Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

by Ron Chernow

oil was struck in western Pennsylvania by Colonel Edwin Drake,

oil, John D. Rockefeller didn’t behold its potential in a sudden revelatory flash but made an incremental transition from produce to oil. Clark and Rockefeller might have taken on consignment some of the first crude-oil shipments that reached Cleveland in early 1860, but it was the friendship between Maurice Clark and Samuel Andrews, an Englishman from Clark’s hometown in Wiltshire, that drew Rockefeller into the business. A hearty, rubicund man with a broad face and genial manner, Andrews was a self-taught chemist, a born tinkerer, and an enterprising mechanic.

ockefeller had speedily acquired a level of respectability that would have seemed unthinkable fifteen years before when he and his demoralized family were crowded into the Humiston house in Strongsville.

In August 1868, after his rebate deal with the Lake Shore Railroad, he certified his enhanced status in Cleveland when he and Cettie moved from Cheshire Street to a solid brick home at 424 Euclid Avenue. This move dramatized the immense distance he had traveled after a few years in the oil business. Local boosters had already tagged Euclid Avenue “the most beautiful street in the world,” with homes that lavishly mirrored the local fortunes in oil, iron, banking, timber, railroads, and real estate. All of the town’s new opulence was reflected in this street of massive houses. The residential address for such local luminaries as Henry B. Payne, Amasa Stone, and John Hay, Euclid Avenue claimed so many mansions that it had richly earned its sobriquet of “millionaires’ row.”

With the spacious grandeur of a fine Victorian street, always busy with fashionable horses and carriages, the wide avenue had a double row of elms that created a tall, shady canopy overhead. The imposing homes were deeply recessed from the street, their trimmed lawns and shapely shrubbery providing buffer zones between the houses and their distant front gates. Since few houses were separated from adjoining houses by fences, the street sometimes ...

Already a mini-empire, Standard Oil controlled 10 percent of American petroleum refining, as well as a barrel-making plant, warehouses, shipping facilities, and a fleet of tank cars. From the outset, Rockefeller’s plans had a wide streak of megalomania. As he told Cleveland businessman John Prindle, “The Standard Oil Company will some day refine all the oil and make all the barrels.”

In business matters, however, Rockefeller stood ready to strike a deal with the devil himself. Since he dreaded an alliance between the Pennsylvania Railroad and Pittsburgh and Philadelphia refiners, he wanted to drive a wedge between them.

One of Rockefeller’s strengths in bargaining situations was that he figured out what he wanted and what the other party wanted and then crafted mutually advantageous terms. Instead of ruining the railroads, Rockefeller

tried to help them prosper, albeit in a way that fortified his own position.

hen John D. Rockefeller turned forty on July 8, 1879, he was already numbered among America’s twenty richest men,

In the late 1870s, one newspaper pegged his wealth at more than $5 million, when his Standard Oil stock alone was by then worth $18 million, or $265 million in 1996 dollars. By comparison, when America’s richest citizen, Commodore Vanderbilt,

died in 1877, he left an estate valued at nearly $100 million.

Standard Oil of New York was formed on August 1, 1882, with William Rockefeller as president; four days later, John became president of the new Standard Oil of New Jersey.

ecause Standard Oil had long exercised a global monopoly, Rockefeller’s name was already known abroad.

hen Rockefeller receded from the business world in the mid-1890s, the average American was earning less than ten dollars per week. Rockefeller’s average income—a stupefying $10 million per annum in those glory days before income taxes—defied public comprehension.

When Roosevelt won by an impressive margin in November, Rockefeller sent a telegram to him: “I congratulate you most heartily on the grand result of yesterday’s election.”2 In the Standard boardroom, the contribution to Roosevelt’s campaign was soon acknowledged to be the worst investment they had ever made.

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.

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.)

Landis delivered his bombshell: a fine against Standard Oil of Indiana that dwarfed any other in American corporate history up until that time: $29.24 million ($457 million in 1996 dollars). This was the maximum penalty: $20,000 for each of 1,462 carloads of oil cited in the indictment. Reporters struggled to convey the magnitude of this fine. That money could build five battleships; fill 177 flatcars with silver dollars; employ 48,730 city-street workers each year.

Rockefeller’s theoretical share of the fine worked out to $8,011,760. Asked about the penalty, Mark Twain said it reminded him of the bride’s words the next morning: “I expected it but didn’t suppose it would be so big.”

Since Rockefeller had created the largest business empire of the late nineteenth century, it was only fitting that he should face the most massive antitrust suit of his day. Some 444 witnesses delivered 11 million words of testimony; swollen by 1,374 exhibits, the proceedings filled 12,000 pages in 21 thick volumes. Before it was over, Standard Oil also contested some 21 state antitrust suits from Texas to Connecticut, leading one historian to comment, “Never before in the history of the United States had there been so far-reaching a struggle between industry and government.”

