The Rockefellers - Oil, Money and Power

the scene Princeton University graduation 1929 of student voted most likely to succeed john d rockefeller the third obviously his fellow classmates had a sense of humor at the time the Rockefeller family fortune was estimated at 1 billion dollars in fact young Rockefellers grandfather was called the world's first billionaire he was called a lot of other things too perhaps no other American family has been so severely criticized for the way they made their fortune or so lavishly praised for the way they have spent it this is their story join us now as biography presents the Rockefellers have you seen the well-to-do thank you up and down Park Avenue on that famous thoroughfare with their noses in the air a john jay rockefeller I believe was America's first billionaire he had to have it all and to get it all he was young I do not believe that great-grandfather went beyond the law but he certainly flexed his muscles he became the kind of lightning rod for all the things that were wrong with Industrial Development Rockefeller once the name meant ruthlessness and oil later public service and philanthropy on a grand scale from Yosemite National Park to the United Nations what has never changed is what the family name has always evoked wealth and power money is like sex power lusts its appetite and can destroy I mean that's what's unique about the Rockefeller is that money was painful legacy for them but it never destroyed really any of them oyel instant fantastic wealth black gold making millionaires out of paupers the true American dream but before 1859 getting at it was a problem that's when Colonel Edwin Drake drilled well in north western Pennsylvania and showed where it was and how to reach it since kerosene from the oil revolutionized the way America lit its houses the nation was soon in the middle of a gigantic oil boom the new chance for fortune made wildcatters of the most unlikely of men with a little capital anyone could strike it rich and thousands tried in Pennsylvania in western Pennsylvania in the 1850s bubblin crude was almost literally coming up in the ground you could get into the business of crude oil production by buying a farm and drilling a well and striking oil and it was a frontier life in the pennsylvania oil towns a rough-and-tumble existence in a land of mud and muck and mire if oil promised their riches to bring a better life its price was some of the hardest living conditions imaginable there was nothing subtle about the towns that sprang up they had names like oil creek and pit hole which grew to 15,000 people in two months time the magazine the nation said of pit-hole it is safe to assert that there is more vile liquor drunk in this town than in any of its size in the world an oil town was a very rowdy place to be from it was dirty oil was flowing in the streets also very muddy they were planks for sidewalks it was about as rough and uncomfortable an atmosphere as one can imagine in spite of the hard life the fortune seekers just kept pouring in but as the oil from any deposit was drained the land could go from priceless - worthless overnight one pit whole farm sold for two million dollars in 1865 and just thirteen years later for four dollars and 37 cents and oil prices fluctuated wildly because of the inevitable overproduction oil was everywhere was on the roads it was slopping around it was it was kind of in the air almost and it was a kind of element that was just waiting to be controlled by somebody the man who would impose that control and make himself a billionaire in the process was John Davison Rockefeller he was born in this house in upstate New York in 1839 Eliza Davison his mother was a fiercely sober Baptist determined to instill the values of order and piety and her children her husband William Avery was something else entirely he was a small-time con artist with a variety of schemes to make money of his countrymen including a treatment guaranteed to cure cancer not the least of his trickeries was his secret life as the husband of another woman Margaret Levingston whether or not John ever knew just what his father was up to he knew the devastating impact of his father's ways and was bent on being different I think that that John Dee senior was was always reacting till the last day of his 90 plus years was reacting against his father the father was wild uncontrolled emotion to him and john d rockefeller wanted to put lightning in a bottle he wanted to control things he want to rationalize them it was John DS sense of order that produced ledger a is minutely detailed account of every penny spent in his childhood here was the money made the money saved and the money spent including the 10% he always gave to the church if religious piety could be brought to the secular world of accounting it would look like ledger a the amounts of money that he was dealing with there were to be calculated in pennies and dimes very small amount of money and the reason for doing this is that if you have to write it down and see it and you have to account for it and help you recognize the value of money and so ledger a was a kind of comprehensive sort of record of his inner life except it has no thoughts it has no emotions it has figures that's kind of at the core in a sense of his character