EPUB paragraph 63 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
After his scandal-ridden childhood with Big Bill, Rockefeller had a fine instinct for enemies and was sensitive to this crescendo of criticism. When out for a walk, he was vigilant and preternaturally aware of anyone following him; it was impossible to sneak up behind him. Yet he lent no credence to his critics and regarded their putative idealism as a flimsy cover for selfish motives. Rockefeller saw himself stoically suffering the fate of all revolutionary figures. “The ideas on which we worked were new …,” he explained. “But knowing that we were right, we went steadily about our business, founded on ideas that were an irresistible force.” He identified many critics as competing refiners who had foolishly taken cash instead of Standard Oil stock for their plants. His melodramatic rendition of it was this: “We think about Hades. What more can punish a man than to sit and groan as he contemplates what might have been!”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Standard Oil · Hades
EPUB paragraph 64 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Despite being the target of so much public obloquy, Rockefeller seemed fearless. “The word ‘fear’ is not found in my father’s vocabulary,” his son once said, “nor does he know what the sensation is.” Junior recalled being driven to a train station in Manhattan by his father at a time when he was swamped by anarchist threats. Though Junior begged him to hire bodyguards, his father scoffed:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Manhattan
EPUB paragraph 65 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
“Why John,” he said, “I can protect myself. If any man should be foolish enough to attack me—well.” … He did not boast. I have never heard him boast. But he stood up full height with his fists clenched. What he said was to the effect that if anyone should attack him he was feeling sturdy—and he hoped he wouldn’t hurt the poor fellow too much.
Names: John
EPUB paragraph 66 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Junior remembered the evening in Cleveland years earlier when a maid shrieked that a burglar was upstairs. Rockefeller unhesitatingly seized a pistol and strode to the back door, hoping to nab the burglar, who had already slipped down a post and escaped.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Cleveland
EPUB paragraph 67 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Rockefeller professed that he bore no malice toward critics and approached them in a spirit of Christian tolerance—so long as they conceded their error. To those “who repented their attacks and abuse we freely extended forgiveness, as we ourselves might hope for mercy and forgiveness from a higher source,” he said. As his private life and philanthropy attest, he was not a cruel man and did not have sadistic impulses. Yet he countered critics with ad hominem attacks and frequently referred to their actions as schemes, implying something devious and illegitimate. Whenever he was about to commit some particularly heinous act, he first found a character flaw in the victim then proceeded with a serene conscience.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
EPUB paragraph 68 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Proof against criticism, Rockefeller nonetheless provoked a small army of gadflies. Perhaps the most picturesque was Lewis Emery, Jr., the rich Bradford producer and pipeline owner and a Pennsylvania legislator, who served as a major source for Ida Tarbell. If only Rockefeller had played fair, Emery insisted, he would have ended up the more powerful oilman. “I had and have as much brains as John D. Rockefeller, but I have never had his cunning nor his ability to use unscrupulous means or unscrupulous men to carry out a programme,” he maintained. Though he spent much of his life stalking the titan, he never actually met Rockefeller, who was, he explained, “too much in the background, too cunning.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ida M. Tarbell · Lewis Emery, Jr. · Bradford · Pennsylvania
EPUB paragraph 69 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Standard Oil applied merciless measures to stop Emery’s pipelines from linking up with railroads, as shown with his Equitable pipeline to Buffalo. In 1892, Emery was about to complete a major pipeline to Hancock, New York, where he expected the Ontario and Western Railroad to pick up his oil and transport it to New York City. When Archbold got wind of this, he demanded a showdown with the railroad. His report to Rockefeller shows the lengths that Standard Oil would go to cripple a competitor:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · Lewis Emery, Jr. · Standard Oil · New York City · New York · Buffalo · Hancock · Ontario · Equitable · Western Railroad
EPUB paragraph 70 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
We have had further interviews with the Ontario & Western people, and feel that we have made some progress toward a possible understanding with them. It is now entirely sure that there has been no definite engagement entered into by them with the Emery party, and we think they are now convinced that the rates they had been talking about with the Emery party are absurdly low, and that business on any such basis would be undesirable and unprofitable. We have made them a proposition of business covering a period of five years, and expect an answer from them this week. Our proposition is that we put over their lines 400,000 barrels of oil yearly, or, in default of any part of the amount, pay a penalty of 10 per cent of the existing rates. We think it a very liberal proposition to them.
