CHAPTER 2
Fires of Revival

hen the Rockefellers moved thirty miles north from Richford to Moravia, they progressed from a backward, frontier settlement to a more sedate community with neat frame houses in the town center. Settled by the United Brethren in Christ—an evangelical denomination that later merged with the United Methodist Church—Moravia was already a stronghold of temperance and antislavery sentiment and boasted a hotel, general store, cotton mill, and Congregational church. Even today, Moravia is a quaintly authentic piece of Americana, with graceful, shady streets that have a companionable feel and houses with wide, friendly verandas.

The Rockefellers lived on the rural outskirts north of town. Around 1843, Bill put down a thousand dollars for a ninety-two-acre parcel of grassy upland that gently sloped down to Owasco Lake, one of the most picturesque of the Finger Lakes. He enlarged an existing house until it contained seven or eight rooms favored with superb views, framed by tall pines, of the bright blue lake set against a backdrop of wooded hills on the far shore. Barns stood across the road, and a smokehouse out back enabled the family to cure ham and bacon. For John D., this two-story clapboard house was a scene of enchantment and became his enduring emblem of pastoral beauty. In the summertime, he loved to pull yellow perch from the cold, clear lake, and even winters captivated him in spite of the bitter cold. The Rockefeller children slept in an unplastered upstairs room that was heated only by a stovepipe rising from the kitchen; snow flurries and sharp winter squalls pressed through cracks in the walls. “How the wind used to roar among the hemlocks by the shore of the lake!” Rockefeller remembered dreamily in his late seventies. ¹ In the predawn dark, the children were often awakened by the sharp chopping of woodcutters or the squeal of sleds on hard-packed snow. Eliza would stand at the foot of the stairs and call up to her eldest son, “Come, my son; time to get up and milk your cow!” ² To warm his feet in the dim, cold barn, John always stood on the steaming earth just vacated by the cow he was milking.

The first three Rockefeller children—Lucy, John, and William—had been born in Richford. Now, in 1843, with Big Bill again on the road during months of her pregnancy, Eliza gave birth to a second daughter, Mary Ann; two years later, twins arrived. The boy, Frank, was healthy, but Frances was sickly from birth and received some seventy visits from a local doctor before she died just short of her second birthday. Eliza tried to protect the seven-year-old John D. from this first lacerating brush with death, but it remained engraved on his memory. When he visited Moravia as an old man in his eighties, he pointed to a field and explained that “when Frances was buried I was sent over to that field to pick stones, so that I should not know.” ³ He later exhibited an unacknowledged dread of death, and Eliza was perhaps the first to intuit it.

In Moravia, William Avery Rockefeller acted like a strange amalgam of solid citizen and engaging ne'er-do-well. As in Richford, the townsfolk goggled as he sped by on swift horses, decked out in smart clothes, and his prodigal spending sometimes fostered the impression that he was the town's richest man. Mary Ann later dismissed the “ridiculous” stories of their childhood poverty. “We always had plenty to eat and wear, and every reasonable kind of comfort. We were not rich, of course—far from it; but we had enough to eat and use and save—always.” ⁴ Moravia was the golden period of John's boyhood when his father briefly aspired to gentility. One neighbor even labeled Bill “about the most notable man in the community.” ⁵ Since the region was rich in pristine pine forests, he organized a legitimate and quite successful logging business. Before dawn, guided only by starlight and lanterns, he and his work gangs carted logs to the lakeside by bobsled, then floated them up to Auburn, situated at the lake's northern tip. In a sudden burst of civic spirit, Bill helped to select the site for the town school by counting the revolutions of his buggy wheels as he drove through town, then placing the school at the exact middle of the community; he persuaded local taxpayers to pay for it at a time when many people still thought families should educate their children at home. With the resourceful, go-getter attitude later transmitted to his son, Bill also stocked Owasco Lake with pickerel and even headed the local temperance committee. “That's the kind of man he was,” boasted John D. “He'd get a thing done while his neighbors were beginning to talk about it.” ⁶ The Moravia period revealed an important truth about Bill: He had an underlying craving for respectability and probably didn't plan to spend his whole life as a floating charlatan, preying on the gullible.

Bill never deigned to dirty his hands with farmwork, of course, which he considered beneath his dignity. He hired a railroad worker named Hiram Odell to work the farm and look after his family during his still-frequent wanderings. As Bill instructed him, “Their mother ain't strong enough to manage 'em and they need some managing. Do just what you think is right for 'em.” ⁷ While Odell cultivated the garden in his spare time, Eliza assigned chores to the children. Drawing a string across the garden one day, she told the two oldest boys, “John, you take care of this side of the string, and, Will, this side is yours.” ⁸ In contrast to his father's disdain for manual labor, John—always a self-styled son of the common people—gloried in the rigors of country life, which, he came to believe, toughened him for later industrial struggle. His frugal boyhood hardened an already stoic nature and made him proof against later adversity.

There was enough economic activity in the America of the 1840s to stimulate the fancy of any future mogul. Banks sprang up everywhere, canals cross-hatched the countryside, steamboats plied the rivers, railroads and telegraphs welded together the first national markets. Territorial expansion was in the air: Texas was annexed in 1845, and war with Mexico seemed inevitable. Though only dimly aware of such distant developments, John D. Rockefeller already seemed a perfect specimen of homo economicus . Even as a boy, he bought candy by the pound, divided it into small portions, then sold it at a tidy profit to his siblings. By age seven, encouraged by his mother, he was dropping gold, silver, and copper coins that he earned into a blue china bowl on the mantel. John's first business coup came at age seven when he shadowed a turkey hen as it waddled off into the woods, raided its nest, and raised the chicks for sale. To spur his enterprise, Eliza gave him milk curds to feed the turkeys, and the next year he raised an even larger brood. As an old man, Rockefeller said, “To this day, I enjoy the sight of a flock of turkeys, and never miss an opportunity of studying them.” ⁹

