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Overview
Despite his status as a scion of one of the wealthiest and most famous families in the United States and an enormously successful businessman in his own right, Laurance S. Rockefeller is unknown to all but a small circle of Americans. Yet while he has been neither Vice President nor Governor nor chairman of the world's largest bank, his contribution to society has been at least as great as that of his more famous brothers.
In Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation, noted historian Robin W. Winks brings Laurance to the forefront, offering an intimate look at his life and accomplishments. While Rockefeller has played a vital role in the business world as one of the most astute venture capitalists of our time -- providing seed money for, among other endeavors, Eastern Airlines, Intel Corporation, and Apple Computers -- his driving passion throughout his life has been the environment. In addition to the millions of dollars he has donated and the numerous conservation organizations he has helped to found, he served under five consecutive presidents in environmental advisory capacities.
Perhaps most significantly, Rockefeller served under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy as chairman of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (ORRRC), brilliantly orchestrating an assessment of the recreation and conservation needs and wants of the American people and the policies and programs required to meet those needs. The reports issued by the Commission represent a groundbreaking achievement that laid the framework for nearly all significant environmental legislation of the following three decades.
Winks uses a combination of historical insight and extensive access to Rockefeller and government archives to present the first in-depth examination of Laurance Rockefeller's life and work. His deftly argued and gracefully written volume explains and explores Rockefeller's role in shaping the transition from traditional land conservation to a more inclusive environmentalism. It should compel broader interpretation of the history of environmental protection, and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the past or future of conservation in America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781610910903 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 271 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Robin W. Winks is Randolph W. Townsend Jr., Professor of History and chair of the history department at Yale University. He is author of seventeen books, including the Pulitzer prize-nominated Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War and Frederick S. Billings: A Life.
Bruce Babbitt was the Secretary of Interior during the two terms of the Clinton administration and is a former governor of Arizona.
Read an Excerpt
Laurance S. Rockefeller
Catalyst For Conservation
By Robin W. Winks
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 1997 Island PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-090-3
CHAPTER 1
Mr. Conservation
The president of the United States came rather abruptly through the door to the right of the audience, apologizing as he walked for being late and keeping so distinguished a group waiting. Here, in the elegance of the White House's Roosevelt Room, serenely federal, clearly historical, George Bush began to read. There was a sense of intimacy to the room, and with cameramen lined up against the back wall, it seemed a bit crowded: the podium was only a few feet from the audience, who listened attentively as the president explained how the Congress of the United States had ordered the unique gold medal he carried in its blue plush case awarded less than a hundred times in the history of the nation. The first recipient was George Washington in 1777. This day the Congressional Gold Medal was being given for the first time for contributions to conservation and historic preservation.
President Bush said that young Americans appeared to know little of the medal's recipient, who now stood quietly to the president's right, listening. The award, the president suggested, ought to help remedy this, for the recipient was "a hidden national treasure," a person who had loved and nurtured and by example taught about conservation nationwide, who had in his work on behalf of New York City shown how parks and boulevards were also part of the "great outdoors." He was a "champion of natural and human values"; he was the "foremost trailblazer in venture capitalism" as well. His life and works would, the president hoped, stand in summary of a century in which Americans had come to appreciate the very real problems of their environment, indeed of the world's environment. The president turned toward the recipient, who was listening with respect, erectly attentive: it was September 27, 1991, in the nation's capital, and in the presence of his wife, members of his family, of his staff, of senators and others, Laurance Spelman Rockefeller moved forward to receive the official recognition that he was, in fact, Mr. Conservation, the man who had done more than any other living American to place outdoor issues—recreation, beauty, national and state parks, environmental education, a responsible combination of development and conservation—clearly on the public agenda.
Laurance S. Rockefeller, or LSR as he was known to many who worked with him, was brief and gracious in "gratefully and humbly" accepting the Gold Medal. He cited his grandfather, father, his brother Nelson, his wife Mary, and his son Larry for what they too had contributed, invoking four generations of "labors of love for our great country." He accepted the medal not primarily as an individual but because it honored all those who had taken part and would in the future take part in saving the nation's heritage. With this ceremony in the Roosevelt Room, chosen as the site in part because an earlier president, Theodore Roosevelt, had done so much to launch the conservation movement in America, the nation honored one of its environmental leaders. The environmental movement, LSR said, was "central to the welfare of people," and it would remain so for as long as "this piece of gold glistens." Nothing was more important to him, he noted, than the "creation of a conservation ethic in America." Though he praised the president for the new Clean Air Act, LSR was looking to the future rather than to the past, and perhaps he hoped that even this joyous occasion might serve to move the man who had promised to be the nation's conservation president (but so far had not fulfilled this promise) to more vigorous action. Much remained to be done, LSR noted: a forthcoming world environmental summit, to be held in Brazil, which the president had shown notable reluctance to attend, was the moment when concern for the environment would find its highest, worldwide expression. Looking across the crowded room, toward the secretary of the interior, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the cameras, the recipient concluded that "the nation's needs demanded that environmental quality must be high on the national agenda." Even at this moment of honor and recognition, Laurance Rockefeller was looking patiently and with his usual stubborn persistence to the future, seeking as he had always done to be a catalyst for change.
