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Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Paperback)
by Ron Chernow
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Biography, Finance, American capitalism |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A superb piece of biographical writing. Chernow writes at epic length, yet never fails to entertain, inform and awe-inspire. |
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Author: Ron Chernow
Publisher: Vintage
Pub. in: March, 2004
ISBN: 1400077303
Pages: 832
Measurements: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00255
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1400077304
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- Awards & Credential -
National Bestseller in North America by the National Book Award winning author of The House of Morgan. |
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- MSL Picks -
Ron Chernow's Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. is a powerhouse from beginning to end. Chernow is fast becoming one of my favorite biographers after reading Alexander Hamilton and now this. In both books, he is able to keep you turning the page while, at the same time, building carefully rendered portraits of these complex historical figures.
In Titan, he is at his best, describing Rockefeller as both a great philanthropist and also a man possessed by greed. Chernow's Rockefeller can be as consumed by creating a great Baptist University [University of Chicago] as building tactical alliances that will squeeze out any hope of competition for his company, Standard Oil.
With his first brush stroke, Chernow paints the picture of Rockefeller's father a mountebank, philanderer and a bigamist. From meager beginnings, it is amazing to see the determination with which Rockefeller builds himself up. Rockefeller's ability to move so rapidly from a life of destitution and failure to one of unparallelled wealth and success is built with clear precision though at a dizzying pace.
Chernow's decision to focus so heavily on Rockefeller's father in the beginning of the book is important because the man Rockefeller becomes is a repudiation of everything his father stood for. The son in this case knew what a scoundrel his father was and acted in every way to become everything he was not. The father was a philnaderer, while the son remained devoted to his one wife even when he had become wildly successful. As the father placed his own interests ahead of his family's needs, the son put his family ahead of everything else. And in the realm of business, the father had become a complete failure, while the son achieved successes beyond the wildest expectations of anyone to that point.
But, for all of his success and his blindess to the fact, Rockefeller grew up to be much like his father. His father's ability to con his way out of any situation at any cost was a built in feature of Rockefeller's personality. No matter how much good he did in the world and how much he evolved as a man, he was his father's son. This was no more evident than in the way Rockefeller did business as the leader of Standard Oil. He removed any and all competition at any cost.
For all of his achievements, Rockefeller was never able to completely remove that original strain of human frailness that his father gave him. This was what eventually led to the downfall of Standard Oil and which made Rockefeller Sr. such a complex figure both beloved and hated by those who knew him or of him.
Despite his profound understanding of the mechanics and psychology of the business world, it is Chernow's ability to develop strong character studies that make his books so admirable. During many of the best parts of Titan, Chernow is developing a colorful hybrid of supporting characters every bit as interesting as Rockefeller himself. What makes it all the more impressive is that Chernow does so while carefully tying everything in to build the theme within Rockefeller's life. You get the idea from reading Chernow that you are witnessing the actual motivations of the characters he writes about.
(From quoting Zubair Khan, USA)
Target readers:
Biography lovers, readers interested in modern American history, American wealth stories, and American capitalism.
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- Better with -
Better with
The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
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Ron Chernow's first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award and the Ambassador Award for the year's best study of American culture. His second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize as the Best Business Book of 1993 and was also selected by the American Library Association as one of that year's best nonfiction books. In reviewing his recent collection of essays, The Death of the Banker, The New York Times called the author "as elegant an architect of monumental histories as we've seen in decades and chose the paperback original as one of the year's Notable Books.
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From Publisher
John D. Rockefeller, Sr. - history's first billionaire and the patriarch of America's most famous dynasty - is an icon whose true nature has eluded three generations of historians. Now Ron Chernow, the National Book Award-winning biographer of the Morgan and Warburg banking families, gives us a history of the mogul "etched with uncommon objectivity and literary grace... as detailed, balanced, and psychologically insightful a portrait of the tycoon as we may ever have" (Kirkus Reviews). Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller's exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book will indelibly alter our image of this most enigmatic capitalist.
Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world's richest man by creating America's most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded "the Octopus" by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America.
Rockefeller was likely the most controversial businessman in our nation's history. Critics charged that his empire was built on unscrupulous tactics: grand-scale collusion with the railroads, predatory pricing, industrial espionage, and wholesale bribery of political officials. The titan spent more than thirty years dodging investigations until Teddy Roosevelt and his trustbusters embarked on a marathon crusade to bring Standard Oil to bay.
