Standard Oil Heiresses: Billions Inherited, Lives Restricted – HT
At its peak, Standard Oil controlled over 90% of the oil refining capacity in the United States. The name Rockefeller became synonymous with wealth so extreme it crossed into mythology. But the money did not reach everyone equally. For the women born into it, the daughters, the granddaughters, the great granddaughters of the men who built it.
The inheritance came wrapped in conditions the public ledgers never recorded. Conditions about how to live, who to marry, and what happened when you wanted something else. Some of them pushed back. Most of them paid for it. This is that story part one. The fortune and the family that held it.
To understand what these women inherited and what that inheritance meant, you have to start with John D. Rockefeller himself. Because the fortune he built was not simply large. It was in the way it was structured and controlled and passed down an instrument of a particular kind of power. John D.
Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870 in Cleveland, Ohio. Within a decade, through a combination of aggressive acquisition, tactical pricing, and the kind of business ruthlessness that the guilded age rewarded and the public eventually turned against, he had built a company that controlled the majority of American oil refining.
By 1882, Standard Oil had reorganized into a trust, a legal structure that allowed it to operate across state lines in ways that existing law had not anticipated and that regulators would spend 30 years trying to dismantle. The wealth this generated was staggering. At the peak of his fortune, around 1913, Rockefeller’s net worth was estimated at approximately $900 million.
a figure that as a percentage of American GDP at the time translates into something in the range of several hundred billion dollars in contemporary terms. He was by most measures the wealthiest private individual in American history. In 1911, the Supreme Court of the United States ordered the breakup of Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The company was divided into 34 separate entities, including what would eventually become Exxon Mobile, Chevron, BP America, and several other major oil companies. The breakup, paradoxically, made Rockefeller even wealthier in the short term because he held shares in all of the successor companies, and their combined value exceeded what the Unified Trust had been worth.
The money then was not simply inherited. It was actively managed through a network of trusts, foundations, and family offices that persisted for generations. The Rockefeller Family Office, eventually formalized as a private wealth management operation, became one of the most sophisticated financial structures in American history, specifically designed to preserve and grow a fortune across multiple generations.
Into this structure, daughters were born. And daughters in the Rockefeller world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries occupied a specific position, valued, protected, educated to a degree unusual for women of their era, and yet fundamentally positioned as recipients rather than stewards of the fortune.
The money flowed through them and around them. It rarely flowed directly to them in the way it did to the men. John D. Rockefeller had five children with his wife Laura Spelman Rockefeller. One son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., known as Junior, and four daughters, Bessie, Altera, Edith, and Maud. The son was groomed from childhood to be the steward of the fortune.
The daughters were groomed for something else entirely. And that difference in expectation, in preparation, in the assumptions made about what each of them would do with their lives, set the terms for everything that followed. Part two. Bessie and Alter, the daughters who disappeared.
The two eldest daughters of John D. Rockefeller are the ones the history books mention least, which is itself a kind of story. Elizabeth Bessie Rockefeller was born in 1866, the eldest child of John and Laura Rockefeller. She grew up in Cleveland during the years when her father’s fortune was being built, and her childhood was marked by the particular combination of privilege and religious austerity that characterized the Rockefeller household.
John D. Rockefeller was a devout Baptist who believed in hard work, careful accounting, and the moral responsibility of wealth. He kept detailed personal account books from the age of 16 and famously gave away a portion of his income, even when he had very little throughout his life. The daughters were raised in this atmosphere, educated, cultured, but firmly contained within the expectations of late Victorian Protestant domesticity.
Their father expected them to marry well, to conduct their lives with property, and to channel whatever energies they had into family, church, and the kind of quiet charitable work that was considered appropriate for women of their station. Bessie married Charles Augustus Strong in 1889. Strong was a philosopher, a serious, intellectually distinguished man who taught at several universities and who was by most accounts a genuine thinker rather than simply a fortune hunter.
He came from a family with its own background in the Baptist church, which aligned with the Rockefeller world. The marriage was respectable and it produced one child, a daughter named Margaret. But Bessie was not healthy. She suffered from persistent illness throughout her adult life.
The specific nature of her ailments is not fully documented, but she was frequently described in family correspondents as fragile, as requiring rest, as being unable to manage the social obligations that her position demanded. She died in 1906 at the age of 39. She had been married for 17 years. She had one child.
