CHAPTER 33

Past, Present, Future

Blessed with his father’s longevity, Rockefeller outlasted all his sib-lings. Though Frank was vice president of two Cleveland steel companies in his later years, he never got over his antipathy to John and raged against him till his dying day. In 1916, John gave a thousand dollars apiece to Frank’s three daughters and contemplated forming trust funds to provide each of them with a lifetime income. Nevertheless, even on his deathbed, following a stroke in early 1917, Frank still ranted against his oldest brother. “I was with him constantly and was there when he died,” said one of Frank’s friends. “You can understand the depth of his feeling when I say that his greatest fear during those last days was that John might try to come and see him.”¹ After Frank died in April 1917, John and William attended the Cleveland funeral at Lake View Cemetery, where Frank was lowered into the plot he had chosen apart from the rest of the Rockefellers. Frank’s wife, Helen, and his three daughters had no plans to perpetuate his crazy vendetta and after the funeral cordially received John, who canceled his dead brother’s outstanding loans.

In his last twenty years, Rockefeller felt the subterranean pull of tender boyhood memories. In June 1919, right before his eightieth birthday, he and William loaded up three Crane-Simplex touring cars and set out for the verdant Finger Lakes region of their boyhood. They returned to Richford, Moravia, and Owego and so cherished the memories that they reenacted the trip every year until William’s death in 1922. The Moravia house, with its splendid view of Owasco Lake, now lodged convicts from the Auburn prison who were working, by a bizarre coincidence, on the nearby Rockefeller Highway. On Rockefeller’s last visit, gazing at the old frame house, he doffed his cap, bowed his head, and declaimed with an actor’s panache, “Farewell old home!”² Several days later came news reports that the house had burned to the ground, probably from a faulty chimney. Affected by the news, Rockefeller jotted down in a short-lived diary that he kept, “That was the scene of our first business venture, when we engaged in the raising of a flock of turkeys.”³ He had traveled so unimaginably far beyond his rustic boyhood world that his life seemed unreal to him at times.

In June 1922, following one of these upstate jaunts, William Rockefeller consulted doctors about his problems with a raspy throat and was diagnosed as having throat cancer. In this weakened state, he decided to canter briskly through Central Park one day, contracted pneumonia, and died shortly afterward. In a letter to Henry Clay Folger, Rockefeller eulogized his brother as a “strong, resourceful, kindly man.”⁴ Though always overshadowed by John, William left a sizable fortune of about $200 million ($1.8 billion today), eclipsing the estates of Payne Whitney and Thomas Fortune Ryan. Yet aside from a million-dollar gift for war relief, William had shown no charitable impulses, even though John had pleaded with him to endow educational or medical projects. Virtually all of William’s estate went to his four children: Emma Rockefeller McAlpin, William Goodsell Rockefeller, Percy Avery Rockefeller, and Ethel Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge.

By 1922, Rockefeller had lost his parents, his four brothers and sisters, his wife, his eldest daughter, two grandchildren, and the vast majority of his old business partners. As he wistfully told Henry Clay Folger, “The ranks of the older associates are thinning out and we of the Old Guard naturally draw closer together.”⁵ He understandably dwelled on his own mortality. In July 1919, on his eightieth birthday, Junior wanted to give him a Rolls-Royce, but he asked how much it would cost and took the $14,000 check instead. As part of the festivities, Rockefeller told the press that he devoutly wished to live to one hundred and credited his good health to golf and a daily tablespoon of olive oil. The white-haired Dr. Biggar repeated his long-standing prophecy: “Mr. Rockefeller will live to be 100 years old.”⁶ Rockefeller and Dr. Biggar shook hands on a pact that they would play a round of golf on July 8, 1939. Dr. Biggar, alas, canceled the appointment: He expired in the 1920s while his celebrated patient, touting the Biggar gospel of fresh air and five daily periods of rest, soldiered on. Because of Rockefeller’s abstemious eating style, along with a substantial loss of bone mass, his weight dipped below one hundred pounds. Once tall and rangy, he was now a wizened little man, no taller than his son.

Despite his rather eerie, cadaverous look, Rockefeller still gazed shrewdly at the world, his eyes alert as he sized up newcomers. He tried to banish gloomy thoughts and admit only joy and pious gratitude for God’s bounty. Though somewhat lonely and susceptible to occasional bouts of depression, he would rally and emerge more ebullient than before. Typically surrounded by six or eight people at golf or meals, he cultivated the company of younger people, especially younger women. On his eighty-sixth birthday, he wrote the following sugary verse:

Four generations of Rockefellers in 1928. From left to right: John D. Rockefeller, Sr., John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Abby (Babs) Rockefeller Milton, and Abby Milton. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)

I was early taught to work as well as play,
My life has been one long, happy holiday;
Full of work and full of play—
I dropped the worry on the way—
And God was good to me every day.⁷

