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Memoirs Page 9

by David Rockefeller


  THE ALDRICH FAMILY

  While my freshman year had lonely moments, two circumstances laid the groundwork for my becoming more fully and happily engaged in college life.

  The first was that several of Mother’s family lived in the Boston area. Mother’s youngest sister, Elsie Aldrich Campbell, lived with her family in Brookline, only a few miles from Cambridge. She invited me to meals and encouraged me to bring my college friends. She always made us feel welcome. A good many years later Benjy Franklin, one of my roommates and a frequent visitor to the Campbells’, married Aunt Elsie’s daughter, Helena.

  I also made numerous trips to Providence to visit Aunt Lucy Aldrich at her home, 110 Benevolent Street, where she, Mother, and their siblings were born and raised. Outspoken in her opinions and mercurial in her feelings, Aunt Lucy was full of life and great fun to be with.

  BENJY AND DICK

  The key moment in my freshman year was meeting George S. Franklin, Jr. (for obvious reasons known as Benjy) and Richard Watson Gilder. Benjy was the son of a prominent lawyer in New York City and two years older than I. He had a brilliant mind and was an excellent student. He was serious-minded and a strong competitor in anything he did—a good tennis player and excellent racing sailor. He won the summer championship in the Atlantic Class of sailboats at the Cold Spring Harbor Yacht Club on Long Island for nine years in a row.

  Dick Gilder was more lighthearted but no less brilliant. He was the grandson and namesake of the founder of The Century Magazine as well as a grandson of the great artist and founder of Tiffany & Company, Lewis Comfort Tiffany. Dick was a fine athlete and played on Harvard’s varsity squash team. He was also quite handsome, and girls found him almost irresistible. Dick loved to argue and to take strong positions, usually contrary to the conventional wisdom, on political or economic subjects.

  As prep school graduates, Benjy and Dick had many friends at Harvard. They included me in their circle, thereby dispelling my sense of isolation. We lived together in Eliot House for our three final years at Harvard in close proximity to several other friends. In fact, by our senior year our suite of rooms—consisting of four bedrooms and two living rooms—was called the “goldfish bowl.” I am not sure exactly what people meant by this, but it may have been because all of us were from prominent families and had a certain level of recognition around campus.

  Oliver Straus of the R. H. Macy family was also a suitemate until he left college his junior year. Walter Rosen, Jr., took his place. Walter was the son of the head of a prominent New York private bank, Ladenberg, Thalmann. His mother played the theremin, a black box containing an electrically charged field. It was played by passing one’s hand through it in mystifying, languorous motions; this changed the electrical field and produced ethereal sounds somewhat like the music in science-fiction movies. We all thought this very amusing, although for a time she had a serious coterie of musical admirers.

  In senior year we connected a third suite occupied by two other friends: Ernst Teves, the son of a German industrialist, and Paul Geier, whose family had founded the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company.

  I went out for soccer as a freshman but disliked it immediately since I had no experience or talent for competitive sports. I switched to squash racquets in the winter and golf in the fall and spring. I had a short stint as assistant business manager for the Harvard Daily Crimson, but otherwise I remained unconnected with most organized school activities. My social life revolved around debutante parties in Boston and visiting the homes of my relations and classmates who lived in the area. Junior year I was asked to join the Signet Society, a lunch club that I greatly enjoyed because many interesting faculty members lunched with undergraduates on a regular basis; this included Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter, who soon after was appointed to the Supreme Court.

  CHALLENGING COURSEWORK

  My father expected me, as he did all his sons, to take courses that were challenging and meaningful and that would be helpful later in life. Father had an excellent academic record at Brown and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and although he never said so, I am sure he hoped each of his sons would do at least as well as he had done. As it turned out, Nelson did the best of all, despite a dyslexic condition far worse than mine, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Dartmouth.

  All freshmen were required to take at least two yearlong introductory courses. The most memorable of these courses was History 1, Modern European History, taught by the flamboyant Master of Eliot House, Professor Roger Merriman. It was an enormously popular and interesting course that covered the political and economic development of Europe from the Middle Ages to the outbreak of World War I. Merriman was a forceful lecturer who made history come alive.

  My long-term interest in beetles and other insect life enabled me to take a graduate-level course in entomology during the second semester of my freshman year. Professor William Marton Wheeler, the great authority on the social life of ants, taught the course, and I got an A-, my only A during four years of college!

  My interest in entomology led to another outside activity my first year at Harvard. Through the Philips Brooks House, an organization sponsored by Harvard to encourage volunteer student activities, I taught a class once a week in nature studies to a group of young teenagers at Lincoln House, a settlement house in south Boston. Every spring I took members of the class out to the country to hunt for insects and learn about trees and wildflowers. One of the boys, Fred Solana, the son of a Spanish stonemason, showed much more interest and aptitude than the others. As a result I asked him to help with my beetle collection, which I had brought to Harvard. For the next three years I employed Fred to catalogue and care for the specimens. I also helped modestly with his expenses at Boston College. After the war Fred joined the Chase National Bank where he had a fine career, but he never lost his interest in beetles. For twenty-five years he came to Hudson Pines every Saturday to work on the collection. My children loved to sit with him in the basement while he worked and became very attached to him.

