On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller - Hardcover

Richard Norton Smith is the author of Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize); An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover; The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation; The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880-1955; and Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation. He has served as the director of presidential libraries commemorating Abraham Lincoln, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. As C-SPAN’s in-house historian, he appears frequently on that network. He has also been a regular contributor to the PBS NewsHour, and an ABC News presidential historian.

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Smith / ON HIS OWN TERMS

One

The House That Sugar Built

I had a grandfather—­don’t jump to any conclusions; this was my mother’s father. He was the collector of art. He also happened to be a politician, which is a rather unusual combination, to be frank.

—­Nelson A. Rockefeller

1

The headlines were predictable. croesus captured. beauty to wed wealth. son of richest man in the world gives up church and goes in for dancing to win miss aldrich. Americans in the autumn of 1901 were both fascinated and repelled by the pending alliance between the world’s greatest fortune and the country’s dominant lawmaker. The site of the wedding was never in doubt. Although the bride expressed her preference for a modest ceremony in a small Warwick church, and the groom would have been perfectly happy to plight his troth before a handful of witnesses in New York’s Little Church Around the Corner, the choice didn’t rest with Abby Greene Aldrich or John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In the Aldrich household, senatorial privilege governed; unmitigated by senatorial courtesy, it reserved all questions of importance to the imperious figure popularly labeled “the General Manager of the United States.”

Virtually forgotten today, for twenty years straddling the end of the nineteenth century, Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich pulled the nation’s financial strings in tandem with Wall Street confederates like J. P. Morgan and Paul Warburg. “He was so much the man of power that he never thought about his power,” wrote Aldrich’s official biographer. “It was natural to him, like breathing air.” Much the same would be said of the senator’s grandson and namesake, who emulated his appetite for command, his chronic restlessness, and his unabashed delight in art at once spiritual and sensual. “Most people don’t know what they want!” Aldrich grumbled. This was not a criticism frequently directed at the senior senator from Rhode Island. The recent assassination of President William McKinley, long a champion of economic protectionism, may have been grim news indeed for like-­minded Republicans like Aldrich. Yet the death of a president, however untimely, could not be allowed to interfere with the wedding of Abby Aldrich four weeks later.

If anything, uncertainty about McKinley’s swashbuckling successor, Theodore Roosevelt, lent a note of urgency to the invitations Aldrich dispatched to his Capitol Hill colleagues. “Come right to Warwick and stay,” he told one. “We will have a committee [meeting] right away after. There are a number of things I want to talk to you about.” The new president, precluded by the requirements of public mourning from attending the nuptials, was nonetheless careful to solicit senatorial counsel as he composed his first, defining message to Congress. Aldrich took such deference as his due. As a child he had come to see himself among the elect, a status reinforced by his mother’s claims of descent from New England patriarchs John Winthrop and Roger Williams. While still a newcomer to the Providence City Council, Aldrich had resolved to build a great country seat on the west shore of Narragansett Bay at Warwick. Even now, architects were drawing plans for a seventy-­room château, serviced by a two-­hundred-­yard private railroad laid down to muffle the clatter of tradesmen making deliveries. The parklike setting already boasted a large stone teahouse, in the elegant ballroom of which Abby and John would exchange their vows.

None of the several hundred invited guests who made their way there on the morning of October 9, 1901, by steamer or special streetcar could fail to be impressed by the waterfront estate Aldrich called Indian Oaks and muckraking journalists made notorious as the House That Sugar Built. Its owner, the son of a millworker from Foster, Rhode Island, had traveled an improbable road in his sixty years. Before his tenth birthday, Aldrich passed up a visiting circus and, with the money saved, purchased the self-­improving volume A Tinker’s Son, or, I’ll Be Somebody Yet. At seventeen, he landed a job as a wholesale grocer’s clerk in the state capital of Providence. Attending evening lectures at a local lyceum to compensate for a meager formal education, Aldrich paid special attention to the rules of debate and parliamentary procedure. The attack on Fort Sumter interrupted his bookkeeping labors, but only briefly; a bout of typhoid fever earned him a discharge from the Tenth Rhode Island Volunteers garrisoning wartime Washington.

Sickened by the possibility that he might remain one of the “dumb driven cattle” constituting the bulk of humanity, Aldrich returned to Providence in the autumn of 1862. He began courting Abby Pearce Chapman, a Mayflower descendant to whom he confided a fierce resolution to achieve, “willingly or forcibly wrested from a selfish world Success! Counted as the mass count it, by dollars and cents!” The ambitious clerk dreaded anonymity only slightly less than the soul-­killing drudgery of the ledger book. Within a year of their 1866 marriage, Nelson and Abby welcomed a son, christened Nelson Jr. The boy’s death at the age of four devastated his parents. But it was the father who fled to the Old World, leaving Abby to console herself as he applied the healing balm of art.

