by Thai Jones
Mounted officers disperse the anarchists.
In the first moments of fighting, detectives had grabbed O’Carroll and dragged him, struggling, from the melee. His friends chased behind, cuffing and shouting at the arresting officers, pulling their hair in a wild attempt to pry him free. The panicked and outnumbered cops lashed out indiscriminately, beating the thin, sickly O’Carroll on the head until a deep gash opened across his scalp and blood was pouring over his face and soaking his clothes. Becky threw her body over his, shielding him as best she could from the policemen’s blows and shouting desperately, “Save Joe from the oppressors of the poor!”
Hearing her calls for help, an unemployed radical named Arthur Caron moved to intervene. Within seconds, he too was on the ground, being struck again and again with blackjacks and fists on his head and legs. “For Christ’s sake,” he pleaded, “stop hitting me.” They grabbed him up, manhandled him toward a patrol wagon, and threw him into the hold. O’Carroll was already in the back, two officers rode up in the cab, and several plainclothesmen stood out on the running board. The door slammed shut as the vehicle coughed into motion. A cop hissed at Caron, “You bastard, we’ve got you now,” and punched him in the face. He tried to get up, blood racing from his nose. “You bastard, lie still!” they yelled, as they all beat him on the back of his skull. O’Carroll staggered over and cradled Caron’s wounded head. “Poor boy!” he muttered in shock. “Jesus! You’re getting it awful.”
At the East Twenty-second Street station, the two crushed protesters were dragged from the wagon and shoved down onto opposite ends of a long bench. Before they could be booked, the detectives made them wash the blood off their faces, necks, and hands to make them presentable to the magistrate. Then they had to think of what charges they would file against their prisoners.
“That’s O’Carroll,” one of them said. “We’ll charge him with striking an officer and resisting arrest.”
“What’ll we charge that big bastard with?” asked another, gesturing to Caron.
“Charge the fuck with trying to take him away from the police and yelling, ‘Kill the bastards!’“
“NO SCENE IN New York for years has approached the violence of the outbreak in Union Square yesterday,” proclaimed the next morning’s Sun. There had been eight arrests and dozens of injuries. For more than a week, newspaper editors had been calling for stern measures against protest demonstrations, and for now the press seemed satisfied with the result. “The police,” a Times reporter wrote, “led by a detachment of mounted men, wielded their clubs right and left, and left many aching heads in their wake.” The World expressed similar contentment at seeing “a couple of hundred vile-tongued I.W.W.’s … routed by unmerciful clubbing.” After the battle, Commissioner McKay surveyed the scene of his masterstroke with complacency. “Though what did happen was bad enough,” he told reporters, “anything might have happened, and we were prepared for it.” Surely, no one would now accuse him of overindulging these anarchists.
* * *
THE TONE OF the telegram from Washington hinted at what was to come:
COMMITTEE ON MINES AND MINING DESIRES YOUR TESTIMONY ON COLORADO STRIKE WILL YOU APPEAR IN WASHINGTON WITH BOOKS PAPERS AND LETTERS WITHOUT FORMAL SERVICE AND WHEN ANSWER.
This seemed brusque even for a cable message, but John D. Rockefeller, Jr., refused to be baited. YOUR COURTEOUS TELEGRAM OF MARCH 31ST I FIND UPON MY RETURN TO THE OFFICE THIS MORNING, he replied. IF IT SUITS YOUR CONVENIENCE I WILL BE GLAD TO APPEAR BEFORE YOUR COMMITTEE ON MONDAY MORNING, APRIL 6TH, AT ANY TIME AFTER NINE O’CLOCK.
He was not sure why the investigators wanted to see him in particular. After all, he was merely one of several directors who sat on a board of one of many companies involved in a nearly statewide coal-mining strike. There must have been dozens of business leaders with more knowledge of the situation. Though it was true that he exchanged weekly—and at times daily—correspondence with his executives at the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, he himself had not even visited the state in a decade. “What possible value any knowledge which I may be able to impart may be to this inquiry, I do not know,” he wrote to his father. “However, since the invitation has been extended, I felt it wise to accept it without hesitation.”
The five congressmen on the subcommittee had just returned from Denver themselves. During their three-week visit to Colorado, they had conducted hearings throughout the troubled districts, interviewing company bosses and union leaders as well as dozens of individual miners and other locals. Through these meetings they had uncovered a “system of feudalism” reinforced through violence, corruption, and coercion. The state militia was controlled by the mine operators, while the strikers in their tent encampments were armed and organized as well. Every hand gripped a shotgun or rifle, and twenty-two people had by now been killed.
The committee members had found no blameless parties, but they had been particularly irritated by the stubbornness of the corporate executives—men like L. M. Bowers, the Rockefeller-appointed chief at Colorado Fuel & Iron. He had reiterated for them his belief that the company treated its workers as well as they had any right to expect. “The word ‘satisfaction,’” he wrote to Junior, “could have been put over the entrance to every one of our mines.” If it wasn’t for the interference of agitators, the miners would be calm as cattle. The only thing worse than a union organizer, in his mind, was the “goody, goody, milk and water” brand of reformer. “It will be a happy day for the business man,” Bowers had written in 1912, “when a lot of these social fanatics are placed in lunatic asylums, and the muckrakers, labor agitators and the grafters are put in jail.”
