John Davison Rockefeller Jr. was an American philanthropist and financier, famous member of the Rockefeller family born in Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Background
John Davison Rockefeller Jr. was born in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. He was the son of John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil combine, and Laura Celestia Spelman. The boy was reared to expect a life of serious hard work, religious observance, great financial responsibility, and social service. Both parents were devout Baptists of a strong fundamentalist cast, and Laura Spelman's mother had been a militant supporter of the Anti-Saloon League. The elder Rockefeller, while giving both time and money to his church, also set his son an example of ruthless devotion to efficiency, rational organization, and hard work that had made him the greatest moneymaker of the age of individual enterprise. The Rockefellers lived in a comfortable middle-class house on Cleveland's Euclid Avenue, but it was at Forest Hill, their summer home outside Cleveland, that the family was happiest. "JDR, Jr. ," as he later preferred to be called, had few playmates besides his sisters and the son of the caretaker. His father soon found that his business dictated a move to New York, and after several years in residential hotels the Rockefellers settled down in a spacious brownstone.
Education
Rockefeller attended private schools in New York and had a private tutor during the long visits the family made to Cleveland. In 1893 he entered Brown University. He was popular with his classmates, who called him "Johnny Rock, " and none of them, he was convinced, stood in awe of the great wealth that he would one day control. He later confessed that his college days had been the happiest of his life. Rockefeller was not a brilliant scholar, but he worked hard at his studies and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated in 1897.
Career
Rockefeller never developed an outstanding talent for business, nor did his father ever press him to do so. After college he entered the New York office of Standard Oil, where he performed miscellaneous tasks for his father.
In these years much of the mushrooming Rockefeller fortune was being channeled into the philanthropies that were the brainchildren of such Rockefeller aides as Abraham and Simon Flexner and Frederick T. Gates. But by far the larger part was being tranferred from petroleum, where it was being made, to industries more acutely in need of fresh capital. Pleased with his son's handling of the sale of Mesabi Range iron ore properties to J. P. Morgan in 1901, the elder Rockefeller gave him the responsibility for overseeing the management of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, in which he owned a 40 percent interest. The assignment brought JDR, Jr. , the most devastating publicity of his life and plunged him deeply into the pressing national problem of labor-management relations. The management of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company had long blocked all attempts to unionize its miners. An even tougher breed than their eastern counterparts, the western miners were fully as determined to achieve company recognition of their right to bargain collectively. The result was a strike in 1914 that led management to close the mines and evict the miners' families from company-owned houses. The militant element among the unionists fomented confrontations between striking and nonstriking miners, the state militia was brought in, and soon the area around Ludlow, Colorado, was a battleground on which more than forty people were killed in a series of skirmishes. One event has been transmogrified into the legend that company thugs and militiamen also shot and killed defenseless women and children. The truth is that two women and eleven children crawled into a cave to escape the gunfire and died of suffocation, but young Rockefeller, because of his stubborn support of a management that was trying to treat new problems with ancient remedies, came to be held responsible by the general public for the "Ludlow massacres. " The congressional investigations that followed did not hesitate to lay the responsibility for the disorders at Rockefeller's feet, and he quickly adopted a radically different policy. Canada's W. L. Mackenzie King, an expert on labor relations, conducted for him a thorough study of the problem and recommended a plan for employee representation. Rockefeller went to the mining camps, where his willingness to listen, and his many informal speeches in which he emphasized the responsibilities and the rights of both management and labor and appealed for a sense of mutual purpose between the two, helped to heal the wounds and provided for a modified "company union" arrangement that would last until the new era of labor ferment during the Great Depression. A few years later he reprinted several of these speeches and magazine articles under the title The Personal Relation in Industry (1923). He demanded that capital realize that the men were working for more than mere wages and deserved a say in their destinies. He also adjured labor to recognize the many other claims on company income besides their wages.
No businessman in the future, he asserted, would be free to consider profit the only motivating force in his affairs, while labor must recognize that low wages are not the result of large profits. "The most successful enterprises, " he wrote, "have been those which have been so well organized and so efficient that the laborers were paid high wages, the consuming public enjoyed declining prices, and the owners realized large profits. " After World War I, Rockefeller devoted himself almost exclusively to public service and philanthropy. His leadership of the Interchurch World Movement in the early 1920's is often cited as the reason for its collapse, but that fatuous, bureaucratized structure was doomed from the start. Undiscouraged about the future of interfaith relations, he endowed Riverside Church, a nonsectarian church on New York's Riverside Drive, built it in stunning gothic style, and persuaded Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick to become its first minister. Never having tasted alcohol in any form (he returned the toast offered him by the burghers of Rheims, whose great cathedral he had helped restore after World War I, with a glass of Perrier water!) , Rockefeller believed that outright prohibition was the only answer to excessive drinking, but when the "noble experiment" failed ignobly, he came out strongly for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. Meanwhile, he saw to it that the medical philanthropies grouped in the Rockefeller Foundation kept abreast of the exploding new sciences by organizing Rockefeller University. In Fort Tryon Park, at the northern end of Manhattan, he installed a great collection of medieval art in the Cloisters that still draws thousands of visitors even as the city itself decays. Having entered into a scheme to redevelop the rapidly growing midtown section of New York at the end of the 1920's, Rockefeller found himself after the beginning of the Great Depression with a long-term lease on several blocks of heavily taxed real estate. He plunged ahead with a striking plan to build skyscrapers that would house, among other enterprises, the new network radio industry. The result, Rockefeller Center, the construction of which spanned the depression and was not completed until after World War II, provided employment for thousands, became New York's number-one tourist attraction, and eventually revealed that the Rockefeller talent for making money was intact. Project after project for preservation of historic sites, conservation of areas of natural beauty, and support of higher education followed. Williamsburg, colonial capital of Virginia, was restored and rebuilt when Rockefeller made a reality of the dream of the Reverend William A. R. Goodwin, a longtime resident of the area. It is one of America's most popular historic shrines. The spectacular regions around Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the Grand Tetons came under Rockefeller's protection. Brown, Dartmouth, the United Negro College Fund, the New York Public Library, and the library of the University of Tokyo, which had been leveled by the earthquake of 1923, were generously assisted. Rockefeller had learned, like his father, that publicity was to be avoided because the newspapers would sensationalize even his most earnest remarks. He saw careless writers begin, after a time, to attribute his well-meant metaphor about snipping off excess rosebuds so that a few might grow to great size and beauty, to his father. But he maintained a quiet equanimity and in the bright glare of his talented sons was slipping into obscurity by 1946 when Senator Warren Austin, U. S. delegate to the United Nations (UN), announced that the UN's worried quest for a homesite in the United States had been solved with Rockefeller's gift of a $9 million plot of land on the East River in New York. He had long since abandoned religious fundamentalism and still believed that the future would prove the validity of his belief in world brotherhood. A slight, modest, good-looking, rather lonely man whose head could not be turned, Rockefeller proved that attainment of the golden mean owes nothing to money or to its lack. His father died in 1937, but for the rest of his life, he insisted upon being called John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , because, he said, there would always be only one John D. Rockefeller.
Views
Quotations:
"The most successful enterprises, " he wrote, "have been those which have been so well organized and so efficient that the laborers were paid high wages, the consuming public enjoyed declining prices, and the owners realized large profits. "
Membership
honorary member of the Georgia Society of the Cincinnati
Connections
On October 9, 1901, he married Abigail (Abby) Aldrich, daughter of Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. They had six children, all of whom went on to notable careers.
Abby Rockefeller died in 1948, and on August 15, 1951, Rockefeller married Martha Baird Allen, a concert pianist and widow of one of his Brown classmates.