Memoirs

by David Rockefeller

  In our secular age it is difficult for us to understand a life that was so governed by religious faith. For many, too, a life lived according to the strictures of the Baptist faith—no drinking, smoking, or dancing—seems a painfully dour existence. But Grandfather wore the commandments of his religion, all the things that would seem to us such burdens, with ease and even joy. He was the least dour man I have ever known; he was constantly smiling, joking, and telling shaggy dog stories. Often at dinner he would start to sing softly one of his favorite hymns. He wasn’t singing to anyone; it was as if a feeling of peace and contentment were welling out of him.

  As a boy I would occasionally walk up the hill to Kykuit from my parents’ home, Abeyton Lodge, a distance of about a quarter mile, for breakfast or lunch with Grandfather. For breakfast Grandfather invariably ate oatmeal, but with butter and salt rather than cream and sugar. He ate very slowly, chewing every bite very thoroughly, because he thought this an important aid to digestion. He said one should even chew milk, which he did!

  Grandfather rarely took his meals alone. Friends and associates, many from the old days in Cleveland, often stayed with him, frequently for extended periods. Meals were long and leisurely, and the conversation informal and congenial. Business was never discussed; instead, Grandfather would joke with his cousin and longtime housekeeper, Mrs. Evans, a rather stout and kindly woman who would return his good-natured jibes in kind. On a few occasions I dined with him at Kykuit as well. After the meal we all moved to a sitting room where, as his guests talked, Grandfather would doze quietly in his easy chair. He always retired for the night at a very early hour.

  At other times Grandfather enjoyed playing a card game called Numerica. The cards were square with only one number on each, and the game was designed to test and improve mathematical reasoning. Grandfather always served as the dealer—and the winner of each round always received a dime and the losers a nickel.

  On one occasion when I was a bit older and Grandfather was in his nineties, he accepted my invitation to a chicken dinner at the Playhouse, which I prepared. Both he and Mrs. Evans came and pronounced the meal “quite delicious!”

  I also visited Grandfather at his homes in Florida and Lakewood, New Jersey. Grandfather loved golf and built private courses at Pocantico and Lakewood. When I was a teenager and just learning the game, we would play a few holes together. By then Grandfather played for the exercise and rarely completed a full round.

  In June 1936, as Grandfather’s health began to fail, I paid him a short visit in Ormond Beach. He was pleased, as always, to see me, but he was noticeably feeble and tired. He spent most of his time sleeping or sitting quietly in his room. We spoke briefly about matters of little consequence, but he seemed content just to have me in the room with him. He allowed me to take several photographs of him sitting in his chair. It was the last time I saw him alive.

  Grandfather was a deeply religious man, but he never judged or condemned others who did not share his beliefs. As a teetotaler his entire life, Grandfather was a rarity at Standard, where most of his closest associates were anything but pious men. John Archbold, a onetime rival who became a close friend, was a very heavy drinker, and Grandfather made it a lifetime project to reform him. Grandfather formed intense friendships with his business partners, including Archbold, Henry Flagler, and his brother, William, who were with him from the earliest days at Standard. On the rare occasions when I heard him mention his business career, he spoke of the fun they had, despite the hard work and long hours, as confederates in a grand new enterprise.

  Grandfather was modest by nature, and while he lived a life possible only for those of great wealth, he was comparatively frugal. At a time when the Carnegies, Fricks, Harrimans, and Vanderbilts were building grand mansions along Fifth Avenue, Grandfather bought a home on a side street whose previous tenant, Arabella Worsham, was the mistress of Collis P. Huntington. It was a very large brownstone, and Grandfather bought several lots beside it into which the family would later expand, but it says something about him that he never bothered to redecorate it. Miss Worsham’s red plush wallpaper and heavy, ornate Victorian furniture remained there as long as Grandfather lived.

  His one indulgence seems to have been trotting horses. He kept a number of matched pairs, and he enjoyed driving them at Pocantico and in Central Park, where he would occasionally become involved in races with his brother and close friends.

  Grandfather was totally lacking in vanity. He gave little thought to surface appearances. As a young man he had been good-looking, but in the 1890s he contracted a painful viral infection, generalized alopecia, which affected his nervous system. As a result of the disease he lost all his hair. In one photograph from this time he is wearing a black skullcap, which made him look a bit like the Merchant of Venice. Later he wore wigs.

  Some people, notably Ida Tarbell, thought his physical appearance repugnant; others disagreed. Initially, John Singer Sargent was reluctant to paint Grandfather’s portrait. However, after lengthy conversations during the sittings, they became friends. In the end, Sargent told Father he wanted to paint a second portrait because he had become intrigued with his subject and said that Grandfather reminded him of a medieval saint.

  “THE ART OF GIVING”

  The truth is that Grandfather found managing his fortune, which had reached almost a billion dollars by 1910, to be a problem. His annual income from Standard Oil and other investments was enormous, and given Grandfather’s meticulous nature, it had to be spent or invested properly. Since he was uninterested in acquiring French châteaus or Scottish castles and was appalled at the idea of buying art, yachts, or suits of medieval armor—all activities engaged in by his more extravagant contemporaries—Grandfather worked out a characteristic solution: He invested a good portion of his income in coal mines, railroads, insurance companies, banks, and manufacturing enterprises of various kinds, most famously the iron ore business, and eventually controlled much of the rich Mesabi Range in Minnesota.