Names: Lewis Emery, Jr. · Ontario & Western
EPUB paragraph 71 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Standard Oil was not content to advance its own interest; it worked actively to damage the business interests of its adversaries. Rockefeller’s papers also reveal that Emery was prepared, at one point, to sell his oil properties to Standard Oil, asking for $750,000 in shares of the trust—hypocrisy that only validated Rockefeller’s dim opinion of his critics.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Lewis Emery, Jr. · Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 72 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Another embittered foe was George Rice, a Vermont native and independent refiner from Marietta, Ohio. A vigorous man with a bulldog face, Rice thrived on crossing swords with the oil trust. More than anyone else, Rice was driven mad by Standard Oil’s unjust methods and became a professional Rockefeller hater. He instigated many legislative probes of Standard Oil and in 1881 published a pamphlet entitled Black Death, an anthology of scathing newspaper exposés. For Rockefeller, Rice was nothing but a blackmailer. “He liked to harass, embarrass, annoy the Standard Oil interests with a view of enabling him to sell his quite unimportant refinery interest.… This is the whole story of George Rice.” In fairness to Rockefeller, Rice tried repeatedly to extort money from him, asking an outrageous $250,000 for a refinery Rockefeller valued at only $25,000. To banish this pest, Rockefeller and his colleagues alternated between trying to buy him out and trying to bludgeon him to death. As Colonel Thompson reported to Rockefeller, “[Rice] admitted that it could be better to occupy friendly relations with us and assumed to be willing to make some arrangement, but extortion was written in every lineament of his countenance and burdened every syllable that fell from his lips.” At the time, Rice was lobbying for a federal investigation of Standard Oil’s railroad rebates.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · W. P. Thompson · George Rice · Standard Oil · Ohio · Rice · Vermont · Marietta
EPUB paragraph 73 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Though Rice insisted that Standard Oil laid deep plots against him, Rockefeller mocked his criticism as the ravings of an overactive mind. “We might as well assume that the Standard Oil Company would get a 21-inch cannon to shoot mosquitoes.” Yet his files show that such a cannonade was fired at Rice. In 1885, Daniel O’Day struck a deal with the Cleveland and Marietta Railroad, which was the lifeline of Rice’s refinery. The railroad agreed to charge Standard Oil 10 cents a barrel versus 35 cents for Rice and his fellow independents. Resurrecting the infamous drawback, Standard would also be paid 25 cents for every barrel that Rice shipped. In dictating this deal, O’Day bluntly warned the railroad that if it didn’t comply, he would build a competing pipeline and drive them out of business. In a rare successful suit against the trust, Rice forced Standard Oil to repudiate the nefarious contract and refund him $250.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Daniel O’Day · Standard Oil · Cleveland · Rice · Marietta Railroad
EPUB paragraph 74 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
With his own brand of courage, Rice tried to market oil against the two roughest Standard Oil subsidiaries, Chess, Carley and Waters-Pierce. As soon as Rockefeller got reports of even minuscule shipments made by Rice, Standard Oil agents in the affected states were told to thwart him by any means necessary. In 1885, W. H. Tilford told Rockefeller, “As far as Chess, Carley Co.’s territory is concerned, every effort is being made to dislodge Rice. Travelling men are being put upon the road, who go from station to station selling oil in competition with any oil which Rice may have in the various towns.” Every time Rice was ejected from another hamlet, Rockefeller was informed. “We have recently driven Rice entirely out of Anniston, Alabama, and feel that we shall soon have him also out of Birmingham,” the Chess, Carley treasurer reported to Tilford. “Wherever this result is accomplished, however, it has only been by our making very low prices, frequently at a loss to this company, and such loss continued through a long period.” No threat to his empire was too small for Rockefeller to overlook.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Rice · Waters-Pierce · Alabama · W. H. Tilford · Birmingham · Tilford · Chess, Carley · Chess, Carley Co. · Anniston
EPUB paragraph 75 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
