How could this pious man, who invented modern institutional philanthropy and lived according to the strictest rules of church attendance, abstinence, hard work and charitable giving, at the same time have conducted his business affairs with utter ruthlessness? Ron Chernow’s fascinating biography explores all three sides of John D. Rockefeller Sr.’s life–personal, business, philanthropic–and remains puzzled by this inconsistency. All the way through the book, he chews at the problem. I offer a lesson of history: Fanatic piety may condone evil means.
As a boy, Rockefeller was taught in a one-room country schoolhouse. At 16, he found a job as bookkeeper with a firm of merchants. He applied unceasing energy to his affairs. “Work enchanted him, work liberated him, work supplied him with a new identity,” Mr. Chernow writes. One day, Rockefeller said to an older businessman, “I am bound to be rich–bound to be rich– bound to be rich! ”
From the first, he gave generously to charity, even when he had very little money himself. At 20, he gave away more than 10 percent of his income, including a gift to a black man in Cincinnati to buy his wife out of slavery. When he joined the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church in Cleveland, he helped sweep out the halls, usher worshipers to their seats and wash the windows. He attended Friday-evening prayer meetings and two services on Sunday. He abhorred drink, dancing, cards and theater.
John D.’s father, William A. (“Big Bill” or “Devil Bill”) Rockefeller, was a flimflam artist who wandered widely, selling cancer cures and other nostrums from a cart. He offered women berries resembling pills, warning them that abortion might result if they were pregnant, which stimulated sales. In due course, Big Bill married devout,. abstentious Eliza Davison and moved her in with his housekeeper-mistress, the beauteous Nancy Brown. The two women started having children in alternation. John D. was born on July 8, 1839, in a bedroom measuring 8-by-10 feet. Big Bill soon began living a double life as “Doc” William Levingston. Under that handle, he married a sweet 17-year-old girl, Margaret Allen, and thereafter wandered irregularly from one family to another.
In his latter years, John D. disavowed his father completely. So perhaps his stern rigor was in reaction to his father’s wicked ways. One can sum up the business side of Rockefeller’s career by observing that in the early 1880’s, the Standard Oil Company refined and transported 85 percent of America’s oil, used as kerosene for illumination, not only for America and Europe, but also for China, Japan and India. In the next decade, Standard Oil entered oil production, attaining a third of U.S. output. How was this possible? Mr. Chernow explains in great detail. Rockefeller was a business genius, although his methods were more than rapacious. Starting in 1879, “Rockefeller began a 30-year career as a fugitive from justice”–i.e. process-servers and Congressional summonses.
Mr. Chernow has examined 20,000 pages of letters to Rockefeller from his associates. They were much less discreet than John D. himself, who was careful not to put things to paper that might be used later in court. As a result, transactions can be documented that once were only suspected. Mr. Chernow says that “he and Standard Oil entered willingly into a staggering amount of corruption,” and that “his correspondence implicates him directly in this skullduggery.” Here, for example, is U.S. Senator John Newlon Camden writing to Rockefeller’s associate, Henry Morrison Flagler: “Politics is dearer than it used to be–and my understood connection with the Standard Oil Co. don’t tend to cheapen it –as we are all supposed to have bushels.” He asked for “$10,000 in some turn–stocks or oil.” On another occasion, he wrote, “I have arranged to kill the two bills in Md. legislature at comparatively small expense.”
Another Rockefeller business tactic was extorting rebates from the railroads that carried his oil, to the amazing point of getting kickbacks on oil shipped by other producers! This, of course, made it inordinately difficult for them to compete. For long the rebates and kickbacks were hidden, although widely suspected. Finally, it all emerged in court and in legislative reports. A New York State Assembly hearing revealed that Rockefeller had extracted 6,000 secret contracts from the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad and similar ones from the New-York and Erie Railroad. In 1907, Standard Oil was fined about half a billion in today’s dollars. A series of extremely hostile exposés inflamed the public. Rockefeller received a blizzard of death threats, and Teddy Roosevelt took an ax to the enterprise.
