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Lloyd’s manuscript found a publisher with difficulty. Mark Twain, who then had his own publishing venture, turned it down in deference to his close friendship with Henry H. Rogers. As Twain told his wife, “I wanted to say [to Lloyd] the only man I care for in the world; the only man I would give a damn for; the only man who is lavishing his sweat and blood to save me & mine from starvation and shame, is a Standard Oil fiend … but I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t want any book; I wanted to get out of the publishing business.” Luckily for Lloyd, he won the passionate sponsorship of another literary luminary, his former Atlantic Monthly editor, William Dean Howells, who was bowled over by his indictment of Rockefeller. “I think that the monstrous iniquity whose story you tell so powerfully, accomplished itself in our time, is so astounding, so infuriating, that I have to stop from chapter to chapter, and take breath.” Howells steered Lloyd to Harper and Brothers, who agreed to issue the book if the author substantially condensed it, paid for publication, and guaranteed a sale of fifteen hundred copies—a deal only a rich radical could afford.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry H. Rogers · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Mark Twain · Standard Oil · William Dean Howells · Harper and Brothers · Atlantic Monthly · Howells
EPUB paragraph 36 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
Published in 1894, the book passed through four printings within a year and sold a respectable eight thousand copies in its first decade. Some sour notes were heard amid the praise. The Nation began its scathing review by saying, “This book is a notable example of the rhetorical blunder of overstatement,” and it branded the book “five hundred pages of the wildest rant.” Yet the work was praised widely by many reformers, including Louis Brandeis, and Edward Everett Hale called it the most important American book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Since Lloyd distributed free copies to politicians, it became the bible of Washington trustbusters.
Names: Henry Demarest Lloyd · Louis Brandeis · Edward Everett Hale · Washington · Uncle Tom
EPUB paragraph 37 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
With his penchant for melodrama, Lloyd claimed he had been tailed by Standard Oil detectives and told friends that he “expected to be crushed by the Standard people.” He seemed half disappointed when 26 Broadway reacted to his book with stern silence. Although colleagues informed him of the book’s accusations, Rockefeller did not read it and said Standard Oil “paid no more attention to all this nonsense than an elephant might be expected to pay to a tiny mosquito.” Rockefeller now declined almost weekly requests to sit for magazine profiles, including one from a new magazine being launched by Samuel S. McClure, who was then in Paris trying to sign up an obscure young writer from Pennsylvania, Ida Minerva Tarbell.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Henry Demarest Lloyd · S. S. McClure · Standard Oil · Paris · 26 Broadway · Pennsylvania
EPUB paragraph 38 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
Even after the publication of Wealth Against Commonwealth, Lloyd regaled friends with scurrilous gossip about Rockefeller, telling one correspondent, with cynical relish, that the mogul had recently gone abroad, ostensibly to recuperate from the strain of his charities. Sure that Rockefeller had left the country to divide up global oil markets with the Russians, Lloyd guffawed at reports that Rockefeller’s health had broken down under the crushing weight of his beneficence. “The wonder is that he expects people to believe that sort of thing, and that they do believe it!” Lloyd told a friend. The irony, of course, is that Rockefeller spoke the unvarnished truth. Lloyd was always as blind to Rockefeller’s virtues as he was sensitive to his glaring vices.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Wealth Against Commonwealth
EPUB paragraph 39 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
By 1895, Rockefeller, age fifty-six, had begun to fade by imperceptible degrees into retirement. That year, he sat for a haunting portrait by Eastman Johnson that was commissioned by the board of the University of Chicago and that shows him toward the close of his business career. Set against a dark backdrop, the titan sits on a simple wooden chair, fixing the viewer with a fiery stare. His long, tapered fingers are delicately interlaced and his legs urbanely crossed, but there is a blazing intensity, an inextinguishable fire, in his eyes. Rockefeller still looks powerful and surprisingly youthful, but there is a sadness about him, as if he were stooped under a great weight and enveloped in unfathomable gloom.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · University of Chicago · Eastman Johnson