the inner John deep it's a kind of a severe accountants and mentality in 1855 the sixteen-year-old john dee moved to Cleveland and becoming a major railroad and commercial hub it was as an accountant that he began his professional life when he went to Cleveland as a young man his father told him that it really wasn't important for him to go to college he wanted to go to college and his father said no do much better if he went to a trade school because then he learned something useful that where he could earn a living and so in fact he learned to become an accountant he joined the firm of Hewitt and Tuttle but when he was refused to raise he started his own company selling produce trade generated by the Civil War and the opening of the West made the success of this first venture Rockefellers business personality was now set his friends called him the deacon he was a kind of pious and also very serious and Stern sober figure people would asking you know what are you gonna be when you grow up he always answered never with a profession he say I'm going to make $100,000 as I'll boomed Rockefeller realized that this was the field for him in 1865 he went into a partnership with an experienced oil refiner the Englishman Samuel Andrews refining oil made more sense to Rockefeller than drilling for it wells dried up but every driller needed a refinery the amount of capital needed to go into the refining business in say 1862 was very small I mean you essentially set up a small still in your backyard and you were in the refining business john d rockefeller nevertheless believed that it's important to be big and the company got very big Rockefeller understood that the bigger the company the cheaper its costs the greater its profits and he grew big through attention to detail for example to save money the company began to make its own oil barrels and then Rockefeller discovered a way to save even more you can imagine the kind of efficiency that somebody who had done something with his life like Leger a would bring to an enterprise one of the things he did he go around and see the people soldering the oil barrels and he found that they were putting 40 drops of solder in and he said one guy said we please try 38 the guy tried it didn't work but 39 did 39 was perfect later on in his life he would recall this john d rockefeller he'd say a fortune we saved a fortune what he was concerned with it was not the fortune he made but the fortune he saved the company grew by buying up refineries and the bottom line grew further through a range of oil byproducts Rockefeller would see nothing of the refining process wasted john d rockefeller formed Standard Oil in 1870 and from delivery to storage wherever middlemen had operated before standards stepped in of course as he put it we made a fine crop of enemies by a two but we made oil far lower in price than it had ever been before by the late 1870s john d rockefeller was a millionaire many times over Rockefellers most important deals were with the railroads that took his oil to market he represented such a large volume of business that he was able to force them to pay rebates from the beginning john d rockefeller saw that he had a kind of common partner in the railroads the railroads had an interest in this oil running smoothly being produced and refined smoothly so that it didn't come in dribs and drabs and unpredictably and so he made an arrangement is that would profit him and really help destroy the competition and one of the things he got for himself were rebates that is for every barrel of oil shipped he got a certain number of dollars back off the shipping fee because of the volume that he was shipping and his competitors he's small competitors didn't get that and then he made a further step in economics of strangulation and coming out with railroads with his concept of the drawback the drawback system was a kind of extortion the railroads had to pay Rockefeller a percentage of the shipping fees his competitors were paying them it was illegal of course but no railroad dared objected and what this obviously did is it made it more difficult for competitors to use the same railroad it's a way not just of getting the best price yourself but frustrating the competition by the early 1880s Standard Oil controlled 95 percent of the refining business Rockefellers reputation for being ruthless now spread as wide as his corporation his business practices were legal like swallowing up competitor questionable like spying on them and illegal like the drawbacks and anyone with the guts to compete could count on a visit from standard to discuss a buyout he would have his people evaluate the worth of their properties issue stock that matched his evaluation of what their properties are worth and they could take it or leave it so he would print a piece of paper that said here's a hundred shares of standard oil you are now a junior partner in a company of which I am a senior partner I may never declare a dividend and you can't sell us to anybody he did buy out and in some cases forced out of business other people but when he did that he would offer them either cash or a standard oil stock did he give him any choice sure you didn't have to take his stock but if you didn't take his such your oil he could show you was going to cost more refined