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Throughout his life, Junior had shadowboxed with unseen enemies who suddenly became three-dimensional human beings in the Colorado mining camps. Now, he would mingle with workers whose fate he had governed from afar. First, the caravan stopped at Ludlow itself, a haunted, windblown spot, now denuded of its tents. Emerging from their cars, Junior, King, and the reporters solemnly approached two railroad ties, nailed together in a black cross, marking the spot where the two women and eleven children had been suffocated in the pit. Afterward, they rode to the first of eighteen CFI coal towns, where they lunched on beefsteak, beans, and mashed potatoes. Entering into the spirit of the place, Junior and King responded to Ivy Lee’s suggestion and bought two-dollar suits of denim overalls from a company store before descending a coal shaft.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Ivy Lee · Colorado Fuel and Iron · Ludlow · Colorado · King
EPUB paragraph 67 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c29_r1.htm
At one coal-mining camp, Junior delivered a short talk to workers in the local schoolhouse then suggested, with uncharacteristic spontaneity, that they clear the floor and hold an impromptu dance. As a little four-piece band struck up “The Hesitation Waltz,” he grabbed a miner’s wife and gaily stepped onto the floor. Too well-bred for tokenism, Junior spent the evening dancing with each of the twenty or so women in attendance—an ironic sequel for a young man once so bashful at Brown that he hesitated to dance at all. Nobody was more flabbergasted than Abby, who tracked his progress in the press. “From the papers I gather that your dancing has been one of your greatest assets,” she wrote to him. “I will never demur again.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Brown University
EPUB paragraph 68 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c29_r1.htm
On October 2, 1915, in the town of Pueblo, Junior addressed two hundred CFI workers and managers. “This is a red-letter day in my life,” he began. “It is the first time I have ever had the good fortune to meet the representatives of the employees of this great company, its officers and mine superintendents, together, and I can assure you that I am proud to be here, and that I shall remember this gathering as long as I live.” Preaching his gospel of cooperation, he laid out his plans for a joint labor-management grievance panel along with new committees for health, sanitation, mine safety, recreation, and education. Significantly, nobody would be fired for joining a union, and there were promises of new housing, schools, and recreation centers. Taking a down-home approach, Junior laid three heaps of coins on a table to represent workers, managers, and directors then tried to show how each group siphoned off coins, leaving nothing for dividends on the $34 million Rockefeller investment. In the end, Junior must have been fairly persuasive, for 2,404 of 2,846 miners voted for his plan in a secret ballot. On the other hand, possibly from disdain for this paternalism, 2,000 miners boycotted the vote.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Colorado Fuel and Iron
EPUB paragraph 69 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c29_r1.htm
Selling the plan to management was no easier. After initial resistance, Welborn accepted the grievance mechanism and introduced other innovations, but L. M. Bowers opposed this reform, and Junior realized he had to cashier Gates’s uncle. “One of the most unpleasant tasks I ever performed was to get his resignation,” he said. “I shall never forget the three or four hours I spent with him in my house here trying to get him to retire amicably—for he could be a nasty enemy.” At this point, Junior’s relations with Gates began to cool forever. The tradition-minded Junior never formally deposed the old gods—his father and Gates—but instead staked out new directions with new advisers. When E. H. Weitzel, CFI’s fuel manager, complained about his clemency toward unions, Junior shot back: “Your attitude in this respect is definitely paternalistic, an attitude which on general principles I am sure you will agree it is unwise for any corporation to maintain.… Paternalism is antagonistic to democracy.” Junior had defected, at least halfway, to the enemy camp. But his representation plan was, at best, only a middling success. In the following years, the company weathered four more strikes before the UMW finally won recognition in 1933. Junior’s species of “company union” was outlawed by the Wagner Act in 1935.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Frederick T. Gates · LaMont Montgomery Bowers · Jesse Welborn · Colorado Fuel and Iron · E. H. Weitzel · UMW
EPUB paragraph 70 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c29_r1.htm
For Junior, the Colorado trip was a trial by fire from which he emerged triumphant, converting the worst moment in the family history into something more promising. As King told Abby during the tour, “From now on he will be able to devote his time to advancing the vast projects … [relating] to human beings, without being thwarted at every step by … the voice … of popular prejudice.” Although much of what Junior had done was likely anathema to him, Senior cheered his son’s journey of reconciliation. “Yes, it was excellent,” he told an old friend. “I could not have managed it better myself.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Colorado · King