  But increasingly, after Grandfather retired from Standard in 1897, he occupied himself with a different form of investing: philanthropy, which he referred to as the “art of giving.” In doing this he would have as profound an effect as he had with Standard Oil.

  From the time he was a young man just starting in business, Grandfather recorded every item of income and expense, including charitable donations of as little as a penny, in a series of ledgers, beginning with the famous “Ledger A,” which are preserved in the Rockefeller Archive Center in Pocantico Hills. Keeping records became a family tradition. Father followed Grandfather’s example and tried to have my generation do the same with varying degrees of success. And I tried it with my own children with even less success than Father.

  In doing this Grandfather was following the religious injunction to tithe, or give a tenth part of his income to the Church and other good causes. As his earnings grew, his charitable donations kept pace, usually reaching the tithe to which he had committed himself. By the mid-1880s, Grandfather found it difficult to handle charitable contributions by himself. It was, in fact, one of the chief causes of stress for him in those years. He felt obliged not only to give but to give wisely, which is a lot more difficult. “It is easy to do harm in giving money,” he wrote. By then his annual income exceeded a million dollars, and disposing of just 10 percent of it was a full-time occupation. His eventual solution was to employ the Reverend Frederick T. Gates, a Baptist minister, to develop a more thoughtful and systematic way to assess the individuals and organizations who requested funds. Fortunately, Gates was a man with a broad education and considerable wisdom. Over the next several decades they planned the distribution of more than half of the fortune; most of the rest ultimately went to Father, who dedicated his life to carrying on and expanding their work.

  Some have said that Grandfather and Father, along with Andrew Carnegie, invented modern philanthropy. That may be true, but it may also claim too much. What the two of them did was emphasize t
he need to move charitable activities away from treating the symptoms of social problems toward understanding and then eliminating the underlying causes. This led them both to embrace a scientific approach and to support the work of experts in many fields.

  Grandfather’s first major philanthropic project was the creation of the University of Chicago in the 1890s. It was only after the turn of the century, however, that Grandfather put his business cares behind him and devoted himself primarily to philanthropy. One of the first initiatives he undertook was the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, founded in 1901.

  Grandfather’s vision, developed in close collaboration with Gates, my father, and the first director of the institute, Dr. Simon Flexner, was to establish a research facility modeled on the Pasteur and Koch institutes in Europe. In creating the institute Grandfather followed the same principles he had first tested at Standard Oil: He hired good men and gave them scope. While he had been intimately involved in the inception and planning, once the institute was up and running, he made it a point not to interfere with its management. He felt it appropriate to hand over the reins to the educators and scientists who were specialists in their field. Father became president of the board of trustees to ensure that the policy of independent scientific research was strictly maintained.

  The General Education Board, Grandfather’s next major initiative, grew out of his desire to create a public education system in the South that would benefit blacks as well as whites. Grandfather provided the GEB with almost $130 million in endowment and operating funds over its thirty-year existence. The GEB worked closely with local and state governments to achieve its goals. It is one of the first and most successful examples of public-private cooperation that our family has always promoted.

  The Rockefeller Foundation, founded in 1913, was the first philanthropic organization with a specifically global vision and the culmination of Grandfather’s efforts to create a structure capable of wisely managing his assets for benevolent purposes. Grandfather provided more endowment for the foundation—approximately $182 million, more than $2 billion in present dollars, over a period of ten years—than for any other institution. The foundation fought against hookworm, yellow fever, malaria, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases. In later years it became a leader in developing hybrid varieties of corn, wheat, and rice that served as the basis for the Green Revolution, which has done so much to transform societies around the world.

  “PUBLIC RELATIONS”

  The charge has often been made that Grandfather’s charitable giving was no more than a public relations ploy to burnish his image after a lifetime of rapacious profit-making. If that had really been his motivation, would he have needed to spend half a billion dollars to achieve that end?

  Public relations pioneer Ivy Lee is often credited with developing the plan that included everything from the creation of the great foundations to having Grandfather give away shiny dimes, which would replace his image as a ruthless robber baron with that of a genial, kindly, and benevolent old man. Most of this is quite preposterous. Grandfather handed out dimes as a means of establishing an easy rapport with people whom he met casually on the golf course, at church, or walking down the street. It helped break the ice with them, and put them at ease, and it usually worked.

  In fact, Grandfather had so little interest in the public relations benefits of his philanthropy that he wouldn’t allow his name to be used for the University of Chicago or the General Education Board, and it was only with great reluctance that he agreed to use his name for the Rockefeller Institute. It is hard to imagine that Grandfather, who refused to allow Standard Oil to refute the libels being spread by the muckrakers, would instead devote the larger part of his fortune to manipulating the public’s view of him. One would have to believe, which I do not, that he experienced a crisis of conscience that compelled him to throw off his “ill-gotten gains.”

