CHAPTER 31

Confessional

If Rockefeller gave way to many lonely moments after Cettie’s death, he was also liberated from the marathon ordeal of her illness. In the coming years, even as his shrunken frame grew spindly, he seemed lighter and more ebullient, more Bill’s son than Eliza’s. Though he lived a solitary life in many ways—Cettie and Bessie were dead, Edith was in Switzerland or Chicago, Alta was often at her Mount Hope farm, and Junior was busy disposing of his fortune—he assembled a substitute family around him.

Until her death in 1920, his prim, precise sister-in-law Lute pitched in as his hostess. But the most enduring presence after Cettie’s death was the buxom Fanny Evans, Rockefeller’s cousin from Strongsville, Ohio, who served as his housekeeper and companion. Rockefeller engaged in wry banter with Evans, who was thirty years his junior. As they sat at opposite ends of the dinner table, Rockefeller took a wicked old man’s delight in both ribbing and flattering her. “I am constantly calling her an angel to her face,” he told his son, “which causes her to throw up both hands and register somewhat of incredulity.”¹ They saluted each other as “Mr. Rockefeller” and “Mrs. Evans,” though he sometimes called her Aunt Fanny. They conspired in the fiction that he had to submit to her tyranny because she governed his social calendar—a useful device for getting rid of people who stayed too long. Among the supporting actors was the smartly attired Swiss valet, John Yordi, who did everything from overseeing his master’s diet to entertaining him on the organ. (He specialized in hymns, of course.) Invested with dictatorial powers, Yordi was authorized to stop Rockefeller from engaging in anything too strenuous.

After all the agonizing effort expended by Junior and Abby on Kykuit, John and Cettie spent little time there. Cettie died soon after the renovation was complete, while he preferred his Lakewood hideout in the spring and Florida in the winter. His romance with the southern latitudes blossomed during his February golf vacations in Augusta, Georgia, where he could hop a trolley car or wander the streets without bodyguards. For all of Pocantico’s magnificence, he felt caged and cut off from the outer world there, held hostage by his wealth. Had he not gotten too chilly on the golf course each morning, he might have selected Augusta for his winter home. When a friend then sent euphoric letters extolling the climate of Seabreeze, Florida, Rockefeller contacted the U.S. Weather Bureau and ascertained that Seabreeze regularly soaked up more winter sunshine than Augusta. Since this would extend his golf season, he made an exploratory trip there with Dr. Biggar in 1913 and found the weather just splendid. Rockefeller spent several winters at the nearby Ormond Beach Hotel, created by Henry Flagler, taking up a whole floor with his entourage, and then finally bought a house in Ormond Beach in September 1918. One must note a small irony. For years, Flagler had begged him to come to Florida, but only after Flagler’s death in 1913 did Rockefeller regularly visit the state, again suggesting his tacit disapproval of his friend’s divorce and ostentation in later years.

As he aged, Rockefeller felt the tug of his Puritan roots and made a fetish of simplicity. “I am convinced that we want to study more and more not to enslave ourselves to things and get down more nearly to the Benjamin Franklin idea of living, and take our bowl of porridge on a table without any table cloth,” he wrote.² At Ormond Beach, a popular resort sprinkled with hotels, Rockefeller tried to return to comparatively humble living. He settled on a three-story, gray-shingled house across from the Ormond Beach Hotel that was called The Casements in tribute to its awning-covered windows. Afraid that the price would soar exorbitantly if his interest was known, he had an associate purchase it, and he took up winter residence there starting in early 1919. Simply furnished, the house was shaded by towering palms and had well-tended terraces sloping down to the Halifax River, an ocean inlet that paralleled the beach. Unassuming by Rockefeller standards, the house had eleven guest bedrooms to handle his growing brood of descendants, though it never teemed with as many family members as Rockefeller had hoped. Showing his old love of tinkering with houses, he would grab a walking stick and outline additions to the house in the wet sand or make quick sketches with a stubby pencil. A veteran sun worshiper, he installed an enclosed sunporch, which enabled tourists to view him, like some American waxwork, sitting inside. Most of all, he wanted to flood the place with music and furnished the house with a Steinway piano, a Victrola, and a lovely church organ. “I reverence a man who composes music,” he once exclaimed after listening to the music of Richard Wagner. “It is a marvelous gift.” ³