Despite Rockefeller's roseate memories, early photos of him tell a much more somber tale. His face was grim, expressionless, lacking boyish joy and animation; the skin is drawn, the eyes blank and devoid of luster. To other people, he often seemed abstracted, and they remembered him with a deadpan face trudging along country roads, lost in thought, as if unraveling deep problems. “He was a quiet boy,” said one Moravia resident. “He seemed always to be thinking.” ¹⁰ In many respects, John was forgettable and indistinguishable from many other boys. When he later dazzled the world, many former neighbors and classmates struggled to summon up even a fuzzy image of him. He was a slow learner but patient and persistent and, like J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould, exhibited a terrific head for math. “I was not an easy student, and I had to apply myself diligently to prepare my lessons,” said Rockefeller, who described himself accurately as “reliable” but not “brilliant.” ¹¹ For thirty weeks per year (rural children needed time off for farm chores), he attended the one-room schoolhouse established by his father, a spare white building with a pitched roof and windows adorned with dark shutters. Discipline was harsh and exacting: When students misbehaved, the teacher menacingly held a slate over their heads. If Rockefeller didn't excel in class, it might have been in part because he lacked the bright boy's exhibitionism, the yearning for gold stars; always inner-directed and indifferent to the approval of others, he was therefore free of a certain boyish vanity.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that there was something extraordinary about the way this stolid boy pinpointed goals and doggedly pursued them without any trace of childish impulsiveness. When playing checkers or chess, he showed exceptional caution, studying each move at length, working out every possible countermove in his head. “I'll move just as soon as I get it figured out,” he told opponents who tried to rush him. “You don't think I'm playing to get beaten, do you?” ¹² To ensure that he won, he submitted to games only where he could dictate the rules. Despite his slow, ponderous style, once he had thoroughly mulled over his plan of action, he had the power of quick decision.

Although he was generally grave and devoted much time to books, music, and church, he had a sly wit, the sort that curled up unexpectedly around the edges of a sentence. As his sister-in-law said, “He had a quick sense of humor, though one might say he was soberly mirthful. His appreciation was keen, but I do not recall him as ever laughing loudly. But I do remember the quick lighting up of his eyes, and the dimples that showed in his cheek when he heard or saw anything amusing.” ¹³ His sister Mary Ann remembered him as an inveterate tease. “He would plague us all with his jokes, always with a straight, solemn face.” ¹⁴ Rockefeller always had a droll sense of fun, but it was often obscured behind a mask of gravity.

John D. Rockefeller was drawn to the church, not as some nagging duty or obligation but as something deeply refreshing to the soul. The Baptist church of his boyhood provides many clues to the secrets of his character. As a young man, he was raised on a steady diet of maxims, grounded in evangelical Protestantism, that guided his conduct. Many of his puritanical attitudes, which may seem antiquated to a later generation, were merely the religious commonplaces of his boyhood. Indeed, the saga of his monumental business feats is inseparable from the fire-and-brimstone atmosphere that engulfed upstate New York in his childhood. Even his father, wont to flirt with the devil's company, knew many hymns by heart and urged his children to go to church; he once offered John five dollars to read the Bible cover to cover, thus creating an early, unintentional association between God and money. Always an iconoclastic, outlaw spirit, Bill never actually joined a church—that would have been going too far—so John identified religion with his beloved mother, who found in the Bible a balm for her troubled spirit.

John attended a Sunday school a short distance from their hilltop house and remembered the teacher as a formerly profane man who had repented and become an earnest Christian. The boy saw religion less as a system of otherworldly rewards than as a means for moral reformation on earth. Since Bill was often away, Eliza coaxed a Presbyterian neighbor into dropping off her and the children at the Baptist church on Sunday mornings. As the family huddled together in a pew, Eliza encouraged the children to drop pennies into the collection plate; Rockefeller later cited his mother's altruism as the genesis of his philanthropy. Early in life, he learned that God wanted his flock to earn money and then donate money in a never-ending process. “I was trained from the beginning to work and to save,” Rockefeller explained. “I have always regarded it as a religious duty to get all I could honorably and to give all I could. I was taught that way by the minister when I was a boy.” ¹⁵ The low-church Baptists didn't prohibit the accumulation of wealth but did oppose its vain, ostentatious display, setting up a tension that would be threaded throughout Rockefeller's life.

While the first Baptist church had been founded by Roger Williams in Rhode Island in 1639, the denomination didn't flourish until the so-called Great Awakening that began around 1739. This upsurge of religious fervor gathered force following the tour of the eastern seaboard by the charismatic English Methodist evangelist George Whitefield. In open fields, amid much weeping, shrieking, fainting, and guilty writhing on the ground, masses of people were converted to Christianity or had their sagging faith restored. This period of rabid emotion spurred fantastic growth among Baptists, who believed in voluntary immersion and a public confession of faith from adherents. More than one hundred new Baptist churches sprang up in New England alone. With their lay leaders and autonomous congregations, the Baptists were ideally suited to frontier areas and the democratic ethos of the colonists. Recruited from the common people, often unpaid and poorly educated, Baptist ministers ventured into the hinterlands where other clergymen feared to tread. Because they opposed religious establishments and owed no allegiance to supervisory bishops or a central church hierarchy, they could start up a church in any creek or hollow. They emerged as a major religious force by the close of the eighteenth century.

A Second Great Awakening aroused New England and the mid-Atlantic states to a new pitch of religious fever from 1800 to the late 1830s. This protracted movement peaked around 1830, when the revival fires blazed so hotly that Rochester and other sections of upstate New York and Ohio were dubbed the Burned-Over District. When revivalists—of whom Charles Grandison Finney was the most celebrated—arrived in a town, they held prayer meetings that often lasted through the night. These theatrical spectacles, marked by dramatic outpourings of emotion, featured hardened sinners who sat on the “anxious bench” as townspeople publicly urged them to repent. When they saw the light, the guilty parties often burst into tears and knelt in prayer. Preachers tried to reach people through vivid appeals to hope and fear, invoking heavenly bliss and burning lakes of hellfire. One popular evangelist, Jacob Knapp, described tormented sinners crawling up the sides of burning pits while devils with pitchforks, perched on the rim, sadistically prodded them back down into the flames. The revival movement was self-perpetuating, for the saved were expected to rescue others from Satan's clutches. They would go door-to-door, trying to flush sinners from their homes until the entire town was caught up in passionate, hysterical emotion.

Several aspects of this revival movement are worth noting because they are so strikingly reflected in Rockefeller's life. In the late 1820s, militant evangelicals in Rochester agitated against smoking, dancing, card playing, billiards, and the theater, while boycotting stores that opened on the Sabbath. As Rockefeller said, “Going back　...　to my early business days and boyhood, the Baptists I knew listened to their consciences and their religious instructions, not only did not dance in public places but did not dance anywhere and did not even concede the reputability of dancing. ... The theater was considered a source of depravity, to be shunned by conscientious Christians.” ¹⁶ Because liquor was considered a satanic brew, a believer couldn't make it, sell it, or offer it to guests, and a temperance pledge became a standard component of accepting Christ into one's life. In his boyhood, Rockefeller internalized an abiding sense that the professing Christian had to be a soldier armed against all secular temptation and must never stray far from godly circles.

