EPUB paragraph 73 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Having booked return passage on the Amerika for July 20, 1906, John and Cettie yearned to take Bessie with them. Rockefeller and Charles clashed repeatedly over this question. Charles later told William James, “I had an uphill fight to prevent Mr. Rockefeller from taking his daughter back with him in defiance of expert opinion.” Rockefeller refused to believe that Bessie was too frail to make the crossing. In the end, somewhat reluctantly, even resentfully, he acquiesced in Charles’s decision to keep her in France. Charles might have performed one signal service for him, however. One Sunday afternoon, he read aloud an essay that he had drafted on the duties of rich men, arguing that when people accumulated wealth on a colossal scale, they should then convert that wealth into public trusts, administered by trustees for the commonweal. This essay might have strengthened Rockefeller’s wish to create a huge philanthropic foundation.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · William James · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · France · Amerika · John
EPUB paragraph 74 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Back in New York in August, Rockefeller tried to launch a new era in his relations with the press. In fact, reporters were so startled by his sudden, voluble friendliness that one headline declared, “Oil King Acts Like Political Candidate.” When Hoster published a long, flattering interview with Rockefeller, the latter applauded the “fair and square treatment” he had received. Deciding to combat ghoulish stories about his patient’s health, Dr. Biggar gathered reporters and said, “Mr. Rockefeller is in stronger physical health than he has been in the last fifteen years. He is as active and as light-hearted as a schoolboy. The trip has benefited him wonderfully.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Hamilton F. Biggar · New York · William Hoster · King
EPUB paragraph 75 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Though sorry to return without Bessie, the Rockefellers had been encouraged by her progress, and Rockefeller, in thanksgiving, distributed shares of stock to family members. These hopes were cruelly dashed when word came from France on November 13 that Bessie had suffered a paralytic stroke. Rockefeller wired Charles, “Love Sympathy Hope. Leave nothing undone.” He took comfort in the thought that Bessie had a good doctor, an attentive husband, and a loving daughter. But the next day came the dreadful wire from Charles: “Bessie Passed Away at Two O’Clock This Morning Without Suffering.” Deeply shaken, Rockefeller replied: “We all send love. All is well with dear Bessie. Command us for any service. Father.” By a ghastly coincidence, this news arrived just as the government began to prosecute Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Standard Oil · Rockefeller family · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · France · Sherman · Antitrust
EPUB paragraph 76 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
When Bessie Strong died, so little was known about this reclusive heiress that the newspapers strained to pad out their obituaries, admitting that she was known only to a small circle of family intimates. In late November, Charles and Margaret brought the body back for burial in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown. Having lost Bessie, the Rockefellers wanted Charles to settle in America, but he was now a permanent expatriate. As he told William James, “I have never been especially proud of being an American.” Fluent in German, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and French, he wanted to return to Europe, seeing it as the fountainhead of culture. For Rockefeller, American to the marrow, convinced that European society was decadent, such an attitude was incomprehensible. Around this time, when reporters asked whether he might ever retire to Europe, he replied, “The United States can’t develop enough drawbacks to make me lose the feeling that there is no place like home.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · William James · Rockefeller family · United States · Europe · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Margaret · Tarrytown
EPUB paragraph 77 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
To Rockefeller’s immense chagrin, Charles took Margaret to England, where she went to school in Sussex and then to Newnham College, Cambridge. During the next thirty years, Charles took an apartment in Paris and a villa in Fiesole near Bernard Berenson’s I Tatti, living the life of a solitary, melancholy widower. Rockefeller kept renewing his earnest plea that Margaret be educated in New York City, and it became a sore point with him that Charles refused to oblige him. A year after Bessie’s death, Rockefeller discontinued all further gifts to his son-in-law, though not to Margaret. He feared that Margaret would become isolated from the rest of the family and was haunted by fears that she would be seduced by a continental fortune hunter. As he bemoaned to Edith, “[Margaret] is a dear girl. How much we wish she were at school in this country, where we could see her oftener; and when she gets all through with the English school, where are the American acquaintances to come from? I am talking this to her and Charles plainly, but without any encouraging response.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · New York City · Paris · England · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Margaret · Cambridge · Fiesole · Sussex · Newnham College · Bernard Berenson · Tatti
