The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America - Hardcover

Dalzell, Robert F.; Dalzell, Lee Baldwin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805075445 ISBN 13: 9780805075441

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2007

Synopsis

What it was like to be as rich as Rockefeller: How a house gave shape and meaning to three generations of an iconic American family

 

One hundred years ago America's richest man established a dynastic seat, the granite-clad Kykuit, high above the Hudson River. Though George Vanderbilt's 255-room Biltmore had recently put the American country house on the money map, John D. Rockefeller, who detested ostentation, had something simple in mind--at least until his son John Jr. and his charming wife, Abby, injected a spirit of noblesse oblige into the equation. Built to honor the senior Rockefeller, the house would also become the place above all others that anchored the family's memories. There could never be a better picture of the Rockefellers and their ambitions for the enormous fortune Senior had settled upon them.

The authors take us inside the house and the family to observe a century of building and rebuilding--the ebb and flow of events and family feelings, the architecture and furnishings, the art and the gardens. A complex saga, The House the Rockefellers Built is alive with surprising twists and turns that reveal the tastes of a large family often sharply at odds with one  another about the fortune the house symbolized.

About this title

About the Author

Robert F. Dalzell is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College, and is the author of Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made and Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism. Lee Baldwin Dalzell was for many years the head of the Reference Department at the Williams College Library. The two collaborated on George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America.

Reviews

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

The great houses of America are a decidedly mixed lot. Only a handful -- Monticello and Fallingwater immediately come to mind -- are genuine architectural monuments. A few are so freighted with historic import -- Mount Vernon, the White House -- that their architectural qualities are little more than filigree. Many were built more as tributes to their owners' wealth and power than as mere residences: the massive oceanside "cottages" of Newport, the Vanderbilts' Biltmore in North Carolina, William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon in California. And some are just oddities, lumps of stone plopped down in incongruously beautiful settings: industrialist James Deering's Vizcaya in Miami, just about anything in Palm Beach.

I have never visited Kykuit, on the east shore of the Hudson River, but on the evidence put forth by Robert F. Dalzell and Lee Baldwin Dalzell in The House the Rockefellers Built, it would appear to fall into this last category. Set high on a hill, in the heart of the incomparably beautiful region that inspired the Hudson River School of landscape painters, Kykuit ("a Dutch word meaning 'lookout,' rhymes with high-cut") overlooks one of the most breathtaking vistas in the United States, which is saying something. But the house itself, which is now open to the public, thanks to a complicated agreement between the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is something else. From beginning to end the product of disagreement and compromise, it is "awkwardly perched on its hillside site" and is neither the "relaxed, unpretentious rural villa" that John D. Rockefeller wanted nor the "larger, grander house" that was John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s dream. Even the Dalzells, who have an understandable vested interest in Kykuit, are hard-pressed to find positive things to say about it.

Indeed, it seems reasonably safe to say that if the house had not been built and inhabited by Rockefellers, it would long ago have been torn down and the estate returned to its natural condition, probably as a park. That is precisely what Laurence Rockefeller, the most environmentally aware of the sons of John Jr., wanted. He was overruled by the other surviving sons, who finally -- and reluctantly -- acquiesced in Nelson's will (he died in January 1979), which "instructed his executors to convey to the National Trust for Historic Preservation his one-quarter interest in the 'Park' section of the estate -- the fenced-in area that included Kykuit -- in the hope that the house with its furnishings would be, as he said, 'preserved as nearly intact as may be practicable' and opened to the public." His motives are unknown, but the Dalzells make an intelligent guess:

"It would seem that what he wanted people to discover there was not just Nelson Rockefeller but the Rockefeller family as a group of complex, interesting individuals, each with his or her own interests, tastes, and personalities, a family, in short, not so very different from most American families. Because of all he had done to the place since taking it over, it would also be clear that Kykuit had changed through the years. And if Kykuit had changed, so by implication had the Rockefeller family, reconstituting itself anew with each generation, just as every American family did, indeed as the nation itself did -- ever fluid, constantly evolving, dynamically democratic."

