John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Sitting idle among the combustion engines, I had ample occasion to survey the valley and appreciate the sheer geographic mathematics of its real estate.

Jackson Hole generally encompasses the broad valley and satellite hamlets like Moose, Teton Village and Wilson, and it owes its current layout to the grand, secretive land purchases of John D. Rockefeller Jr.

A century ago, he quietly acquired vast tracts to protect the dramatic views of the Teton Range from commercial sprawl.

He succeeded immensely, ensuring that roughly 97% of Teton County remains untamed public land today.

Long before monetary policy dominated the agenda, Jackson Lake Lodge had already established a reputation for high-stakes diplomacy.

In 1989, Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze bypassed the grand palaces of Europe to sign a historic treaty in the lodge carpenter shop at a wooden desk known ever since as the Peace Table.

Back in our hotel room in Jackson, looking out at the freezing rain on the pavement, I started reading up on the history of Jackson Hole, specifically John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s role in shaping the landscape outside.

Rockefeller lived with the paradox of his family's Standard Oil legacy, a fortune built on ruthless monopoly that he channeled into massive civic and conservation projects.

And you can see both outcomes in some of America's most famous family fortunes.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. locked his family's money into irrevocable trusts in 1934, and that family has kept billions intact across hundreds of members ever since.

By contrast, Cornelius Vanderbilt left 95% of his estate to one son and four grandsons with no trusts and no restrictions whatsoever, purely on faith in their judgment.

His son actually doubled it past $200 million by 1885.

But the generations after that, the ones handed money they didn't work for and couldn't explain, converted it into mansions and divorces and eventually nothing.

So that's just to say that you need to pass down that market wisdom too while you're here.

And that goes for everyone, not just the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts of this world.

The people who lose fortunes in crypto lose them to impatience, chasing dead narratives, oversized positions, or failing to put the structures in place that really secure the wealth over time.

Why? Well, because of a reverend and a Rockefeller.

Yep, in the 1920s, Reverend Goodwin of Williamsburg convinced John D. Rockefeller Jr. to help preserve the heritage of Colonial Williamsburg.

So plans were made to create this one-of-a-kind, unique, open-air outdoor living history museum.

About 500 buildings have been restored or recreated, all centered along Duke of Gloucester Street, which was the original main street of Williamsburg.

Like many other politicians before and since, King had no trouble finding lucrative work in the private sector.

His reputation as an expert on labor relations brought him to the attention of industrialist John D. Rockefeller Jr. Rockefeller managed the empire built by his father, Rockefeller Sr., who, although retired, still actively managed his investment portfolio and was the richest man in the United States The sprawling Rockefeller empire included everything from oil to railways to mining and medical research.

But as powerful as the Rockefellers were, John Jr. faced a serious public relations problem.

As in Canada, there was growing popular resentment in the United States directed at the barons who exercised monopoly power over certain industries.

The Liberals were divided between Laurier loyalists and Union defectors looking to return to the fold, between Western farmers seeking free trade and established Montreal industrialists married to the protectionist tariff, and between anglophone imperialists in the West and the party's empire-skeptic base in Quebec.

Considering the multiple fissures within the party, Defoe found himself asking, Will the resulting party be anything more than an organized hypocrisy dedicated to getting and holding office? He was especially unimpressed by William Lyon Mackenzie King's candidacy.

King would do well to go back to working for John D. Rockefeller, Defoe wrote.

There is no future for him in Canada.

cities and most states in the country.

So it was, you know, these stories about the beguiling Molly Moon and the playboy, you know, maverick son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. that really added a certain kind of spice to these stories about the fundraising.

So I wanted to chronicle all of that and to imagine what it would be like for for an African-American woman like Molly Moon to endure so much.

And I think that the reason why she did it was in part because, let's just be clear, she did have a penchant for the glamour of it all and the celebrity of it all, but she also had a deep commitment to racial justice.

It was against this backdrop of legislative near misses that Ludlow occurred.

The mine at the center of the massacre belonged to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, whose principal owner was John D. Rockefeller Jr., one of the wealthiest men in the country and a name synonymous with corporate power in Progressive Era America.

When miners at CF&I struck in September 1913 demanding an eight-hour day, the right to choose their own doctors instead of company physicians, and recognition of their union, Rockefeller's company responded exactly as Frick had at Homestead two decades earlier.

It evicted striking families from company housing, and it hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, another private security firm with a reputation for violence, to patrol the resulting tent colonies with an armored car the miners nicknamed the Death Special.

Congress held hearings.

Newspapers ran headlines calling it a massacre.

Even John D. Rockefeller Jr. himself would later admit, under pressure, that conditions at the mine needed reform.

But no federal law protecting the right to organize followed.