Titan
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Unfortunately for Junior and Abby, their ordeal had only begun. Since Cettie had been sick, they had tried to spare her concern with construction details, but she was an extremely finicky lady. For the sake of diplomacy, John and Cettie pretended to be thrilled with their new home, but they increasingly carped in private. The third floor, reserved for guest rooms, had tiny dormer windows that made them stuffy and unsuitable. They then discovered graver problems. The elevator made an awful din; the roaring plumbing in Cettie’s bathroom reverberated in the public areas; the racket from the service entrance below John D.’s bedroom grated on his nerves; rainwater dripped into the dining room; the chimneys sometimes belched smoke, and so on and so on. Cettie even found indecent the charming statues of male cherubim on the porch outside their bedroom and had them chastely converted into female angels. As his parents broke silence and confided their concerns, Junior’s heart sagged: He had let them down again. After a year, it was decided that the house would be completely revamped.
Yet the brouhaha over the house was minor compared to the uproar over the grounds. William Welles Bosworth had planned to surround Kykuit with a small, formal park of 250 acres, with the rest of the estate left in something close to its wild, pristine state. Since Senior fancied himself a landscape expert, he conceived an instant dislike for Bosworth, whom he regarded as a rival and a frighteningly extravagant fellow to boot. When Bosworth submitted his plans, Rockefeller harrumphed that he could do better:
“In a few days,” Rockefeller recalled in his memoirs,
I had worked out a plan so devised that the roads caught just the best views at just the angles where in driving up the hill you came upon impressive outlooks, and at the ending was the final burst of river, hill, cloud, and great sweep of country to crown the whole; and here I fixed my stakes to show where I suggested that the roads should run, and finally the exact place where the house should be.
He then told Bosworth: “Look it all over and decide which plan is best.”44 When this plan was adopted, Rockefeller attributed this decision to its patent superiority, though it is hard to see how Bosworth could have objected. Even with the terraced formal gardens close to the house, Rockefeller interjected his own ideas. He insisted upon lime trees for the garden walk just south of the house, having learned they were the fastest growing trees and would most quickly cast shade on the footpaths.
Luckily, Rockefeller did not do everything himself and allowed Bosworth to create a majestic fantasy straight out of the Italian Renaissance, complete with grottoes, fountains, pergolas, sunken gardens, temples, topiary bushes, classical statues, and running streams. Disgruntled at the cost of these ornaments, Rockefeller would stroll the grounds with guests and tell them, only half jesting, “You know, these little brooks run mighty high!” 45 Cettie was especially fond of Bosworth’s rustic Japanese garden with its quaint teahouse, but every time Rockefeller looked at it, he saw plain extortion and complained to his son. “I can hardly understand how the little Japanese house, which I supposed was to be a very superficial affair, would reach $10,000. . . . Bosworth may be all right. I hope we shall feel later on, as you do, that he has not been a too expensive luxury for us.”46
Whenever they acceded to one of Bosworth’s modest ideas, Rockefeller growled, it ended up costing much more than they imagined. Senior had first been quoted a figure of $30,000 for the entire landscaping job and was horrified in 1910 when the bill swelled to $750,000—more than the cost of house and furnishings combined! (It would equal nearly $12 million in contemporary money.) Thus far, he had been restrained, but now he gave his son a good tongue-lashing. “Granted that we have a very satisfactory result, but $750,000 is very different from $30,000, and is, indeed, 25 times that amount, and what Mr. Bosworth has received for his services is fifty percent more than the entire original estimate of cost to me. I should not want the public to know what our expenditure has been.”47 In the end, the house paled beside the stately gardens, and this must actually have pleased the outdoorsy Rockefeller. For all his complaining, he adored the grounds and planted a network of electric lights that allowed him to illuminate them theatrically at night. “If you were to visit me on the darkest night,” he would boast, “I could show you vistas of trees from one part to the other of my estate by merely touching a button.” 48
Starting in 1911, the house itself underwent two more years of renovation and was transformed into a fine specimen of American Renaissance, a voguish style that bespoke the self-confidence of the burgeoning industrial class. Narrow but deep, the house had four floors above ground and two below that were gouged into the hillside. Gone was the old dormer-ridden third floor, replaced with a mansard roof. By turning the wooden veranda into a stone loggia, the forty-room house acquired new dignity and grandeur. While not exactly modest, Kykuit was decorous and understated and testified to its owner’s simplicity. It fell far short of what Rockefeller could have afforded or what other preening magnates might have built.
