Colorado Coal Strike

The bitter strike waged against the coal operators of southern Colorado in 1913–1914 was one of the first major tests of the emerging field of public relations in the United States.

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) sought to organize the immigrant workers who worked for some 70 companies in the state. However, the largest and most influential coal operator was the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), which was 40 percent owned by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., scion of the Standard Oil Trust. Rockefeller took comparatively little interest in the company, which he invested in as a favor to railroad tycoon George Gould. The Rockefellers actually intended to sell their stake in CF&I as soon as market conditions improved. But events on April 20, 1914, squelched any hope of doing so.

On that Monday morning, as the strike ended its seventh month, a gun battle broke out between Colorado militiamen and armed strikers, who had been evicted from company-owned houses and were living in a tent colony near Ludlow, Colorado. Accounts vary about how the skirmish began, but by the end of the day at least eight men and one boy had been killed by gunfire before the tent colony burned to the ground. However, the real tragedy of the “Ludlow massacre” was the suffocation deaths of two women and 11 children who were consumed by smoke after hiding from the crossfire in earthen pits below ground.

The union, aided by sympathetic and sensationalistic newspapers in Denver, quickly blamed the entire affair on Rockefeller and his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had assumed responsibility for the family's business affairs. Although they were 1,500 miles away from the incident and had not been in Colorado for 10 years, the Rockefellers were labeled as personally responsible for the strike, for the attack by the militia, and for the deaths of innocent women and children.

Newspapers across the country carried glaring headlines for the first several days about the tragedy. But the real pressure came as newspapers in New York and the East covered efforts by Congressman Martin Foster and President Woodrow Wilson to seek a settlement of the strike. Rockefeller had steadfastly refused to meddle with the local managers who, like their counterparts in all other Rockefeller investments, were allowed and expected to operate the day-to-day business. CF&I was a member of a mine operators association that staunchly opposed union recognition, particularly any union led by the tawdry leaders of UMWA District 15.

Rockefeller had told a congressional subcommittee in early April 1914 that he was not opposed to unions. But JDR Jr. (and presumably his father) staunchly believed philosophically that men should not be forced to join a union and should be able to work anywhere they wished. About the strike, he had told the committee prior to Ludlow, “My conscience acquits me.” Those words would haunt him.

The Rockefellers were helplessly sucked into the fray. A well-oiled publicity campaign was launched by Walter H. Fink, publicity director of the UMWA in Colorado. Protests were also organized in Denver by George Creel and in New York City and Tarrytown, New York (home of several Rockefeller [Page 151]estates) by Upton Sinclair. The socialist writer also picketed the Rockefellers' office at 26 Broadway and went to jail instead of paying a small fine in order to generate even more sympathetic press coverage. The Rockefellers received death threats from the radical members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Sunday services at their church were disrupted. Later, a bomb intended for the Rockefellers exploded in a New York tenement house and killed four suspected protesters.

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