As a businessman, Rockefeller was in some ways Carnegie’s twin, but Rockefeller’s public persona was much different: quiet, familial, and secretive. He sprang from one of those Gothic pockets scattered across New England and the South that had fascinated American novelists since Poe. His father was a bigamist, probably a rapist, and a huckster who specialized in patent medicines. He deserted his family seasonally and eventually abandoned them altogether for his other, younger wife. John D. Rockefeller purposely molded himself into his father’s opposite: monogamous, moralistic, disciplined, and
...more
