--- title: "The Rockefeller Empire: A Dynasty That Built America" description: "They are among the most powerful families in American history, a generations-long dynasty that defined what it means to be an oil baron, and accrued so much wealth that its actual value has never been precisely defined. Through well over a century of ravenous, cunning capitalistic expansion, the Rockefeller family has remained atop the pyramid in the United States, while standing alongside the richest and most powerful families of the entire world. They've been a force in geopolitics, in higher education, in the highest offices of the US government, and in waves of innovation, conservation, and exploitation, all depending on where you look. Through it all, they've proven remarkably able to maintain and grow their fortunes in good times and bad, and to ensure that the Rockefellers will remain a global force in the decades, and perhaps even centuries, to come.\n\nThis isn't a story about a single building or a single machine. It's the story of the megaproject that has consumed one American family for generations upon generations: a grand business empire that's just as virile today as it's ever been.\n\n## Origins: From a Normandy Castle to Michigan Hill\n\nThe Rockefeller family has an exceptionally long history, one in which some degree of wealth can be traced all the way back to the year 1090, when one Antoine de Raymond Roquefeuille, an ancestor of the modern-day family, owned a massive castle estate in Normandy and gathered enough apparent influence that he even minted his own currency. But the Rockefeller line that would come to dominate the American economy traces its financial roots to a far more recent ancestor: Johann Peter Rockefeller, who immigrated to the United States from Germany in about 1723. Settling in what is today known as Hunterdon County, New Jersey, Johann put down roots in the then-colonial mid-Atlantic region, where the family empire would first germinate and then propagate itself over the coming centuries. In their early years, the American Rockefellers in and around New Jersey served in each major war of the period, and developed their influence as plantation owners and landholders in the area.\n\nOne of Johann's descendants, his grandson, was one Godfrey Lewis Rockefeller, who, as many historical sources have noted, is really not the guy you'd expect to be grandfather to the richest American in history. Described by one biographer as having had \"a stunted, impoverished look and a hangdog air of perpetual defeat,\" Godfrey was a farmer, a mostly unsuccessful businessman, and a real lover of the drink, who had tried for years to make his fortune in New York. As one family legend tells it, Godfrey may have lost his farm, or been convinced to trade it for a much worse one for whatever reason, then resolved to move his family by Conestoga wagon to Michigan. Finally giving up in the wilderness of upstate New York, he declared, \"this is as close as we shall ever get to Michigan,\" and named the wagon's resting spot Michigan Hill.\n\n## \"Devil Bill\" and a Crash Course in Cheating\n\nIf Godfrey Lewis Rockefeller was the somewhat goofy, albeit well-intentioned patriarch who led his family off into the forest, then it was his eldest son and third child overall, William Avery Rockefeller, better known as Bill, who would bridge the gap between Godfrey and the Rockefeller riches of the following generations. Bill, too, was far from the sort of person one might imagine when trying to picture John D. Rockefeller's dear old dad. Known later in life as \"Devil Bill,\" the elder Rockefeller was a con artist who got his start as a street peddler selling potions, pills, and elixirs that simply didn't work. Frequently, he would claim to be both deaf and mute, or insist he had credentials as a so-called \"botanic physician.\" Charismatic, convincing, and seemingly quite unapologetic about his roguery, Bill was able to amass a good deal of personal capital, helped along by his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy farmer, a daughter he had also conned with the whole deaf-and-dumb routine, but gotten to marry him regardless.\n\nThe couple would have six children, of whom the second and third were names you might recognize today: John Davison Rockefeller Sr., yes, *the* John Rockefeller, and his younger brother, William Avery Rockefeller Jr. The two future oil magnates didn't grow up in a happy home. Devil Bill was rarely on the premises and frequently in trouble, while their mother, by all accounts, seemed to deeply regret her decision to marry him. But the two young men also got one hell of a crash course in business, courtesy of the same hustler who'd brought them into the world.\n\nDevil Bill's teachings were not the ones you'd expect to find at a renowned business school. As Bill himself once told a neighbor, \"I do business deals with my sons, and I always try to cheat them to make them sharp.\" One of his most common tricks was to lend them money at an interest rate, go away for a bit, then show up suddenly and demand immediate payment in full, plus the accrued interest. If the boys were going to accept the money at all, it wasn't enough to just avoid spending it in case their father returned; they had to grow it, or else it wasn't worth taking their father's loans in the first place. As they grew older, they kept accepting the loans, and they eventually figured out how to have Devil Bill's money waiting when he came calling. As John D. Rockefeller would tell it later in life, \"I had a peculiar training in my home. It seemed to be a business training from the beginning.\"\n\nThe boys' relationship with their father would always be strained, but before long it changed in a way that could not be recovered. In 1849, Devil Bill was indicted for the rape of the family's maid, and fled his jurisdiction, leaving his sons behind to face the brunt of the humiliation. Over the next decades, Devil Bill would pose for years as a traveling doctor, while his sons, mostly out of contact, would claw their way up through the muck their father had dragged them into. Through the early 1900s, Devil Bill and his sons never publicly acknowledged each other's existence, clearing the way for the Rockefeller reputation to develop without the family's true patriarch playing any role at all.\n\n## The Birth of Standard Oil\n\nEven by the time Devil Bill skipped town, the Rockefeller boys had started picking up real business acumen. Using their father's lessons on accrued interest, they began loaning sums to locals and collecting on the interest they received back. Using their mother Eliza's lessons, they developed an acute awareness of the importance of saving, and of putting aside sums for charitable donation. John picked up an education at Owego Academy, a well-regarded secondary school in New York, and then at Cleveland's Central High School, the first free public high school established west of the Allegheny Mountains. He trained as a bookkeeper, and put aside dreams of a career in music to work at a produce commission firm in Cleveland, where he learned the ins and outs of commercial transportation well enough to play the whole system and get his firm lower prices.\n\nBefore long, Rockefeller chose to go into business for himself, with two partners who hoped to start a produce commission business of their own. To do it, Rockefeller pooled his own savings of $1,000, plus another thousand he borrowed from his not-quite-fully-estranged father. He brought his younger brother William on board, and together, the Rockefeller boys and their crew netted significant and rapidly expanding profits. As is the case in countless stories of business success, timing was everything; two years after their business started up, so did the Civil War, where their produce supply was desperately in need on the front lines. Neither John nor William would ever see combat, hiring substitute soldiers to go in their place, but their product would be present all up and down the Union lines.