Departing from strict Calvinism, Baptist evangelicals clung to the egalitarian view that all errant souls could be saved, not just a small, predestined elect, and they actively engaged in evangelism and missionary work. Rockefeller was brought up to believe that nobody was ever irretrievably lost, that people were free agents who could be redeemed by an act of will—a self-reliant outlook that stamped his conservative political views. His Baptist upbringing also predisposed him to follow the cult of perpetual self-improvement that played so prominent a role in nineteenth-century American culture. Finney, for instance, was a Presbyterian who exhorted his listeners to pursue perfection in their earthly lives.

Rockefeller entered the Baptist Church at a fateful moment. In May 1845, in a schism over the issue of slaveholders serving as missionaries, Baptist delegates from nine southern states seceded from the national body to create the Southern Baptist Convention. Northern Baptists fervently believed that abolitionism was consistent with their opposition to ecclesiastical hierarchy, their populist spirit, and their broad-based campaign to purge sin from society. The Second Great Awakening had explicitly linked personal conversion with community reform, spawning political activism. During the colonial period, Americans had liberally consumed demon rum, but the new evangelical emphasis on social uplift helped to foster a national temperance movement in the 1820s and 1830s. For Rockefeller, an apolitical man, the church narrowed his social life but widened his vision, providing a bridge to larger social concerns and ultimately preparing him for the world of philanthropy.

If John D. believed, despite the flamboyant antics of Devil Bill, that he had enjoyed a homespun boyhood out of a Currier & Ives print, it was largely due to the compensating influence of Eliza and the church. Her hardships tapped some deep reserve of strength and wisdom in the simple country woman with the spare face, quiet ways, and steady blue-gray eyes. “Mother was wonderful,” said Mary Ann. “She managed the family and the house and did it all so easily.” ¹⁷ Though Eliza dutifully read the Bible, her few surviving missives reveal an extremely rudimentary education; she misspelled the most elementary words, writing herd for heard, plesant for pleasant , and ben for been . (John was a faultless speller and grammarian.) All but a stranger to grammar, she sometimes wrote letters that consisted of a single run-on sentence.

It is hard not to be stirred by Eliza's uncomplaining bravery in steadily tending five children in the face of her husband's erratic, irresponsible ways. When Bill was on the road, she never knew where he was, what he was doing, or when he might surface again. Though she had Hiram Odell, and her father lived just across Owasco Lake, Eliza was often alone with the children at night in a town on the fringe of a wilderness. As she thumbed her Bible and puffed on a corncob pipe, she must have worried about roving thieves. One of Rockefeller's favorite stories reveals her coolheaded response to danger:

From such early experiences, John D. took away a deep, abiding respect for women; unlike other moguls of the Gilded Age, he never saw them in purely ornamental terms.

Born in 1813, Eliza had grown up in the shadow of the Second Great Awakening and was never lax about discipline. While Devil Bill dispensed gifts to the children, Eliza, by default, meted out punishment and tried to subdue the wild Rockefeller streak in her children. A kindred spirit, John accepted her stern country justice when she drew out the birch switch, strapped him to the apple tree, and “laid on Macduff,” as she styled it. “On those occasions I made my protests, which she heard sympathetically and accepted sweetly—but [she] still laid on, explaining that I had earned the punishment and must have it,” Rockefeller recalled. “She would say, ‘I'm doing this in love.’　” ¹⁹ She typically erred on the side of severity. Once, while punishing John for misbehavior at school, he started to plead his innocence. “Never mind,” she interrupted, “we have started in on this whipping, and it will do for the next time.” ²⁰ Rockefeller told a tale of his adolescence that highlighted his mother's grim discipline. They then lived in Owego, and she had forbidden him to ice-skate on the Susquehanna River, but the lure of a moonlit night overwhelmed the better judgment of John and his brother William. They were gliding along the river when they heard the desperate cries of a young boy who had fallen through the ice. Pushing a pole to the flailing boy, John and William fished him from the water and saved his life. When they returned home, Eliza hailed their courage, then promptly got down to business. “We thought we should be left off without punishment,” said Rockefeller, “but mother gave us a good tanning, nevertheless.” ²¹

Where William and Frank had their father's broad face and high forehead, John had Eliza's narrow face, piercing eyes, and sharp chin and a personality that conformed more to the Davison pattern. He also had his mother's slow metabolism and ability to bear a large burden for long periods in an unruffled way. Many neighbors testified that the unflappable Eliza never lost her temper, never raised her voice, never scolded anyone—a style of understated authority that John inherited. From his mother he learned economy, order, thrift, and other bourgeois virtues that figured so largely in his success at Standard Oil. Forced to pay a heavy penalty for her impetuous decision to marry Devil Bill, Eliza trained her children to reflect coolly before making decisions; her frequent admonition “We will let it simmer” was a saying John employed throughout his business career.

For a woman of Eliza's intense pride and religiosity, it must have been hard to endure the unaccountable absences of her gallivanting husband, and she drew closer, of necessity, to her oldest son, who struck her as precocious and prematurely wise. She saw qualities in him still invisible to the world at large. Because she confided in him and gave him adult responsibilities, he matured rapidly and acquired unusual confidence; it must have flattered his pride that he served as a surrogate father and was so vital to the family's survival. His relations with his siblings seemed more paternal than fraternal, and he often instructed them. As he put it, “I know that in my own case I have been greatly helped by the confidence imposed in me since early boyhood.” ²² Of course, this boyhood responsibility took its toll on John D., who experienced little of the spontaneous joy or levity of youth. Growing up as a miniature adult, burdened with duties, he developed an exaggerated sense of responsibility that would be evident throughout his life. He learned to see himself as a reluctant savior, taking charge of troubled situations that needed to be remedied.

