More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  Kingsbury and Davis were among the first generation of specially trained social scientists, and though their research methods and results fell far short of later standards, they nevertheless had a crucial task to perform, one that was illustrated by developments in New York City.

  Advanced university degrees, prestigious governmental positions, and the praise of journalists such as Edward Mott Woolley all combined to imbue these professional reformers with enormous moral authority. Between radicals on the one hand and plutocrats on the other, it was the reformers in the middle whose support would decide the questions of the hour. In 1914, no one had been sure how this powerful force would be deployed. Progressives formed their own distinct bloc. Many among them—Davis, for instance—had loyalties to the Rockefellers or other affluent families. But there were others—Kingsbury was one, Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens were others—who were deeply suspicious of plutocratic influence. Thus in April 1914 the Globe could write of the Mitchel administration standing as a bulwark between two equally malignant forces, “the anarchistic rich as well as the anarchistic poor.”

  Into this fragile equilibrium had stormed Berkman and his followers. They represented a threat that was frightening enough to drive the other two groups together. Facing widespread enmity, the Rockefellers and their peers were forced to humanize their fortunes, diverting large amounts of wealth into foundations, universities, and other institutions of social benefit. To impart credibility to these organizations, they turned to their erstwhile critics, the reformers. Arthur Woods, Katharine Davis, John Adams Kingsbury, and their counterparts in cities across the nation lent their professional standing to these endeavors. Henceforth, the social equation would no longer consist of three independent factors. Once formed, this alliance joining the expertise and authority of professional Progressives with the limitless affluence of the plutocrats would present a nearly insuperable obstacle against the demands of radical activism.

  * * *

  DURING HIS FIRST trip to Colorado, in 1915, Junior had promoted the Rockefeller Plan as a vision for industrial harmony. The scheme, which he optimistically believed would render future strikes “unnecessary and impossible,” had offered employees an opportunity to voice complaints but did not include the right to unionize. With its paternalistic tenor and limited concessions, it had not proven to be the economic milestone Junior had initially hoped for. Workers only bothered to vote on it under duress, complaining that taking a grievance to the owners was “like bringing suit against the devil and holding the court in hell.” Management was downright recalcitrant in its implementation. Labor leaders denounced it. “Imagine,” said Samuel Gompers, head of the A.F. of L., “an organization of miners formed by the richest man in the world, who employs its members!”

  But the Rockefeller Plan had merely been Junior’s first foray into labor politics. In the following years, he expanded his vision of workers’ rights to accommodate the need for independent unions as well as collective bargaining—although he never quite conceded the necessity of the closed shop. And even Gompers had to acknowledge that Rockefeller had “grown both in comprehension of fundamental problems and particularly in the esteem of the people.” By involving himself in the public debate over industry, he acquired an international reputation as an enlightened plutocrat. “Mr. Rockefeller, more so, perhaps, than any other man of immense wealth in America, is conscious of the principle of ‘richness oblige,’” the San Jose News declared. “He is a good type of the new money king,” asserted the London Sunday Pictorial, “the man who controls incredible wealth and seeks to use it as a public trust for the public good.”

  In the years after 1915, Rockefeller spent a quarter of a million dollars to improve the conditions in the mining camps, funding the construction of bathhouses, bandstands, community centers, gardens, and schools. In exchange, he earned the right to consider himself the miners’ patron and to use their story as he saw fit. He elided the violence, as well as the continued suffering, to create a parable of the Golden Rule. “In no field of human relationships,” he observed, “is the spirit of brotherhood on which the church was founded more profoundly needed than in industrial relations.” He crafted for himself a parable out of his experiences with the Ludlow crisis. “The men in the Colorado coal fields,” he liked to believe, “who some years ago had been on strike for many months and in whose minds the most intense bitterness had grown up, responded to the genuine spirit of brotherhood when it was made manifest among them, while personal contact and the rubbing of elbows soon dispelled hatred and bitterness and established mutual confidence and good will.”

  In effect, Junior succumbed to the efforts of Ivy Lee and Mackenzie King: He had come to believe his own publicity.

  The reality was different. In 1918, he and his wife returned to Colorado to attend the opening of his latest bequest, a new YMCA clubhouse. During their visit they learned that the United Mine Workers of America was about to unveil a monument to the victims of the Ludlow Massacre. Confident that he was as well liked as the newspapers said he was, Junior wanted to be present—and even to speak—at the ceremony. A chauffeur drove his party to the place where the tent encampment had once stood. Three thousand people had already arrived to bear witness to the memory of those who had died on this bare stretch of prairie. Rockefeller had a messenger convey his card to the organizers. He was sure that the crowd here would welcome him. The union leaders were just as certain that if he tried to address them, the audience would react with hostility or violence. They told him as much, and the Rockefeller automobile disappeared from the scene; few there ever realized that he had been present.

