CHAPTER 29

Massacre

In his philanthropies, John D. Rockefeller had ascended into the pure air of good works, high above the clash of partisan politics and industrial strife. With the advent of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller name, so besmirched by association with Standard Oil, took another long step toward redemption. And by serving on the white-slavery jury, Junior had tested a brand-new image as a social reformer. It was at this happy juncture that news reached New York of terrible bloodshed in the southern Colorado coalfields and the worst nightmare in Rockefeller history—surpassing anything ever related to Standard Oil—descended upon the family with terrible swiftness.

The Rockefellers’ ill-fated involvement in Colorado dated back to 1902, when Senior was flush with windfall profits from the spectacular sale of Mesabi iron ore to U.S. Steel. At George Gould’s urging, Frederick Gates visited the properties of Colorado Fuel and Iron (CFI), the state’s largest employer, which owned twenty-four coal mines that provided coke for its own steel mills. If the Rockefellers controlled the company, Gould fancied, his railroads might receive lucrative coal-carrying contracts. Inspired by his Mesabi triumph, Gates had a hunch that a CFI investment might be a bonanza on an equivalent scale. In November 1902, Rockefeller paid $6 million for 40 percent of its stock and 43 percent of its bonds, gaining uncontested supremacy over the Colorado company. Only later did Gates learn that Gould had been tipped off by a trusted aide that the company management was “rotten” and that its top executives were a pack of “liars,” “swindlers,” and “thieves.”¹

To strengthen CFI, Gates convinced Rockefeller in 1907 to import a new management team, and he had an ideal candidate in mind: his sixty-year-old uncle, LaMont Montgomery Bowers, whose consumptive wife might benefit from the Colorado mountain air. Because of Bowers’s demonstrated proficiency in running the Great Lakes ore fleet, the Rockefellers reposed extraordinary— and ultimately misplaced—trust in the abilities of this former wholesale grocer from upstate New York who became vice president of the Colorado company and the Rockefellers’ chief liaison with it.

Despite this fresh leadership, the Colorado investment seemed as misbegotten as the Mesabi investment had been charmed, and for years CFI did not pay a penny on its stocks or bonds. Hobbled with a money loser, the Rockefellers took an intransigent tone with union organizers. As early as October 1903, Junior sent fighting words to CFI’s president on the subject: “We are prepared to stand by in this fight and see the thing out, not yielding an inch. Recognition of any kind of either the labor leaders or union, much more a conference such as they request, would be a sign of evident weakness on our part.”² In his decades in business, Senior had learned never to budge on the prerogatives of capital, especially when it came to unions. In 1903, Standard of New Jersey had truculently broken a strike for union recognition at its Bayonne, New Jersey, refinery. So when Bowers came on board, he had an understanding with the Rockefellers that he would be assertive in blocking unionization.

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.” ⁶When 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.²³Having 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

All the Rockefeller wealth suddenly seemed insufficient beside the magnitude of the threat. During one rally outside 26 Broadway, a speaker denounced Junior and exhorted the crowd to “shoot him down like a dog.” ³¹ Such inflammatory rhetoric was not just political bombast. In May, several Wobblies were killed or injured when a bomb they were assembling blew up on the top floor of a Lexington Avenue tenement; it was widely thought that the explosive had been destined for Junior’s town house.

After the massacre, the coalfields witnessed a fresh upsurge in violence as southern Colorado degenerated into a lawless no-man’s-land, and President Wilson faced vociferous demands to dispatch federal cavalry troops to the area. To avert this, he wrote to Rockefeller and implored him to meet with Martin Foster before Foster left to tour the coalfields. Playing his sly old game, Rockefeller said he had not been to work in twenty years, but that his son would meet Foster in New York.

At this April 27 meeting, Junior was completely inflexible, telling Foster that CFI controlled a mere third of Colorado coal output and shouldn’t be singled out for criticism. Afterward, Junior informed the president,

Dr. Foster was unable to make any suggestions which did not involve the unionizing of the mines or the submission of that question to arbitration. We stated to him that if the employees of the Colorado Fuel and Iron had any grievances, we felt sure that the officers of the Company would be willing now, as they had always been, to make every effort to adjust them satisfactorily, but that the question of the open shop . . . could not be arbitrated. ³²

Wilson was stunned by this brazen indifference to a presidential request, telling Junior, “It seemed to me a great opportunity for some large action which would show the way not only in this case but in many others.” ³³ A few days later, Wilson sent federal troops to Colorado.

