Titan The Life of John D Rockefeller Sr by Ron Chernow

Titan The Life of John D Rockefeller Sr by Ron Chernow

CHAPTER 1
The Flimflam Man
In the early 1900s, as Rockefeller vied with Andrew Carnegie for the title of
the world’s richest man, a spirited rivalry arose between France and Germany,
with each claiming to be Rockefeller’s ancestral land. Assorted genealogists
stood ready, for a sizable fee, to manufacture a splendid royal lineage for the
oilman. “I have no desire to trace myself back to the nobility,” he said
honestly. “I am satisfied with my good old American stock.”
 The most
ambitious search for Rockefeller’s roots traced them back to a ninth-century
French family, the Roquefeuilles, who supposedly inhabited a Languedoc
château—a charming story that unfortunately has been refuted by recent
findings. In contrast, the Rockefellers’ German lineage has been clearly
established in the Rhine valley dating back to at least the early 1600s.
Around 1723, Johann Peter Rockefeller, a miller, gathered up his wife and
five children, set sail for Philadelphia, and settled on a farm in Somerville and
then Amwell, New Jersey, where he evidently flourished and acquired large
landholdings. More than a decade later, his cousin Diell Rockefeller left
southwest Germany and moved to Germantown, New York. Diell’s
granddaughter Christina married her distant relative William, one of Johann’s
grandsons. (Never particularly sentimental about his European forebears,
John D. Rockefeller did erect a monument to the patriarch, Johann Peter, at
his burial site in Flemington, New Jersey.) The marriage of William and
Christina produced a son named Godfrey Rockefeller, who was the
grandfather of the oil titan and a most unlikely progenitor of the clan. In 1806,
Godfrey married Lucy Avery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, despite the
grave qualms of her family.
Establishing a pattern that would be replicated by Rockefeller’s own
mother, Lucy had, in her family’s disparaging view, married down. Her
ancestors had emigrated from Devon, England, to Salem, Massachusetts,
around 1630, forming part of the Puritan tide. As they became settled and
gentrified, the versatile Averys spawned ministers, soldiers, civic leaders,
explorers, and traders, not to mention a bold clutch of Indian fighters. During
the American Revolution, eleven Averys perished gloriously in the battle of
Groton. While the Rockefellers’ “noble” roots required some poetic license
and liberal embellishment, Lucy could justly claim descent from Edmund
Ironside, the English king, who was crowned in 1016.
Godfrey Rockefeller was sadly mismatched with his enterprising wife. He
had a stunted, impoverished look and a hangdog air of perpetual defeat. Taller
than her husband, a fiery Baptist of commanding presence, Lucy was
rawboned and confident, with a vigorous step and alert blue eyes. A former
schoolteacher, she was better educated than Godfrey. Even John D., never
given to invidious comments about relatives, tactfully conceded, “My
grandmother was a brave woman. Her husband was not so brave as she.”
 If
Godfrey contributed the Rockefeller coloring—bluish gray eyes, light brown
hair—Lucy introduced the rangy frame later notable among the men.
Enjoying robust energy and buoyant health, Lucy had ten children, with the
third, William Avery Rockefeller, born in Granger, New York, in 1810. While
it is easy enough to date the birth of Rockefeller’s father, teams of frazzled
reporters would one day exhaust themselves trying to establish the date of his
death.
As a farmer and businessman, Godfrey enjoyed checkered success, and his
aborted business ventures exposed his family to an insecure, peripatetic life.
They were forced to move to Granger and Ancram, New York, then to Great
Barrington, before doubling back to Livingston, New York. John D.
Rockefeller’s upbringing would be fertile with cautionary figures of weak
men gone astray. Godfrey must have been invoked frequently as a model to
be avoided. By all accounts, Grandpa was a jovial, good-natured man but
feckless and addicted to drink, producing in Lucy an everlasting hatred of
liquor that she must have drummed into her grandson. Grandpa Godfrey was
the first to establish in John D.’s mind an enduring equation between
bonhomie and lax character, making the latter prefer the society of sober,
tight-lipped men in full command of their emotions.
The Rockefeller records offer various scenarios of why Godfrey and Lucy
packed their belongings into an overloaded Conestoga wagon and headed
west between 1832 and 1834. By one account, the Rockefellers, along with
several neighbors, were dispossessed of their land in a heated title dispute
with some English investors. Another account has an unscrupulous
businessman gulling Godfrey into swapping his farm for allegedly richer turf
in Tioga County. (If this claim was in fact made, it proved a cruel hoax.)
Some relatives later said that Michigan was Godfrey’s real destination but that

Titan The Life of John D Rockefeller Sr by Ron Chernow