Disturbing History - John D. Rockefeller Junior

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

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 [e-mail] 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.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself,

just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. We left the old man in the ground at Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland under an obelisk, 97 years old, and the richest human being who had ever

lived in the United States. And we left him with a reputation that did not match the record. Here was a man who ran a paid espionage network inside the freight offices of American railroads for 30 years and did not stop even after the federal government caught him, who took the greatest iron deposit on the continent away from the family that discovered it and then made those men sign a paper saying he had been fair to them who was indicted for criminal conspiracy in pennsylvania and simply never showed up and who bought his own father a ranch in north dakota for the sole purpose of keeping the man's second wife out of the photograph if anybody ever found him and by the time he died in 1937 the country thought of him as a gentle old man who handed dimes to

children and beat hookworm in the south. That is not an accident, and it is not luck. Somebody built that, deliberately, over decades, and it was not the old man. He was too rigid for it, and too contemptuous of the public to bother. The reputation of the House of Rockefeller was constructed by his son, and the son did it with a genuine and, I think, entirely sincere conscience, which is what makes this episode harder to tell than the last one, because the boy were about to follow was not like his father. He was shy and dutiful and frightened of doing wrong. He gave away more than $500 million in his lifetime, and a great deal of it did enormous good in the world. And in the spring of 1914, his name was on a coal company in southern Colorado,

when the militia opened fire on a tent colony full of immigrant families, and two women and 11 children suffocated in a pit dug under a burning tent. What he did in the year after that, how power talks to the public in this country, permanently, and we are all still living inside the thing he invented. John Davison Rockefeller Jr. was born on the 29th of January 1874 in Cleveland, the fifth child and the only son, which meant that from the moment he could understand language, he understood that all of it was eventually going to land on him, and him alone. The house he came up in was the one I described last time, run on SETI's system. And the details still surprise people.

The children shared a single bicycle among them. They earned their pocket money at fixed rates for household chores and kept ledgers of it in imitation of their father's ledger A. And Junior kept his so faithfully that as a grown man, he could tell you what he had earned in a given week of 1884 for killing flies at two cents a dozen and sharpening pencils at a tenth of a cent apiece. He wore his older sisters hand-me-down dresses as a small boy,

and there is a photograph of it, and he was teased about that photograph for the rest of his life. Dancing was forbidden, and so were cards and the theater. He did not taste alcohol or tobacco, ever in 96 years. There was money in that house on a scale the children were not permitted to perceive. Junior grew up believing the family was comfortable rather than rich, and he was a teenager before he understood what his father actually was, and the way he found out was by reading about him in a new year. newspaper. He was also lonely in a way that comes through clearly in the record. The family kept

the children away from other wealthy children on principle, so he had almost no friends until he was nearly grown. And what he had instead was his mother, whom he adored, and a father who was away building the largest industrial combination on earth, and who wrote him letters about thrift. He went to Brown University and graduated in 1897, and Brown is where the boy loosened up a little, taught Bible class, learn to dance, joined a fraternity, and started to look like somebody who might have a life of his own. Then he came straight home to 26 Broadway and went to work in his father's office at 23 years old, and the life of his own closed up behind him. In 1901, he married Abby Aldrich, and that marriage matters more than most biographies let on. Her father was Nelson Aldrich,

the Republican Senator from Rhode Island, one of the four or five most powerful, men in Washington and known to his enemies as the general manager of the United States. Abby was warm and funny and socially fearless in every way her husband was not. She would go on to found the Museum of Modern Art with two friends in 1929, over the polite objections of a husband who did not care for modern art at all, and paid for a great deal of it anyway. They had six children, a daughter, and then five sons. And those five sons are the reason the name still means something in American life a century later. But in that first decade at 26 Broadway, the sun was drowning.

His actual duties were vague, which made it worse. He sat in on the executive committee lunches with men two and three times his age, and who were polite to him because of his name. He was handed the family's charitable correspondence, thousands of letters a year from strangers asking for money, and told to sort out which ones deserved it. and in 1902 he was taken badly by a swindle. A promoter named David Lamar talked him into a leather trust that turned into a public embarrassment

and cost around a million dollars. And his father covered it and said very little about it. And Jr. appears to have carried that failure privately for years afterward as proof that he was not the man his father was. He had inherited a job nobody could have done. He was the visible heir to the most hated fortune in America during the exact years when Ida Tarbell was taking it apart in McClure's, month after month, 19 installments, and he was a nervous and scrupulous young man being asked to defend practices he had not

designed and did not fully understand. In 1904, at age 30, he collapsed. The family called it a breakdown from overwork, and he was sent abroad for months to recover. Then in 1908 and 1909, the roof caved in. William Randolph Hearst got hold of the private letters between John Archbold, who was running Standard Oil day to day, and Senator Joseph Foraker of Ohio and other men in Congress, and published them. And the country got to read what it had always suspected, which was that standard oil money went directly into the pockets of sitting United States senators. And in the same window, the New York world finally ran down the story of the grandfather. The bigamist buried in Illinois under an invented name.

