65 lines
6.3 KiB
Markdown
65 lines
6.3 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
category: "Business & Finance"
|
|
aliases:
|
|
- "Rockefellers"
|
|
- "the Rockefellers"
|
|
tags:
|
|
- Person
|
|
- Family
|
|
- StandardOil
|
|
- Philanthropy
|
|
- LatinAmerica
|
|
- Banking
|
|
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."
|
|
location: "New York, New York"
|
|
relations:
|
|
- type: founded
|
|
with: "[[Standard Oil]]"
|
|
start: 1870
|
|
role: "John D. Rockefeller and associates"
|
|
fn: 1
|
|
- type: funded
|
|
with: "[[Rockefeller Foundation]]"
|
|
start: 1913
|
|
fn: 3
|
|
- type: founded
|
|
with: "[[Rockefeller Brothers Fund]]"
|
|
start: 1940
|
|
role: "the five sons of John D. Rockefeller Jr."
|
|
fn: 4
|
|
- type: owned
|
|
with: "[[Chase Manhattan Bank]]"
|
|
role: "family control of Chase National from the 1920s"
|
|
fn: 6
|
|
- type: participant_in
|
|
with: "[[Operations Coordinating Board]]"
|
|
role: "Nelson Rockefeller, chairman of the Planning Coordination Group, a grouping of OCB members"
|
|
start: 1955-03-10
|
|
fn: 9
|
|
created: 2026-09-22
|
|
updated: 2026-09-22
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
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 Court's opinion of May 15, 1911 names "The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and thirty-three other corporations" as appellants, together with John D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller and five other individual defendants, and affirmed the decree with directions to modify it.[^2] 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."[^3]
|
|
|
|
### The Five Brothers
|
|
|
|
[[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.[^4][^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.[^6]
|
|
|
|
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][^7] 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 in March 1955 within the [[Operations Coordinating Board]] to cover overt and covert action; its members were the under secretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense and the director of central intelligence.[^8] The Bureau of the Budget had proposed it as "a special grouping of OCB members chaired by Mr. Rockefeller," and Rockefeller was designated its chairman on March 10, 1955. The group was a grouping of OCB members, distinct from the Special Group of [[National Security Council|NSC]] 5412.[^9] 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.[^4][^10] 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.[^11]
|
|
|
|
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]].[^12] David founded the Council of the Americas in 1963 and in 1973, with [[Zbigniew Brzezinski]], the [[Trilateral Commission]].[^5]
|
|
|
|
### Footnotes
|
|
[^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
|
|
[^2]: *Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States*, 221 U.S. 1 (decided May 15, 1911), opening paragraph and concluding part of the opinion of Chief Justice White. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/221/1
|
|
[^3]: Colby, Gerard, and Charlotte Dennett. *Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon.* HarperCollins, 1995, chs. 2-3.
|
|
[^4]: Colby and Dennett, ch. 25, as cited on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund page.
|
|
[^5]: Colby and Dennett, chs. 1, 5, 8, 13, as cited on the Nelson Rockefeller and David Rockefeller pages.
|
|
[^6]: Colby and Dennett, ch. 13, as cited on the Chase Manhattan Bank page.
|
|
[^7]: 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.
|
|
[^8]: Hughes, Rowland, memorandum to the President, March 3, 1955, *Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950-1955, The Intelligence Community,* doc. 210.
|
|
[^9]: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950-1955, Intelligence Community, doc. 210, Bureau of the Budget memorandum to President Eisenhower, with the annotation on the March 10, 1955 designation. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d210
|
|
[^10]: Colby and Dennett, Introduction (2017) and ch. 23, as cited on the Henry A. Kissinger page.
|
|
[^11]: Executive Order 11828, January 4, 1975.
|
|
[^12]: Marks, John. *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.* Times Books, 1979, ch. 8.
|