She had spent much of her adult life managing poor health in a succession of houses and European sanatoria that her husband’s philosophical career and her father’s money made accessible. What Bessie wanted, whether she had ambitions or frustrations or desires that the record does not capture, is largely invisible. She left almost no public record.
She wrote letters, some of which have been preserved in family archives, but they have not been widely published or studied. She lived and she died young, and the fortune moved around her without particularly marking her. Altera Rockefeller, born in 1871, lived considerably longer. She died in 1962 at the age of 90 and her life had more texture to it, though the texture is still not easy to find in the historical record. She married E.
Palmer apprentice in 1901, a lawyer from Chicago who was competent and respectable and not particularly memorable in any direction. They had three children. Alter’s most significant independent mark on the world came through her involvement with agricultural research. She and her husband funded the development of a farm in Williamstown, Massachusetts that became a center for research into improved farming methods, a cause that absorbed her attention and her philanthropic resources for decades.
It was, in other words, the kind of work that women of her generation could do without challenging the fundamental assumptions about what women were for. It was useful. It was charitable, and it operated through the socially acceptable channel of supporting her husband’s interests rather than asserting her own.
She outlived most of her siblings. She watched the fortune she had been born into change shape across a century, and she remained to the end a figure on the margins of the Rockefeller story, present, substantial in her quiet way, but not central in the way the men who managed the money were central. The story of the money and the women, however, becomes considerably more dramatic when you move to the next generation.
and to one daughter in particular whose life was anything but quiet. Part three. Edith Rockefeller McCormick, Jung, Jewels, and Chicago. Of John D. Rockefeller’s four daughters, Edith is the one whose life broke most dramatically from the pattern of quiet contained respectability that defined her sisters. And the story of what happened to her is one of the most genuinely extraordinary in American social history.
Edith Rockefeller was born in 1872 and grew up as the third daughter in the family. By accounts from people who knew the household, she was different from her sisters from early on, more assertive, more intellectually restless, more determined to exist on her own terms. She was also by the standards of the era exceptionally well educated.
She studied at Miss Porter’s school in Connecticut, one of the most prestigious girls schools in the country, and she entered her adult life with a sense of her own intelligence and a desire to use it that the Rockefeller world did not always know how to accommodate. In 1895, she married Harold Fowler McCormick, the son of Cyrus McCormick, the man who had invented the mechanical reaper and whose international harvester company was in its own right one of the most significant industrial enterprises in America. The marriage brought together
two of the great Gilded Age fortunes, and the social expectations attached to it were enormous. They settled in Chicago where the McCormick family was a central institution of upper class social life. Edith became one of the most prominent figures in Chicago society. Her mansion on Lakeshore Drive, her entertainments, her patronage of the arts, all of it operated at a scale that even the wealthy of Chicago found remarkable.
She was a significant supporter of the Lyric Opera of Chicago and was instrumental in establishing the Chicago Grand Opera Company. She gave generously to the city’s cultural institutions and brought to her philanthropic work a genuine passion for music and the arts that went beyond social obligation. But beneath the surface of this accomplished social life, something else was happening.
Edith became deeply interested in psychology, specifically in the work of Carl Gustaf Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who had broken from Ziggund Freud and developed his own framework of analytical psychology. In 1913, Edith traveled to Zurich and began a course of analysis with Jung himself. She would remain in Zurich for 8 years.
8 years. She left her husband and her children in Chicago and went to Switzerland for eight years to be analyzed by Carl Jung. This was by any measure an extraordinary thing to do and the judgment that contemporaries applied to it was harsh. She was criticized in the American press, talked about in Chicago society with a mixture of fascination and condemnation, and treated by many people in her social world as having committed a fundamental dereliction of the duties she owed her family. She did not appear to care
particularly. She stayed in Zurich. She studied Yung’s methods seriously enough that she eventually became a practicing lay analyst herself, treating patients in Zurich under Yung’s supervision. She funded Yung’s work directly. Her financial support was significant in enabling him to develop and disseminate his ideas during a period when his practice was not yet established enough to sustain itself.
