John D. Rockefeller (1839-19.37), the recognized patriarch of the Rockefeller family that grew to prominence over the course of a century and half, both through its business interests and its massive philanthropic efforts, was not born to great wealth.
"Part of
John D. Rockefeller's genius was in recognizing early the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel."
The trustees worried about the reaction from the Rockefeller family--the Rockefellers helped found the museum, and
John D. Rockefeller's wife was its treasurer at the time--and they moved to cancel the exhibit.
Once one of the most famous addresses in the world, the building housed the offices of
John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company from 1883 to 1897.
(40.) On
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., see Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D.
The two recent biographies are Morgan: American Financier, by Jean Strouse, and Titan: The Life of
John D. Rockefeller Sr.
Everyone concerned with this issue and this case should read Titan, the new biography on the life of
John D. Rockefeller, Sr., by Ron Chernow.
The survey by American Heritage, a magazine published by Forbes, found that the great titans of American industry
John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor had amassed far greater wealth in relative terms.
After minions of
John D. Rockefeller caused state troopers in Colorado to incinerate striking miners, their wives and their children in the Ludlow massacre of 1914 (soaking their tents in oil, then setting them on fire), Rockefeller hired a journalist, Ivy Lee, at $1,000 a month, to improve his abysmal public standing.
Roosevelt, beginning a long tradition of White House support, endorsed the organization;
John D. Rockefeller Jr.
In The Rockefellers (1976), they showed how the great-grandchildren of
John D. Rockefeller grew up to be wildly different from their patriarch and from one another, despite the strong efforts of that family's infrastructure to imprint them with common values, manners, and goals.
He not only adds substantially to our knowledge of the infamous Ludlow, Colorado, massacre" of 20 April 1914, but he also supplies much new information concerning how the Canadian politician and social reformer, Mackenzie King, and
John D. Rockefeller, jr., sought to refashion the practice of industrial relations in America's largest corporate enterprises.