EPUB paragraph 40 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
Since he dated his retirement as early as 1894 and as late as 1897, there is some uncertainty as to when Rockefeller officially left 26 Broadway, but 1895 and 1896 are the likely watershed years. Though he was still suffering from sporadic digestive problems and nervous strain, the 1893 panic had forced him to postpone his departure several times. In explaining his retirement, the Rockefeller literature has always stressed his health and the heavy burden of his charities, though another factor contributed as well: He had perfected the gleaming machinery of Standard Oil, and, his appointed task done, he felt he should pass the reins to younger men. As Gates put it, the business “had ceased to amuse him, it lacked freshness and variety and had become merely irksome and he withdrew.” By 1896, Rockefeller was skipping the daily lunch meetings at 26 Broadway and only occasionally exchanged memos with other executives. By June 4, 1896, he had already relinquished most of his duties, for he ended a letter to Archbold, “I shall be very pleased at any time to hear anything new that is important in the business, if it will not trouble you too much, or if you will kindly call Mr. Rogers.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · Frederick T. Gates · Standard Oil · 26 Broadway · Rogers
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In September 1897, Rockefeller suffered another medical setback, apparently related to circulatory problems, and his doctors insisted that he promptly transfer more day-to-day decisions to his representatives. “I do not call myself sick,” Rockefeller commented to one relative, “but this little warning I will promptly heed, as health is of the first importance.” So in 1897—the year his son graduated from Brown—Rockefeller walked away from the empire that had consumed his energies for more than thirty years, and during the next fifteen years he scarcely appeared at 26 Broadway. He was succeeded by John D. Archbold, his jovial, pugnacious protégé, who gave a more defiant and combative tone to the trust in its duels with government investigators, committing a public-relations blunder of no small magnitude.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · 26 Broadway · Brown—Rockefeller
EPUB paragraph 42 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
In a grave misstep, Rockefeller never publicly announced his retirement and retained the titular presidency of Standard Oil of New Jersey. As a result, he remained an inviting target for critics and was personally held liable for many of the questionable judgments made by Archbold, who was nominally vice president of New Jersey Standard.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · Standard Oil of New Jersey
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In our age of an assertive business press, when corporate secrets are readily ferreted out by reporters, it is scarcely conceivable that the world’s richest man, running the world’s largest business, could have drifted away from business without public knowledge. Yet much of the press—to Rockefeller’s later chagrin—swallowed the cover story whole. While some reporters knew that he no longer reported to work, they doubted that he had really surrendered supervisory power. The misconception was understandable. He owned nearly 30 percent of Standard Oil stock—far more than anyone else—and did not hesitate to proffer advice as the urge seized him. Small groups of company lawyers and executives periodically briefed him, and Archbold made regular weekend pilgrimages to consult him at his Westchester estate. As trustbusters took dead aim at the company, Rockefeller was driven to develop a common defense with current executives, pulling him back into the past even as he tried to move on to new pursuits.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · Standard Oil · Westchester County
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Rockefeller entered retirement just at the birth of the American automobile industry. As he noted, “When I retired from business … we had just begun to hope that some day [autos] would be practical.” That year, Frank and Charles Duryea produced thirteen two-cylinder runabouts in Springfield, Massachusetts—the first time a car company had produced several cars from a standardized model—and Henry Ford put the finishing touches to the quadricycle, his first horseless carriage. The automobile would make John D. Rockefeller far richer in retirement than at work. When he stepped down from Standard Oil, he was probably worth about $200 million—$3.5 billion today—whereas, thanks to the internal-combustion engine, his fortune soared to $1 billion by 1913—surely history’s most lucrative retirement, and one that must have softened the sting of press vituperation.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frank Rockefeller · Standard Oil · Charles Duryea · Henry Ford · Massachusetts · Springfield
