by Ron Chernow
When dealing with CFI, Junior reflexively abided by his father’s faith in absentee ownership and delegated wide authority to managers, monitoring their performance by ledger statistics. This approach had made sense where the Rockefellers were minority stockholders and did not wish to get in deeper but proved sadly deficient here. At CFI, the Rockefellers found themselves in the indefensible position of being all-powerful yet passive amid a spiraling crisis.
When Junior resigned from Standard Oil and other corporate boards in 1910, he stayed on at CFI because the family retained a controlling interest. The second-largest steel company and seventeenth-largest industrial firm in America, CFI still operated in the red, and Junior felt it his duty to engineer a turnaround, showing his father that he could solve a difficult situation. Prior to 1914, his papers reveal considerable correspondence about CFI matters— dreary, soulless letters filled with sterile talk about preferred stock, debentures, and dividends and far from the dismal reality of the miners. On January 31, 1910, when an explosion at a CFI mine killed seventy-nine men, Bowers blamed careless miners, even though the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics charged the company with “cold-blooded barbarism.” 3 When Junior wrote Bowers on February 7, he did not even allude to this atrocity and merely noted that CFI’s growth had stagnated in recent years. The Rockefellers had no long-term commitment to the company, which Senior planned to sell to U.S. Steel as soon as he could wangle a fair price. Right on the eve of the Colorado disaster, Gates urged Rockefeller to slim down his investment, but he would not hear of it.
William Lyon Mackenzie King (left) and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., don denim overalls at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, September 1915, after the Ludlow Massacre. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Under Rockefeller rule, it was heretical for anyone in CFI management to concede any legitimacy to unions. To scare off union organizers, Bowers and CFI president Jesse Welborn resorted to terror, fielding spies and detectives and firing union sympathizers. At the same time, they tried to inoculate workers against unions through paternalistic measures, raising their wages 10 percent and introducing an eight-hour day. As a chastened Junior later said of Bowers, “He had the kindness-of-heart theory, i.e. that he was glad to treat the men well, not that they had any necessary claim to it, but because it was the proper attitude of a Christian gentleman. For example, he always argued in favor of company stores. He would say that the company owned the towns, why shouldn’t they own the stores.”4
If Senior’s philanthropies showed his broad-mindedness, his unrelenting opposition to organized labor brought out his more antediluvian side. He could never see unions as anything other than frauds perpetrated by feckless workers. “It is all beautiful at the beginning; they give their organization a fine name and they declare a set of righteous principles,” he said. “But soon the real object of their organizing shows itself—to do as little as possible for the greatest possible pay.” Workers were incorrigible spendthrifts who squandered surplus earnings. “They spend their money on picture shows, and whiskey and cigarettes.”5 At Pocantico, he did not allow employees to take Labor Day as a vacation and fired one group that tried to unionize. Right before the Colorado troubles, he even tried to halt contributions to YMCA building projects that employed closed-shop union labor, but he was talked out of it by his staff. Gates, if anything, was even more obdurate about unions, warning that “it is clear that if they get the power, they have the spirit to rob, to confiscate, to absorb remorselessly, cruelly, voraciously, if they can, the whole wealth of society.” 6 When union organizers targeted CFI, Rockefeller, Junior, Gates, and Bowers treated it as the industrial equivalent of Armageddon.
For years, the Colorado coalfields had been scarred by labor warfare. This was raw capitalism such as Karl Marx pictured it: dangerous mines run by harsh bosses and policed by armed guards in a desolate, hellish place. During 1913 alone, 464 men were killed or maimed in local mining accidents. Blackened by soot from coke ovens, workers lived in filth, shopped in company stores, and were ripe for unionism. Nevertheless, in May 1913, Bowers reassured the Rockefellers that CFI workers were happy souls, prompting Junior’s naive response that it was “most gratifying . . . that a large industrial concern can treat all people alike, be open and above-board in all its dealings, and at the same time increasingly successful.”7
The United Mine Workers of America (UMW) spotted fertile soil in this arid country. In the polyglot mining communities, workers came from thirty-two countries and spoke twenty-seven languages; some of them were so ignorant of American ways that they imagined Rockefeller was president of the United States. As union organizers tramped the dusty foothills, they appealed to workers in English, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Slavic languages. By late July 1913, a showdown appeared imminent as John Lawson of the UMW announced plans to unionize local miners, making a strike all but certain. In response, the three major coal companies, CFI among them, brought in gunmen from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency and had them deputized by county sheriffs. Albert C. Felts took credit for designing a ghastly vehicle dubbed the Death Special, an early version of an armored car, topped with two machine guns that could be trained against strikers.
