I have been working on a little book about the Rockefellers and the family’s pervasive influence on our world today, about how it has been controlling us in many ways, grabbing land and, generally, making wildernesses for its own enjoyment while forcing the rest of us out using tools such as the NRDC that it created for that purpose. Readers of this substack will get sneak peaks as the work proceeds. Chapters 1 and 2 follow for your perusal.
Chapter I - Introduction
This book deals with aspects of the Rockefeller family you’ve probably not heard or discussed; not much anyway. It also deals with members of the family who have received relatively little attention, either yesterday or today. It is not about Standard Oil, although that provides a backdrop. It’s about the family’s other activities; the things they did with the money and are still doing today. The family has global influence over every aspect of the lives of others. This little book aims to demonstrate the tiniest bit of it.
Many suppose, because of Standard Oil, that the Rockefeller family still support oil and gas, but that’s only true in certain situations. Moreover, those instances are deliberately far removed from the image the family has cultivated since John D. Rockefeller’s son cooperated with his father’s nemesis., Ida Tarbell.
The son had first risen to his father’s defense after Tarbell’s attacks but did so by telling offering a sadly revealing metaphor regarding his father’s crushing of any and all competition to secure a monopoly. His defended his father’s ruthlessness by saying “The American Beauty rose can be produced in its splendor and fragrance only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it.” It was akin to the infamous communist excuse that omelets could only be made by breaking a few eggs and did not go over well at all.
John D. Rockefeller. Jr. was hurt by the experience and so launched the family’s alternative strategy of using their wealth to compensate for the manner in which it had been earned. Thus began the great Rockefeller giveaway but, as with all trust-funder stories, there is more to it. The family, indeed, gave away tons of money, and to many great causes.
It’s favorite causes over time, though, became foundations it ran—numerous foundations used to exercise power. And, with power, it had the ability to steer not only more wealth its way but, also, playthings. The world became its stage. Two of Junior’s five sons (Nelson and Winthrop) became governors (Nelson also serving as Vice-President). Another, David, became a banker and global financier. Laurance, became “Mr. Conservation” and John D. Rockefeller III, became a major philanthropist focused, among other things, on China and population control, his son becoming a U.S. Senator. And, so it has gone, their influence becoming pervasive. Now, for how that story has gone for the rest of us…
Chapter II - William, The Millionaire Wilderness Maker
Few are aware of the role of the Rockefeller and other aristocratic families, in conducting a war against fracking, which is really a war for parkland and ideology against the bourgeoisie middle class. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is one of their creations and operates in tandem with something called the Open Space Institute (OSI) as well as another related group by the name of the Catskill Mountainkeeper, all three of which share directors, just like members of the old Rockefeller trusts.
We will, in later chapters, detail some of the land scams involved and explain why fracking is a threat to them. We will talk about these groups’ methods of operation, their contempt for landowners and the way they’ve manipulated government policy to suit “strategic parkification” goals. It all amounts to emptying out rural areas they desire.
First, though, it is crucial to understand it has all been going on for a very long time. The tactics of today’s Rockefeller robber barons are almost precisely the same as they were more than a century ago. Therefore, let us begin with an absolutely fascinating story of one particular Rockefeller by the name of William whose name is much less well-known than his famous brother, John D. Rockefeller.
William Rockefeller (photo above) was not only John D.’s brother, but also his partner in the oil business. He served as Vice-President of Standard Oil. Christopher (“Kim”) Elliman, his great-grandson, is, today, the CEO of the Open Space Institute (OSI) and former President of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. He has served on a NRDC committee and, from time to time, has been boss to former New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Joe Martens, appointed by Andrew Cuomo.
The Dodge Foundation in which Elliman has played such a central role is a funder of the Delaware Riverkeeper (along with the William Penn Foundation, which also funds OSI). Both OSI and the Catskill Mountainkeeper are spinoffs of the NRDC, which is also a Rockefeller creation. This NRDC gang of cronies is one incredibly complex world of interlocking organizations on the same order as Standard Oil was. Little has changed from the old days.
William Rockefeller, too, was every bit as much an operator as his brother (their father was a con artist). They came from Richford (Tioga County), New York and following their tremendous success in the oil business, William decided he wanted a hunting preserve in the Adirondacks and some privacy. He bought up thousands of acres of logged land in Franklin County, the history of which is summarized here and here.