EPUB paragraph 45 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
In 1897, Joseph Pulitzer’s World showcased John D. Rockefeller and Henry M. Flagler as two of the five chief overlords of the Standard Oil trust, yet Flagler had now ranged even farther afield than Rockefeller. A man with many cronies but few close friends, Rockefeller reserved warm praise for Flagler. “You and I have been associated in business upwards of thirty-five years,” Rockefeller wrote to him in 1902, “and while there have been times when we have not agreed on questions of policy I do not know that one unkind word has ever passed or unkind thought existed between us.… I feel that my pecuniary success is due to my association with you, if I have contributed anything to yours I am thankful.” Flagler repaid the compliment, telling one Baptist preacher that “if he would spend the remainder of his life in praising Mr. Rockefeller he could not say too much nor more than was actually deserved.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry M. Flagler · Joseph Pulitzer · Standard Oil · World
EPUB paragraph 46 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
But these high-flown, touching tributes masked a certain froideur that had crept into their relationship as they neared retirement. Although Rockefeller never said so outright, one senses that he thought Flagler had become a slave to fashion and ostentation, a traitor to the austere puritanical creed that had united them. Though his hair and mustache were now dusted with gray, Flagler had a lean, handsome face and was highly susceptible to female charm. He had suffered many personal misfortunes in marriage and exercised woefully bad judgment. His consumptive first wife, Mary, had become a professional invalid. When doctors recommended an extended winter stay for her in 1878, Henry joined her in Florida, but, itching to get back to Standard Oil, he bolted for New York after a few weeks. Unwilling to stay alone, Mary followed him back instead of taking time to recuperate properly. When she died in May 1881, Henry felt profoundly guilty. At that point, he took stock of his life and decided he had sacrificed too much to business, telling one reporter, “I have been giving all my days to the Lord hitherto, and now I’m taking one for myself.” During the winter of 1882–1883, he was hospitalized with a liver ailment and began to pore over newspaper articles about Florida land deals. In 1883, at age fifty-three, Flagler married Ida Alice Shourds, thirty-five, a former actress who had nursed Mary during her illness. A short woman with red hair, electric blue eyes, and an incendiary temper, Ida Alice seemed determined to run through Flagler’s money, gathering an expensive wardrobe and trying to buy her way into New York high society.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry M. Flagler · Standard Oil · New York · Ida Alice Shourds · Florida · Henry · Mary · Ida Alice
EPUB paragraph 47 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
Whatever his reservations about the match, Rockefeller visited Henry and Ida Alice on their honeymoon in Saint Augustine, Florida, during the winter of 1883–1884. No less prophetic in his business hunches than at Standard Oil, Flagler had faith that Florida would someday be converted from a pestilential, mosquito-ridden jungle into a place of wonder, recreation, and exotic beauty. The next winter, when the Rockefellers and Flaglers again traveled to Saint Augustine, Henry bought several acres of orange grove as the site for the future Ponce de Leon Hotel. To cater to a less-affluent clientele, he added the Alcazar Hotel across the street, its façade patterned after the Alcazar Palace of Seville. As the resident railroad expert of Standard Oil, Flagler saw that Florida’s development had been retarded by inadequate transport, and in the late 1880s he bought two railroads that opened for settlement a coastal stretch around Ormond and Daytona beaches. Buying a large hotel on the Halifax River, he remodeled it, grafted on an eighteen-hole golf course, and renamed it the Ormond Beach Hotel. Years later, John D. Rockefeller’s winter home, The Casements, stood directly across the street.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry M. Flagler · Standard Oil · Rockefeller family · Ormond Beach · The Casements · Florida · Henry · Ida Alice · Ormond Beach Hotel · Saint Augustine · Halifax River · Flaglers · Ponce de Leon Hotel · Alcazar Hotel · Alcazar Palace · Seville
EPUB paragraph 48 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
Driven by his faith in Florida’s future, Flagler merged his railroads in 1892 and conceived a master plan for a railroad that would snake down the length of Florida’s Atlantic coast to Key West, with Flagler resorts dotting the route—a vision he realized in 1912. Each time Flagler pushed the railway farther south, it opened more swamp to development, triggering another land boom.