Rockefeller liked to welcome visitors while sitting in Eliza’s old rocking chair. The Casements had no guards or gatehouse, just a protective hedge, and reporters constantly marveled at its apparent lack of security. “It would have been the easiest thing possible for a Corsican to slip a stiletto into [Rockefeller’s] side any minute,” said one local reporter. ⁴ Though the house was not quite as unguarded as it looked—two watchmen stayed inside and another two patrolled the grounds, while Yordi also acted as a bodyguard—Rockefeller strolled around the town unattended, a geezer wrapped in a scarf and tweed cap on cool days. One day, a small boy called out to him, “Hello John D.,” and Rockefeller commented, “It would have been nicer if he had said, ‘Hello Neighbor John.’ ” ⁵ The townspeople thereafter catered to him by calling him Neighbor John, an honorary title that he cherished. As one reporter wrote, “At Ormond he is looked upon somewhat in the aspect of an idolized old mayor, or school teacher, or even minister.”⁶ He often motored the six miles to Daytona Beach, where he sat in a hooded white wicker chair, curtained from sun and breeze, watching racing cars speed over hard-packed sand.

Rockefeller indulged his two consuming pastimes: God and golf. Each Sunday morning, he donned a black derby and cutaway coat and attended the nondenominational Ormond Union Church, where he sat erect in a pew midway up the aisle, belting out hymns with gusto. Afterward, he lingered ouside the church, courteously greeting fellow worshipers and passersby. He always trusted the citizens of Ormond Beach and mingled freely with them. Once a year, he deftly slipped into the pastor’s hands an envelope that contained a check covering both his salary and church operations for the year.

At Ormond Beach, Rockefeller for the first time developed true friends, not just golf cronies or acquaintances. He was belatedly learning to live more fully, more freely, than ever before. His most frequent companion was the ancient Civil War general Adelbert Ames, a ramrod-stiff West Pointer who had been wounded at Bull Run, served as a Mississippi governor during Reconstruction, and returned to battle as a volunteer brigadier general during the Spanish-American War. On the golf course, Ames, who was four years older than Rockefeller, was amused by the petty economies practiced by his thrifty friend. Around water holes, Rockefeller insisted that they switch to old golf balls and marveled at profligate players who used new balls in these treacherous places. “They must be very rich!” he told Ames. ⁷

Often in a lighthearted mood at Ormond Beach, Rockefeller did not mind mugging for newsreel cameras when celebrities made courtesy calls. Henry Ford dropped by without an appointment and was informed that Rockefeller appeared at the public golf course at exactly twelve minutes past twelve each day. The two men met and clasped hands at that precise instant. Ford was struck by Rockefeller’s calm, leathery face and keenly observant eyes. “As soon as I saw his face I knew what had made the Standard Oil Company,” he said.⁸

Rockefeller was also visited by humorist Will Rogers, whose dry, folksy quips were not unlike Rockefeller’s own. Rogers had breakfast at The Casements twice, followed by golf. When Rockefeller gave him a souvenir dime, Rogers replied, “You know, after the company this little dime has been keepin’, I’m afraid it’s gonna be plumb lonesome in my pocket.” ⁹ And when Rockefeller beat him at golf, Rogers said, “I’m glad you beat me, John. The last time you were beaten, I noticed the price of gasoline went up two cents a gallon.”¹⁰ That Rogers dared to joke about such matters—and that Rockefeller dared to throw back his head with laughter—says much about his growing relaxation. The fearsome corporate outlaw was fast becoming a beloved old storybook figure, a certified American character, and his more cheerful mood reflected that.