The story of Kykuit begins with a fire in September 1902 that destroyed the house on the Hudson, known (after previous owners) as the Parsons-Wentworth House, that was the country retreat of John D. Rockefeller and his wife, Cettie. Eventually, the family owned an estate of more than 3,000 acres:

"Rising steadily upward from the valley, it overspread the heights above, offering glorious views of the river to the west and beyond it the Palisades." The senior Rockefeller was hesitant about building a new house and doubly so because his Standard Oil Company was coming under heavy criticism as a monopolistic trust. Senior wanted at most a relatively modest house, but Junior "had much loftier ambitions for the place." He wanted it to be "modest and unpretentious -- no opulent palace, certainly -- yet still beautiful, its architecture and contents displaying the highest, most noble values." He hoped it would be seen as "the home not of greedy, self-seeking individuals but of decent, civic-minded people, determined to do good with the riches that God and the American system of capitalistic enterprise had showered upon them."

Father and son loved and respected each other deeply, but at times relations between them were tense. Junior was not entirely comfortable with the stern Baptist faith of his parents and was interested in the arts, especially after he married the "warm and outgoing" as well as self-confident Abby Greene Aldrich. Senior wanted a house that would be a refuge for his family, "apart from the turmoil and temptation of the sinful world outside." Junior wanted something bolder, a house that would make a statement to the world about who the Rockefellers were and what they stood for. Thus from the outset there were tensions, as well as those provided by other family members, and though they always were expressed politely, they had to be dealt with by the architects, designers, decorators and landscapers who worked on Kykuit.

The original design, produced in 1905, was done at Senior's bidding and reflected his modest, conservative expectations; its "heart and soul . . .would lie enshrined in the music room, that most intimate and private of spaces, where the family gathered to play and listen to music and sing hymns and pray together." Confronted with the design upon his return from a European jaunt, Junior "found plans for a house fifty years out of date and utterly lacking in grace or beauty. . . . Picturesque and homelike it surely was, but he and Abby had dreamed of something altogether different."

What finally emerged was closer to Junior's vision than to Senior's, but it was a compromise. Ultimately, Senior cared more about his son than about his house -- and perhaps even his own reputation -- and yielded repeatedly as Junior pressed for changes and additions, all of which cost money. As stipulated in the original contract, the house was to cost $223,105, but the final reckoning came to $2,770,603.16, and that was in 1915, with many more years of changes and additions to come, including Nelson's exceedingly expensive collections of art and outdoor sculpture.

"Modest and unpretentious" it most certainly was not, except by comparison with the showy statements of self-regard erected by the Vanderbilts, Belmonts, Lorillards and others along Newport's matchless coast. Yet the comparison was an important part of what the two Rockefellers (father and son) hoped to achieve. Modest and unpretentious, in this case, clearly are in the eyes of the beholder:

"By 1912 the estate covered over two thousand acres and had twenty miles of roads, plus gardens and cut lawns, a golf course, a coach barn for horses and automobiles, greenhouses to provide plants for the gardens and cut flowers for the family houses . . . the orangerie and palm house, barns, sheds and livestock pens, in addition to some ninety houses, most of them rented out to estate workers. Following Senior's precept that it was cheaper to have things done by his own (nonunion) men, the Pocantico estate was largely self-sustaining. Included in its outdoor workforce of about two hundred were gardeners, farmers, woodsmen, masons, carpenters, painters, electricians, plumbers, tinsmiths and blacksmiths. The total cost of running the estate when Senior voiced his concern in 1909 was $109,200; by 1919 the payroll alone, accounting for about half the overall costs, had climbed to $123,628.90."

