Titan

by Ron Chernow

  Even with such acrobatics, Hadley’s minions could not catch Rockefeller, and the press joined in the national manhunt. Tracing a welter of rumors, reporters erroneously placed the titan aboard Henry Rogers’s yacht, anchored off Puerto Rico, or in a hideaway with Flagler in Key West. As he decamped from one estate to the next, Rockefeller was reduced to the degrading life of a fugitive. Then his whereabouts were betrayed by the telltale cheese. Every day at Pocantico, Rockefeller received a shipment of his favorite cheese aboard the New York Central. One day, a local hack driver, Henry Cooge, informed the press that suspicious cheeses were again entering Pocantico. “Them cheeses,” he said, “I would recognize anywhere, no matter whether it is day or night. . . . Rockefeller, in my opinion, is somewhere on his estate.”17

  Cooge’s nose was correct: Rockefeller had retreated to Pocantico, turning it into his fortress, flanked on every side by detectives. Waves of process servers flung themselves against the battlements to no effect. “Time and again,” said one newspaper, “process-servers in various disguises have succeeded in passing the pickets, but never have they penetrated beyond the inner guard of detectives. When discovered they have been handled roughly and promptly ejected by the oil king’s minions.”18 Afraid that his phone was being tapped, Rockefeller advised Cettie not to telephone him. He also advised his secretary at 26 Broadway to forward letters to him in plain envelopes without return addresses.

  At a convenient moment, via a backdoor route, Rockefeller fled by boat from Tarrytown to Golf House in Lakewood, where he set up conditions worthy of a maximum-security prison. Floodlights were trained on people approaching the estate at night, and delivery wagons were searched thoroughly, lest they conceal crouching servants of the law. When Abby gave birth to John D. Rockefeller III in March 1906, the newspapers gloated that because of Hadley’s marauding agents Rockefeller could not visit his first male grandson bearing the Rockefeller name. The New York World taunted him with the headline, “Grandson Born to John D. Rockefeller And He, Mewed Up in His Lakewood Fort, Could Only Rejoice by Phone.”19 This artful dodger urged relatives to keep his location secret. He advised brother-in-law William Rudd: “Confidentially I prefer not to have it known where I am. It often saves me much annoyance. My correspondence has been cut down fifty or seventy-five per cent since the autumn. I say this because some curious people might be asking you if you heard from me or if you were writing me, etc. I do not wish to have it known now or at any time.” 20 During the first round of testimony in New York, Hadley failed to get Rockefeller on the stand, but the humiliating pursuit had made an impression on him. After Hadley returned to Missouri, Rockefeller inquired of Archbold, “Would it be well for us to see how we could settle the Missouri cases without further litigation or trouble? I am not prepared to say, but suggest that we give it careful thought.”21

  No sooner had he finished evading Hadley’s men than Rockefeller’s testimony was sought in a Philadelphia suit against the Pennsylvania Railroad. Instructed by his lawyers not to venture within one hundred miles of the city, he had George Rogers draw a hundred-mile radius around Philadelphia on a map, and he did not penetrate that ring. Slowly, his life was being tied into knots by court cases. In March 1906, when Junior wanted him to attend his class reunion at Brown or at least to write a congratulatory note, Rockefeller declined, explaining that “if the location from which I wrote was not given it would cause comment. If the letter was dated from 26 Broadway, that would cause comment, especially in connection with the statement that I had not been in my office for many years. . . . Possibly if no reference was made to me on this occasion, it might be better.”22

  As lawsuits kept appearing, Rockefeller reacted with the indignation of a man who felt wronged, and he cynically dismissed the politicians behind them as sensation-mongers. Nevertheless, he was being held hostage to Standard Oil’s legal travails and expressed frustration with his nominal title of honorary president, which made him a lightning rod for attacks against the trust. When he sounded out Gates and Junior about resigning, he recalled that when Standard Oil of New Jersey was formed, he had allowed his name to be used “at the solicitation of my associates, though I earnestly requested them to name my successor.”23 Both Gates and Junior pressed him to drop the unwanted title, which they thought a handicap to the conduct of his philanthropies.

