“This is my show!” declared Winthrop Rockefeller, as he took Saturday Evening Post journalist Joe Alex Morris on a tour of his recently built Winrock Farms atop Petit Jean Mountain in Arkansas. “It doesn’t have anything to do with any Rockefeller family project. This is all my own.”
It was September 1956, and Winthrop was 44 years old. At six feet and three inches tall, and weighing in at a bulky 225 pounds, he was a commanding presence. He was still handsome, though the creeping signs of middle age were beginning to show in his thinning, dark, slicked back hair and receding hairline. Soft brown eyes hinted at an underlying shyness, contrasting with his more genial, carefree and outgoing demeanor. Winthrop’s aquiline nose was unmistakably inherited from his mother’s Aldrich side of the family. Full and shapely lips formed a big, cheery, welcoming smile to guests, which revealed tobacco-stained teeth, a product of the strong-tasting, unfiltered Picayune cigarettes he liked to habitually smoke.
Winthrop’s work shirt and khakis were standard issue. When he was out working on the farm, he liked to blend in with everyone else. He wore his favorite hand-stitched cattleman’s boots, but their fancy swirling patterns and the WR initials emblazoned on the shins remained modestly tucked away underneath his pant legs. The WR trademark was visible everywhere around Winthrop’s various enterprises. It took pride of place above the corrals at Winrock Farms, and it was seared into the hides of his four hundred cherry-red Santa Gertrudis cattle herd purchased from the King Ranch in Texas, including his $31,000 (equivalent to $297,000 today) showpiece bull called Rock.
Winthrop Rockefeller Collection, UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and CultureWinrock Farms had fast become one of Arkansas’s top tourist attractions. It was located just outside the town of Morrilton and some 65 miles northwest of the state capital of Little Rock. More than 60,000 people traveled from near and far to stare in wonderment at the miracle that had occurred on Petit Jean Mountain. In just three short years between 1953 and 1956, and at a cost of $2 million (equivalent to $19.1 million today) — an eye-watering amount anywhere in the United States, but especially so in one of the poorest states in the nation — Winthrop had transformed the scrub and woodland into a model cattle-breeding operation. After an initial purchase of a 927-acre tract of land, Winrock Farms had grown to 2,400 acres split between the top of the mountain and the valley below.
Everyone told Winthrop that it was far more sensible to build Winrock Farms entirely down in the valley, right next to the water supply that it needed to operate. But the view was better from the mountaintop, and Winthrop’s ever ebullient enthusiasm never stopped him from believing that any obstacle could be overcome. Engineers devised a system that included constructing four lakes, a riverside pumping station, a 25-gallons-a-minute filter plant, auxiliary power plants, 3 miles of underground waterlines, and 2 miles of portable aluminum sprinkler pipes to defy the received wisdom and keep the green grazing pastures on the summit irrigated.
Over 350,000 tons of rock were shifted for fill or retaining walls. Another 50,000 tons of rock were crushed to build roads to make the farm accessible. Three large barns were erected, along with two 300-ton silos to hold feed, cattle corrals with iron fences, horse stables, a fully equipped garage and machine shop, underground storage for 3,000 gallons of gasoline, a firehouse with a fire engine, a laundry, a locker room with shower facilities for farm workers, and a suite of air-conditioned offices for administrators. Winrock Farms even had its own airfield, complete with a hangar, a waiting room, and a 4,600-foot lighted runway that was large enough to accommodate a four-engine jet plane.
Winthrop Rockefeller Collection, UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and CultureIt was Winthrop’s secular version of a city on a hill that his namesake, Puritan John Winthrop the elder, would surely have been proud of. John Winthrop the elder told his flock, as they headed to the Americas from England to found Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, that their new home would be a spiritual “city upon a hill,” and he warned them that “the eyes of all people are upon us.” In Winthrop Rockefeller’s case, as always, it was the eyes of the rest of the Rockefeller family that were upon him.
Winthrop’s move to Arkansas followed a third time in his life that he had failed to meet his family’s expectations in New York. The first time was in his unsuccessful academic career, which culminated in his resignation from Yale University in 1934. His three older male siblings in the so-called brothers’ generation of the family, John Davison Rockefeller III, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and Laurance Spelman Rockefeller, together with his younger brother David Rockefeller, all managed to navigate their way through school and to graduate from Ivy League colleges or universities. Winthrop was disappointingly and disapprovingly left the odd one out.
