The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America

PREFACE

There is nothing more public, and at the same time more intimate, than a house. Whatever its setting, it stands, a palpable object in the landscape, often built to be seen, seldom easy to miss. Yet inside it events occur and feelings ebb and flow that only its occupants can truly know. Indeed, one of its primary functions is to shield such privacies from public notice. Silently woven into its fabric, as well, are all the thoughts, hopes, fears, and dreams that went into building it. In time most of them recede from view, though occasionally enough survives to permit informed speculations about matters like style and period. But such speculations miss much that determined the origins and history of the place. Who built it, and why? How did those who lived there use the house? How did they feel about it? And what beyond its walls gave shape and meaning to their lives?

To study houses, in short, is to study people, which is our goal in this book. The people at the center of it belonged to a single family—the Rockefellers—notable in American history for several reasons, but above all for being tremendously rich. The house is Kykuit,* which was lived in by the leading members of three generations of the Rockefeller family. Two of them were responsible for building it, and the third, after making sweeping changes, left it in his will to an organization he hoped would open it to the public. It is a complex story, full of surprising twists and turns. It is also a story that reveals the Rockefellers—behind the carefully constructed facade of their public presence—as far from united, in fact often sharply at odds with one another about how to use the vast fortune that had come to them, all of which left an indelible stamp on Kykuit, as the chapters to come will show.

In writing about Kykuit and the Rockefellers, we are in some measure crossing familiar ground, for a number of years ago we published a similar book about George Washington and Mount Vernon. He too was rich, and Mount Vernon mattered mightily to him. During every year of his adult life, work of some sort was being done on it. Twice he rebuilt it almost completely, both times doubling it in size. In the same way, Kykuit was never far from the Rockefellers’ thoughts. They doted on it, agonized over it, and decade after decade spent several kings’ ransoms embellishing and maintaining it. Indeed, neither house was ever simply a place to live. Both were indivisibly linked to how their owners saw themselves and how they hoped to be seen by others. Yet in one of those marvelous coincidences that historians love, in the end both houses were relinquished by the same proud individuals who owned them—given up to futures they could only dimly see, indeed ultimately given back to the public.

Both houses, too, are emblematic in significant ways of the eras that produced them. Mount Vernon was by no means typical of American houses during the Revolutionary period, but it does provide a revealing picture of the values and aspirations of the Virginia gentry that played so large a role in opposing Great Britain and establishing the new American republic. Similarly, Kykuit speaks in unmistakable terms of the enormous wealth produced by the nation’s industrial expansion during the late nineteenth century and of the dilemmas that wealth posed in a society committed to faith in equalitarian democracy. By the same token, the decision to let go of the two houses may well have reflected a sense of how, at least in America, surrendering wealth became a moral requirement for all those desiring fame more than fortune.

Inevitably, working on Washington and the Rockefellers also posed for us the question of how we felt about them as people. All of them went at life with a will, meeting its challenges with rare, sometimes ruthless, boldness and determination. All of them faced difficult moral choices. Of those confronting Washington, slavery was the most wrenching; those with which the Rockefellers had to deal were both more numerous and less clear-cut. As our research on Mount Vernon progressed, our estimate of Washington’s intelligence and character rose steadily. Though not without faults, he truly seemed to be, as Thomas Jefferson said of him, a great and good man. The Rockefellers struck us as more complicated. Great one or two of them were; good most of them conscientiously tried to be. Yet among them it was a woman—and not by birth a member of the family—who most impressed us. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s wife, was an extraordinary human being.