than his because his was the biggest refinery in town he said I always offered them stock in standard oil and if they turn that down that was their mistake and of course technically he was correct because Standard Oil went on to be this you know huge thing and they would have all been millionaires he created endless numbers of millionaires but he didn't go to the other side of it that is they didn't accept the stock then he put him out of business he just bought him out in his private life meanwhile he had married the strong-willed Laura Spellman in 1864 and they'd had three daughters in quick succession but it was their fourth child John D jr. born in 1874 who rockefeller hoped would one day take over the firm despite his Puritanism rockefeller bought a large home on Cleveland's fashionable Euclid Avenue and he built a 700-acre country estate Forest Hill which he characteristically hoped would someday turn a profit as a hotel he even surprised at least one business associate with a bill after a visit but eventually accepted the notion of the non profit home but he never lost his deep commitment to religion he had been a trustee of the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church since the age of 18 nor did Rockefeller ever see a conflict between his faith and God and his faith and monopoly capitalism the good Lord gave me my money he would say and the future promised ever more benevolence from above 26 Broadway New York City john d rockefeller moved his Standard Oil headquarters here in 1882 to be at the center of what was becoming a global enterprise in time it would become the most famous business address in the world New York in the 1880s was a city of old money and new wealth society was dominated by the likes of the Astor's and the Vanderbilts but John Dee worth over a quarter of a billion dollars by the middle of a decade lived as simply here as he had in Cleveland even took the elevated train to the office and joined none of the business men's clubs instead the family enjoyed a quiet and pious home life at the modest townhouse they built on unfashionable 54th Street Laura Spellman and John Dee had in common a deep commitment to righteous behavior her family home had been a stop on the Underground Railroad John himself at once paid for a black woman's freedom there was a fierce sense of right and wrong in both my great-grandfather my great grandmother was not so much a matter of some kind of a public statement just a personal commitment and probably not thought to be all that heroic just something that was that you you ought to do because it was right one of the most remarkable things that grandfather did was to establish Spellman college which is college for black women in Lanta and he did this back in the in the 1880s before people were interested either in blacks or in women there may have been interested in women in a different way but not in the way to say they are today and now that his wealth was growing he could express his righteousness by giving freely and he poured millions into the Rockefeller Institute making it one of the world's premier institutions of medical research and in 1889 he donated six hundred thousand dollars to endow the University of Chicago over the next ten years he would give forty-five million dollars to the school inevitably his motives for such huge gifts were suspect it was important for him to be righteous and to be seen to be righteous I think that this was an attempt to control his fate to make a bargain with the Lord that if he did the right thing with his nickels and dimes and pennies perhaps in the grade beyond the Lord would be good to him sometimes people have said that that the only reason that he gave lots of money away was was because he he was trying to atone for what he had done in earning a lot of money through Standard Oil he felt a sense of responsibility to use it intelligently but the notion that he was trying to atone for something that he felt he had done that was wrong just is not true as it happened it really didn't matter how much money he gave away his nearly total control of the vital oil industry he made him the perfect embodiment of capitalism gone mad there was scarcely any disagreeable creature with which Rockefeller was not compared in the political cartoons of the era everybody thought that john d rockefeller was impervious to this criticism USA I mean he it was the most hated man in America certainly perhaps the most hated man in the world his name was synonymous with ruthlessness and it was assumed that he was just a kind of this steely facade but inside of course it was it was taking its toll he suffered the jested problems and in 1901 he contracted alopecia a total loss of body hair that can be congenital or a nervous disorder whether it was the public outcry that took his hair his sense of order dictated a series of wigs of different lengths to emulate natural hair growth if Rockefeller was already the object of vilification Ida Tarbell only made matters worse in articles for McClure's magazine that began in 1902 the noted muckraker depicted his company's tactics as cutthroat and his character as a portrait in greed but America needed little convincing that the power of men like Rockefeller was way out of hand I think the public concern about big business