Deeply religious, and yet eminently ruthless, Rockefeller saw his wealth as part of a divine plan. "It has seemed as if I was favored and got increase because the Lord knew that I was going to turn around and give it back," he later said. And he set about giving it away as if it were a religious mission.

In his lifetime—nearly a century —Rockefeller’s massive and unprecedented wealth brought opprobrium and unwanted attention to him and his family. As such, it was something of a burden. And for five generations, the Rockefellers have attempted to lighten the load. While family members have pursued their own interests in business, they have continued to pursue philanthropy together. By creating institutions, hiring people to staff them, and devoting their own lives to charity, they made giving away funds a profession. Philanthropy would become a full-time job for John D. Sr., his son, grandchildren and some of his great- and great-great-grandchildren.

By the 1890s, with the giant Standard Oil throwing off massive dividends, Rockefeller, who had essentially retired from management of the megalithic trust in his early 50s, devoted his time to dissipating his fortune. In 1892 alone he gave away $1.35 million.

At first, Rockefeller would parcel out requests to his children for evaluation. As biographer Ron Chernow writes: "In this seminal phase of Rockefeller philanthropy, the entire family judged the merits of applications, and the children sometimes audited important meetings."

He enlisted his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr.—known universally as Junior—to work with him full time, then, as giving became more and more an enterprise unto itself, he hired Frederick T. Gates to advise him. Just as he had systematized the chaotic early oil industry, Rockefeller set out to rationalize large-scale philanthropy. As Gates put it: Rockefeller "came to have hardly less pleasure in the organization of his philanthropy than in the efficiency of his business."

Rather than give funds to individuals or to individual organizations, he tended to establish new ones. In 1882, he backed the formation of Spelman College, a school for black women in Atlanta. A decade later, he created the University of Chicago. And in 1901, Rockefeller brought into being the New York-based Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (later Rockefeller University), donating $61 million to create a self- sustaining research center.

A key tenet of Rockefeller’s efforts—and one that would carry down through the generations—was that philanthropy should attack the origins of social problems rather than treat their symptoms. And so another Rockefeller charity, the General Education Board, incorporated in 1903 to help schools in the South, focused on eradicating the boll weevil from cotton crops and improving medical education. In 30 years, the board gave out $130 million.

The more John D. Rockefeller gave—between 1856 and 1909 he would distribute $157.5 million—the more it seemed he needed to give, for the dividends from Standard Oil continued to gush in as fast as he could find worthy causes.

In 1913, John D. created the Rockefeller Foundation, endowed with about $180 million in its first six years, largely in Standard Oil stock. Junior was elected president and would devote the rest of his life to giving away his father’s money. The Rockefeller Foundation embarked on crusades to eradicate infectious diseases and lavished funds on China. "By the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation was the largest grant-making foundation on Earth and America’s leading sponsor of medical science, medical education and public health," wrote Chernow.

What set the Rockefeller tradition apart was a willingness to invest in ideas and knowledge—not just buildings. By the time John D. Rockefeller died in 1939, Junior had emerged as the era’s leading philanthropist. He presided over the Rockefeller Foundation for several decades but also used his own voluminous funds to tackle grand restoration challenges: Versailles, Yellowstone Park and Colonial Williamsburg (on which he spent $55 million alone), to name just a few. In his lifetime, Junior would supervise the disbursement of about $1 billion in philanthropy.

The Rockefellers—and Rockefeller family trusts—continued to invest in developments like Rockefeller Center and other businesses. This allowed a third generation of Rockefellers to carry on the tradition. Each of Junior’s five sons went into a different field. Nelson became a politician, David a banker, Laurance a venture capitalist. John III, like his namesake, would become a full-time philanthropist.

In 1940, the sons created the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), which was ultimately endowed with nearly $130 million in funds from Junior. And as the Rockefeller Foundation grew more independent over time, David Rockefeller wrote in Memoirs, "the Rockefeller Brothers Fund emerged as my generation’s most significant joint philanthropic endeavor, and it was the principal vehicle for our support of groups in fields such as population, conservation, economic development, urban affairs and basic scientific research." By 1973, RBF was the country’s 12th largest foundation.

John D. Rockefeller III, became chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1952, and, like his father, plowed the foundation’s funds into medical and scientific funds. When he died in 1978, for the first time in nearly 100 years, no single Rockefeller was recognized as that generation’s leading, full-time, professional philanthropist.

Instead, today literally dozens of Rockefeller family members—virtually all of independent means—are involved in a dizzying array of nonprofit and philanthropic efforts, many having to do with the environment, education and social welfare. Starting in 1958, the first members of the fourth generation—this time daughters, as well as sons—joined the board of RBF, which now has assets of about $620 million. Today, the chairman of RBF is Steven C. Rockefeller, the son of Nelson, while David Rockefeller’s daughter, Neva, serves as vice chairman.