The congressmen saw that this intransigence was hindering any chance of industrial peace in Colorado. “Society in general cannot tolerate such conduct on either side,” they decreed. “The statement that a man or company of men who put their money in a business have a right to operate it as they see fit, without regard to the public interest, belongs to days long since passed away.”
Thus the antagonism that Junior had detected in the telegram, and which manifested itself as soon as he arrived in the Washington, D.C., hearing room, was not entirely unexpected. Still, he indicated no apprehensiveness as he settled in at the witness table with his lawyer and a sheath of documents. At ten A.M., on April 6, the chairman—Martin D. Foster, a Democrat from Illinois—initiated the proceedings.
THE CHAIRMAN. You may give your name and residence to the stenographer, Mr. Rockefeller.
MR. ROCKEFELLER. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 10 West Fifty-fourth Street, New York.
And that was just about the last collegial exchange of the day.
From then on, Junior was peppered with hostile questions, mockery, and hectoring. The congressmen repeatedly interrupted and challenged him on every last little detail of fact. He had wondered what he—who’d had so little direct contact with the strike situation—could add to the investigation. Now it was clear that the interrogators had no interest in his expertise; they intended to showcase his ignorance.
THE CHAIRMAN. You know when the strike started, do you?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. I could refer to the exact date in this correspondence. It was in September or October, some place along there: but the date I would not have retained.
MR. BYRNES. We can all tell you it was the 23d of September.
MR. ROCKEFELLER. Well, you see, you have been there.
THE CHAIRMAN. Do you realize that since last September this strike has been reported in the press throughout the country, that the governor of Colorado has called out the militia to police the disturbed district, and that the conditions prevailing in that district were shocking, according to such reports, and that the House of Representatives deemed it a duty to undertake this investigation?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. I have been fully aware of all those facts.
THE CHAIRMAN. And yet you, personally, nor the board of directors, have not looked into the matter?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. I can not say
as to whether the board of directors has—
THE CHAIRMAN (interposing). Whether conditions were correct as reported in the press?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. I can not say as to whether the board of directors have looked into the matter or not, their meetings being held in the West.
THE CHAIRMAN. What action has been taken personally to find out about the trouble in Colorado?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. This correspondence will give the whole thing.
THE CHAIRMAN. Personally, what have you done, outside of this, as a director?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. I have done nothing outside of this; that is the way in which we conduct the business …
THE CHAIRMAN. You do not consider yourself a “dummy” director in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co.?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. I do not.
This was how all the family’s operations worked, as Rockefeller patiently explained. Trusted operatives handled daily affairs, with only minimal interference from 26 Broadway. Senior had run Standard Oil that way, and it was hard to cavil with its effectiveness. New York received intelligence from the local proxy—in this case, L. M. Bowers. If he reported that the miners were treated leniently, and had been bullied and preyed upon by alien agitators into striking—that, as one of his associates had claimed, “the strike of our coal miners was literally forced upon them against their wishes by people from the outside”—then that information was considered reliable.
THE CHAIRMAN. What, in your judgment, should be the relation between employee and employer?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. That is a pretty big and broad question, is it not?
THE CHAIRMAN…. Yes; I am getting your opinion, because you have had a good deal to do with the civic uplift of the country, and you ought to have a good idea and an intelligent opinion of those matters. I think it would be valuable to have it in the record.
MR. ROCKEFELLER. If you can make the question at all concrete, I should be glad to try to answer it.
THE CHAIRMAN. You know there has been growing in the country a belief that there does not exist between employers and employees the relation that there should be between the two. What do you say as to that?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. I believe that the employer and the employee are fellow men, and I see no reason why they should not each treat other as a fellow man. You are asking a broad question, and I am giving a pretty broad basic reply. It is difficult to get closer to the subject.
THE CHAIRMAN. That leads me to ask this question: As a director of the Colorado Iron & Fuel Co., and representing a large interest in that company, have you personally taken the trouble to know any of those miners or to look into their conditions there, their manner of living, and all that?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. Oh, when I was investigating vice in New York I never talked with a single prostitute. That is not the way I have been trained to investigate. I could not talk with 10,000 miners.
THE CHAIRMAN. No; you could not.
For hours he parried these attacks with a civility that soon attracted the sympathy of the reporters who witnessed his performance. “Never ruffled,” they wrote, “polite and thoroughly suave,” he was “at ease throughout.” Few public men had so much experience in facing derision. Junior’s position as his father’s son had meant he’d been perpetually underestimated his entire adult life. This session ranked as a minor irritation compared to some of the barbs he’d already endured. He did not stammer. He did not dodge or sidestep. Instead, he waited to make his own case against organized labor. And, finally, he did.