To Senior’s delight, the redesign entailed complicated problems in civil engineering. To lengthen the approach to the house, hundreds of teamsters carted in thousands of loads of topsoil, requiring the construction of a huge retaining wall. To ferry in supplies without disturbing the occupants, an underground tunnel was created for trucks, and Senior delighted in watching the steam shovels punch a hole in the hillside. This construction thrilled him, as if he were a small boy equipped with a new set of toy trucks. The remaking of Kykuit went on until October 1913, when John and Cettie finally moved back into the house after two years of work. By that point, Cettie was very sick and did not have much longer to live.
With Kykuit complete, Rockefeller turned his attention to removing disturbing elements from the grounds. One row of houses inside the Rockefeller acreage was picked up and set back down in the nearby village. As he accumulated more land, Rockefeller was also increasingly bothered by the Putnam division of the New York Central Railroad, which cut a swath across the middle of his estate. He hated the hoboes and hunters drawn by the right-of-way, not to mention the ash that fluttered down on his golf course from the coal-burning locomotives. In 1929, Rockefeller decided to have the train rerouted and paid an estimated $700,000 to buy the entire village of East View, with its forty-six homes; after buying and razing all of the houses, he donated the land for new railroad tracks five miles to the east of the original one. Removing another unwanted intruder, Junior paid $1.5 million for the three hundred acres of Saint Joseph’s Normal College, underwriting the costs of relocating it and building a new campus elsewhere.
At its peak, the Pocantico estate was a self-contained world with seventy-five houses and seventy miles of private roads. Forever reworking his domain, Rockefeller kept hundreds of men busy moving trees and hills to open up new views. The estate included a sizable working farm that supplied the family’s food needs. Rockefeller developed such a taste for Pocantico’s produce and springwater that they were shipped to him wherever he went.
The Pocantico Hills estate was a marvelous haven, but the cluster of newsmen clamoring for answers beyond the majestic iron gates always reminded its owner of the hostile public. Their chorus of accusations grew only louder with time. By Teddy Roosevelt’s second term, Rockefeller and Standard Oil could no longer flout the federal and state governments with impunity, as they had for so long. The moment of reckoning was at hand.
Bessie Rockefeller Strong, whose prolonged illness has always been surrounded by mystery. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
CHAPTER 26
The World’s Richest Fugitive
As they approached the 1904 presidential election, Standard Oil executives knew that Teddy Roosevelt was still miffed at their attempt to snuff out his new Bureau of Corporations and that the oil trust stood at the top of his list of evil trusts to be reined in by federal regulators. Since the idea of backing Roosevelt’s Democratic opponent, Alton B. Parker, was unthinkable to Archbold and his associates, they smothered the incumbent wi
th money, especially a $100,000 contribution from Henry H. Rogers. Other businessmen who feared the lash of federal regulation—including Edward H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, and James Stillman— also paid tribute to Roosevelt, provoking Democratic charges that the president was being bribed by the very companies he vowed to control. Attorney General Philander Knox wandered into Roosevelt’s office one day in October 1904 and heard the president dictating a letter ordering the return of the Standard Oil funds. “Why, Mr. President, the money has been spent,” Knox objected. “They cannot pay it back—they haven’t got it.” “Well,” Roosevelt said, “the letter will look well on the record, anyhow.”1
When Roosevelt won by an impressive margin in November, Rockefeller sent a telegram to him: “I congratulate you most heartily on the grand result of yesterday’s election.”2 In the Standard boardroom, the contribution to Roosevelt’s campaign was soon acknowledged to be the worst investment they had ever made. As Archbold moaned, “Darkest Abyssinia never saw anything like the course of treatment we received at the hands of the administration following Mr. Roosevelt’s election in 1904.” 3 Or as Henry C. Frick phrased it more succinctly, “We bought the son of a bitch, but he wouldn’t stay bought.”4 Nevertheless, the Standard Oil hierarchs remained cocksure that, in any contest for supremacy with the federal government, they would inevitably prevail.