Throughout his life, the mutable Rockefeller had continually re-created himself while adhering to certain core principles. As H. G. Wells wrote, “Manifestly he has grown and broadened at every stage of his career.”⁸ Perhaps the most startling transformation came in his behavior toward women as he sloughed off the old Victorian inhibitions. Free from Cettie’s restraining influence, Rockefeller became positively ribald. When an old colleague, William T. Sheppard, introduced him to a Mrs. Lester one day, Rockefeller said suggestively, “Mr. Sheppard, your friend, Mrs. Lester, is very easy to look at.” Junior stood there aghast. “I beg your pardon,” he apologized to Mrs. Lester, “but my father has picked up some slang phrases without understanding their meaning.” Evidently no prude, Mrs. Lester shot back, “Oh, Mr. Rockefeller, you do not need to apologize for your father.” ⁹

It was a rare golf party that did not include a lady golfer for Rockefeller’s delectation, and when he got off a good shot he erupted into a little mock Charleston, telling the lady, “You ought to kiss my hand for that.”¹⁰ When crowds clustered about him in public, Rockefeller conspicuously waved at the pretty young women. “He was like a little boy in his playtime,” noted one photographer.¹¹ Rockefeller, for the first time, had an identifiable lady friend: Mrs. Ira Warner of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the stout wife, then widow, of an optical-instruments manufacturer and a constant visitor at both Kykuit and Ormond Beach.

Rockefeller increasingly used the afternoon drives as opportunities for hanky-panky. Wearing thick black or amber goggles to screen out the sun, he sometimes borrowed a veil from one of the lady passengers and laced it dramatically across his face and wound it around his ears. He sat tightly wedged in the backseat between two buxom women, usually neighbors or visitors, with their laps covered by a blanket, and he became notorious for his hot schoolboy hands roving under the blanket. The man who had been a model of self-mastery now seemed, on occasion, an itchy-fingered old satyr. Tom Pyle, the head gardener and gamekeeper at Pocantico, steered the second car in the daily motorcade and was often astonished at his employer’s outrageous behavior. When Rockefeller’s car stopped one afternoon at a traffic light, a young woman riding in the backseat with him suddenly burst forth and scrambled back to Pyle’s car. “That old rooster!” she said. “He ought to be handcuffed.” Pyle noted that some local matrons enjoyed the hot seat and frequently returned for more. “I never decided whether different women received different treatment or whether some found it acceptable to be pinched by a ninety-year-old multimillionaire.” ¹²

As if he were living his life backward, Rockefeller belatedly entered adolescence in his ninth and tenth decades. It was as if, after all his preternatural exertions, he had attained the one thing denied him: a carefree childhood. Growing younger in spirit, he became something of a clotheshorse with an extensive wardrobe of dandyish costumes. He now owned sixty stylish suits and several hundred ties and sometimes changed outfits three times a day. To Junior’s astonishment, he squired ladies to concerts and dances at the Ormond Beach Hotel. “What a gay person you are becoming: An opera one night and the Governor’s ball another,” he wrote his father. “I do hope things will quiet down before Abby and I arrive.”¹³ Around this time, Rockefeller also developed a strange fondness for antic behavior. One evening, when the dinner talk turned to corns, Rockefeller said, “I never had one and to prove it I will show you my foot”—then he peeled off his shoe and stocking and placed a bare foot on the table. ¹⁴

As he and his guests drove through the Florida countryside one afternoon, they nearly ran out of gas but found a rural filling station nearby. When a husky country woman appeared, the chauffeur asked for five gallons—which struck her as too small for this mammoth vehicle. Where were they going? she asked. Leaning forward in the backseat, Rockefeller piped up, “My dear woman, we are on our way to heaven. And we’ll get there sooner or later.” She peered at him dubiously. “Yer may be on yer way to heaven, whoever you are,” she told Rockefeller, “but I warn yer you’ll never get there on five gallons o’ gas!”¹⁵ It became one of Rockefeller’s favorite tales. Often, if there were empty seats in the car, he picked up hitchhikers or pedestrians to keep the stream of conversation flowing.

Each year, Rockefeller threw an annual Christmas party at Ormond Beach for his neighbors. The Casements was illuminated with a radiant star of Bethlehem over the door and glowing candles twinkled in each window. Rockefeller appeared in a tuxedo, bowed, pronounced seasonal greetings, and distributed gifts. He then led the group in Christmas carols and tooted party horns along with the children. Rockefeller increasingly warmed to strangers. One day, George N. Rigby, the local newspaper editor, wrote an article titled “Ormond the Different,” a panegyric to the town’s friendliness. When Rockefeller went to congratulate him, they chatted outside the newspaper office, beside a railway siding. As people on the train recognized Rockefeller, they pressed their faces to the windows and started taking pictures. Far from minding this attention, Rockefeller seemed to bask in it. Back in the car, Mrs. Evans reproachfully asked whether he had not made a spectacle of himself. “Of course,” he said. “But I wanted to prove that the article Mr. Rigby wrote, ‘Ormond the Different,’ was true.” ¹⁶

