CHAPTER 21

The Enthusiast

When 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. Of more than $250 million in dividends distributed by Standard Oil between 1893 and 1901, over a quarter went straight into Rockefeller’s coffers. As Standard Oil shares took flight in the late 1890s, one periodical computed that Rockefeller’s wealth had appreciated by $55 million ($972 million today) in nine months. “Where in the history of the world did any man ever make $55,000,000 in 9 months?” the editorialist demanded.¹ Rockefeller was becoming Mister Money Bags, a byword for wealth.

One might have thought Rockefeller would relax in retirement, but he was still a prisoner to the Protestant work ethic and attacked recreational interests with the same intensity that he had brought to business. “I have not had the experience of the majority of business men,” he later told William O. Inglis, “who find time hanging heavily on their hands.” ² Yet his retirement was equally remarkable for its omissions. For instance, he lacked the wanderlust that infected other rich men, such as J. P. Morgan, in their later years. He never collected art or exploited his wealth to broaden his connections or cultivate fancy people. Aside from the occasional courtesy call from other moguls, he hobnobbed with the same family members, old friends, and Baptist clergy who had always formed his social circle. He showed no interest in old-money clubs, parties, or organizations. Commenting on this, Ida Tarbell branded Rockefeller a “social cripple” and detected an inferiority complex that made him afraid to venture beyond his home turf, but his behavior actually connoted mental health.³ When someone expressed surprise to Rockefeller that he had not gotten a big head, he replied, “Only fools get swelled up over money.”⁴ Comfortable with himself, he needed no outward validation of what he had accomplished. We can criticize him for lack of imagination, but not for weakness.

It is striking that Rockefeller, so grave in business, was extremely fond of games in retirement and indulged in a little skylarking. As his body aged, his mind grew younger and more buoyant. Having missed a carefree boyhood, he seemed to want to compensate in his later years and he suddenly showed a lot of his father’s jollity. In the 1890s, Cleveland was seized by a bicycle craze, and the “wheel season” was opened each spring by hundreds of colorful tandem bikes gliding down Euclid Avenue. Though in his fifties, Rockefeller joined the fad with boyish élan. A firm believer in appropriate dress, he bought, in assorted shades, sporty riding costumes of corded knickerbocker suits, alpine hats, and cloth leggings. Frederick Gates was at Forest Hill when Rockefeller learned to ride, and he watched Rockefeller teach himself to turn around without alighting. “He would start in with a wide circle,” Gates recalled, “and then follow it round and round each time narrowing the circuit until without dismounting he was almost circling the rear wheel.” ⁵ As with industrial methods, Rockefeller broke down cycling into its component parts then perfected each movement. Much in the spirit of Big Bill, he liked to perform stunts on the bike, often jumping onto the seat as someone held the bike or holding open an umbrella as he rode with no hands. Through his interest in bike riding, Rockefeller came to master the fundamentals of civil engineering, a subject that had long intrigued him. When he wanted to ride his bike up the steep slope to the Forest Hill house, an engineer told him that no practicable grade could be found. “Nothing is impossible,” Rockefeller replied.⁶ Burying himself in civil-engineering books, he figured out a suitable angle—a 3 percent grade, in engineering lingo—and, true to his prediction, rode his bike straight up to the door.

Rockefeller proved fatally susceptible to another fad: golf. In 1899, he was staying at a hotel in Lakewood, New Jersey, and pitching horseshoes with a friend, Elias Johnson, who praised his easy style and nearly unbeatable game. Johnson tried to persuade Rockefeller that these skills would serve him well in golf. “He would look me through with those calm, gray-blue eyes but say nothing,” said Johnson.⁷ Finally, he convinced Rockefeller to try a few swings on a grassy, secluded spot near their hotel. After a few tips, Johnson later recalled in an interview, Rockefeller drove three balls more than one hundred yards apiece.

“Is that all there is of it?” Rockefeller asked. “Yes, that’s all there is of it, but not one in one hundred would do the same thing you’ve done just now. They want to do too much.” His competitive urges surfacing, Rockefeller said, “Do not some players send the ball farther than that?” “Yes, but long shots come only after much practice.” ⁸

A photo of John D. Rockefeller taken in 1904, after alopecia had drastically altered his appearance. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)

Rockefeller decided to play a little prank on his wife. He had a golf pro, Joe Mitchell, come to the hotel and give him lessons on the sly. Every time the caddies saw Cettie approaching, Rockefeller scampered for cover in the bushes. Several weeks later, he said to her offhandedly that golf seemed like a very nice sport and that he might take a shot at it. He then stepped up to a tee and smacked the ball 160 yards straight down the fairway. After marveling for a moment, Cettie shook her head and said, “John, I might have known it. You do things better and more easily than anyone else.” ⁹

On April 2, 1899, right before his sixtieth birthday, Rockefeller played his first complete game of golf, finishing nine holes in sixty-four strokes. After this, he took up the sport with a vengeance. Not always a powerful player, he was nonetheless eerily accurate, his swing so exacting that time seemed suspended. “It was the slowest back-swing I ever saw,” said one partner. “It seemed to last for minutes.”¹⁰ Once again, Rockefeller dissected his game like a manufacturing method. Noticing that he twisted his right foot at the end of his stroke, he had his caddy nail his foot into the ground with a wire croquet wicket—a hazardous trick that he abandoned once the fault was corrected. Since he lifted his head as he shot, he hired a boy to say “Keep your head down” whenever he teed off. Rockefeller was frustrated at one point when he kept slicing his woods. To identify the source of the problem, he commissioned a Cleveland photographer to do snapshots of his swing, a time-and-motion study that enabled him to root out the troublesome flaw. Later, he had movies made of his game, which he studied intently. As part of this studious approach, he recorded all his golf scores in thick little books, with names, dates, and places included.

Rockefeller’s passion for golf was linked to his medical problems of the 1890s, which turned him into a fitness buff. “Played in moderation golf is not only a fascinating game but a valuable aid to health,” he advised friends.¹¹ His physician and frequent golf partner Dr. Hamilton Biggar credited golf with rejuvenating Rockefeller after his near breakdown. “Since he has taken it up with such gusto there has been a marked change in his appearance,” he told a reporter. “His skin, which was formerly pallid and wrinkled, is now firm and ruddy and healthy.” ¹² In later years, Rockefeller gave up walking and bicycled from hole to hole to conserve energy for the game. As an old man, he sat upright on the bike and had it pushed along by his caddy to economize further on his strength. Nothing could keep him from his morning game. If it rained or the sun was too strong, a caddy shielded him with a big black umbrella throughout. His retinue came equipped with rubbers for muddy weather, sweaters for chilly weather, and towels to dry the clubs in a drizzle.

Golf made Rockefeller a more gregarious person, bringing out a bonhomie that had been stifled during the Standard Oil years. For a man who shrank from intimate discussion, golf provided an ideal way to socialize in a highly structured, risk-free environment from ten-fifteen to twelve each morning. As soon as he arrived, he would clown around, setting a tone of genial banter, and people responded in kind. He hummed hymns or popular songs, told humorous anecdotes, or even read short poems of his own composition. One of his favorite gags involved an eminent minister who liked to cheat at golf; an adroit mimic, Rockefeller aped the divine giving the ball a secret little kick behind a tree stump. Golf brought out a native drollery that he had never allowed to flower before. “We should not rejoice in the downfall of others,” he wrote his daughter Bessie, “but I slaughtered four men at golf on Saturday last. . . . This was very wrong, and of course I will never do it again.”¹³

Rockefeller established various taboos on the course, including that no business or charitable bequests should ever be discussed. People who flouted these rules were never invited back, and Rockefeller was extremely uncompromising on the subject. He wanted to keep things on a superficial, slightly unreal level and ward off any serious discussion. In this way, he could be with people yet surrounded by his own ring of silence, an isolated figure amid the crowd, setting the terms of social intercourse.