The Rockefeller family business, Standard Oil, has long since passed into the hands of other investors, as the first John D. Rockefeller likely wished. So, too, has the Rockefeller Foundation, which has $2.6 billion in assets and not a single Rockefeller on its Board of Trustees. This neatly encapsulates the multigenerational approach Rockefeller formulated a century ago: Create institutions that can stand on their own two feet, and that continue to serve long after formal family control ceases.

The Jeans Genes: Levi Strauss
Historians—especially those with a tendency to psychologize—have frequently cast John D. Rockefeller’s philanthropic undertakings as expiation for the ruthless—and occasionally illegal—means through which he amassed his fortune. Be this as it may, some families have nevertheless found ways of harmonizing business and philanthropic efforts.

When it went public in 1971, Levi Strauss & Co.—at the time the world’s largest apparel maker—included some unorthodox language in its prospectus: "The company’s social responsibilities have for many years been a matter of strong conviction on the part of its management." Indeed, over the past 150 years, the five generations of the family who have controlled Levi Strauss have viewed their business and philanthropy as complementary activities.

Among the Haases, giving has been in the genes—and in the jeans—for longer than a century. Levi Strauss, a German-Jewish immigrant, arrived in gold-rush era San Francisco in 1853. In 1866, the dry-goods merchant built his first store, whose main product came to be sturdy, riveted jeans. By the late 1880s, the childless bachelor began to bring his four nephews—all with the last name of Stern—into the business, which they took over entirely when he died in 1902.

As Levi Strauss & Co. prospered, the Stern brothers supported a range of local religious, cultural and educational charities. Jacob Stern endowed Levi Strauss scholarships at the nearby University of California at Berkeley in the 1920s, for example. (Decades later, the family would create Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.)

The third generation of family management married into the company. In 1914, Walter Haas, also the child of Bavarian immigrants, married young Elise Stern, the daughter of Levi Strauss’ nephew Sigmund Stern. He joined the company soon thereafter, and was in turn joined in 1922 by his cousin Daniel Koshland. As president, Walter Haas (known as Walter Sr. after the birth of his son, Walter Jr., in 1916) ran the company from 1928 through the 1950s together with Koshland, who served as treasurer.

Decades before corporate America’s consciousness was raised in the 1960s, Haas and Koshland regarded the thriving business as not just a means to provide profits for them to support philanthropy on their own, but as a powerful means of effecting social change. They made a point of racially integrating the company’s workforce in the 1940s, as well as Levi Strauss factories—many of which were located in Southern towns—in the 1950s. In the latter decade, they began offering stock to employees, and during this same period, when the firm turned 100, Kosh-land and Haas established the company-controlled Levi Strauss Foundation as a conduit for corporate contributions. Each year, the company would funnel a portion of its profits into the foundation, which frequently piggy-backed on the support given personally to cultural, educational and charitable organizations by the Haas and Koshland families.

Through personal example, they also inculcated a sense of service in the fourth generation. Walter Haas Sr. served on the boards of several universities, and Elise Haas was the president of Mt. Zion Hospital. In 952 the couple formed their own foundation, which helped support the arts, and their three children—Walter Jr., Peter and Rhoda—served on the board. "It’s in the way we were brought up, serving in the community, helping when we could. I saw what my parents were doing. I guess we tried to emulate them," said Walter Jr.

In 1958, the fourth generation assumed the helm at Levi Strauss, as Walter Haas Sr. retired to volunteer as the president of San Francisco’s Recreation and Parks Commission, a position his mother-in-law had held. With Walter Haas Jr. as president and Peter Haas as executive vice president, the company continued to grow into a global phenomenon, spurred by a popular culture that elevated jeans into a fashion statement. And while they continued the firm’s philanthropic efforts (by the late 1960s, according to Levi’s historian Ed Cray, "As a percentage of net profits the San Francisco apparel manufacturer was giving more than twice that of most other firms"), they also brought to it a new vision. Instead of confining donations to the San Francisco area, they began to invest in the communities around the country where Levi Strauss had operations. "It’s not a question of whether or not a business can afford to undertake programs of social reform," Walter Haas Jr. argued. "We don’t think a business can afford not to." At the same time, members of the fourth generation also formed their own personal foundations, while continuing to help run the Walter Sr. and Elise Haas Foundation.

The fifth generation carries on the tradition of the family business and family philanthropy. Robert Haas, the son of Walter Jr. and a veteran of the Peace Corps, served as CEO of Levi Strauss from 1984 to 1999 and is now the chairman, as well as a trustee of his parents’ foundation.

In the past decade, the Levi’s brand has suffered in the highly competitive fashion marketplace. Although the brand may no longer be what it once was, when it comes to philanthropy—and in marrying a family’s commitment to give to a company’s ability to assist—the Levi Strauss tradition has not only held up, but grown remarkably in strength.

An Image Redeemed: The Astors
The Astors, another storied American business family with roots in Germany, took a few generations to get the hang of philanthropy. But once they came around—by focusing resources on the city that had been the source of their wealth—they made up for lost time.