Names: Henry M. Flagler · Florida · Atlantic · Key West
EPUB paragraph 49 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
As always when infected with development fever, Flagler ran up bills that taxed even his massive fortune. In 1890, he sold 2,500 shares of Standard Oil stock to Rockefeller for $375,000 and made further stock sales to him for several years—right on the verge of the auto boom that would send those shares soaring. Rockefeller followed Flagler’s business adventures in Florida with sympathy but at a distance. “Henry did a great job in Florida,” he said. “Think of pouring out all that money on a whim. But then Henry was always bold.” Yet he turned a deaf ear to his friend’s repeated entreaties to visit again. “I believe this country would be a revelation to you, if you would take a week to look into it,” Flagler pleaded with him in 1889. Yet Rockefeller still stayed away from the state after his 1884–1885 visit. “It is marvelous what Mr. Flagler has wrought in that southern country,” Rockefeller told William Rainey Harper in 1898, “and I regret not to have paid him a visit long ago.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry M. Flagler · William Rainey Harper · Standard Oil · Florida · Henry
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Why this sudden distance in so singular a friendship? When they did see each other, Rockefeller and Flagler were always nostalgic, yet they seldom contrived to meet. One suspects that John and Cettie were scandalized by the showy airs and sybaritic indulgence of Ida Alice Flagler. Bowing to his second wife, Henry had bought a private railroad car and a 160-foot yacht (both tellingly named the Alicia), and the Flaglers behaved more and more like the gaudy arrivistes the Rockefellers abhorred. Then Ida Alice began to show incipient signs of the mental illness that overtook her in later years. Out of the blue she began to chatter about her husband’s adultery—a real enough situation, but one magnified in Ida Alice’s fevered mind. In 1891, Henry became infatuated with Mary Lily Kenan, a beautiful, gifted twenty-four-year-old from a prominent North Carolina family who offered him respite from his moody, unstable wife, and Ida Alice became pathologically obsessed with this relationship.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Henry M. Flagler · Rockefeller family · Mary Lily Kenan · Henry · Ida Alice · North Carolina · Flaglers · Ida Alice Flagler · Alicia · John
EPUB paragraph 51 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
During the summer of 1893, Ida Alice’s manic behavior worsened when she obtained a Ouija board. Closeted in her room, she spent hours communing with astral spirits, convinced the czar of Russia had fallen madly in love with her. When she threatened to kill Flagler in October 1895 and accused him of trying to poison her, she was committed to a sanatorium in Pleasantville, New York. In the spring of 1896, after the doctors declared Ida Alice cured, she returned to live with Henry at their large estate, Satan’s Toe, in Mamaroneck, New York. For a few happy weeks, they rode bikes together and read aloud to each other, suggesting a tenuous return to happier times. Then Ida Alice bribed a servant to smuggle in a Ouija board and promptly succumbed to old demons. Once back at the board, she relapsed into her paranoid dreamworld. When she flew at one doctor, wielding a pair of scissors, she was returned to the Pleasantville sanatorium in March 1897. There she renamed herself Princess Ida Alice von Schotten Tech and never saw Henry again.
Names: Henry M. Flagler · New York · Russia · Henry · Ida Alice · Satan · Ouija · Pleasantville · Mamaroneck
EPUB paragraph 52 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c18_r1.htm
After the courts ruled Ida Alice Flagler insane in 1899, Henry set up a trust fund for her, stocked with $2 million in Standard Oil shares, which would appreciate to more than $15 million by her death in July 1930. Henry, meanwhile, was in a bind: New York state law would not permit divorce on grounds other than adultery, and he could not prove adultery against a woman confined to an asylum. Never deterred by restrictive laws, Flagler switched his legal residence to Florida and applied his influence with state legislators. On April 9, 1901, a special law was enacted permitting divorce on grounds of incurable insanity—a law known as the Flagler divorce law. Within two weeks, Flagler married Mary Lily Kenan. The wedding was performed in high style, Flagler bringing friends down from New York in a private railroad car, but Rockefeller did not attend. He must have felt Flagler was making a spectacle of himself, especially when he was named correspondent in a divorce suit in Syracuse, New York, one month after his marriage. That the Rockefellers had drifted away from Flagler is suggested by a note Cettie wrote her son in August 1900. “We have the announcement of Mr. Flagler’s marriage to a Miss Kenan, of N. Carolina. She is thirty-six, he, seventy-two.” Cettie expresses no pleasure at the marriage, but only cites, with implicit disapproval, the difference in age. Mary Kenan was actually thirty-three at the time.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Henry M. Flagler · Standard Oil · Rockefeller family · New York · Mary Lily Kenan · Florida · Henry · North Carolina · Ida Alice Flagler · Syracuse · Kenan · Mary Kenan
EPUB paragraph 1 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c19_r1.htm