EPUB paragraph 71 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c29_r1.htm
After the Colorado trip, Junior became a prophet for improved labor relations throughout American industry, an evangelical role he enjoyed more than browbeating unions. Seizing the high ground, he sold his stock in U.S. Steel during a 1920 strike when management would not annul its policy of twelve-hour days, seven days a week. Junior and King introduced employee-representation plans at both Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of Indiana. Abby even contributed to trade unions and to funds for striking workers—which her husband thought was going a bit far. As a nationwide drive to retain the open shop swept American business in the 1920s, many industrialists looked upon Junior as a dangerous liberal, even though many trade unionists saw his company unions as traps for unsuspecting workers.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Standard Oil of New Jersey · Standard Oil of Indiana · U.S. Steel · Colorado · King
EPUB paragraph 72 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c29_r1.htm
In one respect, Junior’s work with Mackenzie King proved a setback for the family: It fueled popular suspicion of the Rockefeller Foundation. From the outset, the family had insisted that it would be a public trust, not a vehicle to promote Rockefeller causes. Because King’s work was underwritten by the foundation, though, it looked as if the Rockefellers had exploited their philanthropy to lend a veneer of legitimacy to their business activities. After public hearings into the matter, the foundation decided to avoid economic issues and concentrate on public health, medicine, and other safe areas. To boost faith in the foundation’s autonomy, in July 1917 Rockefeller waived his future right to make founder’s designations.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · William Lyon Mackenzie King · Rockefeller Foundation · Rockefeller family · King
EPUB paragraph 73 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c29_r1.htm
If the Ludlow Massacre was a turning point in Rockefeller family history, much of the credit must go to Mackenzie King, who emancipated Junior from strict obedience to his father. He strengthened Junior’s tenuous faith in his own judgment, making him feel that he was strong enough and fit enough to manage the family fortune. King probably did not exaggerate when he said of Junior in his diary: “I really think he feels closer to myself than to any other man he knows.” Politically, Mackenzie King emerged both well paid and unscathed from his detour into the Rockefeller universe. In 1919, he was elected leader of the Liberal Party in Canada and two years later became prime minister, serving in that post off and on for a record twenty-two years and forging much of the modern Canadian welfare state. Like many counselors to the Rockefellers, he had enjoyed the satisfaction of serving both his conscience and his bank account.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · William Lyon Mackenzie King · Rockefeller family · King · Canada · Ludlow Massacre · Liberal Party
EPUB paragraph 1 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c30_r1.htm
he Ludlow saga was intertwined with the final, troubled phase of Cettie’s life. When demonstrators stormed the Pocantico gates, Rockefeller grew alarmed because, among other reasons, his wife lay terminally ill inside. Junior was about to make his trek of atonement to Colorado when his mother died on March 12, 1915, forcing him to postpone it until September. One of the first sympathy notes came from Mother Jones: “The sympathy of one whom thousands of men have called ‘Mother’ is with you at this time when your heart is filled with sorrow for her who called you ‘Son.’ ” A month later, Senator Aldrich, who had retired from the Senate in 1911, died of a stroke, steeping Junior and Abby in the thick gloom of double mourning.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Nelson W. Aldrich · Mary Harris Jones · Pocantico Hills · Ludlow · Colorado
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Cettie had been withering away for many years. When she took up winter residence at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street in late 1909, she was already restricted to a wheelchair, so that Junior and Harold McCormick had to hoist her up the front steps. Largely bedridden, requiring round-the-clock nursing, she was inexplicably reluctant, like her husband, to consult the eminent physicians at the Rockefeller Institute. As her diaries show, she suffered from a gruesome host of afflictions, including pneumonia, shingles, pernicious anemia, and sciatica. She was pestered by so many ailments that it is impossible to come up with a single, clear diagnosis.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Harold McCormick · Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research · West Fifty-fourth Street
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Senior’s response to her chronic troubles was ambivalent. He was often loving and infinitely patient. At dinner parties, he would pluck a flower, excuse himself, tiptoe up the stairs, and present it to her, along with some amusing tidbit of table talk. “He was the most affectionate and thoughtful man in illness and sorrow I have ever known,” said his son. “No woman could have been more tender.” During Cettie’s siege, they remained an old-fashioned couple, sweet and unfailingly courtly with each other.