If Emery, Rice, and other anti-Rockefeller mavericks made little headway in the oil industry itself, they were destined to have a powerful impact in the court of public opinion as they coalesced into an influential lobbying group. They formed a ready source of information for journalists, of whom their first polemical champion was a rich, elegant newspaperman named Henry Demarest Lloyd. The son of a Dutch Reformed minister, Lloyd attended Columbia College, passed the New York bar, then married into the wealthy Bross family, co-owners of the Chicago Tribune. Starting in 1878, Lloyd wrote withering editorials about Standard Oil in a florid style that captured the public’s imagination. He profited from the flood of revelations produced by the Hepburn hearings in New York and the Pennsylvania lawsuits against Rockefeller. In the March 1881 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, editor William Dean Howells published Lloyd’s mordant account of Standard Oil entitled “Story of a Great Monopoly.” The first serious exposé of the trust in a prestigious, mass-circulation magazine, Lloyd’s seminal article was a sensation, and the issue went through six printings.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Lewis Emery, Jr. · Standard Oil · New York · William Dean Howells · Alonzo Barton Hepburn · Pennsylvania · Rice · Chicago Tribune · Atlantic Monthly · Bross · Columbia College
EPUB paragraph 76 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
For Lloyd, the essence of Standard Oil power resided in its secret alliances with the railroads, which had fostered the growth of many trusts. While conceding the “legitimate greatness” of Standard Oil, he said that it only made its ethical shortcuts the more reprehensible. “Their great business capacity would have insured the managers of the Standard success, but the means by which they achieved monopoly were by conspiracy with the railroads.” A vociferous critic of William H. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Tom Scott, and Collis Huntington, Lloyd incorporated his critique of Standard Oil into a comprehensive crusade for railroad reform. He also fastened public attention on John D. Rockefeller as the trust’s embodiment, speculating that only William H. Vanderbilt had earned more money the previous year.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Jay Gould · William H. Vanderbilt · Thomas A. Scott · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Standard Oil · Collis Huntington
EPUB paragraph 77 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Lloyd was a slipshod reporter, and his account is marred by many inaccuracies. At one point, he says that Rockefeller had owned a Cleveland flour store. Yet he wrote lapidary prose and showed a keen political and cultural understanding. In a cunning stroke, he converted the piece into a consumer story, stating at the outset, “Very few of the forty millions of people who burn kerosene know that its production, manufacture, and export, its price at home and abroad, have been controlled for years by a single corporation—the Standard Oil Company.” For Lloyd, the octopus—he helped to popularize the nickname—did more than threaten free competition and fair play; it jeopardized American democracy itself. He charged that Standard Oil controlled two U.S. senators and had engaged in so much corruption in Harrisburg that it had “done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature except to refine it.” A superb phrasemaker, Lloyd declared in a rousing finale that “America has the proud satisfaction of having furnished the world with the greatest, wisest, and meanest monopoly known to history.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Standard Oil · Cleveland · United States · Pennsylvania · Harrisburg
EPUB paragraph 78 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
The article introduced Rockefeller to a national audience and fixed antitrust legislation high on the reform agenda. In proposing a federal agency to ensure uniform railroad rates, Lloyd anticipated the Interstate Commerce Act by six years. If his attack was a harbinger of things to come, so was Rockefeller’s total silence. Confident that posterity would vindicate him, the latter would later explain, “I was concentrated upon extending and developing and perfecting our business, rather than on stopping by the wayside to squabble with slanderers.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Henry Demarest Lloyd · Interstate Commerce Act
EPUB paragraph 79 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
In common with many contemporary moguls—including J. P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, James Stillman, Henry Clay Frick, and George F. Baker—Rockefeller resented the press, and his ferocious allegiance to his concern transcended other claims on his conscience. One of his favorite refrains was “The Standard Oil Company’s business was that of saying nothing and sawing wood.” During the antitrust furor of 1888, he told one minister, “We have gone upon the principle it were better to attend to our business and pay no attention to the newspapers, with the idea that if we were right they could not permanently injure us, and if we were wrong all their comments, though favorable, would not make it right.” Rockefeller asserted that he was less afraid of exposing misbehavior by talking to the press than of inadvertently spilling trade secrets. “What could we say,” he asked rhetorically, “without telling the world just how we were making our success?”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · James Stillman · J. P. Morgan · Henry Clay Frick · Standard Oil · George F. Baker · Andrew Mellon
