The Rockefeller Family

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The Rockefeller Family

During the 70 years between oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s emergence as the richest man in the world (c. 1901) and grandson Nelson A. Rockefeller's service as the first U.S. vice president who was appointed, not elected, to that office (1974-77), the Rockefeller family stood as the very epitome of extraordinary wealth and influence, not rivaled in popular imagination until the emergence of Bill Gates in the 1990s. In at least one measure of wealth, John D., Sr. remains the wealthiest American of all time: Bill Gates may have exceeded him in terms of sheer dollars ($40 billion to Sr.'s $1 billion) and he also dominates an industry—computers. But where John D., Sr. at one time received two and a half percent of the national income, Gates has never received more than a half percent. Proof of the pervasiveness and power of the Rockefeller name came in the 1950s, when the Chock Full o' Nuts Coffee jingle that had originally run "Better coffee Rockefeller's money can't buy" was altered to "Better coffee a millionaire's money can't buy" after the family objected to the allusion. Throughout the twentieth century, several generations of Rockefellers tried to demonstrate how a robber-baron aristocracy could justify its extraordinary wealth by philanthropy and public service.

When John D., Sr. (the founding grandfather) retired from his active business life at Standard Oil in the mid-1890s, he was earning an average of $10 million per year, at a time when the average American earned less than $10 per week. One of the two originators of the modern U.S. corporation—the other was Andrew Carnegie—John D., Sr. was as aloof and secretive as he was before his ascent from utter poverty. Still, Rockefeller remained loyal to the fundamentalist Baptist pieties of his youth. He never bought a yacht, he never sought the treasures of Europe and other continents, and he never exhibited any undue passions for worldly pleasures. Despite glad tidings about his essential humility, the public could not decide what to make of him—just as in years to come, contemporaries and writers could not reach any firm conclusions about his descendants.

On the one hand, John D., Sr. used his money primarily for charitable and educational purposes: to improve health care not only in America but worldwide, to finance great institutions of higher learning such as Spelman College and the University of Chicago, to improve education in the South, and to wipe out hookworm. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. used the family's money to recreate Colonial Williamsburg and to assume quasi-government responsibilities in dealing with the scourge of "white slavery." John D., Sr.'s grandsons (the Brothers) used family funds to help pay for the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which not only provided the masses with access to the arts, but raised American standing in the world community. All the Rockefellers, through grants by their foundations, helped catalyze significant advances in knowledge, particularly in medicine and in the sciences.

Its financial benefactions were not the only reasons why the family enjoyed wide respect. John D., Sr. and his descendants symbolized the utter determination and boundless energy that made America a superpower. John D., Sr. had achieved his wealth and position by eliminating competitors so remorselessly that he enjoyed a virtual monopoly in oil production. Americans regarded him as a genius of private enterprise who demonstrated his superiority over his rivals so commendably that he fully deserved all the rewards of his marvelous organizational abilities.

Paradoxically, John D., Sr. was also seen as the great American villain, a living, breathing dollar sign, a corrupter of railroads and legislators, the murderer of free enterprise in the oil industry, someone who declared individualism dead, and the man who made the masses pay double for their kerosene and axle grease. He dealt in millions, saved in pennies, gave away dimes, and savored pettiness. Among examples cited of his miserliness was his directive to use one less drop of solder in the manufacture of each oil can. On the positive side of the ledger, he and John D., Jr. deeply impressed the public with the sincerity of their religious beliefs. John D., Sr. tithed when, as a youth, he did not have the money to buy himself a warm overcoat for cold Ohio winters. Even after he began his climb to fortune, he helped sweep Cleveland's Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. One of the monuments built by Rockefeller money in 1930, the Riverside Church in New York City, remains a contradictory symbol: it is at once a memorial to John D., Sr.'s childhood religion and a bastion of the liberal Social Gospel theology that finds more sin in unbridled capitalism than in personal peccadilloes. John D., Jr., who saw to its building and the appointment of the liberal Harry Emerson Fosdick to its pulpit, was a more sensitive man who suffered from nervous disorders and had few interests in business. His main interest was Christian benevolence. John D., Jr. also collected Renaissance art and Ming Dynasty porcelain. He explained to his father, "I have never squandered money on horses, yachts, automobiles or other foolish extravagances.… This hobby [of collecting], while a costly one, is quiet and unostentatious and not sensational."

Yet, even the charities of father and son and their claims of piety struck suspicious observers as nothing but covers for their insatiable need to dominate and to profit from duping the masses. The New York Herald commented, "The only thing Standard Oil lacks is a … twenty-five-thousand-dollar chaplain who would open their meetings with religious services." At the University of Chicago's first commencement, John D., Sr. said, "The good Lord gave me my money," to which grateful students responded, "John D. Rockefeller, wonderful great man is he/Gives all his spare change to the U. of C."

Few criticisms of Rockefeller's tactics were as withering as muckraker Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904). Rockefeller's defenders claimed that the writer's antagonism toward the titan sprang from her background as the fiercely independent daughter of an oil producer broken by Rockefeller. Nonetheless, her analysis of Standard Oil was masterful and would thereafter serve as a model for how to dissect a giant corporation. Readers almost invariably came to believe that Rockefeller (like Carnegie) had to be assigned responsibility for the labor strife that had begun to besiege the country in the early 1900s.