and the reaction to Standard Oil and to Rockefeller that was caused by that concern was really due to a feeling of loss of control when we change from a small business and agricultural society to a society in which many people are employed by a big company we give up a lot of control over our own destiny and people felt out of control that was one reason people feared big business so I think that that concern is part of what made people so angry at Rockefeller the President Teddy Roosevelt was the point man in the effort to bring Rockefeller down in spite of his own privileged upbringing Roosevelt was an enemy of the big business trusts he knew the nation was more than ready to rein them in and so he decided to go after one of the biggest of them all Standard Oil and its director john d rockefeller he became the kind of lightning rod for all the things that were wrong with industrial development 1909 the Supreme Court turned to the Sherman Antitrust Act to bring Standard Oil down breaking up so enormous a company so pervasive in American life would be a monumental task I think that at the time the Standard Oil decision was viewed as a real blow to Standard Oil and a victory for the public and I think that that view was a misperception the break-up formed a group of smaller but still powerful companies dominant in their regions Standard Oil of New Jersey became a so now Exxon standard of Ohio became so high Oh standard of Indiana became Amoco standard of New York became mobile standard of California became Chevron and Continental oil became Conoco while in all 34 different companies were created out of Standard Oil and John Dee had a piece of every one of them he didn't fight it they kind of made a joke about it afterwards he sent out to all his lieutenants a kind of fake obituary saying oh that this thing is passed on and we must mourn its passing and that sort of thing but it was a kind of catty and and sarcastic and not very serious response what senior had to take seriously was the new way America would light its homes all this oil that Rockefeller was refining he was refining basically into kerosene and then comes Thomas Edison who has a vision he wants to change the way illumination takes place in homes in businesses and factories and he succeeds in doing this by coming up with the electric light and really just by luck the dominant design in Auto manufacture at the turn of the century turns out to beat the internal combustion engine the internal combustion engine is fueled by gasoline gasoline is refined from petroleum so just as he is losing the core market that he has another market at least as great comes along and the business keeps growing the wholesale transformation of America into a nation on wheels would make Rockefeller the richest man in the world it is said that he was worth between 850 and 950 million dollars in 1911 that's the gross national product that year was about thirty-five billion dollars so think of somebody being worth 135th or 140th of the US GNP but Rockefellers reputation among his countrymen was only declining as his minions increased he had become so despised that he finally decided to do something about it and so he hired the patrician southerner Ivy Lee to reverse his public image an early master of public relations Lee used the media which the muckrakers had used to disgrace Rockefeller to turn him into a sympathetic figure Ivy Lee recognized early the power of the new moving picture and used newsreels to show a remarkably benevolent Rockefeller I am very grateful to you and to a host of people who are so kind and good to me all the time why because you're so good to everybody you all as i biele began to kind of control his public image he became oddly a kind of American character and people kind of warmed to him in a bizarre sort of way it was like having Frankenstein on the loose walking around New York City or something like that with a cane in a long head although this plane never takes off this photo opportunity was presented as seniors first flight perhaps Ivy Lee's most brilliant public relations move was the casting of Rockefeller as the man who gave out dimes don't you give a dime with the Rockefeller thank you sir thank you very much I can handle my thank you for the rice I consider myself more than amply paid unless you wish you get issue here he was viewed as a very wealthy man and viewed with a certain amount of awe and if he gave children dime it gave him a chance to say a few word to them it was really a means of quick communication and it was very effective he handed out some 30,000 dimes these shiny new dimes having a Rockefeller dime was like having a Mickey Mantle 1955 baseball card I mean it was kind of collector's item it was touched by Midas the name Rockefeller soon came to mean the richest and the best to all the world this austere Baptist was now a society's well now if your loom and you don't know where to go - why don't you go where fashion sits puttin on the Ritz different types who wear a day coat pants with stripes and cutaway coat perfect fits putting on the Ritz dressed up like a million dollar troopers trying hard to look like Gary Cooper superduke birth come let's mix were Rockefellers walk with sticks or umbrellas in their myths put on the Ritz he devoted his final years to