  In August 1906, amid great secrecy, Rockefeller quietly dictated a letter to George Rogers, resigning as president of Standard Oil and asking for speedy board approval—a request he renewed several times over the next few years. As he told Archbold, “I am placed in a false position and subjected to ridicule for not knowing about the affairs as one should know to be in the official relation; and I shall not be surprised to hear of stringent legislation to punish people for occupying positions in this way.”24 Every time that Rockefeller made this plea, Archbold resisted, afraid that his departure might appear to repudiate the organization at a vulnerable moment and undermine shareholder confidence. As far as Archbold was concerned, Rockefeller was now in too deep to back out. “We told him that he had to keep” the title of president, Henry Rogers had earlier told Ida Tarbell. “These cases against us were pending in the courts; and we told him that if any of us had to go to jail, he would have to go with us!”25

  Rockefeller and his colleagues had been slow to grasp the power of the growing newspaper chains and mass-circulation magazines, which could now saturate the country with a story. Rockefeller’s image was suddenly everywhere. One cartoonist pictured him approaching a newsstand where his face was featured on the cover of every publication and dolefully asking the vendor: “Do you have any that aren’t about me?” In another cartoon, Rockefeller shoveled coins into one side of a scale, with a scrap of paper saying “A Few Kind Words” on the other side; the caption wondered: “What Would He Give for Them?” This most secretive of men saw his most obscure designs exposed everywhere. Wanting to forget the past, he now had to confront it at every turn.

  In retrospect, it seems clear that Rockefeller’s press critics profited from a fleeting transitional moment when corporations had not adapted to the new media and lacked any public-relations apparatus. For nearly three years, Standard Oil was assailed by Ida Tarbell and made only halfhearted responses. When editorials appeared impugning the McClure’s series, for instance, Rockefeller had copies circulated widely. And for years, Standard Oil clandestinely paid $15,000 per annum to an English economist named George Gunton who edited a magazine that with telltale regularity disputed Lloyd and Tarbell. (For fear of the political consequences, Rockefeller and his descendants always balked at outright ownership of major news properties.) The trust also financed a sympathetic history, The Rise and Supremacy of the Standard Oil Company by Gilbert H. Montague, which began as his thesis as a Harvard undergraduate. Yet these were random efforts, not a coordinated counterattack.

  The real publicity watershed for Standard Oil came after the tainted-money controversy. Feeling impotent in the face of misinformation, Gates badgered Rockefeller with plans for a literary bureau, and Rockefeller encouraged him to speak to Archbold. According to Gates, Archbold was “overjoyed” by Rockefeller’s change of heart, and the upshot was that the trust hired its first publicist, Joseph I. C. Clarke, an editor of the New York Herald. 26 Although Ivy Lee was already handling publicity for the Pennsylvania Railroad, such a step was still a novelty in corporate America. Most businesses did not concede the legitimacy of journalists poking into their affairs and consequently had no full-time publicist on the payroll. A jovial, outgoing poet and playwright, Clarke would greet reporters with a quip and a cigar to warm up the trust’s image. Before long, he was lining up reporters for breezy, lighthearted interviews with Rockefeller, featuring a game of golf with the mogul, who obligingly delivered pithy observations on topical subjects. Articles began to appear with titles like “The Human Side of John D. Rockefeller,” as if its existence wasn’t taken for granted.

  At first, Junior doubted the efficacy of even
favorable stories. But as early as 1903, he and Parmalee Prentice beseeched Senior to publish an authorized biography to rebut Tarbell’s work before it formed the basis of future histories. Sure that history would vindicate him, Rockefeller at first temporized, then compromised to appease his son—setting a pattern for the next three decades. In 1904, he began dictating answers to biographical questions posed by Starr Murphy, yet his heart was not in it, and the project soon expired. Work on an official Standard Oil history fared only marginally better. In 1906, a special executive committee of Standard Oil of New Jersey hired the Reverend Leonard Woolsey Bacon to write a history, and Rockefeller vetted his chapter on the South Improvement Company. Then Bacon got sick and only a pamphlet appeared.

