CHAPTER 28
As the national thirst for gasoline caused his stock in the Standard Oil companies to appreciate wildly, it was only proper that the oil king should develop a passion for automobiles. He kept a Peerless auto at Pocantico as early as 1904. In the 1910s, cars began to fill his stone coach barn alongside the old-fashioned buckboards and coaches. Even as a young man, Rockefeller had been exhilarated by speed and motion, racing his trotting horses down Euclid Avenue, and he now took daily auto drives of fifty miles or more. It was the powerful, gleaming Crane-Simplex touring car of 1918 that truly captured his fancy. Big as a cruise ship, smoothly navigating bumpy back roads, this elaborate maroon vehicle with semi-open sides had wide running boards and a glamorous interior of black leather upholstery.
Since the Crane-Simplex comfortably seated seven, Rockefeller turned the afternoon drives into carefully orchestrated social affairs, telling each person where to sit and specifying the exact itinerary to the chauffeur. Like a king enthroned in his movable court, Rockefeller always sat in the middle of the backseat. As with his golf games, the afternoon drives permitted no intimate or serious conversation, only obligatory jollity. As the huge car swept down country roads, trailing whorls of dust and ventilating the passengers with fresh air, Rockefeller hummed, sang spirituals, whistled, or joked. Social director of these excursions, he was relaxed and jovial, often sitting back and daydreaming— but without ever abandoning his competitive instincts. If a young hotshot sped by, Rockefeller would absorb the affront in silence, then bend forward and calmly instruct the chauffeur, “Phillips!” “Yes, sir.” “How fast are we going?” “Thirty-three, sir.” “Could we go a little faster?” Slowly but inexorably the speedometer would climb until the young motorist was overtaken—at which point Rockefeller would stare resolutely ahead, his face impassive, betraying no sign of his joyful triumph.1 Rockefeller clocked these drives and liked to set new speed records. “Phillips,” he would say, “we got to town Monday in one hour and seventeen minutes. Let’s see what we can do today.”2 Phillips would smile, touch his cap, and go for the record.
On many drives, the touring car stopped by a meadow so that Rockefeller and his guests could recline on the grass. Rockefeller chatted happily with farmers who happened by, quizzing them about their seed or fertilizer and passing along tips to the superintendents of his estates. It was one of many signs in Rockefeller’s later years that he yearned for the innocent pleasures of his bucolic boyhood. “I am very sorry to see this tendency of crowding into the cities, very sorry,” he once told a Bible class. “It is not like fifty years ago, when I was a boy. It seems to me that as the cities grow larger the country in general becomes weaker.”3 Carrying a cane, chatting casually with neighbors, he loved to wander around the Pocantico village in his golf knickers. Each year for his birthday, he invited the local children to Kykuit and offered them huge mounds of ice cream while a brass band boomed and flags fluttered overhead. Shedding his straitlaced image, he even stooped on all fours and played with the town children. His comfort with children was one of the conspicuous features of his later years.
For all the holiday ease of his retired life, Rockefeller could never escape a sense of danger off in the shadows. In 1912, he received threats from the Black Hand, a Sicilian and Italian American secret society engaged in blackmail and terrorism. As a precaution, Junior, Abby, and the children were packed off to Lakewood for the autumn while security was tightened at Pocantico. Senior was sufficiently spooked that he installed a special alarm system at Kykuit, with a button under his pillow. If he heard prowlers or unexplained noises, he pressed the button, which made small, inconspicuous lights twinkle in the trees at three or four spots; the night watchman would then ring Rockefeller to verify his safety.
Rockefeller devoted a great deal of his spare time to religion. Before breakfast, he reverently recited a blessing then read aloud a page from My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year by the Reverend John Henry Jowett, who championed a severe, uncompromising Christianity and counseled readers against pride, lust, and avarice. Jowett preached stoic calm in the face of hatred and warned against bearing grudges against enemies—advice that Rockefeller must have taken to heart. At breakfast, guests were invited to read poems or selections from the New Testament. Rockefeller turned for bedtime solace to another volume of sermons called The Optimist’s Good Night, so that his days were bracketed with the consolations of religion.
While Rockefeller felt that his retirement years were steeped in righteousness, the American public never quite believed it. For all the good work performed by the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the General Education Board, the founder was still accused of hoarding his wealth. The newspapers applied their own grinding pressure, showing that his gifts had neither matched Andrew Carnegie’s nor kept pace with his own growing fortune. One statistician projected in 1906 that if he let his wealth collect compound interest for the next thirty years, he would end up sitting on a pile of ninety billion dollars.