Until he came to appraise him through more mature eyes, John idolized his father. A man capable of Paul Bunyan–esque feats, William Avery Rockefeller possessed the dash and virility that every young boy dreams of in a father. “I come of a strong family, men of unusual strength, a family of giants,” Rockefeller stated later in life. ²³ “What a bright smile my father had. Everybody liked him. ‘Uncle Billy,’ they called him.” ²⁴ By all accounts, Bill was a man of abundant talents. He was such a superb athlete that he could stand beside a fence and jump over it backward; such an amazing ventriloquist that he could create half a dozen characters talking at once; such a legendary animal trainer that he once taught tricks to a pet bear he had won in a shooting competition; and such a skillful hypnotist that he was darkly rumored to “throw a mist” around person and beast alike. ²⁵

If the children associated Eliza with discipline, they identified Bill with laughter, plenty, and good times. He was the ideal hunting and fishing buddy, a crack shot who could bring down small birds in flight. Mesmerized by guns, he kept a splendid set of clean, well-oiled rifles (including one with a telescopic sight) in the Moravia house. Taking aim at a pine tree while standing in a meadow, he would toss off rapid shots until the bark was shredded by bullets. When selling patent medicines, his marksmanship served him extremely well, for he would use it to draw a crowd in strange towns. Setting up a manikin with a clay pipe in its mouth, he retreated to a distance of two hundred paces, shot the pipe to smithereens, then offered a ten-dollar bill to anybody in the crowd who could match his prowess.

Lively and fun-loving, Bill created infectious merriment wherever he went. As his son noted, “He always wanted something going on in the house, singing or music of some sort.” ²⁶ He was nothing if not shrewd and used his talents to further his enjoyment. One day, he heard of a violin virtuoso who had been clapped in the town jail for drunkenness. The offender was given a choice: Either he could pay a hundred-dollar fine or serve a hundred days in jail, with each day served reducing the fine by a dollar. Unable to muster the hundred dollars, Bill let the musician stew for thirty-five days, then bailed him out for sixty-five dollars, taking his violin in exchange. For decades, Bill cherished this rich-toned, concert-quality instrument, which he would bow at waist level, like a country fiddler. It was undoubtedly from the Rockefeller side of the family that John inherited his lasting love of music.

With Owasco Lake always shimmering through the window, many of John D.'s dearest memories of Moravia centered upon fishing with Bill, who was prone to do outrageous things in the boat. During one lake outing, the middle brother, William, then a fat little boy unable to swim, made the mistake of grumbling about the heat. “Then cool off,” said his father, who plucked up the flabbergasted boy by the waistband and pitched him headlong into the water. When William sank straight to the bottom, Big Bill dived overboard, retrieved him, then tried to teach him to swim. As John said of the incident, looking on the bright side, “He was always training us to meet responsibilities and take care of ourselves.” ²⁷

It would be wrong (if highly tempting) to see William Avery Rockefeller as simply some blithe, hedonistic spirit, for he was moralistic in his own way. He was a militant temperance advocate—alcohol having ruined his father, Godfrey—and he fiercely reproached John and William when he caught them smoking in the barn. “When, after my brother had reached the age of 40 years my father learned that he smoked, tears came into his eyes,” said John, who liked to focus on his father's virtuous side as a convenient way to sidestep his vices. ²⁸

In no area did Bill impress his eldest son more—or did his eldest son prove more impressionable—than in the magical realm of money. Big Bill had an almost sensual love of cash and enjoyed flashing plump rolls of bills. “John D. Rockefeller inherited his shrewdness and love of money from his father,” remarked one of Bill's companions. “The old man had a passion for money that amounted almost to a craze. I never met a man who had such a love of money.” ²⁹ Exhibiting a small-town, populist mistrust of banks—a mistrust he would pass along to John, who later kept Standard Oil free from the talons of Wall Street financiers—Bill stashed away his money at home. As one neighbor recalled, “He had money, lots of it. He kept it in a bureau drawer. There I've seen it, ones, twos, threes (we had three-dollar bills then), fives, tens, twenties, and fifties, all corded like wood and the bundles tied with twine, the stacks filling the drawer.” ³⁰ According to legend, he also had a four-gallon pail brimming with gold pieces, though it probably concealed base metal beneath the glittering surface. Once, at a family gathering, Bill disappeared for a time, then suddenly burst forth from his room with a patchwork tablecloth crafted from banknotes of varying denominations. This was part of his obsessive need to project a big-shot image to conceal the pettiness of his accomplishments. Neither as a boy nor a man did John find anything pathological about his father's money madness, suggesting that he shared the same blind spot. After he had made his gargantuan fortune, he said admiringly of his father, “He made a practice of never carrying less than $1,000, and he kept it in his pocket. He was able to take care of himself, and was not afraid to carry his money.” ³¹

The bane of John's boyhood wasn't poverty so much as chronic worry about money, and it is easy to see how cash came to seem like God's bounty, the blessed stuff that relieved all of life's cares. After the family spent anxious weeks or months running up credit bills and waiting for Father's return, Bill would abruptly materialize, a jolly Santa Claus, swimming in lucre. He would compensate for his long absence by extravagant shows of generosity with his children. For John, money became associated with these brief but pleasurable interludes when the mercurial father was at home and the Rockefellers functioned as a true family.

During the early Moravia years, Big Bill began to train his eldest son in business matters, dispatching him at age eight or nine to evaluate and buy cord-wood for the house. “I knew what a cord of good solid beech and maple wood was,” said Rockefeller. “My father told me to select only the solid wood and the straight wood and not to put any limbs in it or any punky wood.” ³² Of all the lessons John absorbed from his father, perhaps none surpassed in importance that of keeping meticulous accounts. This was a matter of necessity, for Bill's wayward life forced his family to husband their credit and closely monitor their often precarious financial situation.

When it came to business ethics, Bill was a most curious compound, extremely honorable one moment, a sharpster the next. To his son, he tacitly conveyed the message that commerce was a tough, competitive struggle and that you were entitled to outwit the other fellow by any means, fair or foul. He tutored John in a sharp, relentless bargaining style that the latter made famous. (A most unorthodox bargainer, Bill once bid a thousand dollars less for a farm than the owner was asking; to settle matters, he suggested they shoot at a target. Bill won and got his thousand-dollar discount.) As a traveling mountebank, selling dubious cures to credulous rural folk, Bill took a dim view of people's intelligence and didn't hesitate to exploit their naive trust.