It was all a regrettable throwback to the days of Standard Oil, with Junior now cast as the villain of the piece. His inability to escape from this debacle stemmed from his own rigidity plus an unbending intolerance toward unions that was also exhibited by his father and Gates. “We are trying to move quietly, and patiently, under the trying ordeal,” Rockefeller told Harold McCormick, “but I repeat it is a matter for all of us to give earnest heed to, and we must all cooperate throughout the land for the maintenance of our rights.”³⁴ Supporting his uncle, Gates also refused to give an inch to save lives. “The officers of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company are standing between the country and chaos, anarchy, proscription and confiscation and in so doing are worthy of the support of every man who loves his country.” ³⁵

Surrounded by these retrograde views, this refusal to entertain new ideas, Junior was locked in an untenable position. The Ludlow disaster threatened to undo all his efforts to cleanse the family name. His father—so long his cynosure, guide, sage, and mentor—could not graduate to new wisdom in this area. The Ludlow Massacre forced Junior to admit that his father held some antiquated views and that he must take spiritual leave of him. To do so, he needed a confidant from outside his immediate circle, someone who shared his sense of ethics and could devise a practicable, honorable way out of the impasse. He found this providential personage in William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Mackenzie King exerted a tremendous influence upon Junior in part because they had similar styles and tastes but radically different knowledge of the world. The offspring of a renowned Canadian family, King had been a wunderkind of Canadian politics. After studying economics at Toronto, Chicago, and Harvard, he was named Canada’s first deputy minister of labor at age twenty-five and then minister of labor nine years later. A gently persuasive man, he had arbitrated many acrimonious labor disputes and espoused new government mechanisms for settling such disputes. In 1911, his luck expired when the Liberal government fell, depriving him of his ministerial post and throwing him into a state of acute anxiety about money. For three years, a rich British woman named Violet Markham helped him financially. King always claimed to find fault with high society, which he dismissed as petty, false, and vain, but when he needed the money, he could be obsequious toward the rich.

In early June 1914, still fretting about his finances, he received a cryptic telegram from the Rockefeller Foundation, inviting him to New York to discuss a special labor project for its new economic-research unit. On June 6, he found himself closeted in a four-hour marathon session at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street with Junior, Jerome Greene, and Starr Murphy. By the close, Junior had asked him to head the foundation’s new Department of Industrial Relations—which, in essence, meant serving as his personal adviser on Ludlow. Even though Junior publicly denied it, he was smart enough to see that he needed to grope toward some new innovation in labor-management relations. An ambitious, liberal politician, King was initially petrified by the potential repercussions of this association. As he confessed to his diary, “Once associated in any way with the Rockefeller concern, my future in politics would be jeopardized.”³⁶ For two months, King wavered about accepting the job. But since it was being offered by the Rockefeller Foundation, not Standard Oil, he was emboldened to take the risk, especially when former Harvard president Charles Eliot strongly endorsed the move. At a second meeting with Junior at Pocantico, in Senior’s presence, King accepted the job.

Just about the same age, King and Junior were both short and stocky, prudish and proper, and dressed in dark, old-fashioned suits. Something about King’s platitudinous moralizing was highly reminiscent of the Rockefellers’. A fervent Presbyterian, King devotedly read the Bible and abstained from cards and tobacco, and these two reserved, rather solitary young men enjoyed an immediate rapport. Many observers saw in King the very strengths and weaknesses—a messianic nature combined with a lack of social ease—often attributed to Junior. Both young men idealized their mothers, and when King later drifted into spiritualism, he claimed that he had communicated with his dead mother’s spirit in séances. According to Junior, King was “quite silly about women,” yet some inhibition always kept him a bachelor. ³⁷

Junior considered King’s arrival “heaven-sent deliverance” and later said, “Seldom have I been so impressed by a man at first appearance.”³⁸ Normally surrounded by elders, Junior found in King a peer who had known firsthand the hurly-burly of the world. Within a year of their meeting, Junior told him, “I feel I have found in you the brother I have never had and have always wished to have.” ³⁹ Despite that, Junior called him “Mr. King” for the next forty years. An idealist with a wide streak of ambition, King saw in Junior a way to carry out social reform and be well compensated in the bargain. Despite his liberal politics and initial prejudice against the Rockefellers, King liked Junior instantly and thought him a kindred spirit. “Whatever his father may have done or is,” King told a friend, “that man I have found to be almost without exception the truest follower of Christ.” ⁴⁰