On Sunday evenings, resplendent in a well-tailored tuxedo, Rockefeller attended the weekly concerts at the Ormond Beach Hotel and often invited visiting divas such as Mary Garden to join him for golf the next morning. With Cettie gone, he could play the gallant openly and liked to disappear with his new lady friends for long afternoon drives.

Benjamin Franklin once observed, “I believe long habits of virtue have a sensible effect on the countenance,” and Rockefeller’s nature became engraved in his aging face. The finely wrinkled, papery flesh told of frugality, the steady gaze of resolute purpose, the masklike face of cunning and craft. He was an ideal subject for a portrait artist, but for a long time he betrayed an ascetic distaste for personal representation. Junior and Abby admired portraits of the Widener family executed by John Singer Sargent, and in 1916 they suggested to Rockefeller that they hire Sargent for five portraits—three of John senior, one of Junior, and one of Abby. The bookkeeper in Rockefeller promptly asserted itself. “What about Kohlbach?” he asked. “The price seems very, very high, but I am willing to consider this question further with you.”¹¹ Junior noted that Sargent, who had studied in Florence and Paris and was the son of expatriate American painters, was possibly the greatest living portrait painter and that Kohlbach, a minor figure, was not in his league. For his part, Sargent was reluctant to do the great man—he was tired of portraits and wanted to devote more time to watercolors—and consented at first only as a favor to Junior.

When the sixty-one-year-old Sargent began to paint Rockefeller at Ormond Beach in March 1917, he discarded the stereotypical images. Instead of painting him in somber business black, he captured him in a casually elegant mood, wearing a blue serge jacket with a white vest and slacks. The face was thin but not yet gaunt, the eyes pensive, and the pose softer and more relaxed than in Eastman Johnson’s 1895 painting. By setting Rockefeller against an unadorned backdrop, Sargent stressed his simplicity rather than his royal wealth. Rockefeller was so pleased that he sat for a second portrait at Pocantico. Sargent found Rockefeller highly evocative and reminiscent of strong-willed figures in ecclesiastical history: “He seemed to me most like an old medieval saint with a great deal of intellect. . . . I was struck first of all by his thoroughbred appearance, the fineness of his type, the fine, keen ascetic type, one might say, and his expression of benevolence.”¹² The two men talked about the brickbats flung at Rockefeller over the years, and Sargent said that while Rockefeller felt their injustice keenly, he had attained a state of philosophic resignation.

Sargent recommended that Rockefeller hire the sculptor Paul Manship, and they, too, developed an easy working relationship. At Lakewood and Pocantico, while Manship chipped away, Rockefeller diverted him with tales of his career and explained the heavenly sanction behind his wealth. “He would repeat to me several times how he considered the fortune that he had acquired as having been given to him as a responsibility, that he must not do with it except for the good of man.”¹³ Drawn to the busts of Roman emperors and Renaissance potentates, Manship also saw in Rockefeller the simple but august power of old Vatican prelates. “He struck me as being an extraordinary man, and I would say to myself, ‘If he’d lived in the Middle Ages, he’d have been Pope at Rome.’ You know, he had that kind of intensity and concentration and with his Baptist upbringing and intensity of belief and his genius, his power, I felt sure that would have been the case.” Manship executed two busts of Rockefeller. In one, the titan seems a saintly figure, thin face upturned, eyes lifted meekly heavenward—a highly unusual bust for a magnate. And in the second bust, Manship sculpted Rockefeller’s harder look, face stern and lips tightly compressed. The two sculptures side by side form a composite portrait of Rockefeller, forever torn between heaven and earth, earthly gain and eternal salvation.

As he loosened up in his later years, Rockefeller showed a real aptitude for image-making. His great brainstorm was undoubtedly his decision to dispense shiny souvenir dimes to adults and nickels to children as he moved about. On his morning rounds, Rockefeller dispensed dimes to household employees or caddies on the golf course. Contrary to myth, it was Rockefeller, not Ivy Lee, who dreamed up this gimmick. Lee’s signal contribution was to get him to make this private practice a public trademark.

