Vol. 20

No. 8

PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY THE TOBACCO WORKERS' INTERNATIONAL UNION

Entered at the Post Office at Louisville, Ky., as second class matter. SUBSCRIPTION, FIFTY CENTS PER YEAR Advertising rates made known upon application

The Tobacco Worker.

PRESS ABSTRACT OF REPORT

ON THE COLORADO STRIKE.

BY GEORGE P. WEST. [Ordered printed by resolution of the Commission.] Continued from July issue.

"From first to last Mr. Bowers, as shown by his letter to Mr. Rockefeller's office, saw nothing in the struggle of the miners for the right to organize for collective bargaining except a plot by 'socialists,' 'anarchists,' and 'political demagogues' to wrest the control of the mines from their owners. His letters to Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., early in the strike show him to have been bitter and prejudiced in the extreme, with an adherence to the individualistic economic doctrines of a century ago that was almost grotesque in its intensity.

"Back of Mr. Bowers and President Welborn in determining and maintaining the operator's policies stood John D. Rockefeller, Jr., whose enthusiastic approval and indorsement of these policies gave incalculable moral and material support to both his own subordinates and to the executive officials of other companies. Mr. Rockefeller's indorsement and approval was accorded promptly at the beginning of the strike in the form of personal letters to Mr. Bowers, which were shown not only to the executive officers of the Company, but to the heads of other companies as well. It is greatly to be doubted if the Colorado operators could have maintained their unyielding

enlightened public opinion of the entire nation had they not been bulwarked by the material and moral power wielded by the possessor of the hugest private fortune in the world.

"Mr. Rockefeller's power to direct the policies of his own company is admitted and needs no discussion. But it is alleged that the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company was but one of many, and by itself unable to control the situation.

"Examination of the evidence shows that Mr. Rockefeller's agents admitted the company's leadership in the counsels of the operators during the first seven months of the strike.

"It was not until the horror of the Ludlow massacre had shocked and outraged the nation and brought upon its perpetrators the wrath and loathing of every decent citizen that Mr. Rockefeller, for the first time, makes the point that his company was but one of many, and that Mr. Bowers in Denver, his supreme self-complacency staggered for the minute, writes his employer, 'we have been given altogether too prominent a place in this trouble.'

"Mr. Bowers used this phrase five days after the Ludlow massacre. The same sudden desire to minimize his part in the affair apparently animated Mr. Rockefeller in New York at about the same time. Telegraphing to Mr. Bowers on April 26th, while the tide of the nation's anger still rose about him, Mr. Rockefeller asked:

great on Mr. Welborn, who has been the recognized leader among the operators.'

"While Mr. Rockefeller may have fully believed that conditions in the Colorado mines had been greatly improved since Mr. Bowers was sent there, and were as good or better than conditions prevailing in other fields, it is submitted that even a cursory reading of Mr. Bower's letters should have revealed to his employer that here was a man temperamentally and intellectually incapable of dealing wisely and fairly with a strike involving the vital rights and interests of thousands of employes and their families, and seriously menacing the peace and well being of a State. Mr. Bowers' letters alone should have been sufficient to convince Mr. Rockefeller that the writer was irritable, arbitrary and obstinate to an exceptional degree; that he was a survival of the dark age of theory and practice regarding industrial relations; that he was ignorant of the characters and records of the men whom he opposed; and that finally his attitude toward the government of the State and nation was contemptuous, hostile and defiant.

"Nor could Mr. Rockefeller be acquitted even had Mr. Bowers concealed these qualities in his, correspondence with 26 Broadway. From the day, seven days before the strike began, when he avoided an interview sought by a mediator of the Federal government, Mr. Rockefeller refused to enter upon any independent investigation in order to determine 'for himself the true situation in Colorado, before he threw all the enormous power of his personal support behind the men who set themselves to the task of crushing the revolt of 8,000 miners.

"Yet the men whose unsupported word he accepted were almost strangers to him. They were men who could not have admitted the grievances complained of without admitting themselves guilty of crimes against society. But their denial was all that Mr. Rockefeller required before projecting himself into the situation as a decisive factor.

"That Mr. Rockefeller's support of his Colorado officials became a factor of tremendous importance, if not a decisive factor, in preventing a peaceful settle

ment is made clear by a study of the testimony and correspondence.

"On May 13, 1913, Mr. Bowers wrote to Mr. Rockefeller's secretary: 'It is well known that the Rockefeller interests are managing the affairs of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co.' Business men, ministers, college professors, editors, and the general public knew that Mr. Bowers and Mr. Welborn represented the greatest financial interest in the world. They represented this interest in a comparatively new State, where dependence on 'Eastern capital' and the habit of sedulously cultivating the friendship of eastern investors still held. They represented the world's greatest investor in a community of small business men newlyarrived in the charmed circle of wealth and power and acutely sensitive to the glamor that surrounds the world's financially powerful.

