More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  As similar confrontations occurred in cities across the nation, President Wilson was determined to ensure that citizens understood their role in the growing crisis. Forcing himself to perform the duties of office—his wife had died two days after the war began—he carefully explained his vision for America’s coming role. “The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls,” he said in a statement to the nation. “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action.”

  Unsure whether such appeals would suffice for New York City, Mayor Mitchel intervened directly into residents’ behavior. “The population of this city is cosmopolitan,” he proclaimed two days after the invasion of Belgium. “We have people of German, of French, of English, of Italian, of Austrian, and of Russian blood. Public demonstrations of sympathy by people of a particular race, while natural from their point of view, are calculated to breed ill feeling upon the part of their fellow-citizens of other blood and sympathies, and should not take place in this cosmopolitan and entirely neutral city.” By executive decree he banned all military parades and stationed police to the streets around foreign embassies. The display of any flag other than the stars and stripes was outlawed. “The wisdom and necessity of this course will, I feel sure, appeal to the natural good sense of our citizens,” Mitchel concluded, “whom I ask to remember that they are after all American citizens first and sympathizers with their respective fatherlands second.”

  In the context of the war, free speech was severely curtailed.

  AFTER TWO WEEKS of fighting, the novelty of the Great War had diminished and New Yorkers began to recall the controversies of the previous months. “What has become of Becky?” a letter writer asked the Times on August 17. “Is she alive or dead? Has Commissioner Davis sent the bunch over … ‘to fight for their country’?” Alone and ignored, Edelsohn continued to fast. While she had generated attention, the sacrifices had been justifiable. Now she was simply starving in prison, and nobody cared. “The war has spoiled everything,” she wrote in a smuggled letter to Berkman. “We cannot get headlines now.”

  On August 20, thirty-one days into her hunger strike, a nurse handed her some street clothes and told her she was free. Her friends had paid a three-hundred-dollar bond to get her released. Preparing to depart, she thought, “I was not sorry to leave hell.” Her ordeal had not seemed to affect her. “She was a little thinner in the face,” a prison official reported, “but looked quite well.” That afternoon she walked unsupported to the Blackwell’s Island slip, was ferried to Manhattan, and then took a taxi to Berkman’s apartment on West 119th Street. There, she collapsed into bed. A doctor was called for, and the few reporters who had bothered to show up were sent away.

  ALEXANDER BERKMAN HAD been right about everything. “The present European catastrophe is no accident,” he insisted. “It was to be foreseen as an inevitable development of existing conditions.” He himself had predicted it. All the way back in January, when every other journalist in New York was certain that international peace was assured, he had written an essay about the horrid potential of the Lewis gun, which now, in the hands of British soldiers, “was giving good results at the front.” For years, he had foretold that socialists, by allowing themselves to be distracted by politics—running for office, canvassing for votes—had merely been duped by their capitalist enemies. In August 1914, they proved themselves even more frail than anyone had imagined. Instead of proclaiming a general strike of workingmen in every nation, the members of the European Social Democratic parties had marched out joyously to slay one another. “You Anarchists have proved to be right in your criticism,” a party leader had conceded to him recently. “The Socialist movement has broken down; there are no more Socialists; to-day we all are bourgeois.” Even that old idée fixe, the attentat, had been vindicated. No one could now claim, as his enemies had often done, that the assassination of an individual was a futile act. Two bullets in Sarajevo—one fewer than Berkman had fired at Frick in Pittsburgh—had careened the world’s empires to the brink of mutual destruction.

  Gazing now—coolly, rationally—into the future, Berkman could see how all this would end. He did not embrace for a moment the soothing fiction that this was going to be the final conflict. “Vain is the hope,” he wrote. “Greater wars yet will come with the newer inventions of the human mind, that will make bullets more deadly, guns more destructive, airships more perfect. War will last as long as capitalism and government last.” Violence would beget violence. “Prussian militarism cannot be destroyed by the military power of other countries. Such a method must lead to national bitterness, thoughts of revenge, increased armaments and future wars.”