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller
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Yet for all his devotion, Rockefeller was often away, refusing to modify his seasonal rotation of houses. During the winter of 1909–1910 at West Fifty-fourth Street, for instance, Cettie inscribed in her diary: “John Sr. is at Pocantico coming down Sundays.” Though he stayed away for long patches—sometimes weeks at a stretch—Cettie expressed no bitterness.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Pocantico Hills · West Fifty-fourth Street · John Sr.
EPUB paragraph 5 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c30_r1.htm
During the summer of 1913 at Forest Hill, with Dr. Biggar in constant attendance, Cettie’s condition deteriorated as lumbago, pleurisy, congestive heart failure, and bladder and rectal problems were superadded to her already long list of maladies. In this cheerless season, sister Lute grew ill and took to a wheelchair, though she recovered by the spring. When doctors warned Rockefeller that Cettie was too frail to leave Cleveland, he was caught in an excruciating predicament, for his seasonal rotation demanded his presence at Pocantico in October. If he stayed through February, he could be listed as a Cleveland resident and face severe tax penalties. Nonetheless, he repeatedly postponed the trip due to Cettie’s frailty. Making the best of things, he drove Cettie around the grounds each day in an old-fashioned open phaeton or newfangled automobile. “John so very cheerful and comforting and glad I am slowly improving,” Cettie told her diary. During one visit to the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, Rockefeller was addressing the congregation when his gaze alighted upon Cettie’s pale, upturned face, and he was moved to a personal utterance. “People tell me I have done much in my life,” he said. “I know I have worked hard. But the best thing I ever accomplished and the thing that has given me the greatest happiness was to win Cettie Spelman. I have had but one sweetheart and am thankful to say I still have her.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Hamilton F. Biggar · Euclid Avenue Baptist Church · Lucy Spelman · Cleveland · Pocantico Hills · Forest Hill · John
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In February 1914, John preceded Cettie to Kykuit to ensure that the remodeled house would accommodate her comfortably. Perhaps with a premonition that she would never see Cleveland again, Cettie postponed her departure for New York. When one employee softly prodded her, she balked. “I don’t want to go yet,” she said. “This is where the children used to be, and Mr. John’s little rocking chair is upon the attic floor.” The journey east in February proved an unspeakable ordeal. When the train stopped at Philipse Manor in North Tarrytown, Cettie, attended by doctors and nurses, was lifted to a waiting automobile. Once she was settled in at Pocantico, Senior promptly resumed his self-imposed routine and rushed off to his Lakewood haunt for his usual spring retreat. Without reproach, Junior wrote him, “Mother misses you, but is glad to feel that you are having a good rest, and while she will welcome you home, realizes that you should have this change.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Cleveland · New York · Pocantico Hills · Kykuit · Lakewood · North Tarrytown · Philipse Manor · John
EPUB paragraph 7 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c30_r1.htm
Dismayed by his wife’s sickness and perhaps feeling faintly guilty, Rockefeller tried to offset his absences with extravagant romantic gestures. On their golden wedding anniversary in September 1914, he brought a brass band to Kykuit, placed them on the lawn, and had Cettie carried from the house to Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Kykuit · Mendelssohn
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John D. Rockefeller attends the ailing Cettie, who was confined to a wheelchair in her final years. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Rockefeller Archive Center