As early as 1901, Rockefeller had realized that he needed to create a foundation on a scale that dwarfed anything he had done so far, and he toyed with the idea of establishing a benevolent trust: “Let us erect a foundation, a trust, and engage directors who will make it a life work to manage, with our personal cooperation, this business of benevolence properly and effectively.” 4 Frederick Gates revived the idea in June 1906 when he wrote to Rockefeller, “I have lived with this great fortune of yours daily for fifteen years. To it, its increase and its uses, I have given every thought, until it has become a part of myself, almost as if it were my own.”5 Mustering all his rhetorical resources, Gates thundered, “Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche! You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows! If you do not, it will crush you and your children and your children’s children.”6 If Rockefeller did not act soon, Gates predicted, his heirs would dissipate their inheritances or become intoxicated with power. The solution he advanced was to set up “permanent corporate philanthropies for the good of mankind” that would give money to education, science, the arts, agriculture, religion, and even civic virtue. 7 These trusts would constitute something novel in American society: private money administered by competent trustees for the public weal. “These funds should be so large that to become a trustee of one of them would make a man at once a public character,” Gates explained. “They should be so large that their administration would be a matter of public concern, public inquiry, and public criticism.”8
The concept of charitable trusts was not invented by Rockefeller; Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Girard, and Peter Cooper had set up such trusts. What he brought to the concept was unprecedented scale and scope. As he contemplated the formation of a giant foundation in 1906, Margaret Olivia Sage, widow of financier Russell Sage, was about to establish a foundation to investigate the plight of working women and the social ills bred by modern life. Junior touted such philanthropies as the best way to advance the family’s favorite causes. To his father, he suggested that he create one trust to promote Christian civilization abroad, a second to do the like at home, and a third to supply money to the University of Chicago, the GEB, and the RIMR. These boards would be small by design and staffed by about five family members and Rockefeller insiders. However limited the vision behind this blueprint, it began to sketch the outlines of a new approach to philanthropy. Not surprisingly, the architect of Standard Oil favored the creation of a single mammoth foundation in which he would retain veto power. Once again, the scale of the Rockefeller fortune demanded that new forms be devised to administer it.
Afraid that a state charter for a Rockefeller Foundation could be repealed at the whim of an unfriendly state legislature, Junior and Gates aimed for a more prestigious federal charter for the new foundation, such as that received by the GEB in 1903. The Rockefellers waited until early 1908 to make their pitch in Washington, possibly hoping to capitalize upon the goodwill generated by Senior’s assistance in quelling the 1907 panic. By chance, on a train trip to golf in Augusta, Georgia, Rockefeller had encountered Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of South Carolina and unexpectedly charmed this critic. Junior was cheered by this serendipitous encounter: “Senator Tillman would formerly have been one of the leaders in antagonizing the bill. If he is favorable to it he could do more with the radicals than anyone else.” 9
On June 29, 1909, Rockefeller signed over 73,000 shares of Standard Oil of New Jersey, valued at $50 million, to three trustees: Junior, Gates, and Harold McCormick. This was supposed to be the first installment of an initial $100 million endowment for the projected Rockefeller Foundation. Getting the U.S. Senate to grant a charter for a tax-exempt foundation amid the tumult of the federal antitrust suit against Standard Oil proved a tricky proposition. Exactly how did legislators explain to their perplexed constituents that the ill-gotten gains now being exposed in court should be honored by a federal charter? Introduced in the Senate in March 1910, the charter bill threatened to stir up more public animosity against the Rockefellers than it assuaged. Only a week later, Standard Oil attorneys filed briefs with the Supreme Court in the antitrust appeal, mingling the two events in the public mind and putting the patently bad Rockefeller and the patently good Rockefeller on display side by side.
The charter traveled a rocky road in Congress. Following the pattern of Johns Hopkins, Rockefeller advocated a broad, unrestricted charter that would allow great flexibility. “Perpetuity is a long time,” he was fond of saying, and he did not wish to saddle future foundation executives with outmoded mandates.10 Gates thus enunciated a purposely vague mission for the Rockefeller Foundation: “to promote the well being of mankind throughout the world.”11 Critics were quick to allege that this nebulous charter gave the Rockefellers carte blanche to manipulate the foundation for their own ends. In fact, this open-ended quality was meant to free the proposed foundation from the influence of its founder. That it would be huge, global, and general—that its money could go anywhere and do anything—was the essence of its novelty. Many newspapers saw the vagueness, however, as a gauzy curtain behind which the evil wizard of Standard Oil could work his mischief. Others deplored the foundation as an elaborate publicity stunt to deodorize the Rockefeller name. In denouncing the charter, one paper called the projected organization a “gigantic philanthropy by which old Rockefeller expects to squeeze himself, his son, his stall-fed collegians and their camels, laden with tainted money, through the eye of the needle.”12
The charter scandalized Attorney General George W. Wickersham, who was entrusted with prosecuting Standard Oil. He protested to President Taft in February 1911.
