Survival Of The Richest

The Trust Giant's Point of View: "What a funny little government!" -An attack on Rockefeller by Horace Taylor, The Verdict, 1899

Meanwhile, John D. Rockefeller had been busy. By 1880, Rockefeller owned or controlled 95% of all oil produced in the United States. Shortly after the turn of the century, Rockefeller became America's first billionaire. (12) It was around the turn of the century that Rockefeller began to give money to the Foundations, Funds, Research Centers and Institutes that would promote all the drugs his chemists churned out in the years to come.

Rockefeller Institute, 1920

The most richly endowed research center - the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research - was established in New York in 1902. By 1928 it had received from John D. $65 million in endowment funds. In contrast, as late as 1938, as little as $2.8 million in federal funding was budgeted for the entire U.S. Public Health Service. (13) By 1929, the Rockefeller Foundation, first created in 1909, had received $300 million. (14)

"Eugenics" or "good genes" was a science based on "social Darwinism" or "survival of the fittest" applied to humans. It was very popular with those who had most of the wealth and felt like they needed a scientific rationale for it - to validate the great poverty and suffering that also would occur. After 1900, Rockefeller, along with the Harriman family - the family that gave the Bush family it's start - began to spend million on "eugenics" research. (15)

Some of the Rockefeller Foundation money went to a Swiss psychiatrist named Ernst Rudin. He later went on to head the German "Racial Hygiene Society," a section of the new Nazi state. (16) Rockefeller would also hire William Lyon Mackenzie King as a "Director of Industrial Research" for the Rockefeller Foundation - shortly after he began the racist war on opium-smoking Chinese in Canada. (17)

Ernst Rudin

King and Rockefeller Jr.

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