Congress's reaction to such anti-Rockefeller sentiment was not only to pass antitrust legislation, but to refuse to grant the Rockefeller Foundation a federal charter in 1913. A second development, which mightily stoked fires against the family, occurred after Woodrow Wilson appointed Frank Walsh, a prominent Kansas City trial attorney, as head of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, an agency created to explore causes of industrial violence. Walsh turned commission hearings into lectures at which he declared that the family's huge philanthropic trusts were not only a "menace to the welfare of society" but "attempts to present to the world, as handsome and admirable, an economic and industrial regime that draws its substance from the sweat and blood and tears of exploited and dispossessed humanity."

When the commission met for the first time in the fall of 1913, strikes marked by violence had become commonplace. Possibly the worst took place in Ludlow, Colorado, in April 1914, where about a thousand miners living in tents with their families struck Colorado Fuel and Iron, a Rockefeller-owned subsidiary. The company dug trenches around the tents, bought machine guns, employed a private army to guard its property, and persuaded Colorado's governor to call out National Guard units. Strikers acquired weapons, and guardsmen and workers fought a 12-hour pitched battle, the "Ludlow Massacre," during which several miners, two women, and 11 children were killed.

Walsh moved commission hearings to Denver, Colorado, and then back to Washington, where he called John D., Sr. as a witness. The magnate skillfully deflected Walsh's probing comments and questions. "Let the world wag," he advised John D., Jr., to whom he had already begun to transfer significant assets and authority over family philanthropic and business enterprises. But John D., Jr. had neither his father's studied calm nor his deep conviction of his own saintliness. He wilted under Walsh's ruthless examination, and his weak responses helped convince the public that the family was legally and morally guilty in the Ludlow incident. The manifest rise in public anger toward the family led John D., Sr. to hire a public relations counsel named Ivy Lee (recommended by John D., Jr.) and John D., Sr. began handing out dimes to passersby, a tactic said to increase his popularity. Still, bodyguards had to protect family members. The most surprising development in the aftermath of Ludlow, however, was that John D., Jr. made one of the most abrupt turnabouts of any major capitalist in American history. After first defending Colorado Fuel and Iron, he toured the Ludlow site, ate with miners in their homes, and advised that improvements would be forthcoming. Thereafter, he received an excellent press nationwide. John D., Jr.'s "transformation" distinguished him from his father, who did not relent.

There was no break with fundamentalist outlooks in the family's second generation. Like John D., Sr., John D., Jr. and his six children reserved Sundays for prayer, and the five boys and one girl were taught that careful accounts must be kept of money received and spent. Above all, as befit an imperial family, they received constant reminders that they were Rockefellers, and that their wealth and good name were sacred trusts. The Rockefeller grandsons, John III, Laurance, and David, tended to fall in line uncomplainingly with their father's and grandfather's strict rules. But Abby (Babs) kept sloppy accounts, smoked at 15, drove recklessly, was ticketed repeatedly for speeding, and necked with her future husband in full view of servants. Winthrop's experiences with liquor and women became the stuff of tabloids; he was a cattle rancher who served as Republican governor of Arkansas in the late 1960s.

In the generation of the brothers, it would be Nelson, born on the founding grandfather's birthday in 1908, who not only had the most active and direct contact with the public, but exhibited some of John D., Sr.'s most pronounced characteristics. Everything Nelson did was strategic, and, like his grandfather, he demonstrated the relentless drive of the self-made go-getter and could not be hurried in his decisions. His brother David remarked, "He spent a lot of time in seeing where he wanted to go, and then developing a strategy to get there. In other words, things did not happen by accident in his life."

Nelson was governor of New York four times and unsuccessfully sought nomination as the Republican candidate for president three times. The public had problems deciding what to make of John D., Sr. and had to be persuaded after Ludlow that John D., Jr. truly regretted what had happened. But Nelson's "anything is possible" behavior both confirmed and confused the public's perception of how the very rich behave. Nelson placed no limits on satisfying his demands for personal gratification. Whether in art, real estate, women, or building monuments to himself with public funds, he simply took whatever he wanted. And this was to be a basis for his political undoing. He was perceived as the mainstay of an Eastern Establishment of money and power, which contrasted unfavorably with "cloth coat" Republicans such as Barry Goldwater (in 1964) and Richard Nixon (in 1968 and 1972).

Succeeding generations of Rockefellers (the Cousins followed the Brothers) have not produced personalities who dominated headlines as the earlier ones, except for John D., IV ("Jay"), who went to West Virginia in 1964 as a VISTA volunteer and remained to become its governor and a U.S. senator devoted to progressive causes, and his cousin Abby Aldrich, daughter of David, who came to be seen as the "hippie" of the family for her interest in environmentalism. She formed a company in the 1970s to import a Swedish composting toilet, the Clivus Multrum, and to educate Americans about the value of recycling—showing at least that the Rockefellers still had a knack for nuancing worthy endeavors with their traditional habits of thrift and shrewd business sense.

—Milton Goldin