hen he entered college in 1893, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., seemed like the prototype of the poor little rich boy, stuck with an overdeveloped conscience and the badge of being the son of one of the world’s wealthiest men. Having had a rather solitary childhood in mansions and on estates, he did not have the social ease of other young men of his age and class. Desperately eager to please his parents, he had exhausted himself in trying to scrub sin from his soul.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
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Much like his father, Junior couldn’t make decisions lightly and fretted over his choice of a college. Set to go to Yale, he passed its preliminary entrance exam and had even selected a room when reports reached him from one minister that a fast set dominated the Yale social scene. Others might have found this decidedly in Yale’s favor, but Junior decided to look elsewhere and finally selected Brown because three close friends had chosen to attend it. As he told Dr. William Rainey Harper, whom he consulted, in a tone of excruciating humility, about the choice of schools, “Being naturally somewhat retiring (I beg you to pardon personal references), I do not make friends readily, and some of those interested in my welfare fear if I go to Yale in a class wholly strange to me, I will be ‘lost in the crowd’ so to speak and remain much by myself, instead of getting the social contact I so greatly need.” Junior tended to discuss himself clinically, as if he were a laboratory specimen wriggling under glass, his parents, especially his mother, having taught him to probe his behavior with such antiseptic detachment.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · William Rainey Harper · Brown University · Yale University
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Junior entered Brown in September 1893, just as the industrial slump worsened, and his college years unfolded against a turbulent backdrop of radical rhetoric and labor unrest, much of it directed against his father. Founded in the eighteenth century, Brown was the oldest and best-endowed Baptist college, and its president, E. Benjamin Andrews, was a Baptist clergyman–cum–political economist. In those days, college presidents were often ordained ministers who had a profound impact on the student body in classroom and chapel alike. During the Civil War, Andrews had lost an eye in the Petersburg siege, and his glass eye endowed him with a visionary gaze. Junior admired his spiritual zeal and keen intelligence and was especially struck one day when Andrews told him, “Rockefeller, never be afraid to stand up for a position when you know you are right.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Samuel Andrews · Brown University · E. Benjamin Andrews · Civil War · Petersburg
EPUB paragraph 4 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c19_r1.htm
Six months before Junior arrived at Brown, Andrews had composed a flattering letter to Henry Demarest Lloyd about Wealth Against Commonwealth. “It is decidedly in my line,” he assured him, “although you are more radical than I am at some points.” Not averse to trusts, Andrews wanted to regulate them for the public good and distribute their benefits more equitably. When Junior took a course with him in practical ethics, Andrews gave him a finer appreciation for employer responsibility in big business. In one undergraduate essay, Junior already evinced the proclivity for corporate reform that would mark his adult life: “Who can look about upon the millions of laborers whose life is a treadmill, a continuous round of work to which they are driven by dire necessity … without being fired with a desire to revolutionize their condition by adopting the profit-sharing system?” However idolized by students, Andrews was roundly condemned by many alumni when he supported William Jennings Bryan’s presidential bid in 1896 and endorsed free coinage of silver, an episode that cost him his job. Henry Demarest Lloyd spied Rockefeller’s fine hand in the ouster, telling a friend, “One of the reasons which actuated the trustees in crowding [Andrews] out was the statement that as long as he remained, Mr. Rockefeller would never give the university any money.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Samuel Andrews · Henry Demarest Lloyd · William Jennings Bryan · Wealth Against Commonwealth · Brown, Andrews
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c19_r1.htm
The bashful young Rockefeller, quartered in Slater Hall, was much shorter than his father but broad chested and square shouldered. Both his mother and Grandma Spelman exhorted him to be vigilant against dormitory vice. In his first letter home, he reassured them by saying that he had already attended a prayer meeting, adding, “Grandmother will be interested to know that there are three colored men in the class.” He also had begun teaching a Sunday-school class at a Baptist church in Providence, and his relieved father wrote him that “the moral and religious tone seem of the best.” During his busy freshman year, Junior joined the glee club, the mandolin club, and a string quartet with some young ladies. As he ventured timidly beyond the self-contained world of his youth, he could not just enjoy spontaneous pleasure and had to justify it in terms of self-improvement. When he joined a college operetta, he wrote his mother, “Then too appearing on the platform before people as I would do and have done in the Glee Club gives me confidence in myself, and helps me to become easy in public which I always need.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Lucy Henry Spelman · Providence · Slater Hall
