More Powerful Than Dynamite Read online

  John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the son of the world’s richest man.

  His desperation to show himself worthy led to neurasthenia, breakdowns, and depression. His lone ambition was to earn the name that he had never asked for, to redeem it to a nation that had come to associate “Rockefeller” with the cold villainy of the plutocratic class. To that end, he had quit the business life—retiring from the directorial boards of every company except for one—and dedicated himself to philanthropy. Through gifts and contributions, he was gradually crafting a new family legacy. As he approached middle age, Junior finally felt that he was becoming a substantial man, and no longer merely a man of substance.

  A few nagging worries still tugged. There was his mother’s illness, which had kept her and Senior in Cleveland for the holidays. Renovations disturbed both his city and country houses. In politics, he had contributed thousands to Mitchel’s election fund, only to watch the new administration lure away several of his most valued advisers with the promise of important cabinet positions. And there was a coal miners’ strike in southern Colorado, affecting one of the few family concerns in which he was personally involved. Taken together, it was “a busy life” he was leading. But still and all he was confident and secure—at least by his own standards—and capable of heeding the counsel of his minister that “cares should sit lightly upon us at this Christmas season.”

  By removing himself to the countryside, Junior had also removed another potential irritant. The New Year’s Eve celebrations in the city, coursing up and down the avenues near his home, grated on his sensibilities. He had never tasted alcohol, puffed a cigar, or played a hand at cards. It wasn’t until his freshman year at Brown University that he had first attended the theater or participated in a dance. The tango continued to be a mystery to him. He found the hotel parties, the mobs in the streets so distasteful that each year he contributed one hundred dollars to the Safe and Sane New Year’s Committee, which hoped to “do away with the noisy rowdyism which heretofore has marked New Year’s Eve in this city.” But until that was accomplished, Junior would flip the calendar in the inviolable security of Tarrytown.

  PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON observed the new year in the Gulf Coast town of Pass Christian, Mississippi, far from the crush of the capital. His first nine months in office were being acclaimed as an unprecedented triumph. He had lowered the tariff and introduced a national income tax. Two days before Christmas, he signed the Federal Reserve Act, sealing his greatest victory of the year. But the effort of it all had smashed his health; he suffered from fevers and indigestion. “I have been under a terrible strain, if the truth must be told,” he confided to a correspondent. “I realize when I stop to think about it all that I never before knew such a strain as I have undergone ever since Congress convened in April.”

  On the morning of December 24, he and his family staggered to a private railroad car—accompanied only by the Secret Service, a physician, and a single stenographer—for a long journey south. This was to be a strict vacation. Official affairs would have to wait; there were to be “absolutely no social diversions or political callers.” Admirers crowded the tracks at every junction, but most left disappointed. The president slept much of the way, emerging at a few stops to shake hands, and then retiring to nap some more. “He is taking life just as easy as possible,” a newsman wrote.

  For the next three weeks, a cottage overlooking the beach became the winter White House. To assure the president’s tranquility, villagers were barred by local edict from approaching closer than three hundred yards. Wilson played golf, walked the strand, and ignored the scores of letters and telegrams that arrived for him in every post. He marked his fifty-seventh birthday and began to display some of his former vigor. His grippe was gone, the physician said; the treatment was taking effect. “For the first time since he left Washington,” a reporter observed, “the President had a ruddy glow on his cheeks.” Renewed and refreshed, his attention once again returned to matters of office. He looked to his correspondence. A second stenographer was hired. He conducted secret discussions concerning the ongoing civil war in Mexico, the troubled neighbor that loomed beyond his sight across the waters of the Gulf.

  On December 31, on a shopping trip in the village, he purchased a toothbrush and a lamp shade while the locals gawked at him through the store windows. New year’s congratulations began arriving; the first was a telegram from Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. But the president himself did nothing special for the occasion. His regimen demanded nine hours of rest each day, and he was asleep long before the stroke of midnight.

  Woodrow Wilson and his wife Ellen at Pass Christian, Mississippi.

