59 lines
5.1 KiB
Markdown
59 lines
5.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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category: "Business & Finance"
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aliases:
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- "Rockefellers"
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- "the Rockefellers"
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tags:
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- Person
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- Family
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- StandardOil
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- Philanthropy
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- LatinAmerica
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- Banking
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summary: "American family whose Standard Oil fortune endowed the Rockefeller Foundation and Chase, and whose sons Nelson and David ran wartime propaganda, covert-action coordination and hemispheric banking."
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location: "New York, New York"
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relations:
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- type: founded
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with: "[[Standard Oil]]"
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start: 1870
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role: "John D. Rockefeller and associates"
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fn: 1
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- type: funded
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with: "[[Rockefeller Foundation]]"
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start: 1913
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fn: 2
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- type: founded
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with: "[[Rockefeller Brothers Fund]]"
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start: 1940
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role: "the five sons of John D. Rockefeller Jr."
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fn: 3
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- type: owned
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with: "[[Chase Manhattan Bank]]"
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role: "family control of Chase National from the 1920s"
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fn: 4
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created: 2026-09-22
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updated: 2026-09-22
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---
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The Rockefeller family's fortune came from [[Standard Oil]]. In 1870 [[John D. Rockefeller]] and his associates formed the Standard Oil Company (Ohio), with the largest refining capacity of any firm in the world; in 1882 the Standard Oil Trust took in Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York, with headquarters at 26 Broadway in New York; after a Supreme Court decision in 1911 it was broken up into 34 companies.[^1] The family's philanthropies followed: the [[General Education Board]], the [[Rockefeller Sanitary Commission]] and, chartered in 1913, the [[Rockefeller Foundation]], which by the 1920s owned stock in thirteen oil companies and nine pipelines. When [[Charles Evans Hughes]], a Standard Oil counsel and Foundation trustee, became secretary of state, the British Foreign Office complained that "Washington officials begin to think, talk, and write like Standard Oil officials."[^2]
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### The Five Brothers
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[[John D. Rockefeller Jr.]] and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller had five sons, John D. III, [[Nelson Rockefeller]], [[Laurance Rockefeller]], Winthrop and [[David Rockefeller]], who in 1940 set up the [[Rockefeller Brothers Fund]] to coordinate their giving.[^3][^5] The family had controlled the Chase National Bank since the 1920s; merged with the Bank of the Manhattan Company in 1955 as [[Chase Manhattan Bank]], it was run by David, president from 1961 and chairman from 1969 to 1981.[^4]
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Nelson, a director of Standard Oil of New Jersey's Venezuelan subsidiary, Creole Petroleum, in the 1930s, was named on August 16, 1940, to head the office that became the [[CIAA|Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs]], which subsidized 1,200 Latin American newspaper publishers dependent on its newsprint shipments.[^5][^6] After the war he set up two private development companies, the [[IBEC|International Basic Economy Corporation]] and the [[AIA|American International Association]].[^5] In 1955, as special assistant to President [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], he chaired the Planning Coordination Group, set up within the framework of [[National Security Council|NSC]] 5412, which governed covert operations; its members were the under secretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense and the director of central intelligence.[^7] The Brothers Fund's Special Studies Project of 1956 to 1961, which Nelson convened, had [[Henry A. Kissinger|Henry Kissinger]] as its director, and Nelson kept him on afterward as his foreign policy consultant; Laurance sat on Kissinger's panel.[^3][^8] As vice president, Nelson chaired the [[Rockefeller Commission 1975|commission]] that [[Gerald Ford]] set up on January 4, 1975, to investigate the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]]'s domestic activities.[^9]
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The Foundation paid for the founding in 1943 of the [[Allan Memorial Institute]] in Montreal, where [[D. Ewen Cameron]] later conducted the depatterning experiments funded under [[Project MKUltra|MKULTRA]].[^10] David founded the Council of the Americas in 1963 and in 1973, with [[Zbigniew Brzezinski]], the [[Trilateral Commission]].[^5]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: ExxonMobil, "Our History," corporate history timeline, entries for 1870, 1882 and the 1911 dissolution. https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/company/who-we-are/our-history
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[^2]: Colby, Gerard, and Charlotte Dennett. *Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon.* HarperCollins, 1995, chs. 2-3.
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[^3]: Colby and Dennett, ch. 25, as cited on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund page.
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[^4]: Colby and Dennett, ch. 13, as cited on the Chase Manhattan Bank page.
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[^5]: Colby and Dennett, chs. 1, 5, 8, 13, as cited on the Nelson Rockefeller and David Rockefeller pages.
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[^6]: Council of National Defense order establishing the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics, August 16, 1940; Executive Order 8840, July 30, 1941.
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[^7]: Hughes, Rowland, memorandum to the President, March 3, 1955, *Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950-1955, The Intelligence Community,* doc. 210.
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[^8]: Colby and Dennett, Introduction (2017) and ch. 23, as cited on the Henry A. Kissinger page.
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[^9]: Executive Order 11828, January 4, 1975.
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[^10]: Marks, John. *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.* Times Books, 1979, ch. 8.
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