Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. [NOOK Book]

Interviews & Essays

Ron Chernow: Very well, and it is nice to congregate with everybody in cyberspace. Welcome.

Ron Chernow: Actually the subject was chosen for me by Random House, and at first I violently objected. My image of Rockefeller was of a mean man. I had always wanted to write a pure bio rather than family saga, and I was looking for somebody who had an inner life, and I didn't see this inner life in Rockefeller. I tried to wriggle out of doing this book, but my editor was very insistent, so I visited the Rockefeller Archive Center in New York. His papers, amazingly enough, had been sitting there open to the public since 1975, and nobody had bothered to use them. So the curators there were not about to let me leave without a fight -- they were dying for people to come and use the materials they had.

I made the mistake of telling the director of the archive that I couldn't write about somebody unless I heard the music of the person's mind -- that is, unless I felt that I heard that inner monologue that we carry on as we move through the day. With Rockefeller I didn't hear that private voice. In fact, I didn't hear any voice at all, so in order to call my bluff, the director showed me the transcript of an interview that had been privately conducted with Rockefeller between 1917 and 1920 but had never been made public. This was 17-page transcript in which he recounted blow by blow every aspect of his career. I was utterly fascinated by this interview, because I thought of him as somebody so closed and mysterious, and the person that I encountered in this interview was somebody I had never encountered in any of the previous bios. He was fiery, articulate, often funny, and amazingly analytical. There were many things that I instantly disliked about him: There was a sanctimonious tone; he denigrated his critic automatically; and he had a chilling capacity to rationalize his behavior. But compared to the cold-blooded monster of myth, this was a much more human and interesting figure. I immediately realized that I had an extraordinary opportunity to take a major figure who on the surface seemed so familiar to all of us but who was really an unknown entity, so I saw that I could present a fresh portrait, and I decided on the spot to do the book.

Ron Chernow: The Rockefeller family opened the Archive Center to the public in the mid-1970s. The papers are available to anybody with a bona fide project; that is, if you are writing a book, article, a school paper, a dissertation, or any other project. The Archive Center is run by professional archivists, not by the family -- they transferred all the literary rights to this team of archivists -- so the center is not devoted to his glorification. It is devoted to deepening the understanding of the man and institutions that he created. I encountered many writers during the course of my research who were there trying to expose the Rockefeller family in one way or another, and they were shown the same courtesy as everybody else, so I think it is to the credit of the Rockefeller family that they have enough confidence in their place in American society that they are willing to open the papers to public scrutiny in this way. I can't think of any other prominent family that has done this. Usually when you write the history of a family, you go through a long struggle with family members to attain access to the papers, and very often the author's relations with the families become very complicated and sticky as a result. This was a nice clean situation in which the Rockefeller family didn't have to approve or disapprove my project; they had cut loose from their own history.

Ron Chernow: Fascinating question. Everybody remembers Rockefeller as a dried-up little man handing out dimes in front of the newsreel cameras; in his later years he gave many press interviews and became a ham actor for the cameras. But he was quite a different personality when he was a young man creating Standard Oil. During his active career, he almost never granted interviews and never allowed himself to be photographed in any business situation. He was somebody whose name was known by everybody but who had seldom been seen by anybody. He was the mysterious wizard of this vast global oil monopoly. Rockefeller did not retain a publicist until the age of 67, in 1906. It was no coincidence that that year the government filed an antitrust suit to break up Standard Oil.

At that point, Rockefeller began to play gold with reporters, and it turned out that he had a great knack for charming and seducing the press. He belatedly learned the power of public relations. It is amazing that during the nearly three-year period in which Ida Tarbell exposed Rockefeller in the pages of McClure's Magazine, Rockefeller never deigned to reply to his articles. She committed several errors in the series, damaging errors, and if Rockefeller had PR people, they could probably have done some serious harm to her reputation. Nowadays, the chief executives in a comparable situation would field a small army of publicists. I have read, for example, that Bill Gates as he goes through his troubles with the Justice Department has no fewer than 30 publicists to advise him. Quite a difference from the old days! But nowadays, any corporate executive recognizes that PR is inseparable from commercial success and a good reputation.