  Junior did not allow this incident to affect his belief that he had made himself a friend to the workingman. The Rockefeller Plan became a model of welfare capitalism; other companies followed suit, offering their employees pensions, stock-sharing opportunities, and other benefits without actually binding themselves to any commitments or sacrificing authority to organized labor. The system worked, more or less, as long as the economy was thriving; the Great Depression bankrupted the pensions and decimated the stocks. Without independent unions, the workers had no means to protect the privileges they had been promised. At Colorado Fuel & Iron, the 1930s brought mass layoffs, the shuttering of the YMCA, and eventually the bankruptcy of the company.

  By then Junior had lost interest in the industrial question. His focus flitted between a series of passing enthusiasms. In the 1920s, he became a spokesman for the Interchurch World Movement, an attempt to unite various Protestant sects into one unified body. Then there was the refurbishment of Colonial Williamsburg, the construction of Riverside Church, and the development of Rockefeller Center—each couched with millennial purpose. Senior, who was determined to live to one hundred, came remarkably close to his goal, dying in 1937 at the age of ninety-seven. Junior lived on for more than twenty years. He died on May 11, 1960, while wintering in Tucson, Arizona. Newspapers described his “serious and studious” character, recalled his Bible class lessons and religious work, and tallied the staggering generosity of his philanthropic donations. In Tarrytown, the flags lowered in mourning. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was eighty-six years old.

  In the spate of praiseful obituaries that followed on his death, no major newspaper made anything but oblique references to the Ludlow Massacre. And yet if it had not been for the experiences of 1914, none of the rest could have taken place. At the beginning of that year, Rockefeller had known only the cloistered privilege of his position. He was not qualified to intervene meaningfully in a labor dispute, and was utterly unprepared to be the target of national criticism. The anarchist threats and the Free Silence pickets, the crushing betrayal of colleagues and friends, the abuse from newspapers and magazines had been the greatest trauma of his life. Blocked by his advisers from intervening, he had relied on publicity to restore his good name. When the disingenuousness of his efforts was revealed, he finally attempted to ameliorate the circumstances of the Colorado miners. T
hough the actual reforms themselves were not enough to compensate for the conditions in the coalfields, the narrative as a whole, with its dramatic arc of hubris, scorn, and redemption, had transformed the Rockefeller name forever.

  Junior understood the importance of his trial. In the course of it he had grown into himself and had learned how to manage his role in life. He had taken a variety of lessons from the experience about the power and malleability of public opinion, as well as the opportunities and hindrances that his fortune provided him. And there were other morals as well. “I never read the papers when there’s apt to be any trouble,” he would later recall. “I learned that in the old days during the strike out west.” All in all, he believed that the whole journey, culminating in his visit to Colorado, had been “one of the best things that ever happened to the family.”

  Rockefeller Junior.

  As time passed, the coalfield strike and the Free Silence movement that attended it joined the growing catalog of industrial troubles. For those who had participated, however, they represented a never-to-be-forgotten epoch in American life. “Forty-eight years have passed since you and I had a brief encounter,” Upton Sinclair wrote to Rockefeller during the 1950s. “Many times I have wondered what it meant to you … I will merely say—which I think is a Christian action—that your public career since that … episode has earned our sincere regards.” Sinclair had pondered the question before. “I have often thought what must have been the effect of that event upon the Rockefeller family,” he wrote of the Lexington Avenue explosion in his autobiography. “There has been an enormous change in their attitude to the public since that time.” Even as he approached his ninetieth birthday, and despite a prosperous literary career that had recovered remarkably from the disappointments of the 1910s, Sinclair continued to weigh the propriety of the actions he had taken half a century earlier. In 1966, he wrote the last in a long series of letters to a member of the Rockefeller family, this time to Nelson, Junior’s son, who was serving as governor of New York State:

  Dear Mr. Rockefeller:

  I am 89+ and my memory is no more. This is to tell you I am flying to NY tomorrow … to address a dinner of writers who have received the Pulitzer Prize.

  Look forward to meeting you + making amends for what I did to your grandfather!

  Sincerely,

  Upton Sinclair

  * * *

  THOUGH CRITICALLY diminished, in 1920 Woodrow Wilson had been eager to seek his party’s presidential nomination for the third time. Carefully staged photographs and disingenuous newspaper stories attempted to assuage concerns about his physical well-being. But in the end, the problem was not his health: It was him. After nearly a decade of his lectures and scolding, his never-ending concern for the state of his own conscience had grown tiresome. The Senate had refused to ratify the Versailles treaty, and the patriot fervor of the war years had subsided into disillusionment and repentance. Fellow Democrats did not intend to follow him further, and the selection went to James M. Cox, governor of Ohio, and, as vice president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In November, voters repudiated his party—and the politics of morality for which he had stood—by electing Republican Warren G. Harding, who had campaigned on the promise of returning to normalcy and represented nothing but the chamber of commerce and an end to millennial movements and causes.

  Wilson spent the last years of his life in private retirement. He died in 1924. Looking back on the former president’s legacy, Walter Lippmann wrote:

  Woodrow Wilson in 1923.

  Woodrow Wilson left behind him a country which was divided between those who swore by him as a prophet and those who firmly believed that his ideals were a threat to the integrity and independence of the country. Was this controversy which wracked us and paralyzed us for a generation a real and irreconcilable issue; I venture to think it was not, and that it arose originally from the fact that Wilson chose mistakenly to state his war aims in the language of a philanthropic crusade. He told the people what they ought to fight for, but he shrank from telling them prosaically why in fact they were compelled to fight.