Despite his unmatched place in America’s urban and industrial growth, Rockefeller remained a country boy at heart and now receded further from the city. Perhaps as a legacy of his upstate boyhood, he was drawn to hilltop houses with spacious water views. Seeking an escape from Manhattan, he was especially attracted to the Hudson River, on which William had built his thousand-acre manor. John D. was moved by the river’s beauty and majestic shoreline, flanked by rolling farmland and picturesque villages. When land prices plunged during the 1893 panic, he bought four hundred acres in the Pocantico Hills of North Tarrytown, just south of Rockwood Hall. Though he considered establishing a weekend house or summer hideaway, he had no exact plan. “As I stated to you before coming,” he wrote to Cettie in early September 1893, “I have no scheme whatever in reference to this new property on the Hudson, further than to own it and let the future determine how [we] wish to use it.” ¹⁴

Rockefeller was drawn to the spot by natural beauty, not elegant neighbors. “He chose the site of his house on Pocantico Hills for its glorious view of the Hudson and the Catskills, one of the most magnificent landscapes in America,” reported Gates, who accompanied him on the first trip.¹⁵The property included a jagged ridge called Kykuit Hill—pronounced kye-cut and derived from the Dutch word for lookout—which enjoyed splendid views of the river and distant Palisades. As at Forest Hill, Rockefeller simply took the furnished house that came with the property, a modest frame structure with wide verandas known as the Parsons-Wentworth House. As was his wont, he kept remodeling the house over the years, enlarging a room here, making one more comfortable there. It was his own Walden, a place where “fine views invest the soul and where we can live simply and quietly.”¹⁶

By 1900, Rockefeller had acquired 1,600 acres and eventually the Pocantico Hills estate expanded to 3,000 acres, threaded by dozens of miles of winding roads and bridle paths. Rockefeller could tolerate extravagance as long as the style was understated and did not trumpet his wealth too loudly. He avoided a gaudy residence and had no desire to impress other people. If anything, he craved seclusion. At one point, Rockefeller decided that he had to purchase a small corner property owned by Thomas Birdsall. He offered an excellent purchase price and said he would buy a nearby strip of land to which Birdsall could move his house. When Birdsall refused, Rockefeller ordered his superintendent to surround the offending property with the largest cedar trees he could find, casting the house into perpetual gloom. Birdsall caved in.

Almost as soon as he caught the golf fever in 1899, Rockefeller laid out four holes at Pocantico. “Mother and Father crazy over golf,” Junior told a college chum in 1900. “Father plays from four to six hours a day, and Mother several hours.”¹⁷ William Tucker, a golf pro from nearby Ardsley, coached Rockefeller regularly. By 1901, the titan hired a golf architect, William Dunn, to plot a twelve-hole course, and he also had a nine-hole course designed for Forest Hill. Gamely trying to please his father, Junior took lessons for a year, but he was not cut out for competitive games and favored the more solitary pleasure of horseback riding.

At some point, Rockefeller decided that he had to play golf daily at Pocantico. In early December 1904, after four inches of snow had fallen on Westchester County, Elias Johnson was taken aback to receive a call from Rockefeller, inviting him up for a foursome. When Johnson objected that they could not possibly play in the snow, Rockefeller said, “Just come up and see.” Even as they spoke, a team of workmen with horses and snowplows were assiduously clearing snow from five fairways and putting greens; the next morning, Johnson found a shimmering green course, carved from a wintry landscape. “We never had a finer game,” said Johnson.¹⁸ Rockefeller played in all kinds of weather. “Yesterday morning I played with the thermometer at 20 in the shade,” he boasted to a niece in 1904. “It was cold indeed on these Pocantico Hills, but a good thing for my health.”¹⁹ To keep his partners warm, he distributed paper vests, which became a trademark gift.

Golf was his greatest indulgence. A full-time crew at Pocantico was charged with keeping the greens clear, and they were often out in the early morning, wiping dew from the grass with special mowers, rollers, and bamboo poles. An account book from early 1906 shows that Rockefeller spent $525,211.47 on personal expenses during the previous year, devoting an astounding $27,537.80—or $450,000 in 1996 dollars—to golf.²⁰

Another rich man might have turned to his estate for rest, but for Rockefeller much of the charm lay in the construction and heavy labor. At first, he had the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park and many other parks, do the landscaping at Pocantico. Then, he took this work in hand himself, relegating outside firms to advisory roles and building a surveying tower to help him lay out the gardens. Rockefeller had a flair for landscape design and delighted in transplanting trees as tall as ninety feet. By the 1920s, he had some of the world’s largest nurseries at Pocantico, where he planted as many as ten thousand young trees at a time, selling some of them at a profit.

Rockefeller belied Thorstein Veblen’s generalization that rich men possessed “an instinctive repugnance for the vulgar forms of labor,” for he always believed in the dignity of manual labor.²¹ Along with his son, he laid out sinuous trails and framed striking vistas, leading the work gangs himself. “How many miles of roads I have laid out in my time,” he reflected, “I can hardly compute, but I have often kept at it until I was exhausted. While surveying roads, I have run the lines until darkness made it impossible to see the little stakes and flags.” ²² He became so skillful that he built roads without an engineer. “I am thinking of moving that hillock,” he would say, quickly sizing up the volume of material involved. “Offhand, I would say there are just about 650,000 cubic feet of dirt here.”²³

As at Standard Oil, Rockefeller was a paternalistic boss at home. Among his three hundred mostly black and Italian workmen he outlawed profanity and even tried to purchase and shut down Tarrytown’s lone tavern. Though he was exacting and did not pay high salaries, he never yelled at his employees and dealt with them in a patient, considerate manner, occasionally inviting them to sit by the fire for a chat.

Rockefeller’s absorption in his estates might well have stemmed from his fear of the general public and preference for staying in a protected home environment. As one early biographer noted, “Universally execrated, broken physically and nervously, he was forced almost three decades ago to retreat behind stone walls, barbed wire fences, grilled iron gates.” ²⁴ He preferred to socialize on home turf, where guests had to conform to his rules and his timetable. He was also concerned about terrorist acts. In early 1892, George Rogers told Cettie that he had just gotten a letter signed “Justice or Extermination,” which warned that a packaged bomb was on the way.²⁵ Such threats posed a dilemma for Rockefeller in fashioning his estates, for he wanted to keep his lands open to the public. He finally decided to protect himself by having a secure, private core of four to five hundred acres, including the family houses and golf course, ringed by fences and manned by watchmen. The public was allowed to wander through the rest of the estate, provided that they brought no cars. For decades, Pocantico was a hiker’s and rider’s paradise, making the Rockefeller domain at once exclusive and democratic.

In retirement, Rockefeller subordinated many things to the overriding goal of longevity. “I hope you will take good care of your health,” he once told Junior. “This is a religious duty, and you can accomplish so much for the world if you keep well and strong.”²⁶ His Baptist avoidance of tobacco or alcohol made him a natural advocate of abstemious living, and he was convinced that virtuous habits were medicinal. “I enjoy the best of health,” he said in later years. “What a compensation for the loss of the theaters, the clubs, the dinners, the dissipations which ruined the health of many of my acquaintances long, long years ago. . . . I was satisfied with cold water and skimmed milk, and enjoyed my sleep. What a pity that more men did not enjoy these simple things!”²⁷

Rockefeller’s boon companion was Dr. Hamilton F. Biggar. They had met in the 1870s in the early days on Euclid Avenue when Rockefeller, playing blindman’s buff with the children, was dashing madly about the parlor and ran smack into a doorway; Dr. Biggar came to stitch the wound and remained in the family bosom. Born in Canada, Biggar moved to Cleveland after the Civil War and became a leading figure in the increasingly popular field of homeopathic medicine. He rose to professor of anatomy and clinical surgery in the local Homeopathic Hospital College and counted William McKinley and Mark Hanna among his patients. Founded by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) and prevalent in nineteenth-century America, homeopathy cured disease by using minute amounts of substances that in larger doses might cause the disease. At Biggar’s behest, Rockefeller served as a vice president and trustee of the Homeopathic Hospital College, providing money for land, building, and instruction. It was a striking paradox that the philanthropist who would create the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and did more than anyone else to advance scientific medicine in the twentieth century was emotionally wedded to traditional remedies. Rockefeller sometimes smoked mullein leaves in a clay pipe to heal respiratory problems and never lost a residual suspicion of medical doctors. “The doctor came to see me today,” he once reported to his son. “He wouldn’t give me the medicine I wanted, and I wouldn’t take the medicine he prescribed, but we had a lovely talk.”²⁸

Portly, tall, and round-faced, given to derby hats and watch chains, Dr. Biggar shared Rockefeller’s love of yarns and dry wisecracks and they took pleasure in good-naturedly ribbing each other. Since Biggar dressed in a more dapper fashion than his rich friend, many people imagined that hewas the titan when they traveled together. More than anybody, Dr. Biggar brought out Rockefeller’s amiability, as reflected in his description of Rockefeller: “He has a keen sense of humor, is fond of jokes, sharp in repartee, an entertaining conversationalist and a gracious listener.”²⁹

Not everybody was enamored of Dr. Biggar. As Rockefeller’s official doctor, issuing medical bulletins to the press, he struck some as pompous and self-serving. Some physicians even thought him a charlatan with a good bedside manner. One such doubter was Harvard president Charles Eliot, who told Frederick Gates that most Harvard doctors considered Biggar inept. In 1901, according to Eliot, when Biggar had a physical breakdown, Rockefeller paid his expenses for a European trip to recuperate. While he was away, Rockefeller had a renewed attack of hydrocele, an accumulation of serous fluid, which Biggar had pronounced incurable. Rockefeller summoned a doctor from the Harvard Medical School “who not only promptly relieved him of present pain but in a month effected a permanent cure, which Mr. Rockefeller had been led to believe was not possible,” Eliot told Gates nine years later. ³⁰ After that, Rockefeller consulted other doctors, especially an elderly German named Dr. Henry N. Moeller, but Biggar was often at his side and had a continuing influence on his views.

