Edith

Edith Rockefeller (1872–1932) had the misfortune of being born female, the fourth daughter of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his wife Laura (called Cettie). The fifth child, John D. Jr., was privileged in this patriarchal household in ways that none of his three surviving older sisters would be.Despite the massive wealth of their father, the Rockefeller children were brought up, mostly near Cleveland, Ohio, in a very pious, restrictive household with no luxuries. Every cent counted, every minute counted, and serving God and other people was extremely important. The children had few playmates besides relatives, in part because their father was so widely hated by members of the public. In addition, Edith was a rather rebellious child, tending to test boundaries more than her siblings. As a result of this sheltered, restrictive upbringing, Edith was ill-prepared to make wise social and financial choices when, as an adult, she finally had access to large amounts of money. However, she did absorb and act upon the philosophy of being generous to people and causes that she supported, believing that spending money by the wealthy was good for the economy.In New York City on November 26, 1895, Edith married Harold McCormick, an heir to the fortune of the famous Chicago agricultural machinery family. He was no more financially savvy than his new wife. Together and separately over the years they spent wildly on construction and furnishing of mansions, clothing, jewelry, travel, art, antiques, and cultural causes, much to the dismay of both the senior and junior Rockefeller men. The McCormicks had five children, two of whom died in early childhood. The remaining three, Fowler, Muriel, and Mathilde, each married a spouse much older than themselves, and the two daughters produced or adopted a total of eight grandchildren for the McCormicks.For a number of years, Edith staged and attended many lavish parties, concerts, and other social events in Chicago. However, she also had extensive intellectual interests and gifts including fine linguistic skills. She collected books and read them, often volumes in non-English languages. She financially supported artists, composers, musicians, authors, and the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Edith had a rather unusual personality and became increasingly subject to possibly hereditary and certainly stress-induced nervous and mental health issues. At least one historian has alleged that she had agoraphobia. She developed a debilitating paranoia about traveling, both by ship (after the Titanic disaster) and train, and withdrew from most society for some years, living in Switzerland from 1913 until 1921.Whatever Edith did as an adult was always subject to inspection and judgment by society, the press, and her father and brother. Her father did nothing to encourage her in her interests or activities. If she did not follow his wishes or guidelines, he expressed his disappointment in no uncertain terms. He did not approve of her donations to found and maintain the Chicago Grand Opera Company or the Brookfield Zoo, and also condemned her real estate ventures, even while they were successful. When Harold decided to divorce Edith to pursue a gorgeous (but untalented) opera singer, Edith refused to agree to the divorce. But her father and brother tried to shut off adverse publicity by siding with Harold and colluding with her lawyer, so that Harold got millions of dollars and she got nothing but expenses in the divorce settlement. When Rockefeller Senior revamped his finances in 1917, he set up twelve-million-dollar trust funds for Edith and her remaining sister, Alta, from which each would get about seventy-two thousand dollars in annual interest. The funds would be managed by a committee of men and the principal would go to Edith's and Alta's children after their deaths. Junior, however, received over four hundred million dollars in funds and had access to the principal, as well as being in charge of his sisters’ funds.In June 1930, Edith was diagnosed with breast cancer and treated with a mastectomy and radiation. The cancer could not be fully removed. True to form, the doctor, her father and brother, and Harold did not tell her that she was dying. Junior forced her to move from her home to the Drake Hotel for the last few months before her death on August 25, 1932. Her collections were auctioned off piecemeal to pay her debts rather than going to museums as she desired.There is no large cache of Edith's papers as there is for other members of the family. The author believes that this is because Junior and Harold burned them. Although there is correspondence by and related to Edith in other collections, the dearth of her own substantial collection has contributed to Edith being largely unknown in Chicago, despite her important cultural contributions, which include the zoo, as well as funding for an institute for infectious diseases in memory of her older son, who died from scarlet fever.This is, therefore, the first biography of Edith Rockefeller McCormick, and Ross champions Edith's cause. Although patronizing, patriarchal treatment of women was not unusual in Edith's time (nor has it died out in the present), the actions of the male members of her family seem particularly egregious and irking to any reader who values women having a say in their own affairs. The biography is very readable, with short chapters and endnotes citing sources used. Family trees for both the Rockefellers and McCormicks are particularly helpful. Not so helpful is the author's tendency not to give the exact dates of events she is discussing. Although the chapters are headed with a range of several years, this is not enough for the reader who needs specifics. The index did not contain references to most details that this reviewer was trying to locate. Ross's biography of Edith Rockefeller McCormick should be useful to readers interested in women's studies, as well as Chicago society and culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

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