Except to his uninhibited wife, Junior never talked as candidly to anybody as he did to King. King bluntly warned him that the Rockefellers’ philanthropic work could be destroyed by Ludlow and that it would be a “Herculean task” to overcome unfair public prejudice against the family. Only King could broach the dreaded topic of Senior’s business ethics without seeming disloyal. He recorded in his diary that he told Junior that he must recognize that we were living together in a different generation than the one in which his father had lived, and that it was possible, in building up an industry such as Standard Oil, to maintain a comparative secrecy as to methods of work, etc. and to keep business pretty much to those who were engaged in it. Today, there was a social spirit abroad, and it was absolutely necessary to take the public into one’s confidence, to give publicity to many things, and especially to stand out for certain principles very broadly. ⁴¹

He made Junior see the need to depart from his father’s legacy and chart an independent course.

By this point, Junior was touchingly frank in his need for advice about Ludlow. “He had vast experience in industrial relations and I had none,” Junior said of King’s influence. “I needed guidance.” ⁴² Though supporting unions, King favored compromise, opposed strikes purely for union recognition, and insisted upon gradual reform. He thought that fair-minded investigations of the facts would suggest a common ground for capital and labor. Appealing to Junior’s conscience, King argued that Christian brotherhood could be brought to the bloodstained fields of Colorado through greater worker-management cooperation. Under the Rockefeller Foundation aegis, King devised a plan in which CFI employees would elect representatives to boards for dealing with worker grievances. At best a halfway house on the road to true labor reform, the plan was a cosmetic modification rather than a sharp break with the past, and organized labor scoffed at it as another paternalistic trick. But it was a courageous departure from the prevailing business ethos, however timid it might seem by later lights. As proof of this, CFI management resisted it, fearing it would deliver the company into the union’s hands. In the end, Senior looked on benignly and let these changes occur. It was a road that he could not have traversed himself, but his son found the way to do so.

King led Junior away from his father’s orthodoxy while simultaneously charming the old man. When King pleaded for greater public openness, Rockefeller seemed deeply moved. “I wish I had had you the thirty or forty years I was in business to advise me on policies,” he said.⁴³ King found Rockefeller far nicer than he had expected. As he told a friend:

In appearance, [Rockefeller] is not unlike pictures one sees of the old popes. In manner he is singularly simple and natural and genuinely kindly. . . . I had the feeling I was talking with a man of exceptionally alert mind and great discernment of character. He is a good deal of a mimic, and in telling of people and his own feelings is apt to imitate the expression of the person or the attitude he is representing. He is full of humor, particularly in conveying a shrewd knowledge of situations and men. His whole nature is a gentle one and a sweet one.⁴⁴

By December 1914—eight months after the Ludlow Massacre—striking miners, their strike fund depleted, voted to end the long walkout, allowing federal troops to leave the area. With the end of the strike, Junior pressed his blueprint for labor-management cooperation upon CFI leadership with renewed vigor. Bowers and Welborn still worried that the plan might lend credence to union grievances, but Junior persisted despite their hostility. Far from fleeing criticism, he exposed himself to it. His old college classmate Everett Colby gave a dinner at the Union Club in Manhattan so that Junior could meet people who had pummeled him, including Lincoln Steffens and the socialist lawyer Morris Hillquit. During postprandial cigars, speaker after speaker reviled Junior’s initial refusal to become involved in the strike. Then Colby said, “Do you want to say anything, Mr. Rockefeller?” “I certainly do,” said Junior, slowly rising to his feet. Everyone expected a withering counterblast, but Junior confounded them by saying, “I want you gentlemen to realize how deeply grateful I am for this. I shan’t forget any of it. My difficulty is that I can’t find out the truth. A chap in my position is so used to being made a target for unjust accusations that his tendency is to disbelieve even those which may perhaps be justified.” ⁴⁵ It was a polite way of saying that his press critics had some truth on their side and was thus a major step forward from his earlier denials.