  In the meantime, the governments of the world would seize this opportunity to silence all dissenters and destroy everything that working-men had struggled to build. Patriotism, nationalism: These were the anarchist’s foremost enemies. A leading French socialist, Jean Jaurés, was murdered by a jingoist gunman on the last day of July; Berkman knew this merely to be a harbinger of the reaction to come. “The revolutionary movement of the world is now in great danger of being swept away in the general conflagration,” he warned. “Let us foresee this danger. Let us combine for concerted action.”

  Never before had he taken so little pleasure in being correct. “Blushing in our shame we bow our heads in this hour of humiliation,” he wrote. “Perturbed in our innermost feelings, distressed to our very soul.” So many certainties had vanished so quickly that even he had lost his poise. “What’s to be done?” he asked. The fulfillment of his predictions had shaken any faith he still possessed in society’s potential to transform itself. Like so many others, he found himself in darkness. “I am sick of appeals to legality,” he sighed, “sick of the hope for class justice.”

  10.

  Who’s Who Against America

  By mid-August the coal war had entered its eleventh month, although it had fallen from the public view since April, when federal troops had arrived to stem the violence. Nevertheless, several thousand miners, weary and increasingly demoralized, still occupied various tent colonies in the district. But they had become little more than an inconvenience. The Colorado Fuel & Iron Company was operating its mines at three-quarters capacity, working them with replacement labor. It was apparent that the strike, though still ongoing, had failed. Surely, thought Rockefeller, the time had finally arrived to initiate reforms. He had received a settlement offer from the vice president of the United Mine Workers of America, and he inclined toward pursuing it. Bowers blocked the idea. “To move an inch from our stand at the time that defeat seems certain for the enemy would be decidedly unwise, in my opinion,” he wrote to Junior. “We are encouraged to stick to the job till we win.”

  Through the autumn, as they had since the start, Bowers and his intransigent colleagues resisted every proposal of arbitration and reconciliation. In September, President Wilson and his secretary of labor suggested a resolution that granted every one of the coal operators’ demands—it did not even require the companies to recognize their workers’ rights to organize. This was the one issue that the owners had insisted upon, and now they had got their way. The union, approaching the end of its stamina, accepted the deal. Seeking only unconditional surrender, the coal operators did not.

  Finally, on December 10, 1914, after fourteen months of struggle, the employees voted to end the strike. The United Mine Workers estimated it had paid out more than $3 million in benefits, while its members had sacrificed twice that amount in lost wages. At least seventy-five men, women, and children had been killed.

  “The feeling of satisfaction on the part of all of us is by no means small,” Bowers wrote to Rockefeller one day later. He had seen himself as waging a titanic moral struggle—opposing all attempts at interference, resisting every temptation to compromise—and now he exulted in victory. “Our rugged stand,” he wrote, “has won us every foot we have gained.” He had no sympathy for the families who had tried
to unionize and who now faced winter in the knowledge that no company would hire them; their future, he sneered, “must be very discouraging.”

  Bowers did not have long to gloat. He had always said that the end of the strike would mean the time had come to examine the company’s conduct. Now that this had occurred, Rockefeller made the one change he thought most pressing. On December 28, he called Bowers to his office at 26 Broadway. In a bitter and painful interview, he ordered the older man to resign his directorship, his place on the board, and every other position—official and unofficial—that he held at Colorado Fuel & Iron. Hoping to retain a scrap of his former authority, the executive suggested he might at least remain in communication with his former staff. Using the same phrase that his subordinate had so often used against him during the preceding months, Junior replied that such a decision “would be unwise.” Bowers was offered a year’s salary as severance, and the prospect of a nice vacation. “We want to have you take the next two or three months for unbroken rest,” said Junior, soothingly. “I fancy you must feel more or less like a colt turned out to pasture.”

