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Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. By Ron Chernow. Random House. 774 pages. $30.
He may be the most hated, envied, reviled man in American history. Until recently he also was the richest man in American history, but he's been outstripped by Bill Gates, who has become literally "richer than Rockefeller," and whose career, and the controversies it's provoked, parallel in intriguing ways Rockefeller's own.
In the mid-1890s, when the average weekly wage was less than $10, John D. Rockefeller was earning $10 million a year from his holdings in Standard Oil, the nation's richest monopoly. This in a time when petroleum's principal product was kerosene, for illumination.
When he retired in the early 1900s, Rockefeller (who was born in 1839, under the presidency of Martin Van Buren, and lived to be almost 98, into Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term) was worth around $200 million, the equivalent of $3.5 billion today. Thanks to the internal combustion engine and the advent of the automobile, by 1913 his fortune had multiplied five times making his perhaps the richest retirement in history.
He remains America's foremost philanthropist,...