As a boss, Bill patented his own queer style of managing people. During his respectable time in the lumber business, he paid his men well and promptly and was said by his son to be very popular. Yet he had a habit of hiring workers for a spell, informing them politely, “I don't need you any longer,” then hiring them again a few days later—what he proudly dubbed his “policy of firing and hiring over.” If this made him sound like a less-than-lovable boss, his son applauded the unsettling tactic. “It kept the men up on tip-toe; no stagnation among them.” ³³ Oddly enough, John described his father as “most liberal and kindly with his employees, yet eminently practical and keen and wide-awake and resourceful.” ³⁴ This was one of many areas where he seemed to embroider the truth about Big Bill. Would the people he fired and hired again have described Bill as “liberal and kindly”?

John D. Rockefeller portrayed his father as a paragon of business virtue, and if this was mostly an effort to cover up the shady side of Bill's life, it had a grain of truth. Bill paid his debts punctually and believed implicitly in the sacredness of contracts, taking great pains in writing them up. As John observed, “He was very scrupulous to carry out his contracts, particular[ly] that they were clearly understood and carefully drawn, that is, committed to writing. And the training he gave me along those lines was very valuable, has proven so in all my life.” ³⁵ In his business career, John D. Rockefeller was accused of many sins, but he took pride in paying his debts promptly and abiding strictly by contracts. He was also accused of mixing the lawless and the honorable, of ignoring ethical niceties, in a manner reminiscent of his father.

Whether John D. Rockefeller ultimately followed his father's unscrupulous craft or his mother's stern respectability in steering Standard Oil is the question that weighs most heavily on his historical reputation. Bertrand Russell once said of Rockefeller, “What he said, what he thought, and what he felt, came from his mother, but what he did came from his father, with the addition of a great caution generated by early unpleasantness.” ³⁶ The issue is much more complicated than that, but there's no doubt that Rockefeller's achievement arose from the often tense interplay between the two opposing, deeply ingrained tendencies of his nature—his father's daring and his mother's prudence—yoked together under great pressure.

Given the paucity of hard evidence about Bill's affairs in Moravia, one is led to rake over the rich folklore he left behind. In 1927, a carpenter turned author named Charles Brutcher published a book entitled Joshua: A Man of the Finger Lakes Region , a thinly disguised roman à clef about William Avery Rockefeller. The privately printed 130-page book has become something of a collector's item, with copies sometimes fetching hundreds of dollars. The protagonist is one William Rockwell, a.k.a. Big Bill, and the author brazenly mingles fact and fiction by reproducing an actual photo of Rockefeller's father in the front. Joshua professes, redundantly, to be a “true story taken from life” and gathers lore about Devil Bill that was still titillating the town gossips in the 1920s. Much of its store of legend came from Melvin Rosekrans, whose father, Joshua, had locked horns with Big Bill in the 1840s. The book presents a slanted, hyperbolic portrait of Bill's career, a compendium of his presumed misdeeds, yet enough details tally with documentary material from other sources that it merits review.

According to this potboiler, the “masterful and self-confident” Big Bill became “the terror of the Finger Lakes region,” whose “evil influence would be felt in every household for miles around.” Eliza makes a cameo appearance as “a sad-faced little woman” kept ignorant of the true reasons for her husband's mysterious trips: “She was always opposed to ‘Big Bill's’ roving disposition and his evil minded tendencies.” ³⁷ If she suspected wrongdoing, she kept it to herself to spare the children. That the fictional Eliza earned the sympathy of the community jibes with what we know of the real Eliza's Moravia life.

The book narrates how Rockwell fell in with a bunch of desperadoes who stole horses and delivered them to the notorious Loomis Brothers gang. (This grave, unsubstantiated charge shadowed Bill in all three New York towns he lived in.) Another equally grave charge in the book concerns Dr. William Cooper, a cousin of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Dr. Cooper disliked Bill and refused to deal with him. The book asserts that Rockwell once coerced at gunpoint a reluctant Dr. Cooper to treat Eliza and that somebody afterward took potshots at the doctor through the blinds of his living-room window, narrowly missing him. Rockwell is further portrayed as an unconscionable philanderer, who lures pretty girls with a secret love potion and tries to seduce a young woman working in his house. He openly squires his girlfriends around Moravia in his carriage and takes them rowing on the lake, notwithstanding Eliza's dismay. “The poor, long suffering little woman knew the failings of her dashing mate. She was overpowered by his master mind and had long since become resigned to her fate.” ³⁸ The diabolical Bill is even accused of palming off counterfeit bills.

At first, the locals were so petrified of the rough-and-tumble Rockwell that they didn't dare to confront him. Yet Joshua ends as a tale of justice triumphant as Bill's gang is disbanded by an irate citizenry. In a climactic courtroom scene, it is proved that Rockwell had paid a black man ten dollars to steal rafting chains in order to smuggle logs across Owasco Lake. His luck having run out, Bill flees the courtroom, though another gang member serves time in Auburn prison for horse theft. When last seen in the book, Big Bill has shifted operations to Owego, where horses again begin to disappear suspiciously. In a shameless bit of press agentry that Bill himself would have savored, Brutcher ends by promising a sequel, adding, “Negotiations are pending for the filming of this gripping story and its early appearance on the silver screen is assured.” ³⁹

In the early 1900s, when Ida Tarbell dispatched a research assistant to upstate New York, he picked up the same allegations of horse theft that flavor the pages of Joshua . Horses were said to have begun vanishing after Big Bill moved first to Richford and later to Moravia. “It became noised about the neighborhood that ‘Old Bill's gang’ were the horse thieves,” reported Tarbell's assistant. ⁴⁰ In 1850, three of Bill's cronies—Caleb Palmer, Charles Tidd, and a man named Bates—were arrested for stealing mares. After Tidd turned state's evidence, he provided the testimony that was used to incarcerate Palmer and Bates. It must be stressed that no court records actually connect Bill with the crime and that biographer Allan Nevins, after much examination, branded the horse-thieving charges “ridiculous.” ⁴¹ Yet the anecdotal evidence can't be so easily dismissed. Tarbell's assistant noted, “Everyone I talked with in Moravia declares that ‘Old Bill’ was the head of the gang.” John Monroe Palmer, son of one of the jailed culprits, fingered Bill as the mastermind of the “underground horse railroad.” “Rockefeller was too smart to be caught,” he griped. “He ruined my father, and then left him in the lurch.” ⁴²

Another tale circulating in upstate New York at the turn of the century contended that Bill had corrupted the village youth by teaching them how to gamble. One ancient resident, Hiram Alley, recalled that the village boys would pay Bill five dollars to instruct them in card tricks so they could then fleece other boys. John D. never commented on allegations against his father but, having never touched cards in his life, scoffed at this particular libel. “If my father had been a gambler, I would have known something about cards, wouldn't I?” ⁴³

Clearly, Devil Bill had a suggestive personality that made imaginations run riot, and some of the stories about him were likely embellished. Yet one charge left behind a more convincing paper trail. Beginning with Nancy Brown in Richford, Eliza had always employed a young woman to assist with the housework, and in Moravia she had a tall, pretty young woman helper named Anne Vanderbeak. On July 26, 1849, according to papers filed at the Auburn Court House, William Avery Rockefeller was indicted for assaulting Anne Vanderbeak on May 1, 1848, and “then and there violently against her will feloniously did ravish and carnally know” her. ⁴⁴ The rape indictment deepens suspicions that Bill was more than just a charming, flirtatious rogue.