In September 1913, with a grisly confrontation imminent, the federal government tried to head off a strike. The Rockefellers’ unsympathetic response was colored by a belief that President Wilson was biased toward labor. Rockefeller lamented after Wilson’s election, “I wish some day that we might have a real businessman as President.”8 When Wilson appointed a former UMW official, William B. Wilson, as the first secretary of labor, he implicitly committed his administration to the concept of collective bargaining. Wilson sent a deputy, Ethelbert Stewart, to New York to confer with Junior about averting the strike. Even with arsenals being stockpiled on both sides, Junior refused to see the emissary and shunted him off to Starr Murphy, who warned that “we here in the east know nothing about the conditions [in Colorado] and would be unwilling to make any suggestions to the executive officers.”9 Junior hid cravenly behind L. M. Bowers, deferring to his judgment.
On September 26, 1913, nine thousand workers at CFI struck to demand union recognition, as well as better hours, wages, and housing conditions. In a bellicose letter to Junior, Bowers promised to resist until “our bones were bleached as white as chalk in these Rocky Mountains.” From 26 Broadway, Junior cheered this combative stance. “We feel that what you have done is right and fair and that the position you have taken in regard to the unionizing of the mines is in the interest of the employees of the company.” Then, in words that would resound with an eerie retrospective ring, he added, “Whatever the outcome, we will stand by you to the end.” 10
In a move that served only to polarize the situation, the coal companies evicted strikers from company homes, forcing them and their families into a massive exodus. The outcasts pitched tent colonies beyond company grounds, with the largest concentration at a spot called Ludlow. By the end of September, more than 11,000 of the nearly 14,000 workers were on strike, bringing Colorado coal mining to a virtual halt. As both sides hoarded weapons, an air of violence hung over the tent colonies. Deputy sheriffs, supplied with guns and paid $3.50 a day, cordoned off the grounds of CFI.
Afraid that the unions would trumpet any meeting as a concession, the mine owners refused even to talk with organizers. Back in New York, the Rockefellers received highly distorted pictures of events as Bowers fed them sanitized reports that made union organizers sound like common hoodlums. “When such men as these, together with the cheap college professors and still cheaper writers in muck-raking magazines, supplemented by a lot of milk and water preachers . . . are permitted to assault the businessmen who have built up the great industries . . . it is time that vigorous measures are taken,” Bowers fulminated in one letter.11 Junior held aloof from these events, not wanting to second-guess management or perhaps reluctant to soil his hands with such filthy business.
On October 17, the situation
veered toward open warfare as gunfire was exchanged between strikers and deputy sheriffs at a tent colony. By the time the battle ended, sheriffs had hurtled through the colony in a Death Special, spraying machine-gun fire and killing several strikers. To intimidate workers, CFI also strafed the colony with blinding searchlights. While Bowers kept Junior well informed about the Winchester rifles and revolvers being smuggled in by strikers, he remained mute about the company’s own ample cache of weaponry, including machine guns.
