RESTORING THE PAST: THE SPRING OF 1926
In the spring of 1926, Mother and Father took Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and me on a trip to Philadelphia and then on to Virginia to visit Revolutionary War and Civil War sites. Father also had agreed to speak at Hampton Institute, the famous Black college in Hampton, Virginia, that had received a great deal of financial support from the family. We spent a day on the campus speaking to students and attending a church service.
The next morning we climbed into the car for the trip to Richmond, where Father was to meet with Governor Harry F. Byrd to discuss conservation work in the Shenandoah Valley. Father had decided earlier that he wanted to stop in Williamsburg, home of the College of William and Mary, to see the work that was being done to renovate the national memorial hall of Phi Beta Kappa, the first chapter of which was located on the college campus. Father had been elected to this national honorary fraternity when he was an undergraduate at Brown and had agreed to lead the fund-raising campaign for the building. Our guide for this brief portion of the trip was to be the Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin, rector of Bruton Parish Church and a part-time development officer for the college.
Dr. Goodwin met us on the road into town early in the morning of a glorious spring day, with the dogwood and azalea in full bloom. He showed us the memorial hall and then led us around the sleepy village that had been the capital of Virginia before the American Revolution. But after the Revolution, when the capital moved to Richmond, the town entered a long period of slow decline. Many of its splendid public buildings, including the Governor’s Palace and the House of Burgesses, had literally fallen into ruins. Dr. Goodwin was an eloquent tour director and a very good salesman. When we visited a handsome but dilapidated brick building known as the George Wythe House, he extolled its fine architecture but pointed out with sadness its state of disrepair. Father picked up on the observation and later agreed to provide the funds needed to restore the house.
That was the modest beginning of Father’s most significant project in historic restoration, a project that gave him as much pleasure as anything he did in the field of philanthropy during his lifetime. Over a period of more than thirty years he spent some $60 million in acquiring and restoring the central portion of the town to its authentic colonial condition. Today Williamsburg is a pilgrimage site for millions of Americans and a place to which presidents of the United States have proudly taken visiting heads of state to catch a glimpse of an earlier America and its customs and traditions.*
EXPLORING THE WILD WEST: THE SUMMER OF 1926
The first extended trip I took with my parents was to the American West in the summer of 1926. We traveled in a private Pullman railway car, the Boston, which was usually reserved for the chairman of the New York Central Rail Road. We left the car on sidings at various points along the way and visited national parks and other sites of interest by automobile. In addition to Mother, Father, Laurance, Winthrop, and me, our group included a French tutor, who wrote long letters every day to his fiancée in France which he claimed were purely philosophical, and a young doctor from the Rockefeller Institute Hospital. We completed a ten-thousand-mile circuit of the country in a period of two months.
Father was a committed conservationist and used his western trips (he traveled there almost every year) to learn about the national park system and meet park superintendents. Two men in particular impressed him: Horace Albright of Yellowstone and Jesse Nusbaum of Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. We saw both of these men on the 1926 trip, and the meetings had important consequences.
We stopped first in Cleveland, Ohio, where we visited Grandmother Rockefeller’s grave. Father stood there quietly for a few minutes as the rest of us watched him from a distance. Then we toured the old Rockefeller home on Euclid Avenue where Father was born and had spent his boyhood. He told us stories about his boyhood days and how different things were before electricity and the automobile. We also visited Forest Hill, where Grandfather had a summer home for many years. Father was then developing it into a middle-class suburb, really a planned community similar to the ones in Radburn, New Jersey, and Sunnyside, New York, in which Father also had an interest. The “Rockefeller Homes” were an innovative departure and had attracted a great deal of national attention, although the project never proved to be a financial success.
Just as important to Father was a visit to the coal fields of southern Colorado, scene of the Ludlow Massacre. We spent a day in Pueblo touring Colorado Fuel & Iron’s large steel mills and meeting representatives of the company union. Father greeted a number of the men by name, and they seemed pleased to see him. I remember being a bit startled by the experience but impressed with my father’s forthright manner and the easy way that he dealt with the men and their families. It was an important lesson for a young boy to learn.
We began our real vacation, at least from my point of view, when we reached Albuquerque. The Southwest was incredibly mysterious and interesting to me, and filled with all sorts of exotic characters: Indians, cowboys, ranchers, and artists. We visited a number of the famous pueblos along the Rio Grande, and at San Ildefonso we met the celebrated potter Maria Martinez and watched her make her black-glazed pots, which would later become so famous and valuable. I celebrated my eleventh birthday in Taos, and that evening our group perched on a roof to watch the traditional fire dance ceremony at Taos Pueblo.