Rockefeller added his own symbolism to the coin distribution. He delivered brief sermons along with the coins, exhorting small children to work hard and be frugal if they wanted a fortune; the coins were for savings, not indulgence. “I think it is easier to remember a lesson when we have some token to recall it by, something we can look at which reminds us of the idea,” he remarked.¹⁴ He informed children that the nickel represented a year’s interest on a dollar. For someone of Rockefeller’s sententious nature, this was a very comfortable persona to adopt.

When he ventured forth in public, Rockefeller often had one pocket bulging with nickels, the other with dimes, while the faithful Yordi carried a backup mint. It has been estimated that Rockefeller distributed between 20,000 and 30,000 coins, and many recipients cherished these mementos, wove them into amulets, or displayed them at home. Because he hated signing autographs, which he thought a stupid custom, and was often ill at ease in public, the dimes gave him a handy ritual to smooth his dealings with strangers and enabled him to hide behind banalities. His grandson David noted, “Here was a means of quickly establishing a basis of conversation and rapport with people he saw, which he enjoyed.”¹⁵

Rockefeller devised myriad uses for the dimes. Whenever somebody excelled at golf, out popped a dime. When Harvey Firestone slipped in a long, tricky putt, Rockefeller stepped over merrily, coin in hand. “Beautiful! Beautiful! That’s worth a dime.”¹⁶ Dimes were given for well-told tales at dinner. If somebody spilled something, Rockefeller poured dimes over the stains as a tip for the person who mopped it up. Sometimes, he teased people by holding back the dime or dropping a horse chestnut into their palms instead, telling them it was good for rheumatism. Old newsreels capture Rockefeller handing out dimes in papal fashion, saying in a reedy voice, “Bless you! Bless you!” as if dispensing communion wafers.

By the time Ivy Lee appeared, Rockefeller had become, implausibly, the darling of feature writers, who found him colorful and easy to dramatize. Lee ensured that the coverage remained understated and devoid of unseemly self-promotion. He perpetuated the policy of letting recipients announce large gifts from Rockefeller and was scrupulous that the titan not play favorites or grant an exclusive interview to one paper that might antagonize another. Such trust did Lee develop with the press corps that many reporters let him vet their stories for accuracy, permitting a more controlled portrait of Rockefeller. Nevertheless, Rockefeller retained a healthy skepticism about the press, and his new openness was largely a cosmetic adaptation of a basically suspicious nature. As one newspaper observed, “So averse is Mr. Rockefeller to being quoted, even indirectly, on public questions that he does not discuss such subjects even with friends, and it is an unwritten rule that guests content themselves with anecdotes and small talk.”¹⁷

If Ivy Lee enjoyed excellent rapport with Rockefeller, it was because he understood his operating style. He saw Rockefeller as a man of superior judgment who was far more adept in reacting to ideas than in initiating them. Whenever Lee laid any proposal before Rockefeller, he was required to list all opposing arguments. Faced with two sides of any question, according to Lee, Rockefeller had an unerring ability to make the right choice.

Encouraged by their ability to shape public opinion after Ludlow, Junior and Lee dusted off the long-dormant idea of an authorized biography of Senior. For Junior, refurbishing the family image was complicated by the fact that he did not know what had happened at Standard Oil and took his father’s integrity as an article of faith. When talking about the infamous South Improvement Company, Rockefeller made this startling confession in the 1910s: “Most of what my son knows of this situation is his memory of what he has read in [Ida Tarbell’s] book, with only here and there a statement of fact by me.” ¹⁸ That Junior had been kept ignorant of such critical matters might have been one reason that Rockefeller agreed to undertake the three-year interview with William O. Inglis. As Rockefeller told Inglis, “I have gone into it because my son, very conscientious, has heard all this talk and cannot answer it himself and wants to have all the facts at hand.” ¹⁹ The Rockefeller family had long been riddled by strange silences, especially about Standard Oil. Among other things, Inglis asked Rockefeller all the sensitive questions that Junior had never dared to pose himself.