Before the election, the Bureau of Corporations, headed by James R. Garfield, had begun to gather data on Standard Oil. The son of the former president and active in Ohio Republican politics, Garfield was friendly with some Standard Oil lawyers, and the initial inquiry went amicably enough. Then, in February 1905, by a unanimous resolution, the House of Representatives urged an antitrust investigation of Standard Oil, a result of the oil boom in Kansas. Re-enacting a drama once played out in western Pennsylvania, independent oil producers and refiners protested that Standard Oil dominated the state’s pipelines, and they also accused it of conspiring with the railroads. Their passions were fanned both by Ida Tarbell’s articles and by a dramatic tour she made through the oil fields. Suddenly, Commissioner Garfield was summoning Archbold and Rogers to question them about Standard’s behavior in the state. When he broached the touchy subject of rebates—the flash point for so many battles in oil history—their relations deteriorated hastily. A new generation of independent oil producers in Kansas, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, and California would provide the motive force behind the antitrust drive against the Standard.
As the moribund Sherman Act quickened to sudden life under Teddy Roosevelt, the Tarbell series virtually guaranteed that Standard Oil would be the central target of any federal trustbusting probe. Tarbell thought it the optimal choice because it was “the mother trust and the most nearly monopolistic.”5 It furnished a well-known consumer article, affected nearly everyone, and had an abundant history of hearings and lawsuits to excavate. In the early 1900s, petroleum was being applied to an array of new uses and it no longer seemed tolerable for one organization to retain a stranglehold over it.
For years, Rockefeller and his colleagues had ignored public opinion, refusing to give interviews and behaving defiantly at hearings. In her McClure’s series, Tarbell had justly said, “If Mr. Rockefeller had been as great a psychologist as he is a business manipulator he would have realised that he was awakening a terrible popular dread.”6 In their hubris, the oil monopolists mocked the petty efforts of politicians to obstruct them. “We will see Standard Oil in hell before we will let any set of men tell us how to run our business,” an unreconstructed Henry Rogers swore.7 Unwilling to compromise, Standard officials dealt with government officials as roughly as they did with business competitors. At this precarious moment, the trust needed a master diplomat, not the hotheaded Archbold.
In 1906, Roosevelt signed a stack of bills to curb industrial abuses. Profiting from the outcry prompted by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, he signed the meat-inspection bill and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Identifying railroad discrimination as a major issue, he supported the Hepburn bill, which granted broader power to the Interstate Commerce Commission to set railroad rates and placed interstate pipelines under its domain. By bringing Standard Oil to heel, Roosevelt hoped to check two abuses at once: railroad collusion and industrial monopoly. When the Bureau of Corporations sent him its report on the oil trust, it highlighted Standard’s collusion, both in secret rates and open discrimination, with the railroads. Seizing upon this as a potent tool to push through the Hepburn bill, Roosevelt made the five-hundred-page report public on May 2, 1906. “The report shows that the Standard Oil Company has benefited enormously up almost to the present moment by secret rates,” the president declared.8
Seriously misreading the punitive public mood, Rockefeller remained silent. When Charles M. Pratt drafted a reply, Rockefeller objected in no uncertain terms: “Giving broadcast [to] this information at this date is unwise and is a headliner for more drastic treatment by the Fed. Govt.” 9 Overriding Rockefeller’s dissent, Standard Oil released a statement denying that it had knowingly committed any unlawful actions.
In Standard Oil, Teddy Roosevelt found a trust tailor-made for his purposes: big, rich, brutal, unpopular, and totally unrepentant. He adored grandstanding and liked to use his bully pulpit to incite a popular furor. With an expugilist’s flair for feints and bluffs, he kept the combine thoroughly confused about his true sentiments. At moments, he issued strong public denunciations: “Every measure for honesty in business that has been passed in the last six years has been opposed by these men.”10 Even less temperate in private, he told his attorney general that the Standard Oil directors were “the biggest criminals in the country.”11 Then, in friendly private chats at the White House, he disarmed the very Standard directors he had reviled by seeming the soul of civility. In early March 1906, Archbold and Rogers were received cordially at the White House, as Junior reported to his father in confidence:
[The president] professed great ignorance of the affairs of the company, saying his knowledge of it was “nebulous.” As to the investigation on foot through Mr. Garfield’s department, he seemed to know little. . . . He exhibited no personal animosity or unkindly feeling, nor could they judge from anything said that he himself was at the bottom of this investigation.
