INTRODUCTION
In the aftermath of the Colorado Coal Wars of 1913–1914, the deadliest labor strike in U.S. history, J. W. Ogden, an ordinary citizen from Lynchburg, Virginia, expressed the anger and dismay that many Americans felt toward John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the newly minted majority shareholder of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I). While Junior's father, the nationally recognizable businessman and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Sr. had been the director and chief shareholder of CF&I during the time of the Coal Wars, he had rewarded his son's early public loyalty with a 40 percent controlling interest in the company. When Senior transferred his shares to Junior, he unwittingly shifted all the emotion and animosity that swirled around what the Rocky Mountain News coined as the Ludlow Massacre to his son, as well. Though labor unrest had grown increasingly organized and violent since the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the catastrophic nature of this particular strike shocked Rockefeller.
Perception played a significant role in how the American public, laborers and union organizers, and the Rockefeller family assigned fault and ultimately understood the strike. In January 1914, Representative Edward Keating (D-CO) persuaded the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Mines and Mining to form a subcommittee to investigate the conditions in Colorado and determine whether CF&I mine operators had flaunted federal regulations and created a “system of peonage” in their mines.Footnote 2 The report, produced from over two thousand pages of testimony, concluded that the majority of the fault rested with the mine owners, and in particular with the militia and mine guards hired to protect CF&I property. In addition, the subcommittee, while acknowledging that the miners were not blameless in the escalating violence, condemned the mine operators for allowing a “system of feudalism” to exist and placed responsibility squarely on the absentee owners, the Rockefellers.Footnote 3 Junior, the Rockefeller family, and the CF&I leadership believed that the fault rested with the United Mine Workers Association (UMWA) for pressuring the CF&I miners to remain on strike for months and for the rise in violence that, in the end, compelled the operators to petition Governor Elias M. Ammons to send in the National Guard.Footnote 4
For his part, Junior believed that the UMWA pressured local newspapers, in particular the Rocky Mountain News, to portray the violence in hyperbolic terms. Writing to Mackenzie King, Junior claimed that describing the dead women and children as innocent victims of the powerful mine management's crackdown on hard-working men striking for their right to unionize and improve their working conditions and labeling it a “massacre” skewed the facts and turned the public against him.Footnote 5 Over the ensuing months, King, who Rockefeller later hired as the creative mastermind behind the Employment Representation Plan (ERP), exchanged letters with Junior, and grew sympathetic to Junior's complaint that press coverage of events unfolding in southern Colorado was both critical and one-sided. For those Americans who had never felt particularly sympathetic toward labor unions, the events at Ludlow tipped the balance, if not in favor of labor unions, at least away from Rockefeller. In response, Junior hired public relations wizard Ivy Lee to help save his name and family reputation. Under Lee's watchful eye, Rockefeller established the foundation for the Rockefeller Plan of industrial democracy, which revolutionized corporate capitalism in the twentieth century. Ogden's pointed criticism, however, hit Junior at his core—striking at his religiosity and his fundamental beliefs about humanity.
Historians have taken two tacks when writing about the CF&I and southern Colorado mining culture and the Colorado Coal Wars of 1913–1914. Scholars, such as Thomas G. Andrews, George S. McGovern, Priscilla Long, Howard M. Gitelman, and Scott Martelle, have examined the class struggles and labor issues that erupted into violence in the mining communities of southern Colorado, and have placed these events into the broader context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labor unrest.Footnote 6 Other historians, such as David Montgomery and Jonathan Rees, have focused more specifically on Rockefeller's managerial response and institutional changes that Junior implemented at CF&I after the Colorado Coal Wars, in particular the ERP.Footnote 7 While this event affected unionization and the development of industrial democracy and corporate capitalism, I suggest that Junior's response also has implications for gender history, in particular the history of masculinity. Previous discussions of gender and welfare work focus on women entering the industrial workforce and workplace unions and women serving as ambassadors for Progressive Era reforms.Footnote 8 Junior believed that the ERP went a long way in addressing many of the workers’ needs, and emphasized the Victorian model of working-class masculinity. But he also thought that workers’ behavior—their sexual, social, and vice behavior in particular—as well as the environment that perpetuated this type of behavior had contributed to their unrest, and therefore needed to be transformed in ways not addressed by the ERP in order to quell future strikes.