  Grandfather never breathed a sigh of remorse to my Father, his grandchildren, or anyone else about his business career. He believed Standard Oil benefited society, and he felt comfortable with his role in creating it.

  What, then, explains Grandfather’s philanthropy? In my view it flowed from his religious training and the experiences of his own life. Ida Tarbell and her intellectual descendants have chosen to picture Grandfather as the essence of greed and the epitome of selfish individualism. Grandfather was a strong individualist, but he defined the term differently. He rejected the idea of individualism as selfishness and self-aggrandizement. Instead, he defined individualism as the freedom to achieve and the obligation to return something of value to the community that had nurtured and sustained him. I believe this was both the source and object of his philanthropy.

  As for Father, far from being ashamed of Grandfather, he was immensely proud of him and his many achievements. If Father had conflicted feelings—and he did—they were that he didn’t measure up. For much of his life my father, one of the greatest philanthropists in history, thought of himself as simply following in the footsteps of a greater man.

  CHAPTER 2

  MOTHER AND FATHER

  When my parents married on October 9, 1901, the press headlined it as the union of the two most powerful families in America: the son and heir of John D. Rockefeller and the daughter of Nelson Aldrich, Republican majority leader in the U.S. Senate and, according to some, “the General Manager of the Nation.”

  Father had been taken with my mother from their first meeting, but he agonized over whether to propose to her for an almost fatal length of time. It is indicative of Father’s earnestness that when he finally asked the Senator for his daughter’s hand, he launched into a lengthy explanation of his financial prospects, apparently anxious to demonstrate that he was a sound match. The Senator, somewhat amused, stopped him in mid-sentence and said, “Mr. Rockefeller, I am only interested in what will make my daughter happy.”

  That Father did make Mother happy, and she him, I have no doubt. They were exceedingly close—perhaps too close, as I will explain in a moment—and I believe they loved each other very much. Mother brought to Father and to the marriage a sense of joy and fun that he desperately needed.

  Mother grew up in a large family of eight siblings, five boys and three girls, in Providence, Rhode Island. Mother was third in age, the second oldest daughter, and was particularly close to her father. Her father played a key role in setting high tariffs and creating a more flexible currency and a more stable banking system through the formation of the Federal Reserve System. Mother recalled him and his Senate colleagues debating legislation while playing poker and enjoying a few drinks at his Washington home. Grandmother Aldrich had been an invalid for many years, so for a decade or so prior to her marriage, Mother often served as hostess for her father. She was thrust into the center of the Washington scene and was not only comfortable but supremely adept at handling the demands of “society.”

  Grandfather Aldrich loved travel and greatly appreciated art. Mother and her siblings often accompanied him to Paris, Rome, and London, where he attended official conferences. At an early age she came to know Paris and its art world, and became comfortable with the new forms and ideas emerging at that time.

  INFLUENTIAL STANDARDS, EMOTIONAL FRAGILITY

  The family Mother married into couldn’t have been more different from hers. Her siblings, especially her older sister, Lucy, kidded her about the “straitlaced” Rockefellers, and in the beginning worried if she would be able to adapt.

  For most of Father’s childhood his mother, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, was the dominant figure in his life. She had the principal responsibility for his upbringing and education, and was a strict disciplinarian. Her parents were deeply religious and had been active in both the antislavery and temperance movements. Her portraits and photographs reveal a formidable individual not easily given to mirth.

  Grandmother Rockefeller provided Father with most of his religious training, his strong sense of moral rectitude, and the first intimati
ons that he would bear a heavy responsibility for the stewardship of the family’s immense fortune. Grandmother Rockefeller joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union soon after its founding, firmly convinced that “demon rum” lay at the heart of all the social problems of the time: poverty, vice, and crime. As a young boy Father attended temperance meetings regularly and, when he was ten, signed a pledge to abstain from “tobacco, profanity, and the drinking of any intoxicating beverages.” Until he entered college, Father’s life was centered on his family and the Baptist Church. Father’s college years at Brown University provided him with the first opportunity to break free from his mother’s influence, but it was a difficult task and he never quite succeeded. He did, however, explore new ideas that gradually broadened his understanding of the world around him and formed a number of friendships that lasted his entire life. Most important, at least from my perspective, he met my mother and began the courtship that would end in their marriage more than eight years later.

  Even with the leavening of a college education, a secure family life, and a large circle of friends, Father approached life with a considerable amount of insecurity. His marriage, despite his initial doubts and hesitation, was a godsend. Mother’s high spirits, gregariousness, and sociability helped him deal with his shyness and introspection, and helped compensate for what he felt keenly were his deficiencies. In Mother he found someone who could understand, care for, and protect his emotional fragility. He wanted her to be with him always—if not immediately by his side, then immediately available. He wanted to retreat with her into their own private circle of two. From one point of view it was romantic, and I believe their relations with each other were extremely intense and loving. From another point of view the bond they shared was exclusive of all else, including the children. And therein lay the source of much tension for Mother.