherited money I would waste it,” said Junior. “I made up my mind that I wouldn’t do it.” 26
Whenever Junior spoke in public, hard-bitten journalists turned out to record and mock his words. In February 1902, he gave a talk at the Brown University YMCA in which he tried to square business ethics and Christianity. To justify the superiority of consolidation over competition, he cited the breeding of the American Beauty rose, which had only been achieved through constant, painful pruning. This figure of speech, tossed in extemporaneously, haunted Junior for years and was cited constantly as a credo of rapacious capitalism.
As Junior said of this period, “My problem was to reconcile right and conscience with the hard realities of life on a practical level,” and he groped his way unaided by his father. He clung ardently to his leadership of the men’s Bible class at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church. After he took over the class from Charles Evans Hughes in 1900, the number of young men in attendance at once quadrupled from 50 to 200 and ultimately reached 500, including many bookkeepers, clerks, salesmen, and students. In the class, Junior tried to use scripture to elucidate moral dilemmas of everyday life. “We have talks along financial, educational, sociological and religious lines, as well as talks of a generally helpful nature,” he explained to William Rainey Harper in 1902.27 It was never clear how many students were there for guidance and how many were angling for Rockefeller jobs or money. Reporters infiltrated the sessions just to hurl embarrassing questions at Junior, who sat with hands tightly clasped on the table as they made sport of his replies. Mark Twain, a guest speaker, observed Junior’s predicament firsthand. “Every Sunday young Rockefeller explains the Bible to his class,” he wrote. “The next day the newspapers and the Associated Press distribute his explanations all over the continent and everybody laughs.” 28 Twain conceded that Junior repeated platitudes preached from every pulpit, but thought he was unfairly roughed up for political reasons.
In 1905, as attacks mounted on his father and his talks were increasingly subjected to savage derision, Junior agonized over whether to relinquish the class. Still recuperating from his breakdown, he devoted three nights each week to preparing this Sunday talk. Gates in particular thought this was taking an excruciating toll. When Junior told his father in June 1905 of his wish to resign, Senior registered unequivocal opposition. “It would interfere with my pleasure to have you give up the class,” he said. “It has been a source of great joy and comfort to your Mother and me.”29 John D. himself had informed one of Junior’s classes, “I would rather see my son doing this work than see him a monarch on his throne.”30
Junior’s reasons for wanting to stay were illuminating. He needed a place where he could resolve the tensions between business and religion, Standard Oil and the Baptist Church, forging a synthesis that would enable him to function in an imperfect world. If he gave up the class, he also worried that the family wealth and notoriety would isolate him from society, as had so clearly happened to his father, who led an artificial existence. He received a timely warning along these lines from Dr. W.H.P. Faunce, the president of Brown University and former pastor of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church:
If you drop that class, you will take a step toward retirement from your fellow-men. Your father has felt obliged—often against my protest—to barricade himself in order to avoid the imposters, cranks etc. of which the world is full. This is the inevitable penalty of his position. But there is no reason why that penalty should descend to you.31
For three years, Junior kept the Bible class, then, at Abby’s gentle urging, withdrew in 1908 at a moment when he would not seem to be retreating under fire. As she reassured him, “You have borne all the criticism and ridicule that is necessary to let the world see that you are sincere.”32 It was not the last time that she rescued him from unnecessary martyrdom.
Since Junior had committed himself to serving his father, the question naturally arises of why Senior, eager to slough off cares, did not commence sooner the great transfer of wealth to his son. Other moguls, such as Commodore Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, Sr., had waited until their deaths to convey the bulk of their wealth to their sons, but they needed their money as working capital in their businesses and did not have extended retirements like Rockefeller’s. Until 1912—when Junior was thirty-eight—Senior kept him in a prolonged adolescence, paying him a salary that was really a glorified allowance. “Why, the girls in the office here have an advantage that I never had,” Junior once lamented. “They can prove to themselves their commercial worth. I envy anybody who can do that.”33 By slow increments, his father ratcheted up his allowance from $10,000 a year in 1902 to $18,000 five years later, but Junior never felt he had earned it, exacerbating his sense of inadequacy. As he told his father in 1907, “I have always wished, simply as a matter of satisfaction to myself, that my salary might represent the real value of my services in the office, while as it is and has been in the past it represents rather your generosity.”34
Before 1911, Rockefeller mad
e only token transfers of oil stock to his son, starting with his first annual gift of one hundred shares of Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1903, but he also deeded to him parcels of valuable property in Cleveland, Buffalo, and New York. Then, in 1909, he gave him a controlling interest in the American Linseed Company, and with this sixteen-million-dollar gift Junior saw the golden floodgates start to open. Grateful but anxious, he wrote to his father, “A deep feeling of solemnity, of responsibility, almost of awe, comes over me as I contemplate these gifts, and my heart rises in silent prayer to God that he will teach me to be a good and faithful steward as my Father has been.”35 Even though he now owned a company and extensive real estate, Junior still dangled in an awkward dependency, having to account to his father for his personal expenses. In January 1910, Senior asked how much he had spent the previous year, and Junior, like an obedient schoolboy, computed the answer, in Rockefeller style, down to the decimal points: $65,918.47.
