by Ron Chernow
John D. Rockefeller attends the ailing Cettie, who was confined to a wheelchair in her final years. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
During her last Pocantico winter, strengthened by a brew of barley, oatmeal, and milk, Cettie seemed to rally, so that Junior and Abby felt confident enough to join Senior at his new winter retreat in Ormond Beach, Florida. As workmen painted the master bedroom for John D.’s return, Cettie was in better spirits than she had been in for a long time. On March 11, 1915, she asked for a wheelchair, wanting to tour the garden and smell the flowers. During this fleeting reverie, she downed a glass of milk, pronounced it good, then wearily sank back on her pillow, feeling faint and weak. Lute and Dr. Paul Allen maintained an overnight vigil at her bedside, and the two sisters were clasping hands at 10:20 A.M. the next morning when Cettie expired. At Ormond Beach, Rockefeller received two telegrams in rapid succession: the first announcing that she was dying, the second her death. Though he had gotten accustomed, by degrees, to the possible imminence of her death, he was still stunned by the finality of the news. When he shuffled back to the breakfast table with the news, John and Abby saw something they had never seen before: Senior was openly weeping.
Returning by train from Florida with his son and daughter-in-law, Rockefeller was amazed by the many expressions of sympathy he received from railway officials and conductors along the route. As Abby said, “He was wonderfully calm and brave but it was a great shock to him.” 8 At Pocantico, Rockefeller found Cettie laid out peacefully where she had died and for a long time stared pensively at the woman who had shared the unprecedented achievements and tumult of his life. Alta came to Pocantico but not Edith, who was studying with Carl Jung in Switzerland. Seven years later, Rockefeller reconstructed for her his impressions of Cettie’s death, saying that “she triumphed gloriously when the end came, and to the last view we took of her, her face bore that angelic radiance.” 9
Rockefeller was always sentimental about his wife, and as he reminisced about their early married days on Cheshire Street in Cleveland, he would take out and lovingly handle the first dishes they had purchased. While grappling with both grief and wistful memory, he had to endure an infuriating tax battle with the city of Cleveland. He had been a legal resident of New York since the 1880s and paid all his taxes there. During the winter of 1913–1914, Cettie’s illness had forced him to prolong his stay at Forest Hill beyond February 3—the tax-listing day that determined taxable residence in Ohio. Rockefeller’s extended sojourn had been dictated solely by the medical emergency.
Nonetheless, his political enemies welcomed this chance to vex him. Declaring Rockefeller a legal resident for 1913, the Cuyahoga County tax office assessed him $1.5 million in taxes. Having already paid taxes in New York, he refused to submit to this extortion, even after Ohio governor James M. Cox threatened to subpoena him if he crossed the state line. While Rockefeller stalled, the Cuyahoga commissioners threatened to slap on a 50 percent penalty. Later on, the courts declared that Rockefeller had been assessed wrongfully, but meanwhile he had no choice but to boycott the state.
The way Cleveland dealt with him had long been a sore point with Rockefeller, who believed that no other town so regularly abused him. He thought the city ungrateful for Standard Oil’s economic contribution and railed against “low politicians” who tried to extract taxes from him. “Cleveland ought to be ashamed to look herself in the face when she thinks of how she treated us,” he stated.10 It irked him that local groups badgered him for money while he was being so mercilessly berated by local reporters and politicians. During his lifetime, he donated more than three million dollars to several local institutions— including the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, Alta House, Western Reserve University, the Case School of Applied Sciences, and the Cleveland Orchestra— and gave the land for two spacious parks, Rockefeller Park and Forest Hill Park. Yet these gifts were extremely modest compared to what Cleveland would have received had it not antagonized him. Rankled, Rockefeller transferred his love and loyalty to his adopted town. “New York has always treated me more fairly than Cleveland, much more.”11 How many New York hospitals, museums, and churches would be enriched by Cleveland’s blunder!
Because of the virulent tax dispute, Rockefeller could not bury Cettie in the family plot in Cleveland without facing a subpoena and had to postpone the burial. To the press, he contrived a saccharine story that he could not bear to part with her remains. “I want to keep her with me as long as I can,” he told reporters.12 For four and a half months, he stored her casket in the green granite mausoleum of the Archbold family at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, which was patrolled at all hours by two armed guards.