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Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., around the time they were married. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Rockefeller Archive Center
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Doggedly earnest, tenacious in his studies, Junior was a good enough student to make Phi Beta Kappa, and he especially enjoyed economics and sociology. Unlike his father, however, his self-confidence was a fragile bloom, easily crushed. “If a person scolded me,” he said, “I shut up like a clam. I wasn’t much of a scholar, but I always tried hard and I didn’t like to be reproached.” Everybody noticed his Baptist austerity: He did not drink, smoke, play cards, go to the theater, or even read Sunday papers. True to his temperance pledge, he plied students with crackers and hot chocolate when they came to his room, but he terribly upset Grandma Spelman when he let boys smoke there.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Lucy Henry Spelman · Phi Beta Kappa
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Junior’s frugality was the stuff of campus legend, and everybody had a favorite anecdote: how he soaked apart two two-cent stamps that got stuck together or how he pressed his own trousers, sewed his own buttons, and mended his own dish towels. Following his father’s example, he recorded every expense in his little book—sometimes to snickers from classmates—and even recorded bouquets of flowers bought for dates. Whether putting money in the plate at church or buying a pencil from a beggar, he jotted down everything to the last decimal. “He told me that his father allowed him all the money he wanted,” said a friend, “but insisted on an exact account of every penny.” Another classmate recalled, “It used to be a great joke, particularly among the girls in Providence, and they used to laugh a good deal about being treated to a soda by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and having him enter it into his book as he sat at the soda fountain.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Providence
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Despite his shy formality, Junior was generally popular at Brown or, at least, highly respected. Some students were bound to see him as a hopeless prig, and one day as he was crossing the campus, one heckled him, “Here comes Johnny Rock, reeking with virtue and without one redeeming vice!” For the most part, however, he became more sociable and self-assured and slowly weaned himself from the airless morality of his upbringing. He was tolerant by nature, telling Grandma Spelman in one letter, “One sees all sorts and conditions of men here viewing life, duty, pleasure and the hereafter, so differently. My ideas and opinions change I find in many ways. I would stickle less for the letter of the law, now, more for the spirit.” Haltingly, he forged an identity separate from those of his forebears. He was more ecumenical, more open to the outside world, more considerate of alternate views. As president of his junior class, he got his classmates to desist from drinking alcohol at the class supper, which had traditionally been a drunken debauch. And when his class took its annual stag cruise to Newport, Junior agreed to keep kegs of beer on hand but tried to avert heavy indulgence. His parents were ecstatic. “Dear John,” his mother wrote, “you have been our pride and comfort from the day of your birth but at no time have we been more grateful for such a son as at the present moment—Tears of joy filled dear father’s eyes when your letter was read and he wants me to tell you how proud and happy it made him.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Lucy Henry Spelman · Brown University · Newport · Johnny Rock · John
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At Brown, Junior learned to savor such illicit pleasures as theater and dancing, small triumphs for a Baptist boy bred with such unrelenting morality. After his sophomore year, he took a bicycle trip through England with Everett Colby, a classmate whose father was a railroad builder. (John D. had invested in his ventures.) In London, Junior saw his first plays: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Charley’s Aunt, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As if admitting to a furtive visit to a brothel, he told his mother: “I shouldn’t have done it at home on account of the example but thought it not harmful in London, where I knew no one and had an opportunity of seeing several of Shakespeare’s plays.” Junior made it through his freshman year without dancing, then succumbed to this vice sophomore year by dancing all evening at a party thrown at the home of a university trustee. To practice for the event, he whirled his friend Lefferts Dashiell around his dormitory room. The whole evening, as he danced with a Miss Foster, he feared that he would crash to the floor. Holding on for dear life, he had the distinct impression that Miss Foster was propping him up. That evening, he met the vivacious Abby Aldrich, daughter of Rhode Island senator Nelson Aldrich, but could not muster the courage to dance with her. The love of dancing lasted, and by the time he graduated Junior indulged this sinful passion two or three times a week.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson W. Aldrich · Brown University · London · England · Everett Colby · Lefferts Dashiell · William Shakespeare · Foster · Rhode Island · Charley · Verona
EPUB paragraph 11 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c19_r1.htm
