Volume 4, Number 11 · July 1, 1965
I Got Plenty o' Money
By Jason Epstein
The Rockefeller Billions
by Jules Abels
Macmillan, 412 pp., $6.95
Among the many problems that confronted John D. Rockefeller when he first set out in the 1870s to monopolize the American oil business there was at least one that, in only slightly different form, was later to face Stalin when he undertook to collectivize Soviet agriculture. For both tycoons it was a matter of converting the kulaks—the small time operators—or, failing that, of liquidating them, if not in one way then in another. For both men too it was the outraged criticism of the liberals, with their Jeffersonian or populist longings, that forced them or their successors to mend their ways, at any rate to improve their public relations. The Rockefeller Billions by Jules Abels is a sketchy but earnest attempt to retell the history of the man who collectivized the American Oil industry and of his money from its origins to the present. Though most of the anecdotes are familiar, the first half of the book makes lively reading as it describes the adventures of the austere young Calvinist, the hymn-singing Sunday School teacher who, while his contemporaries were about to march off to the Civil War, stayed behind to run the modest commission brokerage in which, with $1000 borrowed from his father, he had become, at the age of twenty, a partner.
Review, 2922 words
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