The casket was finally moved to Cleveland under top secret conditions. During a pelting rain and hailstorm, two guards were sent down to the cemetery gate to pick up some decorative plants for the vault—a diversionary tactic that distracted them for twenty-five minutes. While they were away, a local undertaker named Vanderbilt drove up to the vault, peeled away the flower-covered pall, removed Cettie’s casket from its container, substituted a new empty casket, then replaced the pall and flowers. Once he had executed this switch, Vanderbilt drove out the front gate with Cettie’s coffin hidden inside a rough, plain, unmarked box. Driving to the Harmon station of the Lake Shore Railroad, the undertaker loaded the box into a baggage car amid the intermittent flashes of an electrical storm. Nobody associated with the railroad knew the identity of the cadaver, which was accompanied to Cleveland by Vanderbilt and two men from 26 Broadway. One conspirator recalled Rockefeller’s peculiarly boyish pleasure at this intrigue: “To plan and carry out the removal of the body without the papers and the public discovering a thing until all was over, was a source of satisfaction to him.” 13
Perpetuating this intrigue at Lake View cemetery, only Senior, Alta, Parmalee, and Aunt Lute stood by when Cettie’s coffin was lowered into the earth beside Eliza—with a gap left in between them so that Rockefeller could spend eternity flanked by his two favorite women. Rockefeller selected Christian verse to be read aloud at the gravesite, and this clandestine sunset burial filled him with emotion. “That was all so beautiful, so lovely,” he said. “It was just as mama would have wished.”14 It also ended Rockefeller’s association with Cleveland, since two years later the old Forest Hill house mysteriously burned down on a frosty December night. After a failed attempt to create a residential development with houses designed in Norman-château style, Junior transferred the remaining land to Cleveland for Forest Hill Park.
As part of the probate of her will, Cettie’s wardrobe was inventoried and revealed her nunlike simplicity. The most costly item of clothing was a seal coat and muff, appraised at $150. She had a dowdy collection of garments, with 15 suits valued at $300 and 10 hats at $50. Cettie had never replaced the thin gold wedding ring of 1864, which was now valued at $3. As one dumbfounded reporter commented: “Able to have a wardrobe as extensive as Queen Elizabeth’s, she was content with a supply which in quantity and quality could be duplicated by the wife of an ordinarily successful business man.” 15
Cettie’s death elicited Rockefeller’s last major philanthropic commitment: In 1918, he gave $74 million to endow the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. To commemorate his wife, he stipulated that this foundation should promote various causes that she had championed, such as Baptist missions, churches, and homes for the aged. But the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial moved beyond the denominational giving she had favored. In 1922, under the direction of Beardsley Ruml, it began to pour nearly fifty million dollars into research in the social sciences. A husky, loquacious young man, always twinkling with ideas, the cigar-smoking Ruml stimulated the growth of many university research centers in social science and was a moving force behind the creation of the Social Science Research Council. By the time the memorial was folded into the Rockefeller Foundation in 1929, it had left an enduring imprint on the academic world in only a decade of existence. As Robert M. Hutchins of the
University of Chicago said, “The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in its brief but brilliant career did more than any other agency to promote the social sciences in the United States.”16
By the time her mother died, Edith had already spent two years in self-imposed exile in Switzerland and was increasingly alienated from her father and siblings. Aside from a single meeting with Junior, she seemed to have no contact with the other Rockefellers during her years abroad. She kept up a sporadic, stilted correspondence with her father that was both warm and distant, loving and subtly hostile, as she tried to sort out her confused feelings toward him.