In 1910, John D. Rockefeller Jr. resigned from the board of standard oil and from the board of United States Steel and from every other commercial directorship he held, and he never took another one. The stated reason was that he wanted his philanthropy free of any commercial entanglement, and I believe that was true, and I also believe it was not the whole truth. He had watched his family's name become a synonym for corruption, and he had concluded, correctly, that no amount of money could fix that from inside a boardroom. He was 36 years old, and he had just walked away from the largest industrial fortune in the

world as a working concern. And what he had left was the money itself and a conscience that would not sit still. So he went looking for another way to fix it, and the first place he went was vice. In 1910, he served as foreman of a special grand jury in New York, investigating what the era called the white slave traffic, meaning organized prostitution. And he took the assignment with the total seriousness of a man who had been raised to believe that sin was a real and operating force in the world. Out of it came the Bureau of Social Hygiene, which he founded and funded, and which produced serious sociological research on prostitution and vice,

and eventually on birth control and criminology. It is genuinely early and genuinely useful work, and it also tells you something about him, because a great many rich men in 1910 would have paid to make that subject go away, and this one paid to have it studied. There is also a thing he funded that I should name and dispose of, because it circulates constantly, and it is not true.

The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research did not cause the polio epidemic of 1916. That claim gets repeated in a certain corner of the internet with real confidence, and there is no evidence behind it whatsoever. And I mention it only because an episode this critical of a family loses its footing the moment it starts accepting anything unflattering that anybody says about them. And in 1913 came the Rockefeller Foundation, chartered by the state of New York, because the Congress of the United

States refused to charter it. Members of Congress looked at a proposal for a perpetual private institution controlled by the Rockefeller family, endowed at a scale no government agency could match, answerable to nobody, and they concluded it was a threat to the Republic and voted it down. So New York issued the charter instead, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. became the foundation's first president at 39 years old. He had his instrument. He had the money and the freedom and a mind that genuinely wanted to do good with both, and he had arrived at something his father never had, which was a theory of what the fortune was for. Senior gave because Scripture said to give, and because Frederick Gates told him the pile would crush his children otherwise.

Junior gave, because he had decided that the fortune was a trust, he happened to be holding on behalf of everybody else, and he said so, repeatedly, in language that sounds pious until you notice he actually lived by it, and died with a fraction of what he had been handed. And then, 13 months later, Southern Colorado. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company was bought by the Rockefeller Interests in 1902. and Senior never went to look at it, and he handed the family's stake to his son to manage.

What that company was on the ground is the part that gets skipped. Colorado Fuel and Iron ran coal camps in Las Animas and Huarfano counties, and those camps were company towns in the fullest and most literal sense of that phrase. The company owned the house you slept in. The company owned the store where you bought your flour, and it paid you in script that only that store would take. The company owned the school and hired the teacher, and it owned the church and hired the preacher, and it appointed the doctor, and it appointed the man who weighed your coal, which mattered more than any of the rest of it,

because you were paid by the weight of what you dug, and the man doing the weighing worked for the other side. Miners had been asking for their own check-weighmen for 20 years. Colorado had a law on the books requiring it. The company ignored the law and the state let them. The men who worked those mines were largely Greek and Italian and Slavic and Mexican immigrants, hired in part because they spoke different languages and would have a harder time organizing against the company together. The death rate in Colorado coal mines ran at roughly twice the national average, and the coroner's juries that ruled on those deaths were drawn from company towns

and almost never found the company at fault. In September of 1913, about 10,000 miners walked out under the United Mine Workers of America. Their demands were not revolutionary. They wanted the union recognized, an eight-hour day, the right to choose their own doctor and their own store, their own check-weamen, and enforcement of laws that were already on the books in that state. The company evicted them from the company houses in September in the mountains, which the union had expected. The union had leased ground and bought tents, and the strikers built colonies at the miles of the canyons, and the largest of them, at a railroad-stock. called Ludlow, held around 1,200 people. Families loaded furniture and children onto wagons in a cold rain and drove out of the canyons to the tent grounds, and a photographer

caught some of it, and the images ran in newspapers around the country. Roughly 9,000 people ended up living in Canvas through a Colorado winter. The company hired the Baldwinfeltz Detective Agency, which specialized in exactly this work. Baldwinfelt's men built an armored car with a machine gun mounted on it that the strikers nicknamed the death special and they drove it past the tent colonies. There were killings on both sides through that autumn and in late October governor Elias Ammon sent in the Colorado National Guard, which the strikers initially welcomed as neutral. But it didn't stay neutral. As the strike ground on and the state ran out of money, the guards ranks were filled up with company guards and hired gunmen mustered in as soldiers

in state uniforms, paid with company money. Mother Jones came into Colorado that winter. She was in her 70s, and she had been organizing coal miners since before most of those strikers were born, and the state's answer to her was to arrest her without charge and hold her at one point for nine weeks, in a room in the basement of a hospital in Trinidad, with a guard at the door, and no visitors. She was deported out of the strike district twice, and came back both times.

