Books: Benevolent Despot

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER—Allan Nevins —Scribner (2 vols.; $7.50).

Bright particular star of that demagogy-by-document which Roosevelt I called muckraking was Ida Minerva Tarbell. She had been brought up in the Pennsylvania oil fields when the fight between Standard Oil and the independents was hottest. Her father and brother were oil men whom Rockefeller had pushed to the wall. Miss Tarbell proved a terrible avenger. Her History of the Standard Oil Company, a perfervid, superbly documented indictment of oil-trust machinations, brought in a gusher of popular ill will which still bubbles up from time to time in anti-Rockefeller sentiment.

Historian Allan Nevins acknowledges the earnestness and honesty of Muckrakeress Tarbell’s book. But he has long thought that the time was ripe for a reappraisal of John D. Rockefeller Sr. in line with later, less emotional understanding of the nature and function of trusts. Last week he made this appraisal in an exhaustive, intelligent, scrupulously just, lucidly written biography of John D. About half of Volume I describes his poor but honest boyhood in Tioga County, N. Y., his thrifty, God-fearing young manhood in Cleveland, Ohio. About half of Volume II describes his closing years of good works. But most of the biography’s 1,400 pages is about Standard Oil.

Historian Nevins believes that trusts are an inevitable sign of industry’s maturity: their historical justification is their efficiency. He makes no attempt to sidestep or deny Standard’s unfair, savage throat-cutting in its efforts to trustify. But he sees such practices as part of an unfair, savage, cutthroat period in U. S. business, a period that Rockefeller by his vast unification did more than anyone else to end.

Standard Oil was the first great U. S.

trust. It bore the first onslaughts of criticism, lawsuits, public investigation by people to whom the unfamiliar monster was “a conspiracy, a dark plot born in greed.”* Greedy men exist, observes Nevins, but they seldom pile up colossal fortunes. Rockefeller himself said that his great aim was “achievement,” and, says Biographer Nevins, “the statement was true.” He adds: “We must not forget that Rockefeller began to give as soon as he began to earn.”

Rockefeller gifts include some $35,000,000 to the University of Chicago; some $50,000,000 to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; some $100.000,000 to the General Education Board for allocation to needy U. S. colleges and universities; some $235,000,000 to the Rockefeller Foundation for the advancement of public health and medical knowledge.

Philanthropist Rockefeller planned his charities as carefully as he planned his trust. His purpose was threefold: 1) to start object lessons in charity; 2) to start programs for others to carry on; 3) to start others giving by giving himself. But he was against setting up any charitable foundation “in perpetuity.” Said Rockefeller: “Perpetuity is a pretty long time.” With age John D. Sr. came to depend more & more on John D. Jr. to run his empire. He thought the young man did his job very well. But he ruthlessly curbed any tendency to spendthriftness in “Mr.

John’s” character. When J. P. Morgan’s collection of Chinese porcelains was sold, John D. Jr. wanted to buy some pieces, asked his father for the necessary loan. The old man, who never collected china, said no. “I then wrote him,” says John D. Jr., “that I had . . . never spent money on gambling, horse racing, drinking, or fast companions; that the acquisition of Chinese porcelains was my only hobby. …” He got the money, as a gift.

John D. Sr.’s hobby was his northern and southern estates, where he planned vistas, laid roads, planted trees. He systematized these pleasures too. He liked to rise at 6 in the morning, walk barefoot in the dewy grass, play golf at 10. Sometimes he gave out dimes. The dime idea, says Author Nevins, was Rockefeller’s, not Rockefeller Publicity Counsel Ivy Lee’s. Nevins also flatly denies popular stories that Rockefeller lost all his teeth, lived on bread & milk, lived in fear of kidnapping. Until the year he died, age 98, he ate fish, fowl, lamb, vegetables, walked and drove unguarded in Ormond Beach. In Cleveland, church ushers were careful not to seat near him anybody who looked like a crank.

But Rockefeller had one bad moment in his serene old age. University of Chicago’s ex-President Harper once spent a whole evening describing the Soviet system to him. Rockefeller listened intently. Next morning he confessed that the conversation had given him a wakeful night, but he said that he thought the capitalist system, with all its faults, would survive.

*Rockefeller, says Nevins, was never quite a billionaire. At its pre-1913 peak, his fortune probably amounted to some $900,000,000.