Edith and Harold McCormick had a close but tumultuous marriage. It was, in many ways, a classic mismatch: Harold was free and expansive, while Edith was aloof, imperious, and cerebral, very much the mistress of her emotions. Sometimes she found her husband too exuberant, while he criticized her for being standoffish. Their marital tensions were likely aggravated by the death of two of their children: four-year-old Jack in 1901 and one-year-old Editha in 1904, events that cast a shadow across Edith’s life. To worsen matters, between 1905 and 1907 she suffered from tuberculosis of the kidney, which fortunately went into remission. Edith became more rigid, a stickler for a frosty sort of protocol, even forcing her children to make appointments to see her. When she went out driving, she planned the exact itinerary for the coachman then refused to speak to him again during the drive. She and Harold constructed a forty-four-room mansion in Lake Forest, Illinois, called the Villa Turicum, which they never occupied, and the unpacked crates of china and chairs lingered dustily in the storerooms. Once a brilliant society hostess, Edith became increasingly immured in their mansion at 1000 Lake Shore Drive, incapacitated by a terrifying agoraphobia.
In 1910, to investigate new sites for an International Harvester factory, Harold spent two summer months motoring through Hungary with Edith, a trip that sorely debilitated her. The following year, at the last minute, she canceled a cotillion ball for two hundred people without any explanation, fostering rumors that she had had a nervous breakdown. Around this time, she also suffered a crisis of religious faith, producing a breach with her father. For a long time, she had suspected that preachers dressed up their personal beliefs as gospel truth. “I never heard a Baptist minister say anything from a pulpit that convinced me he was Divinely inspired,” she once remarked.17 The upshot, she recalled, was that “as the minister finished his sermon one Sunday I walked from my pew and out into the air vowing never to return and I kept that vow.”18 For Edith, it was a bracing moment that allowed her to map her own route to salvation, yet it also estranged her from a family spoon-fed on simple Baptist pieties.
During the summer of 1912, in a ten-week stay at a Catskill Mountains clinic run by a Dr. Foord, she rebelled against the conventional regimen of fresh air and exercise being prescribed for her depression. She was ripe for some daring approach—“My object in the world is to think new thoughts,” she once stated—ideally one with quasi-mystical ingredients that might substitute for her shattered religious faith.19 She was primed, in short, for her first encounter with Carl Jung, the Swiss clinical and experimental psychiatrist who had treated Harold several years earlier.
While Jung was in New York in September 1912, Harold’s cousin Medill McCormick—an editor and co-owner of the Chicago Tribune who had been treated by Jung for alcoholism—introduced Edith to him. As he began to analyze her, Jung liked her mental sparkle but thought her emotional state extremely precarious. Jung diagnosed Edith as suffering from “latent schizophrenia,” a hypothesis confirmed for him when she told him about a dream she had of a tree struck by lightning and split in two.20 Edith responded to analysis like a frustrated searcher who had at last found her destination. According to one version of the story, the bossy Edith urged Jung to move with his family to America, where she would buy him a house and help him to establish his practice. This grandiosity only strengthened Jung’s misgivings about Edith as a woman who thought “she could buy everything.”21 Regarding American life as sterile and deracinated, Jung recommended that Edith come to study with him in Zurich instead.
Since Edith spent years under Jung’s spell, it is worth noting his intense dislike of Rockefeller. On October 20, 1912, Jung spent the day with Edith at Kykuit, doubtless savoring the chance to study an archetypal figure such as Rockefeller up close. He glibly dismissed the titan as narrow, empty, and sanctimonious. “Rockefeller is really just a mountain of gold, and it has been dearly bought,” he said.22 He thought Rockefeller lonely, obsessed with his own health, and tortured by a bad conscience. At one point, Rockefeller told Jung that the Austrians were bad people. “You know, Doctor, perhaps, of my idea for a standardized price in favor of the Standard Oil Trust; you see what a great advantage it is to pay the same price for oil all over the world—it is for the good of the people—but the Austrians have made a separate contract with Rumania. Those people are very bad.”23 For Jung, who viewed Standard Oil as a monstrous operation, such talk corroborated his worst suspicions. As he later wrote, “We had three great organizations before the war, the famous trinity— the Germany army, the Standard Oil Company, and the Catholic Church. Each considers itself a perfectly moral institution . . . [yet] thousands of decent human beings have been destroyed by the Standard Oil Trust.”24
Having failed to woo Jung to American shores, Edith consented to sail with him to Switzerland in April 1913. For weeks before sailing, Jung met with her daily, and he continued the analytic sessions on board. Sigmund Freud, who had grown increasingly disenchanted with his onetime disciple, believed that Jung was scheming for the Rockefeller money and told Sándor Ferenczi that March that “Jung has gone to America again for five weeks, to see a Rockefeller woman, so they say.”25 For the crossing, the Rockefeller-McCormick retinue included Edith’s son Fowler and his tutor, daughter Muriel and her governess, plus a clutch of servants; Harold and their other daughter, Mathilde, stayed behind in Chicago. In Zurich, the group settled into a suite at the fancy Hotel Baur-au-Lac, where Edith spent the next eight years. At first, nobody, least of all Edith, thought in terms of such an extended stay. For Fowler, the Zurich summer proved intolerable. “This is a very queer place,” he wrote to Rockefeller. “It has rained here this summer almost incessantly and some very peculiar weather phenomenons happen.”26 When autumn came, he returned to America to attend Groton, but Edith tarried in Zurich, consulting Jung daily. In October, Harold and Mathilde went to Europe, hoping to bring Edith back in November, but given her growing attachment to analysis, Harold knew this was impossible. Hence, their two daughters stayed in Switzerland: Muriel was placed in a strict German school, while Mathilde, who suffered from weak health, stayed in a sanatorium.