The aftermath of the indictment was inconclusive, and the whole affair has been obscured by a heavy fog of speculation. Bill never appeared in court, never went to trial, and was never arrested. Everybody who has examined the case has tripped over the same set of questions. Why was the indictment handed down more than a year after the supposed rape? (One feminist scholar has helpfully noted the formidable obstacles placed in the way of women pressing rape charges in those days.) ⁴⁵ Why did the prosecuting attorney never endorse the indictment? Why didn't anybody set off in hot pursuit of Bill when he fled from Cayuga County? And why did Anne Vanderbeak let the matter lapse? Once again, a handful of oral histories suggest a tangled skein of local intrigue. Bill had seduced a young woman named Charlotte Hewitt, whose brothers, Earl and Lew, loathed him for it. One Hewitt brother sat on the jury that indicted Big Bill, leading some to see it as a trumped-up charge, a vendetta by the brothers. Ida Tarbell's assistant devised another theory: “I believe the indictment was quashed, possibly on the understanding that he was to leave the county. This was not unusual procedure in those days.” ⁴⁶

The scandal ended whatever tentative truce Bill had struck with John Davison, who had long rued the day when Bill Rockefeller first bewitched his sensible daughter. During the Moravia period, Davison had patched up relations with Bill and lent him almost $1,000 in two installments, one in August 1845, the other in October 1846. Now the rape indictment shattered their still tenuous relationship—lending greater credence to the charge. When Bill informed Davison of the accusation and asked him to post bail, Davison gruffly replied that he was “too old a man to go bail for anyone.” Taken aback, Bill replied bitterly that he would leave the county and never see him again. Worried about his two outstanding loans, Davison went straight to court, claimed his son-in-law planned to defraud his creditors, and sued him for $1,210.75. ⁴⁷ For Eliza and her offspring, it must have been a thoroughly humiliating moment when the sheriff and two neighbors came to appraise their property and attached all their movable goods in the name of John Davison. Davison also modified his will, placing Eliza's inheritance in the hands of trustees, in all likelihood to keep it safely beyond the eager grasp of his son-in-law.

During the second half of 1849, Bill abandoned his family and gadded about the countryside to reconnoiter new towns. In the spring of 1850, the same year Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter , Bill resettled his family in Owego, near the Pennsylvania border. As a fugitive from justice, he might have wanted to be near the state line whenever trouble loomed. Though only ten at the time and probably ignorant of what had happened—it's hard to imagine Eliza confiding such scandalous things to a young boy—John later ridiculed the rape charge and mocked the idea of his father fleeing justice. “If [my father] left ‘under compulsion’　...　I should have known something about it. There was nothing of the sort. We moved over to Owego, and if he were fleeing from justice that wasn't very far away.” ⁴⁸ John's later tendency to minimize the disgrace probably had several causes, ranging from filial piety to shrewd public relations; he knew people bent upon proving his own immorality wanted to buttress their case by first tarnishing his father. One must also note his penchant for denial, his potent capacity to filter out uncomfortable thoughts, especially about his father, just as he later deflected criticism of his questionable business behavior. John D. Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one's resolve in the face of enemies.

At some point in his boyhood, however, possibly after the flight from Moravia, John's reverence for his father did begin to be intermingled with more hostile, unexpressed feelings. (One writer of a wildly psychoanalytic bent has even suggested that Rockefeller's icy self-control was a reaction to repressed fantasies of murdering his father.) ⁴⁹ In later years, scores of John D.'s friends and associates noted that Big Bill was a taboo topic that they broached at their peril, one on which John maintained a thoroughgoing silence. As one early biographer remarked, “From the beginning to the end of his career, he has made secrecy respecting his father and stealth respecting paternal visits a matter of religious observance.” ⁵⁰

We cannot tell when Rockefeller first felt shame about his father, but this emotion was so consequential for his entire development that we must pause briefly to consider it. In the towns of John's boyhood, Bill was an engaging but notorious character who prompted interminable speculation about his travels and sources of income. A boy with such a father needed to screen out malicious gossip and cultivate a brazen indifference to community opinion. This bred in him a reflexive habit of secrecy, a fear of the crowd, a deep contempt for idle chatter and loose tongues that lasted a lifetime. He learned to cultivate a secretive style and a defiant attitude toward strangers. Perhaps out of a self-protective instinct, Bill taught his children to be wary of strangers and even of himself. When John was a child, Bill would urge him to leap from his high chair into his waiting arms. One day, he dropped his arms, letting his astonished son crash to the floor. “Remember,” Bill lectured him, “never trust anyone completely, not even me.” Somewhat later, walking with his boys through Cleveland, he warned them to ignore the pell-mell rush of people to fires and parades. “Never mind the crowd,” he told them. “Keep away from it. Attend to your own business.” ⁵¹ Eliza also must have inoculated the children's minds against talebearers and told them not to discuss family matters with other people. The boy who faced down the vicious talk of neighbors would be extremely well prepared to walk unscathed and even defiant through the turbulent controversies that later surrounded his life.

For all the uncertainty of their lives, the Rockefellers, in their restless, driven odyssey across the southern tier of New York, enjoyed a sense of upward mobility as they journeyed from Richford to Moravia to Owego, with each town larger, more prosperous, and more hopeful than its predecessor. The county seat of Tioga County, located south of Richford and west of Binghamton, Owego sits astride a broad, beautiful bend of the Susquehanna River. Decidedly more cosmopolitan than anything young John D. had experienced before, it was a refined village with genteel homes along Front Street that vouchsafed glimpses of a finer life. The incorporated village of Owego had an imposing courthouse, a well-stocked library, a renowned school, and other nascent hints of culture. For a country town of seventy-two hundred people, it also boasted a disproportionate number of resident writers and artists.

