We grew up realizing that if we were to have any of Mother’s attention, we would have to compete with Father for it. We knew how much she cared for us and enjoyed spending time with us, and it was apparent to us that the conflict between his needs and ours caused her much anguish. It was a never-ending struggle for her and the cause of great stress; and it was something she was never able to resolve. Father expected Mother to be there for him when he needed her, and his needs in this regard were practically insatiable.
A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN
Despite that tension—which strongly underlies my memories of childhood—whenever I think of Mother even today, it is with a sense of great love and happiness. I suppose by contemporary standards she would not be considered a beautiful woman. Nelson and I inherited her Aldrich features, most prominently the Aldrich nose. However, I thought of my mother as beautiful, as did many of her friends and acquaintances, because those features were animated by such liveliness and infused with such warmth. It was a beauty that was hard to capture in a photograph or a painting, and, in fact, few visual images do her justice. Strangely, the best likeness of her is a drawing done after her death by Fred W. Wright, who took it from a very good photograph of her holding Nelson’s eldest son, Rodman, when he was a small boy. Somehow it captures her expression better than any formal portraits.
Along with the Aldrich physiognomy I inherited from Mother a good deal of the Aldrich temperament. Her calm disposition was in distinct contrast to the more tense, driven quality of Father and some of my siblings. I always felt a special rapport with her. Mother loved small children, and no doubt being the youngest gave me an advantage. My brothers often accused me of receiving special treatment, though both of our parents made a conscious effort never to show any favoritism. But Mother and I had an easy relationship. We enjoyed many of the same things. One of my strongest memories is her love of art and how she subtly and patiently conveyed it to me. Beautiful objects came alive in her hands, as if her appreciation provided them with a special aura of beauty. The longer she looked at a painting, the more she would find in it, as if by some magic she had opened new depths, new dimensions not accessible to ordinary people.
There was little of the “collector” in Mother; having a complete set of something was of much less interest to her than enjoying the quality of each object. By her side I absorbed some of her taste and intuition, which in her was unfailing. I learned more from her about art than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about the technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.
While “officially” Mother and Father agreed on all vital questions of our upbringing and spoke to the children with one voice, they were poles apart in temperament. It wasn’t lost on us children that Mother didn’t attend our morning prayer meetings, preferring to stay comfortably in bed, reading the paper or answering correspondence. Or, that she brought into the house daring new art forms—often along with the artists who produced them—that upset Father. Or, that her face lit up whenever she had a chance to be with us or play with us alone. She loved adventures and the unexpected. Being spontaneous came naturally to her, and she derived the greatest pleasure from doing things on the spur of the moment.
DUTY, MORALITY, PROPRIETY
Father was the opposite. He wanted life to follow an orderly pattern. He liked to know what he was going to do and in what order, with whom and how. Whether in the city or on vacation, the day would be planned out in advance, and deviations from the plan were not greeted with pleasure. I remember his saying, when someone proposed a new activity, “But we planned something else.” For him that was reason enough not to do it.
When we moved to Maine for the summer, Father’s trunks would be brought out three days before we left; some were the old-fashioned steamer trunks which had a lid that opened from the top. Others were known as “innovation trunks”; they opened out and had room on one side to hang suits, and drawers on the other for linen. He would fill half a dozen or more trunks and bags for the two or three months he would be away. To begin with, he and his valet, William Johnson, would start selecting and laying out what to take—overcoats, sweaters, suits, riding clothes, and so forth. Then William would do the actual packing.
Dress was decidedly more formal in those days; in the winter Father wore a black tie to dinner every night, and Mother a long dress, even when the family dined alone. Still, the quantity of clothes they carried everywhere was astounding. Father never ventured out even in the summer without a coat in case the weather turned cold, and he always wore a hat outdoors. A photograph of Father and me taken one summer during my college years on a motor trip through the Southwest shows us seated on a wool lap robe under a lone pine tree in the middle of the Arizona desert. Father is wearing a suit and tie, felt hat on his head, and the ever-present coat lying nearby.
I have no doubt Father loved his children, all of us, very much, but his own rigid upbringing undoubtedly contributed to his inflexibility as a parent. He was formal, not cold, but rarely demonstrably affectionate. Nevertheless, he was physically more present during my childhood than many fathers, and perhaps more than I was with my children. He worked hard, but mostly in his office at home where he did not wish to be disturbed. He was with us in Pocantico on weekends and spent summer vacations with us in Maine, but on the emotional level he was distant.
There were exceptions. When we took walks, rode horseback, or traveled together, he would sometimes talk candidly about his own boyhood and listen to my concerns with real interest and tenderness. Those were important moments in my life.
However, the procedure Father preferred whenever we had something important to deal with, especially an issue with significant emotional content, was an exchange of letters. This happened more frequently when we went off to college and when my parents were on extended trips, but it was the preferred mode of communication even when we were all living under the same roof. Father dictated his letters to his secretary, who typed and mailed them—with one copy for the files!