After a life spent fleeing the press, Rockefeller proved an instinctive master of the new cinematic medium. Curt Engelbrecht, a photographer for the Hearst newsreel company, Movietone News, pursued Rockefeller until he agreed to pose for the cameras. On his ninetieth birthday in 1929, Rockefeller donned a foppish light-gray cutaway suit, white vest, and boutonniere and spent two hours slicing an oversize cake and ad-libbing before the cameras. As Engelbrecht recalled, “He had a lot of fun playing the star of the production, and he was not ready to stop until the last foot of film had been used.”¹⁷ In movie theaters across America, audiences saw John D. Rockefeller on the screen, walloping golf balls with a fierce but clumsy stroke and leading cronies in a rousing medley of hymns. People suddenly found something endearing about this anachronistic old gentleman who had graduated to the status of an American legend.

Why the sudden change in Rockefeller’s image? The titan was always a touchstone for American attitudes toward money, and the nation worshiped it in the 1920s. The passage of time had also spread a mellow glow over his depredations, which seemed to belong to an earlier, half-forgotten era. He also represented an increasingly honored American type: the practical, thrifty, laconic men who had established the country’s industrial base. Now succeeded by salaried managers and corporate bureaucrats, these first-generation industrialists retrospectively took on a new heroic sheen. Perhaps the most obvious reason for Rockefeller’s enhanced stature was that the public now associated him far more with philanthropy than with Standard Oil. The press, once hostile to him, formed his biggest cheering section. “It is doubtful whether any private individual has ever spent a great fortune more wisely than Mr. Rockefeller,” Pulitzer’s World editorialized in 1923, while the Hearst press, not to be outdone, stated, “The Rockefellers have given away more money and to better advantage than anybody else in the world’s history since the ark stranded on Ararat.”¹⁸

Even as Rockefeller became sporty and dapper in the Roaring Twenties, keeping up with the times, his son clung to dark business suits and starched white shirts. Now in his fifties, graying and bespectacled, Junior began to look like a museum piece. In 1923, as if taking refuge in a more comforting past, Junior had his office at 26 Broadway renovated by Charles of London, who installed oak paneling from an English Tudor mansion, bookcases with leaded glass panes, an Elizabethan conference table, and a Jacobean refectory table. While the Standard Oil companies raked in money from the auto boom, Junior preferred horse-drawn carriages and balked at setting foot inside an airplane.

Nothing made both father and son seem so old hat or controversial in certain quarters as their emphatic support of Prohibition. Not only had they never tasted liquor in their lives, but they had steadily supported the Anti-Saloon League and given it $350,000 since its founding in 1895. Before enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920, Rockefeller had doubted that prohibition would work. “It is a vile agent of destruction,” he said of drink, “yet men will go on making it and selling it. It is the right hand of the devil.”¹⁹Yet whatever their private skepticism, the Rockefellers were strongly associated with temperance. To connoisseurs of bathtub gin, Junior seemed a rich, stuffy prig who denied the worker a glass of beer. “One glass of beer may lead to another,” he declared. “Therefore, I say one glass is one glass too many.” ²⁰ By 1926, Junior had sufficient doubts about the course of Prohibition that he withdrew his support from the Anti-Saloon League, but it was several years before he entirely retracted it.

Saddled with the burden of managing half a billion dollars, Junior had little time left over for diversion. An unexceptional man thrust into exceptional circumstances, he accepted his fate with reluctance. As Frederick Gates said, “He would have preferred . . . to cut loose from his father’s fortune and make for himself like other men a wholly independent career. But he was an only son, the heir of colossal wealth, dedicated from his birth to overwhelming burdens, not to be evaded.”²¹ The constant pressure of the Rockefeller philanthropies was a responsibility from which he could never escape, and he continued to be plagued by stress symptoms, including migraine headaches, stomach ailments, and sinus infections. Very often, he came home from work with dreadful headaches and had to lie down in his bedroom for an hour, his brow covered by a soothing compress. As his father had feared, the weight of the Rockefeller fortune often seemed to overwhelm him.

In late 1922, tormented by headaches, nervous exhaustion, and even temporary deafness, Junior checked into the Battle Creek Sanitarium of Dr. John H. Kellogg, an eccentric visionary who prescribed a vegetarian diet and spartan regimen for patients. Junior heard the inevitable: He worked too hard, suffered from strain, and should set aside more time for recreation. Upon leaving the sanitarium, he was still too weak to return to work and contracted a severe flu; to recuperate fully, he went down to Ormond Beach and spent several months with his father. For the next twelve years, unable to release the nervous tension inside him, Junior seldom went for more than two days without an excruciating headache.