The power which, under such bill, would be vested in and exercised by a small body of men, in absolute control of the income of $100,000,000 or more, to be expended for the general indefinite objects described in the bill, might be in the highest degree corrupt in its influence. . . . Is it, then, appropriate that, at the moment when the United States through its courts is seeking in a measure to destroy the great combination of wealth which has been built up by Mr. Rockefeller . . . the Congress of the United States should assist in the enactment of a law to create and perpetuate in his name an institution to hold and administer a large portion of this vast wealth?13
Taft granted the point. “I agree with your . . . characterization of the proposed act to incorporate John D. Rockefeller.”14
Yet Taft saved these barbs for internal consumption and struck a more conciliatory tone with the Rockefellers in person. On April 25, 1911, Senator Aldrich shepherded Junior and Abby to the White House for a top secret lunch with the president. While this meeting was later interpreted as a gauche effort to sway the Standard Oil case, it was concerned exclusively with the Rockefeller Foundation charter. Petrified that the press might get wind of this lunch, Taft insisted that his guests bypass the main door and enter through a side door of the east entrance. The visitors’ names were never recorded in guest books or mentioned by White House staff. Taft’s trusted aide, Archie Butt, was amused by the president’s discomfiture. “It is strange how men in public office shudder at the names of Aldrich and Rockefeller,” he reflected.15 Over lunch, Taft speculated that the foundation charter would pass only if held in abeyance until after settlement of the antitrust suit. Junior, heartened, left the luncheon feeling that the president had been “most agreeable and kindly.”16
To appease the public, the Rockefeller camp volunteered some extraordinary concessions, including offering to base the new foundation in the nation’s capital. When Gates ran into Taft at a Bryn Mawr College luncheon, the president suggested that he send along ideas about how to install safeguards in the plan. In a follow-up memo, Gates said that Congress could, at any time, limit how the foundation money was spent. As to fears that the Rockefellers would wield undue power, Gates said that Rockefeller intimates would make up only five or more members of a board of up to twenty-five people. Gates then made an extraordinary proposal: that all, or a majority, of the following people would have the power to veto board appointments: the president of the United States; the chief justice of the Supreme Court; the president of the Senate; the speaker of the House; and the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago.
Despite this almost unseemly eagerness to accommodate the government, the bill had a checkered career in Congress, even with Senator Aldrich’s high-powered patronage. It passed in the House then stalled in the Senate and kicked around, in various forms, for three years. After a point, legislators started to haggle with the Rockefellers, promising support only if certain foundation grants flowed to their districts. Aghast at this blackmail, Rockefeller asked his son in November 1911 whether it might not be better to seek a state charter. A federal charter, Junior rejoined, would be preferable, since states might require board members to live there, weakening the Rockefeller ties and holding them hostage to statehouse politics.
Nevertheless, the Rockefellers soon despaired of Washington and turned to New York State for a charter in 1913. Two years earlier, the state legislature had chartered the Carnegie Corporation, with a $125 million endowment. Now the Rockefeller charter was quickly approved with scarcely a whisper of protest. Between 1856 and 1909, Rockefeller had given $157.5 million for charitable purposes. Mindful of Gates’s admonition that his gifts must keep pace with his exploding wealth, Rockefeller gave $100 million to the Rockefeller Foundation in its first year, bolstered by another $82.8 million by 1919. In current dollars, that would translate into a $2 billion gift during the foundation’s inaugural decade. It also meant that by 1919 Rockefeller had already given away an amount roughly equal to the $350 million that Andrew Carnegie gave away in his entire lifetime; the titan would donate another $180 million before he died. Since his son gave away an additional $537 million directly and another $540 million through the Rockefeller philanthropies, Rockefeller far surpassed his great rival’s benefactions and must rank as the greatest philanthropist in American history.
