John D. Rockefeller Junior

Part one left the old man under an obelisk in Cleveland, ninety-seven years old, the richest human being who had ever lived, and remembered by most of America as a kindly figure who handed out dimes and beat hookworm in the South.That reputation did not build itself. Somebody constructed it, deliberately, over decades — and it was not John D. Rockefeller Senior. He was too rigid and too contemptuous of the public to bother. It was his son.This is the part of the story that is harder to tell, because the man at the center of it was not a robber baron. John D. Rockefeller Junior was shy, dutiful, terrified of doing wrong, and by every account sincere. He gave away more than five hundred million dollars.He never took a drink or a cigarette in ninety-six years. He collapsed at thirty from the weight of a name he had not chosen. And in the spring of 1914 that name was on a coal company in southern Colorado when the militia set up a machine gun above a tent colony full of immigrant families.We start at his birth in 1874, in a house where the children shared one bicycle and kept ledgers of their chore money, and where the only son wore his sisters' hand-me-down dresses and was teased about the photograph for the rest of his life. We follow him through Brown, through his marriage to a senator's daughter who would go on to found the Museum of Modern Art over his objections, through the Hearst letters and the exposure of his grandfather's double life, and out of the boardroom entirely in 1910.Then Colorado. The company towns where the firm owned your house and your store and your church and the man who weighed your coal. The armored car the strikers called the Death Special.Mother Jones held nine weeks in a hospital basement without charge. Junior's testimony to Congress that the open shop was worth the lives of every employee in the company, sixteen days before the shooting started. Louis Tikas with a rifle stock broken across his skull and three bullets in his back, left along the railway tracks for three days. And the pit under a burning tent where four women and eleven children were sheltering, and what a telephone linesman found when he lifted the bedstead the next morning.What happened after is the real inheritance.A publicity man named Ivy Lee, a chairman named Frank Walsh who took Junior apart on the witness stand, a future Prime Minister of Canada hired to design an answer, and a two-week trip to Colorado that ended with the richest young man in America in his shirtsleeves, dancing with miners' wives while the photographers worked.The union was destroyed. The reputation recovered inside a month. And the arrangement that replaced the union became the national model for keeping unions out for the next twenty years.The episode also goes where I said it would, into the Rockefeller Foundation's money in Germany — the Munich institute, the Berlin race-science laboratories, and the twin research the Foundation funded from 1932 to 1935 by a scientist named Otmar von Verschuer, who a decade later was receiving blood and human eyes from Auschwitz sent by his former assistant Josef Mengele.I draw that line carefully and narrowly, because the version that circulates online is wrong in ways that do not need the help.Then Grand Teton, bought under a false company name from neighbors who were never told. Colonial Williamsburg with the slavery left out. Diego Rivera's revenge. Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [email protected] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.