  THE SNOWDRIFTS STOOD shoulder-high outside the Denver offices of the United Mine Workers of America. The greatest blizzard in the history of the state had passed through three weeks earlier, and the sidewalks were still treacherous with ice. At the country club and the county hospital, volunteers arranged the decorations for the night’s gala parties. Hostesses hurried home with their provisions, struggling to stay upright on the rimy sidewalks. Temperatures close to freezing had residents of the poorer districts anxiously appraising their stores of coal. Nationally, production had reached a record peak, but in Colorado, where fourteen thousand miners had been on strike since September, reserves had dwindled and prices were up. The mayor had been forced to institute emergency measures to keep the workers’ quarters supplied.

  Two hundred miles south, at the colony of Ludlow, the storm had threatened to collapse the tents that served as temporary lodging for the striking miners. Ten-foot-high walls of snow flanked the paths that inhabitants had hacked throughout the camp. A large tree had been adorned with Christmas ornaments to give the bleak settlement some approximation of hominess, and supporters had shipped in thousands of baskets, filled with “candies, fruit, and sweets for the children.” December 25 had been too cold for a communal celebration, so families had shivered inside their separate tents while a union leader dressed as Santa Claus trudged from door to door, distributing the “goodies.”

  It was gloomier still in the nearby town of Trinidad, where twelve hundred state militiamen made their barracks. “Lavish” decorations and holiday boxes from home brought scant cheer to men who had just learned of their general’s orders to close down all saloons in the area. For employees of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, this disappointment had been exacerbated by the news that smoking was now to be forbidden on company property. “If John D. lives much longer,” complained an angry employee, “we will start each day with prayers and finish it with a service of song.”

  For months, these rival encampments had existed in a state of tension, awaiting the catalyst that would instigate unbridled war. The soldiers were supposed to be maintaining peace between the workers and the mine owners, but their officers’ loyalty was to the bosses. Ten men had already been killed in the conflict. The jails in Trinidad were crammed with dozens of labor sympathizers, and the strikebreakers—many of whom had not known they were coming to scab—had to be kept under perpetual guard to prevent their escape.

  In southern Colorado, a months-long conflict between striking miners and the state militia had already resulted in ten deaths.

  In this gruff and vicious atmosphere, no excuse was needed to go and start a fight. On the morning of December 31—responding to news that the strikers were assembling a cache of weapons—forty soldiers marched from Trinidad to Ludlow. The officers negotiated with union leaders. Behind them, two units of cavalry and several infantry companies stood at the perimeter of the camp, a machine gun trained on the tents. Then the mining families stood by while the troops overturned mattresses and scattered furniture, ransacking their homes for armaments. After an hour’s search, which netted fifteen assorted handguns and rifles, the militiamen marched back across the blank tundra, their departure tracked by the eyes of hundreds of resentful strikers.

  FROM HARLEM TO Wall Street in New York, Broadway “was a solid lane of nois
y, convivial humanity.” Midnight approached, anticipated by “a welcoming crowd,” a Tribune reporter calculated, “whose numbers would baffle an army of census takers.” Millions “and then a few” packed the boulevards. At 11:55 P.M., the naval radio towers in Arlington, Virginia, began emitting electric signals—“corrected by stellar observation to the most exact time possible”—over a radius of twenty-five hundred miles. The beats reached ships in the North and South Atlantic; they were heard atop the Eiffel Tower and at the nearly completed Panama Canal. When the last pulse sounded: 1914.

  In the streets, the din re-echoed for many minutes past the hour. For participants, wrote a columnist for the Evening Post, the experience approached ecstasy:

  The whole city seems half delirious. Five minutes in the crowd and you are half delirious, too—you, a New Yorker, in staid, unfeeling, unemotional old New York—yelling your head off, slapping strangers on the back, talking and shouting at the top of your lungs, laughing endlessly, hysterically.