With Rockefeller serenely confident about his place in history, Junior and Lee knew they would have to ease him by imperceptible degrees into any biographical project. In early 1915, Lee approached his old friend Inglis, a genial New York World editor who often golfed with celebrities and then published appreciative profiles about them. The Brooklyn-born Inglis wrote sports and feature stories, had an agile style, and was sufficiently malleable to toe the Rockefeller line. At first, Rockefeller refused to golf with him, even though Lee assured him that “you can be sure that anything he writes will be absolutely friendly.”²⁰ When this gambit did not work, Lee wrote to Rockefeller later in the year, “He would print nothing at all that he did not let us see in advance of publication.” ²¹Rockefeller at last acquiesced, and Inglis produced, as expected, an admiring story.

In May 1917, a month after the U.S. entry into World War I, Rockefeller invited the newsman to golf at Forest Hill but did not commit himself to a biography. Inglis found him a bit more stooped and wrinkled but sunburned and radiating an air of command. He was amazed when Rockefeller announced out of the blue, “We shall not take up anything controversial. A great deal of mud has been thrown at me in the past. Much of it has dried and fallen off since then. To take up those questions now would only revive bitter controversy.” ²² For the next six weeks, Rockefeller golfed with Inglis and recounted innocent boyhood memories in a noncommittal fashion. At the end of this probationary period, Rockefeller agreed to sit for an unprecedented, open-ended private interview. “You have won the old gentleman’s confidence by keeping quiet,” Lee told Inglis, “and now you can go down to Lakewood and ask him any questions you like.”²³ If Flagler had not died in 1913 and Archbold in December 1916, Rockefeller might well have declined this chance to talk, for the proposed biography would violate their policy of never responding to critics. As Rockefeller told Inglis, “If my old associates, Mr. Flagler and others, were here, they’d say, ‘Why, John, what’s come over you?—wasting your time like this!’ ”²⁴

Between November 1, 1917, and December 13, 1920, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, Inglis interviewed Rockefeller for approximately an hour each day, usually before breakfast or golf. (At one point, Rockefeller cooled on the project, which lapsed from July 1919 to November 1920.) Trailing Rockefeller from estate to estate, Inglis extracted a verbatim transcript of 480,000 words from his taciturn subject. His method was quite unusual. He would read aloud portions from Lloyd and Tarbell—both of whom Rockefeller professed never to have read—then record Rockefeller’s responses. With his usual conservation of energy, Rockefeller often reclined on a lounge, shut his eyes, and seemed inert as Inglis read a passage; just when Inglis thought he was fast asleep, his eyes would pop open and he would deliver an exact response to the selection. Inglis also roamed about upstate New York and Cleveland, gathering anecdotes about Rockefeller from his boyhood haunts of Richford, Moravia, Owego, Strongsville, and Cleveland.

At first, Rockefeller regarded the interview as a private record for the family archive, but he was galvanized as he articulated, for the first time, his own defense. By March 1918, Inglis reported this change to Lee: “He says that he now feels it his duty, no less to his family than to himself, to put on record the truth about so many incidents which have been falsely reported.”²⁵ The daily exploration transported Rockefeller back to his glory days. One morning, he told Inglis of a dream he had had: “I was back again in the harness, desperately in earnest and hard at work in the endeavor to meet embarrassing situations, to overcome the difficulties.”²⁶

