John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Rockefeller Jr. was born on January 29, 1874, in Cleveland, Ohio, to John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller. He was the fifth child in the family and had four older sisters, one of whom died in infancy.⁠[1][2][1]

In 1897 he graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts degree; while there he was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. His first job after graduation was in his father’s office at 26 Broadway in New York, where he worked with his father and his father’s chief adviser, the Rev. Frederick T. Gates, on business, philanthropic and public matters; there he found that making money held little appeal for him.⁠[1][1][2]

Together with his father, he created and developed the Rockefeller Institute for Medical ResearchThe Rockefeller UniversityThe Rockefeller University is a biomedical research university on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in New York City, devoted mainly to scientific research and graduate education; it grew out of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research founded by John D. Rockefeller.Open the full entry (1901, today The Rockefeller University), the General Education Board (1902), The Rockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller Foundation is a private philanthropic foundation headquartered in New York City. It was chartered by New York State legislation in 1913 with funding from Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, with the mission “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” In its early years it funded global public health, medical education, and yellow fever vaccine research; in the mid-20th century it supported agricultural programs that came to be known as the “Green Revolution”; and in recent years it has focused its work on energy, health, food, and climate.Open the full entry (1913) and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (1918). He served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Institute from its founding until 1954, including 21 years as chairman of the board, and also served for many years as a trustee and chairman of the General Education Board and The Rockefeller Foundation.⁠[1][1]

On October 9, 1901, he married Abby Greene Aldrich, daughter of Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. They had six children: Abby, John D. 3rd, Nelson A., Laurance S., Winthrop and David.⁠[1]

In 1910 he served as foreman of a special grand jury in Manhattan investigating human trafficking, work that attracted wide attention. After 1910 he devoted most of his life to philanthropy rather than to running businesses.⁠[1][2][1]

His grand jury work led him to establish the Bureau of Social Hygiene in 1913. He provided $5.4 million for it; the bureau conducted in-depth research on crime and juvenile delinquency, published a series of works, and was dissolved in 1940.⁠[1]

Also beginning in 1913, he built carriage roads closed to automobiles on Mount Desert Island, Maine, completing them in 1940; they form the 45-mile carriage road network in today’s Acadia National Park. He personally surveyed the routes, observed the construction and hired experts to design the bridges; in all he gave $3.6 million to Acadia National Park and related projects.⁠[3][3][3][3][1]

The Rockefeller family was the principal shareholder of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), and Rockefeller Jr. managed the family’s interests on behalf of his retired father. During the Colorado coal strike of 1913–1914, miners demanded that mine owners obey the state’s mining laws and recognize the United Mine Workers of America as their representative. Early in the strike he wrote to the company’s management expressing support for suppressing the strike, and publicly agreed that keeping the union out of CF&I was worthwhile “if it costs all your property and kills all your employees.”⁠[4][4][5][6]

On April 20, 1914, fighting broke out between the Colorado National Guard and striking miners at the Ludlow tent colony in Las Animas County; the camp was burned and at least 19 people died, including 13 women and children who suffocated in a pit. After the massacre he became the chief target of union and public hostility: the writer Upton Sinclair and others protested outside his New York office and staged a mock trial near his home.⁠[5][5][5][5]

After its founding, The Rockefeller Foundation sent a commission to China to study medical conditions there and then established the China Medical Board to run its medical education program in China. At the China Medical Board’s first board meeting, on December 11, 1914, Rockefeller Jr. was elected chairman.⁠[7][7]

After the massacre, testifying before Congress, he advocated the “open shop” principle, under which workers are allowed but not required to join outside unions; in 1915 he testified before the Commission on Industrial Relations on the labor conflict at CF&I. After the commission issued a report sharply criticizing his role in the massacre, he hired the labor expert Clarence J. Hicks and Canada’s former minister of labour W. L. Mackenzie King (later prime minister of Canada) to devise an employee representation plan, known as the Rockefeller Plan.⁠[6][6][6][6][5]

The Rockefeller Plan let CF&I’s miners and steelworkers elect employee representatives with some say over working conditions, with the aim of keeping them from joining a union or striking for union recognition; critics called it a “company union.” Its results were mixed: CF&I still saw major strikes in 1919, 1927 and 1933, and the miners were eventually organized by the UMWA; the plan remained in effect at the steel works until 1942, when the National War Labor Board ruled it an illegal “company union” and it was abolished.⁠[4][5][4][4]

During World War I he toured military camps across the country to speak to soldiers and privately counseled soldiers who sought his advice; he also served as chairman of the United War Work Campaign in New York, raising $35 million for the civilian organizations serving the armed forces.⁠[1][1]

The main task of the China Medical Board after its founding was to acquire and reorganize the Union Medical College in Peking and build a new campus. The new campus, a new hospital and two residential compounds were completed in 1921, and a grand dedication ceremony was held that September, attended by an American delegation led by Rockefeller Jr.⁠[7][7]

After World War I he became one of the leaders of the movement against the 12-hour workday and seven-day workweek that were still common in many industries at the time. In 1922 he issued a statement arguing that improving workers’ working conditions was the soundest economic policy.⁠[1][1]