Perhaps because his sojourn there was shorter, Rockefeller never developed quite the same fond attachment to Owego as to Moravia, but he retained pleasing associations with it. “What a beautiful place Owego is!” he once exclaimed. “How fortunate we were to grow up there, in a beautiful country, with good neighbors, people of culture and refinement, kind friends.” ⁵² With amusement, he recalled how Owego had exploded his provincial boyhood. “Down at the railroad station one day I saw a Frenchman! Think of that—a real, live Frenchman. And he wore a mustache—the first I ever saw.” ⁵³ On June 1, 1849, shortly before the Rockefellers arrived, the Erie Railroad had first puffed into Owego, thousands of spectators packing the hillsides to cheer the train as it slid into the station amid a burst of ceremonial cannonades and pealing church bells. “Railroad trains were known even when I was a boy but they were few, short and sooty,” Rockefeller said of the conveyances that would figure so largely in his own exploits. ⁵⁴ In small towns like Owego, the railroad ended isolated, self-contained economies, absorbing them into regional and national markets while also sharpening their inhabitants’ appetites for material goods and inviting them to seek their fortunes in distant cities.

The Rockefellers lived three miles east of town in an area of soft, bucolic meadows and riverine groves. Of the two frame houses they occupied during their time in Owego, the second was smaller, suggesting that Bill and Eliza needed to retrench as they grappled with financial problems. The second house—more a cottage than a farm—had a fine view of the winding, muddy Susquehanna, with the wooded silhouette of Big Island (later Hiawatha Island) in the foreground, ringed by a curtain of blue hills in the distance. In these snug quarters, John shared a bed with brother William. “It was a small house,” John reminisced years later, “but a dear good house.” ⁵⁵

Bill might have chosen Owego because it had signal business advantages for someone who dabbled in the lumber business. During freshets, log rafts were easily floated down the Susquehanna River, and several lumber mills, in consequence, had sprung up in the town. It might also be significant that on September 27, 1849, right before the Rockefellers moved to Owego, an appalling conflagration had consumed 104 downtown buildings, the blaze sparing only three stores, a disaster that presaged a booming lumber business as the town was rebuilt. Finally, the town had a reputation as a mecca for self-styled doctors. As one Owego resident recalled, “After the Civil War, there were a dozen of them living here.” ⁵⁶

During the three Owego years, Bill's escapades seemed even more bizarrely unpredictable than before. His appearances in town were brief and infrequent, however memorable to the gaping natives. “He was the best-dressed man for miles around,” said a close neighbor. “You never saw him without his fine silk hat.” ⁵⁷ Now in her late thirties, Eliza was losing her youthful bloom and developing the hard, thin face that told of her many trials. Many townsfolk recalled her as a sweet, fine, dignified lady who called on neighbors in the afternoon, always clad in a black silk dress that looked like widow's weeds. Everybody commended her unsparing discipline, neat appearance, and commanding presence. For all her travails, she didn't seem as forlorn as she had in Richford and Moravia, as if growing more accustomed to the burden that she bore and more reconciled to Bill's absences.

Once the swaggering, autocratic husband, Bill had now been irredeemably exposed as a scoundrel and was demoted in Eliza's esteem. Her disillusionment with her handsome husband might have simplified matters in the household. “It was she who brought up the family,” said one observer, “for even when he was at home the father did not interfere with her discipline. And it was discipline.” ⁵⁸ Another neighbor termed her “an unusually clear-minded and capable Christian mother. Perhaps her discipline might seem very strict or even severe today, but, although she made them obey her and kept them all busily employed, the children all loved her as she loved them.” ⁵⁹ She wasn't a mother to be trifled with. Once, while sick in bed, she discovered that John had neglected to perform a task for her, and judgment was swift: She sent him to the Susquehanna to select a willow switch. With the quiet cunning that would become a pronounced trait of his nature, he nicked the switch in several places with his knife, so it would bend and crack after the initial blows. Eliza wasn't deceived. “Go and get another switch,” she instructed him, “and see that it is not slashed this time.” ⁶⁰

Eliza must have found the religious atmosphere in Owego suitably wholesome. One of John's imperishable images of Owego was of standing behind the house and hearing the dutiful Eliza praying aloud in an upstairs bedroom. The local Baptists were enterprising evangelists, and every winter they marched scores of reformed sinners down to the frozen Susquehanna, carved out openings in the ice, and baptized them. Every Sunday, neighbors picked up Eliza and the children and drove them to a Baptist church in the village. Inspired by a Sunday-school class on forgiveness, the children initiated a custom that suggests how religion permeated their lives. Each night, when they got into bed, they turned to their siblings and said, “Do you forgive me all I have done to you today?” ⁶¹ By the time they fell asleep, the air had been cleared of all recriminations or festering anger.

In Owego, Eliza increased her dependence on John, as if training him to be everything Bill wasn't. Like his mother, John seemed stronger without Bill, able to escape his shadow and forge a separate identity. His manifold duties habituated him to a heavy workload. When not attending school, he cut wood, milked the cow, drew well water, tended the garden, and went on shopping expeditions while also supervising his younger siblings in their mother's absence. “I was taught to do as much business at the age of ten or eleven as it was possible for me to do,” he later noted. ⁶²

As the stand-in for Bill, he kept a tight rein on the family budget and learned to appraise the world shrewdly. Once he spent three days helping a local farmer dig potatoes for 37½ cents per day. This set up an instructive contrast for the frugal boy when, soon afterward, he loaned one farmer $50 at 7 percent interest and collected $3.50 at year's end—without a stitch of work. He was thunderstruck by the happy math, which hit him with the force of a revelation. “The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good thing to let the money be my slave and not make myself a slave to money.” ⁶³ Brother William—a good-natured boy who pitched in with gusto and never asked too many questions—was far more popular with the local farmers, whereas the more rational John analyzed work, broke it down into component parts, and figured out how to perform it most economically.

Throughout his life, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., reacted in a vitriolic manner to accusations that he had lusted after money as a child and yearned to be fabulously rich. Doubtless embarrassed, he contested insinuations that he was motivated by greed instead of a humble desire to serve God or humanity. He preferred to portray his fortune as a pleasant accident, the unsought by-product of hard work. Yet stories surface of Rockefeller daydreaming about money in Owego when he was only in his early teens. One day, strolling by the Susquehanna with a friend, he blurted out: “Some day, sometime, when I am a man, I want to be worth a-hundred-thousand-dollars. And I'm going to be, too—some day.” ⁶⁴ Nearly identical accounts come from so many sources that one is forced to conclude he had conveniently expunged such memories. Given his father's panting ardor for money, it would have been strange had he not been bewitched by gold.