At the Parthenon (“the most sublime of all temples or churches”), Aldrich was nearly overcome by the urge to prostrate himself on the marble pavement. Rejecting the stern theology of his New England fathers, Aldrich found inspiration in the parallel universe of artistic and literary expression. Denied creative talent, Aldrich was frustrated a second time when his hopes of becoming a great orator, a modern-­day Cicero, went glimmering. Politics beckoned. Elected to the Providence City Council in 1869, Aldrich served simultaneously as president of the city’s Board of Trade and the First National City Bank. After making his peace with the Republican boss of Rhode Island, General Charles Brayton, he won a seat in the state legislature. His subsequent ascent to the Speaker’s chair foreshadowed two terms in the national House of Representatives and three decades as a senatorial powerhouse.

His reliance on government as an engine of democratic capitalism placed Aldrich in the nationalistic camp of Alexander Hamilton, a financial wizard rejected by the very people whose democratic experiment he capitalized. Hamilton believed that only by linking the interests of the state “in an intimate connection” with citizens of great wealth could the success of the young republic be assured. For Nelson Aldrich, the line demarking self-­interest from the public good was indistinct, if not invisible. From an early age, Aldrich the self-­made aristocrat entertained visions of grandeur centered on Warwick Neck. Lacking the cash to realize them, the freshman senator and his growing family made do with a suite of rooms in a Washington hotel, supplemented by rented houses in Providence. Eventually there would be eleven Aldrich children, eight of whom survived infancy. These included a daughter born in October 1874 and named for her mother. As the elder Abby faded under the strain of repeated pregnancies and the physical and emotional distance imposed by Nelson’s political pursuits, the second Abby came to fill the void in her father’s life. Belying his reactionary image, Nelson Aldrich was a thoroughgoing progressive when it came to educating women. Thus his daughter began her formal schooling with a Quaker governess, precursor to Miss Abbott’s School for Young Ladies in Providence, at which modern languages, ancient history, and art lent ballast to the traditional curriculum of dancing, gymnastics, and edifying verse.

Young Abby became a voracious reader, with a versatility extending far beyond the classroom. She enjoyed baseball as much as needlework. Tutored by her father, who entered the Senate when she was seven years old, Abby became proficient at poker, bridge, and games played for much higher stakes. She observed his quiet domination of the Philosophy Club, a powerful quartet of senators that convened on the front porch in Warwick to deal cards and determine the national agenda. In modern parlance a workhorse, not a show horse, even as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee Aldrich held no press conferences, published no manifestos, submitted to no interviews. Trained observers like the painter Anders Zorn found him inscrutable. “Of all the sitters I ever had Senator Aldrich is the most difficult because of the expression of his eyes,” said Zorn. “It is so hard to get.”

By his stubborn refusal to concede public accountability, as in his social Darwinist preference for the strong over the weak, Aldrich mirrored his closemouthed counterpart in business John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (who famously declined to answer critics by muttering, “Let the world wag”). Each man had escaped youthful poverty with the aid of a motivating mother and his own towering ambition. Each invited caricature at odds with his complex motivations and personal magnetism. Certainly Aldrich, a muscular six-­footer with dark hunter’s eyes and a florid mustache, cut an imposing figure in Capitol Hill cloakrooms, where a brisk nod or sidelong glance could fix the fate of legislation. At home in the shadows, according to one lobbyist, “He made no noise . . . but when we saw him moving about, and whispering to Senator Allison, and just giving a wink to Senator Hale and Senator Platt of Connecticut, we knew our cake was dough.”

Aldrich’s domestic table was less amply furnished, his official salary of $5,000 being insufficient to maintain two residences and raise eight children. Too proud to live off his wife’s money, in 1892 the senator announced his retirement from politics. A group of Rhode Island businessmen, grateful for his help in consolidating a tangle of rival street railway companies in Providence, offered to make him president of the United Traction and Electric Company. This set off boardroom alarms in the American Sugar Refining Company, the so-­called Sugar Trust, whose economic interests had never been far from the senator’s heart. Now Big Sugar filled the Aldrich wallet, beginning with $100,000 from chief lobbyist John E. Searles, Jr. As events would demonstrate, this was a mere down payment on Aldrich’s continued services. All thoughts of resignation from the Senate were buried under $5 million of Searles’s money, used by Aldrich to capitalize the fledgling transit company. This, in turn, laid the foundation for a personal fortune exceeding $15 million. His sudden prosperity enabled Aldrich to purchase a mansion in the elegant College Hill neighborhood of Providence and to realize his boyish dream of possessing an estate grand enough for the Philosophy Club, if less garish than the oceanside palaces of Newport.