By 1922, Rockefeller had lost his parents, his four brothers and sisters, his wife, his eldest daughter, two grandchildren, and the vast majority of his old business partners.

“The Rockefellers have given away more money and to better advantage than anybody else in the world’s history

Only in 1943 did President Roosevelt create the Jackson Hole National Monument and accept the Rockefeller land, which was merged into an expanded Grand Teton National Park in 1950.

Once infected with preservation fever, Junior gave money to buy vast acreage for the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North

Carolina and Tennessee, plus a major tract to connect them via the Skyline Drive threaded throu...

1934, President Roosevelt opened Colonial Williamsburg to the public.

A poetic picture of John D. Rockefeller taken on his ninety-first birthday at Pocantico Hills, July 8, 1930. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)

Like his father, Junior hesitated to employ the Rockefeller name, but a team of advisers, from Ivy Lee to son Nelson to managing agent John Todd, convinced him that “Rockefeller Center” would be the most potent marketing tool—an indication of how far the family image had advanced since the dark days of the muckrakers. To lend the complex a forward-looking image, the managers decided to create a “radio city” as its linchpin. In July 1931, after RCA, NBC, and Radio-Keith-Orpheum

(RKO) agreed to lease one million square feet of office space for $3 million a year, Junior broke ground on the first of fourteen projected buildings.

Junior supervised Rockefeller Center with a command he had never shown before in any moneymaking venture. Each morning, he arrived at work by eight o’clock, a golden five-foot ruler wedged into his back pocket. Taking huge blueprints off the table, he would unroll them on the floor and crawl about, taking measurements with his ruler. Construction during the Depression had distinct advantages, most notably in lower costs...

With the completion of the RCA Building in 1933, Junior moved the Rockefeller family offices from 26 Broadway to the fifty-sixth floor of the new skyscraper. Henceforth, room 5600 would be the seat of the Rockefeller empire, with several hundred employees. Nelson, who was still in his twenties, got a real-estate license

and soon became a frenetic salesman for empty office space at Rockefeller Center.

To woo tenants, he offered attractive rents and agreed to assume their old leases. Several companies in the Rockefeller fold—including Standard Oil of New Jersey, Socony–Vacuum, Standard Oil of California, and Chase National Bank—took space in the new midtown complex. In 1938, the first year it turned a profit, Nelson was named president of Rockefeller Center. By the time Junior hammered in the last of some ten million rivets in 1939, he had ...

Between 1917 and 1960, Junior gave away $537 million directly, plus another $540 million indirectly through organized Rockefeller philanthropies. (Junior did not leave himself a pauper. He was left with about $200 million in the 1950s, while his descendants, wisely investing their inheritances, were worth more than $6.2 billion in 1996.)

Before the day was over, Rockefeller had a heart attack. At 4:05 A.M. on the morning of May 23, he lapsed into a coma and died in his sleep. The official cause of death was sclerotic myocarditis, a hardening and inflammation of the heart wall, although it is probably more accurate to say that he died of old age. Rockefeller drifted off peacefully, six weeks short of

his ninety-eighth birthday. His placid end disappointed critics who were still hoping for some earthly retribution.

Having given away most of his money, Rockefeller left behind an estate of $26.4 million, showing that he had recouped his stock-market losses after the 1929 crash.

Rockefeller perfected a monopoly that indisputably demonstrated the efficiency of large-scale business. In creating new corporate forms, he charted the way for the modern multinational corporations that came to dominate economic life in the twentieth century. But in so doing he also exposed the manifold abuses that could accompany untrammeled economic power, especially in the threat to elected government. As architect of the first great industrial trust, he proved the ultimately fragile nature of free markets, forcing the government to

specify the rules that would ensure competition and fair play in the future. The fiercest robber baron had turned out to be the foremost philanthropist. Rockefeller accelerated the shift from the personal, ad hoc charity that had traditionally been the province of the rich to something both more powerful and more impersonal. He established the promotion of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, as a task no less important than giving alms to the poor or building schools, hospitals, and museums. He showed the value of expert opinion, thorough planning, and competent administration in nonprofit work, setting a benchmark for professionalism in the emerging foundation field. By the time Rockefeller died, in fact, so much

good had unexpectedly flowered from so much evil that God might even have greeted him on the other side, as the titan had so confidently expected all along. Although Junior moved into Kykuit after Rockefeller’s death, he knew that his father was inimitable, and so he decided to retain the Jr. after his name. As ...