Saddled with the burden of managing half a billion dollars, Junior had little time left over for diversion. An unexceptional man thrust into exceptional circumstances, he accepted his fate with reluctance. As Frederick Gates said, “He would have preferred . . . to cut loose from his father’s fortune and make for himself like other men a wholly independent career. But he was an only son, the heir of colossal wealth, dedicated from his birth to overwhelming burdens, not to be evaded.”21 The constant pressure of the Rockefeller philanthropies was a responsibility from which he could never escape, and he continued to be plagued by stress symptoms, including migraine headaches, stomach ailments, and sinus infections. Very often, he came home from work with dreadful headaches and had to lie down in his bedroom for an hour, his brow covered by a soothing compress. As his father had feared, the weight of the Rockefeller fortune often seemed to overwhelm him.
In late 1922, tormented by headaches, nervous exhaustion, and even temporary deafness, Junior checked into the Battle Creek Sanitarium of Dr. John H. Kellogg, an eccentric visionary who prescribed a vegetarian diet and spartan regimen for patients. Junior heard the inevitable: He worked too hard, suffered from strain, and should set aside more time for recreation. Upon leaving the sanitarium, he was still too weak to return to work and contracted a severe flu; to recuperate fully, he went down to Ormond Beach and spent several months with his father. For the next twelve years, unable to release the nervous tension inside him, Junior seldom went for more than two days without an excruciating headache.
The demands of spending his father’s fortune were never-ending. During the 1920s, Junior’s annual income fluctuated between $35 million and $57 million. Since he diverted 30 to 40 percent for charitable purposes, he was dispensing, on average, $11.5 million per year—or more than the Rockefeller Foundation’s annual grants.22 Junior had to grapple with the increasingly unwieldy structure of the overlapping Rockefeller philanthropies. This fragmentation had partly come about in order to head off the political criticism that would have greeted a single, all-encompassing foundation. In a sweeping and long-overdue reorganization in 1929, Junior supervised the absorption of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the science and humanities programs of the General Education Board into the Rockefeller Foundation.
Just when he needed advisers most, Junior was abruptly deprived of them. By 1923, Frederick T. Gates was taking insulin treatment for diabetes at the Rockefeller Institute and had to resign from the foundation; he died of pneumonia in Phoenix in February 1929 after acute appendicitis. He had given the Rockefeller philanthropies much of their fervent vision as well as their tenacious attention to detail. After Starr Murphy died in 1921, Junior needed a new general counsel and three years later drafted his old fraternity brother Thomas M. Debevoise, a man of such daunting formality that Junior’s sons christened him “the Prime Minister.” But Junior still needed a strategic thinker of the stature of Gates or of Mackenzie King, whom he still saw periodically but who was now too busy for frequent consultations. Junior found his ideal theoretician in Raymond B. Fosdick, who served as his trusted friend, lawyer, adviser, and finally biographer. The two had met in May 1913 when Junior was forming the Bureau of Social Hygiene and Fosdick was a crusading mayoral aide who had worked with Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement. After World War I, Fosdick sailed to France with Woodrow Wilson and served as a civilian aide to General Pershing before being appointed Under Secretary General of the League of Nations by Wilson. After the Senate vetoed U.S. participation, an embittered Fosdick resigned and lobbied for the global body, advocating a “planetary consciousness” and “collective intelligence.”23
As a good Republican, Junior had initially refrained from endorsing the League, but under Fosdick’s tutelage, he shed his isolationism and gave two million dollars for its new library and liberally endowed its health organization. To foster international harmony, he undertook projects ranging from support for the new Council on Foreign Relations, which was founded in 1921, to creating International Houses at four universities. (Each Christmas, he and Abby hosted a reception for one hundred students from the International House at Columbia University.) Junior’s largest single donation of the decade was a twenty-eight-million-dollar gift to create an International Education Board that would grant fellowships in the natural sciences and transpose the work of the GEB to a global plane.
During a trip to France in June 1923, Junior and Abby were startled by the deteriorating state of the Versailles palace: Iron fences rusted, water dripped from the ceiling, statues were crumbling in the garden. Junior offered the French prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, a million dollars to refurbish the Versailles roof and gardens; make emergency repairs at Fontainebleau; and restore the splendid Reims cathedral, scarred by wartime bombing—an offer the French could not very well refuse. Though shocked by his preference for Perrier over champagne, the French adored Junior’s self-effacing manner, so at odds with their cartoon image of the bumptious American millionaire. When he drove to Versailles from Paris late one afternoon, the guards at the visitors’ entrance told him that the palace was closed. Refusing special treatment, he got back in his car and returned to Paris—a modest act that won him plaudits across France and helped to offset some controversy over his purchase of the famous Unicorn tapestries. Junior spent millions more in France and contributed to a new building for the American Church overlooking the Seine. Suddenly an omnipresent philanthropist, he restored the library of the Imperial University of Tokyo after the 1924 earthquake; paid for the excavation of the Agora, the ancient Athenian marketplace; set up an oriental institute at the University of Chicago; and financed the Palestine Museum in Jerusalem to conserve biblical artifacts.