When the militia would not let her speak, women in the camps organized their own march in Trinidad and were ridden down by mounted troops under General John Chase, who fell off his horse in the middle of it and then ordered a charge. And through the whole of it, John D. Rockefeller Jr. sat in an office at 26 Broadway in New York, 1,800 miles away, backing his managers absolutely and refusing to consider recognizing the union under any circumstances. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. In April of 1914 before the shooting, Junior was called to testify before a committee of the House of Representatives

about the Colorado strike, and what he said there is the thing that would follow him for the rest of his life. He told the congressman that the fight was over the principle of the open shop, meaning the right of a man to work without joining a union, and that it was a principle worth any cost. He said he would stand by that principle even if it meant losing, all the money he had invested, and even if it cost the lives of every employee in the company. The congressman questioning him asked whether he meant to say he would rather have the company's

men killed than recognize the union. But he didn't amend his answer. He had never been to Colorado. He had never spoken to a minor. He had never seen a company town. He was 39 years old, and he had reasoned his way to that position out of principle, and he believed it was the moral answer. What's worth understanding about that answer is that he was not bluffing, and he was not posturing for the committee. He wrote to the company's president that same season, backing him without reservation. The men around him at 26 Broadway had told him that the strike was the work of outside agitators, that the miners themselves were content, and that the union wanted recognition in Colorado only as a step toward organizing the whole Western coal industry.

He believed all of it, because the only people he had asked, were the people telling it to him. 16 days later, the Colorado National Guard set up a machine gun on a ridge overlooking the Ludlow Tent colony. The 19th of April, 1914, was Greek Orthodox Easter, and the Greek families at Ludlow had spent the day the way you'd hope,

with food and music and a baseball game, and there's an account of armed guardsmen walking through the edge of the colony that afternoon and interrupting the game. The next morning, the 20th of April, An officer sent word into the colony demanding the release of a man the militia claimed was being held there against his will. Louis Teakas, who was running the colony that day, went out to meet the officers and told them there was no such man. Tecass was 28 years old, born Elias Spantadakis on Crete, and he was the reason the Greek strikers at Ludlow held together,

and he'd already been shot once by Baldwin-Felt's detectives four years earlier in a different Colorado strike. Nobody knows who fired first. What's known is that the militia had machine guns positioned above the camp, and that they used them, and that the shooting started around 9.30 in the morning, and didn't stop until after 5 in the afternoon. The tents were canvas. There was nothing in that colony that would stop a bullet.

What the families had were pits the miners had dug underneath the tent floors, cellars about the size of a small room, and when the firing started, the women and children went down into those pits. which was the only thing to do, and which was the reason so many of them died. A boy named Frank Snyder, 11 or 12 years old, depending on the source, was killed inside the colony that day. The strikers who had rifles fired back and drew fire away toward the Arroyo, and by evening they were out of ammunition and pulling back into the open country.

Louis Teicus stayed. He was captured and Lieutenant Carl Linderfeld broke a rifle stock across his skull, and then Teacus was shot three times in the back. His body and the bodies of two other men lay out along the Colorado and Southern Railway tracks for three days in plain view of the passing trains, because the militia wouldn't permit anyone to move them, until a railway union local demanded they be taken away and buried. After dark, guardsmen poured kerosene on the tents and set them alight. Underneath one of those tents and one of those pits, four women and 11 children were sheltering,

and when the tent above them burned, two of the women and all 11, of the children suffocated. They were found the next day. The place where they died is called the death pit, and you can still go and look down into it, because it's preserved, and the United Mine Workers put a granite memorial over that ground in 1918. They were found the following morning by a telephone linesman who lifted the burned iron of a bedstead out of the way and looked down into the hole. A woman named Mary Petrucci had gone into a neighbor's pit with her three children when her own tent went up, and she came out alive and all three of her children were dead. She was 24 years old. She spent part of the next year being taken around the eastern cities by the

Union to tell audiences what had happened. And then she stopped, and she said afterward that she couldn't keep telling it. What followed is called the Ten Days War, and it's the closest thing to an insurrection this country saw between the Civil War and the present day. Armed Miners came out of every camp in southern Colorado and attacked mine properties and fought pitched battles with the militia across a front of about 50 miles. And mine guards were killed and mines were burned. And it didn't stop until President Wilson sent federal troops in at the end of the month and disarmed everyone. Miners came down out of Trinidad and Walsenburg with rifles. They burned the Empire Mine and the Forbes camp and fought the militia at Walsenburg. And at one point, the union held a stretch of country

roughly 50 miles long and the state of Colorado had effectively lost control of two of its counties. The governor who'd put the guard in the field a year earlier, now asked Washington to take the field away from him, and on the 28th of April, President Wilson ordered federal troops in, and the regular army disarmed both sides, and the shooting stopped. The strike itself dragged on until the 10th of December 1914, when the union ran out of money and called it off. The miners got nothing. Not recognition, not the check weyman, not one item on the list. The total dead across the whole 14-month Colorado Colfield War is genuinely disputed, and the estimates range from around 69 on the low end to something near 200.