But more important than our personal feelings, obviously, is the historical evidence, including the prodigious amount of material on Kykuit and the Rockefellers available at the Rockefeller Archive Center and detailed on its Web site. In interpreting that material we owe much to the work of other authors who have written both about the family and about American country house architecture during the Gilded Age. Over the years the Rockefellers have provoked an endless torrent of debate, ranging from unrelenting criticism to earnest defense by those who believe the magnitude of the family’s philanthropic contributions—unparalleled until the recent efforts of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet—effectively erased the stain created by the source of their wealth. Among the early critics, Ida Tarbell, in a series of articles published initially in McClure’s Magazine, led the way, followed by historians like Matthew Josephson, in his The Robber Barons, and writers David Horowitz and Peter Collier, in their highly popular book, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty. The defenders, in turn, include one of the leading American historians of the middle years of the twentieth century, Allan Nevins, who produced both a one- and a two-volume biography of John D. Rockefeller. Equally sympathetic are Raymond Fosdick’s biography of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and John E. Harr and Peter J. Johnson’s two fine volumes focusing on John D. Rockefeller 3rd and to a lesser extent on the other members of the brothers generation, The Rockefeller Century and The Rockefeller Conscience.

Together this second group of studies, each carefully researched and thoughtfully written, constitutes an impressive achievement, yet one to which there are also certain limits. As Ron Chernow, in his superb Titan—unquestionably the best biography of John D. Rockefeller to appear thus far—says of Nevins’s work, Rockefeller vanishes for pages at a time amid a swirl of charges and counter charges. To which he might have added that even when Rockefeller does move to the center of the stage, it is almost exclusively as a businessman and philanthropist that we encounter him; the man himself eludes us. That defect Chernow’s biography definitely avoids, as do several other books on members of the family, including Bernice Kert’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Clarice Stasz’s The Rockefeller Women, and Cary Reich’s The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller. In all of these one finds compelling portraits of complex individuals who emerge as much more than simply the sum total of assets accumulated and dispersed across time. It is our hope that we have accomplished something similar, using Kykuit as our principal text.

As for the literature on American country houses of the Gilded Age, it too runs the gamut, stretching from E. L. Godkins’s bitingly critical article, The Expenditure of Rich Men, published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1896, to the recent spate of handsome books documenting the careers of many of the major country house architects of the period, including Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker’s The Architecture of Delano & Aldrich, a study of the firm that served as Kykuit’s principal architects. Quietly celebratory, works like Pennoyer and Walker’s are both informative and lovely to look at. What they tend not to do is connect their subjects in any very systematic way to the larger culture in which a small number of people, suddenly flush with money, set out to use architecture to help define places for themselves in an environment rife with controversy about the meaning and significance of that wealth. More useful in broadening the picture in this regard are studies like Richard Guy Wilson’s The American Renaissance and his The Colonial Revival House, Clive Aslet’s The America Country House, and Mark Alan Hewitt’s The Architect and the American Country House. Also indispensable to understanding the cultural context out of which houses like Kykuit rose are the strikingly perceptive observations of Herbert Croly, a leading architectural critic of the time. Our views have been much influenced by his.

In writing the book we relied as well on newspapers, on interviews with people involved in the events we were describing, and finally—as all historians must when confronted with gaps in the evidence—on our own educated guesses. If at times the ice beneath us seems to stretch too thin, any book can do no more than hope to persuade its readers. Whether it succeeds is a question they alone can answer.

R.F.D. Jr and L.B.D.

Sweden, Maine, August 2006

* Kykuit, a Dutch word meaning lookout, rhymes with high-cut.

INTRODUCTION

Sic Transit … December 1991

It had always felt like the most private of places. Now after more than eighty years that was about to change, and though arguably the entire family was losing a part of its heritage, it was the youngest among them, the children of the cousins, who seemed to feel most deeply the need to mark the break. So it was that on a December night in 1991 the fifth generation of the Rockefeller family—counting from John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his wife, Laura Celestia (Cettie) Spelman Rockefeller, for whom the house had been built—gathered in the dining room of Kykuit for a farewell dinner. It was an extraordinary evening where everyone reminisced about their childhood experiences on the estate, remarked one person afterward. Someone else recalled walking through the house and gardens, just thinking how sad it was that it was changing. It was the end. It wasn’t going to be a family house anymore. It was going to be a public place.