  Gentle applause and tinkling crystal warmed the main dining room at the Plaza Hotel at midnight as the Realtors and railroad executives, the senators’ daughters and financiers’ widows, toasted success to John Purroy Mitchel and his administration. An hour later, the doors of the Grand Ballroom were thrown open, and a forty-piece string orchestra struck up the night’s first two-step. Couples paired around the stone floor—men in white waistcoats and bold-wing collars, women in beaded gowns and chiffon frocks. Taking positions along with the rest, the mayor-elect and his wife clasped each other’s hands, locked eyes, and began to move. Mitchel waltzed famously. “He is frankly and openly a devotee of the dance,” a reporter wrote. He “can tango a l’Argentino, and he is also perfect in the modified one-step and the standardized hesitation, to say nothing of the lame duck, the lively maxixe and the vivacious canter.”

  Across the city, dancers with far less self-government spun and kept spinning. “Anybody with his ear to the ground,” a participant later recalled, “could have heard all over town the sprightly patter and tap of patent leather pumps.” Time grew ragged. Lips dried and cracked. Champagne flattened, spilled, and gummed the floors. As the sun rose, rumpled gentlemen and women “whose hair was beginning to sag from the lines of beauty” still lumbered on the mosaic tile in Delmonico’s. Across the street, at Sherry’s, the rugs were rolled up and tossed aside to make room for the tango. Couples were turkey trotting in the subway stations beneath Times Square.

  Dawn approached and the accounting began. “Confetti, broken horns, wrecked rattles, fancy paper caps and other junk lay dismally along” Broadway. An estimated fifty thousand bottles of champagne had been consumed, as well as a “fortune in the more plebeian beer, highballs, and cocktails.” Rector’s alone had earned ten thousand dollars during the night.

  As the sun rose over Brooklyn, the very last stragglers stumbled toward Jack’s, the all-night restaurant on Sixth Avenue, to honor one final tradition. Settling in at the oyster counter, they recorded their resolutions for the coming year.

  I

  We are the workers of the world, but we can’t get work.

  —FRANK TANNENBAUM

  1.

  So the New Year Opens in Hope

  For twenty-five new years running, John Davison Rockefeller Senior had managed to avoid being in his hometown of Cleveland, and this was why. January 1 was “cold and blustery,” with the mercury below freezing, and everyone around him all shivering and snuffles. He himself felt a touch grippey, so he spent the morning by the fire, while outside his private golf course remained exasperatingly unplayed.

  Rockefeller had taken up the game around the time of his retirement, more than a decade earlier, and he pursued it with the same focus that had made him such a cunning businessman. He was seventy-four years old, and his stroke was deliberate: “the slowest back-swing I ever saw,” a witness said, “it seemed to last for minutes.” But more often than otherwise he drove straight, “his clear gray blue eyes” closely following the shot, and he dutifully recorded his penalties, playing each point to its conclusion: “When finally he arrives on the green, he puts the ball painstakingly into the hole if his last stroke covers only two inches.”

  While playing, he adhered to one rule above the rest: an absolute ban against speaking of business. But it didn’t seem to matter. The violation usually occurred “along about the ninth hole.” He would be well on in his round, finally relaxing into the game, when out came some proposition—“charitable or financial”—and the day was spoiled. “Neither in the privacy of his home, nor at his table, nor in the aisles of his church, nor on his trips to and from his office, nor during the business hours nor anywhere else, was Rockefeller secure from insistent appeal,” a close associate recalled. “He was constantly hunted, stalked and hounded almost like a wild animal.” He tried carefully vetting his golfing partners and preferred close friends, but he played daily, requiring a large pool of opponents, and not everyone was discreet.

  Though the weather hardly brightened in the week after the new year, Rockefeller just had to play. Doggedly, and despite a “drizzly Winter day,” he pedaled over from his mansion toward the first tee. His companions were admitted through the high iron gates of Forest Hill, the family’s Ohio property. They drove over his roads, “in and out, through and up and over,” among a chorus of songbirds, past pheasants and cottontails, to the golf grounds, where the old man also was just arriving. “On schedule, boys, on schedule!” he called, springing down from his bicycle. “That’s the thing!”