The public reaction was unlike anything the family had faced, and this is where the episode turns. The story went out over the wires within a day, and what carried it was the children. Americans in 1914 were entirely accustomed to reading about dead strikers. Dead strikers were a category. 13 women and children suffocating in a hole in the ground under a burning tent wasn't a category. And the newspapers ran the names and the ages.

And the ages were four and six and eight and nine. John Reed went to Colorado for Metropolitan Magazine and wrote it up. The New York Times, which had been broadly sympathetic to the operators through the whole strike turned. Clergymen who'd taken Rockefeller money for years preached about it from their pulpits. Upton Sinclair organized a silent picket outside 26 Broadway, men and women in black armbands walking a circle in front of the standard oil building. Demonstrators came to the gates at Picotico. Somebody put together a plan to bomb the Rockefeller estate, and the bomb went off prematurely in a tenement on Lexington Avenue in July of 1914 and killed four people. Three of them the men

who were building it. Newspapers that had spent a decade calling the father a monopolist started calling the son a murderer. And John D. Rockefeller Jr., who told Congress in April that the open shop was worth any number of lives, discovered in May that he was the most hated man in America. The first response out of 26th Broadway made everything worse, which is the part people forget.

The company put out statements blaming the union. The family said nothing for weeks. and a Rockefeller spokesman described the dead as victims of the strike leaders who had put them in the tents in the first place. That was the old approach, the father's approach, which was to say nothing and outlast it, and it had worked for 40 years, and it didn't work at all in 1914. So he hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee. Lee was a Princeton man and a former newspaper reporter, and he'd done publicity for the Pennsylvania Railroad and for coal companies in strike trouble.

and he'd published something in 1906 he called a declaration of principles, in which he promised that his business was to supply the press and the public with accurate and prompt information about matters of public importance. Whether he lived up to that is the whole argument about Ivy Lee. What Lee did in Colorado was produce a series of bulletins under the heading facts concerning the struggle in Colorado for industrial freedom, and mail them free to thousands of teachers and editors and clergymen and public officials across the country.

They looked like documents. They read like fact sheets. And a number of the facts in them were wrong in ways that consistently favored the company, including a claim about the union spending on the strike that was off by a wide margin and a characterization of Mother Jones that was flatly defamatory. Upton Sinclair started calling him poison Ivy, and the name stuck to Ivy Lee for the rest of his life and passed his death. But here's what makes Lee important, rather than merely dishonest, and why he's in this episode at all.

The bulletins were the small part. The strategy Leesold Jr. was that no volume of paper was going to fix this, and that the only thing that could fix it was the man himself, in Colorado, in person, being seen. Before that, Jr. had to get through Frank Walsh. The United States Commission on Industrial Relations had been created by Congress to investigate the causes of industrial violence in America, and its chairman was a Kansas city lawyer named Frank Walsh, who had no fear of wealth whatsoever.

Walsh put Jr. on the stand in January of 1915, and again in May, and the May sessions were brutal enough that two commissioners publicly objected to the chairman's hostility toward the witness. Walsh's line of attack was simple, and it was devastating. He wasn't trying to prove that Jr. ordered the killing at Ludlow, because Jr. hadn't ordered it, and Walsh knew that. What Walsh was proving was that Junior had absolute authority over that company, had used it to instruct his managers to refuse the union, no matter what happened,

had never gone to Colorado, had never spoken to a single minor, and had approved every decision by telegram from a building in Manhattan, while knowing nothing at all about the conditions those men lived in. He put Junior's own correspondence with the company's president into the record. Walsh also put Ivy Lee on the stand and walked him through the bullet, line by line, forcing him to concede errors in print, and the spectacle of a publicity man being made to correct his own fact sheets, under oath did more damage to Lee's declaration of principles than anything Upton Sinclair ever wrote about him. Mother Jones testified before that same

commission. She was in her late 70s and she'd been jailed during the Colorado strike, held for weeks in a cellar, and she named Jr. directly. He stopped defending. Under questioning, he conceded that conditions in the camps had to change, that he'd been ignorant of them, and that his ignorance was itself a failure on his part. He told Walsh he hoped he was still capable of progressing to something better, and when Walsh asked him mockingly whether he meant he was growing in grace the way the church says, Jr. said that he hoped so. I've watched a lot of people testify.

Most of what you see under that kind of pressure is a man protecting himself. What I see in that transcript is a man protecting himself. What I see in that transcript is a man who's just been shown something about himself and hasn't yet decided what to do about it what he decided to do about it came in two parts and they're the two halves of the machine the first part was William Lyon McKenzie King a former Canadian Minister of Labor and a future prime minister of Canada whom junior hired to design and answer what King built is called the Colorado Industrial Plan and everybody else calls it the Rockefeller Plan it gave the

miners elected representatives who would meet with management. A grievance procedure, guaranteed enforcement of the state mining laws that had been ignored for 20 years, the right to their own checkweiman, the right to shop where they liked and see the doctor they chose, and a program of real physical improvement in the camps, and the company spent serious money making those things true. What it didn't give them was a union. The representatives were company employees inside a company structure with no independent funding, no right to strike, and no power to bargain a contract, and the company could dissolve the whole thing whenever it wanted. Labor historians have a term for it, which is the company union, and the Rockefeller Plan is the most famous example that ever existed.

