EPUB paragraph 29 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Before 1911, Rockefeller made only token transfers of oil stock to his son, starting with his first annual gift of one hundred shares of Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1903, but he also deeded to him parcels of valuable property in Cleveland, Buffalo, and New York. Then, in 1909, he gave him a controlling interest in the American Linseed Company, and with this sixteen-million-dollar gift Junior saw the golden floodgates start to open. Grateful but anxious, he wrote to his father, “A deep feeling of solemnity, of responsibility, almost of awe, comes over me as I contemplate these gifts, and my heart rises in silent prayer to God that he will teach me to be a good and faithful steward as my Father has been.” Even though he now owned a company and extensive real estate, Junior still dangled in an awkward dependency, having to account to his father for his personal expenses. In January 1910, Senior asked how much he had spent the previous year, and Junior, like an obedient schoolboy, computed the answer, in Rockefeller style, down to the decimal points: $65,918.47.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Standard Oil of New Jersey · Cleveland · New York · Buffalo · American Linseed Company
EPUB paragraph 30 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
At the turn of the century, Junior and his three sisters had roughly equal wealth—several hundred thousand dollars apiece—and father kept parity among them for several years. (Much of Junior’s early income came from a $500,000 “credit” John D. had given him to supplement his salary.) Then it grew steadily clearer that Junior would be the receptacle for the bulk of the fortune. Partly this was a plain case of male chauvinism. But special factors also worked against Bessie and Edith, while frigid relations with Alta’s husband, Parmalee, lessened her chances. Senior had cool relations with two of his three sons-in-law and would have hesitated to give them undue influence over his money. In Junior’s opinion, his sisters were also disqualified because they did not handle their finances in the scrupulous manner demanded by father.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · E. Parmalee Prentice
EPUB paragraph 31 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Constantly consulting expert opinion and learning all he could, Junior was now immersed in the Rockefeller philanthropies, and nobody enjoyed finer access to the master. In casual moments at Pocantico, Junior could lightly broach a project or have Cettie read a proposal aloud. “Gates was the brilliant dreamer and orator,” Junior conceded. “I was the salesman—the go-between with Father at the opportune moment.” Junior discharged this role perfectly, for he lacked the itch for fame, willingly laid all glory at his father’s doorstep, and held views congruent with his. For Senior, exhausted from his business labors, this conscientious son was heaven-sent. Once, during a golf game, Rockefeller announced, “My greatest fortune in life has been my son.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Frederick T. Gates · Pocantico Hills
EPUB paragraph 32 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
So why did Senior procrastinate in giving him his money? Since he remained tight-lipped, we can only conjecture. One plausible explanation is that he planned to reach age one hundred and had no wish to surrender power prematurely in his sixties. He must have fretted, too, about Junior’s debilitating breakdown, which started in 1904 and dragged on for nearly three years, curtailing his activities. Senior must have feared that the stupendous weight of the fortune would crush his delicate son. Rockefeller might also have waited until Junior began to show more robust self-confidence. Protective of his vulnerable son, Rockefeller was irate when the press pummeled him. “They have no right to attack Mr. John,” he would insist. “All my life I have been the object of assault. But they have no ground for striking at him!”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · John
EPUB paragraph 33 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Yet the overriding fear was most likely political. Since the family fortune largely took the form of Standard Oil stock, giving it to Junior would have engulfed him in controversy far uglier than anything he had ever known. With Standard Oil besieged by state and federal antitrust suits, Junior would have inherited both the controversy and the legal liability that went with the stock. Had Rockefeller unloaded the oil stock on Junior, editorialists would also have accused him of fleeing retribution and responsibility. That Junior had such grave reservations about Standard’s management under Archbold would have only strengthened his father’s reluctance to hand over significant blocks of shares to him.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · John D. Archbold · Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 34 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
