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[historystrainwrecks]

Fire In The Hole

Major General Ambrose Burnside was going to blow some stuff up.

He was on top of the world in 1862. He had been promoted to major general after winning the battles of Roanoke Island and New Bern, the first significant Union victories in the east. Eight months later, he was given command of the Army of the Potomac after President Abraham Lincoln fired George McClellan, the “Young Napoleon.” He had invented a gun that was named after him (the Burnside carbine) and sported truly magnificent sideburns (also named for him, even though he looked a bit like a walrus in a uniform).

Burnside didn’t want overall command of the Union armies, citing his loyalty to McClellan and lack of military experience. He learned that the command would go to General Joseph Hooker if he declined, which changed his mind.

Ambrose Burnside really didn’t like Joe Hooker.

Listen to the rest of the story on The History's Trainwrecks Podcast Episode 12:

So he took charge of the Army of the Potomac, knowing full well what the Commander in Chief wanted: for him to take the fight south to the Confederacy.

He planned an assault on the Confederate capital at Richmond, which definitely qualified as taking the fight to the enemy. Lincoln, frustrated by Union losses and McClellan’s seeming inability to press forward with the large and well-equipped army the President had gotten for him, approved the plan, despite his doubts that it would work. Lincoln needed a significant victory in order to maintain public support for his administration in the face of consistent Southern victories.

No pressure, Ambrose.

The attack, known as the Battle of Fredericksburg, was a disaster. Bureaucratic slowdowns delayed vital supplies and Burnside reacted slowly to changing events on the battlefield. Robert E. Lee did not, moving his forces rapidly from defense to offense, attacking the slow-moving Union Army before it could get its act together. The Union armies withdrew, having suffered twice the casualties as the Confederacy. Lincoln was called “a weak man, too weak for the occasion, and those fool or traitor generals are wasting time and yet more precious blood in indecisive battles and delays.” The governor of Pennsylvania described the battle to the President as “a butchery,” which drove Lincoln to “a state of nervous excitement bordering on insanity.” Lincoln said, “If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it.”

Burnside was relieved of command a month later and replaced by his nemesis, Joseph Hooker.

Ambrose Burnside really didn’t like Joe Hooker.

Each general ended up with something named after them, by the way. Burnside thought his was better, but Hooker’s were more popular. Plus, it took a long time to grow really bushy sideburns. They were never going to see eye to eye.

It was all downhill from there. Burnside led troops at the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House in a manner described as “reluctant.” He ended up at the Siege of Petersburg, which was the aftermath of Grant’s failed attempt to defeat Lee in a pitched, decisive battle. Both sides dug trenches and waited. Grant knew his opponent had lost men he could not replace, and supplies were running low. But Lee was clever, and Grant worried that the more time Lee had to strategize, the more likely it was that he might escape. The battles leading up to the siege were bloody and costly for the North, and Grant was called a “butcher” for his apparent willingness to sacrifice his men in inconclusive battles. General Grant had his own experience at the siege of Vicksburg to draw upon, where he had learned that sieges were expensive and bad for morale.

Like Burnside, Grant needed something big to turn things around.

***

Colonel Henry Pleasants, a mining engineer from Pennsylvania, hatched a plan where he would dig a long shaft under the Confederate trenches, pack it with gunpowder, and blow the whole thing sky-high. This would open a massive hole in the Southern defenses that troops could pour through and attack.

This sounded great to Burnside, and he approved the plan. General Grant was also onboard, though he later wrote that he saw it as a “mere way to keep the men occupied.” This lack of enthusiasm from the chain of command meant that Colonel Pleasants had to forage for his own materials, demolishing a bridge and an old mill to acquire the wooden supports he needed for the tunnel. He rigged an ingenious air exchange system that kept fresh air in the tunnel where the men were digging—he kept a fire burning near the start of the tunnel that drew fresh air in and stale air out by way of the chimney effect. The men hauled earth out of the tunnel using cracker boxes that had been fitted with handles.