Ron Chernow: Williamsburg was a project of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the only son of John D. Rockefeller Sr., who had no interest whatsoever in that type of restoration project. John Jr. said that his father showed no interest in Colonial Williamsburg, and I think this wounded Junior, because he devoted more love and time to this than to any other project he was involved with.

To return to John Sr.: In the 19th century, most rich people gave away money in a very personal, haphazard, or sentimental fashion. Rich people typically gave money to a local school, hospital, or orphanage. Giving was very personal, direct, and often local in nature. John D. Rockefeller Sr. decided that because of the colossal scale of his wealth, he had to pioneer a whole new philanthropy. He would either create large institutions or use existing institutional channels to distribute large amounts of money. Instead of building buildings that bore the Rockefeller name, he established as his two top priorities medicine and education. He tried to fund things that would benefit all of society rather than one group within society, so he founded in the 1880s Spelman College, to educate emancipated female slaves and their daughters. It was a very daring and visionary thing for a man in his early 40s to do in the early 1880s. In the early 1890s, he created the University of Chicago and turned it overnight into a school on par with the Ivy League schools. The first president of the school had a virtual blank check to raid the Ivy Leagues for professors, prompting yells out outrage from Yale, Cornell, and other schools.

In the early 1900s, he established the first institute devoted purely to medical research. It was originally called the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and today is known as the Rockefeller University. At the time it was considered revolutionary and even somewhat eccentric to think that you could hire grown-ups to sit around and daydream about scientific discoveries. In fact, within years of opening, it developed a system for treating meningitis and curing other diseases.

Another example of the scientific approach of the Rockefellers was the General Education Board. Rockefeller's advisers had noticed that many southern states lacked the extensive high school system of the northern states, and many children of well-to-do southerners went to private academies rather than high schools. Another philanthropist would have decided to build a few high schools in the South. Rockefeller decided to hire education professors in each southern state who would then lobby local communities and state government to finance public schools. As a result of the work of the General Education Board, 800 high schools came into existence in the South. I hope that answers your question.

Ron Chernow: First of all, Rockefeller, like many other self-made industrialists of his time, detested bankers. He thought they were wicked, which was funny, considering his closet addiction to the stock market. When he was a young man, he was the champion borrower of all time. In later years, he said his single biggest problem in creating Standard Oil was to find enough money to buy out all his rivals. In fact, when he bought out a rival refinery, he would take out his checkbook and he would very serenely say that he would be happy to write out a check or the seller could take payment in Standard Oil stock. He later admitted that he prayed that people would take Standard Oil stock, because he couldn't have paid everybody in cash. Standard Oil was founded in Cleveland in 1870; by the 1880s the monopoly was almost completely financed from retained earnings, that is, he no longer needed to borrow from any banker. Standard Oil had such immense cash reserves that when it began to deposit those balances in the National City Bank, it turned the bank almost overnight into the largest bank in America, so Standard Oil was the banker to the nation's largest bank. But Rockefeller came from an era in which industrialists distrusted financiers, and I think that he would have been disturbed by the power that financiers have in the economy today.

Ron Chernow: Interesting question. At the beginning, the attacks against Standard Oil came from Rockefeller's business rivals, the refiners and oil producers who felt squeezed by Standard Oil in the 1870s and 1880s. By the 1890s these rivals had goaded the state attorney generals into filing antitrust suits against Standard Oil on the state level. Three things happened in the early 1900s that inflamed public opinion against Standard Oil. Ida Tarbell and the muckraking press exposed may of the ruthless tactics of the trust and converted Rockefeller into America's most hated businessman. Teddy Roosevelt, who became president in 1901, was the first president to activate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which had been passed in 1890. The third part of the uproar came from consumers who were outraged by rising oil prices.

