Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

The conjunction “and” is crucial to this theme’s title, for Rockefeller never saw any tension between the Christian principles he espoused and the methods he used to amass his great fortune. In fact, Rockefeller regarded his pursuit of wealth as a religious duty, and he interpreted his great success as a sign of God’s favor.

Chernow traces these beliefs to Rockefeller’s coming of age during the intense religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, arguing that “the saga of his monumental business feats is inseparable from the fire-and-brimstone atmosphere that engulfed upstate New York in his childhood” (18). Rockefeller’s Baptist fundamentalism “seemed to applaud him in his course, and he very much embodied the sometimes uneasy symbiosis between church and business that defined the emerging ethos of the post-Civil War American economy” (54).

For instance, a wholly secular description of Rockefeller’s career might assert, without bias, that Rockefeller made his fortune by purchasing and refining a commodity that others extracted from the ground, and then gaining control of the means by which his product was transported, stored, and marketed. Rockefeller, however, saw these events through a “rose-tinted spiritual lens,” convinced “that God had given kerosene to suffering mankind,” which allowed him to “persist where less confident men stumbled and faltered” (76). This lifelong conviction that he was doing God’s will helps explain why Rockefeller “refused to believe that anyone could have a legitimate objection to Standard Oil” (426).

Rockefeller’s aversion to ostentation of any kind makes his pious professions appear largely sincere. Outside the Standard Oil offices, he wanted only to spend time at church and home with his family where, “walled off from temptation, Rockefeller was virtually untouched by the decadence of the Gilded Age” (121). Indeed, what made Rockefeller so different “from his fellow moguls was that he wanted to be both rich and virtuous and claim divine sanction for his actions” (152). In Rockefeller’s life, religion provided “sustenance” and “a necessary complement to his buttoned-up business life” (189). Philanthropy was faith in action. Chernow argues that skeptics who accused Rockefeller of giving away his money merely to sanitize it or improve his self-image miss the fact that “Rockefeller was fantastically charitable from boyhood” (50). Furthermore, as he got older and his fortune swelled, he embraced the social gospel and felt the “need to prove that rich businessmen could honorably discharge the burden of wealth” (468).

Nonetheless, Chernow acknowledges that certain aspects of Rockefeller’s faith do provide fodder for skepticism. For instance, much like his Puritan ancestors, Rockefeller gave little thought to the widening gap between rich and poor “because it formed part of the divine plan” (191). Likewise, his claim to be doing God’s work in the oil industry often rings hollow, for he “never had a single motive for any action and was surely motivated by more than altruism in championing cheap kerosene” (257). Indeed, competition might have its deficiencies, but the ability to provide consumers with the best prices is not one of them. Well into retirement, while reviewing statistical analyses of Standard Oil dividends, Rockefeller admitted that he “had not kept prices low out of altruism but to deter competition,” which “belied his frequent claim that his motive was to bequeath cheap oil to the working people” (546).

During his lifetime, Rockefeller saw his public reputation plummet to uncomfortable depths before rising by the end to unexpected heights. By the late-19th century, “it seemed as if half the country wanted to lynch” the Standard Oil titan, “while the other half only wanted to cadge a loan from him” (299). His name inspired loathing. After the Tarbell exposé The History of Standard Oil (1904), Rockefeller built “a forbidding iron fence” at Forest Hill, “hired Pinkerton detectives,” and “kept a revolver on his bedside table” (501). By the time he died more than three decades later, however, many people had come to associate the Rockefeller name with unparalleled benevolence.

His early reputation as an industrial pirate notwithstanding, Rockefeller “was fantastically charitable from boyhood” (50)—at age 20, he gave away more than 10% of his income. This behavior persisted, and as his wealth increased, he gave away more substantial sums designed to do the greatest possible good. His first major contribution came in 1882 when he donated to the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, Georgia’s only institution of higher learning “for young black women—many of them born under slavery and still illiterate” (239). The school was renamed “Spelman Seminary” in honor of his wife’s family. Ten years later, Rockefeller made another mark on higher education when he founded the University of Chicago. As he looked toward retirement from Standard Oil, “the focus of his life shifted slowly from earning money to dispensing it as intelligently as possible” (323).

Devastated by the death of his four-year-old grandson in 1901, grieved by the illnesses of Cettie and his daughters, and frightened by his own mortality, Rockefeller, bolstered by the advice and leadership of Frederick T. Gates, decided to focus his philanthropy on medicine. This decision enabled Rockefeller’s transformation in the public mind from cutthroat businessman to generous humanitarian, in large part because the philanthropy was so successful. After the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research funded multiple breakthroughs, “Rockefeller and his entourage were delighted, perhaps even mildly surprised, by the unalloyed praise heaped upon the RIMR” (478). Before he was finished, Rockefeller “had established himself as the greatest lay benefactor of medicine in history,” who had “effected a revolution in philanthropy perhaps no less far-reaching than his business innovations” (570).