THE CHAIRMAN. But the killing of these people, the shooting of children, and all that that has been going on there for months has not been of enough importance to you for you to communicate with the other directors, and see if something might not be done to end that sort of thing?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. We believe that the issue is not a local one in Colorado; it is a national issue, whether workers shall be allowed to work under such conditions as they may choose. And as part owners of the property, our interest in the laboring men in this country is so immense, so deep, so profound that we stand ready to lose every cent we put in that company rather than see the men we have employed thrown out of work and have imposed upon them conditions which are not of their seeking and which neither they nor we can see are in our interest.
THE CHAIRMAN. And you are willing to go on and let these killings take place—men losing their lives on either side, the expenditure of large sums of money, and all this disturbance of labor—rather than to go out there and see if you might do something to settle those conditions?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. There is just one thing, Mr. Chairman, so far as I understand it, which can be done, as things are at present, to settle this strike, and that is to unionize the camps; and our interest in labor is so profound and we believe so sincerely that that interest demands that the camps shall be open camps, that we expect to stand by the officers at any cost. It is not an accident that this is our position.
THE CHAIRMAN. And you will do that if it costs all your property and kills all your employees?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. It is a great principle.
THE CHAIRMAN. And you would do that rather than recognize the right of men to collective bargaining? Is that what I understand?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. No, sir. Rather than allow outside people to come in and interfere with employees who are thoroughly satisfied with their labor conditions—it was upon a similar principle that the War of the Revolution was carried on. It is a great national issue of the most vital kind.
The hearing was adjourned at 2:25 P.M If Junior was concerned about his performance, he was reassured the next morning by the newspaper headlines. For the first time in his life, the press treated his words seriously, taking note—with a certain surprise—of his gravity and poise. And then the congratulations began to arrive. “Nothing I have read or heard in recent years,” wrote Charles M. Schwab, “so fully and clearly and logically expresses the views that I hold with reference to a situation of this kind, as the testimony you have given.” J. P. Morgan, Jr., sent a letter saying, “It was exceedingly amusing to see the common-sense business point of view as opposed to the political and excited sociological point of view which all members of Congress appear to occupy.”
The most welcome notes came from his parents in Tarrytown. “It was a bugle note that was struck for principle yesterday before our country,” wrote his mother. His father bragged to a friend, “He expressed the views which I entertain, and which have been drilled into him from his earliest childhood.” To show his gratification, Senior presented his son with a generous gift: ten thousand shares of Colorado Fuel & Iron Company stock. “Nothing could give me greater satisfaction,” Junior replied to his mother, “than to feel that you and Father are satisfied with my effort of yesterday.”
But in fact his conscience was disturbed. One exchange, in particular, had touched on his most delicate feelings.
THE CHAIRMAN. Do you think that a director like you are of a company such as the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. should take the responsibility for the conduct of the company?
MR. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. Chairman, in these days, where interests are so diversified and numerous, of course, it would be impossible for any man to be personally responsible for all of the management of the various concerns in which he might be a larger or smaller stockholder … I do not know of any other way in which a company can be run except by putting the responsibility upon the officers, and then holding them to it, and seeing that they perform in a proper way the tasks imposed upon them.
Junior was profoundly aware that modern industrial organization was incompatible with individual responsibility. This was the very realization that had prompted him to retire from business four years earlier. Colorado Fuel & Iron was the one directorship he had retained, and he had done so only out of a feeling of duty to his father. Now he was in the exact predicament he had hoped to avoid, publicly vouching for the choices of others—men he trusted, but whose actions he could not control.
&nb
sp; The congressmen had nudged him toward uncertainty. Perhaps he had delegated too much responsibility. From L. M. Bowers he had received a vehement, almost feverish, letter of congratulations. It worried him. Hearing that Bowers happened to be visiting his home in upstate New York, Junior sent him an urgent cable: THINK IT IMPORTANT TO SEE YOU BEFORE YOU GO WEST. If they could meet personally, maybe he could convince his subordinate to offer some concessions, or at least assure himself that the man was still qualified to lead.
But the telegram arrived too late. Bowers had already entrained for Colorado.
* * *
THE POLICEMEN’S TESTIMONY was disjointed and contradictory. Their assailants came from uptown; no, from the downtown side; they had yelled “Kill the Cops!” and some other such unlikely things, and had initiated all the fighting. The presiding magistrate shook his head throughout, with a baleful smile.
And then Arthur Caron took the stand: his eye swollen shut, his face checkered with bruises. “The next thing I knew I got a blow over the back of the head with a blackjack,” he said. “I tried to straighten my hat, which was knocked off, and I received a blow over the wrist. A blow was struck into my kidneys at the same moment. I dropped to the sidewalk, but I tried to get up, and then I was shoved into an automobile. Policeman Dawson jumped on the running board and hit me twice in the face, while somebody else hit me on the back.” After he had finished, the magistrate acquitted Caron of all charges, and urged his defense attorney to launch an investigation of the police department. “The condition of these prisoners,” the judge admonished the officers, “is enough to make us feel ashamed.”