EPUB paragraph 78 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Rockefeller worried that Charles was exposing his granddaughter to too many radical, secular ideas. That Charles deplored capitalism, advocated trade unions, and favored taxes to rectify inequalities of income—these things Rockefeller could tolerate. But he could not condone that Charles led his daughter away from the church and deprived her of religious instruction. In 1908, Charles told Junior that he had dismissed Margaret’s beloved Irish governess, a Miss Lawrenson, for introducing religion into their household. “I find that, quite without her fault, Margaret was imbibing Catholic ideas, and there was nothing for it but to make a change, greatly as I regretted letting Miss L. go.” Every time that Charles and Margaret visited New York, the Rockefellers tried to lure them back to church—a strategy that probably backfired and fortified their resolve to stay away. During one such visit in 1909, Junior wrote to his mother, “Charles and Margaret took supper with us again last Sunday night and went with us to church as far as the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street. Whether we ever get any nearer or not time only will tell.” More than a decade after Bessie’s death, Rockefeller was still jockeying to get Margaret back, asking his son-in-law Harold McCormick if he and Edith could use their “united influence to get Charles and Margaret to come over here when it is possible to do so. We want to have Margaret live with us.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Rockefeller family · New York · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Margaret · Fifth Avenue · Lawrenson
EPUB paragraph 79 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Before considering the particulars of the antitrust case against Standard Oil, it is worth pursuing for a moment Rockefeller’s metamorphosis into a master of public relations. Back at Forest Hill that autumn, Rockefeller did something unexpected: He received—in a suitably jolly mood—a delegation from the American Press Humorists, who were so charmed by his wit that they elected him an honorary member and then cheerfully boasted that they now had the highest per-capita income of any such society in the world. For a long time, Starr Murphy and other aides had argued that if only reporters would meet Rockefeller and see him as a father, friend, and neighbor, he would not be so grotesquely misrepresented in the press. Joe Clarke invited more reporters to golf with the titan, and these festive outings, full of gags and banter, invariably produced favorable articles. “I have as my constant companions at golf, magazine writers and newspaper men,” Rockefeller wrote to Harold McCormick in September 1906. “They say they did not know me before, and seem entirely friendly and well disposed.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Harold McCormick · Starr J. Murphy · Standard Oil · Forest Hill · American Press Humorists · Joe Clarke · Titan
EPUB paragraph 80 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
As he abandoned his fearful attitude toward the press, he loosened up, as if liberated by the change. It formed part of a general development away from the more severe manner of his business years. Leslie’s Weekly reported the following year, “At the age of sixty-seven he is growing out of his chrysalis. For the first years of his life he is beginning to enjoy himself. Two years ago he dodged newspaper men. Now he courts them.” Virtually every reporter who profiled Rockefeller was surprised to discover a courteous, lighthearted old gentleman. “Never have I known anyone who could approach Mr. Rockefeller in thoughtful little attentions,” one impressed reporter wrote. “This is the testimony of all his guests. His worst enemy would succumb to this treatment.” In response to this friendlier press treatment, Edith started giving her father giant scrapbooks, stuffed with the hundreds of articles about him that appeared around the world each year.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Leslie’s Weekly
EPUB paragraph 81 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Though he had spurned many chances to respond to Ida Tarbell and declined offers to write his life, Rockefeller now decided to publish his memoirs in Tarbell-like monthly installments in The World’s Work. The magazine was an especially safe, attractive forum since its editor, Walter H. Page, was a member of the General Education Board. In February 1908, Rockefeller began to play golf daily in Augusta, Georgia, with the publisher, Frank N. Doubleday. Their talks resulted in a string of seven articles published under the title “Random Reminiscences of Men and Events” starting in October 1908. These quaint, superficial pieces were ghostwritten by Doubleday, assisted by Starr Murphy. After Doubleday, Page published them in book form in 1909, the volume was released simultaneously in England, Germany, France, and Italy. Rockefeller thought this due penance from publishers who were trying to undo past harm “when they supposed they were serving the cause of righteousness,” as he told Edith.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Ida M. Tarbell · Starr J. Murphy · General Education Board · Augusta · England · Frank N. Doubleday · Random Reminiscences · France · Georgia · Germany · Doubleday · Page · Italy · World’s Work · Walter H. Page
EPUB paragraph 82 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