Although Father’s love for us was heartfelt and sincere, his sense of parental duty prodded him into frequent soliloquies on duty, morality, and proper behavior. My brother Laurance to this day remembers with some distress the letter he received from Father after he was voted “most likely to succeed” by his class at Princeton. Father reminded him that he would have to spend the rest of his life truly earning the good opinion his classmates had of him. Such a response was fairly typical of Father.
But underneath Father’s formal, correct exterior was a tender, warm side that came out if one of us was in trouble. This revealed an aspect of his personality that was very precious to me. It helps explain Mother and Father’s close relationship over nearly five decades. I knew I could count on his love and support when I really needed him even if he might disapprove of something I had done.
Father was a complicated person. Grandfather was a self-made man who created a great fortune starting with nothing, an accomplishment Father would have no opportunity to emulate. Even after he had built a solid record of achievement, he was plagued with feelings of inadequacy. He once described his brief involvement in the business world as one of many vice presidents at Standard Oil as “a race with my own conscience,” and in a sense Father was racing all his life to be worthy of his name and inheritance.
In his early thirties Father suffered a “nervous collapse”—we would now call it depression. It was then that he began to withdraw from active involvement with Standard Oil. In order to recover his health, Father took Mother and my sister, Abby, then only a year old, on a month’s vacation to the south of France. Their stay there lengthened into six months, and even when they came back, Father retreated to his home and rarely went out. It was almost a year before he felt able to return to the office, and then only part-time.
Perhaps it is understandable that he never told me directly of this episode, although once or twice he hinted that as a young man he had some emotional
problems. The first time I became aware that he had gone through some difficult times was a few years after I graduated from college when a close friend of mine was experiencing a similar bout of depression. Father spent hours with him, and my friend said that when Father spoke about his own experience, tears rolled down his face. It was only then that I understood how serious his depression had been.
Once Father overcame his depression, he resigned from Standard and devoted himself exclusively to philanthropy and the management of Grandfather’s personal affairs. As a result, during the decade of the teens, Grandfather began to transfer some stocks and other properties to him, but it was still in relatively small quantities. In 1915, the year I was born, when Father was forty-one years old, he owned outright only about $250,000 of Standard Oil stock.
What was Grandfather waiting for? I am not sure he ever intended to leave a great fortune to his children. His original plans for Father’s inheritance were probably the same as for his daughters: He would leave Father enough to be comfortable, to be “rich” by most measures, but by several orders of magnitude less than it turned out to be. Grandfather truly believed it when he said, in the context of philanthropy, that “there is no easier way to do harm than by giving money,” and he felt it applied most particularly to his own children. Frederick Gates wrote Grandfather a memo about how Grandfather’s fortune was “piling up” into “an avalanche” that would “bury him and his children.” Grandfather was probably a bit stunned at the size of his fortune as it continued to appreciate long after he had retired from Standard Oil. He saw his son, who was struggling to deal with his own emotional problems and to find his place in the world, already weighed down with more responsibility than he could bear, and he probably concluded that dumping an immense fortune on him wasn’t going to help matters. Thus, until 1915, Grandfather probably planned to give the bulk of his fortune to philanthropy either before his death or through his will. What changed his mind was Ludlow.
LUDLOW
The “Ludlow Massacre,” as it has come to be referred to in history books, was one of the most famous or infamous events in American labor history. It was also one of the seminal events in my family’s history as well.
Ludlow, a coal mining town in southern Colorado, was where Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I), a company in which Grandfather owned nearly 40 percent of the shares, operated a number of mines and other facilities. Grandfather, already well into retirement, still maintained large holdings in many companies, but he looked upon them as a passive investment in securities and did not pay close attention to their management on a daily basis. Father sat on the board of CF&I, but corporate meetings were held in New York, and he never visited the company’s operations in Colorado.
In September 1913 more than nine thousand miners represented by the United Mine Workers struck all the coal operators in the southern Colorado fields, including CF&I, over a number of grievances, including wages, hours, safety conditions, and, most important, union recognition. Months of sporadic violence between the strikers and guards employed by the companies forced the governor of Colorado to call out the National Guard. The situation worsened through the winter, and on April 20, 1914, open warfare erupted. During the course of a pitched battle between the strikers and the guardsmen, eleven women and children suffocated to death in a small crawl space under their burning tent; scores of others on both sides were killed and wounded in the days following this event, eventually forcing President Woodrow Wilson to dispatch federal troops to enforce an uneasy truce.
It was a terrible tragedy, and because the name Rockefeller evoked such powerful emotions, Grandfather and Father were dragged into the middle of the conflict. There were even demonstrations outside our West 54th Street home denouncing the Rockefellers for the “crimes” of Ludlow.