The demands of spending his father’s fortune were never-ending. During the 1920s, Junior’s annual income fluctuated between $35 million and $57 million. Since he diverted 30 to 40 percent for charitable purposes, he was dispensing, on average, $11.5 million per year—or more than the Rockefeller Foundation’s annual grants.²² Junior had to grapple with the increasingly unwieldy structure of the overlapping Rockefeller philanthropies. This fragmentation had partly come about in order to head off the political criticism that would have greeted a single, all-encompassing foundation. In a sweeping and long-overdue reorganization in 1929, Junior supervised the absorption of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the science and humanities programs of the General Education Board into the Rockefeller Foundation.

Just when he needed advisers most, Junior was abruptly deprived of them. By 1923, Frederick T. Gates was taking insulin treatment for diabetes at the Rockefeller Institute and had to resign from the foundation; he died of pneumonia in Phoenix in February 1929 after acute appendicitis. He had given the Rockefeller philanthropies much of their fervent vision as well as their tenacious attention to detail. After Starr Murphy died in 1921, Junior needed a new general counsel and three years later drafted his old fraternity brother Thomas M. Debevoise, a man of such daunting formality that Junior’s sons christened him “the Prime Minister.” But Junior still needed a strategic thinker of the stature of Gates or of Mackenzie King, whom he still saw periodically but who was now too busy for frequent consultations. Junior found his ideal theoretician in Raymond B. Fosdick, who served as his trusted friend, lawyer, adviser, and finally biographer. The two had met in May 1913 when Junior was forming the Bureau of Social Hygiene and Fosdick was a crusading mayoral aide who had worked with Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement. After World War I, Fosdick sailed to France with Woodrow Wilson and served as a civilian aide to General Pershing before being appointed Under Secretary General of the League of Nations by Wilson. After the Senate vetoed U.S. participation, an embittered Fosdick resigned and lobbied for the global body, advocating a “planetary consciousness” and “collective intelligence.”²³

As a good Republican, Junior had initially refrained from endorsing the League, but under Fosdick’s tutelage, he shed his isolationism and gave two million dollars for its new library and liberally endowed its health organization. To foster international harmony, he undertook projects ranging from support for the new Council on Foreign Relations, which was founded in 1921, to creating International Houses at four universities. (Each Christmas, he and Abby hosted a reception for one hundred students from the International House at Columbia University.) Junior’s largest single donation of the decade was a twenty-eight-million-dollar gift to create an International Education Board that would grant fellowships in the natural sciences and transpose the work of the GEB to a global plane.

During a trip to France in June 1923, Junior and Abby were startled by the deteriorating state of the Versailles palace: Iron fences rusted, water dripped from the ceiling, statues were crumbling in the garden. Junior offered the French prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, a million dollars to refurbish the Versailles roof and gardens; make emergency repairs at Fontainebleau; and restore the splendid Reims cathedral, scarred by wartime bombing—an offer the French could not very well refuse. Though shocked by his preference for Perrier over champagne, the French adored Junior’s self-effacing manner, so at odds with their cartoon image of the bumptious American millionaire. When he drove to Versailles from Paris late one afternoon, the guards at the visitors’ entrance told him that the palace was closed. Refusing special treatment, he got back in his car and returned to Paris—a modest act that won him plaudits across France and helped to offset some controversy over his purchase of the famous Unicorn tapestries. Junior spent millions more in France and contributed to a new building for the American Church overlooking the Seine. Suddenly an omnipresent philanthropist, he restored the library of the Imperial University of Tokyo after the 1924 earthquake; paid for the excavation of the Agora, the ancient Athenian marketplace; set up an oriental institute at the University of Chicago; and financed the Palestine Museum in Jerusalem to conserve biblical artifacts.

After his mother’s death in 1915, Junior also widened his sights in the religious arena and adopted a more experimental, open-minded approach. As early as the tainted-money controversy, the Rockefellers had tried to shed their exclusively Baptist orientation. After seven religious-service organizations pooled their resources to aid American troops during World War I, the atmosphere seemed auspicious for interdenominational work. Senior believed that denominations had value but should all report, on the Standard Oil model, to one centralized governing body, whereas Junior believed that churches could operate more efficiently if they were not broken up into denominations. He sponsored studies that showed surplus churches in rural communities and proposed consolidation to trim excess capacity. Starting in 1920, he spearheaded the Inter-church World Movement, which encouraged unity among the various Christian denominations. Like an electioneering politician, he went on an exhausting fund-raising tour of twelve cities. This ecumenical effort turned into a fiasco when he raised only three million dollars—one-third of that coming from the Rockefellers; most of the denominations cynically exploited the movement to siphon off money for their own sectarian purposes.

In December 1917, Junior delivered a speech at the Baptist Social Union that struck orthodox folk as rank heresy. Sketching out a new, unified church, he said, “It would pronounce ordinance, ritual, creed, all non-essential for admission into the Kingdom of God or His Church. A life, not a creed, would be its test; what a man does, not what he professes; what he is, not what he has.”²⁴ Adopting a position that would have sounded blasphemous to his mother— and that he would never have voiced while she was alive—Junior now believed that people who manifested Jesus’ moral spirit were religious, whether or not they practiced Christian rituals.