In the past, the dinner served that night would have been prepared by the house’s own staff of servants, but since only a skeleton crew remained indoors the food was brought in by hired caterers. Still, with the china and crystal gleaming softly in candlelight as the four courses of the meal were passed to person after person, everything must have seemed much as it always had, except that this was indeed the last family dinner in the house. Two weeks later Kykuit was turned over to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to be readied for a long-heralded program of public tours of the Rockefeller Family Home.

In May 1994, the month the tours began, the New York Times ran no fewer than three articles on Kykuit. By the time the third appeared, reservations were booked for the remainder of the year, and the newspaper was describing the attention focused on the opening of the house as more or less akin to that surrounding the start of public tours of Buckingham Palace. As for the place itself, the Times architectural critic, Paul Goldberger, was guarded in his assessment, but overall his verdict was favorable. Oddly restrained, almost hesitant, and rather tight in its proportions was one comment, yet that was tempered later in the same article by another observation: The house’s mix of idiosyncrasy and restraint stands in welcome contrast to the self-important hauteur of the average pile of stone in Newport … There is nothing vulgar here, and that alone separates Kykuit from almost every other great house produced in the golden age of American wealth, a judgment with which the public seemed to agree. You know it really was a very livable mansion, remarked one woman, who had come from two hours away in Connecticut to see Kykuit.

As the guides on the tours explained, it was Nelson Rockefeller, the longtime governor of New York and the last member of the family to live in the house, who had paved the way for opening it to the public by stipulating in his will that his share of the estate, along with much of his large collection of modern art, should go to the National Trust. Left undescribed on the tour, however, were the complex and often strained negotiations necessary to give reality to Nelson’s plans for Kykuit, negotiations that stretched on for fourteen years. Nevertheless, in the end his wishes were honored, and the house, together with its contents and eighty-six acres of land, passed out of the Rockefellers’ hands and into those of the National Trust.

During most of the interim between Nelson’s death and the transfer, no one lived in the Big House, but the family continued to hold events there, including weddings, birthday parties, christenings, and gatherings of representatives of at least half a dozen different Rockefeller charities. Several fifth-generation members even organized a seminar on the family’s history, including the life and career of its patriarch, John D. Rockefeller Sr. himself. In addition, there was that final dinner, planned by the same generation, and purposely timed to precede the annual family Christmas luncheon scheduled for the next day. Over the years the number of people attending the Christmas luncheon had grown so large that it had to be held next door in the estate’s coach barn. But after the meal, those present decided to go up to the house and hold a simple ceremony to say good-bye to the place they had known all their lives. Not all of them had been fond of Kykuit, and at least a few had decidedly negative feelings about it. Still, standing in a circle they shared their memories, lighting candles as they spoke, until there was a ring of light commemorating all that had been and all that was being let go.

*   *   *

Let go? Yes. An ending? Unquestionably. But not quite, perhaps, the change from private to public that some people saw, at least in any simple sense. For Kykuit’s privacy had always been more a matter of illusion than reality; given the individuals who built the house and lived there, it could not have been otherwise. The Rockefellers, particularly in the first three generations, were too rich and too prominently involved in too many different areas of American life to enjoy the luxury of privacy as most people know it. For much of his life John D. Rockefeller Sr. managed to ignore that fact, but his son and namesake discovered it soon enough, as did his children. Yet at Kykuit it had still seemed possible to will away the ever-present spotlight of public attention. That was the charm of the place. The great granite-clad house perched high on its hilltop overlooking the Hudson River, the handsome high-ceilinged rooms filled with works of art, the acres of beautifully tended gardens adorned with arresting sculptures—what else was it all for if not to serve as a private refuge, a source of pleasure for its owners and those lucky enough to be invited to see it?

