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Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. By Ron Chernow New York, Random House, 1998. xxii + 774 pp. Bibliography, illustrations, index, notes, and photographs. $30.00. ISBN 0679438084.
Reviewed by Kenneth Warren
To undertake a scholarly study of the almost one hundred year life of the creator of one of the world's biggest companies requires some hardihood. When the scope of the research must extend to the ways in which a personal fortune was used for the wider human good, as well as cover the life of a large and diverse family, the task becomes even more daunting. Given his previous prize-winning studies of the Morgans and the Warburgs, no one was better equipped to meet such challenges than Ron Chernow. Once again, he has succeeded brilliantly.
In a short foreword and a pithy "prelude," Chernow carefully sets out his aims. He points out that previous biographers of Rockefeller have been preoccupied with either execrating him or attempting to vindicate him, as with Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell on the one hand, and Allan Nevins on the other. Nevins' books were the last major studies, and research for them was undertaken sixty years ago. Another reason why a balanced assessment of Rockefeller's character never appeared was that those who studied him were diverted from biography into detailed considerations of his company. As a result, Rockefeller "seems to be missing from his own biographies" and to be "a shorthand for Standard Oil" (p. viii). In this biography, Rockefeller's childhood and maturity, his business career and family life, and his almost forty years of retirement are woven together so effectively that the whole story unfolds smoothly before the reader.
Chernow provides new insights into the business history of the mushrooming petroleum industry of the late nineteenth century. He exposes the explosive nature of the relationship between oil producers and those who, through refining, transportation, and marketing, effectively controlled the whole industry. Chernow examines the notorious episode of the (inappropriately named) South Improvement Company of 1871-72 in which collusion with three main railroad...