As he moved deeper into retirement, and as the distance from his Standard Oil days grew wider, Rockefeller’s transformation continued. At his home in Ormond Beach, Florida, he welcomed visitors and appeared relaxed, for he “was fast becoming a beloved old storybook figure, a certified American character, and his more cheerful mood reflected that” (612). By the late 1920s, the long-retired and suddenly-playful Rockefeller gravitated toward the movie camera, and audiences “found something endearing about this anachronistic old gentleman who had graduated to the status of an American legend,” in large part because “the public now associated him far more with philanthropy than with Standard Oil” (636). During the Great Depression, when Junior was considering a name for the brand-new office complex he built in midtown Manhattan, advisers “convinced him that ‘Rockefeller Center’ would be the most potent marketing tool—an indication of how far the family image had advanced since the days of the muckrakers” (668-69).

Chernow builds the book’s early chapters around Rockefeller’s colorful, duplicitous father, Bill, whereas Junior, Rockefeller’s nervous and dutiful son, figures prominently in the second half of the book. This allows Chernow to explore Rockefeller’s role on both ends of the father-son dynamic.

Rockefeller spent most of his life trying to be everything his father was not: respectable, dignified, and present. Chernow regards Rockefeller’s “shame about his father” as “consequential for his entire development” (29). Rockefeller embraced Baptist teachings about fortitude and tried to mimic his mother’s silent resilience, in part because “after the inordinate attention that his father attracted, John wanted to be quiet and inconspicuous and blend into the crowd” (34). After his father abandoned Eliza and the children in the early 1850s, the teenage Rockefeller referred to his mother as “widowed” (41). In fact, Bill’s abandonment probably prevented young Rockefeller—the family’s lone source of income at age 21—from enlisting in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Rockefeller’s determination to be a better man than his father intensified once he had a family of his own. At home in Cleveland in the 1870s, this “son of a self-absorbed absentee father” always “made a point of being an affectionate parent and something of a homebody” (123). When Bill periodically and unexpectedly reappeared in Cleveland, Rockefeller still “resented his father,” but he allowed Bill to have a grandfatherly relationship with his young family and “didn’t poison the children’s minds against him,” though Rockefeller himself “kept studiously aloof” (193). After Bill died, Rockefeller did not return the body to Cleveland, so Bill’s unknowingly-bigamist wife, Margaret Allen Levingston, buried her late husband at the Oakland Cemetery in Freeport, Illinois. Chernow notes that “[f]ew—if any—Rockefeller descendants seem to know that William Avery Rockefeller is buried there under his assumed name” (463)—a sign of Rockefeller’s success in banishing his father from his family’s memories.

Chernow occasionally describes other men in Rockefeller’s life as reminiscent of Bill’s ebullience. For transitional purposes, the most interesting of these is John D. Archbold, Rockefeller’s successor at Standard Oil. Chernow describes Archbold as “the most significant figure recruited by Rockefeller,” a “cocky” self-promoter with “high spirits,” an “inexhaustible fountain of jokes and stories,” and “the man at Standard Oil who most resembled Big Bill” (165). It seems a matter of great psychological significance that Rockefeller chose a man like his father to execute some of Standard Oil’s most unsavory schemes. Furthermore, Chernow also describes Archbold as the immediate cause of Junior’s eventual discomfort at Standard Oil, and yet “Junior’s disenchantment with Archbold did not diminish his reverence for his father” (551).

Whereas Rockefeller did everything in his power to distance himself from Bill, Junior spent much of his young life trying to please his father and holding him in high esteem. Raised by pious parents in a Baptist home, this “model child would struggle to become the model adult, with often painful consequences” (189). As a young adult, Junior often saw himself as falling short of his father’s immense stature and thus “often brooded about his own inadequacy” (356). Still, there is no evidence that Junior resented his father and plenty of evidence that he both respected and admired the titan. Though Rockefeller never gushed compliments, he did make clear that the feeling was mutual, remarking, “My greatest fortune in life has been my son” (511). Chernow also suggests that Rockefeller “was increasingly buoyed by the admiration of this son who viewed him as a heroic figure in business and philanthropy” (624).

Much like Rockefeller, however, Junior had to find his own way, which meant subtle deviations from his father’s approach. During the Colorado Fuel and Iron labor crisis, for instance, Junior discovered that he had to “depart from his father’s legacy and chart an independent course” (582) by promoting labor-management cooperation. In this area in particular, Junior “repudiated his father’s principles without seeming to repudiate the man” (587). Even in philanthropy, Junior gravitated toward a “conservationist” approach in history and art that “was quite different from the forward-looking, scientific spirit that his father had exhibited in medical research and education” (643). As his son became more independent, just as he had become independent from Bill, Rockefeller seemed to grow more proud.