While Gates initiated Junior into the rites of philanthropy, the crown prince continued to perform many mundane domestic duties foisted upon him by his father, including paying the servants and overseeing repairs. Then, on the night of September 17, 1902, the Parsons-Wentworth house at Pocantico burned down. Hundreds of people stood by helplessly in the dark as flames consumed the wooden structure. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. John and Cettie simply moved their belongings to an undistinguished dwelling on the grounds called the Kent House. Senior had long wanted to build a new house at Pocantico anyway and was not therefore especially fazed by the fire.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Frederick T. Gates · Pocantico Hills · Parsons-Wentworth · Kent House · John
EPUB paragraph 35 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
From 1902, Junior and Abby had occupied a lovely house on the estate known as Abeyton Lodge, a comfortable, rambling affair in Hudson Valley Dutch style, festooned with many dormer windows and awnings. They tended to look askance at Senior’s patched-up residences and wanted him to occupy a grander dwelling. As a result, they reinforced his desire to erect a new house at the property’s highest point, Kykuit, a five-hundred-foot elevation with a peerless vista of the Hudson River, and took charge of planning a manor house that would be a model of quiet elegance and faultless taste. It has been hypothesized that Senior saw the project as therapeutic for Junior after his breakdown, but the latter’s troubles actually stalled the project. As The New York Times reported accurately in May 1905, “The unexpected serious crisis in the health of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., has temporarily checked his father’s plans for building a fine mansion this summer on his immense estate in the Pocantico Hills.” Even a year later, Senior told a cousin that he was trying to stop Junior from overwork and he would never have rushed him into building the new house. He would surely have remembered the onus of supervising construction of the family home in Cleveland as an adolescent.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Cleveland · New York · Pocantico Hills · Kykuit · Hudson River · Abeyton Lodge · Times · Hudson Valley
EPUB paragraph 36 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
In the spring of 1904, Senior had given his son permission to solicit preliminary sketches from architects, and by the following summer contracts were signed with Delano and Aldrich as architects (Chester H. Aldrich was Abby’s distant cousin), Thompson-Starrett as builders, Ogden Codman, Jr., as interior designer, and William Welles Bosworth as landscape architect. Presented with these plans, Rockefeller reacted as he so often did when in a quandary—he did nothing. He exercised a pocket veto, leaving Junior in the old position of trying to figure out his intentions. “After a while,” Junior said, “I became convinced that the reason he did nothing was because he hesitated to build so large a house, with the additional care which its operation would involve, but on the other hand was too generous to suggest a smaller house, which would not adequately accommodate children and grandchildren.” Evidently, Junior guessed right, for when he presented plans for a scaled-down house—small enough to satisfy his father’s craving for simplicity, roomy enough to accommodate guests—Rockefeller consented with relief. The house would be handsome but not ostentatious, previewing a new Rockefeller aesthetic of restrained grace that owed much to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson W. Aldrich · William Welles Bosworth · Chester H. Aldrich · Ogden Codman, Jr · Delano · Thompson-Starrett
EPUB paragraph 37 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Before construction started, Rockefeller, an engineering buff, brought a number of demands to the table. To reinvigorate Cettie’s health, he wanted Kykuit to receive maximum sunshine in the winter. He also wanted sunlight to trail him on his daily rounds, with light shining in the dining room for lunch, for instance, but with his bedroom dipped in shadow for his afternoon nap. This demand might have flummoxed the most adept architect, but for Rockefeller, who had dabbled in construction, it was child’s play. He constructed a boxlike contraption mounted on a turntable at the center of the building site. Stationed in this box for several days, working the levers, he observed how the sunlight slanted down on a small model of the house. He then presented his hourly charts to the architects, who shifted the foundation lines in conformity with them.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Kykuit
EPUB paragraph 38 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Junior and Abby threw themselves into Kykuit’s construction with a mixture of passion and nervous energy. (Mesmerized by measurement, Junior carried a collapsible four-foot ruler in his pocket for the rest of his life.) They oversaw creation of a three-story Georgian manor house, with elegant gables and dormer windows. In deference to Baptist values, the house had no ballroom, but it did have an Aeolian organ for both religious and secular music. Junior and Abby were very partial to their creation. After they had toured some pretentious “châteaux” on Long Island’s north shore, Junior said that Kykuit, by comparison, was “far less elaborate than many houses we have seen” but “more perfect of its kind, more harmonious and more charming.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Kykuit · Long Island · Aeolian