The mine shaft was 511 feet long and more than 50 feet deep with hidden ventilation shafts, which helped avoid detection and countermeasures by the Confederates, who had heard rumors about the plan. General Lee refused to believe it for a couple of weeks before ordering “sluggish and uncoordinated” countermining operations that were unable to discover the tunnel.

Burnside had trained a division of United States Colored Troops under General Edward Ferrero to lead the attack into the crater that would result from the explosion. These two brigades would go around the crater and be the spearhead of the assault on Petersburg. General Meade, Burnside’s commander, vetoed the use of colored troops because of repercussions in the North if the attack failed and it was believed the black soldiers had been sacrificed. Burnside protested to Grant, who sided with Meade.

General Burnside tried to get volunteers to take the duty, but none were forthcoming, so he selected a white division by drawing lots. General James Ledlie’s 1st Division drew the short straw. Ledlie failed to brief or train his men, and was reported to be drunk behind the lines when the battle started.

The plan was to detonate the gunpowder between 3 and 3:45 am on the morning of July 30, 1864. Due to the poor quality of the fuses they had been given, the explosion didn’t happen on time. Two volunteers went forward into the mine and found that the fuse needed to be re-spliced. They tried again and the gunpowder finally went off at 4:44 am in a massive explosion that created a crater 170 feet long, 120 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. The Confederates, stunned by the blast, did not react for at least 15 minutes.

Neither did the Yankees. Ledlie’s division, its command staff back behind the lines and drunk off its posterior, waited 10 minutes before attacking. Instead of going around the crater, they went straight into it, thinking it would be a great rifle pit.

It was, but for the South. The Confederates regrouped at the top of the crater and fired down into it, wiping out the Union soldiers stuck at the bottom. Confederate general William Mahone called it “a turkey shoot.”

Burnside, watching his last chance at redemption disappear into a deep hole, ordered General Ferrero’s colored troops forward, but the Confederate fire forced them down the center of the crater instead of around the sides. They broke through and pushed the Confederates back, but a counterattack drove the Union soldiers back to their own lines.

Casualties on the Union side were, in what was becoming tragically typical for Burnside, more than double that of the Confederates. Most of the brunt was borne by the colored troops. General Meade brought charges against Burnside, and a court of inquiry censured him and General Ledlie, who was drunk during the fighting, as well as General Ferrero, who was also reported to be in his cups.

General Meade, surprisingly enough, neglected to mention his own role in the disaster. General Burnside was relieved of command two weeks later. He met with President Lincoln and General Grant in December, offering to resign, but they asked him to remain in the service. After the meeting though, Burnside wrote that he “was not informed of any duty upon which I am to be placed.” He never went back to active duty and resigned his commission the week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.

The Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War exonerated Burnside in 1865 and censured Meade for changing the plan of attack at the last minute. General Grant testified to the committee that he believed that if the colored troops had been used, the battle would have been won. But if it had failed, “it would then be said and very properly, that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them. But that could not be said if we put white troops in front."

Even though the Battle of the Crater was technically a Confederate victory, it did not end the stalemate. Both sides ended up in the same relative entrenched positions where they had started.

Burnside’s reputation only partially recovered after the Congressional investigation. He went on to run a number of railroads after the war. He was elected to three terms as Governor of Rhode Island and was the first president of the National Rifle Association. While on a visit to Europe in 1870, he took a crack at mediating the Franco-Prussian War.

Which did not work.

He was elected to the United States Senate from Rhode Island and served until his death in 1881. He was a good guy, but as one historian put it, “he had been the most unfortunate commander of the Army, a general who had been cursed by succeeding its most popular leader and a man who believed he was unfit for the post. His tenure had been marked by bitter animosity among his subordinates and a fearful, if not needless, sacrifice of life. A firm patriot, he lacked the power of personality and will to direct recalcitrant generals.”

The Crater operation was just the kind of thing Burnside was good at: complex strategic planning, as long as the execution was up to someone else. The tunnel excavation was in the best possible hands with Colonel Pleasants and his team of engineers. The initial blast did exactly what Burnside said it would do—blow a hole in the Confederate defenses and buy time for the Union by disorienting the enemy. The problem with Burnside, as always, was getting his subordinate commanders to stick to the plan, and not be drunk at the time. And, not to criticize, but Ulysses S. Grant could have been way more supportive.