By the early 1900s, Dr. Biggar frequently prophesied in the press that Rockefeller would live to one hundred (which doubtless endeared him to his patron), and he became such a zealous spokesman for Rockefeller’s health principles that it became hard to tell where Biggar ended and Rockefeller began. In 1907, Biggar stated his foolproof rules for long life: “At fifty the American businessman should cease to worry, eschew liquor and tobacco and make play in ‘God’s out of doors’ his chief aim in life.” ³¹ As time passed, Biggar added an admonition to rise from the table a little bit hungry, while Rockefeller laid additional stress on nine hours of daily sleep, including a long siesta after lunch.

There are hints that Rockefeller had a more than ordinary dread of death. Years later, he was playing a golf foursome at Ormond Beach, Florida, when one partner, a Mr. Harvey, thought he had a severe attack of indigestion. Rockefeller took his arm and uttered consoling words before Harvey crumpled to the ground from a heart attack. Doctors were summoned while Harvey was carried inside, where he died thirty minutes later. Rockefeller, so compassionate at first, unceremoniously fled the scene. As one golfing partner recalled, “Mr. Rockefeller turned away and walked rapidly to his car and drove off. I always felt that he did not want to witness death.”³² Nowhere in his voluminous records does he ever even remotely discuss death.

Rockefeller seemed to believe that he could keep death at bay if he adhered to his fixed rules. Extremely finicky about diet, rest, and exercise, he reduced everything to a routine and repeated the same daily schedule, forcing other people to fall in step with his timetable. In a letter to his son, Rockefeller credited his longevity to his willingness to reject social demands. “I attribute my good condition to my almost reckless independence in determining for myself what to do and the rigid adhering to regulations which give me the maximum of rest and quiet and leisure, and I am being richly paid for it every day.”³³

Part of his single-minded program for reaching one hundred was to go through life in a steady, unhurried fashion. He paced himself, husbanded his energy, and took pride in his abnormally low pulse: “That indicates a capacity for enduring and retaining one’s balance.”³⁴ In his early years, he had struggled to master his temper and clear his mind of petty annoyances; now, he had a medical rationale for purging his system of turbulent emotions, especially anger. “It produces in the blood a lot of toxins that poison the system of the angry person. That tires him out and renders him less efficient, to say nothing of causing him to grow old and wear out before his time.”³⁵ Worry was also to be avoided. “I am certain that worry causes a greater strain upon the nerves than hard work.”³⁶ This outlook further encouraged him to avoid spontaneous, potentially confrontational encounters with people.

Rockefeller was partial to massage and other forms of bodily manipulation. In the early 1900s, he became a passionate devotee of osteopathy, which tries to restore the body’s structural integrity by manipulating the skeleton and muscles, and he talked Cettie and Lute into going for treatments. In one rapturous outburst in 1905, he told his son that he had profited from osteopathy while at Forest Hill and was “more grateful than I can tell you for the good health which I have and which enables me to do two or three times as much work, Mrs. Tuttle [his telegrapher] says, as I used to do when she was here before. Osteopathy! Osteopathy! Osteopathy!”³⁷ When exponents of more advanced medicine—spurred on, ironically, by Rockefeller philanthropy—tried to enact legislation to bar osteopaths, Rockefeller rushed to the osteopaths’ defense. “I believe in osteopathy,” he instructed his secretary, “and if any of our people at 26 Broadway can say or do anything to aid the osteopaths at this time of their struggle, I should appreciate it.”³⁸ A visit to an osteopath occasioned one of Rockefeller’s most celebrated witticisms. As the osteopath cracked his vertebrae, Rockefeller said wryly, “Listen to that, doctor. They say I control all the oil in the country and I haven’t enough even to oil my own joints.”³⁹

In the early 1900s, the press still circulated preposterous stories of how Rockefeller could digest only milk and crackers and had a standing offer of one million dollars to anyone who could fix his stomach. The most ghoulish myth claimed that he needed mother’s milk to survive and that his caddy smuggled it to him daily in a thermos on the golf course. Thousands of letters flooded into 26 Broadway, offering remedies for stomach troubles. Rockefeller was perplexed by these weird rumors. When approaching eighty, he said wearily, “There are multitudes of people in the country today who, from these false reports, believe that I am in such a sad condition that I would give all I possess on earth to be a well man. And I know of no man in better health than I am—and so it goes.” ⁴⁰Biggar had, in fact, prescribed bread and milk for Rockefeller’s digestive troubles in the 1890s, and he continued to drink milk and cream regularly in the early 1900s, believing that “fresh milk is an excellent food for the nerves.”⁴¹ Yet as his health returned in the late 1890s, he resumed a varied menu, which he consumed slowly and in tiny portions. He had a plain but healthy diet: green peas and string beans from his garden, rice, barley water, lettuce, fish, brown bread, and baked potatoes twice a day.

In the early 1900s, portly tycoons such as Morgan incarnated the robust prosperity of the era, while Rockefeller weighed in at a lean 165 pounds. Still the ascetic Protestant, he decried overeating, warning that it caused more sickness than did any other cause. He never ate hot food, waited for dishes to cool, and encouraged guests to start without him. Food was fuel for Rockefeller, not a source of sensual pleasure. “He could not understand why anyone would eat a piece of candy, if that piece of candy were not good for him, just because that person liked candy,” Junior explained.⁴²Once, in an uncharacteristic moment, he had a craving for ice cream and humbly asked Dr. Moeller for a waiver from his prohibition against eating it. “If I had a license from you to eat a very little ice cream occasionally it would be a special dispensation which I would much appreciate, but, you are the Doctor,” he said meekly.⁴³

Rockefeller’s most distinctive piece of medical advice—and the eternal bane of his dinner guests—was that people should chew each bite ten times before swallowing. So conscientiously did he adhere to this practice that he even advised people to chew liquids, which he would swirl around in his mouth. He would still be eating a half hour after other guests had finished. To promote digestion, he also thought it important to linger at the table for an hour or so after dinner. To pass the time, he played a parlor game with guests called Numerica, a form of competitive solitaire. Since, as a Baptist, he could not play cards, he had square counters made to replace the poker decks that were ordinarily used. Any number of guests could play, and Rockefeller distributed a dime to the winner, nickels to the losers. The game required a certain agility with figures, and Rockefeller grew so proficient from incessant practice that he tended to award himself the dime.

For Americans of a later day, John D. Rockefeller was etched in their minds as a bald, wizened man, a desiccated fossil. Yet before his health troubles of the early 1890s, the few reporters who penetrated his inner sanctum were struck by his youthful demeanor. His correspondence does show that his problem with hair loss began earlier than previously imagined; in 1886, at age forty-seven, he was already ordering bottles of hair restorative. In 1893, Rockefeller’s hair loss, or alopecia, suddenly worsened as he struggled with digestive problems and fretted over the University of Chicago finances.