It ran at Colorado Fuel and Iron from 1915 until 1942, and it was copied by employers across the United States and around the world. And for the next 20 years, it was the standard corporate answer to the union question. Congress eventually outlawed that arrangement in the Wagner Act of 1935, which tells you how effective it had been at keeping real unions out. It's worth saying plainly what a company union is for, because the term has gone out of use. It's a structure that gives workers everything a union gives them,

except the one thing that matters, which is independent power. Grievances get heard, conditions improve, sometimes a great deal. And when the interests of the men and the interests of the company finally diverge, which they always eventually do, the men have no treasury, no outside affiliation, no strike fund, and no legal standing, and the whole apparatus can be closed down by the people it was arguing with. It's representation without leverage,

and a great many decent employers adopted it in complete sincerity, and it kept real unions out of American heavy industry for a generation. The second part was the trip. In September of 1915, John D. Rockefeller Jr. went to Colorado for two weeks, and he went without bodyguards. Ivy Lee went with him. And of course, so did the photographers. He went down into the mines. He ate in the miners' kitchens and sat in their houses and he spoke with the wives. He listened to grievances for hours at a stretch. At a dance in Pueblo, he took off his coat and danced with the miners' wives, one after another, all evening. And that's the photograph that

ran in every newspaper in America, the richest young man in the country in his shirt sleeves, dancing with the coal miner's wife. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. He gave a speech to the man in which he said they were all partners, that Capital couldn't get along without the men, and the men couldn't get along without Capital. There's one moment from that trip that I keep coming back to, because it's the only time in either of these episodes where somebody in this family is caught genuinely off balance. At one of the camps, he asked a group of miners what they wanted, and the answers weren't about wages. They wanted the law on the check weighman enforced. They wanted to be able to buy flour, somewhere other than

the company store. They wanted a doctor who didn't work for the company. Junior had spent two years refusing a union on the principle of industrial freedom, 1,800 miles from men who were asking for permission to choose their own grocer, and by every account he hadn't known that until he stood there and heard it. And it worked. It worked completely. The hostile press turned inside of a month. Now, it would be easy to call the whole thing a con. I don't think it was. By every account I've read, including from people at that time who despised him, Junior was genuinely shaken by what he found in Colorado, and the changes he made in those camps were real, and the miners' lives materially improved. He also went on to spend the rest of his life on industrial relations questions

and funded serious academic work on them. But look at the shape of what happened. A company killed people. The owner was hauled in front of a federal commission and taken apart, and the outcome was that the owner's reputation improved. The union was destroyed, and the arrangement that replaced the union, became the national model for keeping unions out for the next 20 years. Whatever was in that man's heart, that's what the machine produced, and the machine was the thing Ivy Lee had come to build, and it didn't stop in Colorado. In 1915 and again in 1916, refinery workers struck at the standard oil works in Bayonne, New Jersey, and company guards and sheriff's deputies fired on strikers, and men were killed in both years. The men there were mostly

Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, working 12-hour shifts around open stills, and the company brought in armed guards from a private agency. And in July of 1915, those guards fired into crowds of strikers over several days. Somewhere between five and ten men were killed, and the count was never settled because the sheriff's office and the company gave different numbers, and the coroner's inquest went nowhere. It happened again the following autumn. Junior was no longer on the board of standard oil of New Jersey by then. But the family was still by far its largest shareholder. And the newspapers put his name on it anyway. And he learned the lesson he'd learned in Colorado a second time. The Rockefeller Foundation under Jr. did some of the most consequential public

health work in human history. It carried the hookworm campaign out of the American South and into 50-some countries. It went after yellow fever across the Americas and Africa. And the vaccine that came out of that work, developed by a foundation scientist named Max Thiler, won a Nobel Prize and is essentially the same vaccine people get today. It funded the Peking Union Medical College. It rebuilt public health education worldwide, and it created the model of the Modern Research University Medical School. It funded the work that produced better anti-malarial treatment in the field, and put

enormous money into agricultural research that became the Green Revolution, which is credited with keeping a number of people alive that runs into the hundreds of millions, and which also brought consequences for water and soil and small farmers that people are still arguing about. Closer to home, the General Education Board put tens of millions into southern schools, and Junior's mother's family name is the reason Spelman College got its name. The Rockefeller Institute in New York, which his father founded and which he sustained, did the work that identified the pneumocococcus types, developed the first serum therapy. and in 1944 produced the experiment by Avery and McLeod and McCarty

that demonstrated that DNA carries hereditary information, which is arguably the single most important biological finding of the 20th century, and which happened in a laboratory paid for with standard oil money. Junior personally paid to restore the Palace of Versailles and the Cathedral at Rhames after the First World War. He built Riverside Church in New York. He assembled and gave away the land for Acadia National Park and for Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He restored colonial Williamsburg from 1926 onward, essentially inventing American historic preservation as a public enterprise.