Father appeared before several congressional committees investigating conditions in Colorado, both before and after the Ludlow tragedy. At first he took a hard-line position against the strikers, undoubtedly influenced by Gates, who considered the strikers little better than anarchists. After Ludlow, Father began to question the soundness of Gates’s position. He removed the despised head of CF&I and hired Ivy Lee, who suggested that Father retain a labor expert to help him resolve the issues. Lee was much more than an image maker. He convinced Father that he would have to address the underlying causes of the miners’ discontent.
Father then hired William Lyon Mackenzie King, who would later become prime minister of Canada. Mr. King became Father’s closest friend, and at his recommendation, Father implemented an “industrial representation plan” at CF&I that became a milestone in labor relations. Father traveled to Colorado with King and spent several days meeting with the miners and even dancing with their wives at a square dance.
Father’s objective was to improve labor relations in the United States by addressing the grievances of labor and persuading businessmen to recognize their broader responsibilities to their workers. For that reason his involvement with labor issues did not end with Ludlow but remained a central interest for the rest of his life. In the early 1920s he established a company, Industrial Relations Counselors, to advise corporations on labor relations. It was well received, and a number of large American corporations, including several in the Standard Oil group, used its services.
Ludlow was a rite of passage for Father. Although not a businessman by talent or inclination, he had demonstrated his skill and courage. What must have impressed Grandfather most was Father’s determination and strength of character under very trying circumstances. Moreover, he had displayed these qualities during a time of intense personal tragedy; in March 1915 his beloved mother, Laura, died after a long illness, and his father-in-law, Senator Aldrich, died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage a month later. These events took place only a short time before my birth on June 12, 1915. It was a period of trauma for both my parents.
Ludlow and its aftermath seem to have convinced Grandfather that his son was fully qualified to bear the burden of managing his great fortune. Beginning in 1917, Grandfather began to transfer his remaining assets to Father—about one-half billion dollars at the time, which was equivalent to about $10 billion today. Father promptly set about restructuring his life to deal with the responsibilities that great wealth had brought him. Essentially, his goals would be the same as those expressed by the motto of the Rockefeller Foundation: improving the “well-being of mankind throughout the world.” This meant continuing his active involvement with the institutions started by Grandfather: the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the General Education Board, and the Rockefeller Foundation, where he already had significant leadership responsibilities. But it also gave him the opportunity to initiate projects of his own—projects that would range over practically every field of human activity from religion to science, the environment, politics, and culture.
CHAPTER 3
CHILDHOOD
I was born in my parents’ home at 10 West 54th Street on June 12, 1915. Their home wasn’t a château with turrets, crenelated walls, and expansive ballrooms of the sort built by the Vanderbilts and others along Fifth Avenue, but it wasn’t exactly simple, either. At the time it was the largest private residence in New York City and had nine floors and an enclosed play area on the roof. Below it there was a squash court, a gymnasium, and a private infirmary, where I was born and where family members would go if sick with a contagious disease such as the measles or mumps. On the second floor was a music room with a pipe organ and a large piano; it was here that my parents hosted recitals by such noted artists as Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Lucretia Bori.
SURROUNDED BY ART
The house was filled with art from many parts of the world, the style and period of which reflected my parents’ very different tastes and personalities. Mother’s taste was eclectic and ranged from the art of the ancient world to contemporary work from Europe and the United States. Her interest in contemporary American artists emerged during the 1920s. Under the guidance of Edith
Halpert, owner of the Downtown Gallery, Mother acquired works by Sheeler, Hopper, Demuth, Burchfield, and Arthur Davies. It was during this time that Mother came to know Lillie Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, who shared her excitement about modern art. The three of them were concerned that talented artists had little prospect of being shown by a museum until they were dead—if then. They decided to establish a museum of modern art where the works of contemporary artists would be shown. It was through their initiative that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) came into being in late 1929.
Although Father provided Mother with ample funds for her personal needs, she did not have independent resources to buy expensive works of art; oil paintings by Monet, Manet, Degas, Matisse, and others were beyond her means. Instead, she acquired prints and drawings by several of these artists, eventually forming a remarkable collection, much of which she later donated to MoMA.
Father disliked modern art. He considered it “unlifelike,” ugly, and disturbing, and discouraged Mother from hanging contemporary art in those areas of the house that he frequented. Though respectful of his views, she remained undaunted in her growing interest. In 1930, Mother retained Donald Deskey, the designer who later supervised the decoration of Radio City Music Hall, to transform what had been the children’s playroom on the seventh floor of Number 10 into an art gallery.
Father’s more traditional tastes prevailed in other parts of the house, although Mother’s influence and good taste was very much in evidence there as well. Indeed, Mother fully shared Father’s appreciation of ancient and classical art, as well as the art of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance periods. Mother loved beauty wherever she found it, but Father’s taste was restricted to the more conventional and realistic art forms.
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