his golf game handed over his business affairs to his son John Jr but if only in his later years John Dee's senior set out to change his reputation his son would make the polishing of the Rockefeller name his life's work John Davison Rockefeller jr. was born in Cleveland on January 29th 1874 his childhood was one of wealth and loneliness his only playmates for the gate keeper son and his three sisters who referred to him as the Crown Prince and in spite of his privileges his father's deep piety dictated for the shy boy a life of relative austerity and childhood the boy gained from his father a lifelong love of nature but in most ways he was his mother Laura's son he had her virtues you know extremely pious extremely religious extremely conscious about criticism and very much a kind of psychologically frail creature father was brought up in a very strict Baptist atmosphere and was not allowed to do anything on Sunday except read the Bible and take a walk and go to church John Dee senior insisted that his son learned thriftiness at a young age and so required him to keep a ledger just like the one he himself had kept so many years before Jr's intricate log detailed every penny earned spent or given away some of the small transactions now seem laughable when measured against the monumental wealth of the family Jr could have attended Yale but he thought the crowd they're a little fast so instead he went to brown with his frugal ways he managed the football team into solvency but his endless thriftiness gained him the reputation on campus of an eccentric the son of a millionaire who went so far as to mend his own dishtowels in an unusual step he attended a college dance where he met Abby Aldrich the daughter of a prominent Rhode Island senator he had met mother at a dance which is interesting because his mother didn't really approve his going to dances but he did anyway and finally persuaded her I think there was good exercise or something so that she finally gave him I think from the onset John D jr. saw that Abby Aldrich was really the woman for him she was everything he wasn't she was cultured she was socially graceful all these things that they still kind of rough-hewn Rockefellers hadn't acquired yet they were very different people and as reserved as my grandfather was so much in the opposite direction was my grandmother unreserved and I think that that was the glory of that marriage Abbie's independence shown early in the marriage to his suggestion that now she keep a detailed ledger of all expenses she gave an unqualified no on graduation in 1897 junior went to work for his father in New York known at the firm as mr. junior but with no specific job his ambiguous status corroded their relationship my impression of it was one of struggle off-camera it had a lot of contention which was dealt with out of the public eye and maybe a lot out of the of the family I he being the only son was given enormous responsibilities at a very young age really the moment he graduated from college and he had very little guidance he was put on many of the boards that his father had been on and he put in a position of making judgments and decisions around the corporate world that he had no feel for no innate skill for it also was a world that his father had exceeded so grandly in that there was no room for him Jr's growing discomfort at Standard Oil ended in a nervous breakdown in 1904 he went to France for six months on his return he announced that he would give up his work at the firm and they vote the rest of his life philanthropy chandi senior had said God gave me my money for john d rockefeller junior was a little different his father who was a kind of god to him gave him his money and but it carried the same kind of theological charge go and do good with his money and do god's work there was of course no shortage of god's work that needed to be done and no shortage of rockefeller money to do it from fighting juvenile delinquency and prostitution to prison reform the range of causes was breathtaking in the arena of Education alone jr. gave 42 million dollars in 1905 to raise teacher salaries in poor areas he was a scientific in his philanthropy as his father had been in business Abbey and jr. had six children between 1903 and 1915 a be known as Babs John D the third Nelson Laurance Winthrop and the youngest David the children spent a great deal of time at one of the five Rockefeller estates pocket Eko Hills the very private three and a half thousand acre home on the Hudson River established by John Dee senior from Georgian manor house two manicured gardens Pocantico was a three-dimensional expression of the quiet opulence that characterized the family to one observer it was an example of what God could have done if only he'd had the money we have on the place of Paquette eco something that's called a playhouse it was built by my parents for my generation I think the term Playhouse if you see it is surprising to most people because it's very big it is in the Playhouse built for the Rockefeller children that one finds the swimming pool the bowling alley and the fireplace overlooking the indoor tennis court such symbols of wealth did not however make the children's upbringing any less strict and pious than that of their father my grandfather and my grandmother were