As that suggests, plenty of diligent research has been done by the Dalzells, both of whom are associated with Williams College. For the last 50 pages, it must be said, they've done too much research; their account of the wrangling over how to take Kykuit public is tedious and essentially unnecessary, an excessively long footnote to what is otherwise an interesting and informative book.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

This closely researched history of Kykuit, the Hudson Valley mansion built to make the Rockefeller name and fortune stand for something other than unbridled greed is too narrow in scope for most readers. The Dalzells (George Washington's Mount Vernon) cover five generations of Rockefellers, focusing on the patriarch (called Senior here) and his son (Junior), at least as far as the mansion is concerned, while taking a stab at linking it to issues surrounding American country houses of the Gilded Age. What was different about Kykuit, the Dalzells claim, was the Rockefellers' moral aspirations, their insistence that the house be not only useful and fashionable, but good. Clean prose keeps things moving, but only the most serious Rockefeller devotees will pore over long passages detailing the process of drawing up blueprints, hiring interior decorators and strategizing housekeeping. The Dalzells chronicle every tussle over control of the house's planning between Junior and Senior and, later, between Nelson and his four brothers over Nelson's overflowing art collection. Several fine biographies exist to satisfy readers' curiosity about the Rockefeller family, and it's questionable whether there's nearly as much inherent interest in Kykuit as in Mount Vernon, the George Washington home that draws 20 times as many visitors. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Despite his immense personal fortune, John D. Rockefeller was by all accounts a modest man who detested displays of ostentation. So it is ironic that the Rockefeller "family house," built above the Hudson River a century ago, has evolved into a 3,500-acre estate with ornate landscaping and a multitude of statues, making it comparable to the great aristocratic homes of Europe. The Dalzells have traced the origins of the house as well as the various additions and remodelings over a century and encompassing three generations of the Rockefeller family. Kykuit, the main house, was built for John D. Rockefeller Sr., but it was constructed under the guidance of his son, John Jr. Although the elder Rockefeller envisioned a "simple, humble" residence, his son was determined to sacrifice nothing to construct an elaborate dwelling based on high standards of taste and beauty. This book will appeal to art historians as well as general readers interested in the tastes and foibles of a family dynasty. Freeman, Jay

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
 
Sic Transit . . . December 1991
 
It had always felt like the most private of places. Now after more than eighty years that was about to change, and though arguably the entire family was losing a part of its heritage, it was the youngest among them, the children of "the cousins," who seemed to feel most deeply the need to mark the break. So it was that on a December night in 1991 the fifth generation of the Rockefeller family--counting from John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his wife, Laura Celestia ("Cettie") Spelman Rockefeller, for whom the house had been built--gathered in the dining room of Kykuit for a farewell dinner. "It was an extraordinary evening where everyone reminisced about their childhood experiences on the estate," remarked one person afterward. Someone else recalled walking through the house and gardens, "just thinking how sad it was that it was changing. It was the end. It wasn't going to be a family house anymore. It was going to be a public place."
 
In the past, the dinner served that night would have been prepared by the house's own staff of servants, but since only a skeleton crew remained indoors the food was brought in by hired caterers. Still, with the china and crystal gleaming softly in candlelight as the four courses of the meal were passed to person after person, everything must have seemed much as it always had, except that this was indeed the last family dinner in the house. Two weeks later Kykuit was turned over to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to be readied for a long-heralded program of public tours of "the Rockefeller Family Home."
 
In May 1994, the month the tours began, the New York Times ran no fewer than three articles on Kykuit. By the time the third appeared, reservations were booked for the remainder of the year, and the newspaper was describing the attention focused on the opening of the house as "more or less akin to that surrounding the start of public tours of Buckingham Palace." As for the place itself, the Times architectural critic, Paul Goldberger, was guarded in his assessment, but overall his verdict was favorable. "Oddly restrained, almost hesitant, and rather tight in its proportions" was one comment, yet that was tempered later in the same article by another observation: "The house's mix of idiosyncrasy and restraint stands in welcome contrast to the self-important hauteur of the average pile of stone in Newport . . . There is nothing vulgar here, and that alone separates Kykuit from almost every other great house produced in the golden age of American wealth," a judgment with which the public seemed to agree. "You know it really was a very livable mansion," remarked one woman, who had come from two hours away in Connecticut to see Kykuit.
 