In the end, the Battle of the Crater had come very close to ending the stalemate at Petersburg, and thereby the Civil War itself, almost a year before Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox.

[historystrainwrecks]

Teddy Roosevelt's Third Term, Part I

When Teddy Roosevelt shot himself in the foot, he did it the same way he did everything else: boldly, energetically, and with little regard for long-term consequences.

This was the approach had catapulted him to national prominence and popularity, making him among the first of that rare breed of celebrity American politicians and kicking off the twentieth-century presidency with a bang. But in this case, his trademark impulsiveness backfired in a way that made him regret it to the end of his days.

This time, it cost him the White House.

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Any time Theodore Roosevelt annoyed the political bosses of New York, they tried to send him out of town to a career-ending job in Washington, DC.

This never worked out for them.

Teddy’s latest stint as a major pain-in-the-arse to the so-called “machine” politicians and bosses was as New York City Police Commissioner from 1895-1897. He promoted officers based on merit instead of party affiliation or bribes paid (one could become a patrolman for two or three hundred dollars, and an officer for a few thousand). He went after the protection money paid by saloon-keepers and brothel owners to police who would look the other way on Sundays, when bars were supposed to be closed.

The new commissioner found that there was a “complete divorce of power from responsibility” in the way the police department was run. “It was exceedingly difficult to do anything,” he said, “or to place anywhere the responsibility for not doing it.” The mayor and police chief lacked the authority to remove corrupt police officers—the political machines of the city, it would seem, were in charge of personnel at the New York City Police Department.

Teddy had learned the power of the press and its effect on public opinion, during his last episode of being a thorn in the side of established New York politics when he served in the state assembly. He was able to launch an investigation into a corrupt state supreme court judge by getting the press to write about it. The newsmen, having discovered that stories about Theodore Roosevelt sold lots of papers, obliged. By the time the investigation bill came to a vote, it passed by an overwhelming margin. Even the assemblymen who were owned lock stock and barrel by the bosses opposing the investigation couldn’t vote against it because of the public outcry in favor of it.

Always a shrewd fellow, Teddy had learned his lesson. He was fond of having reporters (most notably “muckraker” Jacob Riis) accompany him on midnight inspection tours of the city, where he found beat cops napping at their posts or socializing in public when they should have been patrolling. He reprimanded the offenders the following morning, to the surprise of the police department and the adulation of the newspaper-reading public.

But he miscalculated his influence when he went after saloons, which were supposed to be closed on Sunday. Most New Yorkers worked a six-day week, so closing the saloons was a non-starter. The bars flouted the law through ingenious means. A bar could serve liquor if it also served meals, so it could stay open as a pseudo-restaurant, serving “twelve beers and a pretzel” as Teddy wrote in his autobiography. There were also less complicated solutions, like bribing police and city officials. Teddy’s unpopularity over the saloon issue dampened his enthusiasm for the job and motivated the Republican machine to get him out of town.

He was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President William McKinley. This was no plum assignment; at the time, the United States Navy was small and underfunded. Most members of Congress believed that preparing for war would eventually get America involved in one, so they kept the post-Civil War military small and essentially useless. The job Teddy had been given was widely believed to be a career-killer—there was no glory helping to run America’s marginalized fleets.

Deploying the same ingenuity and brashness that had become his trademark, Teddy was able to finagle naval funding from Congress. Because money for the Navy was only supposed to be for coastal defense, Teddy called battleships and cruisers “coast defense battle-ships” and “armored cruisers,” suggesting that the latter would be used primarily “to protect our commerce.” To overcome the resistance of Congressmen who only wanted ships to defend the coastline, the appropriations called for “sea-going coast defense battle-ships.” Teddy later wrote that “the fact that the name was a contradiction in terms being of very small consequence compared to the fact that we did thereby get real battle-ships.”