very good parents but particularly my grandfather was a very stern parent they passed on very Baptist values prayers in the morning prayers at lunch prayers at night as if in some grand duchy of old the Rockefeller children lived in virtual seclusion from the outside world unaware of public perceptions of the family when young Nelson was sailing his toy boat one day a boy reportedly asked him where is your yacht what do you think I am a replied the Vanderbilt when jr. had wanted to free himself of the ugly life of the business world he could find no better place to do it than Picanto Co the cosseted life here made the rest of the world seem unreal but before long the outside world impinged on this sanctuary noisily and irrevocably in 1913 2,000 miles west of mechanical and the coal fields of Colorado a bitter labor struggle was brewing between the powerful Colorado fuel and iron company and its workers Colorado fuel and iron happened to be one of the few companies on whose board jr. still served the life of a miner working for the company and one of its drab little mining towns like Ludlow was straight out of Dickens if you were a miner in Ludlow in 1913 you were trapped in a misery hadn't been seen in America until the advent of industrialization and its kind of wage slave mentality an existence you'd be making $1 60 a day you'd be spending an inn company script you'd be living in exorbitantly priced company housing your children would be ill educated income a school thing and you would be tyrannize Dover by company thugs he was on the board of the Colorado fuel 9 company and he and grandfather were by far the largest investors I think they had something like 30% of the stock they had a very important say in what was going on the United Mineworkers were trying to unionize the company against the fierce opposition of its managers the company hired vicious private enforcers to intimidate the unionize errs most of the workforce walked off the job and set up a tent city nearby escalating confrontations ended with the deaths of two women and 11 children killed when their tent caught fire the Furious retaliation of the miners led President Wilson to mobilize federal troops in the ensuing battles seventy-five miners were killed in what would become forever known as the Ludlow massacre the outrage was national this was a public relations disaster for the Rockefellers Jr knew he'd have to take radical action to undo the damage to the family's reputation and he was prepared to discard his father's policies in the process in a brilliant move suggested by his advisors junior went to Ludlow where he talked for the miners and danced for their wives they went out and father spent two weeks visiting all of the camps he would go and meet with anyone who wanted to see him whether it was in washrooms or in the workplace or he would go where they had dances and he would dance with their wives it was really a very courageous thing for him to done because it was not something he was accustomed to the old clumsiness it was gone junior charmed the miners and he brought improvements to the conditions in the mines but there'd still be no union in Ludlow John Dee senior was so impressed with the way his son had handled the crisis that he transferred to him control of all Rockefeller business in 1914 the next 60 years changed the family's name for it's 1930 in the 90 year old john d rockefeller senior as long ago at the management of Standard Oil now the family's wealth is from a thousand different investments but senior still takes the opportunity to read a letter of thanks to the employees of standard on its 60th birthday I have no words to express my appreciation of all who have had a part in making the company a success it has been or beyond our fondest dreams at the time of its beginning the wealth that senior himself had by now amassed was far beyond his fondest dreams and in his final years in his role of retired magnate he could be seen leading a Baptist him yes we lost Rocco or playing the pocket ago eighteen he'd hope to make it to 100 but died three years I of that on May 23rd 1937 all the days of passing by that's fine you're a good song leader mr. Rockefeller that's good the passing of this last great symbol of unfettered American capitalism and era had loads the full weight of the Rockefeller name now fell on the shoulders of John D jr. his father had made a fortune of nearly a billion dollars and the son would spend the rest of his life giving that much money away my grandfather finally decided to become the person who would translate the making of money into the giving of money and I think he felt a responsibility to make sure that not just his father's name but that the family name be seen in context I think he wanted to be right with the public and I think he got right with the public one enormous contribution was in conservation a field he'll own loved he bought up the entire Jackson Hole Valley of Wyoming and donated it to the new National Park Service for jr. giving back to the nation that had been so good to him was a fundamental principle without certain principles life has little meaning I believe that every right implies a responsibility every opportunity and obligation saving the Redwoods of California was another of the conservation projects he