Generalized alopecia, or total loss of body hair, has been attributed to many causes, ranging from genetic factors to severe stress, but remarkably little is known for certain. For Rockefeller, the onset of the disease coincided with his breakdown of the early 1890s. In 1901, the symptoms worsened markedly, with Cettie recording in a memo book that in March of that year “John’s moustache began to fall out, and all the hair on his body had followed by August.”⁴⁴

The change in his appearance was startling: He suddenly looked old, puffy, stooped—all but unrecognizable. He seemed to age a generation. Without hair, his facial imperfections grew more pronounced: The skin appeared parchment dry, his lips too thin, his head large and bumpy. Soon after losing his hair, Rockefeller went to a dinner thrown by J. P. Morgan (one of the few public dinners he ever attended) and sat down next to a mystified Charles Schwab, the new president of U.S. Steel. “I see you don’t know me, Charley,” said Rockefeller. “I am Mr. Rockefeller.”⁴⁵

Coming on the eve of the muckraking era, Rockefeller’s alopecia had a devastating effect on his image: It made him look like a hairless ogre, stripped of all youth, warmth, and attractiveness, and this played powerfully on people’s imaginations. For a time, he wore a black skullcap, giving him the impressively gaunt physiognomy of a Renaissance prelate. One French writer wrote that “under his silk skull-cap he seems like an old monk of the inquisition such as one sees in the Spanish picture galleries.” ⁴⁶

The alopecia dealt a blow to Rockefeller’s morale—the psychological effect is crushing for most people—and he dabbled restlessly in remedies. Biggar started him on a hair-restoration regimen in which he took phosphorus six days a week and sulfur on the seventh. When such remedies failed, Rockefeller decided to buy a wig. Self-conscious at first and reluctant to wear it, he tested it one Sunday at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. Before the service, he stood in the pastor’s office, nervously adjusting it and telling a listener what an ordeal it would be to wear it in the church. When the wig met with a good reception, he was almost boyishly elated. Soon, he grew to love this wig, telling daughter Edith, “I sleep in it and play golf, and I am surprised that I went so long without it, and think I made a great mistake in doing so.”⁴⁷ He became so fond of wigs that he started to wear rotating wigs of different lengths to give the impression of his hair growing then being cut. He even had wigs styled for different occasions: golf, church, short walks, and so on. For all his wealth, however, Rockefeller could never find the ideal wig. Starting out with a fashionable wig maker on the rue Castiglione in Paris, he grew disillusioned when springs in the framework pushed up through the hair. He then switched to a Cleveland wig maker whose product had another maddening defect: The foundation fabric would shrink, making the wig suddenly slide across his bald pate. What God had taken away, it seems, could never be perfectly restored.

Before Rockefeller’s hair fell out, people noted the contrast between him and his often sickly wife. Then, overnight, the alopecia seemed to equalize their ages. John and Cettie had enjoyed a happy marriage, if one constrained by formality. Whether playing with the children or golfing with cronies, John was capable of a certain hilarity—he could kick up his heels and have fun. Cettie— gentle, sweet, charming—remained immured in her cloistered world of religion and clung to her belief in John as a superman. One observer described Cettie as “a dignified, simple-minded, elderly lady, pleasant faced, soft spoken, entirely without ostentation” for whom John “was still her hero after all the years.”⁴⁸ As reformers branded her hero a corporate malefactor, she found a necessary sanctuary in Christianity, her mind soaring to serene religious heights far above the din of political strife.

It is hard to date with precision Cettie’s transformation from an alert, capable woman into a professional invalid. She had never had a strong constitution: As early as the 1880s, Junior had taken care of many household tasks, such as buying carpets and overseeing repairs, because his mother lacked the strength. By the early 1890s, she complained of “a general state of prostration.”⁴⁹ John had always confided in her about business and in 1893 was still sending her detailed reports about Mesabi ore. Then, abruptly, in the mid-1890s, his letters to her became empty and platitudinous, stuffed with bland descriptions of weather, garden walks, or golf, and they remained so for twenty years. It is hard to avoid the impression that he was deliberately tiptoeing around unpleasant subjects out of respect for her delicate medical state.

Cettie suffered from so many strange symptoms and vague ailments as to defy precise medical diagnosis. She complained in the 1890s of asthma and colitis, as well as sporadic problems with her eyes and spine. For her intestinal troubles, doctors ordered her to cut out fruits and vegetables in favor of a diet rich in milk, cream, butter, and eggs. At first, despite her problems, she was not bedridden. She and John took long drives before lunch, and around 1900 she often sneaked in several holes of afternoon golf. Then, in April 1904, at the height of the publication of Ida Tarbell’s series in McClure’s Magazine, she had an attack, perhaps a mild stroke, that left her nearly paralyzed. As she told her diary, “Dr. Allen says it will take two years of the most quiet living to be myself again. This I accept and shall gain daily feeling thankful that it is no worse.”⁵⁰ John took her to Forest Hill, where she sunned on the porch and listened to him read aloud daily portions from With God in the World by Bishop Brent. She never entirely recuperated.

The image of Cettie projected by her family was invariably that of the stoic mother. “Everything which came to her, she accepted,” her daughter Edith once wrote, “and she bore her frailty of body with uncomplaining patience.”⁵¹ Outsiders, however, saw less of this patient nobility. Where she had always been considerate with servants, she now became finicky and demanding. “Her hot milk must be brought to her at 11 o’clock each morning,” one of Rockefeller’s secretaries, H. V. Sims, recalled. “The little napkin which went with it must be inserted by the maid between the 4th finger and the little finger—or all was wrong.”⁵² She would ask nurses to extract shawls from the middle of a tall stack without disturbing the others. Everybody crept on eggshells around her.

John learned to coax and humor her to get his way. The nurses often wilted in the stifling heat that Cettie demanded and were afraid to open the window. John would waltz in and say, “Mother, don’t you think you should have the window open just so much?” He would spread his fingers slightly apart. When she replied, “Very well, John, if you think so,” he signaled the nurses, when she wasn’t looking, to open it far more. ⁵³ John treated his wife tenderly, but his behavior now became largely ceremonious. If she stayed up too late with guests, he would slip his hand through her arm and announce, “This is good night, as it is Mother’s bedtime.”⁵⁴

In a 1905 portrait of her by Arthur Ferraris, which shows her in a lovely black dress with her hair swept up and holding a prayer book, she seems despondent but still sensitive and wise. She clung ever more assertively to religion and wrote to her children in the elevated language of sermons, telling Junior as he was about to embark on a trip that she was “blessed of God above so many mothers, in my children, my precious jewels—loaned me for a season to be handed back when the call comes.”⁵⁵ On his twenty-first birthday, she congratulated her son thus: “You can celebrate your birthday in no better way, whether at home or not, than by such earnest work as I know you are giving, for God and the saving of the souls of your fellow students.”⁵⁶ It never seemed to dawn on her to encourage her children to have a good time.

Cettie’s invalidism must have tormented Rockefeller. Since his boyhood, he had felt a particular affinity for women and taken special delight in their company. He would not have contemplated extramarital affairs, as other moguls might have done. He stayed loyal to Cettie and his Baptist upbringing, and he always had the specter of Big Bill before his eyes to remind him of the extreme perils of philandering. He had long lived with the knowledge of man’s sinful nature. As long as Cettie was alive, so far as we can tell, he kept his amorous impulses in check and remained a model paterfamilias.

The Rockefellers found it difficult to confront the infirmities of both the mind and flesh. A whole world of forbidden, subversive feelings simply did not exist for them. If you averted your eyes from unpleasant things, they seemed to believe, they would lose their sting. For this reason, the story of the eldest Rockefeller daughter, Bessie, has long been an impenetrable mystery.

After Charles Strong had married Bessie in 1889, he taught briefly at Clark University and then became an associate professor of philosophy at the new University of Chicago in 1892. While Charles had ambivalent feelings toward his father-in-law, he never hesitated to exploit his connections and largesse. In 1895, the Strongs had to abandon Chicago, owing to Bessie’s poor health. As Charles informed his Harvard mentor, William James, his wife’s health was “still so delicate that it seems unwise to expose her to the inclemencies of the Chicago climate, and the result is that I find myself permanently settled in New York.”⁵⁷ So that Charles could write his treatises and live with Bessie in New York, Rockefeller gave him a thousand-dollar subsidy for a year’s work. When Bessie gave birth to a daughter, Margaret, at Pocantico in 1897, Rockefeller declared a holiday for workmen on his estate.