While Archbold professed satisfaction, Junior, educated by his father-in-law in the president’s mutable ways, was more skeptical. “Senator Aldrich observed at my house the other night that while the President agreed with whoever talked last with him and seemed won over entirely to that view of the matter, the following day the next man who approached him with a different view gained an equally cordial hearing and relief.”12
Even as Roosevelt entertained the bosses of Standard Oil, he was about to unleash the government’s full fury against it. He was offended by its obstructive tactics with Garfield, its refusal to concede the legitimacy of his investigation. When he sent the Garfield Report to Congress, he warned that the Justice Department might prosecute Standard Oil for the abuses revealed. This linkage of Standard Oil with railroad rebates laid down the lines for future antitrust prosecution. Like Lloyd and Tarbell, Attorney General William H. Moody decided that the Standard monopoly had been based on a pattern of secret, illegal rebates. In late June 1906, Roosevelt summoned Moody and other cabinet members for an unusual nocturnal session at the White House to discuss possible prosecution. On June 22, Moody announced a preliminary investigation, headed by Frank B. Kellogg, of an antitrust suit against Standard Oil—a move that one newspaper reported under the stark headline, “Standard Oil Officials May Go to Prison.” 13
By this time, Standard officials knew that they had been grossly deceived by the president’s genial manner. “There is no doubt that the special Cabinet meeting, which the President called, and where the action was entirely dominated by him, led to the instituting of the proceedings,” Archbold told Rockefeller. Trying to strike a brave note, he added, “all well, feeling first rate, and ready for the fight.”14 As always,
Standard Oil reacted with bravado, and Hell Hound Rogers sent these fighting words to Rockefeller: “It is my opinion that we are all right and going to win out sure, without doubt I do not think we have anything to fear.”15
In retrospect, it seems clear that the ambiguous signals from the White House reflected more than duplicity on Roosevelt’s part, for he was genuinely reluctant to wield the big stick against Standard Oil. He preferred compromise to antitrust cases, which were slow, time-consuming, and fiendishly difficult to win. He wanted to supervise trusts, not break them up and sacrifice their efficiency, and he was searching for some conciliatory overture from his adversaries, a suggestion that they would accept government oversight and voluntarily mend their ways. But compromise was so alien to Archbold that he did not see that he might have averted an antitrust suit with a little political flexibility.
By the time the Roosevelt administration formulated its suit, Rockefeller had not darkened the door of 26 Broadway for years. After 1905, he even stopped drawing a token salary. But Rockefeller was still held responsible for the sins of Standard Oil and most vilified when least involved in the business. Aware of the benefits of giving a human face to the trust, Roosevelt presented Rockefeller as the active genius of the cabal, and the press dramatized the antitrust case as a cockfight between Roosevelt and Rockefeller, the White House and 26 Broadway.
Even before the federal government filed formal charges against Standard Oil, a rash of state suits broke out, the most aggressive one being in Missouri, where Herbert S. Hadley was elected attorney general in 1905. As a reform-minded prosecuting attorney in Kansas City, he had developed a reputation for battling corruption. No sooner did he become attorney general than he set out to prove that both Waters-Pierce and Republic Oil were secret marketing subsidiaries of Standard Oil that had fixed prices and carved up the state into exclusive sales territories with Standard Oil of Indiana. In serving subpoenas upon Standard executives in Manhattan, Hadley’s men proved to be agile daredevils. “The gentlemen are following their daily avocation in town here but moving cautiously,” Junior reported to his father from 26 Broadway.16 One morning, Henry Rogers strode rapidly from his Manhattan town house to his chauffeured car. As it pulled away from the curb, a process server named M. E. Palemdo sprang from a hiding spot and landed on the running board. “Is this Mr. Henry H. Rogers?” he asked. While a speechless Rogers stared at this impudent interloper, Palemdo flung the subpoena at him, flashed his court order, then leaped from the speeding vehicle.