undertook after 1924 he purchased in whole or in part Acadia National Park Great Smoky Mountains National Park Yosemite and Yellowstone National Park and he believed that at every plant in every rock and every tree in every flower had spirit in it he wanted people to experience the natural world and he felt those things were a manifestation of the divine as he understood it and at the height of the depression he began a project back in New York that was wildly out of step with a battered economy Rockefeller Center he saw there's an opportunity to do something that would be seen as an act of faith in the darkest time in American history and indeed Rockefeller Center is saying America is going to revive America is going to dominate America is going to prevail we are all determined that our economic machine shall work there is a very close relationship between our national state of mind and our general economic status I think he took an enormous personal pride that he put tens of thousands to people to work he went wandered all over that project for years with his famous ruler measuring everything in sight looking at everything of all their holdings Rockefeller Center would become the crown jewel employing thousands making millions over on the Eastside at his son Nelson's urging jr. bought and then donated land for the new United Nations in 1946 his actions brought a prestigious institution to the city and since the land was going to be developed anyway eliminated the site as a potential rival to Rockefeller Center at the same time his stature the public's eye made him an important ally of any national effort here he volunteered to promote an FBI campaign to fingerprint all Americans Abbey's and fists turned more to the artistic they were very very distinct both in their personalities and the things that they cared about grandmother cared passionately about modern art and grandfather could have done without it she just went out to his absolute horror and started something called the Museum of Modern Art with a couple of other very rich ladies it became known in the family as mothers Museum and in spite of his reservations jr. eventually contributed millions of dollars toward its support but the project he adored above all others was the restoration of the small town in Virginia that became Colonial Williamsburg Williamsburg was an act of pure love on his part to be able to take a part of our history and store it and make it available to the American people I think that was an act of never-ending joy it probably was the thing I love most about his whole life was doing Williamsburg year after year after year in many ways he was a person who was cut off from life and so I think when he had opportunities as with Williamsburg to be engaged in a project I almost imagine him laying the bricks somehow the Rockefeller so loved Williamsburg they spent at least two months a year here in their home at Bassett Hall for the rest of their lives in 1948 Abbi Rockefeller died of a stroke she was 73 and jr. himself died in 1960 at the age of 86 the death of john d rockefeller jr. at Tucson Arizona brings a life of wives philanthropy to an end the extraordinary philanthropist that's how the press and public remembered him at his passing it was proof that in the 42 years since the Ludlow massacre he had made the transformation of the Rockefeller name complete john d rockefeller Jr's children carried on the process of tying the families name to good works the degree to which John D jr. had succeeded in his life task which was declares the oil as where the guilt of the family name was seeming the way these children were regarded they were regarded as young princes coming out of this family with tremendous expectations for them eldest child Abby continued her mother's work for the Museum of Modern Art and became a major funder of cancer research the oldest son John D the third devoted his life to the issue of population control started the Asia Society and created Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City Nelson became a four-term governor of New York ran for president and served as vice president of the United States Lawrence carried on his father's conservation efforts besides establishing a series of luxury resorts Winthrop became a two-term governor of Arkansas the first Republican in the State House since the Civil War and David became an international Statesman as well as the president of Chase Manhattan Bank and even with all their public giving the family continued to prosper its net worth is now estimated to be more than five point five billion dollars thank you that's the standard off thank you very much no other family in America has come close to establishing the fame power and influence of the Rockefellers they exemplify the American Dream the idea that anyone can start with nothing and build a great fortune and they've shown that gratitude by giving much of that fortune back to the country that made it all possible their generosity has left an indelible mark on the American landscape you

Channel: John Wilson

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Keywords: rockefeller, gilded age, wealth, oil, philanthropy, business, robber barons

Id: gGbT0l3LoTs

Length: 46min 6sec (2766 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2016