Mother was impressed by the artistic merit of Indian artifacts, as she often was by the simple beauty of good handicrafts. She and Father purchased Navajo rugs and silver jewelry, Pueblo pottery, baskets, beaded saddlebags, and other objects wherever they could find them. Mother was also quite taken by the paintings of Indians and other western subjects done by American artists who had established an art colony a few years before in Taos. She and Father were particularly drawn to the very realistic work of Eanger Irving Couse and Joseph Henry Sharp and bought a number of their paintings.*
Father became more aware of the need to preserve Indian art and to protect ancient archaeological sites as a result of this trip. We spent several days at Mesa Verde with Jesse Nusbaum, who took us through the Anasazi cliff dwellings there. Nusbaum also spoke to Father about the depredations of “pot hunters” and others who invaded old sites and totally ruined the historical record for the sake of unearthing a few pieces of pottery. Largely as a result of this trip Father supported the creation of the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, an institution that continues to exist to this day as part of the School of American Research.
After Mesa Verde we visited the Hopi villages in the Painted Desert and the south rim of the Grand Canyon before moving on to California. After a few days in Los Angeles, where I got my first glimpse of the Pacific, we boarded the Boston for the ride through the Sierras to Yosemite National Park. We spent almost a week at Yosemite and saw El Capitan, Bridal Veil Falls, and Glacier Point. Father spoke here also, as was his custom, with the national park people, who brought to his attention the need for funds to improve public access within the park and to acquire additional acreage to protect the giant redwoods, Sequoia gigantea, from the woodman’s axe.
After a short stopover in San Francisco we headed south for Santa Barbara, where I experienced my first earthquake, and then back north again for a few days on the Monterey peninsula. We then headed for the great groves of coastal redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, north of San Francisco. The year before, Father had made an anonymous pledge of $1 million to the Save-the-Redwoods League to enable this group to purchase one of the last remaining virgin stands of these trees in the area around Dyerville Flats. Even now, more than seventy years later, I can recall the incredible beauty of those redwoods standing like tall sentinels in the groves near Eureka.
Our party finally reached Yellowstone on July 13. We had been on the road for more than a month and had grown a bit weary of constant traveling. Yellowstone quickly revived our spirits.
Horace Albright presided over Yellowstone, the crown jewel of the National Park System
. He took us to see Old Faithful and a number of other sites in the park, many of which could only be reached on horseback in those days. Albright urged Father to visit Jackson Hole, just south of Yellowstone, and we drove with Albright to see for the first time the Grand Teton Mountains, probably the most magnificent peaks in the Rocky Mountains, which only recently had been set aside as a national park. As Albright pointed out, however, the drive through Jackson Hole, from which one had the best view of the Tetons, was marred by ugly signs and tumbledown roadside stands.
Both Father and Mother quickly saw Albright’s point, and Father would later acquire anonymously the sagebrush-covered floodplain of the Snake River at the foot of the mountains in order to extend the park and preserve its beauty. Over a period of several years he bought more than thirty thousand acres and then offered it to the federal government if they would include it and a number of other parcels controlled by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management within the park. It was nearly twenty years, however, before the Roosevelt administration would finally accept the gift.
A collateral benefit from Father’s purchase of the Snake River land was his acquisition of the JY Ranch, a beautiful dude ranch on the eastern end of Phelps Lake, nestled at the foot of the Tetons. We had lunch there in 1926, and it became a favorite place for our family members to visit in subsequent years.
We started the homeward trek in late July and made one final stop in Chicago to see Aunt Edith Rockefeller McCormick, one of my father’s sisters, at her palatial home on North Michigan Avenue. Aunt Edith was quite flamboyant and had recently divorced her husband of many years, Harold Fowler McCormick, the son of the founder of International Harvester, Cyrus McCormick. Aunt Edith was a devoted patron of the Chicago Opera and had also spent a great deal of time being analyzed by Carl Jung. She obviously relished her position as one of the grandes dames of Chicago society; she entertained us at a formal luncheon complete with liveried footmen in tights behind every chair.
FRANCE AND THE RESTORATIONS: THE SUMMER OF 1927
Although my parents felt their children should first get to know their own country, they believed it was just as important for us to learn about European cultures and civilization. So in 1927 they took Winthrop and me to France. Four years earlier Father had offered to place a million dollars at the disposal of the French government to repair sections of the Rheims Cathedral damaged by German artillery, and to restore the portions of Fontainebleau palace and the Palace of Versailles, where the leaking lead roof threatened the integrity of the limestone walls and made the famous Hall of Mirrors, where the treaty ending World War I had been signed, too dangerous to be used.
France was still reeling from the enormous human loss and physical destruction of the Great War, and neither the French government nor wealthy citizens of France were in a position to assume responsibility to protect or restore these monuments of incomparable architectural beauty and historic significance.
Once the French government had accepted Father’s offer, he retained his old friend and the Beaux Arts–trained architect Welles Bosworth to supervise the restorations. Over the course of the next decade he provided more than $2 million for these projects.
We had a chance to inspect the work that had been completed to that point during our 1927 trip. We spent a week at Versailles in the lovely old-fashioned Trianon Palace Hotel so that Father could spend time with Bosworth and the French architects going over the details of the work under way. The conservator of Versailles gave Winthrop and me a special pass to ride our bicycles in the park and to climb over the vast lead roofs of the palace.
