John D. Rockefeller Sr. The Man Who Bought the Story

In February of 1908, a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World walked into a drugstore in Freeport, Illinois, put a photograph on the counter, and finally closed a manhunt that had run for seven years. The man in the picture had died there two years earlier under the name Doctor William Levingston. He had a wife in Illinois and a wife he had never divorced back in New York, and the son he walked away from was John Davison Rockefeller, the richest man in the world.This is part one of a two-part series, and it covers the father and the son who spent seventy years being his opposite in every visible way and identical to him in the one way that made him rich. We start with Devil Bill, the traveling con man who kept his mistress under his wife's roof, fathered children by both women in the same two years, sold cancer cures for twenty-five dollars a consultation, and was indicted for rape in Cayuga County in 1849 before running ahead of the sheriff.Then we follow his second son from a ten-cent account book called Ledger A to the Cleveland Massacre, where the fear of a secret railroad scheme emptied twenty-two of twenty-six refineries into his hands in six weeks.Along the way there is the drawback, the contract clause that made a competitor pay his own executioner every time he shipped a barrel.There is the war Rockefeller declared on the largest railroad in America and won in nine months. There is the paid informant network inside the freight offices that the Interstate Commerce Commission found still running twenty-eight years after it was exposed. There is the sabotage trial in Buffalo that most accounts get wrong, and I explain exactly how, including the part where Rockefeller stood up in that courtroom and shook his fist at the plaintiff.There are the Merritt brothers of Duluth, who found the Mesabi Range and were made to sign a paper saying they had been treated fairly as the price of the money they needed to live on.And there is the family nobody saw. A daughter dead at forty in Cannes. Another who went to Zurich to be analyzed by Carl Jung, stayed eight years, and quietly paid James Joyce a monthly stipend while he wrote Ulysses. A brother who dug his own children out of the family plot rather than leave them under his brother's monument.And a ranch bought in North Dakota in 1881 on one condition, which proves the richest man alive knew his father was a bigamist and managed that secret for twenty-seven years without saying a single public word about it.The episode ends where the Supreme Court broke Standard Oil into thirty-four companies in 1911 and made him the first billionaire in American history. Part two takes up his son, Ludlow, and the invention of public relations as a paid profession.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.