Junior was relieved by his father’s enthusiasm. “I had never even dreamed of your pursuing the matter with the persistence and continuity of which Mr. Inglis writes,” Junior told his father. “I thank you a thousand times for what you are doing.”²⁷ It tells much about Junior’s underlying motivation and insecurity that he specifically asked Inglis to quiz Senior about Ida Tarbell. “To be able to take the words out of her own mouth and prove the case against her is of the utmost value,” Junior instructed him.²⁸ In responding to Tarbell, Rockefeller alternated between biting criticism and his express desire to avoid unpleasantness. “But let us avoid anything controversial,” he told Inglis. “We don’t want to start another set of Tarbells and such people with their slanders.”²⁹ The Rockefeller that emerges from this transcript is alternately wry and genial, fiery and sardonic. An articulate man, he had worked out elaborate justifications for his actions that he had never shared with anyone, the vital inner reflections in which he reconciled his business and religious beliefs. The interview shows the extraordinary energy he invested in rationalizing those actions and forging exculpatory positions. If he felt no need to explain himself to the public, he had a powerful need to justify his behavior to himself. With Inglis, Rockefeller delivered an extended defense of trusts probably unique among those who created them. Yet even in this confession-box setting, Rockefeller was often voluble rather than candid; the habit of secrecy was too deeply ingrained. He voiced no regrets about his anticompetitive practices and seemed incapable of true self-criticism. To hear Rockefeller tell it, Standard Oil was now a beloved organization, worshiped by the masses for bringing them cheap oil. “It is conceded today that the whole performance from beginning to end was one of the most remarkable, if not indeed the most remarkable, in the annals of commercial undertakings of all times.”³⁰ Never once in the three-year interview did Rockefeller refer to the 1911 dismemberment, and he bizarrely talked of Standard Oil as if the trust still existed. When Inglis volunteered to read aloud the 1911 Supreme Court opinion, Rockefeller declined. “No; I have never heard the decision read. I shirked it; left it to the lawyers.” ³¹

Throughout the interview, Rockefeller contended that cooperation had triumphed over competition in American life—which might sound odd coming so soon after both the 1914 passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act—which outlawed unfair trade practices, such as interlocking directorates—and the 1915 creation of the Federal Trade Commission, which policed anticompetitive measures and enshrined competition as the central tenet of American economic life. But lest it seem that Rockefeller had succumbed entirely to self-delusion, we must recall that the Inglis interview commenced shortly after the United States entered World War I. In a reversal of past antitrust policy, the government urged the Standard Oil companies to pool their efforts, leading Rockefeller to gloat that “the Government itself has adopted the views [that the Standard Oil leaders] have held all these years, and notwithstanding the Sherman law and all the talk on the other side, the Government itself has gone further than any of these organizations dreamt of going.” ³² In February 1918, an Inter-Allied Petroleum Conference was created to coordinate oil supplies, and Standard Oil of New Jersey, which provided one-fourth of all Allied oil needs, worked closely with its bitter rival, Royal Dutch/Shell. Oil’s strategic importance was now universally recognized, and 80 percent of that oil came from American companies. When Lord Curzon, a member of the British war cabinet, rose at a postwar dinner in London and stated, “The Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil,” Rockefeller was elated, certain that his own pioneering work in the field had contributed materially to the victory.³³ In all, Rockefeller gave $70 million to the war cause, including $22 million from the Rockefeller Foundation to rescue Belgium from famine after the German invasion, and his generosity elicited loud hosannas from a once wary public. For Rockefeller, Germany’s defeat signified nothing less than God’s final blessing on Standard Oil. “There must have been a Providence ruling over these aggregations of great funds which have been used with such conspicuous benefit in helping to liberate the world from the bondage of the arbitrary military power which was threatening to crush out the liberties of mankind everywhere.”³⁴