\n\nThe company did fantastic business over the course of the war, and with all that capital, the Rockefellers and their main partners, one Maurice B. Clark and his two brothers, started a new partnership with a chemist who was operating an oil refinery. Oil was in high demand during the war, with prices increasing exponentially, and the Rockefellers and the Clarks added a critical, previously missing business acumen to their partner Samuel Andrews' operation. The crew got in on the early days of the oil boom, and by the time the Civil War ended in 1865, they had diversified their business to the point that they were sure to survive even after their lucrative wartime contracts were canceled. By then, John D. had married his lifelong partner, Laura Spelman, whom he would regard for decades as a woman of fantastic judgment and business insight. In 1867, John Rockefeller was able to outbid the Clark brothers for ownership of the oil business. With a bid of $72,500, Rockefeller gained sole practical control, and two years later the Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler company was born. Three years after that, it would get a new name, one that has echoed through American history ever since: Standard Oil.\n\n## The Oil Barons\n\nBy the time Standard Oil came into being, the Rockefeller brothers and their associates were already setting themselves apart in the oil industry. They'd opened an office in New York to control the flow of their oil overseas, they were aggressive in borrowing and reinvesting money wherever they could, and they made sure to use their own waste and capture excess gas rather than let it go unused, as many firms of the time did. Perhaps it's more a statement on just how young the oil industry was than how incredible the Rockefeller operation was, but by the time they became the Standard Oil Company, they were already the largest refinery in the world. They were rich beyond their wildest dreams; they could have lived very comfortably even if they'd left the business entirely. But cashing out didn't seem to be on anybody's mind.\n\nJust after the incorporation of Standard Oil, the Rockefellers started making bigger and bigger plays for control of the market. In 1871, Standard Oil joined a handful of America's biggest refineries in a secret deal with the kingpins of the railroad industry. Together, the two industries would conspire to give the largest oil refineries a premium on transport costs for their product, while raising prices on smaller, more independent refineries so high that their businesses would be throttled in the process. Every time one of those smaller organizations folded, Rockefeller was right there to buy them out. In one instance known as the Cleveland Massacre, Rockefeller purchased 20 Cleveland oil companies in the span of just one month in 1872. By the end of this Rockefeller-led exercise in industrial cannibalism, Standard Oil controlled 25% of the entire American oil supply. The deal between the refineries and the railroads wouldn't survive the era, dissolved amid massive public backlash against Standard Oil's actions, but that was just one casualty from Standard's carnage. The other, more important casualty was the oil industry itself, which had now given way to a company marching toward monopoly status.\n\nFrom there, the Rockefellers did what they'd now established as their standard practice: they reinvested their earnings and expanded outward yet again. Before long they'd put refineries into New York and Pennsylvania, even acquiring one of their largest competitors just years after that rival had been instrumental in the breakup of the rail-and-oil cartel. Meanwhile, they expanded oil access to the middle and lower classes, raising the standard of living across America while vastly increasing demand for their own product. Buying out the competition became easier and easier; now, rivals who got a quick glance at Rockefeller's internal numbers quickly realized they had no hope of survival if he decided to make them a target. Instead, they became more and more eager to take Rockefeller up on his buyout offers while they still existed.\n\nEven as he pruned away the rest of the oil industry around Standard, John Rockefeller didn't publicly express any interest in forming a monopoly. Rightly or wrongly, he seemed to believe that new competitors would always rise up to fill the void where others had withered away or been consumed. He described himself as an \"angel of mercy\" toward the oil industry, an embodiment of business Darwinism in which the strong absorbed the weak and made even them richer, but as refinery operators rather than business owners. His business absorbed not just other oil companies, but the companies that allowed the oil industry to function, be it in manufacturing, transportation, or anything else. In 1882, the Rockefellers and their expanding network of allies formed the Standard Oil Trust, which had the capability to completely manage every element of Standard's business from oil drilling to sales of a final product.\n\n## The Trust, Antitrust, and the Richest Man in History\n\nTo get this far, the Rockefeller family had survived intense attacks from the press for a span of decades, a process that took a toll on John D. personally. Building the Standard Oil Trust had been a mess of PR nightmares and unrelenting legal battles. In the words of the New York World newspaper, Standard Oil was \"the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country.\" In 1890, Rockefeller and the rest of the trust watched nervously as the Sherman Antitrust Act passed through Congress and became the first American federal legislation to limit the growth and reach of monopolies. It would take sixteen years for the US government to wade through the muck and the legal obstructionism before President Teddy Roosevelt's administration finally brought the law to bear against two dozen companies, of which Standard Oil was presented as America's biggest, baddest trust, most desperately in need of dissolution. One Ida Tarbell would play an outsize role in the effort; her book, *The History of the Standard Oil Company*, brought to light decades of shady business practices and disdain for the law. But by then, the Rockefellers had spent decades in nearly full control of the American oil industry, collecting unbelievable profits in the intervening time. When Standard Oil was eventually forced to break up into 33 independent companies, John D. would remain a major stockholder in all of them, a move that ended his trust but led to yet another exponential expansion of his personal wealth.