The full story, told by Samuel Hopkins Adams to Collier’s Weekly readers in 1905, though, is what ties it all together, with insights on today’s Rockefellers and the NRDC gang. You can read the whole thing here and following are some of the most revealing excerpts (emphasis added):
A MAKER OF WILDERNESS
“A Little Town’s Struggle Against the Power of A Millionaire”
Mr William Rockefeller bas demolished the houses and evicted the squatters on a tract of 150 square miles in the Adirondack Mountains, which he intends to use for a hunting preserve…
To buy a wilderness and make a community of it is within the opportunity of any moneyed man. To buy and make a wilderness of it may well be beyond the powers of the greatest of millionaires. William Rockefeller, vice-president of the Standard Oil Company, is making the experiment on the little hamlet of Brandon in the heart of the Adirondacks. By methods that are always within the law–or what his attorneys interpret as the law–he is patiently striving to dislodge the remnants of the populace that still hold root inside the circle of his great game preserve. All the land about them is his; he bought it and paid for it, thousands upon thousands of acres, more than two whole townships, comprising lakes, rivers, forest and mountains.
Only Brandon stands in his way; therefore Brandon must go. Not in any spirit of vindictiveness has Rockefeller reached this determination, but because he wants the land upon which the population now lives for the deer and the foxes, the partridges and the quail of his domain. To that end he has brought every means in his vast power for several years, from damage suits for trespass in which sterile victory brought him six cents, to making the Government of the United States, through tho Post Office Department, his instrument of persecution. But the town is still on the map.
Five years ago Brandon boasted twelve hundred inhabitants. It had its church, its prosperous hotel, its flourishing school and its busy mill. Today, it can muster but fourteen families and as many more deserted houses. All the rest is scrub-grown space. Tho hotel is burned down, the mill is razed, the church stands empty, the two or three hundred dwellings have vanished…
Rockefeller built himself a superb country place on Bay Pond, one of the fairest little bodies of water in the Adirondacks, some four miles from Brandon. Other purchases followed, until he owned all the land for miles around the town, including both banks of St. Regis River and its tributary streams.
But Ducey [seller of the lumbered tracts acquired by Rockefeller] couldn’t sell the town of Brandon entire, because he didn’t own it all. For instance, Harrison G. Baker owned the little summer hotel. Being in the centre of a rich fishing and hunting country, it was a paying enterprise. But to have a lot of summer and fall fishermen and gunners tramping over his property was no part of Rockefeller’s program. He undertook to buy the hotel. Baker named a pretty stiff price. Rockefeller’s agent laughed at him. ”Your hotel isn’t worth anything now,” said he. ”You won’t have any guests after this.”
”Oh, I think they’ll stand by me,” said Baker, failing to see the point.
“Then they’ll have to go a long way for their fun,” retorted the agent.” They can’t cross our property to get to the St. Regis River, and they couldn’t fish our stream if they could get there. We’ll prosecute if they shoot in our woods. What are they going to do?”
In vain the hotel-keeper protested that the river had been stocked at State expense, and that, as a stream used for years for floating down lumber, it was public water.
”You’ll have to prove it in every court, tight up to the Court of Appeals,” said the agent. ”We’ll fight on to a finish on that point.”
Baker had no money to undertake an expensive legal campaign. He sold his hotel for 5000dol, went away, and died shortly after…
By paying 100 dollars, 150 dollar, 200 dollars each for the houses, Rockefeller soon owned nearly the whole town. Then came a move which startled the inhabitants–the ”letting in the jungle.” Like a destructive horde of ants came the money-king’s men, carried away the houses piecemeal, and soon the little cluster of human remnants looked out upon the place where their neighbors had once lived to see only the swift-growing brush drawing its mask of warm and kindly green across swept ground and raw excavations.
The making of a wilderness was in progress.
Thus far, the pursuance of the Rockefeller ambition was along legitimate lines…
The campaign against Brandon now began to broaden. Signs warning off trespassers were put up on on all the roads leading out from the town. Many of these are high-roads, but the Rockefeller attorneys assume that they are private property. ”Let the other fellows prove that they are highways,” say the lawyers. Old trails were closed and barred against the passage of the Brandonites. Residents of the little settlement, who had obtained employment in a lumber company controlled by William Rockefeller, were discharged at the behest of the Bay Pond estate watchers. The word went forth that no Brandon man could get a job in that country. Children going out from the hamlet to pick berries on the mountain sides were driven home by the watchers and threatened with harm if they repeated the offense. Undeniably, the berries belonged to Rockefeller, but in view of the fact that they were never marketed, and that ninety-nine per cent of them were left to wither on the bushes, the inhibition is regarded by those most concerned as harsh, though legal enough…
Naturally, methods such as these made William Rockefeller unpopular, but what followed was a sorer exasperation to the thinning population of Brandon.