Unlike Senior, whose hide was thickened by abuse, Junior was traumatized by press invective. “I never read the papers when there’s apt to be any trouble,” he reflected years later. “I learned that in the old days during the strike out west.”⁴⁶ In May 1914, while still reeling from the Ludlow Massacre, Junior asked Arthur Brisbane to recommend someone who might burnish the family image, and Brisbane suggested thirty-six-year-old Ivy Ledbetter Lee, executive assistant to the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The son of a Georgia Methodist preacher, the slim, blue-eyed Lee had a southern drawl and willowy southern charm that would subtly seduce a generation of newsmen. After working his way through Princeton, he traced a career route that became commonplace in the news business: After stints at two New York papers, Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’sWorld, he went into corporate public relations, a budding field fostered by the dual impact of investigative journalism and government regulation of business. At their first encounter at 26 Broadway, Junior told Lee, “I feel that my father and I are much misunderstood by the press and the people of this country. I should like to know what your advice would be on how to make our position clear.”⁴⁷ Instead of buying press coverage, Lee expounded his belief that businessmen should present their views fully and frankly—then trust to the truth. Said a relieved Junior: “This is the first advice I have had that does not involve deviousness of one kind or another.”⁴⁸

Still committed to an unfinished project at the Pennsylvania Railroad, Lee started out by working on a $1,000-a-month retainer for Rockefeller, which was shortly increased to a handsome full-time salary of $15,000 a year. Though he soon defected to set up his own consulting firm, he faithfully served the Rockefellers and Standard Oil of New Jersey from this outpost. So pervasive and trusted was his counsel that Junior later told a head of Standard of New Jersey: “Mr. Lee is very much more than a publicity agent. He is one of our advisers in regard to various matters of policy.” ⁴⁹

It is difficult to assess whether Ivy Lee had a beneficial effect upon the Rockefellers. His instructions to Junior sounded commendable enough: “Tell the truth, because sooner or later the public will find out anyway. And if the public doesn’t like what you are doing, change your policies and bring them into line with what people want.”⁵⁰ Excellent advice, to be sure, but did it reflect Lee’s own behavior? For several months in mid-1914, he issued a series of bulletins called “Facts Concerning the Struggle in Colorado for Industrial Freedom” that were broadly disseminated to opinion makers, giving the Rockefeller version of events. Many critics faulted Lee for playing fast and loose with the facts when he grossly overstated the pay given to strike leaders by the union, dished out scabrous stories about Mother Jones’s supposed early career as a brothel madam, and blamed the Ludlow Massacre on an overturned tent stove instead of militia gunfire. The literary fraternity skewered him: Carl Sandburg published an article called “Ivy Lee—Paid Liar”; Upton Sinclair memorably branded him “Poison Ivy”; and Robert Benchley later mocked him for suggesting that “the present capitalist system is really a branch of the Quaker Church, carrying on the work begun by St. Francis of Assisi.” ⁵¹

Initially, Lee repeated the error that had landed the Rockefellers in trouble in the first place: He relied upon slanted reports from CFI executives. After some embarrassing gaffes, he traveled out West in August 1914 and returned with a more balanced picture. Lee discovered that Bowers and Welborn had issued distorted information and that CFI employees were too cowed to voice complaints. “It is of the greatest importance,” he advised Junior, “that as early as possible some comprehensive plan be devised to provide machinery to redress grievances.”⁵² Whatever his truth-shading tendencies, Lee probably helped to bring about more humane policies at CFI.

Under the joint tutelage of King and Lee, Junior regained his equanimity and even launched a publicity offensive for improved labor relations, a transformation evident when he testified in January 1915 before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations at New York’s City Hall. Assembled by President Wilson, the commission was composed of representatives of employers, employees, and the public. The hearing was chaired by Senator Frank P. Walsh, a reformist Missouri lawyer who had won his spurs defending Jesse James. With an impressive mane of hair and a histrionic manner, Walsh was gunning for Rockefeller. To coach Junior for this event, King gave him a brief reading list on trade-union history and issued a delphic warning: “I reported . . . to him, that there appeared no alternative so far as he was concerned, to his being either the storm centre of a great revolution in this country or the man who by his fearless stand and position would transfuse a new spirit into industry.” ⁵³ For his part, Lee insisted that Junior not skulk around and behave guiltily. When the question arose of which door Junior would enter upon arriving at City Hall, Jerome Greene said, “Oh, the rear door of course.” At once, Lee jumped to his feet. “The days of the rear door philosophy are over. Mr. Rockefeller will have to enter through the same door as everyone else.”⁵⁴ When Junior, clad in derby and chesterfield coat, arrived at City Hall, looking pale and tense, he strode down the center aisle, pausing to shake hands with Mother Jones and other Colorado union organizers.