\n\nBy the time Standard Oil was broken up, it had had an incredible cumulative effect on the industries of the world. It had driven the creation and trading of oil futures on the National Petroleum Exchange, it had assumed control over 20,000 American wells and a hundred thousand employees, and it had kicked off a global wave of oil production in Europe, Asia, and then-Imperial Russia. Standard had worked its way into the European market, started producing American natural gas, and led the way into providing gasoline for automobiles, making up for the loss of profits on kerosene from when oil lamps had been replaced by lightbulbs. The Rockefellers had expanded into iron ore production, kicking off a long few years of public competition with the Carnegie business empire. William Rockefeller had long since diversified into copper, where he continued to earn massive sums and eventually formed the Mutual Alliance Trust Company. The family's oil companies, following the breakup of Standard Oil, would evolve into ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Pennzoil, and other modern, globally dominant companies. By 1913, John D. Rockefeller's personal fortune would make up nearly three percent of the United States' entire gross domestic product. By that metric, he was the richest man in US history, and he's widely regarded as the richest person, by proportion of global wealth, in the history of the modern world.\n\n## After John D.: A Family Reinvents Itself\n\nOf course, John D. Rockefeller's personal dominance over the oil industry couldn't last forever. By the late 1900s, he was stepping back from business and focusing more on philanthropic efforts across the United States. He founded the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research in New York City, which has since grown into the graduate-only Rockefeller University; the work done in those labs would cure meningitis, identify the purpose of DNA, and make many other critical contributions to global health. Rockefeller invested his money heavily into education and medicine, and in 1913 he created the Rockefeller Foundation with an initial investment of $100 million, which today is equivalent to several billion dollars. The organizations the Rockefellers founded and funded would go on to nearly eradicate hookworm and yellow fever from the United States. Rockefeller himself would die in May of 1937 at the age of 97, long after he had personally finished his work.\n\nBy then, the Rockefeller empire and the family fortune had passed down to the control of John D.'s only son and youngest child overall, John Jr. The younger John never assumed full control of Standard Oil, but he played an outsize role in company affairs throughout his life, working largely as a manager of the Rockefeller fortune, including in support of his father's philanthropic efforts. He gained notoriety for his involvement in the organized-labor disputes leading to 1914's Ludlow Massacre, in which militiamen fired upon striking workers at a Rockefeller-controlled company in an incident that saw many women and children killed by fire while trying to take shelter. But despite this black mark on the Rockefeller name, John Jr. proved to be a competent steward for his family.\n\n## Two Policies That Kept the Fortune\n\nIt was during this time that the Rockefellers established two policies that would define their fortune for years to come. One was to keep control of the family fortune in the hands of its male members, despite the outsize influence of John Jr.'s mother and his own wife, each of whom would likely have been more than competent enough to manage the fortune if given the opportunity. Instead, they each received allowances from the male members of the family, even on occasions, like that of John Jr., where it meant that the family's only boy and youngest child would gain stewardship of the finances of all four of his older sisters.\n\nThe other decision was perhaps the key reason the Rockefellers have kept, or even grown, their fortune while other Gilded Age-era families have lost theirs: their decision to keep a majority of their wealth not just locked away in a trust, but managed by a committee of professional money managers. The Rockefellers do get a say in how that money is managed, but the day-to-day minutiae of the family fortune are left to the most highly competent people the family can find, rather than being squandered by the family's second and third generations of heirs. The family's total net worth, as well as the personal wealth of its members, has long since been obscured from public view, to the point that independent researchers have not been able to establish any reliable estimates on the family fortune for nearly a century.\n\nIn the years John Jr. spent at the head of his family, the Rockefellers were responsible for the construction of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, a lifeline for 75,000 New York families during the Great Depression. The family established the United Service Organizations, or USO, an aid agency for US military members and their dependents, during the height of World War II. The family donated the plot of land where the United Nations headquarters now sits, a move that single-handedly brought UN headquarters to New York City. They spearheaded the construction of low-income housing all across New York. The family's trust holdings would merge with Chase National Bank, which would later evolve into the modern JPMorgan Chase, while the 1920s-era Dunbar National Bank in Harlem would briefly be New York's most prominent bank run by Black Americans. John Jr. would play an outsize role in the widespread growth and adoption of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, in the birth-control activism of Margaret Sanger, and in the purchase and donation of countless square miles of land for the benefit of America's National Parks. According to some tellings, the life's work of John Jr. was a rehabilitation effort, looking to slowly but surely resuscitate the Rockefeller name after the excesses and corporate destruction of his father's era. Whether or not that was his intention, it was certainly his impact; while the high controversies of the prior decades weren't forgotten, they were relegated to history all the same.\n\n## A Family in Public Life\n\nIn the years to follow, a number of Rockefellers would rise to prominence across the United States. Nelson Rockefeller, son of John Jr., was Governor of New York for well over a decade, served in undersecretary positions under three US presidents, and was Vice President of the United States under Gerald Ford, following three unsuccessful attempts to run for the Republican nomination for President. Nelson's brother, Winthrop Rockefeller, would serve as Governor of Arkansas, while his nephew John D. Rockefeller IV would serve first as governor of West Virginia, and then as Senator from the state for a total of twenty years. Another of the brothers, Laurance Rockefeller, played a key role in investing in Apple and Intel, while David Rockefeller was critical to the merger between Chase Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company, as well as in the construction of the original World Trade Center. Other members of the family would become leaders in business and philanthropy, and at times they'd disengage themselves from family matters entirely in order to pursue their private lives in peace. No matter who they became or what they did, they maintained access to the vast Rockefeller fortune, although how much of it they could access, and how much they'd ultimately enjoy, may never be publicly known.\n\n## The Modern-Day Dynasty\n\nThe modern-day Rockefeller family stretches across several generations and a wide radius of states within the continental United States. The total sum of their wealth, while still unknown, is believed to be far beyond the publicly known estimates of the family's net worth, which today typically coalesce around a figure of eight to nine billion dollars. The family still continues to receive honors across New York, Washington DC, and the rest of the United States, and the family's most recently deceased patriarch, David Rockefeller, is believed to have given just about $900 million in charitable donations over the course of his life, until his death in 2017. Today, the Rockefeller most likely to be described as its patriarch is David Jr., but the fortune itself is believed to exist outside the authority of any individual Rockefeller.