When she returned to Chicago in 1921, the marriage to Harold McCormick had effectively ended. He had divorced her in 1921 and married Gana Wolska, a Polish opera singer in the same year. Edith did not remarry, though she did in her 60s form a significant relationship with Edwin Krenn, a Swiss architect who was decades younger than her and with whom she developed real estate in Chicago.
The real estate venture was not successful. Edith, who had spent decades with access to Rockefeller wealth, had also developed a financial independence that was real, but that her own spending habits consistently outpaced. By the late 1920s, she was in genuine financial difficulty. She had borrowed against her assets. Her real estate investments had not performed as hoped, and the fortune she had been born into was, from her personal perspective, considerably diminished.
She sold her jewels. The collection she had assembled over decades, one of the most remarkable private jewelry collections in America, was auctioned at Park Bernet in New York in 1929, the same year as the stock market crash. The sale generated considerable attention and considerable money, but the money did not solve the underlying problem.
She died in 1932 at the age of 59 in a Chicago hotel room. The woman who had been one of the most socially prominent figures in the city, who had analyzed with Jung and funded his work and helped build the city’s opera, died in circumstances that were by the standards of her earlier life genuinely reduced.
Her story is a particular kind of American tragedy, not because she failed, but because the choices she made that were most fully her own were also the ones that cost her most dearly in the world that had formed her. Part four. Moraud Rockefeller McCormick, the quiet sister. Moraud Rockefeller, the youngest of John De’s daughters, was born in 1872 and chose a path that was almost the exact inverse of her older sister Ediths.
She married Harold Irving Fowler in 1895 and lived a life that was in almost every visible respect the model of what a Rockefeller daughter was supposed to be. devoted to her husband, her family, her church, and her charitable work. She was not a public figure in the way Edith was. She was not the subject of newspaper columns or social commentary.
She did not leave for Switzerland or sell her jewels at auction or appear in the newspapers as anything other than a Rockefeller daughter conducting herself correctly. She lived quietly, gave generously, and died in 1953 at the age of 80. The contrast between Maud and Edith is instructive precisely because they grew up in the same household, with the same father, the same fortune, and the same expectations.
One of them internalized those expectations and built her life within them. The other pushed against them with everything she had found in that pushing some of the most genuine experiences of her life and paid a considerable price. What Maud experienced privately is something the record does not show. She left no yung, no jewel auction, no reduced death in a hotel room.
She left only the quiet fact of a long life conducted within the lines she had been given. Neither path was entirely free. Neither path was entirely comfortable. The money was never simply liberating. It always came with the weight of what it represented and what was expected in return. But the story of Standard Oil’s daughters does not end with John D.
Rockefeller’s children. The second and third generations produced heirses whose lives were in some cases even more dramatic and whose inheritance precisely because the fortune had been filtered through another generation of male stewardship came with even more complicated strings attached. Part five.
Abby Rockefeller the rebel with a cause. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Junior, the son who had been groomed to steward the fortune, married Abby Green Aldrich in 1901. Abby was not herself a Rockefeller by birth. She was the daughter of Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, a man of considerable political power who was one of the most influential figures in American finance at the turn of the century.
But she married into the Rockefeller world and she spent her adult life both within it and in certain important respects productively in tension with it. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller is best remembered today for something she built, something that has become one of the most visited cultural institutions in the world.
In 1929, she was one of the three founders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York known as MoMA. The other two founders were Lily P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. All three of them women, all three of them working in a cultural establishment that was still dominated by men with conventional tastes.
The year 1929 was also the year of the stock market crash, which makes founding a major cultural institution, then an act of extraordinary stubbornness, and by every account it was. Junior was not enthusiastic about modern art. He was, in his aesthetic sensibilities, as in many other respects, a conservative man. He preferred traditional forms, established institutions, the kind of art that had already been validated by time and critical consensus.
Aby’s passion for modern art, for the new, the experimental, the work that made people uncomfortable because it had not yet been granted the legitimacy of the museum, was something he tolerated rather than shared. She funded the early years of MoMA, largely from her personal allowance. Junior controlled the family finances, and Abby had to work around that control in ways that required considerable resourcefulness.
She sold jewelry when she needed money for acquisitions. She managed her MoMA commitments through channels that minimized the confrontation with Junior’s more conventional instincts. The museum she helped create became over the following century one of the defining cultural institutions of the modern world.
