Oh Boy A Half

 

My little one needed to do a report on one of a short list of late nineteenth century industrial magnates and decide whether the person was a robber baron or a philanthropist.  We talked aloud about Carnegie and Vanderbilt and Pierpont Morgan, all of whom have let their mark in the greater New York area.  And we also talked about John D. Rockefeller.  I shared the infamous exchange which to my mind summed up his whole persona: “Mr. Rockefeller, how much is enough?”  To which he is supposed to have replied: “One more.”

Today she returned to inform me that she’d decided to look at John D.  And she wanted to argue that he was both a robber baron and a philanthropist.  And she was having trouble finding evidence that he had been unfair to his work force.  This surprised me.  Without knowing anything I assumed that the record was replete with stories of strikes broken and workers forced to toil for a pittance.   “There you see.”  A quick search and I found something about the Ludlow Massacre of 1914.  “Yeah, I saw that too.  But it’s John Jnr.  It’s not the guy I’m writing about.”  And of course, she was right. 

 

Somewhere around the house.  There, finally in the bedroom of all places I found the old-but-gold counterpoint to the standard American History narrative, “A People’s History of the United States,” by Howard Zinn and suggested she look in the index for John D.  “Trust me anything you find about the man in this book will not be salutatory.”    And, as I looked myself it was interesting to see that the main critique of John D’s practices had more to do with his strong arm business tactics competing upstream, downstream to completely dominate the value chain, and less to do with his crushing his employees, the way, say, Carnegie did. 

My stepdad is a ninety-two year-old adolescent today.  He’s turned another globe spin at the end of March and I gave my father who’s a decade behind him earlier this month, and he the same gift this year:  “Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps.”  If ever a book review sold a tomb, it was this one, by Jenny Uglow (the British biographer who’s name sounds beautiful if pronounced ‘you-glow’ and rather less so if it is pronounced ug-low) in this month’s New York Review of Books.   A book-man, certainly, my father loved it.  And as hoped my stepdad must have said “oh boy” a half a dozen times this morning, when I called him and asked him what he thought. 

Wednesday, 03/31/21