God’s Gold

SOMETHING is due, before we plunge into this story, to the curiosity of the reader who wishes to know

First, why the author chose to write the history of a man who still lives and whose history, therefore, has not yet been fully made up, and

Second, what were the sources of this narrative and how far the Rockefeller family has participated in its preparation.

The answer to the first is that the career of John D. Rockefeller, so far as history is concerned, is quite finished and has been for more than fifteen years. When Mr. Rockefeller has made an end of the business of living, some sympathetic biographer, enjoying the confidence of his family, will be able to add many unimportant personal incidents in the life of a retired country gentleman during the last score of years. These doubtless will be interesting, but will hardly add anything to the picture about which history is concerned, the materials for which are already available.

The answer to the second question is that the materials have been gathered from the vast records of the age in which Mr. Rockefeller lived, as made up in innumerable legislative and congressional investigations and countless court decisions, all of which have been carefully read; in an endless array of pamphlets, articles, addresses and letters and in the records of the daily press from the time of Rockefeller’s birth to date, all of which, including the newspapers of Owego, Auburn in New York, of Cleveland and of New York City, Oil City and Titusville in Pennsylvania, have been read and compared for the whole period which this volume covers. I have, of course, talked with a very large number of persons who took part in the events described or who found themselves in a position to observe them.

For reasons which seem sufficient to the author no application was made to the Rockefeller family for information until the work of collection had been completed and the results assembled in a tentative draft. I then submitted to Mr. Ivy Lee, the representative of the Rockefeller family, a list of forty-two questions covering obscure or disputed points. These questions were, with a few exceptions, answered quite fully and frankly. After this, the completed manuscript was turned over to Mr. William O. Inglis, a writer and journalist of ability and experience, who spent ten years working with the elder John D. Rockefeller collecting materials for an official biography. Mr. Inglis was commissioned by Mr. Lee to examine my manuscript and to note such statements of fact and opinion as he believed to be at variance with the accepted Rockefeller version. Mr. Inglis spent many weeks in this work and submitted to me one hundred and eighty suggested corrections or criticisms. I discussed these criticisms at length with him in a number of very pleasant conferences. In the end I adopted sixty-four of these corrections. As for the others, I felt constrained to adhere to my own findings and views. Mr. Inglis also supplied me with a large number of interesting and important personal details and was good enough to put at my disposal a very considerable mass of his own notes on certain highly controversial points.

This course was adopted in an effort to be quite just to the subject of this history and to his family by making it possible for them to call attention to inaccuracies before, rather than after, this book is published. Where the Rockefeller version of the incidents described has been rejected a note has been carried, wherever possible, giving the other side of the case. This, of course, must be understood along with the further statement that in certain important, major episodes, the records and the opinions of the Rockefeller family are so at variance with the interpretations of the author that it has seemed unnecessary to call attention to the difference.

It is worth noting, in justification of this work, that no life of Mr. Rockefeller has yet appeared. Miss Ida Tarbell’s brilliant account of the Standard Oil Company’s affairs between 1872 and 1898 as well as Henry Demarest Lloyd’s earlier volume, were not biographies. They were attacks; and though they deserve to rank among the most important documents in our industrial history, they did not pretend to be biographies. Since the writer began work on this volume nearly four years ago, two books have appeared about Mr. Rockefeller, one a brief journalistic sketch, the other a rambling and incoherent attack, chiefly upon his philanthropies. Countless articles have appeared in magazines and newspapers about the man, most of them violent attacks called forth by the events of the time, some of them, especially in recent years, fulsome panegyrics. No one has made an effort to examine, impartially, the whole record of this extraordinary man’s life and to relate his character and achievements to his times.

For the story itself I can claim but one virtue; that I have tried honestly to disengage the character of the subject from the features with which both hatred and affection have invested it and to make a true picture of him and the times in which he moved.

J. T. F.

Bayside, Long Island
June 3, 1932