The short ceremony concluded, the president and the recipient shook hands, the president quipping that his staff had told him that he might look at the medal but couldn't touch it. The assemblage politely laughed, perhaps a little disproportionately. Mary French Rockefeller, LSR's wife, in electric blue, rose to be greeted by the president, after which he sought out each person in the room, to shake a hand, exchange a quick word, at least to wave, and after a final murmur of congratulations, to leave for his next affair of state. LSR, receiving the warm congratulations of others, no doubt already was thinking about the next step by which he could further the environmental agenda to which he had committed so much effort. The Congressional Gold Medal did not make him Mr. Conservation; he had been that for many years. Rather, it affirmed the significance of his contributions and provided a form of national validation for them.
As the president had noted in his brief allusion to Rockefeller's pioneering in venture capital, conservation was not, of course, the only significant matter on LSR's mental map. When asked by an interviewer what motivated him, he had replied, "I profoundly feel that the art of living is the art of giving. You're fulfilled in the moment of giving, of doing something beyond yourself That's the moment of truth.... The act of giving, the act of creating, the act of doing—[by these] you're alive and fulfilled." He had been a pioneer in aviation, in environmentally compatible resorts; his philanthropic contributions to medical research, especially on cancer, were extensive. When philanthropy relates to the conquest of disease or the healing of a shattered environment, it is a subject for the long haul, as LSR would remind people over and over. Everything, he told another interviewer, is related. What was required, in business, medical research, or conservation, was to "think newness and to see connections."
CHAPTER 2The Quieter Path
There are over zoo books on the Rockefeller family. They figure significantly in at least 400 more. Many of these books are about the third generation, the children of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: Abby, John D. 3rd, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David, in the order of their birth. One may read all these books, some friendly, some angry, to discover that there is one Rockefeller who is barely present in most of them. This is Laurance, who moves in and out for a page or so and is then gone, neglected by an author who sometimes is in search of scandal or the stuff of headlines, or whose interests are in politics, high finance, or international affairs.
As a result, most of these books have neglected the Rockefeller who, in the tradition of grandfather and father, arguably has moved and shaken to the most long-range purpose—the preservation of the nation's natural heritage, of great historic landscapes. That preservation and the resulting creation of a conservation ethic that is endurable, bipartisan, and rooted in a consistent sense of values is a quieter but far more significant achievement than much that is done in politics, education, or business. Laurance Rockefeller chose this quieter path early in life.
This book is about a person who is still alive. This welcome fact poses problems for any biographer. There is no attempt here to tell LSR's whole story. Rather, the book is an effort to catch the intensity of the subject's most consistent concern and to relate in some detail why and how this concern will outlast him. There are people who have no sense of place, who neither know nor care whether a mountain range in Wyoming, a run of hills in Vermont, or a tidal marsh in New York endures over time for others to share. But some care deeply. There are those who have no sense of time—a rather American failing—and who appear to believe that their meaning rests almost entirely between the parentheses of their birth and death dates. Other people plant, build, and protect for a distant future long beyond their own mortality. Some people contemplate both place and time and are content in reflection without action. Some act on their reflections. This is an account of one such person.
Not all judgments on the Rockefellers as a family, or on LSR as an individual, are as favorable as will be argued here. Some commentators have noted that he has been a shrewd and careful investor, and though such a judgment would be taken as praise in business circles, have turned this conclusion against him. Others have observed that his philanthropies, extensive as they are, have not reduced him to poverty, as they might a Christian monk. With respect to conservation, some critics have suggested that Laurance Rockefeller was, at best, inconsistent, and at the harsher edge of judgment, insufficiently purist in his approach to environmental issues.
With all rich men and women there is, of course, a substantial body of populist literature that concludes that their riches were won from the labor of others, or that the structure of capitalist society ensured that the rich would grow richer as the poor grew poorer, or that riches are prima facie evidence of unethical behavior. There is little that can be said to refute this generic argument, which is simply unexamined ideology. The historian's argument—that all individuals must be understood in the context of their time, place, and background—is dismissed by the simplistic argument (sometimes Marxist, but often lacking even the rigor of thought a Marxist scholar brings to analysis) that wealth in itself both corrupts and is a sign of corruption. A historian who argues that capitalism has, on the whole, been a motor for human progress, and that success in a capitalist society is the product of a dozen or more traits, many of them desirable and all of them quite human, may be accused of being equally ideological. All wealthy men will have their critics, for wealth is believed to carry great responsibilities; the proper evaluation of a life is in the deeds done with that wealth.
