In this brief prelude, less than four pages in length, Chernow describes several revealing moments recorded in the transcript of a William O. Inglis’s three-year private interview (1917-20) with Rockefeller. According to Inglis’s verbatim notes, Rockefeller keeps his legendary calm throughout the interview. Only twice does the titan appear rattled, reacting with indignation to passages from Ida Minerva Tarbell’s The History of Standard Oil (1904). In the first passage, Tarbell accuses Rockefeller of using intimidation and threats to coerce his Cleveland rivals into selling their oil refineries—the so-called “Cleveland Massacre” of 1872. In the second passage, Tarbell assails the character of Rockefeller’s father, William Avery Rockefeller.

After a brief description of the Rockefeller family background in America, which dates back to the early-18th century, Chapter 1 focuses on Rockefeller’s colorful and peripatetic father, William Avery Rockefeller—“The Flimflam Man.” Born in 1810, William Avery Rockefeller, aka “Big Bill'' or “Devil Bill,” made a long career as a traveling charlatan who, among other things, peddled phony medicinal remedies to credulous consumers in small towns across North America. After Bill’s parents—John D.’s grandparents—move to Richford on the New York frontier in the 1830s, Bill, who was by all accounts an affable, confident, and seemingly worldly young man, courts a “sheltered farm girl” named Eliza Davison (7).