EPUB paragraph 80 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Those few intrepid reporters who tried to penetrate Standard Oil often gave up in despair. When the New York Sun dispatched a reporter to Cleveland in 1882 to investigate Rockefeller, he could not get near the mogul and was stunned by the layers of secrecy that surrounded him. He was further impressed by the silence of hundreds of Standard Oil employees he buttonholed, all schooled in Rockefeller’s philosophy. Even with friendly journalists, Rockefeller would not supply a photo of himself in an oil field or refinery and banned photographers from his home for even the most innocuous magazine spreads. Of course, this invisibility only piqued the public’s interest. That silence came so easily to Rockefeller should not surprise us. As an inner-directed man, he required no approbation from others and was much too circumspect to toss out opinions in a newspaper interview.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Cleveland · New York Sun
EPUB paragraph 81 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
By the mid-1880s, facing severe political assaults, Standard Oil could no longer decline all press contact. In 1885, the Oil City Derrick—long a heated critic of the trust—was bought by an intimate of Captain Vandergrift, who installed Patrick Boyle, a Standard Oil adherent, as its editor. Around 1887, Standard Oil hired a press bureau called the Jennings Publishing Company to place favorable ads, disguised as independent articles, in Ohio newspapers. Soon the Standard cooperated selectively with other periodicals. When Harper’s Weekly profiled Rockefeller in 1889, the article was first thoroughly vetted by Archbold. On those odd occasions where Rockefeller sat for interviews, he came across as unfailingly dignified and courteous. In 1890, a reporter for the World described him as a man “with an intelligent and pleasant countenance, fair complexion, sandy hair and mustache intermixed with gray, a somewhat prominent nose, mild gray eyes, and an agreeably expressive mouth.” The next year, another reporter, braced for a bloody ogre, said of Rockefeller, “He is modest, retiring, gentle-mannered, and without the human vanities which we associate with great millionaires.” This favorable coverage should have alerted Rockefeller to two critical facts: that even hostile reporters could be swayed and that he had a flair for public relations no less pronounced than his gift for making money.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · Jacob J. Vandergrift · William Rainey Harper · Standard Oil · Patrick Boyle · Ohio · World · Oil City Derrick · Jennings Publishing Company
EPUB paragraph 82 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Some of the most pungent criticism came from within Standard Oil’s own ranks, from isolated subordinates who thought that the trust’s muscular tactics offended Christian principle. In the 1870s, Rockefeller recruited a stout, bewhiskered young man, William Jay Cooke, a grandnephew of Jay Cooke, whom he had befriended at the Cleveland YMCA. A former wholesale milliner, Cooke prospered at Standard and was soon elevated to a manager’s post in Toledo. After three years, he suddenly quit, unable to reconcile the trust’s sales tactics with his Christian faith. As a history of Standard of Ohio notes tactfully, “He didn’t see eye to eye with Mr. Rockefeller in the manner of eliminating competitors.” Unfortunately, we don’t know how Rockefeller reacted to this defection by a devout protégé.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Standard Oil of Ohio · Jay Cooke · William Jay Cooke · Toledo · Cleveland YMCA · Cooke
EPUB paragraph 83 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Perhaps the most extraordinary act of contrition in Standard history came in an eloquent appeal to Rockefeller written by William G. Warden on May 24, 1887. One of the trust’s most senior figures, Warden sent Rockefeller a haunting letter regretting the revulsion that the firm inspired in the popular imagination:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William G. Warden · Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 84 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
We have met with a success unparalleled in commercial history, our name is known all over the world, and our public character is not one to be envied. We are quoted as the representative of all that is evil, hard hearted, oppressive, cruel (we think unjustly), but men look askance at us, we are pointed at with contempt, and while some good men flatter us, it’s only for our money and we scorn them for it and it leads to a further hardness of heart. This is not pleasant to write, for I had longed for an honored position in commercial life. None of us would choose such a reputation; we all desire a place in the good will, honor & affection of honorable men.