What else indeed, yet neither John D. Rockefeller nor his son thought of it that way. In their eyes life was not about pleasure; it was about work and accumulation and the careful disposition of what had been accumulated. That was the lesson father taught son, as he himself had learned it from his mother, the redoubtable Eliza Davison Rockefeller. Moreover, as the family moved into the twentieth century the emphasis would increasingly shift from getting to giving, as John D. Sr. liked to put it, from constantly piling up money to using it on an ever-grander scale to do good in the larger world. The building of Kykuit both coincided with that shift and was intimately connected to it.

Writing about Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the architectural historian Dell Upton describes it as both a hermitage—a private retreat—and a republican place, designed to teach those who encountered it the principles of civic virtue. Upton also sees this dual identity as characteristic of more than a few American elite houses, and certainly, given the history of its building, Kykuit meets the test. But as with so much else about the Rockefellers, the scale of things tended to change the usual formulas. Thomas Jefferson died deeply in debt, in no small part because of what he spent building and rebuilding Monticello. The day John D. Rockefeller moved into Kykuit he was widely assumed to be the richest man in the world, and the bulk of his wealth would remain either in family hands or in the hands of institutions controlled by the family.

Yet for all its durability, the Rockefellers’ wealth could not be made infinitely elastic. With each succeeding generation the great fortune was divided into smaller and smaller pieces. By the time Kykuit was turned over to the National Trust, no one in the fourth and fifth generations of the family could have afforded to live there, even if they had wanted to. In this way, too, the passing of the house from family ownership marked a change, and no doubt a poignant one for many people present at those farewell events.

To be sure, reactions varied. One person at that final dinner described stripping off his clothes later in the evening and striding naked into his great-great-grandfather’s incredible shower with the millions of nickel-plated spigots, shower heads, and liver sprays. A bit of good-natured fun, undoubtedly, but showers of that sort had once been badges of the kind of near-limitless wealth no single Rockefeller any longer possessed, just as being a Rockefeller had once meant—and now no longer would—claiming Kykuit as your family seat.

Still, the house itself survives and remains a fascinating artifact, rich in historical significance, which it is the purpose of this book to unravel. On one level, it is a story of money, power, and taste—that elusive entity, which at Kykuit was meant to both fuse the other two and lift them to a higher plane. On the subject of taste, too, the New York Times was definitely right: Kykuit is different from other houses built by the American rich. The taste that shaped it was not the taste of a particular group or class. It was, quintessentially, the Rockefellers’ taste. And what gave it its distinctive character was the underlying conviction that things, the tangible props of daily life, ought to mean something beyond the ordinary ends they served. If taste is the pursuit of excellence, excellence at Kykuit invariably came to a matter of moral judgment. It was not enough for things to be useful, or fashionable, or even beautiful; they also had to be good.

The Rockefellers were hardly alone in imputing moral qualities to physical objects. Every human culture has had its sacred totems. But their creation generally depends on long-standing, deeply rooted structures of collective consensus. In the Rockefellers’ case it all happened so quickly, fueled by energies coming from so many different directions at once, that consensus constantly eluded the family. Indeed, what most surprised us while we were working on the book was how often and how sharply they disagreed with one another in their anxious search for the proper material forms in which to clothe their moral aspirations. And from the beginning a major source of those disagreements was Kykuit itself. John D. Rockefeller Sr. had wanted to build a simple family home; his son had much loftier ambitions for the place. The same son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., disliked modern art, yet his wife, Abby, became one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art, and the chastely banal nudes he chose for the gardens at Kykuit would eventually have to share the space with works by Picasso, Lachaise, Maillol, and Henry Moore put there by their son, Nelson Rockefeller. Husbands and wives, sons and brothers, they all had their own opinions.