\n\nToday, members of the family are patrons of the arts, investors in scientific research, leaders in business and entrepreneurship, and trustees in all manner of enterprise, academia, and conservation. Perhaps the family's greatest asset today, besides the fortune itself, is the incredible amount of personal connections they claim all up and down American and global industry. The modern-day Rockefellers have ties with just about anybody who's anybody, and a family-name credibility that's just about unmatched in modern American society.\n\n## Divesting From the Source\n\nOf all the Rockefeller family's modern contributions, perhaps none has been so influential as the decision the family's foundation made in late 2020 to completely divest from fossil fuel holdings and end its future investment into the sector. The move was a seismic shift for the global divestment movement, with the Rockefeller Foundation becoming the largest American foundation, by far, to extricate itself from the influence of big energy companies. The fact that the Rockefeller fortune was quite literally built on oil, the same product from which the modern family has chosen to divest, has not been lost on anyone, and the move has been taken as an unmissable signal to powerful global investors that fossil fuels are no longer the future of American industry.\n\nIn the coming years, it's difficult to predict just what the Rockefeller Foundation, or the individual members of the family, are going to do with their fortune. But if one thing is clear, it's that the Rockefellers have already escaped the greatest pitfall of America's wealthiest historic families. They've managed to navigate through several generations of heirs without any person spending the fortune away or otherwise squandering the legacy left for them. Instead, riches gained via the monopolization of a late-1800s oil industry have carried the family through to the 21st century, in a legacy that seems to show zero signs of stopping anytime soon.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The Rockefeller financial line in America traces to Johann Peter Rockefeller, a German immigrant who arrived around 1723, but the fortune was forged by John D. Rockefeller Sr., son of the con artist \"Devil Bill.\"\n- John D. gained sole practical control of his oil business with a $72,500 bid in 1867, and by 1872 Standard Oil controlled 25% of the entire American oil supply.\n- After the Sherman Antitrust Act, Standard Oil was broken into 33 companies, but John D. held stock in all of them, and his fortune grew to nearly 3% of US GDP by 1913.\n- Two family policies preserved the wealth: keeping it under a trust managed by professional money managers, and concentrating control among male heirs.\n- The family reinvented its reputation through philanthropy, from the Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller University to Rockefeller Center, the USO, and the donated land for the UN headquarters.\n- In late 2020 the Rockefeller Foundation divested entirely from fossil fuels, the largest American foundation to do so, despite a fortune originally built on oil.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### Who was \"Devil Bill\" Rockefeller?\n\nWilliam Avery Rockefeller, known as \"Devil Bill,\" was the father of John D. Rockefeller Sr. He was a con artist who sold useless potions and pills as a street peddler, often pretending to be deaf and mute or claiming to be a \"botanic physician.\" He deliberately cheated his own sons in business deals to make them sharp, a brutal education John D. later credited as his training from the beginning.\n\n### How did John D. Rockefeller build Standard Oil into a monopoly?\n\nHe reinvested aggressively and used hardball tactics, including an 1871 secret deal with railroads that gave the biggest refineries cheap transport while throttling smaller rivals. As competitors folded, Rockefeller bought them out, purchasing 20 Cleveland oil companies in a single month in 1872 in what became known as the Cleveland Massacre. By 1882 the family formed the Standard Oil Trust, controlling every element of the business from drilling to final sale.\n\n### Why was Standard Oil broken up, and what happened to its pieces?\n\nThe Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was the first federal law limiting monopolies, and after sixteen years of legal battles the Roosevelt administration targeted Standard Oil as America's biggest trust. It was broken into 33 independent companies, though John D. remained a major stockholder in all of them. Those companies evolved into modern giants including ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Pennzoil.\n\n### How have the Rockefellers kept their fortune across generations?\n\nThe family adopted two key policies. They locked most of the wealth in a trust managed day-to-day by a committee of professional money managers rather than the heirs themselves, and they concentrated control among male family members who allocated allowances. This shielded the fortune from being squandered by later generations, a fate that befell many other Gilded Age families.\n\n### How rich was John D. Rockefeller?\n\nBy 1913, his personal fortune made up nearly three percent of the entire United States' gross domestic product. By that measure he was the richest man in US history, and he is widely regarded as the richest person, by proportion of global wealth, in the history of the modern world. The modern family's net worth is obscured but is publicly estimated around eight to nine billion dollars.\n\n### What did the Rockefeller Foundation do in 2020?\n\nIn late 2020, the Rockefeller Foundation committed to completely divesting from fossil fuel holdings and ending future investment in the sector. It became the largest American foundation by far to extricate itself from big energy companies, a striking move given that the family fortune was originally built on oil through Standard Oil.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original MegaProjects video: The Rockefeller Empire: The Dynasty That Changed America](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38_XxqE89q4)\n- [Rockefeller family | History & Today — Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rockefeller-family)\n- [Biography: John D. Rockefeller, Junior — PBS American Experience](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rockefellers-johnjr/)\n- [The Rockefeller Foundation Commits to Divesting From Fossil Fuels](https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/news/the-rockefeller-foundation-commits-to-divesting-from-fossil-fuels/)\n- [Our History — The Rockefeller Foundation](https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/about-us/our-history/)\n\n- [Hero image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panoramic_View_of_Standard_Oil_Company_at_Baton_Rouge,_Louisiana,_1916.jpg) by Baton Rouge Digital Archive / Wikimedia Commons (public domain), public domain.\n\n## Related Coverage\n\n- [33 Thomas Street: The Windowless Skyscraper Built to Survive the Apocalypse](/article/33-thomas-street-nsa-spy-hub)\n\n- [Ak Saray: Erdogan's Billion-Dollar Palace Built on Protected Land](/article/ak-saray-billion-dollar-palace)\n\n- [Istana Nurul Iman: The World's Largest Palace Is Also a Working Government](/article/istana-nurul-iman-largest-palace)" url: https://megaprojects.pub/article/rockefeller-empire-dynasty-standard-oil.md canonical: https://megaprojects.pub/article/rockefeller-empire-dynasty-standard-oil datePublished: 2026-06-09 dateModified: 2026-06-09 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://megaprojects.