  Just as he discarded one troublesome employee, however, Rockefeller found himself accounting for the excesses of another. During government hearings in December, Colorado Fuel & Iron officials had been compelled, under oath, to reveal the true author of the series of pamphlets that had been issuing forth from their offices since June. Forty thousand had been sent, at a cost of $12,000, and the tone and scale of the effort had made scrutiny inevitable. Ivy Lee’s months of work were undone in a hail of criticism. “The strike bulletins,” wrote editors at the Survey, “were shown to be not only biased ex parte statements, but to contain gross misstatements of the salary and expense of the Colorado miners’ leaders.” A close reading revealed—among other fabrications—that Lee, attempting to discredit the opposition, had exaggerated union officials’ wages by a factor of ten. ivy l. lee—paid liar, declared a story in the Call. Upton Sinclair dubbed him “Poison Ivy.” Attempting to cover up the extent of the manipulations, the company at first denied that Rockefeller had played any part in the campaign. But internal correspondence revealed the extent of his complicity. “More systematic and perverse misrepresentations than Mr. Lee’s campaign of publicity,” the Masses proclaimed, “has rarely been spread in this country.”

  With anger still fresh, Rockefeller and Lee were called to testify before the Commission on Industrial Relations, the federally funded tribunal that had been traveling the country since 1912, examining the causes and consequences of labor disputes.

  January 25, 1915, was a snowy, sleet-spoiled day in the midst of another hard New York City winter. Rockefeller strode through the front door of City Hall: On Ivy Lee’s advice, he had abandoned the habit of sneaking in and out of back entrances. On Commissioner Woods’s insistence, he was flanked by several uniformed policemen and half a dozen detectives, including the mayor’s own personal bodyguard. He climbed the stairs to the Common Council chamber, where his interrogators awaited him.

  Rockefeller Junior on the stand.

  The audience, which the Times observed “was in large part frankly hostile,” had come for its first glimpse of the man behind the Ludlow Massacre. During all the months of protests and persecutions, he had never allowed himself to be seen. Tense and nervous, “his platoon of shifty, active guards” kept at the ready. “Constantly they eyed every man and woman in the City Hall room where the hearing was held.” The whole assembly was against him, and no one more so than the commission’s chairman, Frank P. Walsh, a midwestern attorney who knew he faced one of the most important witnesses of his entire career.

  The questions came quick and angry, with no purpose but to embarrass or implicate Rockefeller as a cold tyrant and a shiftless son of wealth, an autocrat and an absentee ruler. With twenty or so cameras aimed at him, Junior managed to stay poised. But his answers did not satisfy anyone. He hedged and stalled, refusing to clarify his general opinions about organized labor, trying as hard as he could to distance himself from Ivy Lee and his publicity work. “Wary and bland” was the Times reporter’s evaluation of his performance. By the end of the first of two days of testimony, the audience had lost its savor for the spectacle; the hectoring examiners, the evasive witness—neither party could succeed in winning favor under the conditions.

  No one felt the banality of the moment so acutely as Walter Lippmann, who covered the hearing as a correspondent for the New Republic, a magazine he had helped create a few months earlier. Here sat the inheritor of the greatest fortune in the world, a man with more responsibility over a larger part of the national economy than any other single person, a living symbol of monopoly capital and labor injustice. “Yet,” to Lippmann’s disgust, “he talked about himself on the commonplace moral assumptions of a small business man.” No greater failure of the American system could be comprehended than that this “careful, plodding, essentially uninteresting person” should have his position—unwanted, unearned—thrust upon him. It was an absurd situation from which nobody benefited. “Those who rule and have no love of power suffer much,” thought Lippmann. “John D. Rockefeller, Jr., is one of these, I think, and he is indeed a victim.”

  After the ordeal was over, Junior was descending the staircase when he suddenly paused. A white-haired woman in glasses stood in his path. It was Mother Jones. The guards urged him forward, but he stopped and held out his hand to her.

  “We ought to be working together,” he said.

  “Come out to Colorado with me,” she replied, “and I’ll show you what we can do.”