Since Charles had become a freethinker, Rockefeller might have feared for the immortal soul of his granddaughter. “Charles would tell Margaret, ‘There is no God,’ ” Margaret’s daughter would recall. “Both mother and father concurred and agreed not to contaminate her with uncertain belief.”⁵⁸ Perhaps aware of this indoctrination, Rockefeller was eager to keep the Strongs in New York. He had Junior approach Seth Low, the president of Columbia College, about endowing a professorship in psychology for Charles, who increasingly studied both psychology and philosophy in his work. Junior suggested that it would be more gracious to endow the chair and then let the college voluntarily appoint him, rather than to demean Charles by creating a chair expressly for him. Senior followed this advice and, after making sure that Columbia would give him the chair, gave the school a $100,000 endowment, effectively buying his son-in-law’s job at considerable expense.

For a time in the early 1900s, Rockefeller saw a lot of Charles and Bessie, thanks in part to his newfound passion for golf. Desperate for a place where he could extend Pocantico’s limited golf season, he found it in the tony resort of Lakewood, New Jersey, where George Gould and other rich residents played polo, attended tea parties, rode to hounds, and held cotillions. Rockefeller began buying property there in May 1901, and a year later a dreamlike opportunity appeared. The Ocean County Hunt and Country Club decided to merge with another club and abandon its clubhouse, which was surrounded by a golf course set amid seventy-five acres of spruce, fir, pine, and hemlock. Only eight or nine miles from the sea, this flat, sandy country had “delicious, dry air,” Rockefeller told a friend, and would permit him to golf nearly ten months a year.⁵⁹ The big, rambling, three-story wooden clubhouse—which Rockefeller always called Golf House—had striped awnings and a glass-sheltered porch that gave a view of sheep browsing on the lawn. This hideaway could be reached only by a twisting road of crushed bluestone that ran through dense woods—perfect for security purposes. Expanding the house and adding acreage, Rockefeller transplanted thousands of trees from Pocantico to this new estate. Rockefeller loved his new, relaxed place. “I believe I have recovered my health,” he wrote to a friend from Lakewood in 1903. “I feel better now than I have felt in years. . . . I believe the improvement in my condition is due to my newly acquired habit of playing golf.” ⁶⁰

To provide company, Rockefeller also bought the small Claflin Cottage at Lakewood, where Charles and Bessie stayed for three seasons. To hear William James, a frequent visitor, tell it, it was a gloomy place. When Strong’s first major book, Why the Mind Has a Body, appeared in 1903, James extolled it as “a sterling work, admirable for clearness of statement & thoroughness of discussion, luminous, and likely to be much used by students of philosophy.”⁶¹ During his stays at Lakewood, James accompanied Charles on walks around the lake and the two often paused to sit on pine needles and reflect. On such a stroll, James paid them both a high compliment when he turned to Strong and said, “I am John the Baptist and you are the Messiah.”⁶² Yet James was more versatile than Strong and came to dread these Lakewood trips, where he felt trapped by perpetual shoptalk. Charles could convert a pleasant weekend into an interminable seminar, and James voiced his frustrations to his wife, Alice, tempering them with his great admiration for Charles. “I never knew such an unremitting, untiring, monotonous addiction as that of his mind to truth. He goes by points, pinning each one definitely, and has, I think, the very clearest mind I ever knew. . . . I suspect that he will outgrow us all, for his rate accelerates, and he never stands still.”⁶³

As an antidote to Charles, William James especially welcomed his Lakewood encounters with Rockefeller, who would sometimes materialize at lunch, fresh from golf. Rockefeller had only the most fleeting encounters with the intelligentsia, which makes James’s descriptions of him the more valuable. The philosopher had an uncanny knack for telescoping titanic figures into thumb-nail sketches. He was especially struck by Rockefeller’s willpower and wrote to Alice about the primordial strength that radiated from him, telling her that Rockefeller was a “very deep human being” who gave him “more impression of Urkraft [primitive or original force] than anyone I ever met.” He was also unexpectedly charmed by his genial style: “Glorious old John D. . . . [is] a most love-able person.” To round out this portrait, he marveled that Rockefeller could be “so complex, subtle, oily, fierce, strongly bad and strongly good a human being.”⁶⁴

William dashed off an even more vivid description to his brother Henry:

Rockefeller, you know, is reputed the richest man in the world, and he certainly is the most powerfully suggestive personality I have ever seen. A man 10 stories deep, and to me quite unfathomable. Physionomie de Pierrot (not a spear of hair on head or face) flexible, cunning, quakerish, superficially suggestive of naught but goodness and conscientiousness, yet accused of being the greatest villain in business whom our country has produced, a hater of cities and lover of the open air (playing golf & skating all the time at Lakewood) etc.⁶⁵

James wrote this while Ida Tarbell was inflaming popular opinion against Standard Oil. He urged Rockefeller to discard his policy of silence and combat the attacks by letting the public become better acquainted with him. When Rockefeller published his memoirs in book form in 1909, James applauded. “This is what I proposed to you many years ago!” he wrote to him. “Expansiveness wins a way where reserve fails!”⁶⁶

In 1902, the already somber world of Charles and Bessie Strong darkened suddenly when Bessie, age thirty-six, experienced fresh medical problems. One cannot state with certainty what this ailment was, but in one letter to her brother, she refers to her “most weak and unreliable heart.” ⁶⁷ We do know that her condition deteriorated dramatically in the spring of 1903, for that autumn Charles wrote to William James, “Mrs. Strong is pretty well for her, thank you; but she had an attack in the spring which gave some cause for disquietude.”⁶⁸ Her granddaughter later contended that Bessie had “suffered a stroke and consequent impairments.” ⁶⁹

In the few brief, cryptic references to Bessie’s illness in the press, it was always said that she had withdrawn from Lakewood society to lead a quiet life—a cover story that does not begin to capture the pathos of what happened. Overnight, the stroke or heart condition turned this pretty young woman into someone much older and frailer. The Rockefellers always suppressed the fact that it affected her mind. As Strong’s friend George Santayana wrote, “She was always, as they put it, in delicate health, which was a euphemism for not being in her right mind.”⁷⁰ Turned into a semi-invalid who spent much of the day in bed, she shuffled slowly about the cottage in a gray shawl, careworn and bent. She sometimes lapsed into morbid fears of poverty, retrenching on household expenses, reworking gowns to save money, and informing friends that she could no longer afford to entertain. During these periods, Charles supplemented her spartan grocery orders with extra purchases. Even as she wondered darkly in early 1904 how she and Charles would survive, Bessie was worth $404,489.25, with an estimated annual income of $20,030. At moments, she also threw off her imaginary cares and gaily announced that they were rich.

After a while, transported into a dreamworld, Bessie started to babble in childlike French. William James arrived in Lakewood one day and was thunderstruck by Bessie’s condition. To his wife, he reported Bessie’s words as follows:

“M. James, cela me fait de joie de voir votre bonne figure, vous avez un coeur généreux comme mon papa. Nous sommes tres riches maintenant. Mais Papa me donne tout ce que je lui demande pour le donner a ceux qui ont besoin. Mois aussi j’ai un bon coeur.” (Translation: “Mr. James, it gives me joy to see your nice face, you have a generous heart like my papa. We are very rich now. But Papa gives me everything I ask him for, to give to those who are in need. I too have a good heart.”)

A flabbergasted James said afterward, “It was just like a fairy-tale.” ⁷¹ It was an indescribably sad fate for the one Rockefeller daughter who had gone to college.

It was also a bitter irony for Charles Strong, with his overpowering intellect, to become a nursemaid for the blighted, demented Bessie. Solitary and emotionally blocked, he soon grew bored with any conversation that did not revolve around philosophic disputation. His letters to William James contain few personal asides or mundane details, and they read like philosophic abstracts. For such a man to have ended up the caretaker of a wife spouting gibberish must have been an intolerable strain. In the spring of 1904, nervous and rundown, Charles took a leave of absence from Columbia and sailed for Europe with Bessie. He planned to consult with French specialists in nervous diseases and hoped that his wife might be helped by the warm climate of southern France. It might also have been for Charles a chance to escape from both his overbearing father and father-in-law.

Like Bessie, the Rockefeller’s youngest daughter, Edith, was beset by nervous troubles throughout her life. Unlike Bessie, her maladies led her on an odyssey of sustained introspection unique in Rockefeller annals. She experimented with psychology and other spheres alien to the rest of the family, subjecting the Rockefeller verities to the cold test of modern skepticism and threatening her relationship with her father along the way.