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During her last Pocantico winter, strengthened by a brew of barley, oatmeal, and milk, Cettie seemed to rally, so that Junior and Abby felt confident enough to join Senior at his new winter retreat in Ormond Beach, Florida. As workmen painted the master bedroom for John D.’s return, Cettie was in better spirits than she had been in for a long time. On March 11, 1915, she asked for a wheelchair, wanting to tour the garden and smell the flowers. During this fleeting reverie, she downed a glass of milk, pronounced it good, then wearily sank back on her pillow, feeling faint and weak. Lute and Dr. Paul Allen maintained an overnight vigil at her bedside, and the two sisters were clasping hands at 10:20 A.M. the next morning when Cettie expired. At Ormond Beach, Rockefeller received two telegrams in rapid succession: the first announcing that she was dying, the second her death. Though he had gotten accustomed, by degrees, to the possible imminence of her death, he was still stunned by the finality of the news. When he shuffled back to the breakfast table with the news, John and Abby saw something they had never seen before: Senior was openly weeping.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Lucy Spelman · Pocantico Hills · Ormond Beach · Paul Allen · Florida · John
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Returning by train from Florida with his son and daughter-in-law, Rockefeller was amazed by the many expressions of sympathy he received from railway officials and conductors along the route. As Abby said, “He was wonderfully calm and brave but it was a great shock to him.” At Pocantico, Rockefeller found Cettie laid out peacefully where she had died and for a long time stared pensively at the woman who had shared the unprecedented achievements and tumult of his life. Alta came to Pocantico but not Edith, who was studying with Carl Jung in Switzerland. Seven years later, Rockefeller reconstructed for her his impressions of Cettie’s death, saying that “she triumphed gloriously when the end came, and to the last view we took of her, her face bore that angelic radiance.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller · Carl Jung · Pocantico Hills · Florida · Switzerland
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Rockefeller was always sentimental about his wife, and as he reminisced about their early married days on Cheshire Street in Cleveland, he would take out and lovingly handle the first dishes they had purchased. While grappling with both grief and wistful memory, he had to endure an infuriating tax battle with the city of Cleveland. He had been a legal resident of New York since the 1880s and paid all his taxes there. During the winter of 1913–1914, Cettie’s illness had forced him to prolong his stay at Forest Hill beyond February 3—the tax-listing day that determined taxable residence in Ohio. Rockefeller’s extended sojourn had been dictated solely by the medical emergency.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Cleveland · New York · Forest Hill · Cheshire Street · Ohio
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Nonetheless, his political enemies welcomed this chance to vex him. Declaring Rockefeller a legal resident for 1913, the Cuyahoga County tax office assessed him $1.5 million in taxes. Having already paid taxes in New York, he refused to submit to this extortion, even after Ohio governor James M. Cox threatened to subpoena him if he crossed the state line. While Rockefeller stalled, the Cuyahoga commissioners threatened to slap on a 50 percent penalty. Later on, the courts declared that Rockefeller had been assessed wrongfully, but meanwhile he had no choice but to boycott the state.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · New York · Cuyahoga River · James M. Cox · Ohio · Cuyahoga County
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The way Cleveland dealt with him had long been a sore point with Rockefeller, who believed that no other town so regularly abused him. He thought the city ungrateful for Standard Oil’s economic contribution and railed against “low politicians” who tried to extract taxes from him. “Cleveland ought to be ashamed to look herself in the face when she thinks of how she treated us,” he stated. It irked him that local groups badgered him for money while he was being so mercilessly berated by local reporters and politicians. During his lifetime, he donated more than three million dollars to several local institutions—including the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, Alta House, Western Reserve University, the Case School of Applied Sciences, and the Cleveland Orchestra—and gave the land for two spacious parks, Rockefeller Park and Forest Hill Park. Yet these gifts were extremely modest compared to what Cleveland would have received had it not antagonized him. Rankled, Rockefeller transferred his love and loyalty to his adopted town. “New York has always treated me more fairly than Cleveland, much more.” How many New York hospitals, museums, and churches would be enriched by Cleveland’s blunder!