The next three days of arduous testimony provided a catharsis for John D. Rockefeller, Jr. During the first day’s testimony, he still professed ignorance of the CFI situation. He endorsed the right of labor to organize but also the right of capital to resist. At day’s end, when he strolled down Broadway to his office, he was trailed by masses of jeering demonstrators. Even though Police Commissioner Arthur Woods assigned special details to 26 Broadway and West Fifty-fourth Street, Junior declined this special protection. “Father never was afraid of anybody,” he explained. “He was the most completely fearless man I ever met, and I don’t want the public to think that I had to have police around me to protect me.”⁵⁵

The second day held surprises for Junior’s detractors. He buttonholed Mother Jones—who had been jailed in Colorado for nine weeks and escorted from the state at bayonet point—and invited her to visit his office. Responding in a friendly manner, she told Junior that she had never believed he knew what “those hirelings out there were doing. I can see how easy it is to misguide you.” Junior kidded her about throwing compliments his way. To the delighted roar of press and spectators, Mother Jones retorted, “I am more inclined to throw bricks.”⁵⁶ On the stand that day, Junior delivered the mea culpa so long awaited by the public when he admitted that he had taken too narrow a view of a director’s responsibilities. “I should hope that I could never reach the point where I would not be constantly progressing to something higher, better— both with reference to my own acts and . . . to the general situation in the company. My hope is that I am progressing. It is my desire to.”⁵⁷ Mackenzie King later identified this testimony as the turning point in Junior’s life.

Such public confessions of error were alien to Senior, who interpreted criticism as the martyrdom of the just. In Junior’s place, he would have reacted with cool defiance or expedient forgetfulness. Yet he saw that his son was following King’s advice, exhibiting uncommon courage, and accomplishing a critical shift in the family’s public posture. Moved by his son’s strength, Senior bequeathed to Junior another eighty thousand shares of CFI stock, which gave him effective control of the company. If he had been scanning the heavens for a sign that his son was strong enough to carry the burden of a colossal fortune, this was it. He said later of his son’s testimony:

They tried so hard to badger my son, to harrow him into saying something that they could use against him, against us. It was like the trial of Joan of Arc. I don’t know where he got the answers, his language, so quick, so instant to every question. . . . He surprised us all. He seemed to answer like one inspired. Indeed, I believe that his sainted mother must have inspired him; he was so kindly, so right in his attitude and all his statements. ⁵⁸

For most reporters, Junior came across as frank and sincere, if a trifle stuffy. Walter Lippmann, however, accused him of mouthing commonplaces.

Those who listened to him would have forgiven him much if they had felt that they were watching a great figure, a real master of men, a person of some magnificence. But in John D. Rockefeller, Jr., there seemed to be nothing but a young man having a lot of trouble, very much harassed and very well-meaning. No sign of the statesman, no quality of leadership in large affairs, just a careful, plodding, essentially uninteresting person who justifies himself with simple moralities and small-scale virtues. ⁵⁹

It was a savage indictment and one repeated frequently over the years. But it failed to appreciate how bravely this pedestrian young man at age forty had managed to appease both a venomous public and an all-powerful father. He had repudiated his father’s principles without seeming to repudiate the man, an ingenious strategy that opened up fresh possibilities for the family. To see how far Junior had traveled beyond his reactionary mentors, one need only cite a hysterical memo that Gates wrote after the Walsh testimony, deploring Junior’s leniency:

I do not so understand Christ that he adopted any spirit of conciliation toward those who came to him in the spirit of these Unionists. . . . I would have engaged an array of the most brilliant and able counsel to be gotten in New York—men not afraid, if necessary, to make a scene in court. . . . If necessary I would have carried the matter so far as to invite arrest, and I would have resisted arrest, and been carried struggling—shrieking from the court room for the purpose of getting my case vividly, powerfully, before the people of the United States.⁶⁰