While providing abundant new evidence of Rockefeller's misdeeds, Chernow discards the stereotype of the cold-blooded monster to sketch an unforgettably human portrait of a quirky, eccentric original. A devout Baptist and temperance advocate, Rockefeller gave money more generously - his chosen philanthropies included the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago, and what is today Rockefeller University - than anyone before him. Titan presents a finely nuanced portrait of a fascinating, complex man, synthesizing his public and private lives and disclosing numerous family scandals, tragedies, and misfortunes that have never before come to light.
John D. Rockefeller's story captures a pivotal moment in American history, documenting the dramatic post-Civil War shift from small business to the rise of giant corporations that irrevocably transformed the nation. With cameos by Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Jay Gould, William Vanderbilt, Ida Tarbell, Andrew Carnegie, Carl Jung, J. Pierpont Morgan, William James, Henry Clay Frick, Mark Twain, and Will Rogers, Titan turns Rockefeller's life into a vivid tapestry of American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is Ron Chernow's signal triumph that he narrates this monumental saga with all the sweep, drama, and insight that this giant subject deserves.
(From the Hardcover edition.)
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CHAPTER 1
The Flimflam Man
In the early 1900s, as Rockefeller vied with Andrew Carnegie for the title of the world's richest man, a spirited rivalry arose between France and Germany, with each claiming to be Rockefeller's ancestral land. Assorted genealogists stood ready, for a sizable fee, to manufacture a splendid royal lineage for the oilman. "I have no desire to trace myself back to the nobility," he said honestly. "I am satisfied with my good old American stock." The most ambitious search for Rockefeller's roots traced them back to a ninth-century French family, the Roquefeuilles, who supposedly inhabited a Languedoc château-a charming story that unfortunately has been refuted by recent findings. In contrast, the Rockefellers' German lineage has been clearly established in the Rhine valley dating back to at least the early 1600s.
Around 1723, Johann Peter Rockefeller, a miller, gathered up his wife and five children, set sail for Philadelphia, and settled on a farm in Somerville and then Amwell, New Jersey, where he evidently flourished and acquired large landholdings. More than a decade later, his cousin Diell Rockefeller left southwest Germany and moved to Germantown, New York. Diell's granddaughter Christina married her distant relative William, one of Johann's grandsons. (Never particularly sentimental about his European forebears, John D. Rockefeller did erect a monument to the patriarch, Johann Peter, at his burial site in Flemington, New Jersey.) The marriage of William and Christina produced a son named Godfrey Rockefeller, who was the grandfather of the oil titan and a most unlikely progenitor of the clan. In 1806, Godfrey married Lucy Avery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, despite the grave qualms of her family.
Establishing a pattern that would be replicated by Rockefeller's own mother, Lucy had, in her family's disparaging view, married down. Her ancestors had emigrated from Devon, England, to Salem, Massachusetts, around 1630, forming part of the Puritan tide. As they became settled and gentrified, the versatile Averys spawned ministers, soldiers, civic leaders, explorers, and traders, not to mention a bold clutch of Indian fighters. During the American Revolution, eleven Averys perished gloriously in the battle of Groton. While the Rockefellers' "noble" roots required some poetic license and liberal embellishment, Lucy could justly claim descent from Edmund Ironside, the English king, who was crowned in 1016.
Godfrey Rockefeller was sadly mismatched with his enterprising wife. He had a stunted, impoverished look and a hangdog air of perpetual defeat. Taller than her husband, a fiery Baptist of commanding presence, Lucy was rawboned and confident, with a vigorous step and alert blue eyes. A former schoolteacher, she was better educated than Godfrey. Even John D., never given to invidious comments about relatives, tactfully conceded, "My grandmother was a brave woman. Her husband was not so brave as she." If Godfrey contributed the Rockefeller coloring-bluish gray eyes, light brown hair-Lucy introduced the rangy frame later notable among the men. Enjoying robust energy and buoyant health, Lucy had ten children, with the third, William Avery Rockefeller, born in Granger, New York, in 1810. While it is easy enough to date the birth of Rockefeller's father, teams of frazzled reporters would one day exhaust themselves trying to establish the date of his death.
As a farmer and businessman, Godfrey enjoyed checkered success, and his aborted business ventures exposed his family to an insecure, peripatetic life. They were forced to move to Granger and Ancram, New York, then to Great Barrington, before doubling back to Livingston, New York. John D. Rockefeller's upbringing would be fertile with cautionary figures of weak men gone astray. Godfrey must have been invoked frequently as a model to be avoided. By all accounts, Grandpa was a jovial, good-natured man but feckless and addicted to drink, producing in Lucy an everlasting hatred of liquor that she must have drummed into her grandson. Grandpa Godfrey was the first to establish in John D.'s mind an enduring equation between bonhomie and lax character, making the latter prefer the society of sober, tight-lipped men in full command of their emotions.