Among the four children, Edith seemed the family changeling. Where her siblings had been submissive children, Edith was recalcitrant, headstrong, and outspoken. Once, as an adolescent, she greeted Grandma Spelman with a hug so fierce that she cracked one of her ribs. She read voraciously and by an early age entertained religious doubts. In a smart but not reflective family, Edith had intellectual aspirations. “Reading has always been more important to me than eating,” she confessed to a newspaper reporter late in life. “Except in a case of dire starvation, if a bottle of milk and a book were placed on the table, I would reach for the book, because I must feed my mind more than my body.”⁷² Such a person might well find something antiseptic about the Rockefeller life.

In 1893, twenty-seven-year-old Bessie and twenty-one-year-old Edith went to Philadelphia for a rest cure at the Hospital for Orthopedic and Nervous Diseases, run by the patrician neurologist-cum-novelist, S. Weir Mitchell. A specialist in female nervous disorders, Mitchell separated his patients from their quotidian world, banning casual visits or even mail from relatives. Rockefeller visited his daughters only once, in February 1894, and would have heartily endorsed their program of relaxation, massage, good food, and electrical stimulation of muscles. Bessie responded better than Edith, who required an extended follow-up rest in a cottage at Saranac Lake in upstate New York.

In November 1895, hard on the heels of her recovery, Edith married Harold McCormick of Chicago, who had just graduated from Princeton. He was the son of Cyrus McCormick, the developer of the mechanical reaper and founder of what became International Harvester. Junior had befriended Harold at the Browning School and was the inadvertent matchmaker. During the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, he, Cettie, and his three sisters traveled west to Chicago by private railroad car and stayed with Nettie Fowler McCormick, Cyrus’s indomitable widow, at her Rush Street mansion. Devout Presbyterians and generous donors to missionary work, the McCormicks resembled the Rockefeller family in many respects. They had raised their children strictly, giving them small allowances and urging them to donate to the poor. There was also a streak of mental instability among the McCormick children that would be far more pernicious than that among the Rockefeller offspring.

The Rockefellers deplored the vogue among rich Americans of marrying off their daughters to titled Europeans and welcomed the McCormicks as an upright, God-fearing industrial family. As the heir to a fortune, Harold McCormick did not have to allay suspicions that might have shadowed another suitor for Edith’s hand, and John and Cettie found something winning about his expansive ways. He was an athletic man with luminous blue eyes and a dreamy gaze who wore jeweled cuff links and embroidered vests. Among his tightly wound in-laws, he stood out for his free and open manner. Yet he got along well with Senior and was the only son-in-law allowed to smoke in Cettie’s presence.

The only misgivings that John and Cettie had about the marriage centered on Harold’s drinking. Several times before the wedding, Rockefeller tried to extract a pledge that he would abstain from liquor, but each time Harold firmly resisted. “While I believe we hold the same general views as to the ruin wrought in the world by strong drink, and as to individual responsibility with regard to it, I am convinced that for me a life pledge is not for the best,” Harold told Rockefeller two months before the wedding. As a concession, he stopped drinking briefly. Senior was again receiving threats, and Harold closed his note by adding, “I am distressed to have the subject renewed, and just at a time, when you, and therefore we, have much anxiety and worry by reason of the cranks.”⁷³

Edith and Harold were to be married in November 1895 at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Manhattan, but Harold got a cold and the ceremony was shifted to the Buckingham Hotel. Right before the wedding, Senior sent for his daughter, telling her that they needed to have one last confidential chat. Once they were alone, Edith recounted in a later interview, he said in his most portentous manner, “I have brought you here to make a request that lies very close to my heart and a request that has been very carefully considered.” “Yes, father,” Edith replied, “but why be so serious. . . . what is this request that stirs you so much?” “It is this daughter. I want you to promise never to serve a drink of liquor in your home. . . . Promise me that and you will never regret it.” As Edith recalled, “Unthinkingly, I said, ‘Why, of course, father,’ and immediately set off in a peal of laughter over the solemnity of what seemed such a trivial request.”⁷⁴ This agreement concluded, father and daughter proceeded to the ceremony, and Edith entered on her father’s arm, wearing a tiara of diamonds and emeralds given to her by Harold. In the press coverage, Edith was labeled the “Princess of Standard Oil” and Harold the “Prince of International Harvester.” Henceforth, Edith was always known as Edith Rockefeller McCormick, signaling that she planned to retain her own identity.

With his children, Rockefeller had tried to create that most elusive thing, a self-perpetuating puritanism, but he was destined to produce at least one rebellious spendthrift and that honor fell to Edith. After an Italian honeymoon, at last emancipated from her austere past, she and Harold moved into a grand stone mansion at 1000 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. In this Gold Coast fortress, barricaded behind a high iron fence, Edith vied for social preeminence. She displayed in bold relief qualities that Rockefeller had struggled to root out of his children—vanity, ostentation, narcissism, and hedonism—but they were redeemed in part by her prolonged introspection and intellectual fearlessness. In Chicago, away from her father, Edith cultivated a separate set of interests.

All the affectations of European royal courts were displayed in Edith’s mansion, and Chicago society tattled about her “imperial complex.” ⁷⁵ After being welcomed by footmen, guests were escorted into sumptuous rooms embellished with beautiful pictures and chandeliers. Edith decided that the Rockefellers were descended from the noble La Rochefoucaulds, and this accounted for a French motif throughout the house. Her dinner guests, sometimes numbering as many as two hundred, received menus and place cards printed in French and engraved with raised gilt letters. The guests dined off a gilded-silver service that had belonged to the Bonapartes and footmen stood stiffly behind every second chair. Edith had a majestic empire room that featured four of Napoleon Bonaparte’s royal chairs—two with Ns emblazoned across the back and two with Bs. Edith slept in an ornate Louis XVI bed and kept a gold box on her dressing table that had been a gift to the Empress Marie Louise from Napoleon.

Edith was not shy about her self-presentation. She ran through clothes like a queen, renewing her wardrobe yearly, and always shimmered in jewels. A 1908 painting shows a demure, gray-eyed Edith gazing knowingly at the viewer in tiara and expensive décolleté gown, a boa draped over her shoulders. A short, slender woman, she daringly exposed her ankles and wore a gold ankle chain. On one social occasion, she appeared in a silver dress of such imposing weight that it was said she could scarcely breathe. She had one cape of 275 animal skins, laboriously stitched together, which all but smothered her. Doubtless to her father’s horror, Edith assembled a jewelry collection that would have made an eastern potentate blush. She had a Cartier necklace strung with ten emeralds and 1,657 tiny diamonds. For her wedding, her parents gave her a $15,000 rope of pearls, a modest gift soon overshadowed by her $2 million string of pearls. In 1908, discovering that Edith and Harold were borrowing to support this luxury, Rockefeller scolded Harold: “Since my attention was called to this subject, I have made inquiries of Alta and John as to their expenses, and find that theirs have been less than one-third of what yours have been.”⁷⁶

Edith’s temperance pledge cramped her style as a hostess. Noticing that her soirées lacked a certain sparkle, she turned to Harold for an explanation. “My dear,” he said, “don’t you realize that these red-blooded young Chicagoans are used to having liquor? They simply must have their cocktails, their wine, their highballs and cordials.” ⁷⁷ No child of John D. Rockefeller would flout a temperance oath made to him, so Edith had to contrive ways to compensate. “I invited the most brilliant men and women whom I met,” she told one reporter. “I gave musicales at which I presented the greatest artists of the day.” ⁷⁸ She befriended artists, intellectuals, and society figures and developed into a prominent patroness of the arts, collecting antique furniture, lace, Oriental art, and fine books.

Having always loathed hymns, Edith shared Harold’s affection for the opera—she paid for the translation of several librettos into English—and they frequently threw dinner parties on opera nights. In a habit that curiously parodied her father, Edith kept a small jeweled clock at the dinner table and held the guests to a precise schedule, so that everyone arrived at the opera on time. When she pressed a button for the next course, the team of waiters whisked plates away from the startled guests, whether they were finished or not. Edith ran a hierarchical household and never addressed most of the servants directly, dealing exclusively with the top two of them.