For legal reasons, editing the series required great tact. Rockefeller knew that the attorney general would be scanning the series for his antitrust suit and Standard’s lawyers rigorously combed every word. At first, Rockefeller wanted to trim the Widow Backus section, citing the petty sums at stake, but Gates rejoined that it was precisely the minute sums that had given the story its hold over the popular imagination. “I doubt if any single libel against you or the company has done more harm,” Gates said bluntly. “If a man or a company could do such things to a poor and defenceless widow and for a small sum of money, how relentless must be its spirit and its methods!” Bowing to Gates’s reasoning, the titan devoted more pages to Backus than to any of his mighty industrial ventures.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Standard Oil · Backus
EPUB paragraph 83 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
For the most part, Rockefeller eschewed controversy in his book. Doubleday wanted to replace the image of the forbidding Rockefeller with that of the easygoing man he had come to know. In the series, Rockefeller struck an avuncular note, presenting himself as an avid gardener and sportsman, telling the reader at the outset, “On a rainy morning like this, when golf is out of the question, I am tempted to become a garrulous old man.” He was just plain John, the next-door neighbor. Of his current life, he said, “I live like a farmer away from active happenings in business, playing golf, planting trees; and yet I am so busy that no day is long enough.” As always, he tried to seem a model of Christian forbearance, turning the other cheek to unfair attacks against him. “I have had at least my full share of adverse criticism, but I can truly say that it has not embittered me, nor left me with any harsh feeling against a living soul.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Doubleday · John
EPUB paragraph 84 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
In Random Reminiscences, Rockefeller described a fair world where strong, hardworking people were rewarded, and lazy folks punished; no admixture of tragedy clouded his vision. Despite the swelling tide of antitrust suits, Rockefeller reiterated his faith that cooperation, not competition, advanced the general welfare. “Probably the greatest single obstacle to the progress and happiness of the American people,” he intoned, “lies in the willingness of so many men to invest their time and money in multiplying competitive industries instead of opening up new fields, and putting their money into lines of industry and development that are needed.”
EPUB paragraph 85 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Though Rockefeller’s memoirs received mixed reviews, they helped to humanize his image. Everyone, of course, was eager for Ida Tarbell’s reaction, and she duly delivered a booming cannonade of criticism to a Chicago newspaper: Listen: There is the Mr. Rockefeller of his autobiography, for whom I have a real, a great admiration. He is admirable—there is no other word—in his quietly wise discussions of the proper setting out of Japanese quinces and blue firs, of the arrangements of geraniums and roses.… And then there is the other Mr. Rockefeller.… Utterly and almost as impersonally ruthless as a whirlwind or a torrent, he has swept through the country a conquering Hun, regardless of all save winning for himself. No, he’s not a Hun: the destructive force of him is too intelligent. He is more like Bernard Shaw’s Napoleon—great, because for himself he suspended the ordinary laws of conventionality and morality while keeping them in operation for other people. He is a mastodon of mental machinery. And would you ask a steam plow for pity? Would you look for scruples in an electric dynamo?
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Chicago · Napoleon · Hun · Bernard Shaw
EPUB paragraph 86 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Clearly, the lady had not mellowed.
Names:
EPUB paragraph 87 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Besides acting as midwife for Random Reminiscences, Doubleday made another valuable contribution to Rockefeller’s rehabilitation. As head of the Periodical Publishers’ Association, he dreamed up the idea of having Rockefeller address a luncheon of New York publishers; in a splendid coup de théâtre, the mogul would be introduced by Mark Twain, the chief satirist of the Gilded Age. As it turned out, Twain was ripe for this venture. In the summer of 1907, his dear friend Henry H. Rogers had suffered a stroke, and Twain had stayed with him in Bermuda from February 24 to April 11, 1908, easing his convalescence. Twain’s favorite daughter, Susy, had died of spinal meningitis a decade earlier at age twenty-four. When Frank Doubleday told Twain that Simon Flexner’s antimeningitis serum, developed at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, had cut the death rate from the disease from 75 to 25 percent of those afflicted, Twain was all the more eager to help.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry H. Rogers · Simon Flexner · Mark Twain · Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research · New York · Random Reminiscences · Gilded Age · Doubleday · Frank Doubleday · Bermuda · Periodical Publishers’ Association · de théâtre · Susy
