PRELUDE:
POISON TONGUE

“Reading this book brings back to my mind facts and situations that I had forgotten for years,” John D. Rockefeller mused. “It digs up things long past and dead, so that they stand before me once more alive. I am glad of it, very glad of it.” ¹

For months, Rockefeller had listened to his authorized biographer read aloud from Henry Demarest Lloyd's Wealth Against Commonwealth , a savage account of his career published in 1894. Now retired and in his late seventies, the world's richest man had reluctantly agreed to reminisce behind closed doors. Starting in 1917, for an hour each morning, Rockefeller fielded questions while slumped in an easy chair or reclining on a lounge in his bedroom at Kykuit, a Georgian mansion set amid the woodland beauty of Westchester County's Pocantico Hills. Serene in his conscience, convinced that God had blessed his career and that the court of history would acquit him, Rockefeller had submitted to this exercise only to please his son, who wanted to cleanse the family name of all controversy. As Rockefeller reminded his appointed Boswell, the affable William O. Inglis, a newspaperman recruited from Rockefeller's old nemesis, the World , but “for the urgent request of my son, who is not familiar with this history　...　I would never have taken the time and the trouble to make any refutation to these questions.” ²

Despite his initial hesitation, Rockefeller couldn't resist the invitation to relive his turbulent early years in the petroleum industry, and he warmed to the giant task of remembrance. During hundreds of hours of interviews, spanning a three-year period, he revisited the past and spoke his mind freely. At times, he evoked his life in the dulcet tones of a preacher addressing a brotherhood of kindred souls. At other moments, he was dryly sardonic or brutally funny about his critics—though all the while, as a good Christian, he tried to suppress vengeful feelings toward them.

Before Inglis's wondering eyes, the old man was rejuvenated by the flood tide of memory, and his voice deepened from the high, breathy pitch of age to the mellow baritone of early adulthood. His step grew springy and lithe as he paced the floor, recounting the glorious struggles of his career. Far from dodging controversy, Rockefeller suggested a novel structure for this retrospective talk: Inglis would read passages from Rockefeller's two chief antagonists, Henry Lloyd and Ida Tarbell (whose influential broadside had been published in the early 1900s), and Rockefeller would refute them, paragraph by paragraph. Having dismissed their indictments as beneath his dignity, he hadn't deigned to read them when they first appeared. Now, in a measure of his feisty self-confidence, he decided to tackle the toughest charges point-blank. “I was averse for eight months to say anything in response to these foolish writers,” he noted, “but now that I've gotten into it I find it interesting.” ³ And once John D. Rockefeller, Sr., set his mind to something, he brought awesome powers of concentration to bear.

As Rockefeller undertook this extended defense, he clearly believed that he had been vindicated in the time since these journalists had blackened his reputation in the early 1900s and made him America's most hated businessman. “All of those in the business today are doing business along the modern lines, following the plans which we were the first to propose,” he said with pride. ⁴ Public bitterness toward him had waned, he believed, and opposition to his petroleum empire was “practically nil and has been for many years, and it has ceased to be popular to raid the Standard Oil Company.” ⁵ Indeed, the American public during World War I appreciated the industrial strength conferred by the Standard Oil companies, and Rockefeller imagined, with some justice, that his compatriots now viewed him as a public benefactor, not as a corporate buccaneer. The huge philanthropies he had endowed in recent years had also mitigated public animosity toward him.

As always with Rockefeller, the pregnant silences in the interview spoke as eloquently as the words. Coached by his publicist, Ivy Lee, Rockefeller eschewed such loaded terms as trust, monopoly, oligopoly , or cartel when referring to Standard Oil and preferred to speak of “cooperation.” He expressed scorn for the textbook world of free markets evoked by Adam Smith: “What a blessing it was that the idea of cooperation, with railroads, with telegraph lines, with steel companies, with oil companies, came in and prevailed, to take the place of this chaotic condition in which the virtuous academic Know-Nothings about business were doing what they construed to be God's service in eating each other up.” ⁶ During the three-year interview, Rockefeller never once alluded to his most stinging setback: the federal government's 1911 dismemberment of Standard Oil into dozens of constituent companies. Annulling the Supreme Court verdict by a trick of memory, Rockefeller talked of Standard Oil as if the old monolith still stood unscathed.