It is easy to satirize Edith’s foibles and dismiss her as dilettante, yet she was fiercely devoted to her adopted causes. After she had five children—John, Fowler, Muriel, Editha, and Mathilde—Edith created a kindergarten for girls, with classes held in French. Senior doted on her eldest son, John Rockefeller McCormick, known as Jack. During the winter of 1900–1901, Jack and Fowler were staying at Pocantico when both boys contracted scarlet fever. Whatever the latent tensions between them, Edith gratefully remembered her father’s behavior during Jack’s illness. “As long as I live I shall never forget the great love and the untiring effort which you put forth to save dear Jack’s life,” she wrote to him a few years later. “Absolutely forgetful of self and showing a love much like the Christ love.”⁷⁹ To confine the disease, Rockefeller constructed a special staircase that allowed the children and nurses to go from the upstairs sickroom to a glass-enclosed porch without infecting other household members. Rockefeller offered one New York physician a half-million dollars to save the two boys. Little was then known about the cause or treatment of scarlet fever, and although Fowler recovered, John Rockefeller McCormick, nearly four years old, died at Pocantico on January 2, 1901. The shock was no less profound to Rockefeller than to Edith and Harold. A scurrilous rumor later circulated that Edith had learned of Jack’s death from a butler during a dinner party at her Chicago mansion, but the report was bogus. Edith happened to be at Pocantico at the time.

Jack McCormick’s death strengthened Rockefeller’s resolve to endow a medical-research institute. A year later, as a memorial to their son, Edith and Harold created the John McCormick Institution of Infectious Diseases in Chicago. Among the grants it gave out was one to researchers at Johns Hopkins, who isolated the bacterium that causes scarlet fever and set the stage for a treatment.

After Jack’s death, Harold succumbed to depression. His charm and gaiety had always veiled a deep vein of melancholy, and he now sought psychiatric help in Switzerland. In 1908, he returned as a patient to the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic outside Zurich under the care of Dr. Carl Jung. Edith had also long exhibited manic-depressive mood swings that only widened after the birth of Mathilde in April 1905. Because she had been ill during the pregnancy, Edith and Harold toured Europe by automobile that summer, leaving the baby with John and Cettie. After a fleeting improvement in her health, Edith relapsed the next spring and was belatedly diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis of the kidney. Rockefeller knew his daughter’s troubles were as much psychological as physical in origin and observed to Harold’s brother Cyrus that Edith would “require quiet and rest for some time, after all the severe strain through which she has passed in the last few years.” ⁸⁰ For both Harold and Edith, the lure of Europe deepened over the years, a magnetic attraction that the provincial Rockefellers found difficult to fathom.

Edith’s marriage to Harold McCormick brought Rockefeller under renewed scrutiny because it attached him to the reaper trust as well as the oil trust and steel trust. In August 1902, George Perkins, a J. P. Morgan partner, amalgamated McCormick Harvesting Machine, Deering Harvester, and three smaller competitors into International Harvester, a behemoth with 85 percent of the farm-equipment market. Harold McCormick was named vice president and brother Cyrus president of the company. It was a troubled merger, and the McCormicks feared that Perkins and the Deerings were secretly plotting to gain control of the company. To create a counterweight, they persuaded Rockefeller to take a five-million-dollar block of preferred stock. Never one to do things by halves, Rockefeller soon expanded his stake to between twenty-five and thirty million dollars. His loans to International Harvester later rose as high as $60 million, and he took stock in the trust as collateral.

This discreet collaboration did not thaw the icy relations between the Rockefeller family and the house of Morgan. On the contrary, the Rockefellers spied conspiracies everywhere. When Junior learned that control of International Harvester would be vested in a three-man voting-trust committee composed of Perkins, Cyrus McCormick, and one of the Deerings, he felt their worst fears were confirmed. “The object of so tying up these securities is that J.P. Morgan & Co. may be assured of the control of the business for a given period of years, and they have made every effort to make it difficult, yes well nigh impossible, for the securities to change hands,” he wrote to Senior.⁸¹ Though Rockefeller requested a board seat, George Perkins countered that this would tip the power balance toward the McCormicks and “engender feelings so strong that he could not hope to harmonize them,” as Junior told his father.⁸² Since the Rockefellers thought that J. P. Morgan and Company secretly exercised the Deering shares, they were not entirely surprised when their vigorous dissent came to nothing.

Equipped with a fine instinct for flattery, Harold professed the greatest admiration for Senior’s business abilities. “I have always taken you and the Standard Oil Company as my ideals in the progress of a large company,” he told him a year after the reaper trust was formed. ⁸³ Rockefeller did not reciprocate the sentiment and grew critical of Harold’s stewardship of International Harvester. He developed a lengthy list of grievances, including Harold’s failure to notify him of upcoming earnings reports. Sounding an old refrain, he also chastised Harold for paying excessive dividends. In time, George Perkins grew adamant that the dividend should be boosted, even though the company was borrowing heavily. When Gates went to Morgan to protest, he came away convinced that the house of Morgan was milking the stock for short-term profit. “It is further highly probable,” he told Rockefeller, “that the reason why Morgan & Co. are so insistent on increasing the dividend from 4 to 6% is to enable them to sell out their stocks at a very high figure on the basis of the increased dividend. The stock has lately been manipulated upward clearly by an insider namely Mr. Perkins who knew that it was closely held and little was to be had.” ⁸⁴ Senior was dismayed when Harold and Cyrus McCormick protested this only in the lamest fashion. When the voting trust expired in 1912, the McCormicks, with a majority of shares, grimly maintained control, but Rockefeller gradually sold off his position. He would not allow family sentiment to overrule his business judgment.

Unlike the nonconformist Edith, the middle daughter, Alta, was kind and obedient and always eager to please her parents. Slender and dainty, she was an anxious teenager and wrote to her brother reassuringly from the Rye Female Seminary, “Classes are not very large and I shall not be frightened.” ⁸⁵ Of the three daughters, she probably felt most affectionate toward father and never strayed too far from the family fold. “No, I don’t change,” she once confessed to a friend. “I’m still wearing cotton stockings.”⁸⁶ She could exhibit a touching innocence and even when married with children radiated a girlish charm. “She seemed just like the 16 years old daughter of the home,” Cettie told her diary after a visit from the forty-one-year-old Alta.⁸⁷

As would happen to her brother, Alta suffered from terrible headaches. At age eight or nine, she had an attack of scarlet fever that left her partly deaf in one ear, an affliction that brought her closer to her parents. She later found significant relief with a Viennese physician, Dr. Isidor Muller, and for decades thereafter made annual pilgrimages to Karlsbad to renew this ear treatment. Alta was such a fine singer and pianist that many people did not detect the handicap, but close observers noted the quick, subtle way she flicked her good ear toward the speaker to catch his words.

Forever vigilant against fortune hunters with designs on his daughters, John D. worried the most about Alta, who was passionate and impressionable. Easily smitten, she was constantly falling in love with the wrong men, prompting family rescue operations. Often her crushes were mixed up with a missionary impulse to redeem her beloved from some presumed failing.

If Rockefeller had thought Alta safe in the sanctuary of the Baptist Church, he was rudely awakened in early 1891. Though the Rockefellers had moved to Manhattan, they resumed their involvement in the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church every summer when they returned to Forest Hill. As a deacon and superintendent of the Sunday school, Rockefeller still paid half the church expenses from his own pocket. While teaching in the Sunday school, Alta, nineteen, became infatuated with the forty-seven-year-old pastor, the Reverend Dr. L. A. Crandall. Despite the considerable age difference between them, Alta tried to wean him from his evil smoking habit. Though only five years younger than Rockefeller himself, Reverend Crandall was highly susceptible to Alta’s adoration. His wife had died a year and a half earlier, leaving him with a son in college, a daughter in private school, and an emotional void in his life.

Persuaded that Alta genuinely loved him, Crandall began to talk to her about marriage. When Rockefeller heard rumors of this, he refused to believe them at first, then summoned people to his home, quizzed them, and was stunned to discover the truth. Rockefeller delivered a stern ultimatum to Dr. Crandall: Either he would resign or the Rockefellers would withdraw from the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. The church would have been devastated without the Rockefeller money and torn apart by the scandal. Submitting to a superior force, Dr. Crandall left for a Chicago pastorate under the cover that he was moving there to seek a superior education for his children.

Three years later, Alta fell in love with a young minister named Robert A. Ashworth, who was in poor health. When Rockefeller got wind of his daughter’s attachment, he tried to figure out how to cure her of it without showing his hand. In late December 1894, he suddenly organized a party of young people, including Junior, Alta, and Ashworth, for a festive sledding and tobogganing trip to the Adirondack Mountains. Rockefeller chose to emphasize vigorous sports that would expose Ashworth’s frailty to Alta. “Most of the young men taken along were highly robust, and the minister in his physical weakness cut a sorry figure beside them,” said Junior’s friend Everett Colby.⁸⁸ The ploy apparently worked and the problematic relationship ended a week later.