As the guides on the tours explained, it was Nelson Rockefeller, the longtime governor of New York and the last member of the family to live in the house, who had paved the way for opening it to the public by stipulating in his will that his share of the estate, along with much of his large collection of modern art, should go to the National Trust. Left undescribed on the tour, however, were the complex and often strained negotiations necessary to give reality to Nelson's plans for Kykuit, negotiations that stretched on for fourteen years. Nevertheless, in the end his wishes were honored, and the house, together with its contents and eighty-six acres of land, passed out of the Rockefellers' hands and into those of the National Trust.
 
During most of the interim between Nelson's death and the transfer, no one lived in "the Big House," but the family continued to hold events there, including weddings, birthday parties, christenings, and gatherings of representatives of at least half a dozen different Rockefeller charities. Several fifth-generation members even organized a seminar on the family's history, including the life and career of its patriarch, John D. Rockefeller Sr. himself. In addition, there was that final dinner, planned by the same generation, and purposely timed to precede the annual family Christmas luncheon scheduled for the next day. Over the years the number of people attending the Christmas luncheon had grown so large that it had to be held next door in the estate's coach barn. But after the meal, those present decided to go up to the house and hold "a simple ceremony to say good-bye to the place" they had known all their lives. Not all of them had been fond of Kykuit, and at least a few had decidedly negative feelings about it. Still, standing in a circle they shared their memories, lighting candles as they spoke, "until there was a ring of light commemorating all that had been and all that was being let go."
 
 
Let go? Yes. An ending? Unquestionably. But not quite, perhaps, the change from private to public that some people saw, at least in any simple sense. For Kykuit's privacy had always been more a matter of illusion than reality; given the individuals who built the house and lived there, it could not have been otherwise. The Rockefellers, particularly in the first three generations, were too rich and too prominently involved in too many different areas of American life to enjoy the luxury of privacy as most people know it. For much of his life John D. Rockefeller Sr. managed to ignore that fact, but his son and namesake discovered it soon enough, as did his children. Yet at Kykuit it had still seemed possible to will away the ever-present spotlight of public attention. That was the charm of the place. The great granite-clad house perched high on its hilltop overlooking the Hudson River, the handsome high-ceilinged rooms filled with works of art, the acres of beautifully tended gardens adorned with arresting sculptures--what else was it all for if not to serve as a private refuge, a source of pleasure for its owners and those lucky enough to be invited to see it?
 
What else indeed, yet neither John D. Rockefeller nor his son thought of it that way. In their eyes life was not about pleasure; it was about work and accumulation and the careful disposition of what had been accumulated. That was the lesson father taught son, as he himself had learned it from his mother, the redoubtable Eliza Davison Rockefeller. Moreover, as the family moved into the twentieth century the emphasis would increasingly shift from "getting" to "giving," as John D. Sr. liked to put it, from constantly piling up money to using it on an ever-grander scale to do good in the larger world. The building of Kykuit both coincided with that shift and was intimately connected to it.
 
Writing about Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, the architectural historian Dell Upton describes it as both "a hermitage"--a private retreat--and a "republican" place, designed to teach those who encountered it the principles of civic virtue. Upton also sees this dual identity as characteristic of more than a few American elite houses, and certainly, given the history of its building, Kykuit meets the test. But as with so much else about the Rockefellers, the scale of things tended to change the usual formulas. Thomas Jefferson died deeply in debt, in no small part because of what he spent building and rebuilding Monticello. The day John D. Rockefeller moved into Kykuit he was widely assumed to be the richest man in the world, and the bulk of his wealth would remain either in family hands or in the hands of institutions controlled by the family.
 
Yet for all its durability, the Rockefellers' wealth could not be made infinitely elastic. With each succeeding generation the great fortune was divided into smaller and smaller pieces. By the time Kykuit was turned over to the National Trust, no one in the fourth and fifth generations of the family could have afforded to live there, even if they had wanted to. In this way, too, the passing of the house from family ownership marked a change, and no doubt a poignant one for many people present at those farewell events.
 