In the early 1920s, the Baptist Church was rent by vitriolic clashes between southern fundamentalists and northern liberals over the proper interpretation of the Bible, a heated debate that culminated in the 1925 Scopes monkey trial. Throwing off his diffidence, Junior inveighed against the “narrow and medieval creed” of the fundamentalists, whom he accused of breeding enmity and division. This was sharper, more self-confident criticism than Junior had ever expressed and by the mid-1920s he openly doubted the literal interpretation of the Bible, regarding it as incompatible with modern science. By this point, even Senior was coming around to figurative interpretation. For fundamentalists, such heretical views diluted religion to a watery form of social work, and in 1926, in a mounting reaction, the Southern Baptist Convention reaffirmed the Genesis account of creation and unequivocally rejected the theory of evolution.

Junior was backed up in his views by a new influence: Harry Emerson Fosdick, the older brother of Raymond B. Fosdick. In 1924, when Cornelius Woelfkin retired as pastor of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church (which had moved to Park Avenue two years earlier), Junior saw an opening for a charismatic leader who would courageously lead the congregation toward interdenominationalism. As a young pastor, Fosdick had championed the Social Gospel and preached to the dispossessed in lower Manhattan slums and Appalachian shantytowns. Even something of a muckraker in his early days, he had admired the work of Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and other colleagues of Ida Tarbell. In 1922, he delivered a controversial sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” that was such a strong, unadulterated statement of modernist beliefs that he was nearly tried for heresy by the Presbyterian Synod. Sometimes tagged a socialist and once branded “the Jesse James of the theological world,” Fosdick denied the virgin birth, the inerrant Bible, and the conventional version of the Second Coming.²⁵

In 1925, Fosdick, who was actually a Baptist, left the First Presbyterian Church because of his iconoclastic views. Junior wooed him at the height of this controversy. It was very rare for Junior to court trouble, and Fosdick was thunderstruck by his invitation to him to head the Park Avenue Baptist Church. During their meeting, the left-leaning Fosdick confessed to misgivings about becoming the pastor of such a swank church. To entice him, Junior floated the idea of creating a new church to serve a more heterogeneous community. Still, Fosdick demurred. When Junior pressed him for a reason, Fosdick blurted out, “Because you are too wealthy, and I do not want to be known as the pastor of the richest man in the country.” Embarrassed silence ensued. Then Junior replied, “I like your frankness, but do you think that more people will criticize you on account of my wealth, than will criticize me on account of your theology?”²⁶ Both men laughed, and a close relationship was started.

Even before the ground breaking for a new church began, Fosdick threw open the Park Avenue Baptist Church to new members, including those not baptized by immersion. A year after his arrival, Junior initiated a project that had long tantalized him: building a great interdenominational church in New York City. With Junior himself chairing the building committee and donating ten million dollars to the project, a site was selected in Morningside Heights for what would become the Riverside Church. The Gothic building, designed by Charles Collens and Henry C. Pelton, was inspired by the cathedrals of Chartres and Laon.

Formally dedicated in 1931, the church was an ecumenical shrine that seemed to bridge both the spiritual and temporal worlds. Instead of saintly statues lining the chancel screen, one found scientists, doctors, educators, social reformers, and political leaders, including Louis Pasteur, Hippocrates, Florence Nightingale, and Abraham Lincoln. Statues of Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, and Moses stared down from archivolts above the main portal, while Darwin and Einstein occupied honored niches. After a few years, the congregation was both interdenominational and interracial, with fewer than a third of the members coming from Baptist backgrounds. Once exponents of the old-time religion, the Rockefellers had now advanced into the vanguard of liberal Protestantism and were loudly denounced by conservative theologians for desecrating the true church. The Baptist Bible Union said of Riverside Church that it was “obviously part of a plan to extend to the whole Baptist denominational life the influence of the Rockefeller Foundation, which already had succeeded in converting nearly all our educational institutions into hotbeds of modernism.”²⁷Thirty years after left-wing social reformers had vilified the Rockefellers, the family, under Junior’s influence, was now being excoriated from the right. In 1935, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had been the principal lay donor to the Northern Baptist Church, made his last annual gift. “What gives me pause,” he said in his valedictory letter, “is the tendency inherent in denominations to emphasize the form instead of the substance, the denominational peculiarity instead of the oneness of Christian purpose.”²⁸

In 1924, John Jr., Abby, and their three oldest boys made a swing through the American West in a private railroad car, stopping to camp along the way. Outside the Northeast, Junior was seldom recognized, and he thrived on the anonymity of the open road. When they arrived at Yellowstone National Park, the family was greeted by park superintendent Horace Albright, who was startled to see the Rockefeller boys pitching in to assist the porter with the luggage. As Albright escorted them around the park, Junior and Abby were chagrined by tree stumps and fallen timber that littered the roadside. Later, in a letter to Albright, Junior offered money to clean up and beautify these thoroughfares. On their second day, Albright drove the Rockefellers to see the craggy, snow-capped Grand Tetons. Struck as with the sudden force of an epiphany, Junior decided to preserve this exquisite view for posterity.