By late December, lingering in Zurich with Edith, Harold saw the need to defend her protracted absence to her father. In a long letter to Rockefeller, he tried to explain some of Jung’s methods, though he was often reticent about the substance of Edith’s analysis. “Edith is becoming very real, and true to herself and is seeking and I am sure will succeed to find her path. . . . At any rate, she is in absolutely safe and trustworthy hands for no finer man ever breathed than Dr. Jung. He has an intense admiration for Edith and yet recognizes that she is the toughest problem he ever had to deal with.” To head off family criticism, Harold added, “It was a God-send that she met Dr. Jung and that her family stood back of her in her resolve and that she felt this assurance.” 27
Served with this warning to be tolerant, Rockefeller tried to be forbearing, but for a nineteenth-century man, Jung’s modern approach to nervous jitters sounded like so much mumbo jumbo. In detailed, informative letters, Harold gamely outlined Jung’s theory of the unconscious and how he investigated that realm through dreams, reveries, and free association. Rockefeller was diplomatic but obviously befuddled. “I have not been able up to date to get down satisfactorily to all the underlying principles,” he apologized to Harold. “But so long as they exercise a beautiful, helpful, continuing i
nfluence for good over the lives, that is the thing.”28
On December 20, Harold sailed back to America without Edith. Beyond her veneration of Jung, she was immobilized by a travel phobia that made even brief train trips unbearable torments. The severity of her fears can be gleaned from a gossipy account written by her Zurich chauffeur, Emile Ammann, who was driven to distraction by her antics. He portrayed Edith as a vain, haughty, narcissistic woman with a slender waist and bright, piercing eyes. He said she was known for her eccentric behavior, her furs and diamonds, and her beautiful fashions straight from Paris and Wiesbaden. According to Ammann, she was indifferent to her family, brutal with servants, and preoccupied with punctuality in a way that mirrored her father. On his first morning, she ordered him to pick her up at 9:14. After he arrived, she checked her diamond-studded wristwatch. “Ammann,” she said, “I ordered you to be here at 9:14. You were here at 9:13. Naturally, that’s not the same thing.”29
Ammann claimed that Edith had been able to sail to Switzerland because Jung had effectively sedated her by putting her in a hypnotic trance. The chauffeur played a pivotal role in the therapy to cure her travel phobia. Jung recommended that Edith board a train and travel as far as she could; sometimes, however, she sprang from the train in terror before it even left the station. But if she could stave off the terror and stay aboard, Ammann would speed ahead in the Rolls-Royce and meet her at the next station; if she felt secure enough to go on, she waved from the train window and he raced to the next station. Sometimes these grueling exercises lasted three hours, leaving both Edith and Ammann exhausted. Jung evidently thought Edith had to conquer her haughtiness as well, for he had her kneel down in her luxurious hotel suite and scrub the floors. Like some self-flagellating penitent, she also walked hatless and dripping through the rain while Ammann trailed alongside her in the car.