Theodore Roosevelt was a naval expert—his book on the naval war of 1812 was a major historical work. The U.S. Navy had ordered that every ship have a copy on board within a few years of its publication. And the United States was facing a naval war with Spain over Cuba. As it became apparent that war was inevitable, that it would be primarily a naval war, and that the nation was wholly unprepared for it, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy’s efforts to get the country ready made national headlines. When his boss took a day off Teddy issued orders to American naval commanders around the world, moving squadrons to strategic locations in order to be ready when the war broke out. When the President learned of the unauthorized instructions, he let them stand. Once war was declared, Admiral Dewey, moved into place by the impetuous Assistant Secretary, took Manila Bay in the Philippines without losing a single man.

So much for a dead-end job.

Teddy resigned from the Navy Department when war finally came, getting himself appointed second-in-command of a volunteer regiment that became nationally known as the “Rough Riders.” He had always been ashamed of the fact that his father, whom he adored, had hired a substitute to get out of service in the Civil War, and he had resolved to fight in whatever war came along.

He served bravely in the conflict, and once again made sure that his exploits made it into the papers. He brought newsmen and early motion picture cameras with him to Cuba. After only ten weeks America had won the war, and Teddy was a national hero. He had been nominated for a Medal of Honor, but his superiors in the regular army blocked the award, annoyed by his grabbing of headlines. He was awarded the medal posthumously in 2001.

New York Republicans had an unpopular incumbent governor and were heading into a tight race in 1898. Against their better judgment--and owing to Teddy’s national fame--the machine bosses, most notably Senator Thomas Platt, who ran New York Republican politics, asked him to run for governor. Platt feared he would oppose his interests, so Teddy promised to try not to “make war” with the Republican establishment.

He won the election, campaigning heavily on his war record. Once in office, he held twice-daily press conferences, knowing that real power rested in public opinion. He inevitably clashed with Senator Platt over political appointments and pushed for a bill that taxed corporations that had their franchises granted by the state. He also took on corporate monopolies, championed labor interests, and set aside state land for conservation.

William McKinley’s sitting Vice President died of heart failure in 1899. Senator Platt, eager to be rid of Governor Roosevelt, started a newspaper campaign pushing for Teddy’s nomination to yet another dead-end job: Vice President of the United States.

It would seem that Teddy wasn’t the only one who had learned the power of the press.

America had had only a few Presidents who had been considered heroes: Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, and possibly Grant. The rest were considered to be bland mediocrities at a time when real power rested with Congress and the political machines that owned it. The Vice Presidency was even more of a non-entity, and was perceived as a powerless and marginal office. It had been an open secret since John Adams first held the office. America’s most lovable crank called the vice presidency “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

Teddy definitely did not want the job.

He said, “I would a great deal rather be anything, say professor of history, than Vice-President,” but always a dutiful Republican, Teddy went to the 1900 convention and told Platt he would accept the nomination if it was offered. Otherwise he would run for another term as Governor of New York.

This was all the threat Platt needed.

Despite Teddy’s usual political brilliance, he was at times astoundingly naïve about how real politics worked. It was easy for Platt to engineer Roosevelt’s vice presidential nomination at the convention—Teddy’s status as a national war hero made him a popular candidate, and conventions are about campaigning, not governing. McKinley’s first election had been uncomfortably close, and no President had won a second term since the mythic Ulysses S. Grant nearly thirty years before. The delegates knew Teddy’s national fame could help McKinley win, and that was what they cared about in that moment. Only Mark Hanna, McKinley’s campaign manager and Ohio party boss, had the foresight to imagine Teddy anywhere near the reins of power.

He demanded of McKinley and the senior Republican power brokers, “Don’t any of you realize there’s only one life between this madman and the presidency?”

Of course they did, but the powerful New York bosses wanted Teddy far away from the governor’s office, and hoped that after one term as Vice President to a lame duck President, his career would end up the same way of most other VP’s: over. The needs of the moment outweighed any remote future considerations, and Teddy got the nomination.

The pattern of underestimating Theodore Roosevelt continued. At this point in American politics, no one had ever seen anything like him. Politicians worked in secret and avoided the limelight. Andrew Jackson was as close as anyone had ever come to the rough-and-tumble, ready-for-action politician that Teddy was, and he had been feared and misunderstood in his own time. Current political wisdom warned against another “Old Hickory.” American politics were run by American business, which depended on compliant stability from their federal officeholders. Most political leaders in America were mediocrities because their handlers wanted business as usual.