  IN FACT, HE had long planned to visit the coalfields. During the strike, a trip to Colorado would have been inflammatory and detrimental to the company’s position. But even as he suffered through the outbreak of criticism that accompanied the revelations of his publicity efforts, he was simultaneously working on a way to bring meaningful reforms to the mine employees.

  Increasingly aware that some of Ivy Lee’s “advice had been unsound on several occasions,” Junior had come under the tutelage of William Lyon Mackenzie King. The former minister of labor for Canada, King had been brought in to help with the project of industrial relations—just as Lee had been hired to conduct public relations. Believing that Colorado Fuel & Iron had to offer its men more of a say in their own affairs, he suggested the creation of a grievance board where workers could seek a hearing for their complaints. While it did not go so far as to grant workers the right to unionize, it still showed a willingness to compromise that would never have been sanctioned by Bowers and the other operators. At the center of the idea was Junior’s belief that personal connection between workers and bosses could overcome the perception of differences. “The hope of establishing confidence between employers and employed,” he wrote to the president of Colorado Fuel & Iron, “will lie more in the known willingness on the part of each to confer frankly with the other than in anything else.” Officially called “the Plan of Representation and Agreement,” it would come to be known as the “Rockefeller Plan,” and, in September 1915, Junior traveled to Colorado to convince both sides to ratify it.

  For three weeks he toured mines, camps, and factories, speaking personally with hundreds of employees, sharing their meals, and even going so far as to don overalls and wield a pick in one of the coal shafts. “He did not dig very much,” a reporter for the Times noted. “The miners grinned, but Mr. Rockefeller hacked away and laughed as the black lumps began to rattle down.” He distributed prize money to the homes with the nicest gardens and offered to reimburse a community that wanted to construct a bandstand. At one meeting he suggested pushing the chairs to the side of the hall and then organized an impromptu dance, fox-trotting with each of the miners’ wives in turn.

  There had been no way to predict how the workers would receive him. Ambling through the camps and mingling with the men, Rockefeller exposed himself to reprisal. Any person in Colorado who claimed a grudge—and thousands might have done so—could have enacted
a just revenge. It had been a risk to stride into the center of what had been a war zone. Senior had tried, unsuccessfully, to convince his son’s secretary to carry a pistol with him for protection. But Junior encountered only warmth and generosity. The miners were in the mood to forgive, and with employment so precarious, it would have been foolhardy to make a demonstration. Few of the active strikers had been rehired, so the employees he met were almost certainly not the same people who had actually inhabited the Ludlow colony. But it was also true that Junior, with his modest and self-effacing manners, chose this occasion to show his best self. “Had Mr. Rockefeller not been the man he is,” King wrote to Abby during the trip, “and had he not met his fellowmen of all classes in the manner he did … some situation would almost have certainly presented itself which would have made the tour of the coal fields as disastrous in its effect as, owing to his wonderful adaptability, it has been triumphant.”

  ROCKEFELLER WINS OVER MINERS WHO FORGET TRAGEDY AT LUDLOW, a Denver Post headline exulted. ROCKEFELLER TURNS HATE OF MINERS TO LOVE, reported the Chicago Tribune. “Enmity,” wrote King, “has been changed into good-will; bitterness into trust; and resentful recollections into cherished memories.” In Pueblo on October 2, Junior formally introduced his plan of management, which, according to the press, granted “practically every point which any labor union ever asked, with the one exception of recognition of the union.” To illustrate his vision of the ideal corporation, Junior spilled some coins onto a small table. Each leg represented one of the four parties that made up a business: stockholders, directors, officers, workers. Because the legs were represented evenly, the tabletop was level and the money piled up. “Again,” he explained, “you will notice that this table is square. And every corporation to be successful must be on the square—absolutely a square deal for every one of the four parties, and for every man in each of the four parties.” When the vote was tallied, an overwhelming majority of the employees, and all the directors, had opted for the Rockefeller Plan.