"In the business community of Denver Mr. Rockefeller's agents had a prestige comparable to that of those strong men of Rome sent out from the world's capital to carry its grandeur into distant provinces. Three newspaper publishers, preachers of the gospel, obscure officers of the militia, looked to Mr. Rockefeller, a stranger in distant New York, for succor in their financial distress. When the United States government, warned of the discontent and the impending revolt in the coal fields, moved to prevent a disastrous strike, it was to Mr. Rockefeller's office in New York that this government sent its mediator. It was to Mr. Rockefeller that a Cabinet Officer appealed early in the strike, and Mr. Rockefeller's answer then, in contrast with his attitude after Ludlow, carried no denial or repudiation of his supreme authority and power."

There submitted many extracts from the correspondence between Messrs. Bowers and Rockefeller in Denver and Mr. Rockefeller, or members of his personal staff, at 26 Broadway, all bearing on the question of Mr. Rockefeller's responsibility.

The report continues:

"But Mr. Rockefeller's part in the Colorado conflict was not confined to these letters of praise and indorsement which so heartened and sustained the Colorado

operators. Prior to the massacre at Ludlow on April 20th, the letters proved quite sufficient for Mr. Rockefeller's purpose. But the storm of popular wrath that rose after Ludlow demanded more active participation. It was then that Mr. Rockefeller initiated the nation-wide publicity campaign by which he hoped to convince the country that the strikers, and not his company's mine-guard-militiamen, were responsible for the deaths of thirteen women and children who perished at Ludlow, and that the strike itself, instead of a struggle for freedom, was a revolt by bloodthirsty and anarchistic foreigners, led by men who obtained huge incomes from organized agitation and lawlessness.

"Still hiding behind his executive officials in Denver, Mr. Rockefeller employed a publicity expert and advanced him money from his personal funds to begin the campaign. He chose for the purpose Mr. Ivy L. Lee, publicity agent for the Pennsylvania Railroad. The President of that railroad consented that Mr. Lee should devote a part of his time to Mr. Rockefeller's service, and the pamphlets and bulletins were to be dispatched in bulk from Mr. Lee's Philadelphia office to Denver, for distribution from the office of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. They were to go forth under the name of the operators' committee, as correct information gathered and written on the scene by men familiar at first hand with the facts.

"Early in the summer of 1914 there began that remarkable publicity campaign by which Mr. Rockefeller flooded the nation with bulletin after bulletin, defending the coal operators and denouncing the strikers and their leaders. These bulletins contained false and deceptive statements. Salaries paid to officials of the United Mine Workers in Colorado for the year ending November, 1913, were conspicuously displayed as salaries for the nine weeks ending in that month. This gross and palpable slander was mailed to thousands of congressmen, editors, ministers of the gospel, school teachers, public officials, business and professional men whose names appeared on Mr. Lee's carefully prepared mailing lists. No correction was made until it had been

exposed by this Commission during the hearing in Denver in December, 1914.

"The preparation and distribution of these bulletins was carried on with the greatest secrecy as to the authorship of Mr. Lee and as to his employment by Mr. Rockefeller. When this Commission demanded the name of the writers of the bulletins of Mr. Welborn, during the hearing in December, Mr. Welborn refused to answer until he had consulted his attorney. Even then he carefully refrained from revealing the fact that the publicity campaign had been initiated and paid for by Mr. Rockefeller.

"Has the Colorado strike opened the eycs of Mr. Rockefeller and his associates to the necessity, wisdom or moral obligation pointing toward radical concessions and changes in Colorado? The evidence justifying an affirmative answer is lacking.

"The Rev. Mr. Gaddis visited all the camps of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and had exceptional opportunity to meet the miners and superintendents and to ascertain the actual conditions. Testifying in May, 1915, he summed up his judgment of the situation existing in these camps in the following language: "I have never seen a situation to my more despicable and damnable.

mind

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It is an oligarchy that is controlling everything.'"

"The direct cause of the strike," says the report, "was the refusal of the mine owners, led by the Rockefeller Company, to grant a conference to representatives of the strikers." The report says, after relating at length efforts of the union officials to obtain a conference during the summer of 1913 and prior to the strike:

"Spies and local officials had kept the operators fully informed of the unrest existing in the coal camps. That this unrest was of long standing is shown by Mr. Bowers' letter of Sept. 19, 1913, to Mr. Murphy, in which he tells of the steps taken within the preceding year or two to forestall agitation. Before the strike began Mr. Welborn wrote to a director in New York, Mr. J. H. McClements, expressing the writer's anxiety and predicting that most of the men would go out if a strike was called.

"In his letter of Sept. 19 to Mr. Rocke