Of all the Rockefeller children, Alta was the most affected by the plight of the poor immigrant populations crowding into American cities in the late nineteenth century. Where her father exercised his benevolence at a distance, Alta rolled up her sleeves, went into the slums, and administered self-help programs for the poor. At Tenth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan, she set up a sewing school for indigent girls, drafted a corps of volunteer teachers, and enrolled 125 pupils. She also set up a small private clinic for invalid women.

Despite her managerial talents, Alta departed from her father’s penchant for building large institutions and favored small-scale charities, of which the best example was Alta House in Cleveland. In the 1890s, a local minister interested Rockefeller and his daughter in a charity, the Day Nursery and Free Kindergarten Association, serving poor Italian immigrants in the Murray Hill district, the Little Italy of Cleveland. Many working couples left their children there during the day. Rockefeller agreed to construct a new settlement building, Alta House, which was dedicated in February 1900 and furnished with a family laundry and medical dispensary. Although he supplied the money and covered the budget for its first twenty years, Alta did the legwork. She enjoyed direct contact with the immigrant families and took special delight in dressing up dolls for their children.

After completion of the settlement house, Alta was desperately eager to marry. When Edith married Harold McCormick in 1895, Alta was openly envious and told her brother that “I must try to enter heartily into all her happiness.”⁸⁹ Through Harold McCormick, Alta met Ezra Parmalee Prentice, then working in Chicago as general counsel for the Illinois Steel Company. Cold and smart, a rigid perfectionist, Parmalee was also an amateur scientist with a large collection of meteorological instruments. The scion of an old Albany family and a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, he underwent the same microscopic scrutiny that awaited any supplicant for Alta’s hand. As she told Junior in early 1900, “[Parmalee] gave Father the names of four of his friends who would answer any questions about him that Father might want to ask and said that he would add to this list if it were desired.”⁹⁰ When Parmalee passed muster, he and Alta were married the following year, but Parmalee and Senior had a remote relationship and seldom saw each other. Parmalee penned formal letters to his father-in-law that began, “Dear Mr. Rockefeller” and were signed, “E. Parmalee Prentice.”

Unlike Edith, Alta wanted to live near her parents. Perhaps Parmalee erred by abandoning his Chicago job to practice law in New York and join a firm that would one day evolve into Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy. Surrendering his freedom by slow degrees, he allowed Junior to buy and furnish a new home for them at 5 West Fifty-third Street. A gift from Senior, this house stood behind his own home on West Fifty-fourth Street. “Uncle John did furnish that house,” one of Alta and Parmalee’s children said. “My father could not have cared less and my mother did not have the know-how. She had grown up in the same rut as Uncle John and had no one to pull her out. She was timid, spiritual like her mother, and besides, she had the idea that her brother always knew best.”⁹¹ Parmalee had a fine legal mind, authored two legal books, and argued cases before the Supreme Court. At first, Rockefeller referred legal work to him and advised other moguls to follow suit, but he never got the expected gratitude from his proud son-in-law. In 1905, when Rockefeller asked him to reorganize Colorado Fuel and Iron, he was not only outraged by the fees Parmalee charged but indignant at his high-handed treatment of the bondholder representatives. At that point, Rockefeller advised Gates to refer less business to Parmalee’s firm. Unable to compromise on business principles, Rockefeller chose to jeopardize family relations instead.

Instead of distributing money to his children at maturity, Rockefeller kept them on allowances after they married and reserved the right to oversee their finances. Junior was appointed family auditor, and this turned him, perforce, into an irritating, censorious presence in the lives of his three brothers-in-law. When Junior decided in 1904 that Alta and Parmalee were spending twice as much as their income warranted, Parmalee bristled at this intrusion into their private lives. The prodigal generosity displayed by Senior after Alta’s wedding now turned into its opposite, and she was placed in the demeaning position of having to beg him for money. After a point, she did not disguise her anger. “Ten years ago when we came into the house you were good enough to pay for all the lace curtains,” she wrote to her father. “These curtains are now worn out and I have bought new ones. . . . Would you help me out by buying the curtains. If so, I shall be greatly pleased. If not, of course it will be all right.”⁹² Once he had made them feel punished for earlier extravagance, Senior would relent and disburse the money. As long as the right conditions were met, this controlling father was always happy to be generous. In 1910, he offered Alta and Parmalee $250,000 to purchase a house and land, and they bought a thousand-acre farm, which they christened Mount Hope, in the Berkshire Mountains near Williamstown, Massachusetts.

It is interesting that both Alta and Bessie married cold, remote, self-absorbed men. One can speculate that they chose these men because of their resemblance to their father, yet neither Charles Strong nor Parmalee Prentice had Rockefeller’s redeeming cordiality or spontaneous interest in other people. Many observers felt that Alta had blundered in marrying the autocratic Parmalee. Priggish and straitlaced, he demanded that their three children dress formally for dinner each night, and he never allowed them to bring friends to the table. Highly cerebral, Parmalee translated Treasure Island into Latin and insisted that the children converse with him in Latin each evening. Each Sunday, he prepared an essay on a theme and led a family discussion. Parmalee was so fearsome a father that even Junior’s children felt their own home positively wild and decadent in comparison.

Whatever her frustrations, Alta put the best face on the marriage. “Parmalee is beautiful in his thoughts for me and his consideration of me, and if he had his way nothing would ever be allowed to fret me nor disturb me for one single minute,” she wrote to her father. “He makes my life one long, glad song.” While Parmalee had rather cool relations with his children, Alta insisted to her father that they “love him as dearly and respect him so much that they cannot bear to see even the slightest shadow cross his face.”⁹³ The compliment can also be read to connote a certain fear that the children had of him.

After purchasing the farm, Alta and her husband increasingly inhabited a rural world, tramping about the muddy fields and growing corn, oats, potatoes, buckwheat, and McIntosh apples. Alta’s letters abound in talk of plowing, threshing, and manure. Prompted by an interest in Gregor Mendel’s genetic theories, Parmalee began to experiment with scientific agriculture and studied ways to boost the output of their potato crop, dairy herd, and hens. Visitors to Mount Hope were far more likely to meet geneticists from Williams College than society figures. When Parmalee organized an experiment to cross black and white mice, Alta had to photograph a thousand mice. Where Edith had ventured out into the world, Alta—who had little contact with her sister— stuck to a simple life that revolved around her husband, children, farm, and horses.

Senior wanted all three sons-in-law, along with Junior, to be involved in the Rockefeller philanthropies; for reasons discussed later, he skipped over his three daughters. Senior and Junior made intermittent efforts to interest Parmalee, but he habitually declined their offers. At one point, Harold McCormick tried to relieve tensions between Junior and Parmalee. While admitting to Senior that Parmalee had “a proud and perhaps even haughty spirit,” Harold maintained that he was a good-hearted man who suffered from a “feeling on the part of the harsh world . . . that he is discredited by his family or even viewed with indifference.” Citing the hostility between Junior and Parmalee, Harold added, “Alta is torn almost in two in her love.”⁹⁴ Apparently, Senior was not convinced. Soon after Harold’s plea, he complained to Edith that Junior was overburdened with charitable work and explicitly blamed his sons-in-law: “I could wish that Harold and Parmalee, with their broad shoulders, were heart and soul in this work with us.”⁹⁵ Yet it was never clear how they could do that without subordinating their identities to Rockefeller, who never understood their need for freedom from his domineering presence.

While Parmalee craved distance from Senior, he did not renounce the financial rewards that came with the relationship. In 1912, Rockefeller guaranteed him a $30,000 annual income from his legal work; if he failed to reach that level, Rockefeller would make up the difference. Whether Parmalee suddenly grew lazy or suffered a sharp downturn in business is unclear, but two years later Rockefeller had to pay $26,000 of his salary. Two years after that, he doubled Parmalee’s annual guaranteed salary to $60,000. Meanwhile, Alta’s annual allowance was boosted to $50,000 in 1914. By transferring more money to Alta and Parmalee and giving them the means to pay their own bills, Rockefeller hoped to end the constant tussles between them and Junior over money— something that he should have done in the first place.