Williamsburg deserves a second look, though, because of what it left out. Junior spent something in the neighborhood of $70 million restoring that town, and for roughly the first 50 years of its life, the restored capital of colonial, Virginia presented visitors with a tidy world of cabinet makers and silversmiths and gentlemen in wigs and almost no enslaved people at all. About half the population of 18th century Williamsburg was enslaved. The restoration didn't seriously interpret that until the 1970s and didn't put it at the center until the 1980s, which means that for two generations, millions of American school children were walked through a full-scale physical reconstruction of a slave society with the slavery taken out of it. I don't think that was malice. I think it was a wealthy, pious, conservative man in the 1920s

building the 18th century he wanted to believe in, which is the same instinct that runs through everything else in this episode. He wasn't lying about Williamsburg any more than he was lying in Colorado. He was editing. He built the cloisters. And in 1946, he wrote a check for $8.5 million for 18 acres on the East River in Manhattan and gave it to the United Nations, which is why the United Nations is in New York and not in Philadelphia or Geneva. He was, by any reasonable accounting, one of the most generous men who has ever lived, and he gave away more than $500 million of his own money. The Rockefeller Foundation, during the 1920s and into the 1930s, paid to build the institutional

foundation of German racial science. The context people forget is that in the 1920s, this wasn't fringe science, and it wasn't a German idea. It was an American one. Indiana had passed the first compulsory sterilization law in the world in 1907. By the mid-20s, something like half the states had them. The Supreme Court would uphold them in 1927 in an opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes that ended with the line about three generations being enough, and more than 60,000 Americans were sterilized under those statutes. Most of them poor, many of them black or native or simply institutionalized.

German researchers in that decade looked at the United States as the country that was doing this properly, and said so in print. So when a New York Foundation went looking for the best minds and human heredity to fund, the field it was funding already had this inside it, and everybody involved considered it progress. In 1926, the Foundation gave a very large grant on the order of $300,000, and the exact figure varies between the Foundation's own archive and outside accounts, to the German Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich,

which moved into a new building on the strength of it. The man who would come to direct that institute was a Swiss psychiatrist named Ernst Rudin, who was doing serious pioneering work on the heredity of mental illness, and who was also, and increasingly openly, an advocate of eugenic sterilization. In 1929, the Foundation put a large grant, commonly cited at $317,000, into the Kaiser-Vilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin, which until then had been operating out of essentially one room, and which became a major center of German race biology on the strength of that building. The Foundation also helped pay for the building of the Kaiser-Vilhelm Institute

for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin-Dalem, which was founded in 1927 and which became the intellectual headquarters of scientific racism in Germany, and Foundation money helped keep that institute alive through the Depression. And from 1932 to 1935, the Rockefeller Foundation directly funded the twin research of a scientist at that institute named Atmar von Verschur. In 1933, Ernst Rudin was one of the principal drafters of the Nazi sterilization law, the statute that authorized the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of Germans, and that was the legal doorway to the killing program that followed.

The Rockefeller Foundation continued funding in Germany for roughly two years, after Hitler took power and pulled back, as Rudin emerged publicly as a propagandist for Nazi racial hygiene. In 1942, Atmar von Fersheuer became director of the Kaiser-Vilhelm Institute for Anthropology. He had a former assistant from his Frankfurt Days, a young physician named Joseph Mangala. And in 1943, Minglei went to Auschwitz as a camp doctor. Over 1943 and 1944, Mingli sent his old mentor, blood samples, and human tissue, and in at least one documented case, the eyes of murdered prisoners, taken from twins he had selected on the ramp,

and then killed for that purpose. The Auschwitz research wasn't paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation. It was funded by the German Research Foundation and the Reich Research Council in 1943. And by then American money had been out of Germany for years, and the two countries were at war. Nobody in New York wrote a check for what Mengele did on that ramp. What American money did was build the building, fund the twin research program that made Versheir's reputation,

and underwrite the Institute, and the careers of the men who supplied Nazi racial policy with its scientific respectability. At a point in the 1920s, when the leading eugenicists in the world were American, and this was regarded as the most advanced science going. That's the honest version. It's not a conspiracy, and it's not a plot, and it's a great deal worse than a plot in some ways, because it was ordinary. Serious people at a serious foundation,

trying to advance human genetics, funded the best researchers in the field. And the field was rotten. And about 15 years later, a man was standing on a railway platform in Poland, choosing children out of a crowd so he could mail their eyes back to a laboratory the money had helped build. I don't think John D. Rockefeller Jr. ever knew a single one of those names. That's not a defense of him. That's the point of the entire episode. He built an institution designed to act at a scale no individual could supervise,