After his mother’s death in 1915, Junior also widened his sights in the religious arena and adopted a more experimental, open-minded approach. As early as the tainted-money controversy, the Rockefellers had tried to shed their exclusively Baptist orientation. After seven religious-service organizations pooled their resources to aid American troops during World War I, the atmosphere seemed auspicious for interdenominational work. Senior believed that denominations had value but should all report, on the Standard Oil model, to one centralized governing body, whereas Junior believed that churches could operate more efficiently if they were not broken up into denominations. He sponsored studies that showed surplus churches in rural communities and proposed consolidation to trim excess capacity. Starting in 1920, he spearheaded the Inter-church World Movement, which encouraged unity among the various Christian denominations. Like an electioneering politician, he went on an exhausting fund-raising tour of twelve cities. This ecumenical effort turned into a fiasco when he raised only three million dollars—one-third of that coming from the Rockefellers; most of the denominations cynically exploited the movement to siphon off money for their own sectarian purposes.
In December 1917, Junior delivered a speech at the Baptist Social Union that struck orthodox folk as rank heresy. Sketching out a new, unified church, he said, “It would pronounce ordinance, ritual, creed, all non-essential for admission into the Kingdom of God or His Church. A life, not a creed, would be its test; what a man does, not what he professes; what he is, not what he has.”24 Adopting a position that would have sounded blasphemous to his mother— and that he would never have voiced while she was alive—Junior now believed that people who manifested Jesus’ moral spirit were religious, whether or not they practiced Christian rituals.
In the early 1920s, the Baptist Church was rent by vitriolic clashes between southern fundamentalists and northern liberals over the proper interpretation of the Bible, a heated debate that culminated in the 1925 Scopes monkey trial. Throwing off his diffidence, Junior inveighed against the “narrow and medieval creed” of the fundamentalists, whom he accused of breeding enmity and division. This was sharper, more self-confident criticism than Junior had ever expressed and by the mid-1920s he openly doubted the literal interpretation of the Bible, regarding it
as incompatible with modern science. By this point, even Senior was coming around to figurative interpretation. For fundamentalists, such heretical views diluted religion to a watery form of social work, and in 1926, in a mounting reaction, the Southern Baptist Convention reaffirmed the Genesis account of creation and unequivocally rejected the theory of evolution.
Junior was backed up in his views by a new influence: Harry Emerson Fosdick, the older brother of Raymond B. Fosdick. In 1924, when Cornelius Woelfkin retired as pastor of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church (which had moved to Park Avenue two years earlier), Junior saw an opening for a charismatic leader who would courageously lead the congregation toward interdenominationalism. As a young pastor, Fosdick had championed the Social Gospel and preached to the dispossessed in lower Manhattan slums and Appalachian shantytowns. Even something of a muckraker in his early days, he had admired the work of Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and other colleagues of Ida Tarbell. In 1922, he delivered a controversial sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” that was such a strong, unadulterated statement of modernist beliefs that he was nearly tried for heresy by the Presbyterian Synod. Sometimes tagged a socialist and once branded “the Jesse James of the theological world,” Fosdick denied the virgin birth, the inerrant Bible, and the conventional version of the Second Coming.25
In 1925, Fosdick, who was actually a Baptist, left the First Presbyterian Church because of his iconoclastic views. Junior wooed him at the height of this controversy. It was very rare for Junior to court trouble, and Fosdick was thunderstruck by his invitation to him to head the Park Avenue Baptist Church. During their meeting, the left-leaning Fosdick confessed to misgivings about becoming the pastor of such a swank church. To entice him, Junior floated the idea of creating a new church to serve a more heterogeneous community. Still, Fosdick demurred. When Junior pressed him for a reason, Fosdick blurted out, “Because you are too wealthy, and I do not want to be known as the pastor of the richest man in the country.” Embarrassed silence ensued. Then Junior replied, “I like your frankness, but do you think that more people will criticize you on account of my wealth, than will criticize me on account of your theology?”26 Both men laughed, and a close relationship was started.
Even before the ground breaking for a new church began, Fosdick threw open the Park Avenue Baptist Church to new members, including those not baptized by immersion. A year after his arrival, Junior initiated a project that had long tantalized him: building a great interdenominational church in New York City. With Junior himself chairing the building committee and donating ten million dollars to the project, a site was selected in Morningside Heights for what would become the Riverside Church. The Gothic building, designed by Charles Collens and Henry C. Pelton, was inspired by the cathedrals of Chartres and Laon.