By securing the Rockefeller Foundation charter in 1913, Rockefeller insulated a large portion of his wealth from inheritance taxes. That year also saw the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, which provided for the first federal income tax. Even though the top rate was only 6 percent to begin with, Rockefeller categorically denounced this innovation. “When a man has accumulated a sum of money, accumulated it within the law, the Government has no right to share in its earnings,” he complained to a reporter in 1914.17 As taxes became steeper and more progressive in the coming decades, it became a daunting task for any businessman to amass the money that Rockefeller had earned in a laissez-faire world devoid of antitrust laws. His own wealth, in fact, was the text for many sermons in favor of using taxation as a way to check the acquisition of huge fortunes, to redistribute wealth, and to reduce social tensions.
The birth of the Rockefeller Foundation coincided with the gradual retreat of Frederick T. Gates from Rockefeller’s business affairs after twenty years of tenacious attention. During the summer of 1909, the fifty-six-year-old Gates was suffering from nervous strain, likely from overwork, and wanted to spend more time with his wife and seven children. Around 1912, the once threadbare Minnesota preacher picked up at bargain prices twenty thousand acres of land near Hoffman, North Carolina, and set about growing cotton, corn, and oats and raising livestock on a thousand-acre farm with a peach orchard of seventeen thousand trees.
In August 1912, Gates tendered his resignation from the business side of the family office to devote himself solely to the philanthropies. Long reliant upon Gates’s sound judgment, Rockefeller tried to sweet-talk him into staying: “Shall we not, dear friend, continue along life’s pathway together, both of us recognizing the propriety for ourselves of increasing freedom from care, but, nevertheless, both continuing to give what time we wisely and appropriately can, to the large and important questions, old as well as new, which we find ourselves in a position to help to solve?” 18By November, Rockefeller had capitulated and accepted his resignation. For the next five years, Gates chaired the GEB but ceased to draw a regular salary and performed only sporadic business missions for Rockefeller. For all his panegyrics about Rockefeller’s wisdom, Gates had some private grievances and was irked by what he saw as his skimpy compensation; the value of his services had been a sore point with him ever since the 1901 Mesabi-ore sale to U.S. Steel. In 1915, Gates undertook a long, tortuous negotiation for Rockefeller with the Consolidation Coal Company; afterward, he rejected as too meager Rockefeller’s $25,000 in compensation and held out for $60,000.
Although Gates had been the visionary behind the Rockefeller Foundation, he now became just one of nine trustees. When the foundation held its first meeting at 26 Broadway on May 19, 1913, Junior was elected president. He invited his father to attend but knew he would decline. Nominally a trustee for ten years, Rockefeller followed his usual practice and never sat in on a single meeting. He was now receding to a more distant supervisory role with his philanthropies and yielding more power to his son, although he never surrendered his veto power. Perhaps the congressional donnybrook over the foundation charter reminded him of the value of keeping a salutary distance from his foundations. Or perhaps it was just age.
Several features of the new foundation mocked the idea that it was a public trust and suggested instead a closely guarded Rockefeller preserve. Its governing structure conjured up a holding company for existing Rockefeller philanthropies instead of the autonomous operation once promised so fervently to Congress. Of the nine trustees, two were family members (Senior and Junior), three were staffers (Gates, Starr Murphy, and Charles O. Heydt, Junior’s secretary), and four came from Rockefeller philanthropies (Simon Flexner and Jerome Greene from the RIMR, Harry Pratt Judson from the University of Chicago, and Wickliffe Rose from the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission). The Rockefeller philanthropies remained a self-contained universe, with the same faces rotated among the various boards.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s claim to autonomy was also undercut by Rockefeller’s retention of the right to allocate $2 million of its income yearly. Until this practice was abolished in 1917, these founder’s designations constituted up to a third of all grants and financed several of Senior’s pet projects, from Baptist missionary work to the Eugenics Record Office of Charles B. Davenport. In retrospect, Congress, by denying a charter to the foundation, had forfeited a chance to restrict Rockefeller’s influence over his money.
As for the recipients of grants, buffeted by the uproar over the federal charter, the Rockefeller Foundation refrained from anything that smacked of controversy. Having had more than enough public criticism, the Rockefellers wanted everything to be simon-pure. Like the family’s other philanthropies, the Rockefeller Foundation was attuned to the optimistic, rational spirit of the Progressive era and drew on its new class of technocrats. (Woodrow Wilson, a political scientist, had been elected to the White House in 1912.) Science would be the magic wand waved over any project to show that it was sound and objective, free of favoritism or self-interest. For a long time, the Rockefeller Foundation shunned the humanities, social sciences, and the arts as areas too subjective or fraught with political peril. In 1917, when advising his father to pump another fifty million dollars into the RIMR, Junior explained his preference for medicine: “This is a field in which there can be no controversy, so that I think the possibility of criticism as regards the use of the fund or its potential dangers would be almost nothing. There is no limit to the development of medical work.”19
In its first decade, the Rockefeller Foundation focused on public health and medical education both at home and abroad. As founder of one of the first multinational corporations, Rockefeller applauded the unique global range of his new philanthropy, a feature that would always distinguish it. In its maiden action in June 1913, the new board decided to take the superb work of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission’s antihookworm campaign and apply it around the globe. To accomplish this, it created a new International Health Commission under the leadership of Wickliffe Rose, who exported his campaign to fifty-two countries on six continents, treating millions of people.