answerable to nobody. And he built it because he wanted to attack the, the causes of human suffering rather than the symptoms. And the Congress of the United States told him, in 1913, that a thing like that was dangerous, and he did it anyway. Both of those outcomes came out of the same design. The yellow fever vaccine and the money in Munich came out of the same design. In 1926, Junior took his family west and was shown around Jackson Hole by Horace Albright,

the superintendent of Yellowstone. And what Albright wanted him to see wasn't the mouse. mountains. It was the dance halls and the billboards and the hot dog stands going up along the valley floor under the titans. Junior went home and asked for maps and cost estimates. In 1927, he formed the Snake River Land Company, and the entire purpose of that company was to conceal who was buying. His name appears nowhere on it. Albright wanted the source of the money hidden so that prices wouldn't be run up the moment a Rockefeller was known to be in the valley. And Jr. agreed, and they hired a well-like Jackson banker named Robert Miller to go and negotiate with

his own neighbors. Miller opposed a national park in that valley and wasn't told what the land was actually for. Over the next several years, that front company bought better than 30,000 acres of Jackson Hole, ranch by ranch and lot by lot, and it bought the entire town of Moran. In 1930, the secret came out, and the valley went up. Ranchers who'd sold said they'd been lied to about what the land was for, and that they'd have asked far more or refused outright, had they known. Wyoming Senator Robert Carey held public meetings and wrote to Rockefeller's attorney saying his state wouldn't stand for its citizens being driven out to gratify an eastern millionaire. In 1933, the United States Senate opened a subcommittee investigation into whether

the National Park Service had conspired with a private buyer to acquire land by deception. And the hearings ran for four days in August, and Robert Miller testified that he'd never known what he was buying or for whom. The subcommittee cleared them. Legally, the purchases held up. Every acre bought willingly at a price the seller accepted, and the fight went on for another 17 years, and it took a presidential proclamation from Franklin Roosevelt in 1943, and an act of Congress in 1950, before that land became Grand Teton National Park. He also did it by putting a false name on the paperwork and sending a trusted local man out to buy his neighbor's ranches without telling him why.

The methods are the family's methods. They're always the family's methods, and this is the one time and the whole story where I find myself glad they were used. The other great monument of his life went up in the middle of the Depression. Junior had signed a lease on a large tract of Midtown Manhattan in 1928 for an opera house that was never built. And when the market collapsed in 1929, he was left holding an enormous obligation with no project. He decided to build anyway, on his own account. And Rockefeller Center went up through the 1930s and employed something like 40,000 people during the worst years this economy has ever had.

It was the largest private building project in American history to that point, and he paid for it essentially a loan. And in 1932, the family commission Diego Rivera to paint the the mural for the main lobby. I've never fully understood what anybody thought was going to happen. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Rivera was a committed communist and the most famous muralist alive, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller admired his work, and Nelson, then in his 20s, handled the commission. Rivera began painting a work called Man at the Crossroads. Then a New York paper ran a headline about Rivera painting communist scenes with John D. Jr. footing the bill, and Rivera, who was being attacked from the left for

taking the money in the first place, responded by sending an assistant out for a photograph of linen and painting linen into the mural. Junior asked him to take linen out. Rivera refused and offered to balance it with Abraham Lincoln. The mural was covered with canvas. Rivera was paid his full fee and sent away, and in February of 1934, the whole thing was chiseled off the wall and carted out as rubble. Rivera went home and repainted it in the Palacio de Bellis Art in Mexico City, under the title Man, Controller of the Universe, and in the new version he added a scene that wasn't in the original.

He painted John D. Rockefeller Jr., the lifelong teetotaler who never took a drink in 96 years, sitting in a nightclub with a cocktail in his hand and a woman beside him, directly beneath a rendering of syphilis bacteria. That mural is still there. You can go look at it. One more thing happened to the company while he was alive, and though he'd been off its board since 1910,

the family was still its largest shareholder, and the name was still on it in every newspaper in the country. In 1929, Standard Oil of New Jersey entered into a broad agreement with the German chemical combine I.G. Farben. The two of them divided the world between chemicals and petroleum, agreed not to compete in each other's territory, and pooled patents. It was, on its face, an ordinary corporate cartel arrangement of the kind that era produced constantly.

Then the 1930s happened, and IG Farben became the industrial heart of the Nazi war economy. The firm that would build a plant at Auschwitz and worked prisoners to death inside it and manufacture the gas used in the chambers, and the patent agreement was still in force. When the United States began scrambling for synthetic rubber after Pearl Harbor, because the Japanese had taken the natural rubber supply of Southeast Asia. It emerged that the arrangement with Farben had restricted what standard could do with the synthetic rubber process for years. In March of 1942, the Justice Department brought an antitrust action, and Standard Oil of New Jersey signed a consent decree and surrendered the patents and paid a fine that came to $50,000.

A Senate committee investigating the war program took testimony on it that spring, And the chairman of that committee, a senator from Missouri named Harry Truman, said in public that what the company had done came close to treason. Junior had no operational role in any of it. He'd walked away from those boardrooms 32 years earlier, precisely so that nothing like this would ever attach to him again. It attached anyway, because his name was on the building. And that's a thing about this family that no amount of philanthropy ever solved. John D. Rockefeller Jr. died on the 11th of May, 1960, in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 86. But the machine outlived him. John III built Lincoln Center and founded the Population Council.