Of all the poses he assumed, perhaps the hardest to maintain was that he bore no grudges against his detractors. He peppered his talk with references to his forgiving nature. “The representatives of the Standard Oil Company cherish most kindly and brotherly feelings even toward those who abused them most, and are ready to lay it to their weakness and ignorance and whatever else was controlling them.” ⁷ Furthermore: “And to those who have uttered against them harsh words, we cherish no resentment. ‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’　” ⁸ And, even more conciliatory: “And I rejoice also that we are charitable and sweet-spirited to these jealous, small men who made it the business of their lives to try to pull us down because their vision did not extend beyond the ends of their noses.”

Over time, however, the sacerdotal tone began to falter. Rockefeller couldn't conceive of a genuinely principled objection to his career and increasingly resorted to ad hominem attacks, deriding his critics as croakers, howlers, grumblers, complainers, blackmailers, pirates, spoiled children, whiners, adventurers, wolves, and freebooters. Clearly, the allegations rankled, especially those of Ida Minerva Tarbell, whose cool, clear-eyed investigative prose had turned his name into a byword for corporate greed. With golf cronies, Rockefeller had poked fun at her, calling her “Miss Tarbarrel,” but this was a transparent attempt to draw the sting from her words.

During the marathon interview, Inglis saw Rockefeller's iron poise and self-mastery crumble only twice and both times, significantly, in responding to Tarbell. The first time came when he read aloud her charge that in 1872 the thirty-two-year-old Rockefeller had taken over the Cleveland refineries by threatening to crush rivals who refused to join his cartel. Now, 1872 had been the starting point of his relentless march toward supremacy in oil. If that year was tainted, then everything was. Inglis recorded a graphic account of Rockefeller's reaction to Tarbell's allegation:

After this outburst, Rockefeller's emotions subsided, but the insinuation stung. Later, he and Inglis roamed over the hills and golf fairways of his vast estate; “How ridiculous all that talk is!” he exclaimed. “It's twaddle, poisonous twaddle, put out for a purpose. As a matter of fact, we were all in a sinking ship, if existing cut-throat competition continued, and we were trying to build a lifeboat to carry us all to the shore. You don't have to threaten men to get them to leave a sinking ship in a lifeboat.” ¹⁰ The purchase of his competitors’ firms had not been the benevolent act that Rockefeller suggested, but he had a powerfully selective memory.

Rockefeller reserved his most bitter epithets for another passage, where Tarbell dealt with the touchiest matter in his personal life: the character of his colorful, raffish father, William Avery Rockefeller. In July 1905, she had capped off her serial history of Standard Oil with a two-part “Character Study” of Rockefeller filled with venomous portrayals of his father, an itinerant peddler of patent medicines who had led a shadowy, vagabond life. William Avery Rockefeller had been the sort of fast-talking huckster who thrived in frontier communities of early-nineteenth-century America, and Tarbell amply reported his misdemeanors. At one point in her blistering portrait, she said, “Indeed he had all the vices save one—he never drank.” ¹¹

This thrust against his dead father probed some buried pain, some still-festering wound inside Rockefeller, and he suddenly erupted with explosive fury. “What a wretched utterance from one calling herself a historian,” he jeered, speculating, quite incorrectly, that Tarbell had been embittered by the failure of her series to dent the Standard Oil empire. “So she turned to this miserable fabrication, with all the sneers, all the malice, all the sly hintings and perversions of which she is master, and with more bitterness than ever attacked my father.” ¹² Momentarily, Rockefeller couldn't regain his self-control: His famous granite composure had utterly broken down. And for one of the few times in his life, he let forth a torrent of intemperate abuse. Spluttering with rage, he railed against “the poison tongue of this poison woman who seeks to poison the public with every endeavor　...　to cast suspicion on everything good, bad, or indifferent appertaining to a name which has thus far not been ruined by her shafts.” Aware that he had, uncharacteristically, let down his guard, Rockefeller soon checked himself and restored the old pose of philosophic calm, reassuring Inglis in soothing tones, “After all, though, I am grateful that I do not cherish bitterness even against this ‘historian,’ but pity.” ¹³ The titan had regained his dignity, and he made sure that his tightly fitted mask never slipped again in front of his authorized biographer.