The Rockefeller records offer various scenarios of why Godfrey and Lucy packed their belongings into an overloaded Conestoga wagon and headed west between 1832 and 1834. By one account, the Rockefellers, along with several neighbors, were dispossessed of their land in a heated title dispute with some English investors. Another account has an unscrupulous businessman gulling Godfrey into swapping his farm for allegedly richer turf in Tioga County. (If this claim was in fact made, it proved a cruel hoax.) Some relatives later said that Michigan was Godfrey's real destination but that Lucy vetoed such a drastic relocation, preferring the New England culture of upstate New York to the wilds of Michigan.
Whatever the reason, the Rockefellers reenacted the primordial American rite of setting out in search of fresh opportunity. In the 1830s, many settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut were swarming excitedly into wilderness areas of western New York, a migration that Alexis de Tocqueville described as "a game of chance" pursued for "the emotions it excites, as much as for the gain it procures." The construction of the Erie Canal in the 1820s had lured many settlers to the area. Godfrey and Lucy heaped up their worldly possessions in a canvas-topped prairie schooner, drawn by oxen, and headed toward the sparsely settled territory. For two weeks, they traveled along the dusty Albany-Catskill turnpike, creeping through forests as darkly forbidding as the setting of a Grimms' fairy tale. With much baggage and little passenger space, the Rockefellers had to walk for much of the journey, with Lucy and the children (except William, who did not accompany them) taking turns sitting in the wagon whenever they grew weary. As they finally reached their destination, Richford, New York, the last three and a half miles were especially arduous, and the oxen negotiated the stony, rutted path with difficulty. At the end, they had to lash their exhausted team up a nearly vertical hillside to possess their virgin sixty acres. As family legend has it, Godfrey got out, tramped to the property's peak, inspected the vista, and said mournfully, "This is as close as we shall ever get to Michigan." So, in a memorial to dashed hopes, the spot would forever bear the melancholy name of Michigan Hill.
Even today scarcely more than a crossroads, Richford was then a stagecoach stop in the wooded country southeast of Ithaca and northwest of Binghamton. The area's original inhabitants, the Iroquois, had been chased out after the American Revolution and replaced by revolutionary army veterans. Still an uncouth frontier when the Rockefellers arrived, this backwater had recently attained township status, its village square dating from 1821. Civilization had taken only a tenuous hold. The dense forests on all sides teemed with game-bear, deer, panther, wild turkey, and cottontail rabbit-and people carried flaring torches at night to frighten away the roaming packs of wolves.
By the time that John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839, Richford was acquiring the amenities of a small town. It had some nascent industries-sawmills, gristmills, and a whiskey distillery-plus a schoolhouse and a church. Most inhabitants scratched out a living from hardscrabble farming, yet these newcomers were hopeful and enterprising. Notwithstanding their frontier trappings, they had carried with them the frugal culture of Puritan New England, which John D. Rockefeller would come to exemplify.
The Rockfellers' steep property provided a sweeping panorama of a fertile valley. The vernal slopes were spattered with wildflowers, and chestnuts and berries abounded in the fall. Amid this sylvan beauty, the Rockfellers had to struggle with a spartan life. They occupied a small, plain house, twenty-two feet deep and sixteen feet across, fashioned with hand-hewn beams and timbers. The thin soil was so rocky that it required heroic exertions just to hack a clearing through the underbrush and across thickly forested slopes of pine, hemlock, oak, and maple.
As best we can gauge from a handful of surviving anecdotes, Lucy ably managed both family and farm and never shirked heavy toil. Assisted by a pair of steers, she laid an entire stone wall by herself and had the quick-witted cunning and cool resourcefulness that would reappear in her grandson. John D. delighted in telling how she pounced upon a grain thief in their dark barn one night. Unable to discern the intruder's face, she had the mental composure to snip a piece of fabric from his coat sleeve. When she later spotted the man's frayed coat, she confronted the flabbergasted thief with the missing swatch; having silently made her point, she never pressed charges. One last item about Lucy deserves mention: She had great interest in herbal medicines and home-brewed remedies prepared from a "physic bush" in the backyard. Many years later, her curious grandson sent specimens of this bush to a laboratory to see whether they possessed genuine medicinal value. Perhaps it was from Lucy that he inherited the fascination with medicine that ran through his life, right up to his creation of the world's preeminent medical-research institute.