On a subsequent visit to the Grand Tetons in 1926, Junior and Abby recoiled at the creeping blight of hot-dog stands, gas stations, and gaudy billboards that were beginning to clutter the countryside around Jackson Hole. As Albright recorded in his journal, “I believe Mr. Rockefeller had a genuine distaste for the garish advances of civilization—and what’s more he feared them. So he took every opportunity he felt possible to step in and save his fellow humans from the onslaught of the crippling effects of industrial society.”²⁹ The son of America’s foremost industrialist now worked assiduously to save nature’s monuments and preserve the spirit of America’s preindustrial past. It was a propitious time to do so: The National Park Service had been created by Congress in 1916 with a large mandate to promote and regulate national parks and monuments but without an adequate budget to accomplish this. The first two directors, Stephen Mather and Albright, cultivated philanthropists as a way to rectify this.

Lacking his father’s hostility toward government and imbued with a Wilsonian sense of public service, Junior, under Albright’s tutelage, formed a unique partnership with Washington to save wilderness areas. Upon returning home, Junior began to buy thousands of acres in the Jackson Hole Valley with an eye to creating a new park—an idea anathema to many local cattlemen, hunters, and dude-ranch operators who saw this as meddling in their businesses. To minimize political opposition and keep land prices down, Junior made the land purchases through a front group, the Snake River Land Company. Though he accumulated 33,562 acres and yearned to hand them over to the National Park Service, his bountiful gift was consistently spurned due to fierce, shortsighted local opposition. Only in 1943 did President Roosevelt create the Jackson Hole National Monument and accept the Rockefeller land, which was merged into an expanded Grand Teton National Park in 1950. Once infected with preservation fever, Junior gave money to buy vast acreage for the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee, plus a major tract to connect them via the Skyline Drive threaded through the Blue Ridge Mountains.

If Horace Albright was one of Junior’s environmental gurus, the other was Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History. As founder of a group called the Save-the-Redwoods League, Osborn sounded the alarm about the impending destruction of redwood forests in northern California, which were being felled rapidly by lumber companies. When one company started to chop down redwoods on Bull Creek Flat, an especially fine stand, Junior supplied one million dollars to stop the logging and save the virgin woods. He later gave money to save other redwood forests, along with $1.5 million to preserve thousands of pristine acres of sugar pines in Yosemite Valley. Closer to home, he assembled seven hundred acres of land along the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River that he donated to the Palisades Park Commission. What makes these conservation efforts notable is that Junior was putting his own stamp on Rockefeller philanthropy and having a striking national, even global, impact. His conservationist impulse was quite different from the forward-looking, scientific spirit that his father had exhibited in medical research and education.

Junior’s veneration of the past and implicit discomfort with the modern era were exemplified by several restoration projects in his later years that again marked a break with his father’s legacy. He seemed at times not so much to want to study the past as to inhabit it, taking on its recaptured dignity. His most celebrated exercise in time travel came through the Reverend Dr. William Goodwin, a professor of sacred literature at William and Mary College, who met Junior at a Phi Beta Kappa banquet in 1924. Goodwin tried to pique Junior’s interest in his personal obsession: restoring the old colonial capital of Williamsburg, Virginia. A monomaniac on the subject, Goodwin often ambled about the town in a moonlit reverie, communing with eighteenth-century ghosts. Though Junior turned him down, the Episcopal clergyman sensed that he had stumbled upon the one man in America willing and able to implement his fantasy. For the next two years, Junior had to steel himself against Goodwin’s maddeningly persistent entreaties.

In the spring of 1926, when Junior decided to speak at the Hampton Institute, Goodwin saw a chance to waylay him to Williamsburg. When John Jr. and Abby arrived, he took them about town, a clinging, heavy-breathing cicerone. At one point Junior asked innocently whether plans existed to preserve the old buildings; at this, the minister must have seen a ray of divine sunlight. As he sheepishly said, “I found it exceedingly hard at the time not to burst forth in the presence of Mr. Rockefeller into unfolding my cherished dream.”³⁰ He soon swamped Junior with artistic renderings of how the restored town might look.