Cettie Rockefeller never entirely relaxed her militance about this pastime. During his senior year, Junior wanted to repay his classmates for their kindness to him and asked his parents to host a dance in Providence. Striking a compromise, John and Cettie agreed to have a musical evening of Mendelssohn, Bach, Chopin, and Liszt, followed by informal dancing. When they mailed out the invitations, the infernal word dancing appeared in small, almost apologetic lettering in the lower left-hand corner of the card. Yet when the evening arrived, Cettie developed a headache and took refuge in her hotel room. As a result, Senior, resplendent in tails and white gloves, stood alone on the receiving line, cordially greeting three hundred guests. Cettie’s behavior on this and other occasions supports the thesis that she retreated to her bed as an escape from threatening realities.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Providence · Mendelssohn · Bach · Chopin · Liszt · John
EPUB paragraph 12 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c19_r1.htm
Before Brown, Junior had known little about sports: The Rockefellers were more interested in exercise, which stressed health, than in sports, which stressed pleasure. When he became a manager of the football team his senior year, Junior endured endless ribbing when he referred to the center as “the middle.” He was so much his thrifty father’s son that when one husky lineman asked for new shoestrings, Junior retorted, “What did you do with the pair I gave you last week?” Because of his son’s position, Senior, who had never been to a football game, attended one in New York between Brown and the Carlisle Indians. He started out in the stands, calmly surveying the spectacle, then grew so excited that he rushed down to the field in his tall silk hat and began to race up and down the sidelines with the coaches. The captain of the team assigned a lineman to explain the fine points of the game to him, and with his exceptional mind for tactical maneuvers John D. Rockefeller gave the impression that he had mastered the game, with all its subtleties, within five minutes.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Brown University · Rockefeller family · New York
EPUB paragraph 13 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c19_r1.htm
Junior needed somebody who would release him from the suffocating prudery of his upbringing, and that liberating figure was Abby Aldrich. She was a confident girl who did not need his money and was not awed by his name. Something about the socially maladroit Junior appealed to the maternal instincts of this sophisticated young lady with the gracious manners and erect carriage of a senator’s daughter. One of eight children, she had often hosted her father’s Washington receptions and had met everyone from General Ambrose Burnside to William McKinley to Custer’s widow. Tall, voluptuous, and somewhat matronly in appearance, she was handsome rather than pretty. She liked to wear broad-brimmed, eccentric hats, a symbol of her outgoing personality. She seemed to give Junior the faith in himself that his parents couldn’t foster. As he said of their meeting sophomore year, “She treated me as if I had all the savoir faire in the world and her confidence did me a lot of good.”Through Abby, Junior made a startling discovery that had been artfully concealed from him: Life could be fun.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · William McKinley · Washington · Ambrose Burnside · Custer
EPUB paragraph 14 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c19_r1.htm
Abby came from old New England stock on her mother’s side and was descended from Elder William Brewster, a passenger on the Mayflower. Though the son of a mill hand, Senator Aldrich claimed Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island colony, as an ancestor. Tall and virile, with thick mustache and side-whiskers, the unflappable Senator Aldrich had escaped from poverty, but he never lost his dread of it. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1881 and held that seat for the next thirty years, winding up as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. A confirmed protectionist and devoted servant of the trusts, he used public office to feather his own nest. Bolstered by a $5 million loan from the American Sugar Refining Company—the so-called sugar trust—he invested in four Providence street-railway companies while also representing the New Haven Railroad. Senator Aldrich turned public service into such a lucrative racket that he amassed $16 million by his death. As if he were a mogul, not a public servant, he built a 99-room château at Warwick Neck on Narragansett Bay and sailed a 200-foot yacht, equipped with 8 staterooms and a crew of 27. He bore a host of pejoratives, most notably those conferred by Lincoln Steffens, who referred to him in McClure’s Magazine as the “political boss of the United States, the power behind the throne, the general manager of the U.S.” Too entrenched to be ruffled by such journalistic pinpricks, Senator Aldrich stuck by his policy of “Deny nothing, explain nothing.”
Names: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson W. Aldrich · United States · New England · Lincoln Steffens · William Brewster · Providence · U.S. Senate · Roger Williams · Rhode Island · New Haven Railroad · Senate Finance Committee · Narragansett Bay · McClure’s Magazine · Mayflower · American Sugar Refining Company · Warwick Neck
Source: Ron Chernow, Titan. Names and relationships retain the full atlas’s extraction limits. Map points are references; historical sites and regions can be approximate. Open the full interactive atlas.