In 1923 he founded the International Education Board and gave it more than $21 million to support the natural sciences, the humanities and agriculture. The board provided $1.4 million for the 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar in California (in operation from 1948), $357,000 to establish a mathematics department in Göttingen, Germany, $283,000 for Niels Bohr’s research on atomic structure, and $3.2 million for the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In 1926 he began funding the restoration of Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia, the project to which he was most deeply committed. In all he provided $56 million for Colonial Williamsburg and related projects, removing hundreds of 19th- and 20th-century buildings from the restoration area and reconstructing period buildings and gardens on their original sites.⁠[1][1][1]

The same year he toured Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with Horace Albright, superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, and afterward began buying private land in the valley through the Snake River Land Company, accumulating about 35,000 acres over two decades with the intention of later donating it to the federal government for inclusion in Grand Teton National Park. When local residents discovered his involvement, they worried that federal ownership of the land would reduce local tax revenue; the matter was ultimately resolved through congressional hearings.⁠[8][8][8]

In 1928, working with others, he planned to acquire a site in Midtown Manhattan for a new Metropolitan Opera House, taking a long-term lease from Columbia University on most of what is now the site of Rockefeller Center and buying the rest from other owners. The Great Depression scuttled the opera house plan, and because he had already signed the long-term lease, he decided to build an international business and entertainment center instead.⁠[1][1]

In 1929, having lost confidence in Robert W. Stewart, chairman of Standard Oil Company of Indiana, after Stewart failed to answer questions candidly at a U.S. Senate committee hearing, he solicited proxies from the company’s shareholders to remove Stewart and won; the proxy fight drew worldwide attention.⁠[1][1]

More than 200 brownstones and older buildings on the Rockefeller Center site were cleared, and the first 14 buildings were completed between 1931 and 1940; on November 1, 1939, he drove the last rivet into the steel frame of the U.S. Rubber Company Building, the last to be completed before World War II. During the Great Depression, construction of the project employed more than 75,000 people.⁠[1][1][1]

Before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he helped create the United Service Organizations (USO). On July 8 that year, in a radio broadcast from the Empire State Building in New York, he joined an appeal for funds for the USO and other organizations and delivered a statement of his personal creed, widely reprinted under the title “I Believe”; in 1962 the full text of the creed was inscribed on a plaque at Rockefeller Center. Two years later he helped establish the National War Fund and served as a director; the fund raised more than $321 million for the armed forces, the merchant marine and others.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Long concerned with improving educational opportunities for African Americans, he became chairman of the United Negro College Fund’s advisory committee in 1944 and gave a total of $5.2 million, helping the fund support more than 30 accredited private colleges.⁠[1][1]

In December 1946 he gave $8.5 million to buy land in Manhattan for the permanent headquarters of the United Nations. The impromptu offer was accepted by a majority vote of the UN General Assembly on December 14, 1946, and New York City then donated additional parcels to complete the site. He had earlier given the League of Nations its library building in Geneva.⁠[1][9][9][1]

In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated more land in the valley as Jackson Hole National Monument. In 1949, Rockefeller Jr. donated the land he had bought to the federal government for inclusion in the national park; in 1950, Congress combined the original park, the national monument and the land he had donated into today’s Grand Teton National Park. He gave a total of $17.5 million to the Jackson Hole Preserve.⁠[8][8][8][1]

His wife, Abby, died in 1948. On August 15, 1951, he married Martha Baird Allen, a former concert pianist and the widow of his Brown University classmate and close friend Arthur M. Allen.⁠[1]

The same year, he brought three historic sites in Westchester County, New York, that he had paid to preserve or restore, Philipsburg Manor, Sunnyside, the home of Washington Irving, and Van Cortlandt Manor, together under Sleepy Hollow Restorations (today Historic Hudson Valley), which he established.⁠[1][1]

Throughout his life he was engaged in the affairs of the Protestant churches and was a leader of the interdenominational movement. For many years he led the young men’s Bible class at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in New York, and he gave millions of dollars to build Riverside Church and the Interchurch Center, while also supporting Catholic and Jewish organizations. In 1955 he gave securities worth $20 million to strengthen Protestant theological education in the United States, and a further $2 million to support Protestant seminaries in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Rockefeller Jr. died on May 11, 1960, in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 86, and was buried in the Rockefeller family cemetery near Kykuit, close to Tarrytown, New York. He gave a total of $58.9 million to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, established by his five sons in 1940, and left half of his estate to the fund.⁠[1][2][1]

In 1972, the U.S. Congress established the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway between Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in recognition of his contributions to the national park system.⁠[8]

Rockefeller Jr.’s philanthropic giving is estimated at about $537 million in total; together with his father’s giving of about $540 million, the two generations’ philanthropy between 1860 and 1960 exceeded $1 billion. The authors of The Rockefeller Century (1988) calculated that the largest share, $192.2 million, went to foundations such as the International Education Board and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, followed by $71.7 million to churches and religious organizations, $63.3 million to historic preservation, $58.4 million to American colleges and universities, and $44.4 million to parks and conservation, among other categories.⁠[1][1][1]

In conservation, he gave $5 million through the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial to buy private land in the Great Smoky Mountains, provided more than $1 million to protect 15,000 acres of sugar pine forest near Yosemite, and funded the construction of museums in Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Parks. He also spent $5.9 million to build Fort Tryon Park, which he turned over to New York City, and built The Cloisters within the park to house the Gothic art he gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with related gifts totaling $15.7 million.⁠[2][2][2][1]