Still, they pressed on with their quest, for on a deeper level what was at stake was one of the most perplexing issues in American life: the proper place of great wealth in a democracy. The twenty years before, Kykuit’s building had witnessed, in the United States, an altogether unprecedented accumulation of riches in private hands. Should that circumstance be celebrated as a triumphant affirmation of the benefits of a social order unfettered by fixed position and privilege? Or was it fundamentally inimical to the health and well-being of such a society? Plutocrats, robber barons, malefactors of great wealth—the less flattering labels widely applied to the possessors of the new wealth made clear just how uncomfortable many Americans were with the phenomenon. And no family was more thoroughly condemned for its wealth and the methods that had produced it than the Rockefellers. How could a fortune the size of theirs, earned as it had been, possibly be compatible with the nation’s traditional democratic ideals? That was the question that confronted the family.

John D. Rockefeller Sr.’s answer was to live frugally and give an ever-increasing portion of his fortune away. But there were those who argued that in so doing he ignored the higher cultural values that it was also the duty of the rich to promote, for great democratic societies do not, cannot, live by bread alone. Nor was this just the view of his critics; it was also what his own son came to feel. If evidence was needed to prove that wealth and democracy were in fact compatible, Junior, as he was called, believed Kykuit ought to serve that end by being modest and unpretentious—no opulent palace, certainly—yet still beautiful, its architecture and contents displaying the highest, most noble values. Since the values were universal, the connection to democracy would be obvious. Obvious too, or so the family hoped, would be the fact this was the home not of greedy, self-seeking individuals but of decent, civic-minded people, determined to do good with the riches that God and the American system of capitalistic enterprise had showered upon them. And if all that seemed like a heavy burden for any house to bear, through most of the twentieth century the Rockefellers never doubted for a moment that it was possible, however strenuously they disagreed about the details.

Great Good Fortune

1

Heir Apparent, 1902

The fire began at night. One of the maids smelled smoke near the wall separating the parlor and the dining room. A hurried search revealed that flames, darting upward, could be seen through the slot for the sliding door between the two rooms. The cause seemed to be faulty wiring, and in apparent confirmation of that theory the electric lights failed almost at once, plunging the house into darkness.

By the time someone chopped through the plaster for a better view of the blaze, it was already too late to stop it. The problem was more the shortage of water than the fire itself, which actually burned rather slowly at first. There was even time to move many items—including a piano and a large bookcase—to safety out on the lawn. In the flickering amber light, family members, servants, and estate workers pitched in together, hurrying in and out with furniture, rugs, and hastily made-up bundles of whatever came to hand. But all the while the fire continued to burn, spreading inexorably through room after room in the twenty-five-year-old wooden structure, gaining momentum as it went, leaping from floors to walls to ceilings.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people had gathered from every direction and stood for hours on the lawn, watching as the flames spent themselves. After all, it was not every day you had a chance to see the home of the world’s richest man burn to the ground, though as it happened—elusive as always—he was away that evening.

In the great scheme of things, 1902 was not a good year for John Davison Rockefeller and his family. There were some happy moments: two grandchildren were born. But then came the night of September 17, when fire destroyed the house at Pocantico Hills, in Westchester County, New York, and barely two months after that the first installment of Ida Tarbell’s devastating exposé of Standard Oil appeared in McClure’s Magazine. At the time the two events—the Pocantico fire and Tarbell’s assault on the enterprise that had brought the Rockefellers both great riches and tremendous public notoriety—might have seemed unrelated. And so they were. But in the aftermath, each, like pebbles dropped in a pond, sent ripples circling outward, and eventually the circles intersected.

A prime example of the thundering industrial expansion that had swept the United States into the twentieth century, Standard Oil and Rockefeller, its creator, were a reporter’s dream of a story, and Tarbell went at it with a passion. Reared in the oil regions of Pennsylvania where Standard had battled for control with particular ferocity, she saw her father go down to defeat in that war, and her account of Standard’s rise was indelibly marked by the experience. It was also a first-rate piece of journalism, exhaustively researched and deftly written. Within nine years the storm of angry protest it fueled would lead to the breakup of Standard Oil by the U.S. government.