To be sure, reactions varied. One person at that final dinner described stripping off his clothes later in the evening and striding naked into his great-great-grandfather's "incredible shower with the millions of nickel-plated spigots, shower heads, and liver sprays." A bit of good-natured fun, undoubtedly, but showers of that sort had once been badges of the kind of near-limitless wealth no single Rockefeller any longer possessed, just as being a Rockefeller had once meant--and now no longer would--claiming Kykuit as your "family seat."
 
Still, the house itself survives and remains a fascinating artifact, rich in historical significance, which it is the purpose of this book to unravel. On one level, it is a story of money, power, and taste--that elusive entity, which at Kykuit was meant to both fuse the other two and lift them to a higher plane. On the subject of taste, too, the New York Times was definitely right: Kykuit is different from other houses built by the American rich. The taste that shaped it was not the taste of a particular group or class. It was, quintessentially, the Rockefellers' taste. And what gave it its distinctive character was the underlying conviction that things, the tangible props of daily life, ought to mean something beyond the ordinary ends they served. If taste is the pursuit of excellence, excellence at Kykuit invariably came to a matter of moral judgment. It was not enough for things to be useful, or fashionable, or even beautiful; they also had to be good.
 
The Rockefellers were hardly alone in imputing moral qualities to physical objects. Every human culture has had its sacred totems. But their creation generally depends on long-standing, deeply rooted structures of collective consensus. In the Rockefellers' case it all happened so quickly, fueled by energies coming from so many different directions at once, that consensus constantly eluded the family. Indeed, what most surprised us while we were working on the book was how often and how sharply they disagreed with one another in their anxious search for the proper material forms in which to clothe their moral aspirations. And from the beginning a major source of those disagreements was Kykuit itself. John D. Rockefeller Sr. had wanted to build a simple family home; his son had much loftier ambitions for the place. The same son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., disliked modern art, yet his wife, Abby, became one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art, and the chastely banal nudes he chose for the gardens at Kykuit would eventually have to share the space with works by Picasso, Lachaise, Maillol, and Henry Moore put there by their son, Nelson Rockefeller. Husbands and wives, sons and brothers, they all had their own opinions.
 
Still, they pressed on with their quest, for on a deeper level what was at stake was one of the most perplexing issues in American life: the proper place of great wealth in a democracy. The twenty years before, Kykuit's building had witnessed, in the United States, an altogether unprecedented accumulation of riches in private hands. Should that circumstance be celebrated as a triumphant affirmation of the benefits of a social order unfettered by fixed position and privilege? Or was it fundamentally inimical to the health and well-being of such a society? "Plutocrats," "robber barons," "malefactors of great wealth"--the less flattering labels widely applied to the possessors of the new wealth made clear just how uncomfortable many Americans were with the phenomenon. And no family was more thoroughly condemned for its wealth and the methods that had produced it than the Rockefellers. How could a fortune the size of theirs, earned as it had been, possibly be compatible with the nation's traditional democratic ideals? That was the question that confronted the family.
 
John D. Rockefeller Sr.'s answer was to live frugally and give an ever-increasing portion of his fortune away. But there were those who argued that in so doing he ignored the higher cultural values that it was also the duty of the rich to promote, for great democratic societies do not, cannot, live by bread alone. Nor was this just the view of his critics; it was also what his own son came to feel. If evidence was needed to prove that wealth and democracy were in fact compatible, "Junior," as he was called, believed Kykuit ought to serve that end by being modest and unpretentious--no opulent palace, certainly--yet still beautiful, its architecture and contents displaying the highest, most noble values. Since the values were universal, the connection to democracy would be obvious. Obvious too, or so the family hoped, would be the fact this was the home not of greedy, self-seeking individuals but of decent, civic-minded people, determined to do good with the riches that God and the American system of capitalistic enterprise had showered upon them. And if all that seemed like a heavy burden for any house to bear, through most of the twentieth century the Rockefellers never doubted for a moment that it was possible, however strenuously they disagreed about the details.
 
Copyright © 2007 by Robert F. Dalzell Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805075445
• ISBN 13: 9780805075441
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352