Redemption came in the southwestern oil fields. Winthrop was the first family member to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather John D. Rockefeller Sr. (known as Senior) by going into the oil business where the family fortune had been made. Senior cofounded the Standard Oil Company in 1870 and built it into the world’s first multinational corporation, becoming one of the richest men alive in the process. Winthrop, who started out as a lowly roustabout laborer, earned the respect of his fellow workers and the acclaim of management. His efforts made up for his scholarly shortcomings and in 1937 it earned him a coveted place in the Rockefeller family office located in Room 5600 (which was, in fact, an entire floor of the building) in midtown Manhattan’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where he joined his older brothers and his father John D. Rockefeller Jr. (known as Junior).
The second time Winthrop failed to meet Rockefeller family expectations was in his business and civic career in New York prior to World War II. Winthrop returned from the oil fields with the idea of becoming a junior executive in the oil industry. He dabbled in banking for a while, but he found it deadly boring. He tried philanthropy and fundraising by co-chairing the Greater New York Fund, but this met with mixed results. He then secured an appointment at Socony-Vacuum Oil Company in the Foreign Trade Department as liaison officer with the Near Eastern Development Company. Socony-Vacuum, formerly Standard Oil of New York, was one of the many derivatives of the Standard Oil Company that were formed after the U.S. Supreme Court broke up its operations under antitrust laws in 1911. Socony later morphed into Mobil, which in 1999 was absorbed into ExxonMobil. Although Winthrop enjoyed his time at Socony, it did not ignite his passion in the same way that performing practical manual work with his hands in the oil fields had. Meanwhile, his brothers were well on the way to pursuing their lifelong vocations in philanthropy, politics, business and finance. Winthrop struggled to secure himself a similar role in which to represent family interests.
Winthrop Rockefeller Collection, UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and CultureRedemption came in military service. Winthrop enrolled in a Citizens’ Military Training Camp before joining the Army as a volunteer in early 1941. He crisscrossed the United States in training, rising through the ranks to major. In 1944, he was deployed overseas. Island-hopping with the Seventy-Seventh Infantry Division in the Pacific during World War II, Winthrop participated in the battles of Guam, Leyte and Okinawa. It was a grueling 16 months that involved many brushes with death, including surviving a Japanese kamikaze attack on his transport ship, the USS Henrico. He returned a decorated war hero, the only one of the Rockefeller brothers to see active combat duty in service to his country. Again, it had been in the cut and thrust of the field — this time in the battlefield, rather than in the oil field — that Winthrop had thrived and proved himself adept at dealing with its workaday issues and concerns.
The third time Winthrop failed to meet Rockefeller family expectations was in his marriage and family life after World War II. He returned from war the only bachelor among his brothers and the only one childless. With time to make up, he became a fixture in New York’s postwar cafe society nightclub scene. He was linked with a string of female stars of stage and screen and frequently described in the press as America’s most eligible bachelor. On Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 1948, Winthrop married actress and divorcee Barbara “Bobo” Paul Sears at an impromptu ceremony in Lake Worth, Florida. Bobo was pregnant with Winthrop’s only child, future Arkansas Lt. Gov. Winthrop “Win” Paul Rockefeller. Within 18 months, the couple separated, and protracted and acrimonious divorce proceedings followed. The sensationalist headlines alarmed the private and secretive Rockefellers. Winthrop and Bobo eventually arrived at a divorce settlement in 1954.
By then, Winthrop had moved to Arkansas. The failure of his marriage prompted a good deal of soul-searching and reflection. For the third time in his life, Winthrop sought redemption. But this time, it was different. He craved a more permanent fix, rather than just a temporary escape. It was, he decided, time to finally take his destiny into his own hands and to define his own place in the Rockefeller family firmament. To do this, he once again returned to the field. This time, it was not to the oil field, nor to the battlefield, but to the fields of Winrock Farms. Although all three were very different sorts of propositions, they shared a common denominator. Whereas his brothers were contented pen-pushers with office jobs, happily pulling the strings and making decisions behind their desks at major organizations, Winthrop had always craved to work with his hands, to deal with practical matters, to grapple with issues face-to-face daily, and to constantly interact with and shape the environment around him. He lived his life, metaphorically, and often quite literally, in the field, with his boots planted firmly on the ground.
The same central theme that profoundly shaped Winthrop’s life as a New Yorker continued to dominate his life as an Arkansawyer: the ever-present tension between seeking to embrace and fulfill the high demands of being a member of the Rockefeller family and forever striving to step out of its shadow and to become his own person. In Arkansas, Winthrop found a place where he could continue to sow the seeds of the Rockefeller legacy, but one that would also allow him to grow them in his own independent and distinctive way.
John A. Kirk is the George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His new book “Winthrop Rockefeller: From New Yorker to Arkansawyer, 1912-1956” is being published by the University of Arkansas Press this month.
