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Titan:
The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
By Ron Chernow
Random House. 774p $30
Americans have rarely made heroes of their businessmen, and "John D.," as Rockefeller was widely known, is no exception. Prominent public figures said he belonged in jail, and an eminent clergyman urged a missionary association to return $100,000 of his "tainted money." The muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell read moral degeneracy into his alopecia, the appearance-altering disease that rendered Rockefeller totally hairless after 1901. "It is this puff ness [of his cheeks], this unclean flesh, which repels," she concluded her expose in McClure's of Standard Oil, "as the thin slit of a mouth terrifies."
A minority, increasing over the years, saw a different Rockefeller. Winston Churchill termed Rockefeller's medical philanthropies a "milestone" in human progress. "Glorious old John D.... [is] a most lovable person," wrote the philosopher William James, though he also knew that there was more to it, marveling that Rockefeller could be at once "so strongly bad and strongly good a human being." Ron Chernow, author of prize-winning studies of The House of Morgan (1990) and The Warburgs (1993), likewise concludes that the Titan was a complex amalgam of "godliness and greed, passion and fiendish cunning," neither to be understood without the other.
Rockefeller's parents, in Chernow's telling, provide the key to these apparent contradictions. His mother, Eliza Davison, instilled religion and devotion to duty. His flamboyant, philandering father moved in a girlfriend as "housekeeper" soon after...