During those years, the Pocantico Hills house was replaced with a new one, far grander than its predecessor, though the process that led to its building was anything but smooth or easy. By that time the nation’s industrial barons had been dotting the landscape with hugely expensive new country houses for more than a decade, but erecting yet another millionaire’s palace was most definitely not what John D. Rockfeller had in mind. On the other hand, deciding what to build instead provoked, from the outset, sharp disagreement within the family. Indeed, in the beginning it was unclear whether anything at all would be built.

Certainly money was not the problem. In 1902 Rockefeller’s annual income had reached $58 million. Still, he prided himself on living as simply as possible. Forest Hill, the family’s country home outside of Cleveland, the city where he began his business career, was a failed tourist hotel he had invested in initially with other local businessmen. When he transferred the center of Standard Oil’s operations to New York City, he lived with his family in hotels for almost ten years before finally buying, in 1884, a house on West Fifty-fourth Street that was notably less imposing than his brother William’s place, around the corner on Fifth Avenue.

Rockefeller’s dislike of spending money was not lost on Tarbell. Along with the secret deals, the rebates, the kickbacks, the brutal treatment of its rivals that marked Standard’s relentless drive to dominate the oil industry, she duly noted—in a two-part treatment of Rockefeller’s character that followed her series on the company—what she called his cult of the unpretentious. Far from finding it attractive, she considered it petty and mean-spirited, as well as inimical to any appreciation of higher cultural values. Here was parsimony made a virtue, she declared. Rockefeller’s houses struck her as especially telling in this regard. Unpretending even to the point of being conspicuous, they showed him to be a person who took no pleasure in noble architecture and appreciated nothing of the beauty of fine lines and decorations. Forest Hill she dismissed as a monument of cheap ugliness.

Fifteen years after the fact, Rockefeller’s fabled composure could still crack when, in private, he spoke of some of Tarbell’s charges, for example, her claim that he had acquired his monopoly of Cleveland’s oil refineries by threatening to force his competitors out of business. Her scathing treatment of his father, William Avery Rockefeller, a traveling patent medicine salesman who had led a thoroughly irregular life and in fact bigamously married a woman other than Rockefeller’s mother, he also found deeply offensive. But toward Tarbell’s assault on his stinginess and taste in architecture he adopted a more philosophical attitude, or at any rate there is no record of his ever complaining about it.

Publicly, meanwhile, Rockefeller said nothing at all about any of Tarbell’s charges, though his apparent calm was not shared by John D. Rockefeller Jr., his only son and namesake (the Rockefellers’ other surviving children were daughters—Bessie, Alta, and Edith), who seemed determined to do something. Admittedly, much of Tarbell’s case focused on the rise of Standard Oil, about which Junior knew little, but her attack on Rockefeller as an individual was another matter. There the battle could be joined confidently, and by the end of 1902 a dutiful son had already begun considering how that might be done. Moreover, one strategy he gravitated toward with growing conviction was persuading his father to build that new house in Pocantico Hills, something Senior appeared to have little if any desire to do.

*   *   *

The young man thus occupied was also to find, in 1902, the salary he received for working in the family office at 26 Broadway raised to $10,000. He had started there in 1897, three months after graduating from Brown University, at $6,000 a year with no clear-cut duties. In a preview of things to come, some of his earliest assignments involved supervising renovations to the family homes. But at the same time he began to familiarize himself with his father’s business commitments, which included far more than simply Standard Oil. He also took an early interest in the family’s burgeoning philanthropic activities, and in both cases his tutor was his father’s brilliant, tirelessly energetic factotum at 26 Broadway, the former Baptist clergyman Frederick T. Gates.