  A SUMMER IN HITLER’S GERMANY

  Satisfying Harvard’s language requirement caused me some real difficulties. I had not studied classical languages at Lincoln—Dewey’s philosophy viewed Greek and Latin as irrelevant to the modern world—and so I was required under Harvard’s rules for graduation to demonstrate proficiency in two modern languages. My French was good enough so that I was able to handle an advanced course in French literature my sophomore year where the lectures were given in French by a well-known scholar, Professor André Maurice.

  German was a different matter. I found it difficult to keep up with the introductory course and dropped it at the end of the first term. My alternative was to pass a reading examination, and to prepare for it I decided to spend the summer of 1933 in Munich studying German.

  I lived in a pension run by Hans Defregger and his wife, and took German lessons every day with Frau Berman, a remarkably talented teacher. Her intensive “immersion” program worked well, and while I could not have translated Goethe by the end of the summer, I did pass the reading exam when I returned to Harvard that fall!

  The Defreggers were well known in the Bavarian art world. My host’s father, Franz von Defregger, was a respected nineteenth-century Romantic artist whose paintings were well represented in the Neuespinakotec in Munich. Frau Defregger took a great interest in her guests and took us on weekend trips by car to nearby parts of Bavaria and sometimes even farther afield. She was well versed in German art and history, and we visited many historic sites, including the wildly exuberant rococo churches in southern Bavaria, such as the Wal Fahrt Kirche auf dem Wies. During the course of our tours she introduced me to the magnificent paintings of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach and the exceptional wood carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider. Frau Defregger explained the architectural mysteries of the Nymphenburg Palace and the development of beautiful medieval towns such as Rothenburg and Nuremberg. I came to appreciate the relaxed fun-loving ways of the Bavarians and
acquired a feel for German history and the incredible culture that had produced those marvelous works of art. In the evening we would often visit Munich’s renowned Hofbrau Haus, an immense beer hall, where we would drink giant steins of beer and sing along with the rest of the huge crowd.

  At the same time I saw the new Germany that Hitler was bringing into being, a glimpse that left me uneasy and uncomfortable. The Defreggers introduced me to one of Hitler’s close friends, Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl, who handled press relations during the Führer’s rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Putzi, a tall, bushy-haired man with an easygoing artistic temperament, was part American and had graduated from Harvard. The deferential way in which he was treated suggested the apprehensions that people felt even then about anyone with a close connection to the iron-willed new leader of Germany. Later he broke with Hitler and fled to the United States.

  Already, only a few months after Hitler had taken power, people were speaking in hushed terms about the Gestapo, and there were reports of “concentration camps” where political opponents of the new regime had been sent. The first laws purging the German civil service of Jews and those of Jewish descent had already been implemented. I found it personally offensive that the worst kinds of anti-Semitic language were openly tolerated, not least because I was working closely with Frau Berman who was Jewish. I was indignant as well that quite a few people seemed to accept without serious question the Nazi claims that Jews were responsible for all of Germany’s economic problems and that they deserved to be punished.

  THREE MEMORABLE PROFESSORS

  That fall in Cambridge I had to select a more specialized area of study, and I chose English history and literature. I also opted to pursue a “degree with honors,” which entitled me to have a tutor, in effect a faculty advisor, whose role was to help with course selection and to recommend outside reading that would broaden my base of knowledge in a field of concentration. It was customary for an honors student to meet with his tutor two or three times a month to discuss academic progress and even issues of a more personal nature.

  My first tutor was F. O. Matthiessen, a highly intellectual professor of English literature. Unfortunately, he and I had little in common. I felt as uncomfortable with him as he did with me. I simply was not ready to take advantage of his subtle and sophisticated mind; therefore, for my last two years I switched to Professor John Potter, a historian and later Master of Eliot House, who was more accessible.

  I was also fortunate to study under three men who opened my mind to creative thought and powerful new ideas. The titles of their courses now sound narrow and pedantic, but the way in which they taught them opened up a new world that I had previously only dimly perceived.

  Professor Charles McIlwain taught British constitutional history from the time of the Magna Carta to the sixteenth century. A distinguished lawyer, McIlwain traced the political evolution of England from its feudal origins to the emergence of a centralized state in which the rule of law was an increasingly important element. McIlwain used legal and historical documents, beginning with the great charter itself, to illustrate his points, but he breathed life into those dusty documents and made us see them in their historical and human context. I began to understand the reasons that democracy and the rule of law are so important in any society, as well as why it has been so difficult to achieve them.

  The same year I took Professor John Livingston Lowes’s course on the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The most exciting part of the course was the analysis of Coleridge’s two greatest poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” We used Lowes’s book, The Road to Xanadu, which painstakingly identified the influences on Coleridge as he wrote those two masterpieces. Lowes had read not only everything Coleridge had ever written but everything he had ever read as well, and he identified all the personal and literary influences that inspired this great Romantic poet when he wrote his epic poems. I also learned that good writing—writing that conveys ideas lucidly and elegantly—is the result of a combination of factors that may begin with inspiration but also includes personal experience, formal learning, exhaustive research, and a great deal of hard work.