On the good side, John D. built large enough refineries to make much cheaper kerosene; during Standard’s reign the price dropped substantially. The oil refining and shipping business had been composed of inefficient units, which Rockefeller gobbled up, sometimes by ruining them, thus bringing order to the industry.
By his 50’s, Rockefeller had become so enormously wealthy that more money meant nothing to him. In today’s money, his dividends reached about a billion tax-free dollars a year. To reach that figure after tax would now require capital of perhaps $40 billion. Since he was also able to pass on what he wanted to his offspring without estate tax, in effective terms his capital would be double that, so he was vastly richer than any American of our time. He began to give away huge sums, following these donations with the same minute attention that he had given to the business. He was inundated by requests. After the announcement of one large educational gift, he received 15,000 letters in a week and 50,000 by the end of the month!
Now let’s turn a little darker.
Here are the “conspiracy theories” (or is that “conspiracy facts”?) posted by Wikipedia:
The Rockefellers have long been associated with the idea of a secret world government, New World Order, or One World Order, through institutions such as the Trilateral Commission, which was founded by David Rockefeller to facilitate international economic cooperation and having lots of fancy foreign conferences. Other secretive institutions like the Bilderberg Group are often implicated.[5]
One of the first conspiracy theorists was Emanuel Josephson in Rockefeller: “Internationalist”: The Man Who Misrules The World in 1952.[2]Gary Allen‘s 1976 book The Rockefeller File is a detailed attack on the family and their supposed internationalist conspiracy.[6] He accuses the Rockefellers of manipulating tax law so they can donate money to trusts and avoid tax but retain control over it.[6]
They are also accused of being part of a Roman Catholic conspiracy against American Protestantism and freedom of religion, being supposedly the descendants of the Jesuit Roggenfelder family who fled Germany in one of the country’s periodic outbursts of anti-Catholicism.[7] This is despite the fact that most sources say William Sr. and his family were Protestant.[1] But theorists like to claim the Rockefellers lied about their religion.[7]
In 2015, David light-heartedly confirmed the conspiracy theories, saying he had indeed been working for increased international cooperation all his life.[3]
The facts are these. In 1908 following various financial crises, Congress passed the Aldrich-Vreeland Act to examine banking, and Senate Republican leader Nelson Aldrich led the inquiry, meeting with representatives of prominent banks including J P Morgan, National City Bank of New York, and Kuhn Loeb & Co. The National City Bank of New York in particular was closely linked to the Rockefellers, but the Rockefellers also did a lot of business with J P Morgan (which also funded Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad), and John D. Rockefeller Jr was married to Aldrich’s daughter Abigail. Aldrich’s inquiry led to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the subsequent establishment of regional Federal Reserve banks, of which the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was most powerful. The Rockefellers were also major shareholders of the Equitable Trust Company, which merged with Chase National Bank in 1930. Everything was quite closely interrelated.
Conspiracy theorist also point to the role of the Rockefellers in the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, which was initially founded to handle Germany’s World War I reparations, but now “fosters international monetary and financial cooperation and serves as a bank for central banks”[9][10]. Gates McGarrah formerly of Chase Manhattan/Chase National Bank and the Federal Reserve was its first President. By the way, McGarrah’s grandson Richard McGarrah Helms was a senior official at the CIA at the time of John F. Kennedy‘s assassination. Needless to say, the Rockefellers have also been linked vaguely to amorphous Kennedy assassination conspiracies.[11]
The Rockefellers have been accused of using their donations to medical charities such as the Institute for Medical Research (now the Rockefeller University in New York) to promote conventional (i.e., scientific, evidence-based) medicine, aid Big Pharma in world domination, and crush alternative medicine.[2][12]
David Rockefeller of the Chase National Bank was supposedly one of the earliest advocates of building the World Trade Center in New York.[11]
The two towers of the World Trade Centre, destroyed in the 9/11 attacks, were supposedly nicknamed David and Nelson after the Rockefeller brothers.[7] And after the towers were destroyed they took revenge or something.
What does it all mean? Who knows? But it must mean something…
The Rockefellers are often accused of corrupt business practices, abusing their monopoly position, etc.[2] This may have more merit than any of the other theories here, and it’s clear that American business has often involved a small group of enormously powerful people scheming together to make as much money as possible. It’s called capitalism.
