Supposedly former Governor Tom Dewey once told Rockefeller, “I like you but I can’t afford you.” Across nearly sixteen years Rockefeller taxed, borrowed and spent, building highways, hospitals, schools, museums and an ever more expansive social welfare state. He had every confidence that few social problems could not be solved with enough funding and the right experts.

Richard Norton Smith’s outstanding new biography of Nelson Rockefeller does not directly focus much on the religious beliefs of the wealthy scion and long-time presidential aspirant. But there are enough tidbits to imply that he was a Social Gospel Christian, very much the product of his family’s targeted philanthropy and devotion to liberal Protestantism.

The grandson of America’s first billionaire, Rockefeller was born into a pious Baptist home where liquor, smoking and profanity were prohibited, family prayers were a daily ritual, and the Sabbath always sacred. His grandfather, John Sr., the builder of an oil empire, was a conventional but not very theologically minded Baptist. His father, John Jr., the heir and only son, was devout but committed to modernizing Christianity under the guidance of experts he would fund. His counsel for philanthropy was Raymond Fosdick, a backslidden Baptist who championed cautiously progressive causes. Fosdick was brother to the great liberal preacher Harry Emerson, a zealous foe of “fundamentalism” who had survived a Presbyterian heresy trial.

John Jr. so admired Rev. Fosdick that he funded his tracts and built a cathedral for him on New York’s upper West side, Riverside Church, where Protestantism and modernity were merged together by Fosdick’s sermons and the church’s progressive iconography. The church was and is next door to Union Seminary, once Baptist, and long an academy of liberal Protestantism, also supported by the Rockefellers. In the same neighborhood in the late 1950s the Rockefellers also built the soaring Interchurch Center as headquarters for liberal Protestant denominational and ecumenical agencies.

Earnest, chaste, sober, punctilious, generous, and committed to social uplift, John Jr. and his more exuberant wife Abby raised their five sons to be conventionally moral but theologically liberal Baptists who would perpetuate the family tradition of high-minded philanthropy. Their exertions were partly successful. Young Nelson, himself still chaste, married an upright woman whom he admired, quickly fathering five children. For most of his life he avoided hard liquor, profanity, and smoking. His work ethic never wavered. His commitment to humanitarian causes, political reform, and the arts was perpetual.

After helping with the management of Rockefeller Center during the Depression, he spent the rest of his life in public service, starting with appointive positions in FDR’s administration, despite his Republicanism. Always a fervent patriot, Rockefeller worked to counter Nazi and later Communist influence in Latin America. He conferred and socialized with FDR, who remained his lifelong beau ideal as President, and who helped further instill in Rockefeller a lifelong confidence in the power of government to sweepingly reform society.

Rockefeller served but did not as zealously admire Truman and Eisenhower. Against expectations, he was elected governor of New York in 1958, a big year for Democrats, the first of four unprecedented terms that would change the face of then America’s most populous and wealthiest state, instantly making him a major presidential contender.

Supposedly former Governor Tom Dewey once told Rockefeller, “I like you but I can’t afford you.” Across nearly sixteen years Rockefeller taxed, borrowed and spent, building highways, hospitals, schools, museums and an ever more expansive social welfare state. He had every confidence that few social problems could not be solved with enough funding and the right experts.

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