Lawrence funded conservation and venture capital. David ran Chase Manhattan Bank for a generation. Winthrop moved to Arkansas and became its governor, and Nelson became governor of New York four times, and vice president of the United States. The one nobody planned for was the grandson. Michael Rockefeller was Nelson's son, 23 years old, fresh out of Harvard, and in 1961 he was in Southwest New Guinea collecting art among the Asmat people for a museum his father had founded. On the 17th of November, his catamaran overturned off the coast, and after drifting for a day, he decided to swim for shore, and he was never seen again.

The official finding was drowning. There have been persistent claims ever since, some from missionaries in the region, and some from later journalists, that he reached the beach and was killed by Asmot men in a revenge cycle that had begun with a Dutch patrol killing several of their leaders years earlier. That has never been proven. The evidence is contested and that a young man drowning in open ocean is an entirely sufficient explanation. Nelson chartered planes and boats and searched for two weeks with his daughter beside him

and went home with nothing at all. And the family never held a funeral because there was nothing to bury. Michael was declared dead three years later. In September of 1971, prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in Western New York and held hostages and demanded better conditions. Negotiations ran four days. Observers on the ground, including elected officials, pleaded with Governor Nelson Rockefeller to come to Attica in person,

and he refused to go. On the 13th of September, he authorized the assault. State police and corrections officers went in through tear gas and opened fire into a crowded yard. And when it stopped, 39 men were dead in that yard, 29 prisoners and 10 hostages, and every one of the hostages had been killed by state gunfire, rather than by the prisoners holding them. The full toll of the uprising came to 43. Rockefeller had been told by the observers on the ground, among them a state senator and a New York Times columnist, that his physical presence might be enough to settle it, and he told them

by telephone that he didn't believe a visit would serve any useful purpose. He never went. He was in Pocanico, about 300 miles away, and he approved the assault from there. And afterward, he told a congressional committee that he considered it a beautifully planned operation. The state told the press that the hostages had died with their throats cut. That was false. And the autopsies proved it false within a day, and the state had to retract it. What I'm left with, after two episodes and a great deal of reading, has almost nothing to do with oil. The father ran the espionage networks and took the iron ore and beat the widows and the brothers and the rival refiners, and the country knew what he was inside his own lifetime. And the courts, and the Congress and Ida Tarbell all went at him,

and he still died as the richest man alive. His methods were visible. You could see the knife. The son never held a knife in his life. He was a decent, anxious, generous man who told the truth as he understood it and gave away a fortune and meant every bit of it. And he invented something more durable than anything his father built, which is the modern apparatus by which enormous private power presents itself to the public as a benefactor. And the modern institution through which that power acts at a scale so large that nobody, including the man who signs the checks, can actually see what it's doing. And I keep thinking about the fact that he was a good man. That's not a rhetorical concession. It's the load-bearing fact of the whole thing. A cynical man couldn't have done what Junior did

because a cynical man wouldn't have gone to Colorado, wouldn't have gone down the mine shafts, wouldn't have danced with the wives, wouldn't have meant it. The apparatus only worked because the man at the center of it was sincere. That's what made it new, and that's what made it copyable. And every corporation in America has been running some version of it ever since. Ludlow is why we have public relations. That's the real inheritance. A company killed 13 women and children in a hole in the ground in Colorado. And the response wasn't simply to hide it or to lie about it,

though there was some of both. The response was to build a permanent profession whose job is managing what the public believes about power. And it worked so well that 110 years later, I had to go find a granite marker in a field in Los Animas County to tell you that any of it happened. And the last thing, which I can't stop thinking about. When the Rockefeller Foundation was proposed in 1913,

the United States Congress refused to charter it, on the grounds that a perpetual private institution controlled by one family, with more money than the government could match, and no accountability to anyone, was a danger to the country. But they weren't entirely right. That institution helped end hookworm and yellow fever, and it saved a number of lives. They weren't entirely wrong either.

Some of that money built the laboratories in Berlin and Munich, where the science that justified the sterilization law was done. And Congress couldn't have imagined that particular outcome, and neither could junior. And that's exactly the problem those congressmen were pointing at. And nobody voted for any of it. Before I let you go, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts,

please take a second and leave a rating and a review. If you're on Spotify, drop a rating and leave a comment, because I do read them. Tell me what you thought about the Rockefellers or about anything else I've covered on this show. And if there's a story you think I ought to be digging into, scroll down to the show notes for this episode, and you'll find a button that lets you leave me a voicemail. Push it and tell me about it. And if talking into your phone isn't your thing, my email is Brian at paranormalworldproductions.com. and that comes straight to me.

I've said before, the best episodes of this show start with somebody telling me about something I had never heard of. Until next time, remember that the people who write the history are usually the ones who could afford to. Your scoff course, phone is out.