EPUB paragraph 39 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
John and Abby enlisted the services of Ogden Codman, the Boston interior designer who helped Edith Wharton refurbish her Newport home and coauthored a book with her, The Decoration of Houses, in 1897. In the book, Wharton rebelled against the cold, cluttered rooms of her childhood. Codman wanted to invest Kykuit with the easy tranquillity of an English country house, furnishing it with pieces that would seem like old family heirlooms. No detail of design escaped John and Abby’s exacting attention. They fussed over every item with that small flutter of anxiety that Junior always felt when performing a task for his father. “We bought all the furniture, china, linen, glass, silver and works of arts, employing, of course, the best advisers obtainable,” he said. Before unveiling the house to his parents, Junior and Abby slept there for six weeks, testing every bedroom and taking meals there.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Kykuit · Boston · The Decoration of Houses · Edith Wharton · China · Newport · Ogden Codman · Wharton · John
EPUB paragraph 40 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Sure that the house was now ready, they apprehensively invited John and Cettie to sample it in October 1908, and it seemed, at first, an unparalleled success. “The new house all furnished by John and Abby was ready for us,” Cettie recorded in her diary. “It is beautiful and convenient within and without.” Cettie and sister Lute delighted in playing the large pipe organ, with its player-piano attachment, and Senior imported an organist from the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church for after-dinner concerts on Sunday evenings. That Thanksgiving, three generations of Rockefellers gathered in the new house, with Abby and Junior bringing their growing brood of Babs, John III, and five-month-old Nelson. They instituted a tradition of no smoking or drinking at either Kykuit or Abeyton Lodge.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Abby Rockefeller Mauzé · John D. Rockefeller III · Nelson Rockefeller · Fifth Avenue Baptist Church · Lucy Spelman · Rockefeller family · Kykuit · Abeyton Lodge · John
EPUB paragraph 41 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Unfortunately for Junior and Abby, their ordeal had only begun. Since Cettie had been sick, they had tried to spare her concern with construction details, but she was an extremely finicky lady. For the sake of diplomacy, John and Cettie pretended to be thrilled with their new home, but they increasingly carped in private. The third floor, reserved for guest rooms, had tiny dormer windows that made them stuffy and unsuitable. They then discovered graver problems. The elevator made an awful din; the roaring plumbing in Cettie’s bathroom reverberated in the public areas; the racket from the service entrance below John D.’s bedroom grated on his nerves; rainwater dripped into the dining room; the chimneys sometimes belched smoke, and so on and so on. Cettie even found indecent the charming statues of male cherubim on the porch outside their bedroom and had them chastely converted into female angels. As his parents broke silence and confided their concerns, Junior’s heart sagged: He had let them down again. After a year, it was decided that the house would be completely revamped.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · John
EPUB paragraph 42 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Yet the brouhaha over the house was minor compared to the uproar over the grounds. William Welles Bosworth had planned to surround Kykuit with a small, formal park of 250 acres, with the rest of the estate left in something close to its wild, pristine state. Since Senior fancied himself a landscape expert, he conceived an instant dislike for Bosworth, whom he regarded as a rival and a frighteningly extravagant fellow to boot. When Bosworth submitted his plans, Rockefeller harrumphed that he could do better: “In a few days,” Rockefeller recalled in his memoirs,
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · William Welles Bosworth · Kykuit
EPUB paragraph 43 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
I had worked out a plan so devised that the roads caught just the best views at just the angles where in driving up the hill you came upon impressive outlooks, and at the ending was the final burst of river, hill, cloud, and great sweep of country to crown the whole; and here I fixed my stakes to show where I suggested that the roads should run, and finally the exact place where the house should be.
Names: Hill
EPUB paragraph 44 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
He then told Bosworth: “Look it all over and decide which plan is best.” When this plan was adopted, Rockefeller attributed this decision to its patent superiority, though it is hard to see how Bosworth could have objected. Even with the terraced formal gardens close to the house, Rockefeller interjected his own ideas. He insisted upon lime trees for the garden walk just south of the house, having learned they were the fastest growing trees and would most quickly cast shade on the footpaths.
