Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick by Andrea Friederici Ross (review)

On August 25, 1932, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, Chicago’s once-affluent patron of artistic and civic causes, died in a four-bedroom suite of the Drake Hotel overlooking her shuttered Lake Shore Drive mansion. In the years that followed, Rockefeller McCormick’s properties and prized possessions were sold at bargain prices to cover her debts, leaving her surviving heirs a paltry inheritance. Her correspondence was likely burned and her prized Chicagoland homes, once the centers of the city’s elite beau monde, slowly fell into ruin. With Edith, Andrea Friederici Ross offers the first complete biography of the influential heiress. In doing so, she highlights some of the reasons for previous scholarly neglect. “She’d gone missing,” claims Ross pithily, suggesting that “her voice was deliberately erased” (xii).

Ross’s book unfolds chronologically, devoting each of twenty-one chapters to a brief period in Rockefeller McCormick’s life. While this episodic approach sometimes limits the author’s ability to develop or contextualize biographical information, it effectively organizes Rockefeller McCormick’s documented experiences in a manner that palpably conveys the fast-paced living for which she was known. Ross first tackles her subject’s upbringing within the Rockefeller family and, in the process, establishes some guiding premises for the remainder of the book. “It was a somber life but a safe one,” writes Ross, describing a “childhood of fear, piety, frugality, and envy” that accompanied her early years under the authority of her industrialist father, John D. Rockefeller (7). In contrast to the hard-nosed, domineering nature of her father and brother (John Jr.), Rockefeller McCormick was, by all accounts, a creative and noted intellectual. Her personal interests in such humanistic areas as languages and arts carried forth into her public life in Chicago. There, she spent time and money on opera, theater, and visual art. These causes, in addition to the “impressive shopping” (16) that characterized much of her lifestyle, were often criticized by father and brother as sources of needless spending: “It was too much. Senior disapproved. Junior disapproved” (42). As the managers of her trust, her father and brother also criticized her decade-long support of the development of Jungian analysis in Switzerland. When the1929 crash upended her otherwise successful real estate endeavors, they removed Rockefeller McCormick from her home—all the while hiding the extent of her declining health.

The sheer amount of research and synthesis required of this project is especially noteworthy. Scant primary source information on Rockefeller McCormick exists in the family archives, and very little attention has been given to her beyond her mere familial relationship to her father. Nevertheless, Ross pieces together an admirable assortment of sources from period press clippings, numerous archival collections in the U.S. and abroad, and a century of passing appearances in secondary sources. As Ross explains, she has been “searching for traces” of Rockefeller McCormick; her documentary elusiveness was a primary motivation for this work (xi). Although perhaps not as well and truly “missing” from cultural memory as the author’s discovery narrative might suggest, Rockefeller McCormick certainly has posed a methodological challenge for researchers. Reconstructing her life required Ross to follow a complex trail leading from Chicago and surrounding midwestern states to New York and then across the Atlantic to Switzerland.

In all of this, perhaps more could be said about Rockefeller McCormick’s social and artistic work on its own terms rather than in relation to the industrial and economic influence of her father, brother, and ex-husband, Harold McCormick (Cyrus McCormick’s son). While social pressures and the financial domination of her male relatives undoubtedly loomed large in her life, Rockefeller McCormick’s philanthropic and organizing efforts offer a chance to reevaluate a narrative of gendered repression in ways that imbue her routine activities with further agency. Rather than a mere “merry-go-round of social engagements” conducted without purpose while her husband “went off to work each morning . . . and spent his evenings in board...