As the violence intensified, the well-meaning but indecisive Governor Elias Ammons sent in the Colorado National Guard to restore order. Instead of acting in an evenhanded fashion, the guard primarily protected company property from the miners. On October 30, President Wilson intervened, asking Jesse Welborn of CFI to “submit a full and frank statement of the reasons which had led them to reject counsels of peace and accommodation in a matter now grown so critical.”12 Instead of a temperate response, Bowers sent Wilson a shocking, six-page diatribe, dismissing union recognition as unthinkable: “We shall never consent, if every mine is closed, the equipment destroyed, and the investment made worthless.”13 Since the UMW had now enlisted the legendary organizer Mary Harris Jones—better known as Mother Jones—Welborn retailed vicious scuttlebutt to the president about her alleged early career in a brothel. After reviewing this response, Junior, who was sure the trouble sprang from the strikers, extolled the “energetic, fair and firm way” that CFI had conducted itself. When Labor Secretary Wilson asked Junior for his cooperation, he ducked responsibility and expressed confidence in CFI executives who “have always been quite as solicitous for the well-being of employees as for the interest of stockholders.” 14 Workers had struck, he argued, only because they were terrorized by union organizers: “The failure of our men to remain at work is due simply to their fear of assault and assassination.”15 Senior shared this grievous misperception. Junior informed Bowers, “I know that Father has followed the events of the past few months in connection with the Fuel Company with unusual interest and satisfaction.” 16
That December, a terrible blizzard blanketed Colorado. Twenty thousand men, women, and children shivered in their tents, but Junior’s position only hardened. While egged on by his father, he was clearly the point man during the strike. For the first time, Junior was the target of a Rockefeller political controversy. Summoned to give testimony before the House Subcommittee on Mines and Mining in March 1914, Junior saw himself perpetuating his father’s noble legacy. “Father was the greatest business witness ever on the stand,” he said. “No one could ever ruffle him or corner him and he never lost his temper. I had this great example before me and I felt I couldn’t let him down.”17
On April 6, 1914, Representative Martin D. Foster of Illinois questioned Junior before the subcommittee. Cool and poised, Junior made several admissions that critics thought damaging but that he submitted with pride: He had done nothing personally to end the strike; had not visited Colorado in ten years; had not attended a CFI board meeting since the strike; did not know of any valid worker grievances; and did not know the company had hired Baldwin-Felts detectives. For Foster, this seemed a damning self-indictment:
FOSTER: “Now, do you not think that your duty as a director goes further than that?”
JUNIOR: “We spent ten years testing out . . . one of the men in charge.”
FOSTER: “Do you think your duty goes further than that? . . . Don’t you believe that you, looking after the welfare of other civilians of the United States, that somewhat closer relations between officers and . . . these six thousand coal diggers who work underground, many of them foreigners, ignorant and unacquainted with the ways of the country, would be an uplift to them to make them better citizens?”
JUNIOR: “It is because I have such a profound interest in these men and all workers that I expect to stand by the policy which has been outlined by the officers, and which seems to me to be first, last and always, in the greatest interest of the employees of the country.”18
At a climactic moment, when Foster posed the question of whether Junior would willingly lose all his property and see all his employees killed to uphold the open shop—that is, the principle that every employee had the right not to join a union, even if it bargained collectively for other workers—Junior replied, “It is a great principle,” and then compared it to the sacred ideals of freedom for which the Revolutionary War had been fought.19
Thrilled by Junior’s defense of their privileges, businessmen swamped him with congratulatory telegrams. Almost tearful with joy at her boy’s performance, Cettie wired him that his testimony “was a bugle note . . . struck for principle.”20 A no-less-exultant Senior told a friend apropos of Junior’s testimony, “He expressed the views which I entertain, and which have been drilled into him from his earliest childhood.”21 Until this point, Junior had not owned any shares in the Colorado company and acted only as his father’s proxy. Now, Senior gave him ten thousand shares of CFI as a reward for his testimony. Before the month was out, the stock certificates would seem like a curse that he had myopically visited upon his son.
Two weeks after Junior testified in Washington, the inadequacy of his position became evident at the tent colony in Ludlow. Some thirty-five militiamen from the national guard—many of them, said the union, company gunmen sworn in as soldiers—were stationed on a ridge overlooking the camp when a shot was fired at dawn. Who fired it was never ascertained, and perhaps it does not matter, for both sides were heavily armed and ready to fight. After the shot, the militiamen pelted the gray and white tents with machine guns, the staccato fire tearing many tents to shreds, and by day’s end they had killed several strikers. Then the drunken guardsmen swooped down into the colony and, by some reports, spread a blaze from tent to tent with oil-drenched torches. The arsonists did not know that two women and eleven children were huddling for safety in a dirt bunker that had been scooped out by hand under one tent. As the canvas above them caught fire, they were overcome by smoke and promptly asphyxiated—a slaughter that was not discovered until the next morning.