Since 1887 the little place has had a post office of its own. It was in the middle of the village, convenient for all, and the nearest available point, moreover, for several lumber camps in the vicinity. Late in April of last year, William Rockefeller wrote a letter to Henry C. Payne, then Postmaster-General, about the post office at Brandon. Persons who declare that they have seen this document quote from it this passage: ”Heretofore, you have granted us many favors. We have still one more to ask of you, that you remove the post office from Brandon to Bay Pond.”
Mr. Payne is dead; suffice it to say of him that he was a man peculiarly amenable to such influences as Mr. Rockefeller could bring to bear. Instead of referring the matter to the Fourth Assistant Postmaster-General, Mr. Bristow (an official reputed to be disobliging in delicate matters of this sort), as is customary in the affairs of fourth class post-offices, Mr. Payne himself sent an inspector to investigate. Before the inspector’s report came in, Mr. Payne, by what urgency it is impossible to state, took matters into his own hands and ordered the Brandon Post Office to be closed. The effects were removed to Bay Pond, a settlement exclusively made up of the Rockefeller menage, four miles distant in the heart of the estate. The personal request of a private citizen had sufficed to move a post office from a point where it was needed to a point where it was not. Bay Pond already had a post office of its own…
William Rockefeller was determined to remove a community for the sake of “making a wilderness” where only he was permitted to live among deer and the foxes that were the ostensible subject of his affections. His real affection, though, was for a different sort of fox; the one in the mirror. The parallels with the actions of the NRDC gang, which include his great-grandson at OSI, are absolutely eerie.
Today’s Rockefellers are busy “making a wilderness” in the Catskills and Upper Delaware regions, among other places; places where they can play, enjoy their privacy and immerse themselves in the snooty self-satisfaction of having preserved a natural monument to themselves. Meanwhile, the locals be damned. No fracking for them. No, nothing can be permitted that would throw up obstacles to “dislodging the remnants of the populace that still hold root inside…preserve.” They must go.
Fracking, after all, would raise property values and make it more difficult to acquire land on the cheap, more problematic to pull off arbitraged land deals with the state at three times the market value. If that means locals suffer the loss of long deserved economic opportunity, so be it. They’re merely “collateral damage,” as NRDC gang allies at the Park Foundation put it; remnants standing in the way of the monument.
Like William, today’s Rockefellers also have access to government officials “peculiarly amenable to such influences as Mr. Rockefeller could bring to bear.” It’s not hard when you’re able to put your own employee in as Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation. Yes, Joe Martens came from OSI and went back there after he left DEC and while he was there OSI staff and continued to refer to him as “our colleague” while he was there.
It’s not hard if you have the power to put three of your senior attorneys on the governor's sham hydro-fracking advisory panel, not to mention representatives from numerous other organizations you fund. The Rockefellers use that power today for things of much greater import than merely moving a post office. Indeed, they have successfully twisted New York State into knots over fracking, while also turning it into a piggybank for their preserve land acquisition plan.
William Rockefeller’s great-grandson, “Kim” Elliman, has, in fact, relatively recently collaborated with John D.’s great-grandson, Larry Rockefeller, Jr. (NRDC, OSI and Beaverkill Mountain Corp.) and Edward Ames (Catskill Mountainkeeper and OSI), to secure state favors to finance planning of another Adirondacks-like land grab in the Catskills.
Meanwhile, the NRDC coordinated with New York State’s Attorney General to harass towns with the nerve to say they’re pro-gas. And, Delaware Riverkeeper mercenaries have colluded with the gang in suing the DRBC to prevent fracking. It’s 1905 all over again, only worse.
Worse yet, the Rockefeller/NRDC gang is still doing it to the Adirondacks, which tells us where all of Upstate New York and other prized Rockefeller rural playgrounds may well end up. Consider this self-serving statement on the Adirondack Foundation web page:
“I rely on Adirondack Foundation because of the integrity of its process and the egality of its mission,” Kim adds. “As a second home owner, I look to the Foundation’s staff to understand the local issues and concerns far better than I can, and I prefer to consult with and delegate to them how best to approach those concerns.
Lectures from the half-million per year salaried Rockefeller man at OSI, a man whose great-grandfather drove out the locals from the Adirondacks, about the egality of mission don’t especially resonate. The truth is revealed in the second sentence. It’s all about them and they’re going to tell us what’s best for them. That’s the real NRDC gang today; plutocrats with a mission to make a wilderness for themselves.