Winthrop and I were particularly intrigued by the restoration of Marie Antoinette’s “Le Hameau,” an exact replica of an eighteenth-century farm village filled with miniature houses, barns, and a dairy. Marie Antoinette had been a devotee of the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great romantic philosopher, and seems to have heeded his advice about returning to nature, at least on occasion. She constructed a bucolic fantasy where she could escape from the stress of court life and palace intrigue with a few of her friends. There she dressed as a shepherdess and tended a flock of sheep. Not wanting to be too removed from the conveniences of court life, however, the Queen also built a small opera house, seating less than one hundred people, where she would go to be entertained by great musicians and singers. The story is also told that the Queen objected to the smell of the sheep and would send word of her arrival so that they could be perfumed.
During the remainder of the trip we traveled in two huge Spanish-built Hispano Suissa limousines with uniformed chauffeurs through the château country of the Loire Valley and then on to Mont-Saint-Michel and the wonderful coasts of Brittany and Normandy, which Mother particularly loved because of its associations with the great masters of the Impressionist school.
I returned to France in 1936 with my parents to participate in the ceremony rededicating Rheims Cathedral. Jean Zay, the minister of culture in Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, gave a banquet in Father’s honor at the Palace of Versailles to express the French government’s appreciation for Father’s assistance, and named a street for him there as well. A few days later President Albert LeBrun decorated Father with the Grand Croix of the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration, in front of a large and distinguished gathering at the Elysée Palace.
Sixty-four years later the French government generously awarded me the same decoration at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Paris. It was a particularly meaningful occasion because the only other living American to hold that rank is President Ronald Reagan.
THREE MONTHS AMONG THE PYRAMIDS: THE WINTER OF 1929
Father was enthralled by the discoveries of archaeologists who had uncovered so much about the emergence of the great civilizations of antiquity. As a young man he had taken a special interest in the work of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, headed by the distinguished Egyptologist Dr. James Henry Breasted. For a number of years Father supported Breasted’s work in Luxor and at the Temple of Medinet Habu across the Nile just below the Valley of the Kings.
In late 1928, Dr. Breasted invited Mother and Father to visit his “dig” in Egypt and to review the work of the institute. Neither of my parents had ever been to that part of the world, and after some discussion they readily agreed to go. I was in the ninth grade at the time and quickly made it obvious to my parents that I wanted to go with them. I had read about the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb only a few years earlier, and a trip to Egypt seemed to me the most exciting of adventures. Father was concerned about my missing so much school because of the length of the trip, which would last for more than three months, but I finally persuaded him to let me go on the grounds that I would learn so much from the experience. He agreed on condition that a tutor went along to keep me up to date on school-work. This was the best deal I could get, so I eagerly agreed.
We sailed from New York on the S.S. Augustus in early January 1929. At the last moment Mary Todhunter Clark, known as Tod, who was a close friend of Nelson’s from summers in Seal Harbor, came along as well.
In Cairo we spent a week at the elegant old-world Semiramis Hotel, where a colorfully dressed dragoman served as our interpreter and guide. We visited the Sphinx, and I rode a camel out to Giza, where I climbed the Great Pyramid. We saw whirling dervishes dance in the Arab Quarter one evening and visited mosques and the ancient Arab university of el Azhar. Best of all for me were the bazaars, where I spent as many hours as I could, fascinated by the women dressed in black robes whose faces were always veiled, and by the exotic wares sold by hundreds of small shopkeepers from their tiny stalls facing onto narrow streets of the souk. The pungent smells of the spice market, the sounds of hammering on copper pots and bowls that were being fashioned, and the colorful displays of rugs and textiles caught my fancy, and I quickly learned to bargain for everything, offering but a fraction of the listed price for anything I was interested in. There were swarms of flies everyw
here, clinging to freshly dressed meat hanging from hooks in the butchers’ stalls, and hordes of beggars, many of them children with trachoma who had fluid running from their milky white eyes.
From Cairo we headed up the Nile on a large dahabiyah (a passenger boat) to see Dr. Breasted’s excavations at Luxor. I still remember the picturesque feluccas sailing on the Nile, the farmers patiently raising buckets of water from the river with shadoofs (a counterbalanced sweep) to irrigate their fields, which for centuries has fed millions of people in defiance of the desert. There were many other important ancient sites on the way, and each evening after we tied up along the riverbank, Dr. Breasted gave a slide lecture on the monuments we would see the following day.
After Luxor and Karnak we continued on to the Second Cataract at Wadi Halfa, the first town in the Sudan. On the way we passed the beautiful Temple of Philae, now submerged under Lake Nasser following the construction of the High Dam at Aswan in the 1960s. We also saw the magnificent Temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel with its four colossal statues of a pharaoh carved into the face of the cliff. Half a century later I visited Abu Simbel again after the entire temple, including the great statues, had been cut free and lifted hydraulically to the top of the cliffs, to protect it from the rising waters of the Nile behind the Aswan Dam. Reinstalled in this new setting in front of an artificial cliff, it looked as imposing as when I had first seen it in 1929.
Memoirs Page 6