Theodore Roosevelt was not their man.

The election of 1900 was a rematch of 1896, pitting McKinley against William Jennings Bryan. McKinley had run a classic “front porch” presidential campaign, addressing over half a million mostly handpicked people who had been brought to the front lawn of his Canton, Ohio home. By contrast, Bryan had traveled the country and addressed millions of people, who came out for the novelty of seeing a presidential candidate in person and ended up captivated by Bryan’s presence. The Democrat’s late surge in the Midwest worried the Republicans. In the end, 53,000 votes would have cost McKinley the White House in 1896.

It has been argued that Teddy Roosevelt changed the math in 1900. He stormed the country with enthusiasm, matching Bryan’s own travels. He drew in large crowds usually not seen for a vice presidential nominee. Bryan, meanwhile, made significant gains in the parts of the country where he had underperformed four years earlier. McKinley sat out the race on a grander front porch this time—the White House, but did no real active campaigning. It isn’t hard to believe that, had McKinley had a bland running mate, he would not have won.

Teddy attracted lots of press attention, as usual, because he always made for good copy. Other politicians looked to newspaper editors for favorable coverage in the form of measured, reasonable editorials about dry policy. Teddy got the traveling reporters to write about him, and he captured the imagination of the country. The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket won the election by a wide margin, adding the western states the president had lost four years before; the ones where Teddy was incredibly popular.

The vice presidency “is not a steppingstone to anything except oblivion,” Teddy mused on assuming the office. Thomas Platt came to the inauguration to watch Teddy “take the veil” as he put it, gleefully thinking that he had permanently sidelined the ornery former governor.

Teddy himself thought so too. Once in office he went quiet, declining an invitation to address a crowd in February, 1901, “chiefly for the excellent reason that I have nothing to say.” He marched to his duty of presiding over the Senate like a man plodding to the gallows: “Now all that there is for me to do is to perform with regularity and dignity the duty of presiding over the Senate, and to remember the fact that the duty not being very important is no excuse for shirking it."

Fun times.

Teddy was no more suited for the Senate than he had been for a career in law: his impatient, active mind wandered while the Senators droned on, and he had a limited understanding of how the Senate worked. He had disdained legislative politics after his time in the New York Assembly—he felt he was meant to govern as an executive. One of the senators at the time agreed, saying, “his peculiar qualifications for the public service fitted him better for wider, broader and more useful fields." Teddy himself admitted he was “the poorest presiding officer the Senate ever had.” President McKinley believed his young Vice President was too incautious and impulsive, and never consulted him on policy or assigned him any tasks other than sitting in front of the Senate. Teddy, for his part, thought the boss moved way too slow.

Don’t worry, Theodore. Only three more years to go.

The Senate adjourned, and Teddy fled to New York to vacation with his family. After a season of stifling Washington politics, this escape was his most enjoyable vacation in years. He was like a man let out of jail on furlough.

In September, 1901, President McKinley was shot by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo. Teddy rushed to the city, but the president’s doctors told him the prognosis for McKinley was good. He was encouraged to leave by the President’s staff, thinking that the presence of the Vice President at McKinley’s bedside would cause public concern. Teddy went to the Adirondacks to climb a mountain.

A messenger struggled up to see him on September 13th, bearing the news that the President was dying and Teddy should get back to Buffalo.

At midnight, Teddy started his race down the mountain to become President.

On our next episode, we go with the Rough Rider on his midnight ride to the White House, and the decision that cost him another term as President.

Stay tuned for Teddy Roosevelt’s Third Term, Part II.

[historystrainwrecks]

John D. Rockefeller’s Favorite Cheese

The richest man in the world was on the run.

President Theodore Roosevelt’s Justice Department was planning to file an antitrust suit against Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company in 1906, and the states wanted to get into the action before the Attorney General did. Multiple lawsuits were filed against the directors of the company that controlled over ninety percent of oil production in the United States and had, by prevailing accounts, used unfair practices to gain its monopoly in the market. 