So the general backdrop to the Inglis interview must have strengthened Rockefeller’s confidence in his own rectitude. As Inglis waded through Lloyd and Tarbell, Rockefeller pounced on many errors but also listened to many long passages in silence, tacitly acknowledging their truth. As if unable to mouth the names Lloyd and Tarbell, he would refer mockingly to “the distinguished historian” or some other scornful description. He saw Lloyd as reckless, hysterical, and inaccurate. “Tarbell is much more dangerous,” he said. “She makes a pretence of fairness, of the judicial attitude, and beneath that pretence she slips into her ‘history’ all sorts of evil and prejudicial stuff.”³⁵ He largely responded to her charges with ad hominem attacks, dripping with a fair amount of male chauvinism. “Like some women, she distorts facts, states as facts what she must know is untrue, and utterly disregards reason.”³⁶ At first, Rockefeller noted how Tarbell would praise him to establish the credibility of her subsequent criticism, yet as the interview progressed, he had to concede that her impartiality was not just a pose. “Say, I’m amazed at her writing, all the time!” he exclaimed at one point. “There’s so much in it favorable to the Standard Oil Company. What with all her prejudices . . . it is really surprising that she would be willing to speak so favorably and give so much credit to the Standard Oil Company and its leaders.” ³⁷ Without citing a shred of evidence, he manufactured a cockeyed fantasy that Ida Tarbell was now tortured by guilt for having defamed him. “And if she could only cause the general public to forget what she said and the venomous way she said it, would she not live a more peaceful life, and wouldn’t she die a more peaceful death? Peace to her ashes!”³⁸

Though Rockefeller tried to sound statesmanlike, his anger leaked out around the edges. Even though the Lloyd and Tarbell exposés had led to the breakup of Standard Oil, he insisted of these critics that “their writing fell flat and proved a boomerang to them.”³⁹The more he talked, the more bottled venom surfaced, until he was spewing hatred at “socialists and anarchists” who dared to attack him. “They are a stench today in the nostrils of all honest men and women. They are a poison; and I would have them go and colonize and live out their theories and eat one another up; for they produce nothing, and they subsist as suckers on what honest men, frugal and industrious, produce.”⁴⁰ This was a voice that Rockefeller’s family and closest confidants never heard—the raw, uncensored Rockefeller who had been so carefully muzzled by the Christian Rockefeller. In the last analysis, the Inglis interview was a talking cure as the titan dredged up buried pain whose existence he had long denied. He was not a Christian martyr but a man with a very human vulnerability and an understandable need for catharsis.

Inglis was taken in by Rockefeller’s charade of candor. Instead of engaging in extemporaneous discussion, Inglis stuck to the safe, prescribed format of reading from Lloyd and Tarbell then recording the responses verbatim. He expressed no discernible desire to examine Standard Oil files or Rockefeller papers and lazily received most of the history through the filter of Rockefeller’s memory. Though he interviewed many relatives and business associates, they knew that he had been sent by Rockefeller, and, not surprisingly, they tended to remember him in a rosy glow.

Junior soon saw that Inglis was being seduced by the easy life on the Rockefeller estates and would be tempted to prolong his work. Inglis later admitted that he had been lulled by the narcotic power of his boss’s monotonous but pleasant daily routine. Finally, in early 1924, after seven years of work, Inglis finished his biography, which presented a sanitized, adulatory version of Rockefeller’s life. Junior had the good sense to circulate it to reliable judges, including William Allen White, the Kansas newspaper editor, and George Vincent, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, both of whom delivered a damning verdict. White said it was “too toadying and reverential” and advised the Rockefellers not to publish it.⁴¹

Following a suggestion from Ivy Lee, Junior naively rushed the manuscript over to Ida Tarbell in her apartment on Gramercy Park in Manhattan. They had worked together at an industrial conference arranged by President Wilson in 1919 and developed a cordial relationship. “Personally I liked her very much,” Junior said, “although I was never much of an admirer of her book.” ⁴² Tarbell reciprocated this fondness, telling a friend, “I believe there is no man in public life or in business in our country who holds more closely to his ideals than does John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In fact, I will go so far as to say I do not know of any father who had given better guidance to a son than has John D. Rockefeller.”⁴³ Over the years, Tarbell had become more conservative and sympathetic to business—in 1925, she published a laudatory biography of Judge Elbert H. Gary of U.S. Steel—yet she found the Inglis biography evasive and one-sided and recommended that it be shelved. With immense disappointment, Junior consigned the manuscript to the Rockefeller archives forever.

An unusually ebullient John D. Rockefeller, Jr., returns from Europe aboard the S. S. Mauretania, December 1925. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)