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Euclid Avenue Baptist Church · Cleveland · New York · Forest Hill Park · Alta House · Case School of Applied Sciences · Western Reserve University · Cleveland Orchestra · Rockefeller Park
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Because of the virulent tax dispute, Rockefeller could not bury Cettie in the family plot in Cleveland without facing a subpoena and had to postpone the burial. To the press, he contrived a saccharine story that he could not bear to part with her remains. “I want to keep her with me as long as I can,” he told reporters. For four and a half months, he stored her casket in the green granite mausoleum of the Archbold family at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, which was patrolled at all hours by two armed guards.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · John D. Archbold · Cleveland · Tarrytown
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The casket was finally moved to Cleveland under top secret conditions. During a pelting rain and hailstorm, two guards were sent down to the cemetery gate to pick up some decorative plants for the vault—a diversionary tactic that distracted them for twenty-five minutes. While they were away, a local undertaker named Vanderbilt drove up to the vault, peeled away the flower-covered pall, removed Cettie’s casket from its container, substituted a new empty casket, then replaced the pall and flowers. Once he had executed this switch, Vanderbilt drove out the front gate with Cettie’s coffin hidden inside a rough, plain, unmarked box. Driving to the Harmon station of the Lake Shore Railroad, the undertaker loaded the box into a baggage car amid the intermittent flashes of an electrical storm. Nobody associated with the railroad knew the identity of the cadaver, which was accompanied to Cleveland by Vanderbilt and two men from 26 Broadway. One conspirator recalled Rockefeller’s peculiarly boyish pleasure at this intrigue: “To plan and carry out the removal of the body without the papers and the public discovering a thing until all was over, was a source of satisfaction to him.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Cleveland · 26 Broadway · Vanderbilt · Lake Shore Railroad · Harmon
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Perpetuating this intrigue at Lake View cemetery, only Senior, Alta, Parmalee, and Aunt Lute stood by when Cettie’s coffin was lowered into the earth beside Eliza—with a gap left in between them so that Rockefeller could spend eternity flanked by his two favorite women. Rockefeller selected Christian verse to be read aloud at the gravesite, and this clandestine sunset burial filled him with emotion. “That was all so beautiful, so lovely,” he said. “It was just as mama would have wished.” It also ended Rockefeller’s association with Cleveland, since two years later the old Forest Hill house mysteriously burned down on a frosty December night. After a failed attempt to create a residential development with houses designed in Norman-château style, Junior transferred the remaining land to Cleveland for Forest Hill Park.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Eliza Davison Rockefeller · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Alta Rockefeller Prentice · E. Parmalee Prentice · Lucy Spelman · Cleveland · Forest Hill · Forest Hill Park · Lake View · Norman
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As part of the probate of her will, Cettie’s wardrobe was inventoried and revealed her nunlike simplicity. The most costly item of clothing was a seal coat and muff, appraised at $150. She had a dowdy collection of garments, with 15 suits valued at $300 and 10 hats at $50. Cettie had never replaced the thin gold wedding ring of 1864, which was now valued at $3. As one dumbfounded reporter commented: “Able to have a wardrobe as extensive as Queen Elizabeth’s, she was content with a supply which in quantity and quality could be duplicated by the wife of an ordinarily successful business man.”
Names: Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Queen Elizabeth
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Cettie’s death elicited Rockefeller’s last major philanthropic commitment: In 1918, he gave $74 million to endow the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. To commemorate his wife, he stipulated that this foundation should promote various causes that she had championed, such as Baptist missions, churches, and homes for the aged. But the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial moved beyond the denominational giving she had favored. In 1922, under the direction of Beardsley Ruml, it began to pour nearly fifty million dollars into research in the social sciences. A husky, loquacious young man, always twinkling with ideas, the cigar-smoking Ruml stimulated the growth of many university research centers in social science and was a moving force behind the creation of the Social Science Research Council. By the time the memorial was folded into the Rockefeller Foundation in 1929, it had left an enduring imprint on the academic world in only a decade of existence. As Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago said, “The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in its brief but brilliant career did more than any other agency to promote the social sciences in the United States.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · University of Chicago · Rockefeller Foundation · Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial · United States · Robert M. Hutchins · Beardsley Ruml · Social Science Research Council
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By the time her mother died, Edith had already spent two years in self-imposed exile in Switzerland and was increasingly alienated from her father and siblings. Aside from a single meeting with Junior, she seemed to have no contact with the other Rockefellers during her years abroad. She kept up a sporadic, stilted correspondence with her father that was both warm and distant, loving and subtly hostile, as she tried to sort out her confused feelings toward him.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Rockefeller family · Switzerland
