“Dear Son”

Correspondence of John D.Rockefeller

For my wife; Helen, my daughter, Elizabeth;

and my three sons, Stephen, Christopher, and Jonathan.

Preface

The Letters

Epilogue

Preface

What did it mean to be “rich as Rockefeller”?

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., ***ieved that every right i**lied a responsibility? every opportunity, an obligation? every possession, a duty. How he shared these ideals with his father is revealed in this short co**ilation of letters they exged over 50 years.

Historians, journalists, and other entators have offered differin interpretations of what it meant to be a Rockefeller. There were over 200 magaziic*** and more than 60 books written on this father and soween 1**6 and 1990. Some had access to this correspondehers did not. Among those who did not were Ida Tar***l, who published her works on John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Co**any in 1904 and 1905? Henry Demarest Lloyd, who published in 1**4? and Matthew Josephson, who published in 1934 and 1938.

Allan Nevins was the first to have access to these letters. He and his researcher read over 1,000 letters which had beeed from the f***ly fi*** by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Nevins quoted key ses of the letters as he developed his 1940 vision of Rockefeller in the heroic age of Ameri enterprise. Most of the same quotes appear in his revised 1953 version of the biography of Rockefeller, industrialist and philanthropist.

Raymond B. Fosdick’s biography of Rockefeller Junior, published in 1956, was the sed study based extensively on the same 1,000 letters.These letters, removed from their inal places in the fi*** and anized ologically, stitute a separate file series in the f***ly archives at the Rockefeller Archiv