When Junior consented to underwrite the project the following year, he estimated it would cost five million dollars and he faced the familiar dilemma of buying up land without triggering a real-estate boom. With the Rockefeller involvement concealed, Goodwin referred to his patron by the code name “Mr. David.” As lawyers, real-estate agents, and property owners flocked to Goodwin’s office in suspicious numbers, the rumor mill churned with guesses about the project’s rich backer: Henry Ford, George Eastman, J. P. Morgan, Jr., and Otto Kahn were all mentioned. When this speculation grew counterproductive, Goodwin gathered the local citizenry and announced, “It is now my very great privilege and pleasure to announce that the donors of the money to restore Williamsburg are Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., of New York.”³¹

As always, the Rockefeller method was to start slowly, test the concept, and then expand. True to this approach, Junior planned to redo one building at a time. He never dreamed he would resurrect the whole town, but the idea of meticulously restoring the past cast a potent spell over his mind, and he became fantastically engrossed in the most minuscule details. As he told his subordinates, “No scholar must ever be able to come to us and say we have made a mistake.”³² At one point, the resident architect reminded Junior that everything wasn’t spotless in the eighteenth century. “But Mr. Rockefeller did not like that at all,” he recalled. “He wanted everything to be perfect.”³³ Junior had a special affinity with this lovingly retrieved world. “I really belong in Williamsburg,” he once said. He and Abby bought an elm-shaded manor house, Bassett Hall, where they spent two months each year and where Abby created a firstrate collection of American folk art.³⁴

As a form of recreation rich in social value, Colonial Williamsburg captivated Junior and grew into such a passion that he eventually spent fifty-five million dollars on it. “I gave more time, thought, and attention to Williamsburg than I did to any other project I ever undertook—far more than I gave to Rockefeller Center. . . . The more I did the more complete the project became and the greater my interest became.”³⁵ Senior never discussed Colonial Williamsburg with his son and, in solipsistic fashion, tended to edit out of his mind what he himself had not originated, even though Junior’s projects were perpetuating his legacy and enormously enhancing the Rockefeller image. Nevertheless, when Junior was later honored by the Virginia legislature, he became choked up and departed from his prepared text to say, “How I wish my father were here! I am only the son.”³⁶Such self-abnegation had become a habit—never mind that John D. had ignored the project. In 1934, President Roosevelt opened Colonial Williamsburg to the public.

Another project conceived in an analogous spirit was The Cloisters museum, which reflected Junior’s long-standing interest in medieval art, with its hierarchy, exacting craftsmanship, and strong spiritual content. His West Fifty-fourth Street home was decorated with gorgeous medieval tapestries, including the Hunt of the Unicorn, and his collection expanded after William Welles Bosworth introduced him to a highly romantic sculptor named George Grey Barnard. Barnard traveled through France and Italy each summer, scooping up Gothic statues and other medieval treasures and bearing his trophies back to New York. The Cluny Museum in Paris gave Barnard the idea for a medieval museum in upper Manhattan which came to be known as The Cloisters (later the Barnard Cloisters). In 1914, this one-man museum opened on Fort Washington Avenue in a small brick building. Barnard created for visitors a full-blown medieval fantasy: Robed figures would lead visitors through a shadowy, churchlike interior perfumed with incense and echoing with medieval chants. By the time Barnard put up his entire collection for sale in the 1920s, Junior had already purchased one hundred Gothic pieces from him, storing most of them in delivery tunnels at Pocantico.³⁷ The Metropolitan Museum of Art took the entire collection, with money provided by Rockefeller.

As a boy, Junior had frequently taken horseback rides along the Hudson to a high, wooded point that enthralled him. Even then he had vowed that he would someday buy the land and give it to the city. Now such an opportunity presented itself. Having bought the Cornelius Billings estate and other parcels near Barnard’s museum, he offered them to the city for a park. Five years later, the city accepted this gift for a new Fort Tryon Park and honored Junior’s proviso that four elevated acres be set aside for a new museum, The Cloisters, to house the medieval art collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

As with Colonial Williamsburg, Junior loved the demanding scholarship that went along with the creation of the medieval museum. He paid for a building that ingeniously blended cloisters from five French monasteries as well as many pieces that he had previously bought from Barnard. As he was reviewing plans for The Cloisters one day, he noticed a room marked “Tapestries” and asked James Rorimer, the curator, what he had in mind. “Oh, something like the Unicorn Tapestries,” Rorimer said airily. Junior grimaced. But, in an act of supreme sacrifice, he eventually parted with his precious tapestries. By the time the Cloisters opened in 1938, Junior had donated or underwritten the cost of more than 90 percent of the art displayed.

