Jackson Hole - Redux

Thanks for the comments on my latest post.  Part of my thought was informed by Ron Chernow's Titan, his biography of John D. Rocekfeller, Sr.  There are significant debates about the means by which wealth is created.  Those debates have much to do with the times and our attitudes many decades later about the effects of business actions on others.  Chernow paints a portrait of Rockefeller as a predatory businessman, but also spends more than half of the book on Rockefeller's family life - especially his religious convictions and his philanthropy.  So one answer to myself is that for Rockefeller, Sr., giving away his wealth (to Baptist causes, to the University of Chicago, and to what became the research center Rockefeller University, and others) was a manifestation of his religious ideals about stewardship (read: money is a tool to serve others).  That may have mixed with other impulses in his son, who was also driven by the need to improve the family name and reputation (Colonial Williamsburg both was an act of giving, as well as an effort to refurbish the name).  As TJD alluded to, I am generally not comfortable judging the moral rectitude of historical actors (though I admit there are some big exceptions).  It is just these contradictions in peoples lives that might history so interesting.  These are individual stories, so I concur with Salvatore that these things must be judged on an individual basis.  Together they might point toward an American "culture" of philanthropy. (OK - there is the title of my book, "The American Culture of Philanthropy"! Quite grandious!)

Comments

[Dianne Schmidley]

I think you are onto something here. This is not a black and white world, no matter how much we try to make it one. Even Hitler probably had his good points, although they are hard to find.

Not grandoise at all. I took two semesters of undergraduate hisory that looked at this topic (I think). The title was "The History of American Intellectual Thought." I came away with two imprssions:

1/ It was all about money (remember the 'green light' at the end of Daisy's dock in Fitzgerald's 'Great Gatsby' and De Toqueville's thoughts along the same line?), and

2/ It was all about ripping off the system.

That religion was a factor, as in Joh D.'s case perhaps goes back to Weber, who according to Talcott Parsons suggested that the Protestant ethic has something to do with capitalism. Dr Holt has a slightly different opinion I believe.

[Wayne Z.]

I am a firm believer that simple answers, Rockefeller was Evil, Money is Evil, blah blah are what gets us into trouble. Any author that seems to present such a monochromatic picture of an historical figure is worth reading only from an historiographical POV. I sometimes refer to it as Crayola History. Create a simple story that touches on bias and belief and simply confirms feelings, then run really fast and hope nobody notices how the details don't support the conclusions.

[Lindsey Bestebreurtje]

Dianne - I took a class by that same name but what I took away from it was "white people try and keep everyone else down" and we learned how that was done through business, science, and society. It wasn't a real uplifting semister.