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: MegaProjects image: https://media.megaprojects.pub/articles/38_XxqE89q4/hero.jpg type: Article contentHash: 2a94a5303ef49a50e332ea65f62c997fd3ab9c4455c362927c5231f4db82d45f tokens: 7549 summaryUrl: https://megaprojects.pub/article/rockefeller-empire-dynasty-standard-oil.md.summary.md --- They are among the most powerful families in American history, a generations-long dynasty that defined what it means to be an oil baron, and accrued so much wealth that its actual value has never been precisely defined. Through well over a century of ravenous, cunning capitalistic expansion, the Rockefeller family has remained atop the pyramid in the United States, while standing alongside the richest and most powerful families of the entire world. They've been a force in geopolitics, in higher education, in the highest offices of the US government, and in waves of innovation, conservation, and exploitation, all depending on where you look. Through it all, they've proven remarkably able to maintain and grow their fortunes in good times and bad, and to ensure that the Rockefellers will remain a global force in the decades, and perhaps even centuries, to come. This isn't a story about a single building or a single machine. It's the story of the megaproject that has consumed one American family for generations upon generations: a grand business empire that's just as virile today as it's ever been. ## Origins: From a Normandy Castle to Michigan Hill The Rockefeller family has an exceptionally long history, one in which some degree of wealth can be traced all the way back to the year 1090, when one Antoine de Raymond Roquefeuille, an ancestor of the modern-day family, owned a massive castle estate in Normandy and gathered enough apparent influence that he even minted his own currency. But the Rockefeller line that would come to dominate the American economy traces its financial roots to a far more recent ancestor: Johann Peter Rockefeller, who immigrated to the United States from Germany in about 1723. Settling in what is today known as Hunterdon County, New Jersey, Johann put down roots in the then-colonial mid-Atlantic region, where the family empire would first germinate and then propagate itself over the coming centuries. In their early years, the American Rockefellers in and around New Jersey served in each major war of the period, and developed their influence as plantation owners and landholders in the area. One of Johann's descendants, his grandson, was one Godfrey Lewis Rockefeller, who, as many historical sources have noted, is really not the guy you'd expect to be grandfather to the richest American in history. Described by one biographer as having had "a stunted, impoverished look and a hangdog air of perpetual defeat," Godfrey was a farmer, a mostly unsuccessful businessman, and a real lover of the drink, who had tried for years to make his fortune in New York. As one family legend tells it, Godfrey may have lost his farm, or been convinced to trade it for a much worse one for whatever reason, then resolved to move his family by Conestoga wagon to Michigan. Finally giving up in the wilderness of upstate New York, he declared, "this is as close as we shall ever get to Michigan," and named the wagon's resting spot Michigan Hill. ## "Devil Bill" and a Crash Course in Cheating If Godfrey Lewis Rockefeller was the somewhat goofy, albeit well-intentioned patriarch who led his family off into the forest, then it was his eldest son and third child overall, William Avery Rockefeller, better known as Bill, who would bridge the gap between Godfrey and the Rockefeller riches of the following generations. Bill, too, was far from the sort of person one might imagine when trying to picture John D. Rockefeller's dear old dad. Known later in life as "Devil Bill," the elder Rockefeller was a con artist who got his start as a street peddler selling potions, pills, and elixirs that simply didn't work. Frequently, he would claim to be both deaf and mute, or insist he had credentials as a so-called "botanic physician." Charismatic, convincing, and seemingly quite unapologetic about his roguery, Bill was able to amass a good deal of personal capital, helped along by his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy farmer, a daughter he had also conned with the whole deaf-and-dumb routine, but gotten to marry him regardless. The couple would have six children, of whom the second and third were names you might recognize today: John Davison Rockefeller Sr., yes, *the* John Rockefeller, and his younger brother, William Avery Rockefeller Jr. The two future oil magnates didn't grow up in a happy home. Devil Bill was rarely on the premises and frequently in trouble, while their mother, by all accounts, seemed to deeply regret her decision to marry him. But the two young men also got one hell of a crash course in business, courtesy of the same hustler who'd brought them into the world. Devil Bill's teachings were not the ones you'd expect to find at a renowned business school. As Bill himself once told a neighbor, "I do business deals with my sons, and I always try to cheat them to make them sharp." One of his most common tricks was to lend them money at an interest rate, go away for a bit, then show up suddenly and demand immediate payment in full, plus the accrued interest. If the boys were going to accept the money at all, it wasn't enough to just avoid spending it in case their father returned; they had to grow it, or else it wasn't worth taking their father's loans in the first place. As they grew older, they kept accepting the loans, and they eventually figured out how to have Devil Bill's money waiting when he came calling. As John D. Rockefeller would tell it later in life, "I had a peculiar training in my home. It seemed to be a business training from the beginning." The boys' relationship with their father would always be strained, but before long it changed in a way that could not be recovered. In 1849, Devil Bill was indicted for the rape of the family's maid, and fled his jurisdiction, leaving his sons behind to face the brunt of the humiliation. Over the next decades, Devil Bill would pose for years as a traveling doctor, while his sons, mostly out of contact, would claw their way up through the muck their father had dragged them into. Through the early 1900s, Devil Bill and his sons never publicly acknowledged each other's existence, clearing the way for the Rockefeller reputation to develop without the family's true patriarch playing any role at all. ## The Birth of Standard Oil Even by the time Devil Bill skipped town, the Rockefeller boys had started picking up real business acumen. Using their father's lessons on accrued interest, they began loaning sums to locals and collecting on the interest they received back. Using their mother Eliza's lessons, they developed an acute awareness of the importance of saving, and of putting aside sums for charitable donation. John picked up an education at Owego Academy, a well-regarded secondary school in New York, and then at Cleveland's Central High School, the first free public high school established west of the Allegheny Mountains. He trained as a bookkeeper, and put aside dreams of a career in music to work at a produce commission firm in Cleveland, where he learned the ins and outs of commercial transportation well enough to play the whole system and get his firm lower prices. Before long, Rockefeller chose to go into business for himself, with