There have always been those who do good for others, as there have been those who think only of themselves. But organized philanthropy, the giving of great sums of money to improve society by searching for the cure to a disease, or building a great library, or creating a major recreational or educational resource, is a product of the nineteenth century, and even more of the twentieth century. The best known philanthropists have been men of moral conviction, generally rooted in an organized religion but not satisfied with the way in which their church, any church, dealt with systemic problems. They were individuals like Andrew Carnegie, generally said to be the first modern philanthropist, who did not think that giving a dime to one beggar would bring significant change to society, or the life of the beggar, while giving millions of dimes for libraries, hospitals, and research institutes to protect clean air and promote a healthy environment might change a harmful societal trajectory into a better one. Philanthropy tends to be most generous and most noticeable during times of rising crime, social disorder, and violence, when thoughtful reflection leads to the desire to mitigate poverty and ignorance. This desire was underpinned in the nineteenth century by the doctrine of progress, in the early twentieth century by belief in the power of the individual, and in the late twentieth century by a conviction that neither churches nor governments could, alone, ensure people of the exercise of their natural rights.
Andrew Carnegie had written that "those who would administer [their wealth] wisely must indeed be wise." He opposed "indiscriminate charity," which often encouraged "the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy." He wished to benefit the community, and the individual only as a member of that community: to use private wealth "to place within [the community's] reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise—free libraries, parks, and means of recreation, by which men are helped in body and mind; works of art, certain to give pleasure and improve the general condition of the people...."
These remarks, from Carnegie's famous essay on "Wealth," published in 1889, were much satirized by the 1930s, and even more so after World War II, for Carnegie appeared to be embracing a Darwinian "survival of the fittest" doctrine while clothing it in moral rhetoric. He did not admit that the slothful, drunken, and unworthy might be so because of systemic patterns of greed, abuse of power, and denial of access to education and good health. His suggestion that he was wise and others were not did not go down well in a time of increasing democratization of education. Carnegie's particular interest, free public libraries across the United States (and in his native Scotland), depended upon the belief that education would lift the potentially worthy out of the mud, a belief based upon the notion of the improving society. With access to knowledge, natural selection would bring the most intelligent and hard-working men to the top, thereby improving the community at large. Wealth more than nobility obliged one to help the unfortunate. Many of the great philanthropists of the twentieth century have been more sophisticated in their language while sharing Carnegie's basic assumptions. They have believed that philanthropy, unfettered by the compromises of the political arena, might attack the root causes of poverty—disease, illiteracy, racism, dependency on drugs, a lack of beauty in one's life, despair—more directly than government. John D. Rockefeller 3rd could devote his philanthropic energies to population studies, to research and the distribution of information on birth control or, later, abortion (from which, he wrote in 1976, there must be "no retreat" if women were to take control of their lives and assert their inherent right to freedom) because he did not need to win voters to his cause. Individuals of great wealth could pursue their dreams while governments could hardly hope to dream at all.
Charity work was allied to and often based in a generalized religiosity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but by the 1920s and 1930s religion was less important than the social work ethic that sought to ameliorate for the weak the impact of laissez faire capitalism. The 1930s saw a rapid growth in fact-finding commissions, the use of statistics, the application of sociology and social psychology to the welfare of individuals and communities. Bureaucracies, in government and in charitable organizations, turned to science to supply answers to society's problems.
But science did not supply answers; rather, by multiplying factual data, it complicated, refined, and redirected the search for answers. It asked new questions. Science combated racism but there was a countervailing scientific racism. Science quantified the numbers in population growth, identified the vectors of diseases, supplied cures. Yet, a scientific rationalism was not what many of the great philanthropists sought from their gifts. Most held to a belief that there was something higher, beyond science, upon which communities must draw. They generally believed in people; they believed that individuals, if exposed to education, to art and to music, to the sublimity of great landscapes, and to the complexity and beauty of the natural world, would blossom. These individuals would form a community of spirit and intellect, and would, through a sense of stewardship passed to them by their experiences, tithe themselves financially and intellectually to help the next generation.
Such ideas may seem simple. In practice they are anything but. John D. Rockefeller, a so-called robber baron, found nothing contradictory in pouring much of his vast wealth into activities he believed would benefit society. Unlike Carnegie, he did not focus on a single activity, however: he took up Carnegie's list, as it were (and he began before Carnegie wrote), to create parks, colleges, universities, and hospitals and to enhance nature's natural beauty by the standards of his time. He had one son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who did even more, more extensively, broadly, deeply, and imaginatively, in education, medical research, and conservation. All of John D., Jr.'s children would also be philanthropists, some more than others, each specializing to some extent. His son Laurance would most directly carry on the wide-ranging work of father and grandfather in education, conservation, and medicine, while being closely identified with issues of the environment, to which improving education and medicine contributed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Laurance S. Rockefeller by Robin W. Winks. Copyright © 1997 Island Press. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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