EPUB paragraph 45 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Luckily, Rockefeller did not do everything himself and allowed Bosworth to create a majestic fantasy straight out of the Italian Renaissance, complete with grottoes, fountains, pergolas, sunken gardens, temples, topiary bushes, classical statues, and running streams. Disgruntled at the cost of these ornaments, Rockefeller would stroll the grounds with guests and tell them, only half jesting, “You know, these little brooks run mighty high!” Cettie was especially fond of Bosworth’s rustic Japanese garden with its quaint teahouse, but every time Rockefeller looked at it, he saw plain extortion and complained to his son. “I can hardly understand how the little Japanese house, which I supposed was to be a very superficial affair, would reach $10,000…. Bosworth may be all right. I hope we shall feel later on, as you do, that he has not been a too expensive luxury for us.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · William Welles Bosworth · Renaissance
EPUB paragraph 46 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Whenever they acceded to one of Bosworth’s modest ideas, Rockefeller growled, it ended up costing much more than they imagined. Senior had first been quoted a figure of $30,000 for the entire landscaping job and was horrified in 1910 when the bill swelled to $750,000—more than the cost of house and furnishings combined! (It would equal nearly $12 million in contemporary money.) Thus far, he had been restrained, but now he gave his son a good tongue-lashing. “Granted that we have a very satisfactory result, but $750,000 is very different from $30,000, and is, indeed, 25 times that amount, and what Mr. Bosworth has received for his services is fifty percent more than the entire original estimate of cost to me. I should not want the public to know what our expenditure has been.” In the end, the house paled beside the stately gardens, and this must actually have pleased the outdoorsy Rockefeller. For all his complaining, he adored the grounds and planted a network of electric lights that allowed him to illuminate them theatrically at night. “If you were to visit me on the darkest night,” he would boast, “I could show you vistas of trees from one part to the other of my estate by merely touching a button.”
EPUB paragraph 47 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Starting in 1911, the house itself underwent two more years of renovation and was transformed into a fine specimen of American Renaissance, a voguish style that bespoke the self-confidence of the burgeoning industrial class. Narrow but deep, the house had four floors above ground and two below that were gouged into the hillside. Gone was the old dormer-ridden third floor, replaced with a mansard roof. By turning the wooden veranda into a stone loggia, the forty-room house acquired new dignity and grandeur. While not exactly modest, Kykuit was decorous and understated and testified to its owner’s simplicity. It fell far short of what Rockefeller could have afforded or what other preening magnates might have built.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Kykuit · American Renaissance
EPUB paragraph 48 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
To Senior’s delight, the redesign entailed complicated problems in civil engineering. To lengthen the approach to the house, hundreds of teamsters carted in thousands of loads of topsoil, requiring the construction of a huge retaining wall. To ferry in supplies without disturbing the occupants, an underground tunnel was created for trucks, and Senior delighted in watching the steam shovels punch a hole in the hillside. This construction thrilled him, as if he were a small boy equipped with a new set of toy trucks. The remaking of Kykuit went on until October 1913, when John and Cettie finally moved back into the house after two years of work. By that point, Cettie was very sick and did not have much longer to live.