two partners who hoped to start a produce commission business of their own. To do it, Rockefeller pooled his own savings of $1,000, plus another thousand he borrowed from his not-quite-fully-estranged father. He brought his younger brother William on board, and together, the Rockefeller boys and their crew netted significant and rapidly expanding profits. As is the case in countless stories of business success, timing was everything; two years after their business started up, so did the Civil War, where their produce supply was desperately in need on the front lines. Neither John nor William would ever see combat, hiring substitute soldiers to go in their place, but their product would be present all up and down the Union lines. The company did fantastic business over the course of the war, and with all that capital, the Rockefellers and their main partners, one Maurice B. Clark and his two brothers, started a new partnership with a chemist who was operating an oil refinery. Oil was in high demand during the war, with prices increasing exponentially, and the Rockefellers and the Clarks added a critical, previously missing business acumen to their partner Samuel Andrews' operation. The crew got in on the early days of the oil boom, and by the time the Civil War ended in 1865, they had diversified their business to the point that they were sure to survive even after their lucrative wartime contracts were canceled. By then, John D. had married his lifelong partner, Laura Spelman, whom he would regard for decades as a woman of fantastic judgment and business insight. In 1867, John Rockefeller was able to outbid the Clark brothers for ownership of the oil business. With a bid of $72,500, Rockefeller gained sole practical control, and two years later the Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler company was born. Three years after that, it would get a new name, one that has echoed through American history ever since: Standard Oil. ## The Oil Barons By the time Standard Oil came into being, the Rockefeller brothers and their associates were already setting themselves apart in the oil industry. They'd opened an office in New York to control the flow of their oil overseas, they were aggressive in borrowing and reinvesting money wherever they could, and they made sure to use their own waste and capture excess gas rather than let it go unused, as many firms of the time did. Perhaps it's more a statement on just how young the oil industry was than how incredible the Rockefeller operation was, but by the time they became the Standard Oil Company, they were already the largest refinery in the world. They were rich beyond their wildest dreams; they could have lived very comfortably even if they'd left the business entirely. But cashing out didn't seem to be on anybody's mind. Just after the incorporation of Standard Oil, the Rockefellers started making bigger and bigger plays for control of the market. In 1871, Standard Oil joined a handful of America's biggest refineries in a secret deal with the kingpins of the railroad industry. Together, the two industries would conspire to give the largest oil refineries a premium on transport costs for their product, while raising prices on smaller, more independent refineries so high that their businesses would be throttled in the process. Every time one of those smaller organizations folded, Rockefeller was right there to buy them out. In one instance known as the Cleveland Massacre, Rockefeller purchased 20 Cleveland oil companies in the span of just one month in 1872. By the end of this Rockefeller-led exercise in industrial cannibalism, Standard Oil controlled 25% of the entire American oil supply. The deal between the refineries and the railroads wouldn't survive the era, dissolved amid massive public backlash against Standard Oil's actions, but that was just one casualty from Standard's carnage. The other, more important casualty was the oil industry itself, which had now given way to a company marching toward monopoly status. From there, the Rockefellers did what they'd now established as their standard practice: they reinvested their earnings and expanded outward yet again. Before long they'd put refineries into New York and Pennsylvania, even acquiring one of their largest competitors just years after that rival had been instrumental in the breakup of the rail-and-oil cartel. Meanwhile, they expanded oil access to the middle and lower classes, raising the standard of living across America while vastly increasing demand for their own product. Buying out the competition became easier and easier; now, rivals who got a quick glance at Rockefeller's internal numbers quickly realized they had no hope of survival if he decided to make them a target. Instead, they became more and more eager to take Rockefeller up on his buyout offers while they still existed. Even as he pruned away the rest of the oil industry around Standard, John Rockefeller didn't publicly express any interest in forming a monopoly. Rightly or wrongly, he seemed to believe that new competitors would always rise up to fill the void where others had withered away or been consumed. He described himself as an "angel of mercy" toward the oil industry, an embodiment of business Darwinism in which the strong absorbed the weak and made even them richer, but as refinery operators rather than business owners. His business absorbed not just other oil companies, but the companies that allowed the oil industry to function, be it in manufacturing, transportation, or anything else. In 1882, the Rockefellers and their expanding network of allies formed the Standard Oil Trust, which had the capability to completely manage every element of Standard's business from oil drilling to sales of a final product. ## The Trust, Antitrust, and the Richest Man in History To get this far, the Rockefeller family had survived intense attacks from the press for a span of decades, a process that took a toll on John D. personally. Building the Standard Oil Trust had been a mess of PR nightmares and unrelenting legal battles. In the words of the New York World newspaper, Standard Oil was "the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country." In 1890, Rockefeller and the rest of the trust watched nervously as the Sherman Antitrust Act passed through Congress and became the first American federal legislation to limit the growth and reach of monopolies. It would take sixteen years for the US government to wade through the muck and the legal obstructionism before President Teddy Roosevelt's administration finally brought the law to bear against two dozen companies, of which Standard Oil was presented as America's biggest, baddest trust, most desperately in need of dissolution. One Ida Tarbell would play an outsize role in the effort; her book, *The History of the Standard Oil Company*, brought to light decades of shady business practices and disdain for the law. But by then, the Rockefellers had spent decades in nearly full control of the American oil industry, collecting unbelievable profits in the intervening time. When Standard Oil was eventually forced to break up into 33 independent companies, John D. would remain a major stockholder in all of them, a move that ended his trust but led to yet another exponential expansion of his personal wealth. By the time Standard Oil was broken up, it had had an incredible cumulative effect on the industries of the world. It had driven the creation and trading of oil futures on the National Petroleum Exchange, it had assumed control over 20,000 American wells and a hundred thousand employees, and it had kicked off a global wave of oil production in