There was nothing unusual about Rockefeller's boyhood dreams, for the times were feeding avaricious fantasies in millions of susceptible schoolboys. Antebellum America was a place of high adventure and unbounded opportunity for industrious young men. Following the war with Mexico, huge chunks of land—Texas, New Mexico, and upper California—were annexed to the country in early 1848. That same year, gold was discovered at John Sutter's sawmill in California, triggering a mad westward rush of ninety thousand prospectors. Just as the Rockefellers were moving from Moravia to Owego, hordes of frantic men swarmed across the continent, sailed around South America, or slogged across the Isthmus of Panama, hell-bent to reach California. The pandemonium foreshadowed the petroleum craze in western Pennsylvania a decade later. Though the gold rush proved a snare and a delusion for most miners, the occasional success stories nonetheless inflamed the popular imagination. Mark Twain singled out the California gold rush as the watershed event that sanctified a new money worship and debased the country's founding ideals.

Before he left Owego, John secured a first-rate education, then a rarity in rural America, where few children attended secondary school. At first, the Rockefeller children went to a schoolhouse a short walk from their house; due to the family's straitened circumstances, a friendly neighbor purchased their textbooks. In August 1852, John and William entered Owego Academy, which had been founded in 1827 and was unquestionably the finest secondary school in that part of New York. Topped by a tall steeple, fenced in by lovely parkland, the three-story brick school building must have awed the still-rustic Rockefeller boys. Presiding over the academy was an able Scot, Dr. William Smythe, who made the students hone their verbal skills by writing fortnightly essays and delivering speeches on assigned themes; the linguistic skills mastered at Owego became evident in Rockefeller's concise business letters. The school produced many eminent graduates, including Thomas C. Platt, later the “Easy Boss” who ran the New York Republican machine, and Washington Gladden, the preacher who issued some of the most scorching screeds directed against Standard Oil.

Many of the 350 pupils came from affluent urban families, and John later lauded this exposure to city boys, saying it was “bound to benefit country boys.” ⁶⁵ The school charged a steep tuition of three dollars per term, suggesting that Bill's medical road show was finally prospering after two years in Owego. John never expressed resentment at being, by academy standards, a poor boy. When a photographer came to shoot class pictures, John and William were excluded because their suits were too shabby. Other boys might have smarted, but John always prized his daguerreotypes of his fellow scholars, later insisting, “I would not part with this collection for any money.” ⁶⁶ In Eliza Rockefeller's household, one didn't morbidly dwell on slights but kept one's sights fixed on the practical goals ahead. John never aspired to popularity at the school. It was as if, after the inordinate attention that his father attracted, John wanted to be quiet and inconspicuous and blend into the crowd.

While many well-to-do students boarded at the school, the Rockefeller boys undertook a three-mile hike to school every morning and, like many students, wandered barefoot down the dusty lanes in warm weather. This long trek led John past fine, imposing homes with well-trimmed lawns facing the Susquehanna River. With his slow, deliberate pace, he often set out early and reflected in an unhurried manner as he walked, his eyes always fixed on the ground ahead. Not averse to taking shortcuts, however, he sometimes sat by the roadside and asked passing teamsters for a lift.

John was a plodding, lackluster student, with no discernible trace of brilliance, and only one aspect of school life truly seemed to intrigue him. Every Saturday, the principal demonstrated the newfangled devices then revolutionizing American business, and John was riveted by displays of a telegraph instrument (invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1837), galvanic batteries, and other modern contrivances. Such things captured his mind more than the rousing social issues raised by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin , which was published in 1852 in horrified response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

To the extent that the Rockefeller children had difficulties with schoolwork, it stemmed from the chaotic situation at home. For five growing, energetic children, their small cottage was noisy and cramped. Each evening, Eliza packed her brood off to a teenage neighbor named Susan La Monte, who tutored them and ensured that they completed their homework. She remembered William and Frank as typically mischievous boys, kicking and teasing each other, while John was oddly self-possessed, already a boy-man, a model of adult decorum. “I have no recollection of John excelling at anything. I do remember he worked hard at everything; not talking much, and studying with great industry. ... There was nothing about him to make anybody pay especial attention to him or speculate about his future.” ⁶⁷

An 1852 photo of the Rockefeller children shows John, age thirteen, William, eleven, and Mary Ann, nine, sitting in the inky gloom of a photo studio. They are a cheerless trio as they stare blankly into the camera. Wearing a plaid suit, and with his hair neatly brushed back from a wide forehead, John has a long, impassive face, and his expression is inscrutable. William has a softer, rounder face, and his garments—including a polka-dotted vest and a watch chain—suggest his father's more outgoing personality. Mary Ann wears the plain dress of a farm girl, her hair in pigtails and parted down the middle. Although the group portrait suggests middle-class respectability, its somber mood—which also must owe something to the slower photography of the day—discloses something less than the idyllic boyhood John liked to evoke.

The drudgery of daily life was often leavened by play as John had his first chances to flirt with young ladies, and he exhibited flashes of droll wit. One afternoon, at a Sunday picnic—he was perhaps twelve—he passed a group of young ladies seated before heaps of food and observed, “Remember, girls, if you eat slowly, you can eat more!” ⁶⁸ Rockefeller was intensely aware of the opposite sex yet, knowing of his father's history, kept his impulses under tight control. Susan La Monte saw a sensitivity in the boy that escaped casual observers; she was struck by “his great admiration of beauty. There was a little girl going to school near our home, a pretty little thing named Freer, with red cheeks and bright eyes and a sweet face. In after years Mr. Rockefeller would ask for her, and when she was left a widow in distress he aided her with a modest pension.” ⁶⁹ Susan La Monte saw that the boy's eerie self-discipline concealed a deep fund of emotion, and she remembered the ceremony of grief he went through when one of her sisters died. “On the day she died John came to our house and stretched out on the ground and would not go away. He was so sorry that he would not go away, but lay there all day.” ⁷⁰ Such stories reveal a sensitivity in Rockefeller that would always be there but that would later be studiously concealed behind the polished façade of the hard-driving businessman.