How much Junior had evolved beyond such die-hard opposition was also made clear when Mother Jones visited him at 26 Broadway. The eighty-four-year-old, cheerfully vulgar, Cork-born rabble-rouser liked to rally striking miners while outfitted in boots and bonnets and peering at them humorously through granny glasses. Now, having helped to turn the Colorado strike into an anti-Rockefeller vendetta, she stood face-to-face with Junior. She teased him that she had pictured him with a hard jaw and firm-set mouth, clutching for money. Mimicking this, she added, “When I saw you going on the stand, and listened to the evidence, and saw the kind of man you are, I was filled with remorse. I felt I had done you a great injustice.”⁶¹ Having paid tribute to Junior’s sincerity, Mother Jones did not mince words about his employee-representation plan, which she called “a sham and fraud.”⁶² But after the bitter stalemate of past years, this meeting represented a major advance in mutual confidence. After the chat, Ivy Lee invited in reporters, and Junior, his face reddening shyly, said, “Gentlemen, I know it is my duty as a director to know more about actual conditions in the mines. I told Mother Jones that, of course, there should be free speech, free assembly, and independent, not company-owned, schools, stores and churches in the mine field. I am going to Colorado as soon as I can to learn for myself.” ⁶³ The promised two-week trip was made in September 1915, an overdue rite of passage that would complete the partial conversion begun in New York.

When Junior journeyed to southern Colorado, he betrayed the feverish urgency of a man on a spiritual quest. In a second round of hearings in May, Frank Walsh had released subpoenaed copies of correspondence that had passed between Junior and CFI executives during the strike. They showed Junior in his most militantly antiunion mood, implicating him more deeply in management than he had admitted and making the expiatory trip to Colorado even more essential. Having always shrunk from contact with his anonymous foes, Senior confided to a friend that he would give a million dollars to spare his boy exposure to peril in Colorado. He tried to prevail upon Charles O. Heydt to carry a gun, but Junior, determined to prove his courage, refused either weapons or bodyguards. The eight reporters who tagged along were requested, as a security precaution, to keep his itinerary a secret.

The trip pointed up critical differences between Senior and Junior. For Senior, vast wealth had permitted a retreat to his estates, whereas for Junior it underscored the need for greater openness. Instinctively, he behaved like a head of state, always cordial and generous in public—a style he transmitted to his children. Unlike his father, he did not wish to be eternally at war with the American public and had the courage to make the necessary midcourse corrections; in this last respect, he was a stronger person than his indomitable father, who had always dug in his heels and become intransigent when attacked.

Throughout his life, Junior had shadowboxed with unseen enemies who suddenly became three-dimensional human beings in the Colorado mining camps. Now, he would mingle with workers whose fate he had governed from afar. First, the caravan stopped at Ludlow itself, a haunted, windblown spot, now denuded of its tents. Emerging from their cars, Junior, King, and the reporters solemnly approached two railroad ties, nailed together in a black cross, marking the spot where the two women and eleven children had been suffocated in the pit. Afterward, they rode to the first of eighteen CFI coal towns, where they lunched on beefsteak, beans, and mashed potatoes. Entering into the spirit of the place, Junior and King responded to Ivy Lee’s suggestion and bought two-dollar suits of denim overalls from a company store before descending a coal shaft.

At one coal-mining camp, Junior delivered a short talk to workers in the local schoolhouse then suggested, with uncharacteristic spontaneity, that they clear the floor and hold an impromptu dance. As a little four-piece band struck up “The Hesitation Waltz,” he grabbed a miner’s wife and gaily stepped onto the floor. Too well-bred for tokenism, Junior spent the evening dancing with each of the twenty or so women in attendance—an ironic sequel for a young man once so bashful at Brown that he hesitated to dance at all. Nobody was more flabbergasted than Abby, who tracked his progress in the press. “From the papers I gather that your dancing has been one of your greatest assets,” she wrote to him. “I will never demur again.”⁶⁴