  Rockefeller imagined that the press’s muckraking ardor would cool shortly. He took comfort from the fact that the new mass media exemplified the big-business capitalism they deplored and so could not very well tolerate radical critiques for long. How could big newspaper barons such as Joseph Pulitzer crusade against their own interests? As Rockefeller assured Gates, “The owner of the World is also a large owner of property, and I presume that, in common with other newspaper owners who are possessed of wealth, his eyes are beginning to be opened to the fact that he is like Samson, taking the initiative to pull the building down upon his head.”27 By 1905, Rockefeller and his entourage were picking up hints that investigative zeal was ebbing among the editors at McClure’s, where, Starr Murphy reported, “the thing has now gone so far that they themselves are getting disgusted and heartily wish they were out of it.”28 In March 1906, Teddy Roosevelt delivered his famous speech at Washington’s Gridiron Club in which he borrowed a term from Pilgrim’s Progress and denounced the new investigative reporters as muckrakers who kept their eyes fixed on lowly matters instead of occasionally lifting them up to heaven. The muckrakers were now on the wane, but the trustbusters were not.

  Hounded by government and the press, Rockefeller found little solace in family affairs. In May 1906, he provided one cousin with a somber litany of problems that had beset the family since the Tarbell series. Edith had returned from her therapeutic travels in Europe, which were supposed to alleviate her depression, but she was sick and recuperating only slowly; Junior was making progress after his breakdown but was still weak; Alta had been in bed for several weeks after surgery; and Cettie was laid low with pneumonia and grippe. “So I think we will agree,” Rockefeller summed up, “that no one family has a monopoly of the ills of life.”29 At sixty-six, he was the healthiest specimen in the family.

  Of all the family medical problems, the most worrisome was that of Bessie. She and her husband, Charles Strong, had moved to Cannes in May 1904 to confer with neurological experts, especially a Dr. Bourcart. Now, two years later, she was also suffering from heart trouble and was too debilitated to return home. While Rockefeller applauded her for seeking rest in a warm, sunny climate, he was distressed by her two-year absence abroad. Sensitive to her delicate psychological state, he sent her gently whimsical letters. “I weigh nearly two hundred pounds, without my five wigs,” he wrote in December 1905. “You should see them! They are real works of art, and most satisfactory. I sleep in one, and do not know how I got along all these years without the hair.”30

  In spring 1906, frustrated by Bessie’s absence, Rockefeller and Cettie decided to spend seven weeks with the Strongs in France—an eternity abroad for these two provincials—at their summer residence in Compiègne, northeast of Paris. That May, Charles had reported that Bessie “you will be glad to hear, is in better condition at the present than at any time since we came abroad, though we shall hardly be able to cross the ocean this summer.”31 Rockefeller might have seen a sudden chance to deliver a timely plea for Bessie’s return to America. In commenting on the trip, George Santayana said of the Rockefellers, “they are going to travel under an assumed name, to protect themselves from begging letters and indiscreet curiosity.”32 But Rockefeller might also have wanted to travel incognito to foil efforts to serve him with subpoenas.

  In June 1906, the Rockefeller party—including Cettie, Lute, Alta, and Dr. Biggar—sailed for France aboard the Deutschland, with the Rockefeller name discreetly omitted from the passenger list. When it was learned that Rockefeller was aboard, the press busied itself with speculation about his motives. Some reporters stressed his desire to avoid testimony and others his supposedly broken health. Perhaps the most outrageous theory came from a New York American reporter, William Hoster, who conjectured luridly that Rockefeller’s stomach was ruined, that he was going to consult a renowed European specialist, and that he might never return alive. Hoping to observe Rockefeller at close range, Hoster purchased a ticket for the crossing, intending to file a series entitled “How the Richest Man in the World Plays.”