It houses works by Picasso, Matis, Seaison, Warhol, Pollock. The permanent collection is a monument to the taste and the vision of a woman who had to fund it from her personal allowance because her husband didn’t particularly like modern art. Abby died in 1948 before MoMA had become fully what it would eventually be. But the institution she helped found outlasted her and outlasted every other claim to significance that any of the Rockefellers of her generation might make.
It is in certain respects the most lasting thing that came out of that world. Her children, six of them, including Nelson Rockefeller, who became governor of New York and vice president of the United States, and David Rockefeller, who ran Chase Manhattan Bank and became one of the most influential private citizens of the 20th century, went on to considerable lives of their own.
But the daughters of Junior’s generation and the granddaughters who followed had their own stories to live through. Part six, the granddaughters and the weight of the name. By the time the fortune reached the third generation, the grandchildren of John D. Rockefeller Jr., It had been through enough trusts, foundations, and family governance structures that its direct availability to any individual was considerably more limited than the mythology of Rockefeller wealth suggested.
The money was there in the aggregate. For any single person, however, accessing it was a matter of navigating family offices, trusts with specific terms, and the unspoken expectations of a family culture that had been built around the idea of stewardship rather than enjoyment. The daughters of this generation grew up with a name that announced itself wherever they went, a name that preceded them into every room, that shaped every relationship before it had a chance to develop.
and that carried with it a set of public assumptions about who they were and what they represented that had nothing to do with their actual personalities or desires. One of the most interesting figures in this generation is Mary Rockefeller, the daughter of Lawrence Rockefeller, one of Junior’s sons, who grew up in the particular atmosphere of the third generation Rockefeller world, and who found in her adult life that the weight of the name was a specific kind of burden.
The third generation Rockefeller daughters were by and large not public figures in the way their grandfather or even their fathers had been. They attended good schools. They married many of them men from comparable social backgrounds. They sat on boards and supported charities and conducted their lives with the kind of discretion that very old money by the midentth century had decided was the appropriate way to exist.
But within those lives the constraints of what the money meant, what it demanded, what it prevented, what it made impossible in terms of ordinary human connection were real. When you are a Rockefeller daughter, every person who enters your life arrives with prior knowledge of who you are. Every potential friend, every romantic interest, every professional colleague knows the name before they know the person.
That is not a problem that money solves. In a certain sense, money is the problem. The question of marriage was particularly acute. The Rockefeller family, like all families with significant dynastic wealth, had developed over generations a set of assumptions, sometimes explicit, sometimes simply ambient, about what constituted an appropriate match.
The considerations were not purely romantic. They were also about family reputation, about the management of the fortune, about the protection of the name from associations that might compromise it. For daughters, those constraints operated with a particular sharpness because daughters were the point of entry for outsiders into the family.
A son who married someone unexpected might be managed. A daughter who married someone unacceptable brought that person into the family circle in ways that were harder to contain. The stories of individual marriages in the third and fourth generation of the Rockefeller family are not all matters of public record.
Many of them were conducted with the privacy that significant money can purchase. But the pattern that emerges from the available record is consistent. The women who tried to define their own romantic lives on their own terms without reference to the family’s expectations found the experience considerably more difficult than the mythology of independent wealthy women would suggest.
Part seven. Peggy Rockefeller and the life she built. Among the third generation Rockefeller women, Peggy Rockefeller, born Mary French Rockefeller in 1927, the wife of David Rockefeller, occupies a position that is in some ways the most visible and in other ways the most carefully obscured. She was not herself a Rockefeller by birth.
She was born Mary French, the daughter of a distinguished New York family, and she married David Rockefeller in 1940 when she was 23 years old, and he was 25. The marriage lasted until her death in 1996, 56 years, six children, and a life conducted almost entirely in the service of the family, the institutions, and the causes that the Rockefeller world demanded.
Peggy Rockefeller was, by the accounts of those who knew her, a woman of considerable intelligence and personal force who channeled those qualities into the roles the family world provided for her. She was deeply involved in horiculture. She developed the gardens at the family’s property in Seal Harbor, Maine, and at their estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, into genuinely distinguished horicultural projects that were recognized by people who knew about such things as exceptional work.