Junior’s early forays into business were not auspicious. In 1899 he lost more than $1 million speculating with money that he did not in fact have in the stock of the United States Leather Company. But then two years later he more than redeemed himself in a series of highly important negotiations with J. P. Morgan over the sale of the Mesabi iron ore mines, which Senior had developed and which Morgan hoped to make part of U.S. Steel. At their initial interview the crusty banker had kept Junior and Gates waiting and then gruffly demanded to know what price they were asking, to which Junior coolly replied, Mr. Morgan, I think there has been some mistake. I did not come here to sell. I understood that you wished to buy. Senior’s reaction on hearing this story was to exclaim to his wife, Laura—or Cettie, as she was called—Great Caesar, but John is a trump! to which she herself added, Are we not proud, as parents, of our boy! As it turned out, the Mesabi properties sold for $88.5 million, which Gates calculated represented a clear profit of $55 million on Rockefeller’s investment.

As yet another way of being of service, Junior occasionally spoke in public on various topics, including religion, although his efforts sometimes backfired, as happened in February of 1902 in a talk he gave to the Brown University YMCA. Picking Christianity in Business as his subject, he endeavored to show that sound business principles and Christian faith were not in the least incompatible. Unfortunately, in making his point he chose to draw an analogy between the benefits of consolidation as opposed to competition in business and the process of developing superior roses by pruning away unwanted, lesser buds. Labeled the American Beauty Rose Speech by the press, his remarks provoked a blast of derisive criticism and seven years later could still prompt an irate clergyman to remark, A rose by any other name will smell as sweet, but the odor of that rose to me smacks strongly of crude petroleum.

The press also had a field day with Junior’s earnest determination to teach a men’s Bible study class at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church. With painstaking care he prepared for each session, only to find himself both heckled on the spot by enterprising reporters and made the butt of endless jibes in newspaper stories on the subject. Quipped the Pittsburgh Press: With his hereditary grip on a nation’s pocketbooks, his talks on spiritual matters are a tax on piety. Still, he doggedly persisted in leading the class for eight years, remarking, This work has meant so much to me … that I feel, from a selfish point of view, that I cannot afford to give it up without good cause. When he finally let the Bible class go, he did so only because his philanthropic energies had become increasingly caught up in other, more ambitious projects.

In that regard one of the signal events of 1902 was the creation of the General Education Board. Building on the deep commitment of Cettie Rockefeller’s parents to the cause of abolition, she and Senior had contributed heavily over the years to institutions like Spelman Seminary in Atlanta. In the same spirit, in 1901, Junior had joined a train trip planned by Robert C. Ogden, a wealthy department store executive, for the purpose of interesting northern philanthropists in southern black colleges. The General Education Board grew out of that trip on the so-called Millionaires’ Special. Organized at a meeting at Junior’s house lasting until after midnight on February 27, 1902, it was funded in large part by his pledge of $1 million to support the board’s work. The money came from his father, and over the years, Senior continued to pour funds into the effort, making it one of a small number of premier Rockefeller philanthropies.

As significant as the donations themselves was the way the General Education Board’s finances were structured. The year before its establishment, a similar body, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, had been created to further basic research in the field of medicine. In that case too Rockefeller’s initial gift was followed by others, eventually totaling tens of millions of dollars. For the most part the gifts consisted of shares of Standard Oil stock, which were kept by the institute as a permanent endowment, with only the income used for the purposes designated. Today organizations that function this way are known as philanthropic foundations, and there are literally thousands of them in the United States; at the time the form was relatively novel, and more than anyone else it was the Rockefellers who gave it its modern shape.

In doing so they were responding to a situation that was itself unprecedented. Unlike most of his contemporaries among the very rich, John D. Rockefeller Sr. was a committed philanthropist all his life. In 1855, the year he began his business career in Cleveland as a clerk at the firm of Hewitt and Tuttle, earning three dollars a week, he had tithed. In 1889 he founded the University of Chicago with a gift of $600,000. Three years later his charitable giving reached $1.35 million. Yet all the while, the value of his holdings continued to spiral upward. By 1901 it totaled $200 million, not to mention the millions in income that flowed into his coffers every year. How was charity’s share of all that to be spent? It was a question to which there was no ready answer. Such riches had never existed before, at least not in the United States.