Europe, Asia, and then-Imperial Russia. Standard had worked its way into the European market, started producing American natural gas, and led the way into providing gasoline for automobiles, making up for the loss of profits on kerosene from when oil lamps had been replaced by lightbulbs. The Rockefellers had expanded into iron ore production, kicking off a long few years of public competition with the Carnegie business empire. William Rockefeller had long since diversified into copper, where he continued to earn massive sums and eventually formed the Mutual Alliance Trust Company. The family's oil companies, following the breakup of Standard Oil, would evolve into ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Pennzoil, and other modern, globally dominant companies. By 1913, John D. Rockefeller's personal fortune would make up nearly three percent of the United States' entire gross domestic product. By that metric, he was the richest man in US history, and he's widely regarded as the richest person, by proportion of global wealth, in the history of the modern world. ## After John D.: A Family Reinvents Itself Of course, John D. Rockefeller's personal dominance over the oil industry couldn't last forever. By the late 1900s, he was stepping back from business and focusing more on philanthropic efforts across the United States. He founded the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research in New York City, which has since grown into the graduate-only Rockefeller University; the work done in those labs would cure meningitis, identify the purpose of DNA, and make many other critical contributions to global health. Rockefeller invested his money heavily into education and medicine, and in 1913 he created the Rockefeller Foundation with an initial investment of $100 million, which today is equivalent to several billion dollars. The organizations the Rockefellers founded and funded would go on to nearly eradicate hookworm and yellow fever from the United States. Rockefeller himself would die in May of 1937 at the age of 97, long after he had personally finished his work. By then, the Rockefeller empire and the family fortune had passed down to the control of John D.'s only son and youngest child overall, John Jr. The younger John never assumed full control of Standard Oil, but he played an outsize role in company affairs throughout his life, working largely as a manager of the Rockefeller fortune, including in support of his father's philanthropic efforts. He gained notoriety for his involvement in the organized-labor disputes leading to 1914's Ludlow Massacre, in which militiamen fired upon striking workers at a Rockefeller-controlled company in an incident that saw many women and children killed by fire while trying to take shelter. But despite this black mark on the Rockefeller name, John Jr. proved to be a competent steward for his family. ## Two Policies That Kept the Fortune It was during this time that the Rockefellers established two policies that would define their fortune for years to come. One was to keep control of the family fortune in the hands of its male members, despite the outsize influence of John Jr.'s mother and his own wife, each of whom would likely have been more than competent enough to manage the fortune if given the opportunity. Instead, they each received allowances from the male members of the family, even on occasions, like that of John Jr., where it meant that the family's only boy and youngest child would gain stewardship of the finances of all four of his older sisters. The other decision was perhaps the key reason the Rockefellers have kept, or even grown, their fortune while other Gilded Age-era families have lost theirs: their decision to keep a majority of their wealth not just locked away in a trust, but managed by a committee of professional money managers. The Rockefellers do get a say in how that money is managed, but the day-to-day minutiae of the family fortune are left to the most highly competent people the family can find, rather than being squandered by the family's second and third generations of heirs. The family's total net worth, as well as the personal wealth of its members, has long since been obscured from public view, to the point that independent researchers have not been able to establish any reliable estimates on the family fortune for nearly a century. In the years John Jr. spent at the head of his family, the Rockefellers were responsible for the construction of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, a lifeline for 75,000 New York families during the Great Depression. The family established the United Service Organizations, or USO, an aid agency for US military members and their dependents, during the height of World War II. The family donated the plot of land where the United Nations headquarters now sits, a move that single-handedly brought UN headquarters to New York City. They spearheaded the construction of low-income housing all across New York. The family's trust holdings would merge with Chase National Bank, which would later evolve into the modern JPMorgan Chase, while the 1920s-era Dunbar National Bank in Harlem would briefly be New York's most prominent bank run by Black Americans. John Jr. would play an outsize role in the widespread growth and adoption of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, in the birth-control activism of Margaret Sanger, and in the purchase and donation of countless square miles of land for the benefit of America's National Parks. According to some tellings, the life's work of John Jr. was a rehabilitation effort, looking to slowly but surely resuscitate the Rockefeller name after the excesses and corporate destruction of his father's era. Whether or not that was his intention, it was certainly his impact; while the high controversies of the prior decades weren't forgotten, they were relegated to history all the same. ## A Family in Public Life In the years to follow, a number of Rockefellers would rise to prominence across the United States. Nelson Rockefeller, son of John Jr., was Governor of New York for well over a decade, served in undersecretary positions under three US presidents, and was Vice President of the United States under Gerald Ford, following three unsuccessful attempts to run for the Republican nomination for President. Nelson's brother, Winthrop Rockefeller, would serve as Governor of Arkansas, while his nephew John D. Rockefeller IV would serve first as governor of West Virginia, and then as Senator from the state for a total of twenty years. Another of the brothers, Laurance Rockefeller, played a key role in investing in Apple and Intel, while David Rockefeller was critical to the merger between Chase Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company, as well as in the construction of the original World Trade Center. Other members of the family would become leaders in business and philanthropy, and at times they'd disengage themselves from family matters entirely in order to pursue their private lives in peace. No matter who they became or what they did, they maintained access to the vast Rockefeller fortune, although how much of it they could access, and how much they'd ultimately enjoy, may never be publicly known. ## The Modern-Day Dynasty The modern-day Rockefeller family stretches across several generations and a wide radius of states within the continental United States. The total sum of their wealth, while still unknown, is believed to be far beyond the publicly known estimates of the family's net worth, which today typically coalesce around a figure of eight to nine billion dollars. The family