  But Wilson could fight for only one thing: unequivocal moral righteousness. And during the Progressive years, the country could be convinced to engage in a foreign conflict only on those terms. The nation as a whole had taken on the president’s personal self-conception as the conscience of the world.

  *

  WHILE AMERICANS HASHED out their daily differences—soldiering through the war, coming to grips with the conflicts of labor, adjusting to Prohibition—a fundamental shake-up had occurred without anyone particularly noticing. The fighting spirit of the era had been sparked by a sense of the inhumane scale of twentieth-century life: Monopoly corporations left no space for independent entrepreneurs, colossal cities degraded the families who lived among the jumbled tenements, sprawling factories reduced labor to anonymous routine. To protest against these conditions had been the central motive behind both Progressivism and anarchism; both movements, though they used different strategies and cherished divergent goals, had been based on a shared sympathy for the individual’s plight in a mass society.

  In 1914, anything suggestive of large-scale agglomeration had immediately been suspect. “Everything askew—all the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a deliberate evil intelligence,” Walter Lippmann wrote that year in Drift and Mastery, “and men like Morgan and Rockefeller take on attributes of omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity would reduce to a barbarous myth.” This skepticism had been eroded by familiarity and frustration. Progressives gradually applied the methods of monopoly and centralization in their own attempts at reform, until their solutions were hardly distinguishable from the problems they had initially been trying to resolve. These experiments had reached their height during the war, when President Wilson and his advisers had instituted national control over food, fuel, and transportation. After the armistice, business leaders had reasserted themselves to ensure that economic conditions returned to their previous hectic state. Widespread suspicion of corporate influence was written off as a naïve and somewhat ridiculous habit of the past. “The allegations that ‘the Rockefeller interests’ are stealthily scheming to ‘put over’ this, that and the next nefarious plot to shackle or enslave the people,” scoffed a writer for Forbes in 1920, “are so ludicrous that even the wildest-eyed revolutionaries are beginning to doubt not only their truth but their power to poison the minds of the masses.”

  To speak out for the essential dignity of the individual had been the anarchists’ greatest contribution to American society. For decades, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had performed this task with principled conviction. But they were gone now, their movement scattered and destroyed, and no comparable voices remained to protest the increasing interference of state and corporate power into private lives. Their successors on the left certainly had no interest in the role. Communists had replaced anarchists as the new Red Menace, but their party was much more concerned with realizing the dream of Soviet-style central planning than it was with defending individual freedoms. Despite their inherent differences, communists and leading capitalist businessmen—as well as the Rockefellers and, eventually, the New Dealers—all tended to believe that the good of society took priority over personal liberation. Individual expression was subsumed into a discipline that was deemed to be good for the whole community. Without the anarchists to remind them of what they were sacrificing, Americans by the 1920s had learned to accept the unacceptable. The previous decade’s fears of powerlessness in the face of centralized control had come to seem as outmoded as its silent films and tango parties.

  BY THE TIME the new decade was half over, it seemed incredible that a radical movement had ever thrived in the United States. The bygone anarchists and socialists became an object of curiosity and nostalgia, and magazines across the nation bestirred themselves to inquire into the lives of the men and women whose protests had dominated the headlines in 1914. “That was a time when a tidal
wave of unrest swept the world,” the Literary Digest reminded its readers. “Soap boxes were to be seen in almost every public square … Strikes flourished. Bombs were manufactured and set off. The army of rebels, under Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the arch-anarchists, grew and grew. Wild popeyed radicals they were—most of them fiercely sincere in their beliefs. And wild and insane were the things they did or tried to do for the thing they called their ‘cause.’”

  “What has become of this movement that promised so much twenty years ago?” asked the Survey in 1925. “What has become of the pre-war radicals?” Perhaps because their protests no longer posed an apparent threat, it was suddenly safe to wonder about them. “What changes … have come over these rabid Reds, and their various and sundry philosophies?” editors everywhere wondered. “What are they doing now, as compared with that day of rampant Socialism, Radicalism, Communism, Anarchism—a period which knows no parallel in our history?”

  A correspondent from Collier’s magazine was duly assigned the task of seeking out the agitators and reporting back on their circumstances. First he journeyed to Brooklyn, where he discovered Marie Ganz “wheeling a baby carriage, a little stouter than she was in her stormiest days—a picture of complete domestication.” She had long since parted with the anarchists, joining the patriotic rush to war and afterward writing a breathless memoir entitled Rebels: Into Anarchy—And Out Again. At the height of the Ludlow protests, she had stormed the inner offices of Standard Oil brandishing a handgun and threatening to assassinate John D. Rockefeller, Jr. For her, those days were over. “‘Sweet Marie’ dabbles not with pistols and violence, but with such absolutely necessary things as rompers,” the reporter continued. “The volcanic little firebrand of 1914 is now a rebel in retirement—one of the millions of plump mothers whose sole absorbing occupation is motherhood.”