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Kykuit · John
EPUB paragraph 49 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
With Kykuit complete, Rockefeller turned his attention to removing disturbing elements from the grounds. One row of houses inside the Rockefeller acreage was picked up and set back down in the nearby village. As he accumulated more land, Rockefeller was also increasingly bothered by the Putnam division of the New York Central Railroad, which cut a swath across the middle of his estate. He hated the hoboes and hunters drawn by the right-of-way, not to mention the ash that fluttered down on his golf course from the coal-burning locomotives. In 1929, Rockefeller decided to have the train rerouted and paid an estimated $700,000 to buy the entire village of East View, with its forty-six homes; after buying and razing all of the houses, he donated the land for new railroad tracks five miles to the east of the original one. Removing another unwanted intruder, Junior paid $1.5 million for the three hundred acres of Saint Joseph’s Normal College, underwriting the costs of relocating it and building a new campus elsewhere.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · New York Central · Kykuit · Putnam · East View · Saint Joseph · Normal College
EPUB paragraph 50 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
At its peak, the Pocantico estate was a self-contained world with seventy-five houses and seventy miles of private roads. Forever reworking his domain, Rockefeller kept hundreds of men busy moving trees and hills to open up new views. The estate included a sizable working farm that supplied the family’s food needs. Rockefeller developed such a taste for Pocantico’s produce and springwater that they were shipped to him wherever he went.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Pocantico Hills
EPUB paragraph 51 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
The Pocantico Hills estate was a marvelous haven, but the cluster of newsmen clamoring for answers beyond the majestic iron gates always reminded its owner of the hostile public. Their chorus of accusations grew only louder with time. By Teddy Roosevelt’s second term, Rockefeller and Standard Oil could no longer flout the federal and state governments with impunity, as they had for so long. The moment of reckoning was at hand.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil · Pocantico Hills
EPUB paragraph 52 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c25_r1.htm
Bessie Rockefeller Strong, whose prolonged illness has always been surrounded by mystery. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Rockefeller Archive Center
EPUB paragraph 1 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
s they approached the 1904 presidential election, Standard Oil executives knew that Teddy Roosevelt was still miffed at their attempt to snuff out his new Bureau of Corporations and that the oil trust stood at the top of his list of evil trusts to be reined in by federal regulators. Since the idea of backing Roosevelt’s Democratic opponent, Alton B. Parker, was unthinkable to Archbold and his associates, they smothered the incumbent with money, especially a $100,000 contribution from Henry H. Rogers. Other businessmen who feared the lash of federal regulation—including Edward H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, and James Stillman—also paid tribute to Roosevelt, provoking Democratic charges that the president was being bribed by the very companies he vowed to control. Attorney General Philander Knox wandered into Roosevelt’s office one day in October 1904 and heard the president dictating a letter ordering the return of the Standard Oil funds. “Why, Mr. President, the money has been spent,” Knox objected. “They cannot pay it back—they haven’t got it.” “Well,” Roosevelt said, “the letter will look well on the record, anyhow.”
Names: John D. Archbold · Henry H. Rogers · James Stillman · Henry Clay Frick · Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil · Edward H. Harriman · Philander Knox · Alton B. Parker · Bureau of Corporations
EPUB paragraph 2 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
When Roosevelt won by an impressive margin in November, Rockefeller sent a telegram to him: “I congratulate you most heartily on the grand result of yesterday’s election.” In the Standard boardroom, the contribution to Roosevelt’s campaign was soon acknowledged to be the worst investment they had ever made. As Archbold moaned, “Darkest Abyssinia never saw anything like the course of treatment we received at the hands of the administration following Mr. Roosevelt’s election in 1904.” Or as Henry C. Frick phrased it more succinctly, “We bought the son of a bitch, but he wouldn’t stay bought.” Nevertheless, the Standard Oil hierarchs remained cocksure that, in any contest for supremacy with the federal government, they would inevitably prevail.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil · Henry C. Frick
EPUB paragraph 3 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Before the election, the Bureau of Corporations, headed by James R. Garfield, had begun to gather data on Standard Oil. The son of the former president and active in Ohio Republican politics, Garfield was friendly with some Standard Oil lawyers, and the initial inquiry went amicably enough. Then, in February 1905, by a unanimous resolution, the House of Representatives urged an antitrust investigation of Standard Oil, a result of the oil boom in Kansas. Reenacting a drama once played out in western Pennsylvania, independent oil producers and refiners protested that Standard Oil dominated the state’s pipelines, and they also accused it of conspiring with the railroads. Their passions were fanned both by Ida Tarbell’s articles and by a dramatic tour she made through the oil fields. Suddenly, Commissioner Garfield was summoning Archbold and Rogers to question them about Standard’s behavior in the state. When he broached the touchy subject of rebates—the flash point for so many battles in oil history—their relations deteriorated hastily. A new generation of independent oil producers in Kansas, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, and California would provide the motive force behind the antitrust drive against the Standard.