Names:
EPUB paragraph 85 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
After advancing a profit-sharing plan that might assuage the hostility of the oil producers, Warden urged Rockefeller to ponder his letter:
EPUB paragraph 86 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
Don’t put this down or throw it to one side, think over it, talk with Mrs. Rockefeller about it—She is the salt of the earth. How happy she would be to see a change in public opinion & see her husband honored & blessed. May he who’s [sic] wisdom alone can put it in our hearts to love our fellow men, guide and direct you at this time.… The whole world will rejoice to see such an effort made for the people, the working people.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
EPUB paragraph 87 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
The Warden letter is an exceptional statement, as dramatic in its way as a deathbed confession. It also confirms that Cettie Rockefeller was extremely upset by the opprobrium heaped upon her husband. And how did Rockefeller respond to this brave, thoughtful letter? About to sail to Europe with his family, he employed his departure as an excuse to send a short, platitudinous reply: “I have not been able to write you sooner,” he wrote the following week, “nor to give a careful consideration but be assured its content will not escape me.” To cool off a tense situation with a bland note was vintage Rockefeller, and there is no evidence that he ever again communicated with Warden on the subject.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · William G. Warden · Europe
EPUB paragraph 88 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c14_r1.htm
A dignified but slightly careworn John D. Rockefeller, probably then in his fifties. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Rockefeller Archive Center
EPUB paragraph 1 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c15_r1.htm
s John D. Rockefeller was busy consolidating America’s largest industrial empire, his father, William Avery Rockefeller—a.k.a Dr. William Levingston—was showing his old wanderlust, peddling panaceas under his assumed name. A frontiersman in a nation where the frontier was vanishing, he gravitated to wilderness areas that provided asylum from the modern, industrial world epitomized by his son.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · United States
EPUB paragraph 2 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c15_r1.htm
Huge patches of Bill’s life remained a mystery to earlier Rockefeller biographers, but a rough portrait of his later years can now be sketched from Rockefeller’s papers and some previously overlooked newspaper and magazine accounts. Bill had relatively little contact with his rich sons, John and William, but was extremely close to the envious Frank, who shared his love of fishing and hunting. (Perhaps associating these sports with his prodigal father, John never hunted or fished in later years.) After Frank bought an immense ranch in Kansas in the 1880s, his father was a frequent guest, and they hunted quail and prairie chickens together.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Frank Rockefeller · Kansas · Uncle William · John
EPUB paragraph 3 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c15_r1.htm
Much of what we know about Bill’s later years derives from his remarkable friendship with a surrogate son, Dr. Charles H. Johnston. When Charles was a baby in 1853, Dr. Levingston visited his Ontario home and cured his mother of an illness. In 1874, Charles, now a young man, encountered Bill in Wisconsin, where Bill cured him of a fever and promised to tutor him in the “art of healing.” In Freeport, Illinois, Johnston met Mrs. Margaret Allen Levingston and later called her “one of the sweetest women I ever knew.”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Charles W. Johnston · Freeport · Charles H. Johnston · Pratt. Charles, Sr. · Illinois · Ontario · Wisconsin
EPUB paragraph 4 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c15_r1.htm