  But his good humor was ruined, and in the usual way, when one of his playing partners casually asked him to comment on the quality of a certain stock. Rockefeller’s spirits wilted, his joy in the game all gone.

  The stock, he grudgingly replied, was “as good as eggs.”

  “Yes,” pressed the other man, “but there are good eggs and bad eggs.”

  John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

  “And likewise, my friend,” said Rockefeller in a tone that was anything but friendly, “there are good stocks and bad stocks.”

  WITHIN DAYS, THIS repartee had been published in newspapers from Oregon to North Carolina. JOHN D.’S WIT WELL OILED, exulted the New York Tribune. “That mad, mad wag, John D. Rockefeller,” marveled Franklin Pierce Adams, had done it again, and this was just his latest oracle to find such wide circulation. Sympathetic reporters waited outside his church on Sundays to record his sunny sentiments about world peace or the weather. His philanthropic gifts—from the one hundred million dollars with which he endowed the Rockefeller Foundation, to the gold coins he bestowed on train porters or the pennies he disbursed to lucky children—always received prominent attention. Readers knew him as a plain country squire, a vestige of a simpler era. They saw photos of him on his bicycle, on the links, pottering in the garden, usually smiling a vaguely senile grin and always wearing some outlandish combination of gaiters, sweaters, and caps. “Mr. Rockefeller is a most kindly, gracious gentleman,” the Fra magazine enthused, “when he talks to you his countenance beams with animation, friendliness, appreciation, goodcheer.” He was harmless and endearing. “Glorious old John D.,” concluded William James, the Harvard philosopher, who encountered him at a resort, “a most lovable person.”

  In his dotage, he had become more popular than he had ever been during his career. And yet just a decade earlier his reputation had stood in ruins, apparently beyond repair. For two years, beginning in 1902, Ida Tarbell’s investigative articles in McClure’s magazine had exposed the lawless schemes by which Standard Oil had trampled its competitors. She had reserved her cruelest testimony for the last two installments of her series, devoted to lengthy character studies of Rockefeller himself. “This money-maniac,” she had called him, a disfigured wreck of a man who had squandered his soul, “secretly, patiently eternally plotting how he may add to his wealth.”

  Rockefeller had been slow to appreciate the damage. He had always kept himself private, rarely appearing in the society page
s or attending public events. Once, after a particularly taciturn day of testifying, the World had reported, ROCKEFELLER IMITATES A CLAM. This was his way: “Never make friends. Don’t join clubs. Avoid knowing people intimately.” The McClure’s articles demanded a rebuttal, a response, but still he kept silent and unapproachable, “the very personification of the Sphinx.” City editors sent reporters to see him, not because they thought they could get an interview but “in a sort of hopeless, desperate sense of duty.” As Tarbell’s stories ran month after month and his son, John Jr., staggered under the attacks and collapsed toward a nervous breakdown, Senior was unmoved. He had the articles read aloud to him, and he chuckled at what he heard. “The world is full of socialists and anarchists,” he explained. “Whenever a man succeeds remarkably in any particular line of business, they jump on him and cry him down.” His wealth and good fortune had inevitably provoked hard feelings, but he was unapologetic and unconcerned. He would continue to do what was right until he was absolved, and for now he would just “let the world wag.”

  After the Tarbell stories, two personae vied for dominance: “A Mr. Hyde Rockefeller, who became ‘money-mad in his early twenties … and the Dr. Jekyll Rockefeller, simple, kindly, courteous, beneficent and broad-minded.” He kept to his old ways, as if the opinions of others did not concern him. Sunday church. Morning golf. Holidays with the family, preferably not in Cleveland. But he did make one concession. For the first time in his life, he embraced publicity. He gave interviews to all who asked. If a photographer spied him, he’d pause, pose, smile, and wait till the light was just so. And as he warmed to the press, it warmed to him. “This was the new Rockefeller, the revelation,” a journalist wrote. “The man of mystery was talking freely and showing himself utterly unlike the popular perception of him.”