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Edith and Harold McCormick had a close but tumultuous marriage. It was, in many ways, a classic mismatch: Harold was free and expansive, while Edith was aloof, imperious, and cerebral, very much the mistress of her emotions. Sometimes she found her husband too exuberant, while he criticized her for being standoffish. Their marital tensions were likely aggravated by the death of two of their children: four-year-old Jack in 1901 and one-year-old Editha in 1904, events that cast a shadow across Edith’s life. To worsen matters, between 1905 and 1907 she suffered from tuberculosis of the kidney, which fortunately went into remission. Edith became more rigid, a stickler for a frosty sort of protocol, even forcing her children to make appointments to see her. When she went out driving, she planned the exact itinerary for the coachman then refused to speak to him again during the drive. She and Harold constructed a forty-four-room mansion in Lake Forest, Illinois, called the Villa Turicum, which they never occupied, and the unpacked crates of china and chairs lingered dustily in the storerooms. Once a brilliant society hostess, Edith became increasingly immured in their mansion at 1000 Lake Shore Drive, incapacitated by a terrifying agoraphobia.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · John Rockefeller McCormick · Editha McCormick · Illinois · China · Villa Turicum · Lake Forest · Lake Shore Drive
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In 1910, to investigate new sites for an International Harvester factory, Harold spent two summer months motoring through Hungary with Edith, a trip that sorely debilitated her. The following year, at the last minute, she canceled a cotillion ball for two hundred people without any explanation, fostering rumors that she had had a nervous breakdown. Around this time, she also suffered a crisis of religious faith, producing a breach with her father. For a long time, she had suspected that preachers dressed up their personal beliefs as gospel truth. “I never heard a Baptist minister say anything from a pulpit that convinced me he was Divinely inspired,” she once remarked. The upshot, she recalled, was that “as the minister finished his sermon one Sunday I walked from my pew and out into the air vowing never to return and I kept that vow.” For Edith, it was a bracing moment that allowed her to map her own route to salvation, yet it also estranged her from a family spoon-fed on simple Baptist pieties.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · International Harvester · Hungary
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During the summer of 1912, in a ten-week stay at a Catskill Mountains clinic run by a Dr. Foord, she rebelled against the conventional regimen of fresh air and exercise being prescribed for her depression. She was ripe for some daring approach—“My object in the world is to think new thoughts,” she once stated—ideally one with quasi-mystical ingredients that might substitute for her shattered religious faith. She was primed, in short, for her first encounter with Carl Jung, the Swiss clinical and experimental psychiatrist who had treated Harold several years earlier.
Names: Harold McCormick · Carl Jung · Catskill Mountains · Foord
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While Jung was in New York in September 1912, Harold’s cousin Medill McCormick—an editor and co-owner of the Chicago Tribune who had been treated by Jung for alcoholism—introduced Edith to him. As he began to analyze her, Jung liked her mental sparkle but thought her emotional state extremely precarious. Jung diagnosed Edith as suffering from “latent schizophrenia,” a hypothesis confirmed for him when she told him about a dream she had of a tree struck by lightning and split in two. Edith responded to analysis like a frustrated searcher who had at last found her destination. According to one version of the story, the bossy Edith urged Jung to move with his family to America, where she would buy him a house and help him to establish his practice. This grandiosity only strengthened Jung’s misgivings about Edith as a woman who thought “she could buy everything.” Regarding American life as sterile and deracinated, Jung recommended that Edith come to study with him in Zurich instead.
Names: Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Harold McCormick · Carl Jung · New York · Zurich · United States · Medill McCormick · Chicago Tribune
EPUB paragraph 24 · Text/Cher_9780307429773_epub_c30_r1.htm
Since Edith spent years under Jung’s spell, it is worth noting his intense dislike of Rockefeller. On October 20, 1912, Jung spent the day with Edith at Kykuit, doubtless savoring the chance to study an archetypal figure such as Rockefeller up close. He glibly dismissed the titan as narrow, empty, and sanctimonious. “Rockefeller is really just a mountain of gold, and it has been dearly bought,” he said. He thought Rockefeller lonely, obsessed with his own health, and tortured by a bad conscience. At one point, Rockefeller told Jung that the Austrians were bad people. “You know, Doctor, perhaps, of my idea for a standardized price in favor of the Standard Oil Trust; you see what a great advantage it is to pay the same price for oil all over the world—it is for the good of the people—but the Austrians have made a separate contract with Rumania. Those people are very bad.” For Jung, who viewed Standard Oil as a monstrous operation, such talk corroborated his worst suspicions. As he later wrote, “We had three great organizations before the war, the famous trinity—the Germany army, the Standard Oil Company, and the Catholic Church. Each considers itself a perfectly moral institution … [yet] thousands of decent human beings have been destroyed by the Standard Oil Trust.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Carl Jung · Standard Oil · Kykuit · Germany · Rumania · Catholic Church
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