EPUB paragraph 88 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Always on good terms with Rockefeller, Twain thought he deserved a fair hearing from the press and was sure he would make a good impression on the publishers. Beyond his affection for Rogers, Twain recoiled at the sanctimonious tone the press often adopted in attacking the trusts. He knew all about Rockefeller’s business reputation, but some perverse, irreverent streak attracted him to anyone who was so deliciously notorious. For Twain, a man so universally hated by the American public had to have many redeeming features.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mark Twain · Rogers
EPUB paragraph 89 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
When Doubleday asked Rockefeller to meet with the magazine publishers, Rockefeller, now an old hand at press relations, replied, “Certainly. Why not? I am willing to meet and talk with any body of men, friends or enemies.” On May 20, 1908, Doubleday sat at the head of the luncheon table at the Aldine Club, surrounded by forty or fifty magazine publishers, when the rear door flew open and Mark Twain, Henry Rogers, and the two Rockefellers, junior and senior, marched single file into the room. As Twain noted of those present, “there was probably not one whose magazine had not had the habit for the past few years of abusing the Rockefellers, Henry Rogers, and the other chiefs of the Standard Oil.” Since Rockefeller had avoided contact with the literati, three-fourths of the publishers, by Twain’s estimate, had never before set eyes on him.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry H. Rogers · Mark Twain · Standard Oil · Rockefeller family · Doubleday · Aldine Club
EPUB paragraph 90 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
First Rogers and then Twain gave brief introductions before Rockefeller got up to speak. His talk, illustrated with moving anecdotes, described the work of the RIMR. Rockefeller was still a tall, imposing man, yet there was now a touch of melancholy in his eyes, and it was a sadder, more reflective face that stared out at the magazine publishers. The next morning, Twain, who had no equal himself on the lecture platform, jotted down this tribute:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mark Twain · Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research · Rogers
EPUB paragraph 91 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Mr. Rockefeller got up and talked sweetly, sanely, simply, humanly, and with astonishing effectiveness, being interrupted by bursts of applause at the end of almost every sentence; and when he sat down all those men were his friends and he had achieved one of the completest victories I have ever had any knowledge of. Then the meeting broke up, and by a common impulse the crowd moved forward and each individual of it gave the victor a hearty handshake, and along with it some hearty compliments upon his performance as an orator.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
EPUB paragraph 92 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
It was an unlikely triumph for a reclusive man who had refrained from public speaking and had fled from the press for so long. Unfortunately, he had turned this skill to advantage much too late, since the political assault against Standard Oil now headed inexorably toward its finale.
Names: Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 93 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
A grim John D. Rockefeller votes in November 1908, not long after the shocking disclosure of the Archbold bribery scandal. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · Rockefeller Archive Center
EPUB paragraph 1 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
n November 18, 1906, the federal government filed suit in Missouri to dissolve Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act, naming as defendants Standard Oil of New Jersey, sixty-five companies under its control, and a pantheon of chieftains, including John and William Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, Oliver Payne, John Archbold, and Henry Rogers. They were charged with monopolizing the oil industry and conspiring to restrain trade through a familiar litany of tactics: railroad rebates, the abuse of their pipeline monopoly, predatory pricing, industrial espionage, and the secret ownership of ostensible competitors. The proposed remedy was sweeping: to break up the massive combine into its component companies. As a government report documented in 1907, the Standard Oil leviathan still refined 87 percent of all kerosene, handled 87 percent of exported kerosene, marketed 89 percent of domestic kerosene, and was more than twenty times the size of its most serious competitor, Pure Oil. After the suit was filed, Standard officials tried to sound sanguine and could not subdue their now delusional sense of invincibility. In a letter marked “Strictly confidential,” Rockefeller told Archbold of reports that the Justice Department had scant confidence in its own case and that it was just a flimsy vendetta worked up by Roosevelt. “This program is the usual topic of his present day talk with friends and he shows a disposition that is vindictive. If his suit fails, he means to urge legislation, if he can have it framed, aimed at the same target.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Rockefeller · Henry M. Flagler · John D. Archbold · Henry H. Rogers · Oliver H. Payne · Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil · Standard Oil of New Jersey · Sherman · Missouri · Antitrust · Justice Department · Pure Oil · John
EPUB paragraph 2 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