Formally dedicated in 1931, the church was an ecumenical shrine that seemed to bridge both the spiritual and temporal worlds. Instead of saintly statues lining the chancel screen, one found scientists, doctors, educators, social reformers, and political leaders, including Louis Pasteur, Hippocrates, Florence Nightingale, and Abraham Lincoln. Statues of Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, and Moses stared down from archivolts above the main portal, while Darwin and Einstein occupied honored niches. After a few years, the congregation was both interdenominational and interracial, with fewer than a third of the members coming from Baptist backgrounds. Once exponents of the old-time religion, the Rockefellers had now advanced into the vanguard of liberal Protestantism and were loudly denounced by conservative theologians for desecrating the true church. The Baptist Bible Union said of Riverside Church that it was “obviously part of a plan to extend to the whole Baptist denominational life the influence of the Rockefeller Foundation, which already had succeeded in converting nearly all our educational institutions into hotbeds of modernism.”27 Thirty years after left-wing social reformers had vilified the Rockefellers, the family, under Junior’s influence, was now being excoriated from the right. In 1935, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had been the principal lay donor to the Northern Baptist Church, made his last annual gift. “What gives me pause,” he said in his valedictory letter, “is the tendency inherent in denominations to emphasize the form instead of the substance, the denominational peculiarity instead of the oneness of Christian purpose.”28
In 1924, John Jr., Abby, and their three oldest boys made a swing through the American West in a private railroad car, stopping to camp along the way. Outside the Northeast, Junior was seldom recognized, and he thrived on the anonymity of the open road. When they arrived at Yellowstone National Park, the family was greeted by park superintendent Horace Albright, who was startled to see the Rockefeller boys pitching in to assist the porter with the luggage. As Albright escorted them around the park, Junior and Abby were chagrined by tree stumps and fallen timber that littered the roadside. Later, in a letter to Albright, Junior offered money to clean up and beautify these thoroughfares. On their second day, Albright drove the Rockefellers to see the craggy, snow-capped Grand Tetons. Struck as with the sudden force of an epiphany, Junior decided to preserve this exquisite view for posterity.
On a subsequent visit to the Grand Tetons in 1926, Junior and Abby recoiled at the creeping blight of hot-dog stands, gas stations, and gaudy billboards that were beginning to clutter the countryside around Jackson Hole. As Albright recorded in his journal, “I believe Mr. Rockefeller had a genuine distaste for the garish advances of civilization—and what’s more he feared them. So he took every opportunity he felt possible to step in and save his fellow humans from the onslaught of the crippling effects of industrial society.”29 The son of America’s foremost industrialist now worked assiduously to save nature’s monuments and preserve the spirit of America’s preindustrial past. It was a propitious time to do so: The National Park Service had been created by Congress in 1916 with a large mandate to promote and regulate national parks and monuments but without an adequate budget to accomplish this. The first two directors, Stephen Mather and Albright, cultivated philanthropists as a way to rectify this.
Lacking his father’s hostility toward government and imbued with a Wilsonian sense of public service, Junior, under Albright’s tutelage, formed a unique partnership with Washington to save wilderness areas. Upon returning home, Junior began to buy thousands of acres in the Jackson Hole Valley with an eye to creating a new park—an idea anathema to many local cattlemen, hunters, and dude-ranch operators who saw this as meddling in their businesses. To minimize political opposition and keep land prices down, Junior made the land purchases through a front group, the Snake River Land Company. Though he accumulated 33,562 acres and yearned to hand them over to the National Park Service, his bountiful gift was consistently spurned due to fierce, shortsighted local opposition. Only in 1943 did President Roosevelt create the Jackson Hole National Monument and accept the Rockefeller land, which was merged into an expanded Grand Teton National Park in 1950. Once infected with preservation fever, Junior gave money to buy vast acreage for the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee, plus a major tract to connect them via the Skyline Drive threaded through the Blue Ridge Mountains.
If Horace Albright was one of Junior’s environmental gurus, the other was Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History. As founder of a group called the Save-the-Redwoods League, Osborn sounded the alarm about the impending destruction of redwood forests in northern California, which were being felled rapidly by lumber companies. When one company started to chop down redwoods on Bull Creek Flat, an especially fine stand, Junior supplied one million dollars to stop the logging and save the virgin woods. He later gave money to save other redwood forests, along with $1.5 million to preserve thousands of pristine acres of sugar pines in Yosemite Valley. Closer to home, he assembled seven hundred acres of land along the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River that he donated to the Palisades Park Commission. What makes these conservation efforts notable
is that Junior was putting his own stamp on Rockefeller philanthropy and having a striking national, even global, impact. His conservationist impulse was quite different from the forward-looking, scientific spirit that his father had exhibited in medical research and education.
Junior’s veneration of the past and implicit discomfort with the modern era were exemplified by several restoration projects in his later years that again marked a break with his father’s legacy. He seemed at times not so much to want to study the past as to inhabit it, taking on its recaptured dignity. His most celebrated exercise in time travel came through the Reverend Dr. William Goodwin, a professor of sacred literature at William and Mary College, who met Junior at a Phi Beta Kappa banquet in 1924. Goodwin tried to pique Junior’s interest in his personal obsession: restoring the old colonial capital of Williamsburg, Virginia. A monomaniac on the subject, Goodwin often ambled about the town in a moonlit reverie, communing with eighteenth-century ghosts. Though Junior turned him down, the Episcopal clergyman sensed that he had stumbled upon the one man in America willing and able to implement his fantasy. For the next two years, Junior had to steel himself against Goodwin’s maddeningly persistent entreaties.