John D. Rockefeller, a Cleveland produce merchant during the Civil War, had diversified into the nascent oil business in 1870, taking huge risks in a new industry that no one believed would endure. He took advantage of this lack of confidence, buying up failing refineries. In one six-week period between February and March of 1872, he bought 22 of the 26 refineries in the city in what was later called “The Cleveland Massacre.” In his telling of the story, Rockefeller paid a fair price for refineries that were failing, poorly run, or had inferior equipment. He could have simply waited for them to go under and then picked up the pieces, but he believed he was doing a good thing by buying them out. Some of the later gripes about his tactics derived from the refiners he bought out for cash (most refusing shares of Standard Oil stock instead) who later saw him build a massive fortune from the bones of their endeavors. A lot of them were peeved they hadn’t taken the stock, which paid out over half a billion dollars in dividends between 1882 and 1906. 

Ida Tarbell, one of America’s first and best-known investigative journalists called “muckrakers,” grew up in the oil fields of Pennsylvania during the early years of the oil boom. She saw what the oil business was like from the side of the original drillers and producers—fluctuating prices, deadly accidents, and the gradual squeezing out of small producers and refiners by Standard Oil. Her father’s refinery was put out of business by Rockefeller, she believed, because of the company’s unfair business practices, which included favorable transport rates achieved through secret collusion with the railroads. 

In 1904, Tarbell wrote the bestselling “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” which laid bare the worst of Standard Oil’s monopolistic practices. She found evidence of strong-arm tactics, price manipulation that drove the sale price of oil below the costs of production, and collusion with the railroads that gave Standard a significant competitive advantage. And this was not merely history; at the time of her investigation, she was able to procure documents from Standard’s headquarters at 26 Broadway in New York that showed the company was still up to its usual monopolistic shenanigans.

John D. Rockefeller was portrayed as the evil mastermind behind the “Octopus,” as Standard Oil was derisively known, even though he had been retired from the business since 1895. Management of the company had been left in the hands of his mercurial and combative successor John D. Archbold, but Rockefeller remained its largest shareholder. His income from dividends in 1902 alone was $58 million. This massive fortune already made him a target, but once Standard Oil’s shady practices became known, Rockefeller became the poster child for everything that was wrong with big business in America. 

President Roosevelt, having established a reputation as a trust-buster, could not ignore Standard Oil after Tarbell’s expose. He did believe that large and efficient companies were essentially good for the country, creating jobs and lowering the cost of items that most Americans had to buy or use on a regular basis like kerosene and oil byproducts, meat, sugar, and railway transportation. But Roosevelt owed a large part of his political success to mastering the press and its capacity to influence public opinion. Once Tarbell’s scathing indictment of the Octopus came out and outraged the country, the President was hoist with his own petard. The Standard Oil antitrust suit offered a shot at both the world’s largest oil monopoly and the unfair practices of American railroads. 

He could not let this one get away. 

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Once the floodgates of lawsuits against Standard Oil opened, the focus landed on the company’s origins and rise to power, which meant the testimony of the company’s founder was essential. And of course, having the richest man in the world dragged into your courtroom was a pretty big deal. 

Process servers with court orders and subpoenas (along with legions of reporters) went on the hunt for Rockefeller, whose testimony was sought in cases in Missouri, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and others. He went on the lam, moving furtively between his estates, living the life of a fugitive. Rumors spread that he was hiding on a yacht off the coast of Puerto Rico, or at his business partner Henry Flagler’s estate in Key West. Rockefeller asked his wife not to call him on the telephone, believing the line was tapped. He didn’t put return addresses on his letters. He hired detectives to guard his estates and turn away process servers. He told Standard Oil headquarters to send his correspondence in plain white envelopes, so that no one would get any sense that he was involved in the operations of the company (which he wasn’t). 