She was a trustee of major institutions. She was a presence in the philanthropic world that had absorbed so much of the Rockefeller energy for generations. But she was also the wife of David Rockefeller who was by any measure one of the most active and powerful private citizens of the 20th century. He ran Chase Manhattan Bank.
He was involved in an astonishing range of international and domestic policy discussions. He traveled constantly, met with heads of state, and conducted a public life of almost unprecedented scope for a private individual. Peggy was in that context the person who managed everything else. The six children, the houses, the social obligations, the charitable commitments, the thousand demands of a life conducted at that scale.
She did it by all accounts with real skill and genuine commitment. But it was a life that had been in its fundamental structure built around someone else’s work rather than her own. She developed a passion for horses in her later years that was not simply a hobby. She became a serious competitive equestrian, competing in horse shows and devoting significant time and energy to the sport in ways that gave her a domain that was genuinely hers.
She died in 1996 in Seal Harbor, Maine, following a riding accident. She was 69 years old. The manner of her death in pursuit of the thing that was most fully her own has a quality that feels meaningful, even if it is difficult to say precisely what it means. She had lived for 56 years in the shadow of a name and a fortune and a husband’s enormous public life, and she died doing something that she had chosen for herself, that no family expectation had required, and that she was genuinely good at. The horses were hers, the
gardens were hers. Part eight. The Harkness Aeryses. Another branch, another story. The Rockefeller fortune was not the only one built by Standard Oil. Among the early investors and associates who became wealthy through the company’s rise was Steven Fe Harkness, a Cleveland businessman who had invested in Standard Oil in its earliest years and who became as a result one of the wealthiest men in America.
Steven Harkness died in 1888 and the fortune passed to his wife Layman Harkness and eventually to their son Edward. Edward Harkness who became one of the great American philanthropists of the early 20th century gave hundreds of millions of dollars to institutions including Yale, Harvard, Colombia and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
and he died in 1940 having given away most of what he had inherited. But it is the women of the Harkness family who offer one of the most dramatic illustrations of what inherited oil money could do and not do for the women who received it. Rebecca Harkness, born Rebecca West in 1915, was not a Harkness by birth.
She married William Hail Harkness, a great grandson of Steven the 5th Harkness in 1947 and inherited an enormous fortune when he died of a heart attack in 1954. The inheritance was estimated at between 75 and $150 million, a staggering sum in the mid 1950s. What Rebecca Harkness did with that fortune is one of the most extraordinary and most squandered stories in the history of American patronage.
She had always wanted to be in the world of dance and music. Before her marriage, she had been a composer of modest but genuine ambition. After inheriting the Harkness fortune, she decided to pursue that world at a scale that only extreme wealth makes possible. In 1964, she founded the Harkness Ballet, a full professional ballet company that she funded entirely from her personal fortune.
The company performed internationally, appeared in New York, and for a period in the mid 1960s, was a genuine presence in the American dance world. But Rebecca Harkness’s management of the company was, by the accounts of virtually everyone involved with it, chaotic. She treated the dancers with a combination of extraordinary generosity and erratic control that made the organization impossible to sustain.
She spent money at a rate that even her fortune could not support indefinitely. She made artistic decisions based on personal whim rather than professional judgment. In 1975, she spent approximately $2 million renovating a Broadway theater, the Colonial Theater, which she renamed the Harkness Theater.
As a home for her company, the theater opened to considerable fanfare and closed within a year, unable to sustain its operating costs. By the late 1970s, Rebecca Harkness had spent a very large portion of one of the great American fortunes on a dream that the money had ultimately undermined rather than supported. The paradox of her story is that the wealth gave her the means to pursue something she genuinely cared about and then made it impossible for her to pursue it with any of the discipline or constraint that artistic endeavor
requires. She died in 1982, having spent decades in a world she had bought her way into but never fully belonged to, surrounded by people whose relationship to her was inevitably complicated by the money, and having produced in the end very little of lasting artistic significance from an investment of staggering scale.
The Harkness story is not simply a cautionary tale about bad financial management. It is a story about what happens when the money is real and the dream is real and the world around the dreamer is organized by the money in ways that make the dream impossible to achieve cleanly. Part nine, what the money actually provided. There is a version of this story that is simply about waste, about women who had enormous fortunes and did not know what to do with them or who made choices that squandered what they had been given.