On October 2, 1915, in the town of Pueblo, Junior addressed two hundred CFI workers and managers. “This is a red-letter day in my life,” he began. “It is the first time I have ever had the good fortune to meet the representatives of the employees of this great company, its officers and mine superintendents, together, and I can assure you that I am proud to be here, and that I shall remember this gathering as long as I live.” ⁶⁵ Preaching his gospel of cooperation, he laid out his plans for a joint labor-management grievance panel along with new committees for health, sanitation, mine safety, recreation, and education. Significantly, nobody would be fired for joining a union, and there were promises of new housing, schools, and recreation centers. Taking a down-home approach, Junior laid three heaps of coins on a table to represent workers, managers, and directors then tried to show how each group siphoned off coins, leaving nothing for dividends on the $34 million Rockefeller investment. In the end, Junior must have been fairly persuasive, for 2,404 of 2,846 miners voted for his plan in a secret ballot. On the other hand, possibly from disdain for this paternalism, 2,000 miners boycotted the vote.

Selling the plan to management was no easier. After initial resistance, Welborn accepted the grievance mechanism and introduced other innovations, but L. M. Bowers opposed this reform, and Junior realized he had to cashier Gates’s uncle. “One of the most unpleasant tasks I ever performed was to get his resignation,” he said. “I shall never forget the three or four hours I spent with him in my house here trying to get him to retire amicably—for he could be a nasty enemy.”⁶⁶ At this point, Junior’s relations with Gates began to cool forever. The tradition-minded Junior never formally deposed the old gods—his father and Gates—but instead staked out new directions with new advisers. When E. H. Weitzel, CFI’s fuel manager, complained about his clemency toward unions, Junior shot back: “Your attitude in this respect is definitely paternalistic, an attitude which on general principles I am sure you will agree it is unwise for any corporation to maintain. . . . Paternalism is antagonistic to democracy.” ⁶⁷ Junior had defected, at least halfway, to the enemy camp. But his representation plan was, at best, only a middling success. In the following years, the company weathered four more strikes before the UMW finally won recognition in 1933. Junior’s species of “company union” was outlawed by the Wagner Act in 1935.

For Junior, the Colorado trip was a trial by fire from which he emerged triumphant, converting the worst moment in the family history into something more promising. As King told Abby during the tour, “From now on he will be able to devote his time to advancing the vast projects . . . [relating] to human beings, without being thwarted at every step by . . . the voice . . . of popular prejudice.”⁶⁸ Although much of what Junior had done was likely anathema to him, Senior cheered his son’s journey of reconciliation. “Yes, it was excellent,” he told an old friend. “I could not have managed it better myself.” ⁶⁹

After the Colorado trip, Junior became a prophet for improved labor relations throughout American industry, an evangelical role he enjoyed more than browbeating unions. Seizing the high ground, he sold his stock in U.S. Steel during a 1920 strike when management would not annul its policy of twelve-hour days, seven days a week. Junior and King introduced employee-representation plans at both Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of Indiana. Abby even contributed to trade unions and to funds for striking workers—which her husband thought was going a bit far. As a nationwide drive to retain the open shop swept American business in the 1920s, many industrialists looked upon Junior as a dangerous liberal, even though many trade unionists saw his company unions as traps for unsuspecting workers.

In one respect, Junior’s work with Mackenzie King proved a setback for the family: It fueled popular suspicion of the Rockefeller Foundation. From the outset, the family had insisted that it would be a public trust, not a vehicle to promote Rockefeller causes. Because King’s work was underwritten by the foundation, though, it looked as if the Rockefellers had exploited their philanthropy to lend a veneer of legitimacy to their business activities. After public hearings into the matter, the foundation decided to avoid economic issues and concentrate on public health, medicine, and other safe areas. To boost faith in the foundation’s autonomy, in July 1917 Rockefeller waived his future right to make founder’s designations.

If the Ludlow Massacre was a turning point in Rockefeller family history, much of the credit must go to Mackenzie King, who emancipated Junior from strict obedience to his father. He strengthened Junior’s tenuous faith in his own judgment, making him feel that he was strong enough and fit enough to manage the family fortune. King probably did not exaggerate when he said of Junior in his diary: “I really think he feels closer to myself than to any other man he knows.”⁷⁰ Politically, Mackenzie King emerged both well paid and unscathed from his detour into the Rockefeller universe. In 1919, he was elected leader of the Liberal Party in Canada and two years later became prime minister, serving in that post off and on for a record twenty-two years and forging much of the modern Canadian welfare state. Like many counselors to the Rockefellers, he had enjoyed the satisfaction of serving both his conscience and his bank account.