And obviously the Rockefellers invented the Zika virus and are using it to kill people. Apparently the Rockefellers have provided funding to an organisation called the American Type Culture Collection which sells biological preparations and offers freeze-dried Zika virus agent to reputable researchers.[13][14]
For every second in David Rockefeller’s long life, he’s been one of the wealthiest human beings on the planet. Like the devil in the song by the Rolling Stones, he has always been a man of wealth and taste. Growing up in a nine-story house full of Renaissance treasures doesn’t make a normal child. If he were ever elected president of the United States of America, it would be a demotion.
David Rockefeller is a grandson of America’s first billionaire, John Davison Rockefeller. He died in 2017, at the age of 101.
Because of his tremendous fortune and influence, David Rockefeller is at the forefront of the minds of every conspiracy theorist. He’s even has a character on the hit cartoon show, The Simpsons, that for all the world seems to be modeled after him (Mr. Burns).
It is impossible to imagine walking a mile in his shoes. But how can we be so quick to judge a life most of us could never begin to comprehend? Read on for more facts that make it exceedingly easy to dislike such a person.
David Rockefeller: Traitor to the US, His Nation of Birth
What is David Rockefeller worth? You will find many *cough* “official statements” on seemingly reputable websites that cite an obscene number, but you shouldn’t believe it because the real number won’t be found.
Call it a “404 page not found” error if you like, but David’s grandfather was the first billionaire in America, and if you know how “it takes money to make money,” then you know the official numbers are just bunk junk for public consumption. If you were one of the wealthiest men on the planet, then you would surely prefer that people believe that Bill Gates is worth more than you, and you’d only leave a trail for a very small portion of your wealth. This is what David Rockefeller has done.
He was rumored to be worth over a trillion dollars, but Wikipedia says he’s worth only $2.9 billion, which is a number so ridiculously low one has to wonder if the person who put it there knows how to balance their own bank account. Wikipedia is terrific for facts, but only if they fit the agendas of the global oligarchy.
How much money did John Davison Rockefeller have? Well, according to “politically correct” sources on what is really controlled information on the internet, David Rockefeller’s grandfather had just $1 billion (adjusted for inflation, that amount today would be $318.3 billion). Large sums of his fortune were donated to causes like medical research, but to assume that David Rockefeller inherited less than $3 billion from his grandfather would be rather silly.
Why Do So Many People Believe David Rockefeller Was Evil?
Are we or are we not seeing a global economic crisis? I think we can all agree that we are seeing just that, and those who secretly control the flow of money are not acting in the best interest of the public. David Rockefeller was a huge part of virtually every secret organization of ultra rich on the planet. What did he do to make it a better place?
If you know who a person’s friends are, you can then tell what sort of person he is. David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger have been very close friends since they first met in 1954. Why do people consider Henry Kissinger to be so evil? Answer that one, and you’ll know the same thing is true about Rockefeller. Despite the huge international influence Kissinger has wielded over the past several decades, even more was wielded by David Rockefeller.
So why do people hate David Rockefeller? A terrific answer would be because he hated us, wanted global governance, and was actively pursuing whatever evil he thinks needs doing in order to make that happen.
While only purposeful ignorance or stupidity could lead one to be satisfied with the current state of affairs in Washington D.C., most people still very much love this country. Only terrific strain and sorrow would force citizens submit to any outside governance, but David Rockefeller’s life has been dedicated towards such ends. People are right to have and to hold total hatred for Mr. David Rockefeller’s actions on planet Earth, and especially in regards to his nation of birth.
David Rockefeller: Staunch Backer of Global Government
David Rockefeller: A Life of Deceit and Dishonor
We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination [democracy] practiced in past centuries.”
—David Rockefeller in June 5, 1991 at the Bilderberger meeting in Baden Baden, Germany (a meeting also attended by then-Governor Bill Clinton.
Friend with Bill Clinton, what more to you need to know?
Join the conversation!
Please share your thoughts about this article below. We value your opinions, and would love to see you add to the discussion!