In his autobiography Rockefeller would promote philanthropic foundations as an ideal means of keeping money profitably invested in business, since the assets donated did not have to be sold. He would further claim that sound businesses were themselves the very best type of philanthropy by virtue of their ability to employ people and create wealth. But it was Gates who stripped the issue to its core when he wrote in a letter to Senior in 1905: Two courses are open to you. One is that you and your children while living should make final disposition of the great fortune in the form of permanent corporate philanthropies for the good of mankind … or at the close of a few lives now in being it must simply pass into the unknown, like some other great fortunes, with unmeasured and perhaps sinister possibilities. Here was the system of philanthropic foundations laid out for Rockefeller’s approval with all its key features in place: the commitment to doing good; the determination to control how it was done; the determination as well to hang on to the power that went with great wealth; the blending of family responsibility and corporate power; and the promise of permanence that would make of it all a lasting monument to the Rockefellers’ generosity. The letter ended with a detailed plan calling for the creation of no fewer than six foundations, each in a different field.

While the problem Gates was addressing would continue to preoccupy the Rockefellers for decades, his letter had about it an air of urgency that plainly bore the stamp of the time in which it was written. Five months earlier in Washington, D.C., the House of Representatives had passed a unanimous resolution urging an immediate antitrust investigation of Standard Oil. This was Gates’s view of how the Rockefellers should respond. And Junior, every bit as concerned, wrote his father, Mr. Gates’s letter to you seems to me a powerful and unanswerable argument, adding, I very much hope it may seem wise to carry out this plan. For his part, Senior responded with notable promptness. Within two weeks he arranged to give $10 million to the General Education Board, the beginning of a veritable flood of gifts to that and other family foundations, which in time would swell to over $446 million.

Bowled over by his father’s generosity, Junior hurried to thank him for the $10 million, writing, I believe this is a great thing, far greater than any of us can conceive today. The fact that the first of the new gifts went to the GEB must have been especially gratifying to Junior, too. In effect it amounted to a tacit endorsement of the path he had already tentatively embarked upon and would continue to follow with growing self-confidence and energy in the years ahead, as he progressively limited his involvement in business and turned instead to managing the ever-expanding philanthropic universe his father’s millions had called into being.

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In 1902, however, all that lay in the future. Junior had no idea what would become of his life, or even any very clear sense of what he wanted to do. He continued to take on whatever seemed to require his attention at 26 Broadway. The year before, when his sister Alta married, he had not only supervised the purchase of a house for the newlyweds but planned its decoration and furnishing down to the last pair of lace curtains. He also worried constantly about whether he did enough to help his father. On hearing that his salary had been raised that year, he wrote, My breath was completely taken away by what you told me regarding my salary … I cannot feel that any services which I can offer are worth to you such a sum as $10,000 a year.

Grounded in genuine affection on both sides, the relationship between Junior and his father was complex. As a young parent, Rockefeller had often taken afternoons off from work to be with his children. But at every turn their upbringing had been strictly molded to conform to the moral standards he and Cettie drew from their unwavering Baptist faith. Not only had that precluded all sinful amusements like card playing, dancing, and the consumption of alcoholic beverages; it also demanded constant acts of service to others. My mother and father raised but one question, Junior would say in later life, Is it right, is it duty? Living with such pressures was not always easy. During the winter of his thirteenth year, Junior had shown sufficient signs of stress to convince his parents to send him from New York to their summer home in Cleveland, dear old Forest Hill, for a season of strenuous outdoor activity, and four years later, as he was about to finish school before going off to college at Brown, the experiment was repeated. On that occasion a grateful son had humbly thanked his father for the trouble and expense you have incurred in order that I might stay here this winter, to which Senior replied in terms he would use again and again over the years: "Be assured the appreciation you show is ample payment for all we have ever tried to do for you, and I have not words to express our gratitude for what you show us in your daily life, and for the hope you give us for the future time when our turn comes for us to lean more on