This essay examines this second, less-studied aspect of Rockefeller's reconstruction plan where Junior used the crisis of Ludlow and the soft power of reform—to borrow terminology from foreign relations history—in order to accomplish his goal to form a more perfect worker.Footnote 9 According to foreign relations historian Joseph S. Nye, ‘soft power’ is power that convinces by social and cultural means, rather than coerces through military, political, or economic methods. In the aftermath of Ludlow, “soft power” meant relying on established social and cultural institutions, such as the YMCA, and municipal support of public, civic space to instill Protestant, middle-class values and provide a model of manhood that reflected the core principles of democracy within the limited structure of industrial capitalism. Thus, in studying the gendered history of Rockefeller's plans, I take a top-down approach that focuses more on Junior and his cohort's views on gender and attempts to implement them within their mines and focus less on miners’ responses to these views. Miners’ voices occasionally illuminate the story, but I am interested in Rockefeller's attempts to use cultural and social institutions to define masculinity and mold his miners into docile, American men. While supporting local anti-vice organizations, he also used, developed, and expanded municipal and corporate policing in order to enforce middle-class masculinity and to solidify the relationship between CF&I and its workers. As R. Todd Laugen suggests, Rockefeller was not alone in his endeavors to transform manhood in Colorado for his own interests.Footnote 10 His access to power, money, and organizational support, however, remained unparalleled. In efforts to define a “normal” sexuality, I argue that with Rockefeller's support, state-sanctioned regulation of manhood, sexuality, and same-sex activity begins in the early twentieth century. These efforts laid the foundation for the more comprehensive intervention during both world wars, as well as the U.S. government sponsored, postwar attacks on homosexuality that Margot Canaday and Pippa Holloway identify.Footnote 11 Thus, Rockefeller's mark on a system of corporate and social welfare that established Protestant, middle-class values as its base, falls in line with what historian Nikki Mandell identifies as the “corporate family” model that served as a national model through most of the twentieth century.Footnote 12
Though Rockefeller himself did not play an active role in statewide reform or politics, his financial support of churches, reform organizations, and social betterment societies helped create and sustain an environment willing to clamp down, regulate, and demonize vice. As an adherent to the Progressive Era principles of welfare capitalism, the gospel of efficiency, and muscular Christianity, Junior relied on organizations like the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), longitudinal statistical studies on vice, the new pseudoscience of eugenics, and eventually the law in his attempt to reshape his workers into docile company men who embodied middle-class masculinity.
Rockefeller relied on his national experiences in reform and anti-vice campaigns to design company policies that encouraged workers to change negative masculine leisure activities—drinking, swearing, low church attendance, participating in radical social and political clubs, and nonmarital sexual behavior. These efforts transformed the relationship between the municipal and corporate state and Coloradans, throwing into question the existence of a narrow, rugged western style of masculinity that other historians, such as Peter Boag and Jacqueline M. Moore have begun to complicate.Footnote 13 In his desire to meet his managerial needs at CF&I, Rockefeller helped bolster a fledgling social reform agenda within Colorado, and connected it with the larger national and international reform movements that would continue to influence social betterment during the twentieth century.
In his early days at CF&I, Junior reviewed the company's decisions and believed that the executive board had represented the right side of the law, the best interests of the shareholders, and the fundamental principles of liberty and economic freedom. Though he received letters supporting his company's hard-line position against the miners, by late 1914 Junior recognized that he needed to repair his public image and restore the nation's trust in him as a businessman and philanthropist. Throughout 1914 and 1915, Rockefeller depended on MacKenzie King's advice on transforming CF&I. King's imprint on the Rockefeller Plan is significant. His mark on Rockefeller, especially after their trip to southern Colorado in 1915, proved long lasting, as well. Alongside King, Rockefeller also sought the aide of Ivy Lee, an early influential figure in advertising and public relations. It was with Lee that Rockefeller took King's contributions—a system of practical workplace changes and a foundation for a new public image—and began reconstructing his image into a more involved businessman and repairing his relationship with the American people.Footnote 14
Much as Rockefeller had relied almost entirely on King for the Rockefeller Plan, Junior turned himself over completely to Lee, who suggested a multifaceted approach to correcting the public's perception of Rockefeller as a corporate monster. Lee's involvement with Junior and CF&I marked the beginning of Rockefeller's personal transformation. Lee took charge of every aspect of Junior's life and business. His goal was to make everything Junior did explicit and transparent, declaring “The days of the rear door philosophy [are] over. Mr. Rockefeller will have to enter through the same door as everyone else.”Footnote 15 Lee believed that by making Junior more knowledgeable of and active in every facet of CF&I, he could help change public perception of the tarnished Rockefeller.