still continues to receive honors across New York, Washington DC, and the rest of the United States, and the family's most recently deceased patriarch, David Rockefeller, is believed to have given just about $900 million in charitable donations over the course of his life, until his death in 2017. Today, the Rockefeller most likely to be described as its patriarch is David Jr., but the fortune itself is believed to exist outside the authority of any individual Rockefeller. Today, members of the family are patrons of the arts, investors in scientific research, leaders in business and entrepreneurship, and trustees in all manner of enterprise, academia, and conservation. Perhaps the family's greatest asset today, besides the fortune itself, is the incredible amount of personal connections they claim all up and down American and global industry. The modern-day Rockefellers have ties with just about anybody who's anybody, and a family-name credibility that's just about unmatched in modern American society. ## Divesting From the Source Of all the Rockefeller family's modern contributions, perhaps none has been so influential as the decision the family's foundation made in late 2020 to completely divest from fossil fuel holdings and end its future investment into the sector. The move was a seismic shift for the global divestment movement, with the Rockefeller Foundation becoming the largest American foundation, by far, to extricate itself from the influence of big energy companies. The fact that the Rockefeller fortune was quite literally built on oil, the same product from which the modern family has chosen to divest, has not been lost on anyone, and the move has been taken as an unmissable signal to powerful global investors that fossil fuels are no longer the future of American industry. In the coming years, it's difficult to predict just what the Rockefeller Foundation, or the individual members of the family, are going to do with their fortune. But if one thing is clear, it's that the Rockefellers have already escaped the greatest pitfall of America's wealthiest historic families. They've managed to navigate through several generations of heirs without any person spending the fortune away or otherwise squandering the legacy left for them. Instead, riches gained via the monopolization of a late-1800s oil industry have carried the family through to the 21st century, in a legacy that seems to show zero signs of stopping anytime soon. ## Key Takeaways - The Rockefeller financial line in America traces to Johann Peter Rockefeller, a German immigrant who arrived around 1723, but the fortune was forged by John D. Rockefeller Sr., son of the con artist "Devil Bill." - John D. gained sole practical control of his oil business with a $72,500 bid in 1867, and by 1872 Standard Oil controlled 25% of the entire American oil supply. - After the Sherman Antitrust Act, Standard Oil was broken into 33 companies, but John D. held stock in all of them, and his fortune grew to nearly 3% of US GDP by 1913. - Two family policies preserved the wealth: keeping it under a trust managed by professional money managers, and concentrating control among male heirs. - The family reinvented its reputation through philanthropy, from the Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller University to Rockefeller Center, the USO, and the donated land for the UN headquarters. - In late 2020 the Rockefeller Foundation divested entirely from fossil fuels, the largest American foundation to do so, despite a fortune originally built on oil. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Who was "Devil Bill" Rockefeller? William Avery Rockefeller, known as "Devil Bill," was the father of John D. Rockefeller Sr. He was a con artist who sold useless potions and pills as a street peddler, often pretending to be deaf and mute or claiming to be a "botanic physician." He deliberately cheated his own sons in business deals to make them sharp, a brutal education John D. later credited as his training from the beginning. ### How did John D. Rockefeller build Standard Oil into a monopoly? He reinvested aggressively and used hardball tactics, including an 1871 secret deal with railroads that gave the biggest refineries cheap transport while throttling smaller rivals. As competitors folded, Rockefeller bought them out, purchasing 20 Cleveland oil companies in a single month in 1872 in what became known as the Cleveland Massacre. By 1882 the family formed the Standard Oil Trust, controlling every element of the business from drilling to final sale. ### Why was Standard Oil broken up, and what happened to its pieces? The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was the first federal law limiting monopolies, and after sixteen years of legal battles the Roosevelt administration targeted Standard Oil as America's biggest trust. It was broken into 33 independent companies, though John D. remained a major stockholder in all of them. Those companies evolved into modern giants including ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Pennzoil. ### How have the Rockefellers kept their fortune across generations? The family adopted two key policies. They locked most of the wealth in a trust managed day-to-day by a committee of professional money managers rather than the heirs themselves, and they concentrated control among male family members who allocated allowances. This shielded the fortune from being squandered by later generations, a fate that befell many other Gilded Age families. ### How rich was John D. Rockefeller? By 1913, his personal fortune made up nearly three percent of the entire United States' gross domestic product. By that measure he was the richest man in US history, and he is widely regarded as the richest person, by proportion of global wealth, in the history of the modern world. The modern family's net worth is obscured but is publicly estimated around eight to nine billion dollars. ### What did the Rockefeller Foundation do in 2020? In late 2020, the Rockefeller Foundation committed to completely divesting from fossil fuel holdings and ending future investment in the sector. It became the largest American foundation by far to extricate itself from big energy companies, a striking move given that the family fortune was originally built on oil through Standard Oil. ## Sources - [Original MegaProjects video: The Rockefeller Empire: The Dynasty That Changed America](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38_XxqE89q4) - [Rockefeller family | History & Today — Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rockefeller-family) - [Biography: John D. Rockefeller, Junior — PBS American Experience](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rockefellers-johnjr/) - [The Rockefeller Foundation Commits to Divesting From Fossil Fuels](https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/news/the-rockefeller-foundation-commits-to-divesting-from-fossil-fuels/) - [Our History — The Rockefeller Foundation](https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/about-us/our-history/) - [Hero image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panoramic_View_of_Standard_Oil_Company_at_Baton_Rouge,_Louisiana,_1916.jpg) by Baton Rouge Digital Archive / Wikimedia Commons (public domain), public domain. ## Related Coverage - [33 Thomas Street: The Windowless Skyscraper Built to Survive the Apocalypse](/article/33-thomas-street-nsa-spy-hub) - [Ak Saray: Erdogan's Billion-Dollar Palace Built on Protected Land](/article/ak-saray-billion-dollar-palace) - [Istana Nurul Iman: The World's Largest Palace Is Also a Working Government](/article/istana-nurul-iman-largest-palace)