Each summer, the Aldriches gathered at Warwick Neck to bask in nautical breezes and navigate the choppy currents of Narragansett Bay. Besides sailing lessons, the patriarch imparted to Abby his unconcealed joy in acquiring European masters, Persian rugs, and Chippendale chairs. (One of the senator’s proudest legislative achievements was the elimination of import duties on art and antiquities, thereby accelerating the Yankee plunder of Old World collectibles.) By the time she made her social debut in the autumn of 1893, nineteen-­year-­old Abby Aldrich was a beguiling compound of majesty and mirth. Tall and bosomy, her Gibson girl figure topped by luxuriant chestnut hair, she was outgoing, free of prejudice, and exuberantly original, with a low, slightly nasal voice that erupted in frequent laughter. Her square jaw and thick blade of a nose marked Abby as a true Aldrich. If these rendered her appearance more vivid than beautiful, they did nothing to diminish the line of suitors who bestowed on her no fewer than fifty-­two bouquets. Nor was it difficult to see why: boasting confidence to spare, Abby exuded the intuitive sympathy and warmth that make a man feel more of a man.

Denied access to power by a society that placed women on pedestals to avoid dealing with them as equals, Abby channeled her political energies into such respectable substitutes as the Providence Day Nursery and the Dorrance Home for Aged Colored Women. She enjoyed an active social life. No dinner of the period was complete without a Welsh rarebit; in her diary, each was “the best I have ever tasted in all my life.” On foreign travels, everything was “marvelous . . . I simply can’t understand it,” Abby wrote of her less impressionable companions. “They just don’t enjoy anything so much as I do.” (An indiscriminate use of superlatives, topped by the all-­purpose “Faa-­bu-­lous,” would reappear in the speech of her son Nelson.)

One evening in November 1894, Abby went to a party at the home of a friend whose father was a trustee of Brown University. There she met a shy, socially awkward Brown sophomore who had never been to a “round dance” out of fear it might offend his deeply religious mother. Simply attending the party was, for John D. Rockefeller, Jr., an act of muffled rebellion. He did not ask Abby to dance, fearing that he might slip and fall on the highly polished dance floor. Miss Aldrich compensated for his timidity. Distilling the pattern of their lives together, John would recall, “She treated me as if I had all the savoir faire in the world, and her confidence did me a lot of good.”

2

If Abby Aldrich was her father’s daughter, the youth Brown classmates called Johnny Rock was emphatically his mother’s son. All his life he insisted that there could be but one John D. Rockefeller; to the end of his days he was known as Junior, Mr. Junior to family retainers. The struggle for self, intensified by spiritual perfectionism, left him physically vulnerable and emotionally stunted. Such was the inheritance bequeathed her only son by Laura Spelman Rockefeller, the deacon’s daughter with the blood of New England abolitionists in her veins. An early advocate of equal rights for black Americans, she was just as outspoken in promoting education and votes for women. At Cleveland High School, her valedictorian’s address was entitled “I Can Paddle My Own Canoe.”

After 1859, Laura taught school and let herself be courted by John D. Rockefeller, a stone-­faced high school classmate staked to the commission merchant business with $1,000 of personal savings and an equal amount advanced him—­at 10 percent interest—­by his hedonistic father, William Avery Rockefeller. The elder Rockefeller had first appeared in the countryside around Richford, New York, in 1835, displaying a slate chalked with the statement “I am deaf and dumb.” Among those taken in by his act was red-­haired Eliza Davison, who in twenty-­four unremarkable years had never done an imprudent deed—­until she defied her father and wed the charismatic peddler in February 1837. Economic uncertainty, sexual fecklessness, and public humiliation were her reward. Cayuga (“Land of Superior Cunning”) County seemed tailor-­made for “Devil Bill” Rockefeller, a charming scoundrel and self-­styled “botanic physician,” whose phony cancer cures were less embarrassing to Eliza than his habit of impregnating housemaids.

After installing a girlfriend named Nancy Brown as his “housekeeper,” in two years the con man fathered four children between his emotionally battered wife and his mistress. In 1849, a hired girl in nearby Moravia accused him of rape. The case never went to court. Instead, Rockefeller moved his legitimate family to the village of Owego. Then he took to the road. Abandoned for months at a time, Eliza and her youngsters lived precariously on credit extended by sympathetic merchants. Youthful insecurity bred in her second child, John Davison, an adult need, bordering on ...