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Serge Marinkovic (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
Chernow does not mass produce is works but takes his time with his small research staff to finely engrave his biographies with unsurpassed vital detail. He always captures the small less reknown yet pivotal moments in Rockefellers life. His poor relationship with his father that late in his fathers life he tries to reclaim. Is unsurpassed in capturing a man that all he wished was to feel loved as a child. Which by appearances he wasn't. Although a goal of Rockeffeler was to live to be a 100 years old was not achieved. He achieved so many others. His philanthropy was unequaled even by Carnegie and JP Morgan. He established the University of Chicago which has produced more Nobel Laureats than any other university. We see and feel Rockefellers decisions and the emotions behind many of them which is the most difficult aspect of biographical writing to achieve. A superb biography by my favorite writer.
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Serge Marinkovic (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
Chernow does not mass produce is works but takes his time with his small research staff to finely engrave his biographies with unsurpassed vital detail. He always captures the small less reknown yet pivotal moments in Rockefellers life. His poor relationship with his father that late in his fathers life he tries to reclaim. Is unsurpassed in capturing a man that all he wished was to feel loved as a child. Which by appearances he wasn't. Although a goal of Rockeffeler was to live to be a 100 years old was not achieved. He achieved so many others. His philanthropy was unequaled even by Carnegie and JP Morgan. He established the University of Chicago which has produced more Nobel Laureats than any other university. We see and feel Rockefellers decisions and the emotions behind many of them which is the most difficult aspect of biographical writing to achieve. A superb biography by my favorite writer.
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M. Nowacki (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
John D. Rockefeller was the richest man ever in America. He had $900 million in 1911. Today that would be worth about $120 billion by some estimates. For this, Rockefeller was hated by journalist Ida Tarbell. Ron Chernow does not subtly avoid talking about the controversy surrounding Rockefeller, but addresses it head on and doesn't give his opinion. It is just the facts. Ron Chernow also spends time talking about Rockefeller's philanthropic efforts. He leaves the reader without any doubts that Rockefeller was the greatest philanthropists American has produced. (Bill Gates is will be close though).
This book is very detailed (that is why it is so long) and is the best biography I have ever read. It is the best not only because I am a big fan of Rockefeller, but because of the way it is written. Many people give 5 stars to average books, but this really is a 5 star book. |
Mary Sibley (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
The University of Chicago and the Riverside Church are two institutions which came into existence through Rockefeller largesse. John D. Rockefeller was a true force in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century America. His strategic-thinking in the area of business was exceptional, his one-sidedness notable. Not everyone considered him a force for the good. He did not distribute money to his children upon their maturity, but kept them on allowances. His daughters, Alta and Bessie, married cold, remote, self-absorbed men. Standard Oil attained its peak influence in the 1890's.
Under Theodore Roosevelt Rockefeller's name became short-hand for corporate villainy. Ida Tarbell began her series on Standard Oil in McClure's Magazine in 1902. Ida Tarbell's series may be the most impressive thing about Standard Oil. The rise of Standard Oil was based upon its relationship with the railroads. There were secret kickbacks. Rockefeller was both the brains of Standard Oil and a monarch of philanthropy. Moving from one mode to another he experienced no self-dividedness. Trying to square philanthropy with self-reliance, he contributed to education and medical research. His work was influenced by the social gospel movement. Frederick t. Gates headed the philanthropies.
In retirement Rockefeller devoted about one hour a day to philanthropy. Winston Churchill felt that Rockefeller's endowment of research was a sort of milestone. In 1907 Standard Oil received a record fine of $29.4 million. Reporters saw in Rockefeller a poker face, but there was deep rage. An appeals court reversed the fine and found in imposing the fine there was an abuse of judicial discretion. During the 1907 Panic in October Rockefeller seemed civic-minded when he pledged half his wealth to stave off economic collapse.
Purloined letters of Archbold, Rockefeller's successor, concerning bribery resulted in scandal publicized by the Hearst papers. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was shocked. He resigned from the Standard Oil Board in 1910. The company was dismantled in 1911 pursuant to a Supreme Court decision. Rockefeller brought an unprecedented scale and scope to the charitable trust. He contemplated the formation of a giant foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation was attuned to the optimism of the Progressive Era. Initially the focus was on public health and medical education.
I have not sufficient space to outline for the reader the immense task undertaken by Chernow to set forth the social and economic context of Rockefeller's extensive business and charitable activities. |
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