At the turn of the century, Junior and his three sisters had roughly equal wealth—several hundred thousand dollars apiece—and father kept parity among them for several years. (Much of Junior’s early income came from a $500,000 “credit” John D. had given him to supplement his salary.) Then it grew steadily clearer that Junior would be the receptacle for the bulk of the fortune. Partly this was a plain case of male chauvinism. But special factors also worked against Bessie and Edith, while frigid relations with Alta’s husband, Parmalee, lessened her chances. Senior had cool relations with two of his three sons-in-law and would have hesitated to give them undue influence over his money. In Junior’s opinion, his sisters were also disqualified because they did not handle their finances in the scrupulous manner demanded by father.
Constantly consulting expert opinion and learning all he could, Junior was now immersed in the Rockefeller philanthropies, and nobody enjoyed finer access to the master. In casual moments at Pocantico, Junior could lightly broach a project or have Cettie read a proposal aloud. “Gates was the brilliant dreamer and orator,” Junior conceded. “I was the salesman—the go-between with Father at the opportune moment.”36 Junior discharged this role perfectly, for he lacked the itch for fame, willingly laid all glory at his father’s doorstep, and held views congruent with his. For Senior, exhausted from his business labors, this conscientious son was heaven-sent. Once, during a golf game, Rockefeller announced, “My greatest fortune in life has been my son.”37
So why did Senior procrastinate in giving him his money? Since he remained tight-lipped, we can only conjecture. One plausible explanation is that he planned to reach age one hundred and had no wish to surrender power prematurely in his sixties. He must have fretted, too, about Junior’s debilitating breakdown, which started in 1904 and dragged on for nearly three years, curtailing his activities. Senior must have feared that the stupendous weight of the fortune would crush his delicate son. Rockefeller might also have waited until Junior began to show more robust self-confidence. Protective of his vulnerable son, Rockefeller was irate when the press pummeled him. “They have no right to attack Mr. John,” he would insist. “All my life I have been the object of assault. But they have no ground for striking at him!”38
Yet the overriding fear was most likely political. Since the family fortune largely took the form of Standard Oil stock, giving it to Junior would have engulfed him in controversy far uglier than anything he had ever known. With Standard Oil besieged by state and federal antitrust suits, Junior would have inherited both the controversy and the legal liability that went with the stock. Had Rockefeller unloaded the oil stock on Junior, editorialists would also have accused him of fleeing retribution and responsibility. That Junior had such grave reservations about Standard’s management under Archbold would have only strengthened his father’s reluctance to hand over significant blocks of shares to him.
While Gates initiated Junior into the rites of philanthropy, the crown prince continued to perform many mundane domestic duties foisted upon him by his father, including paying the servants and overseeing repairs. Then, on the night of September 17, 1902, the Parsons-Wentworth house at Pocantico burned down. Hundreds of people stood by helplessly in the dark as flames consumed the wooden structure. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. John and Cettie simply moved their belongings to an undistinguished dwelling on the grounds called the Kent House. Senior had long wanted to build a new house at Pocantico anyway and was not therefore especially fazed by the fire.