The greatest friction between Junior and Abby arose over the subject of modern art, which exposed fundamental differences in their personalities. Junior seemed to be unnerved by the outlaw, bohemian side of modern art, its free experimentation with form and content. While he was stubbornly mired in the past, as if escaping the strife associated with his father’s career and the Ludlow Massacre, Abby embraced change and responded to the freedom and spontaneity of the new European art. She was enamored of German Expressionist paintings, with their bold colors, grotesque themes, and nightmarish sensuality. When she began to collect such works, Junior found them raw and harshly unappealing. Banishing the forbidden art to an upper-floor gallery at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street, he often struck a patronizing tone when talking about Abby’s picture collection. “These were strange, irresponsible objects that she was bringing into his home,” said their son Laurance. “He did not approve of them.”³⁸

Many things about modern art—including the sometimes garish colors, dreamlike imagery, and violent or distorted forms—disconcerted this inhibited man. “I am interested in beauty and by and large I do not find beauty in modern art,” Junior said, preferring the classic beauty of, say, Chinese porcelains. “I find instead a desire for self-expression, as if the artist were saying, ‘I’m free, bound by no forms, and art is what flows out of me.’ ”³⁹ Junior must have identified the freedom inherent in modern pictures with Abby’s emancipation in collecting them, for otherwise it is hard to account for his vehement resistance to her avocation. Frustrated by her husband’s hopelessly blinkered vision, Abby found compensation in her sons, especially Nelson, who shared her love of these threatening objects.

For once heedless of her husband’s wishes, Abby joined with Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Sullivan in 1929 to found the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which provided an outlet for the talents of many wealthy New York women. It was a brave act at a time when most Americans still sneered at such artistic innovation. At first, the museum rented gallery space in the Heckscher Building before moving to a West Fifty-third Street house owned by the Rockefellers. Even as the museum grew in popularity, Junior kept up his deprecating tone. “I showed Papa the pictures and the gallery today,” Abby wrote to Nelson, “and he thinks that they are terrible beyond words, so I am somewhat depressed tonight.”⁴⁰ Filling the breach left by his father, Nelson was named chairman of the museum’s Junior Advisory Committee in 1930—he was only twenty-two and still in his last semester at Dartmouth—and ended up as its president.

Notwithstanding his hatred of modern art, Junior became the museum’s chief benefactor, donating a total of six million dollars in endowment grants and land. So considerable was the Rockefeller largesse behind MoMA that one historian has written that “since the beginning” it has “been a Rockefeller responsibility, a protectorate, one might almost say.” ⁴¹ Modern art nevertheless remained contentious at home. Distressed that her budget allowed her to buy just one small Matisse painting and drawing, Abby instructed an intermediary, “Please tell him [Matisse] the only reason I have no more is my inability to acquire them.”⁴² To remedy this, Abby invited Matisse to dinner in December 1930 and the French master grew impatient that someone of Junior’s cultural attainments could be so insensitive to the beauty of Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, and Braque. One editor present, Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair, registered Junior’s tactful response, saying that “the philanthropist, who had listened very politely, regretted quite as politely, and in the most polished French, that he must still appear adamant. Then, with an engaging burst of confidence, he added that Mr. Matisse must not altogether despair, because, though he might still seem to be stone, he suspected that Mrs. Rockefeller, thanks to her very special gifts of persuasion, would eventually wear him down to the consistency of jelly.”⁴³ Unfortunately, this charm was strictly for public consumption and Junior kept up his stony obduracy.

Overriding Junior’s objections, Abby served as MoMA’s first treasurer and gave the museum its first fund for acquiring art. She was a blithe, energetic, ubiquitous figure in the museum’s maiden years. All this prodigious work only alienated Junior further, a disapproval so noticeable to the young director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., that he once told Abby, “Remember me cordially to Mr. Rockefeller (who I find hard to forgive his granite indifference to what interests you so much).”⁴⁴ Philip Johnson was no less scornful: “He was a bulldog, a very strong man, one who would say, ‘As my wife you can do this and not that.’ ”⁴⁵ Since Abby’s involvement with MoMA coincided with the years in which her children graduated from college, married, and started jobs, it grated on Junior that he could not now have his wife all to himself. “We children, who had been his competition, were on our own now—presumably our needs were no longer a threat to him,” said David. “But here was the museum, more complex than ever, demanding her energy, and it rankled.”⁴⁶ Having bequeathed a stunning 181 artworks to MoMA in 1935 alone, Abby attained a new celebrity status and was featured on the January 1936 cover of Time magazine, which named her “the outstanding individual patron of living artists in the U.S.”⁴⁷

Abby’s work gave the family an important presence in art patronage that it had largely lacked to date because of Senior’s conspicuous indifference to painting, inherited by his son. However much he inwardly writhed with displeasure, Junior kept the money spigot open. After Lillie Bliss died in 1931, her collection came up for sale—brimming with twenty-four Cézannes, nine Seurats, eight Degases, and so on. She had left it to the museum with the proviso that it have an endowment fund sufficient to ensure its permanence; Junior gave $200,000 and Nelson $100,000. In 1935, to encompass this swelling collection, the trustees voted for a new building to be fashioned by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone in the International Style. For the site, the Rockefellers provided land on both West Fifty-third Street and West Fifty-fourth Street and contributed 60 percent of the building-fund money. The homes of Senior and Junior were razed to make way for the museum and the adjoining Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. In early 1938, Junior and Abby moved into a new apartment at 740 Park Avenue. For Junior, it must have been the ultimate affront that his nine-story mansion had been demolished to make way for modern art.

A soaring nocturnal vision of Rockefeller Center. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)