There seems little doubt that Standard Oil seriously misplayed its cards with Roosevelt. In January 1907, the president tangled with one of his nemeses, Ohio senator Joseph B. Foraker, before a crowded dinner at the Gridiron Club in Washington. A stout ally of Standard Oil, Senator Foraker stiffly resisted measures to regulate business. With patent indignation, Roosevelt excoriated Foraker and the “malefactors of great wealth” behind him. As he pronounced the classic phrase, some reporters thought his gaze traveled to J. P. Morgan, whereas Morgan’s friends insisted that the president eyed Henry H. Rogers, then sitting next to Morgan. The latter were probably right, for Morgan and his client firms had handled relations better with the White House. If Roosevelt treated the Morgan interests (U.S. Steel, International Harvester, et al.) more leniently than he did Standard Oil, it was partly because they had submitted to guidance from the Bureau of Corporations and worked out informal arrangements to correct violations. In briefing his father on the antitrust case, Junior relayed rumors that U.S. Steel had pushed Frank Kellogg to target Standard Oil so as to deflect heat from itself. He also mentioned that several Standard Oil executives, including Charles M. Pratt and Edward T. Bedford, thought that U.S. Steel had wisely placated the government while Archbold had been foolishly antagonistic. Senior preferred to view Standard Oil as vengefully singled out for abuse and claimed that “other large corporations went scot free who were regarded by these ablest attorneys in the land as far more vulnerable than was the Standard Oil Company.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · John D. Archbold · Henry H. Rogers · J. P. Morgan · Theodore Roosevelt · Joseph B. Foraker · Standard Oil · International Harvester · U.S. Steel · Frank B. Kellogg · Edward T. Bedford · Ohio · Washington · White House · Bureau of Corporations · Charles M. Pratt · Gridiron Club
EPUB paragraph 3 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
By the summer of 1907, the political fight against Standard Oil had spread across a vast, bloody battlefield, with seven federal and six state suits (Texas, Minnesota, Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi) in progress against the embattled trust. New legal skirmishes seemed to crop up weekly. That year, an Ohio grand jury brought in 939 indictments against Rockefeller and other Standard Oil officers; a bill was introduced in Tennessee to oust the trust on antitrust grounds; Missouri fined and expelled the Waters-Pierce Company; and so on and so forth.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Ohio · Texas · Minnesota · Tennessee · Missouri · Mississippi · Waters-Pierce Company
EPUB paragraph 4 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
Approaching his sixty-eighth birthday, Rockefeller had never imagined that his twilight years would be so eventful. His fortune had failed to purchase him even a poor man’s mite of tranquillity. As nominal president of Standard Oil, he was in a bind, responsible for actions he had not approved. In a July 1907 letter that betrayed considerable anguish, Rockefeller again pleaded with Archbold to accept his resignation and release him from his torment. During the next two weeks, he repeatedly proffered his resignation, telling Archbold this would free him from several subpoenas. Though he owned 27.4 percent of Standard Oil stock—three times the amount held by Flagler, the next largest shareholder—Archbold turned him down flat, and Rockefeller bowed to his protégé’s wishes. But the decision did not sit well with him.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry M. Flagler · John D. Archbold · Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
One thing evident amid the spate of lawsuits was that railroad rebates had not faded as an issue, even though pipelines had governed the oil business for more than a generation. When rebates were again forbidden by the Elkins Act of 1903 and the Hepburn Act of 1906, the public naively assumed they had ended. Then the Interstate Commerce Commission reported in January 1907 that Standard Oil was still secretly accepting rebates, spying on competitors, setting up bogus subsidiaries, and engaging in predatory pricing—the same deadly sins patented by Rockefeller back in the 1870s. Roosevelt and his cabinet thirsted for a test case that would prove Standard Oil’s collusion with the railroads and dramatize the twin evils of abusive trusts and scheming railroads.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil · Alonzo Barton Hepburn · Interstate Commerce Commission · Elkins Act
EPUB paragraph 6 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
The issue was duly highlighted in a 1907 case in Chicago in which Standard Oil of Indiana was accused of taking illegal rebates from the Chicago and Alton Railroad. The shipments in question had passed between Whiting, Indiana, and East Saint Louis, Illinois, after such rebates were outlawed by the Elkins Act. (Rockefeller, we recall, always insisted that Standard Oil took no rebates after they were banned in 1887.) The presiding figure in the Chicago courtroom was a gaunt, outspoken judge with premature white hair named Kenesaw Mountain Landis who, at forty-one, was newly appointed to the federal bench and later served as the first baseball commissioner.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Kenesaw Mountain Landis · Standard Oil · Standard Oil of Indiana · Chicago · Illinois · Indiana · Whiting · Elkins Act · Alton Railroad · East Saint Louis
EPUB paragraph 7 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