  During the voyage, as he stalked his quarry, Hoster was amazed at how different Rockefeller was from the stereotype that he himself had foisted on readers. For one thing, Rockefeller had an excellent appetite and wolfed down three meals a day. “It was a distinct shock to me,” he later wrote, “when Mr. Rockefeller strolled up the plank to find him, instead of the hopeless dyspeptic that he had been painted, a tall, broad-shouldered, robust man, with ruddy complexion, clear eyes, alert step and altogether vigorous manner.”33 Far from being aloof, Rockefeller fairly cavorted around the ship: bursting into a dance when he bested Dr. Biggar at shuffleboard; donning a harlequin’s costume the night of the captain’s dinner; and delighting small children with his antics. “One sturdy little fellow one afternoon produced two pennies, which he insisted upon sharing with his playmate Rockefeller,” Hoster later wrote. “The man of millions gravely accepted the copper and carefully placed it in his pocket, then, with his face turned seaward impulsively took up the child and folded his arms about it.”34 This warmhearted man was a revelation to Hoster.

  One part of Hoster’s assignment was to land an exclusive interview with Rockefeller. When the boat docked at Cherbourg, he knew that the Rockefeller party would shortly roar off in a touring car and that he had to confront the mogul at once. While Rockefeller wandered in an arbor, Hoster accosted him and introduced himself. Though he pretended that he never read his critics, Rockefeller evidently knew Hoster’s byline and expressed bitterness at the absurd treatment of his health. Hoster meekly confessed his error. Then, with a reporter’s cheek, he asked, “Mr. Rockefeller, have you ever reflected that perhaps you yourself may be in a measure responsible for the way that you have been treated by the newspapers?” He recounted how, dozens of times, he had gone to Rockefeller’s homes to try to interview him but had never been admitted or even allowed a glimpse, which seemed to verify the reports of ill health. Turning to another canard that Hoster had swallowed, Rockefeller noted that he had not been involved in Standard Oil management for many years. “Is it possible that is not known?” he asked. “I have made no concealment of it. All my friends know it.”35 Yet Hoster insisted that he and other reporters were genuinely ignorant of that, and he implored him to make it public.

  For a time, Rockefeller gazed stonily at Hoster and dug his walking stick into the gravel path. Then his face relaxed and a faint smile crossed his lips. “So it is all my fault,” Rockefeller said, with a touch of sarcasm. Then, after a pause, he added more seriously, “I suppose there may be something in what you say, though I had never thought of it in that way before.”36 Since Rockefeller had demonized reporters, much as they had demonized him, he was surprised to find that Hoster was sincere and invented stories for lack of accurate information.

  Rockefeller’s attitude toward the press had already begun to evolve with Standard’s hiring of Joseph I. C. Clarke, which might have predisposed him to talk more freely with Hoster. When Hoster asked if he was worth a billion dollars, Rockefeller shot back, “Nothing like it—not by one-third of that amount. I want to make clear to you the injury that is done to me by these persistent stories that I am worth a billion dollars. They provoke in the minds of thousands thoughts which le
ad to great unhappiness.”37 Gradually opening up as they walked along, Rockefeller told Hoster how grieved he was to be transformed into a monster. “Is it not patent that I have been made into a sort of frightful ogre, to slay which has become a favorite resource of men seeking public favor?”38 As always, Rockefeller blamed business rivals and demagogic politicians for his troubles. Yet however self-serving his remarks, he was at least now talking to a reporter. Then, to Hoster’s extreme amazement, Rockefeller invited him to accompany the party to Compiègne. How could he possibly resist?

  Charles and Bessie were renting the Château des Avenues at the edge of the forest of Compiègne for the summer. Once the summer home of Queen Isabella of Spain, it was now owned by the Duc de l’Aigle. Despite his wife’s illness, Charles was winding up a new book called The Origin of Consciousness. The Rockefellers were heartened to find the forty-year-old Bessie in improved health, though her mental faculties remained gravely impaired. When George Santayana visited during the Rockefellers’ stay, he wrote to a friend, apropos of Charles, “It is a terrible life he leads as his wife is like a child, hopelessly ill, yet apparently not going to die for the present.”39 Unlike Hoster, Santayana was shocked at how poorly Rockefeller looked, old and wrinkled and wearing a “pepper and salt wig decidedly too small for him.”40