From 1902, Junior and Abby had occupied a lovely house on the estate known as Abeyton Lodge, a comfortable, rambling affair in Hudson Valley Dutch style, festooned with many dormer windows and awnings. They tended to look askance at Senior’s patched-up residences and wanted him to occupy a grander dwelling. As a result, they reinforced his desire to erect a new house at the property’s highest point, Kykuit, a five-hundred-foot elevation with a peerless vista of the Hudson River, and took charge of planning a manor house that would be a model of quiet elegance and faultless taste. It has been hypothesized that Senior saw the project as therapeutic for Junior after his breakdown, but the latter’s troubles actually stalled the project. As The New York Times reported accurately in May 1905, “The unexpected serious crisis in the health of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., has temporarily checked his father’s plans for building a fine mansion this summer on his immense estate in the Pocantico Hills.”39 Even a year later, Senior told a cousin that he was trying to stop Junior from overwork and he would never have rushed him into building the new house. He would surely have remembered the onus of supervising construction of the family home in Cleveland as an adolescent.
In the spring of 1904, Senior had given his son permission to solicit preliminary sketches from architects, and by the following summer contracts were signed with Delano and Aldrich as architects (Chester H. Aldrich was Abby’s distant cousin), Thompson-Starrett as builders, Ogden Codman, Jr., as interior designer, and William Welles Bosworth as landscape architect. Presented with these plans, Rockefeller reacted as he so often did when in a quandary—he did nothing. He exercised a pocket veto, leaving Junior in the old position of trying to figure out his intentions. “After a while,” Junior said, “I became convinced that the reason he did nothing was because he hesitated to build so large a house, with the additional care which its operation would involve, but on the other hand was too generous to suggest a smaller house, which would not adequately accommodate children and grandchildren.”40 Evidently, Junior guessed right, for when he presented plans for a scaled-down house—small enough to satisfy his father’s craving for simplicity, roomy enough to accommodate guests—Rockefeller consented with relief. The house would be handsome but not ostentatious, previewing a new Rockefeller aesthetic of restrained grace that owed much to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.
Before construction started, Rockefeller, an engineering buff, brought a number of demands to the table. To reinvigorate Cettie’s health, he wanted Kykuit to receive maximum sunshine in the winter. He also wanted sunlight to trail him on his daily rounds, with light shining in the dining room for lunch, for instance, but with his bedroom dipped in shadow for his afternoon nap. This demand might have flummoxed the most adept architect, but for Rockefeller, who had dabbled in construction, it was child’s play. He constructed a boxlike contraption mounted on a turntable at the center of the building site. Stationed in this box for several days, working the levers, he observed how the sunlight slanted down on a small model of the house. He then presented his hourly charts to the architects, who shifted the foundation lines in conformity with them.
Junior and Abby threw themselves into Kykuit’s construction with a mixture of passion and nervous energy. (Mesmerized by measurement, Junior carried a collapsible four-foot ruler in his pocket for the rest of his life.) They oversaw creation of a three-story Georgian manor house, with elegant gables and dormer windows. In deference to Baptist values, the house had no ballroom, but it did have an Aeolian organ for both religious and secular music. Junior and Abby were very partial to their cr
eation. After they had toured some pretentious “châteaux” on Long Island’s north shore, Junior said that Kykuit, by comparison, was “far less elaborate than many houses we have seen” but “more perfect of its kind, more harmonious and more charming.”41
John and Abby enlisted the services of Ogden Codman, the Boston interior designer who helped Edith Wharton refurbish her Newport home and coauthored a book with her, The Decoration of Houses, in 1897. In the book, Wharton rebelled against the cold, cluttered rooms of her childhood. Codman wanted to invest Kykuit with the easy tranquillity of an English country house, furnishing it with pieces that would seem like old family heirlooms. No detail of design escaped John and Abby’s exacting attention. They fussed over every item with that small flutter of anxiety that Junior always felt when performing a task for his father. “We bought all the furniture, china, linen, glass, silver and works of arts, employing, of course, the best advisers obtainable,” he said.42 Before unveiling the house to his parents, Junior and Abby slept there for six weeks, testing every bedroom and taking meals there.
Sure that the house was now ready, they apprehensively invited John and Cettie to sample it in October 1908, and it seemed, at first, an unparalleled success. “The new house all furnished by John and Abby was ready for us,” Cettie recorded in her diary. “It is beautiful and convenient within and without.”43 Cettie and sister Lute delighted in playing the large pipe organ, with its player-piano attachment, and Senior imported an organist from the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church for after-dinner concerts on Sunday evenings. That Thanksgiving, three generations of Rockefellers gathered in the new house, with Abby and Junior bringing their growing brood of Babs, John III, and five-month-old Nelson. They instituted a tradition of no smoking or drinking at either Kykuit or Abeyton Lodge.