In the future, Rose would engage in battles to subdue malaria, tuberculosis, typhus, scarlet fever, and other scourges, but he registered his most spectacular success with yellow fever, once tagged “the terror of the Western Hemisphere.” During the Spanish-American War, Major Walter Reed had shown that mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever, knowledge used by Colonel W. C. Gorgas to control the disease in Panama during the building of the canal through mosquito-infested jungles. Touring the Far East in 1914, Rose heard fears from public-health officials that a fresh outbreak of yellow fever could result from ships passing through the new canal. Back in the United States, Rose consulted Colonel Gorgas, who asserted that yellow fever could be “eradicated within a reasonable time and at a reasonable cost” if a systematic campaign was mounted to stamp out seedbeds in the Western Hemisphere.20 Hired by Rose to accomplish just that, Gorgas achieved such triumphant results that the disease was nearly wiped out in South and Central America by the late 1920s. When it flared up again, the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a team of scientists to develop and manufacture a vaccine to fight it, a dramatic effort that yielded a vaccine by 1937 but also claimed the lives of six researchers, who contracted the disease. Millions of doses of the vaccine were distributed worldwide and saved innumerable American soldiers during World War II.
These moving crusades to eliminate infectious diseases generated one troubling afterthought: What if these diseases returned for lack of trained government personnel in the affected areas? It soon became evident that the best way to safeguard Rose’s work was to assist governments in establishing public-health machinery. It was an auspicious moment for such an approach, for pure science had now begun to outstrip applied medicine, which meant that enormous gains could be made simply by implementing existing knowledge. With this in mind, the Rockefeller Foundation gave six million dollars to Johns Hopkins for a new school of hygiene and public health that opened in 1918, a newfangled institution to train public-health professionals in such emerging disciplines as sanitary engineering, epidemiology, and biostatistics. In 1921, the foundation made a similar gift to Harvard to start a public-health school and finally spent twenty-five million dollars to create such schools from Calcutta to Copenhagen, along with numerous fellowship programs. Through its catalytic role, the Rockefeller Foundation played an integral part in the rise of American medicine to the pinnacle of world leadership.
While Rockefeller Foundation largesse was distributed across many continents, China was a special beneficiary, receiving more money than any country except the United States. As Rockefeller scaled back involvement with the University of Chicago in 1909, Gates fancied that they might replicate this feat with a great Chinese university. Like many Baptists of his era, Rockefeller was interested in China because of the extensive missionary efforts there. Though the political unrest in China gave him pause, Gates sent a study mission there to investigate. Two groups stoutly opposed the project: local Christian missionaries, who feared the heathenish secularism of the proposed university, and government officials, who feared foreign subversion. So the interest in China turned to that old Rockefeller standby: medicine. In 1915, the Rockefeller Foundation set up the China Medical Board, which constructed the Peking Union Medical College and opened it in 1921. One of Rockefeller’s most ambitious projects, the medical complex contained fifty-nine buildings, roofed with jade-green tiles (it would be dubbed the Green City) scattered across a twenty-nine-acre site. Later nationalized by the Communists, the school introduced a generation of Chinese doctors to modern medicine.
By the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation was the largest grant-making foundation on earth and America’s leading sponsor of medical science, medical education, and public health. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., had established himself as the greatest lay benefactor of medicine in history. Of the $530 million he gave away during his lifetime, $450 million went directly or indirectly into medicine. He had dealt a mortal blow to the primitive world of nineteenth-century medicine in which patent-medicine vendors such as Doc Rockefeller had flourished. He had also effected a revolution in philanthropy perhaps no less far-reaching than his business innovations. Before Rockefeller came along, rich benefactors had tended to promote pet institutions (symphony orchestras, art museums, or schools) or to bequeath buildings (hospitals, dormitories, orphanages) that bore their names and attested to their magnanimity. Rockefeller’s philanthropy was more oriented toward the creation of knowledge, and if it seemed more impersonal, it was also far more pervasive in its effect.