When Bowers informed Junior of the so-called Ludlow Massacre, he gave it his usual self-serving gloss, describing it as an act of self-defense committed by outnumbered militiamen. Echoing the party line, Junior sent back regrets over “this further outbreak of lawlessness.” 22 Junior and Abby were doing landscaping at Kykuit at the time—Abby objected to the “rather cramped” proliferation of gardens, balconies, and terraces—so that the horrific news from Colorado seemed to arrive from some infernal, faraway world.23 Having pledged his ardor in the wrong cause, Junior could not accept blame. Two months later, he wrote a strange memo for his files in which he seemed to lambaste the strikers for the deaths of their own wives and children:
There was no Ludlow massacre. The engagement started as a desperate fight for life between two small squads of militia, numbering twelve and twenty-two respectively, against the entire tent colony which attacked them with over three hundred armed men. There were no women or children shot by the authorities of the State or representatives of the operators in connection with the Ludlow engagement. Not one. . . . The two women and eleven children who met their death in a pit underneath the floor of one of the tents, where they had been placed by the men, apparently for safety, were smothered. That such an outcome was inevitable as a result of placing this number of human beings in a pit 8×6 and 4½ feet, the aperture of which was concealed, without any possible ventilation is evident. . . . While this loss of life is profoundly to be regretted, it is unjust in the extreme to lay it at the door of the defenders of law and property, who were in no slightest way responsible for it.24
However he might rationalize it, it was a nightmare for Junior, a huge stain on what he had hoped would be an immaculate life, and a reversion to the Rockefeller past. As one Cleveland paper said, “The charred bodies of two dozen women and children show that Rockefeller knows how to win.”25 John Lawson castigated Junior for these “hellish acts”
and sneered that he “may ease his conscience by attending Sunday school regularly in New York but he will never be acquitted of committing the horrible atrocities.”26 Others regarded Junior as an errand boy for his father, and even Helen Keller, once helped so generously by Henry Rogers and Rockefeller, now told the press, “Mr. Rockefeller is the monster of capitalism. He gives charity and in the same breath he permits the helpless workmen, their wives and children to be shot down.” 27
A show of penitence on Junior’s part might have placated the public, but his defensive moralizing invited a severe backlash. In late April, Upton Sinclair sent a “solemn warning” to Junior: “I intend this night to indict you upon a charge of murder before the people of this country. . . . But before I take this step, I wish to give you every opportunity of fair play.”28 When Junior did not respond to his requested interview, Sinclair spearheaded a demonstration outside 26 Broadway, a “mourning parade” of pickets dressed in black armbands, their ranks swollen, at one point, by a delegation from Ludlow. “The harder we pound Rockefeller, the surer we are of winning,” Sinclair told his associates.29 In this threatening environment, a woman with a loaded pistol was forcibly removed from Junior’s office. Senior had been unflappable in crises, but his son was shaken to the core. He now kept a Smith & Wesson .38 pistol in his office drawer and posted watchmen at Fifty-fourth Street, where another chanting contingent besieged his home.
As Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and other prominent anarchists and Wobblies flocked to Kykuit to protest, guards tried to seal off the estate against these interlopers, some of whom penetrated the grounds, smashed windows, and set fire to the dairy barn. Foolishly confident of his persuasive powers, Senior marched toward the wrought-iron gates, hoping to calm the protesters, but the Burns detectives urged him to go back into the house. The local fire department was summoned to train water cannons on demonstrators who were trying to clamber over the gates. So many journalists converged on the scene that Rockefeller was distracted at golf by the incessant glare of the photographers’ lights and had to alter his daily schedule. Before the summer was over, he had installed barbed-wire fences at Pocantico and strung out potentially lethal razor wire across the tops of walls. Dismayed by the fortresslike atmosphere of their compound, Junior told his father, “I am wondering whether so obvious an effort to make entrance to the place difficult at this time may not challenge attention and suggest a fear and apprehension on our part which might induce, rather than help, to keep out intruders.”30