Eager to levy an eye-popping fine against the trust, Landis asked its attorneys for figures on its capitalization and earnings between 1903 and 1905. The Standard lawyers, Landis knew, were in a tight spot: If they furnished the true figures, they might invite a punitive fine; if they withheld them, they would look guilty. On June 26, 1907, the federal district attorney tried to pry loose from Standard counsel John S. Miller a list of employees privy to those numbers. “I’ll see you in hell first” was Miller’s cordial reply. This riposte backfired: Landis assigned U.S. marshals to subpoena several Standard Oil officials, including Rockefeller. Flouting the judge’s request, Rockefeller again fled and stayed with Alta and Parmalee in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He instructed the bedridden Cettie, by now a battle-hardened veteran, to keep quiet about his whereabouts and send him mail only under the Prentice name. For several days, as the press guessed at Rockefeller’s whereabouts, Landis’s process server tried to track the titan through the New England countryside.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · E. Parmalee Prentice · Kenesaw Mountain Landis · Standard Oil · United States · New England · John S. Miller · Massachusetts · Miller · Pittsfield · Prentice
EPUB paragraph 8 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
When Teddy Roosevelt and his attorney general heard that Landis wanted to haul Rockefeller into court, they were greatly dismayed, for if Rockefeller testified in the Chicago case, he might win an “immunity bath” from possible criminal prosecution in the more important federal antitrust suit. They sent an emissary to Chicago to plead with Landis. “I’d like to oblige Mr. Roosevelt,” he said. “I’d do anything in reason to oblige him. But Rockefeller is making a monkey out of my process server, and I’m going to bring him before this court to vindicate its dignity.” Rockefeller must have discovered the legal advantages of testimony, because he suddenly contacted Judge Landis from Pittsfield and voluntarily accepted a subpoena from a deputy marshal.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Theodore Roosevelt · Kenesaw Mountain Landis · Chicago · Pittsfield
EPUB paragraph 9 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
On July 5, 1907, arriving by private railroad car, John and William Rockefeller and Henry Flagler conferred with lawyers at the spacious new offices of Standard Oil of Indiana in Chicago. Instead of cooperating with Landis, Rockefeller counseled defiance and opposed revealing the balance sheets. “But, Mr. Rockefeller, times have changed,” Flagler said. “The old maxim, silence is golden, doesn’t work so well.” “Well,” Rockefeller drawled, “it did when I was at the helm.” Though he had agreed to travel to Chicago, Rockefeller hesitated to appear in court, and when he canvassed the lawyers present, they seemed to side with him. Then he sounded out the youngest lawyer, Robert W. Stewart, who said, “Mr. Rockefeller, in view of the opinion rendered by the distinguished legal talent present, I hesitate to express an opinion.” “Young man,” Rockefeller said, “I’m paying you to give me your opinion.” Summoning up his courage, Stewart said, “Mr. Rockefeller, you are no different from any other citizen before the law, and if I were you, I would appear.” For all his tough talk, Rockefeller was smart enough to abide by the young man’s advice.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Rockefeller · Henry M. Flagler · Kenesaw Mountain Landis · Standard Oil of Indiana · Chicago · Robert W. Stewart · Stewart · John
EPUB paragraph 10 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
On the sultry morning of July 6, 1907, John and William Rockefeller arrived at the federal building and found streets teeming with hundreds of spectators. When Rockefeller was spotted in a straw hat, grasping a slender cane, somebody shouted, “Here he comes!” The crowd surged forward in such close ranks that it took a squad of twenty club-wielding detectives to clear a path. Rockefeller grinned when a street urchin called out, “There’s a man who got his picture in the paper.” Some zealous onlookers tore buttons from Rockefeller’s coat. By the time the Rockefeller brothers reached the sixth-floor courtroom, a red-faced William, sweating profusely, muttered, “An outrage! I never heard of such treatment.” By contrast, John D. exhibited his usual cool demeanor before an unruly mob. When he entered the sweltering courtroom, with electric fans slicing overhead, he even imitated a reporter trying to take notes in the crush of people. Once the doors were closed, the hum of spectators outside was still so loud that policemen had to clear the corridor.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Rockefeller · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 11 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c27_r1.htm
After the marshal brought down his gavel, Rockefeller began fifteen minutes of unforgettable testimony. A virtuoso of evasive testimony, he was the tranquil eye of the storm. As one reporter noted, “Mr. Rockefeller was the coolest looking man in the room. Every motion he made was slow and dignified. His step was slow. His replies to the questions of the court were even slower.” Judge Landis, itching to interrogate Rockefeller, had not reckoned on his incomparable mastery of prevarication and selective memory loss. Once again, in the halls of justice, Rockefeller turned himself into a confused old dotard. The most modest question seemed to pose insurmountable challenges to his mind.
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.