It might have been Charles Johnston’s appearance that suggested to Bill a scam tailor-made for the Indian reservations. Before meeting Johnston, Bill had fallen back on his old deaf-and-dumb peddler routine. Native Americans believed that when the gods deprived people of one sense, they granted them supernatural healing powers in return, and this made them easy targets for Bill’s act. Now he spotted a new opportunity. Charles Johnston had high cheekbones, nut-brown skin, and flowing black hair and could easily be mistaken for a Native American. Bill hired him as his assistant, decked him out in splendid feathers and war paint, and featured him as his adopted Indian son. From the back of his wagon, Bill told his spellbound audience that Johnston, an Indian prince, had learned secret medicinal formulas from his father, a great chieftain. It was testimony to Bill’s gall that Johnston had to pay him for this apprenticeship in fraud. “In spite of his friendship and liking for me,” Johnston said, “he made me pay him $1,000 for my tuition, which illustrates his shrewdness as a bargain driver and his love of money.” As he had once done with John, Big Bill toughened Johnston by goading and cheating him at every turn. One is left to wonder whether Bill saw in Johnston a substitute son who might fill the large emotional void left by his formerly adoring eldest son.
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Charles W. Johnston · John
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c15_r1.htm
As he traveled with Johnston across Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas, Bill’s business methods deviated little from the methods he had honed in upstate New York. As Johnston recounted after Bill’s death: “He would drive into a town, scatter handbills in which the great Dr. Levingston asserted that he could cure all diseases and we would have a suite of rooms at the best hotel and to the doctor there would come the sick and the halt and the lame. In all cases of common ailments he could detect the cause almost at a glance.” To impress yokels, Bill wore a glittering diamond in his shirtfront, although when negotiating hotel rates he covered it up to get the cheapest deal. According to Johnston, he pulled in hefty profits, sometimes $200 a day, and gave the false impression that he was worth several hundred thousand dollars. As in earlier years, Bill dabbled in commodity speculations. At one point, he bought fifty thousand bushels of corn and stored them in bins, selling the lot for a steep markup when grasshoppers devoured crops the following summer. Johnston always admired this colorful, rough-hewn character with his bottomless bag of tricks. “He was all business and his mind was centered on the almighty dollar.”
Names: William Avery Rockefeller · Charles W. Johnston · New York State · Illinois · Minnesota · Iowa
EPUB paragraph 6 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c15_r1.htm
At first, Johnston did not know that Dr. Levingston was related to the Rockefellers, though he noticed a recurring obsession with John D. Rockefeller, whom Levingston claimed to visit in Cleveland once or twice a year. “He told me he went there to look after his money invested with John D. Rockefeller, and he would tell me wonderful stories of John, his shrewdness and great wealth.” One time, a skeptical Johnston asked Bill how he knew this famous personage. “I started John D. Rockefeller in the oil business,” Bill said flatly. “I loaned him the first money he invested in it and I helped him all along.” Bill boasted that his Standard Oil investment was now worth $375,000. “He used to say that he made John D. rich and he told me if I would stay with him and do as he said he would make me rich, too.” At first, it never dawned on Johnston that Bill was Rockefeller’s father, for the braggadocio seemed part of his carnival-barker blarney, but when Bill began to chatter about old man Davison, Johnston recognized the name of Rockefeller’s maternal grandfather and began to wonder. He remained suspicious for several years, while Bill resolutely denied the truth, scattering hints all the while.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Avery Rockefeller · Margaret Allen Levingston · Standard Oil · Charles W. Johnston · Rockefeller family · Cleveland · Davison · John
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