  Abbott Payson Usher’s economic history of England from 1750 to 1860 was a revelation of a different kind. Usher was a dull lecturer but a meticulous scholar who uncovered the hidden processes of economic change. He showed how successive inventions and innovations in plowing, fertilizing, and the use of improved seeds had revolutionized agricultural production in England. Over the same period, the introduction of the one-cylinder steam engine, coupled with the many inventions relating to the manufacture of iron, textiles, and other industrial products, had changed the lives of the ordinary man and woman in England. The facts were not new, but Usher explained their interrelationships in a manner that was a model of clarity. He made history come alive and seem real to me. Years later, as I wrestled with the difficult problems of economic development and social change in Latin America and other parts of the world, I would often recall Professor Usher’s analysis of the complex process by which history unfolds.

  As I discovered a number of times in the course of my education, an inspiring teacher can stimulate thinking in a manner that has little to do with the subject matter in question. I will always be grateful to Professors McIlwain, Lowes, and Usher for teaching me how to reason.

  SUMMER INTERLUDES AT HOME AND ABROAD

  The summer following my sophomore year, Paul Geier and I took part in an entomological expedition in the Grand Canyon organized by the American Museum of Natural History. The expedition was led by Dr. Frank E. Lutz, curator of entomology at the museum, with whom as a boy I had spent two summers at the Station for the Study of Insects near Tuxedo Park, New York. The purpose of the 1934 expedition was to study the variation of insect species at different altitudes between the bottom of the Grand Canyon and the top of the nearby San Francisco peaks. It was an ecological study, a term little used at that time, which demonstrated that insect species at the bottom of the canyon were common to Mexico, whereas species at the summit of the peaks a few miles away, but ten thousand feet higher, were indigenous to Alaska. In short, altitude, with corresponding temperature changes, may be as important as latitude in determining the distribution of insect species. That summer I understood more clearly than ever before nature’s underlying order.

  At the end of the summer, to my pleasant surprise, Father joined me for a week. This had not been planned, and I have never fully understood why he decided to endure the two-day train trip to meet me; it was so uncharacteristic of him to do anything impulsively. We spent a week visiting the Hopi villages in the Painted Desert, Monument Valley in northern Arizona, and the great Anasazi ruins in Canyon de Chelly.

  Although I was nineteen years old, it was really the first time that Father and I had been alone for any length of time. We were both relaxed, and he talked openly about himself and his childhood. It was one of the best times we ever had together.

  In the spring of 1935, Dick Gilder and I decided to spend the summer touring Europe by car. We were motivated in part by two art courses we had taken and a desire to see firsthand some of the masterpieces of European art we had studied. In fact, we managed to visit some thirty museums in six countries. At the same time, however, we became absorbed by the ominous political situation in Germany, which left us deeply concerned about the future.

  We sailed tourist class on the S.S. Olympic and took with us in the hold the Model A Ford touring car that Father had given me for use while I was at college. We drove across the Low Countries and stopped in Paris for a few days before driving on to Germany, where we spent two weeks.

  The country had visibly become the Third Reich. As we made our way through Germany, we saw posters in public squares with slogans denouncing the Jews as Germany’s “ruination.” Half the population seemed to be in uniforms of one kind or another. One evening when Dick and I were in a tavern on the outskirts of the Black Forest, a gro
up of soldiers came in, sat at a nearby table, and entered into conversation with us. They were curious about the United States and very talkative; by the end of the evening they had told us their life stories. They could not have been friendlier—until a couple who had been hiking in the Black Forest entered the tavern. A pall fell over the room. We only began to understand what was going on when the soldiers conspicuously turned their backs on the new arrivals and began talking in a loud voice about the Jews and the menace they represented to Germany. When the couple left, a soldier turned and with a raised right arm said, “Heil Hitler”—the obligatory salutation in Germany. The woman very politely said that she didn’t use the official salute but wished them a good night anyway. They then walked out the door. We felt very uncomfortable and left soon thereafter.

  Dick and I would often listen to the radio at night, and I would translate the broadcasts of Hitler’s impassioned diatribes as best I could. Even without being able to understand every word, we sensed Hitler’s powerful hold on the German people, which we also saw in the growing regimentation of daily life. Just hearing the cadence and drama of Hitler’s oratory left Dick enraged and terrified, and by the end of a speech he would have tears of anger in his eyes. Dick later said that it was those bloodcurdling broadcasts that had convinced him we would eventually have to fight the Nazis. Anybody with that kind of hypnotic power to move and mold people was dangerous, he said.

  MEETING PADEREWSKI AND FREUD

  From the Black Forest we drove into Switzerland where we crossed the Rhine and continued on to Geneva. On the way we stopped in Morges to call on Ignacy Jan Paderewski, one of the world’s great musical figures who had also been prime minister of Poland for a brief period right after World War I. I had met him when he gave a concert at my parents’ home in New York the year before and had been charmed by his personality as well as his playing. He was an impressive man with a shock of long gray hair. He greeted us with great warmth and enthusiasm and took us on a tour of his property. From there we visited the library Father had built for the League of Nations a few years before.

 

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