John Jacob Astor, born in the German town of Waldorf in 1763, came to Amer-ica in 1783. After selling musical instruments, he entered into fur trading, shipped goods to and from China, and, ultimately, took up that most lucrative of enterprises, the acquisition of Manhattan real estate. In the last three decades of his life, he invested $1.25 million in New York property—an enormous sum for that period. "Could I begin life again, knowing what I now know, and had money to invest, I would buy every foot of land on the island of Manhattan," he once said. Instead, he satisfied himself with a substantial percentage.

In the end, John Jacob Astor was much better at getting than giving. The public was shocked to learn that in 1848, when he died, the richest man in America left only about $500,000 to charity. Most of this went to establish a library, to be built on land that he donated. With grudging support from the next two generations, the Astor Library—the only major reference library in New York—grew, providing the basis for what is now the mammoth New York Public Library.

Neither John Jacob Astor’s son, William Backhouse Astor, nor his children—William Jr. and John Jacob III—felt any more inclined than the patriarch toward good works, even as the inexorable rise in Manhattan real estate made them still wealthier. William Jr. married Caroline Schermerhorn, whose lavish balls defined Gilded Age society and set new standards of snobbery. (She was known as the Mrs. Astor.) But John Jacob III’s wife, Charlotte Augusta, began a new tradition. Deeply religious, Augusta supported Charles Loring Brace’s pioneering Children’s Aid Society, and spurred her husband to give $250,000 to support the construction of the Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer.

Augusta’s nephew, Vincent Astor, the grandson of William and Caroline, preserved this fragile tradition. Born in 1891, he was, as Astor family biographer Derek Wilson acidly notes, "a hitherto unknown phenomenon in America: an Astor with a highly developed social conscience." A stroke of fate put him in charge of the family fortune at a young age. His father, Jack, went down with the Titanic in 1912, after chivalrously helping his second wife and several other women into lifeboats. And so, not yet 20, Vincent dropped out of Harvard and found himself in charge of an $87 million fortune.

He was intent on changing the family image from that of tight-fisted, high-living, aloof slumlords. Influenced by the various urban reform movements of the early 20th century, Vincent began to divest the family’s slum holdings in lower Manhattan. He built a significant housing complex in the Bronx, complete with a large children’s play area, and transformed a valuable plot in Harlem into a playground.

He funneled the cash raised from real-estate sales into other ventures, amassing stakes in publicly held banks and shipping companies and purchasing Newsweek in the 1930s. In 1948, the childless Vincent created the Vincent Astor Foundation, which began making grants to hospitals and children’s homes.

In 1953, after his second marriage broke up, the 62-year-old Vincent met the recently widowed Brooke Marshall, a vivacious, well-bred woman who worked at Conde Nast’s House and Garden. It was she—Brooke Astor—who would finally carve out for the family an important place on the map of great philanthropists.

When Vincent died on Feb. 3, 1959, half of his $130 million estate was given to the Vincent Astor Foundation. While he directed that his wife have the sole power to distribute the foundation’s largesse, Vincent had not discussed his plans for the foundation with Brooke, beyond noting that the funds should be used for "the amelioration of human misery."

Brooke Astor called John D. Rockefeller III for advice. As she recalled in her memoir, Footprints, he said: "The person who has control of the money should also be personally involved in the giving."

For the next 40 years, the energetic Brooke Astor would devote her life to this work—and she did so with a distinctly un-Astorian sense of joy. "That is the fun of it all. Giving away money should be exhilarating," she said. She also did so with a sense of urgency. Since she and Vincent Astor did not have children of their own—Brooke had a son from a prior marriage—there was no logical heir to run the family foundation.

"As the original Astor fortune had been made in New York," she wrote, "I felt that the foundation money should be spent only within the five boroughs." Mimicking some of Vincent’s earlier efforts, she used funds to beautify public housing projects, creating "outdoor living rooms." She built tiny parks all over Manhattan and established projects in Central Park to teach children about gardening and conservation. Although always decked out in fur and pearls, Brooke Astor was no Lady Bountiful. "Giving the money away would not mean nearly as much to me if I never saw what comes of it."

She also found a way to continue and bolster Astor traditions. As part of her Crown Jewels Program, she funded the city’s great public institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bronx Zoo (where she gave $5 million to support construction of the Wild Asia exhibit) and Channel 13. Chief among her favorite jewels was the New York Public Library, which prior generations of Astors had supported, however grudgingly. Brooke Astor became a regular fixture at the vast Beaux Arts New York Public Library at the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, as well as at branches around the city. By 1997, when she formally closed the foundation, Brooke Astor had directed $30 million of the foundation’s $195 million in net donations to the New York Public Library.

By giving shape and form to her husband’s instincts, Brooke Astor not only managed to rehabilitate crucial and historic institutions in the city that had provided so much of the Astor family’s wealth, she also managed to rehabilitate the family’s historical image.

Photography courtesy of the Rockefeller archive, Underwood & Underwood, and Corbis