Names: John D. Archbold · Ida M. Tarbell · Standard Oil · James R. Garfield · Ohio · Pennsylvania · Rogers · Texas · California · Illinois · Kansas · Garfield · Oklahoma · Bureau of Corporations · House of Representatives
EPUB paragraph 4 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
As the moribund Sherman Act quickened to sudden life under Teddy Roosevelt, the Tarbell series virtually guaranteed that Standard Oil would be the central target of any federal trustbusting probe. Tarbell thought it the optimal choice because it was “the mother trust and the most nearly monopolistic.” It furnished a well-known consumer article, affected nearly everyone, and had an abundant history of hearings and lawsuits to excavate. In the early 1900s, petroleum was being applied to an array of new uses and it no longer seemed tolerable for one organization to retain a stranglehold over it.
Names: Ida M. Tarbell · Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil · Sherman Act
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
For years, Rockefeller and his colleagues had ignored public opinion, refusing to give interviews and behaving defiantly at hearings. In her McClure’s series, Tarbell had justly said, “If Mr. Rockefeller had been as great a psychologist as he is a business manipulator he would have realised that he was awakening a terrible popular dread.” In their hubris, the oil monopolists mocked the petty efforts of politicians to obstruct them. “We will see Standard Oil in hell before we will let any set of men tell us how to run our business,” an unreconstructed Henry Rogers swore. Unwilling to compromise, Standard officials dealt with government officials as roughly as they did with business competitors. At this precarious moment, the trust needed a master diplomat, not the hotheaded Archbold.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Archbold · Henry H. Rogers · Ida M. Tarbell · S. S. McClure · Standard Oil
EPUB paragraph 6 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
In 1906, Roosevelt signed a stack of bills to curb industrial abuses. Profiting from the outcry prompted by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, he signed the meat-inspection bill and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Identifying railroad discrimination as a major issue, he supported the Hepburn bill, which granted broader power to the Interstate Commerce Commission to set railroad rates and placed interstate pipelines under its domain. By bringing Standard Oil to heel, Roosevelt hoped to check two abuses at once: railroad collusion and industrial monopoly. When the Bureau of Corporations sent him its report on the oil trust, it highlighted Standard’s collusion, both in secret rates and open discrimination, with the railroads. Seizing upon this as a potent tool to push through the Hepburn bill, Roosevelt made the five-hundred-page report public on May 2, 1906. “The report shows that the Standard Oil Company has benefited enormously up almost to the present moment by secret rates,” the president declared.
Names: Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil · Alonzo Barton Hepburn · The Jungle · Upton Sinclair · Bureau of Corporations · Interstate Commerce Commission · Pure Food and Drug Act
EPUB paragraph 7 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
Seriously misreading the punitive public mood, Rockefeller remained silent. When Charles M. Pratt drafted a reply, Rockefeller objected in no uncertain terms: “Giving broadcast [to] this information at this date is unwise and is a headliner for more drastic treatment by the Fed. Govt.” Overriding Rockefeller’s dissent, Standard Oil released a statement denying that it had knowingly committed any unlawful actions.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Fed · Charles M. Pratt
EPUB paragraph 8 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c26_r1.htm
In Standard Oil, Teddy Roosevelt found a trust tailor-made for his purposes: big, rich, brutal, unpopular, and totally unrepentant. He adored grandstanding and liked to use his bully pulpit to incite a popular furor. With an ex-pugilist’s flair for feints and bluffs, he kept the combine thoroughly confused about his true sentiments. At moments, he issued strong public denunciations: “Every measure for honesty in business that has been passed in the last six years has been opposed by these men.” Even less temperate in private, he told his attorney general that the Standard Oil directors were “the biggest criminals in the country.” Then, in friendly private chats at the White House, he disarmed the very Standard directors he had reviled by seeming the soul of civility. In early March 1906, Archbold and Rogers were received cordially at the White House, as Junior reported to his father in confidence:
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · John D. Archbold · Theodore Roosevelt · Standard Oil · Rogers · White House
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