That version is too simple, and it misses something important. The women of the Standard Oil dynasties, the Rockefellers, the Harknesses, and the other families whose fortunes had grown from the same source, lived in a world that had been specifically designed to manage wealth across generations, and that management was conducted in ways that privileged certain outcomes over others.
The men in these families were trained from childhood to be stewards of capital to understand trusts and investments and the governance of large financial structures. The women were trained to be partners to those stewards to support the philanthropic and social dimensions of the family’s public identity and to conduct their personal lives in ways that reflected well on the name.
When women in these families tried to use the money on their own terms, to fund their own creative ambitions, to make their own romantic choices, to pursue their own interests without reference to the family’s expectations, the results were mixed, and the mixture was not random. The cases where it worked, where a woman used her position and her resources to build something genuinely lasting were the cases where she found a way to align her own ambitions with the institutional frameworks that the family world
supported. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and MoMA is the clearest example of this. She wanted to support modern art. She found a way to do it through an institution with its own governance and its own mission and the result outlasted her by decades. The cases where it did not work, Edith Rockefeller McCormick’s financial collapse, Rebecca Harkness’s squandered patronage were the cases where the money was used to pursue something personal without the structural support that institutions provide.
The money without that structure turned out to be insufficient protection against the ordinary human problems of poor judgment, manipulation by others, and the difficulty of sustaining creative ambition over a long period. In both cases, the women at the center paid the costs alone. This is not a comfortable conclusion because it suggests that the liberation the money seemed to offer was always conditional that it was freedom within a framework and that the framework was not negotiable.
The women who worked within that framework built things that lasted. The ones who stepped entirely outside it found the freedom briefer than it had appeared. Part 10. The inheritance they didn’t choose. The standard oil aireses did not choose to be born into what they were born into.
That sounds obvious, but it is worth saying because the stories of their lives are sometimes told in ways that treat the money as simply an advantage, as if the fortune were an uncomplicated gift that they either used well or did not. The money was never uncomplicated. It came with a name that announced itself before they did.
It came with family expectations that were not always stated explicitly, but that were present in every choice they made and every choice that was made for them. It came with a world of other people, advisers, employees, suitors, friends, artists, causes who related to them primarily through the lens of what they represented financially rather than who they actually were.
It also came with the particular loneliness of great inherited wealth. The difficulty of knowing in any relationship whether the person in front of you is there for you or for the money. That problem does not resolve itself with time or with effort. It is structural built into the situation and no amount of intelligence or self-awareness makes it entirely manageable.
What the women in these families built or tried to build against that background deserves to be understood on its own terms with some awareness of what they were working with and what they were working against. Edith Rockefeller McCormick, who went to Zurich to study with Jung and came back to build something of her own, was working against a world that expected her to be her husband’s social accessory and her father’s beautiful daughter.
that she managed to be something else, something stranger and more interesting and ultimately more costly is not a failure. It is a particular kind of courage, even if the ending was not what she would have chosen. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who sold her jewelry to fund art acquisitions because her husband didn’t share her taste, left behind something that millions of people visit every year without knowing her name.
That anonymity is its own kind of injustice and its own kind of truth about the world she lived in. Rebecca Harkness, who spent a fortune on a ballet company that didn’t survive, at least spent it on something she genuinely loved, even if the love was not enough, and even if the money made the love complicated in ways that a person without it might have avoided.
and the quieter women, Bessie, Maud, Peggy, Alter, the dozens of daughters and granddaughters, whose names do not appear in the history books, built their lives inside the constraints they were given, and made of those constraints what they could, which was sometimes quite a lot, even if the record does not always show it.
The standard oil fortune shaped American life in ways that are still visible. In the companies that came from the breakup, in the museums and universities the money funded, in the political careers it enabled, in the philanthropy that bears the family names. But it also shaped in ways that are less visible and less celebrated the lives of the women who carried it, who were formed by it and sometimes broken by it, and occasionally against considerable odds enlarged by it.
That story deserves to be told as clearly as the one about the oil wells and the trusts and the antitrust cases because the women were there too at the center of all of it even when the center was defined in ways that made their presence easy to overlook. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.