Oil In The Family

By LANCE MORROW

William James played golf with John D. Rockefeller now and then. The philosopher of pragmatism admired the psalm-singing old pirate of Standard Oil. James was bemused that Rockefeller could be "so complex, subtle, oily, fierce, strongly bad and strongly good a human being." John D. was "a most lovable person" and yet, as James wrote to his brother Henry in 1905, seemed "a man 10 stories deep, and to me quite unfathomable..."

Like the U.S. in which he prospered for so long, from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression, Rockefeller was an organism of some contradiction: his idealism and his rapacity, the good John D. and his evil twin, went partners with each other. The deeply pious Baptist Sunday-school teacher would work the rest of the week as a corporate Borgia--the worst of the "malefactors of great wealth," according to Teddy Roosevelt. In his parallel universe of philanthropy, the lipless, squinty skinflint would dispense hundreds of millions of dollars, which among many other things built the University of Chicago and transformed the entire field of medical education and research. Rockefeller's enemies simplified the puzzle by dismissing him as a hypocrite. Rockefeller, being a man of profound internal consistency and with a certain gift for denial, never saw the contradictions at all.

In Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Random House; 774 pages; $30), Ron Chernow, author of two earlier epic works of business history (The House of Morgan and The Warburgs), has produced one of the great American biographies. Rockefeller may linger in the national memory as a fading capitalist icon, a moral double exposure from long ago, but his story (and that of Standard Oil and the great trust-busting struggles at the turn of the century) becomes an interesting rear-view mirror at the turn of another century, at a moment when the Federal Government has moved against Microsoft and Bill Gates--the man who, with $48 billion, has surpassed John D. Rockefeller as the richest American ever. Even the tabloid atmospherics of today savor eerily of Hearst and Pulitzer 100 years ago.

A sculptor for whom the aging Rockefeller posed thought that "if he'd lived in the Middle Ages, he'd have been Pope at Rome." It's a shrewd thought: the Standard Oil monopoly represented a centralized, hierarchical organization that was as intolerant of competitors as the Vatican was of heretics. Chernow proposes a shrewder thought: "At times, when he railed against cutthroat competition and the vagaries of the business cycle, Rockefeller sounded more like Karl Marx than our classical image of the capitalist." America is still trying to figure out where it stands concerning monopoly and competition.

Chernow neither sanctifies nor demonizes his sometimes strange protagonist, but writes with a rich impartiality. He turns the machinations of Standard Oil and the other trusts into fascinating social history. His assessment of Ida Tarbell and other muckrakers is thorough and not entirely approving. He interweaves the larger American story with an unforgettable account of Rockefeller's family and personal life.

The most memorable character: Rockefeller's father, William Avery Rockefeller, a backwoods mountebank and snake-oil pitchman whose history John D. tried to suppress. "Big Bill" Rockefeller, crack shot and con artist, claimed to be a medical doctor and, in the gullible towns of upstate New York and farther west, promised to cure any cancer for $25. Eventually, "Doc" Rockefeller (who made a habit of impregnating the servant girl at home) became a bigamist and started a separate family as "Doctor Levingston"--the name that appears on his tombstone. All his life, Big Bill loved money, and when he had it, he tied the bills in bundles with twine and stacked them in a dresser drawer like cordwood. It was from his charlatan/shaman father that the boy John acquired the knowledge that money is magic.