Rockefeller went by boat from Tarrytown, New York to a fortress he had set up in Lakewood, New Jersey, complete with guards, floodlights, and thorough inspections of all incoming vehicles. Newspapers reported that Rockefeller was unable to visit his first grandson, born in 1906, because the process servers would get him. The New York World put out a headline, “Grandson Born to John D. Rockefeller and He, Mewed Up in His Lakewood Fort, Could Only Rejoice by Phone.” Rockefeller cut his correspondence by seventy percent and asked relatives to keep his location a secret: “Confidentially,” he told his brother-in-law, “I prefer not to have it known where I am. It often saves me much annoyance.”

Rockefeller was fond of understatement. 

Long retired from the company, he dictated a letter in 1906 resigning as president of Standard Oil and asking the board of directors to approve it quickly. With the directors facing their own subpoenas, they stalled. John Archbold and Henry Rogers, who were running Standard Oil, “told him he had to keep the title of president.” They said, “these cases against us were pending in the courts; and we told him that if any of us had to go to jail, he would have to go with us!”Despite all these many precautions, John D. Rockefeller was ultimately undone by cheese.

A modest and plain Baptist for most of his life, Rockefeller studiously avoided vice and ostentation. He made his children (and his business partners) pledge to abstain from alcohol (on one memorable occasion asking his daughter Edith to promise to never serve alcohol in her house on the day before her wedding) and metered out small allowances to them in exchange for household chores. He and his wife lived plainly, often using the furniture that was left behind in the houses they bought instead of buying new. His wife Cettie was horrified when she learned one of her daughters wanted to buy silk underwear. John, beset with digestive ailments, ate plain and simple food.

Cheese was both his luxury and his weakness. To teach his children restraint when they were young, Rockefeller restricted them to one piece of cheese each day. His daughter Alta one day tattled on her sister Edith for having two pieces of cheese. “Rockefeller professed shock at this indulgence,” and for the rest of the day, whenever the offender was within earshot, he would say, “Edith was greedy” and “Edith was selfish.”

Rockefeller’s chickens came home to roost, as it were, while he was on the run from various state governments. He had his favorite cheese shipped to him daily. While holed up in his Pocantico estate in New York, the New York Central railroad delivered his cheese to the station, where hack drivers would take it the rest of the way. One of these drivers, Henry Cooge, told the press (with ominous gravity) that “suspicious cheeses were again entering Pocantico.” This was irrefutable evidence of Rockefeller’s current whereabouts. “Them cheeses,” Cooge said. “I would recognize anywhere, no matter whether it is day or night…Rockefeller, in my opinion, is somewhere on his estate.”

Rockefeller and his family had to leave the country, sailing for France in the spring of 1906. His name was discreetly left off the ship’s passenger list, and the rest of the family traveled under assumed names. 

The heat was on back in the States. A court in Ohio brought an antitrust action against Standard Oil and issued a warrant for Rockefeller’s arrest. John Archbold sent a message that Rockefeller should extend his European vacation: “There seems to be a perfect wave of attacks all along the line.” A sheriff vowed to meet Rockefeller’s ship when it came back and arrest him right there on the dock. 

Standard Oil had never taken lawsuits like this seriously, and there had been many over the years. It was able to fend them off with high-priced lawyers (and the fact that most of its rapacious practices weren’t illegal until the 1890’s). The company and Rockefeller remained silent in the face of public criticism, which was a tactical error; it made the company and its founder out to be as privileged and arrogant as everyone said they were. And as guilty.

In the new age of muckraking journalism and widespread attacks on the super-rich, this approach wasn’t going to work anymore. Standard Oil’s legal team arranged for Rockefeller’s voluntary testimony, and he was able to safely return to America. 

Rockefeller was served and did testify in court in 1907, and the government’s case against the company was filed in 1909. In May, 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil was “an unreasonable monopoly under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.” The company was broken up into 34 independent companies with different boards of directors. 

Rockefeller ended up owning a quarter of the shares in all the smaller companies. With the advent of gasoline-powered automobiles, the value of those stocks “mostly doubled.” His fortune reached as high as 900 million dollars. 

John D. Rockefeller, now even richer after the breakup of Standard Oil, was finally able to move freely about the land.

And wherever he went, his favorite cheese followed.