So it was the combination of the discontented business rivals, the militant state attorney generals, the muckraking press, a crusading president, and irate consumers who combined to overthrow Standard Oil. In 1906, the federal government filed an antitrust suit to break it up, and that happened in 1911. The trust was so large that the individual companies spun off in the break up include the companies that are today, Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, ARCO, Conoco, BP America, and 27 others. By the time the federal government won the 1911 antitrust case, there had been 21 separate state antitrust suits lodged against Standard Oil.

When I heard Janet Reno, the attorney general, announce that the federal government was filing an antitrust action against Microsoft along with 20 states and D.C., I saw the unparalleled comparison. One big difference between the cases is that the impetus behind the Microsoft case seems to be primarily Bill Gates's business rivals, joined by trustbusters on the federal and the state levels. Bill Gates remains generally popular among consumers, although his approval ratings have begun to drop rather sharply as a result of the antitrust case, but so far most consumers are pleased by the fact that computer prices generally continue to fall and the quality of the products continues to improve.

Also, John D. Rockefeller made his fortune in kerosene for illumination. It burned in virtually every household in the late 19th century. We have to remember that the majority of American households don't own a computer and have no access to cyberspace. We are talking in a realm that still lies beyond the means of most Americans. This will certainly change within the next few years, and I am sure that nearly every home will be wired within the next five years, but for the moment, at least half of the American public is watching the case with complete indifference or incomprehension, because they neither own nor know how to operate a computer; it is not yet a universal consumer product. This is one thing that slightly weakens the Justice Department's political support in this case. I think I will stop there because it is a very large and complicated subject.

Ron Chernow: I am open to suggestions. The question now is, Is there life after Rockefeller? I am in the position of the mounted climber who has climbed Everest.

Ron Chernow: One of the big lessons that I learned from writing the book is that free markets don't exist in a state of nature. Between the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, we had a vast national experiment in completely unregulated markets, and what we discovered is that markets, if left completely to their own devices, can wind up terribly unfree. Rockefeller, who is a business genius, managed to figure out every conceivable anticompetitive practice, so when the first antitrust legislation was enacted in 1890, all its authors needed to do was to study his career closely, then enact legislation accordingly.

Before the antitrust laws existed, businessmen not only entered into conspiracies against the public but also worked actively to damage their opponents in ways that would seem inconceivable today. For instance, if Rockefeller wanted to eliminate a rival oil refiner, he might buy up all the existing barrels on the market so that his rival could neither store nor ship his oil. He might create an artificial shortage of tank cars so there was no way his rival could ship his product to distant markets. He might go to the local banker and urge that no loans be given to his rival. He might go the local railroad and demand that punitive freight rates be imposed upon his rival.

We tend to think that the style of business competition is rough today, but even some of our most ruthless businessmen seem like passive pussycats compared to the 19th century titans of industry. And that is because we have antitrust legislation that defines the rules of competition. They are so deeply embedded in the economy that we almost forget that they exist or how they got there. A great surprise for me in doing this book was that many businessmen in the late 19th century did not believe in free markets or competition. Rockefeller saw himself as the product of a new economic order that he called cooperation and the rest of us referred to as monopoly. At the turn of the century, most American industries operated under the control of trusts or cartels; it was really government intervention under Teddy Roosevelt that introduced competition when none had previously existed.

Ron Chernow: John D. Rockefeller was the eldest son of crazily mismatched parents. His mother, Eliza, was a thrifty, sober, God-fearing woman who drilled John in hard work and introduced him to the Baptist church. Her husband, William Avery Rockefeller, was nicknamed Devil Bill, and as the name suggests, he was a colorful, fast-talking scoundrel. During John's boyhood, Bill would disappear for weeks or months at a time, peddling snake oil on the road to gullible country people. He was a very shrewd and crafty individual, if thoroughly disreputable. If John D. Rockefeller strikes us as such a contradictory figure, as both the monopolist and philanthropist; it is because he blended together traits from both parents. He combined his mother's thrift and discipline with his father's extraordinary and sometimes unscrupulous cunning.

Ron Chernow: This is the first online interview that I have ever done, after being a professional writer for 25 years. So in its modest way, this has been a historic occasion for the historian.