Between 1914 and 1927, Rockefeller became remarkably more involved with his mines and his miners through the creation, development, and implementation of the Rockefeller Plan. Though workers bristled at the limitations of a company union, to managers it marked a middle ground and remained a standard form of organization until the Wagner Act of 1935.Footnote 16 Throughout 1914 and 1915, Junior spoke at universities, corporate boardrooms, and worksites to mark what he believed to be a new day in industrial management.
Equally important, he hoped to restore his reputation by conceding certain worker needs while respecting managerial power. In order to counteract claims of appearing aloof and unconcerned about his company and his workers, Lee also insisted that Rockefeller embark on a public tour of his Colorado mines during the spring of 1915. When Junior and his wife, Abby, arrived in Colorado for their three-month tour, they looked like dandies in the rough. Photo after photo show them in awkward, stiff poses wearing atypical clothing—Junior in a pair of clean overalls standing among soot-laden workers fresh from the mines, Mrs. Rockefeller dressed all in summer white meeting with destitute widows and their children in the tent colony. The incongruities stretched beyond wardrobe choices, as Junior also met with his intellectual adversaries, Upton Sinclair and Mother Jones.
As stiff and out of place as the Rockefellers appeared, however, they slowly won over their hosts. A Pueblo Chieftain reporter, describing Junior dining with the miners and their families, wrote, “It may not be as fancy as dining in New York, but he seemed to have a real fun time and enjoy the food. Mrs. Rockefeller even asked for the recipe.”Footnote 17 The photographs and daily stories that chronicled their journey slowly but surely worked to improve Rockefeller's public image.
Though Rockefeller's industrial plan remains a model of corporate-labor relations throughout the twentieth century, it represented only half of his plan to reconstruct his labor force. For Junior, restructuring the relationship between management and labor left the reconstruction project incomplete, and thus vulnerable to future crises. As Lizabeth Cohen demonstrates, the political, economic, and social contexts of labor reforms operated together, creating a constant state of controlled, but consistent, tension between management and labor throughout the early twentieth century that only broke apart in the 1930s. Though often left out of this equation, debates about manhood remained central to these conflicts.
JUNIOR AND THE AFTERMATH OF A MASSACRE
Throughout his life, John D. Rockefeller Sr. had groomed Junior to head at least one of the family corporations. While Senior's influence remained unparalleled in developing Junior's business acumen, Junior's mother played an important role in shaping his character and faith throughout his childhood.Footnote 18 Unlike his austere father, Rockefeller developed into a sensitive child and young man, choosing schools and colleges, such as the Baptist Brown University, which offered a combination of excellent academic opportunities, but also provided small, personal environments in which he could grow spiritually.
Rockefeller's holistic choices continued throughout his early days working under his father, and often caused conflict between father and son. In 1891, his initial experience of working with his father at Standard Oil proved wrenching and isolating. The driving pace of work shook Junior out of the leisurely paced life of his Brown days. Recording in his diary, “Father never said a word to me,”Footnote 19 Junior found working with Senior increased his sense of inadequacy, and it was years before Junior found his footing within the corporate structure. Even when he reached his stride, revealing a gifted business mind, he remained sensitive and responsive to personal issues. In this respect, Junior was not unlike many of his contemporaries who found ways to incorporate their Christianity and the principles of the Social Gospel into their business practices.Footnote 20
Under the tutelage of Ivy Lee and Mackenzie King, Rockefeller developed his own system of social welfare that strengthened the existing ecclesiastical and secular network in southern Colorado. Churches of many denominations had been a part of Colorado society for centuries. The Spanish were the first to introduce Christianity to inhabitants of Colorado, building several missions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the United States acquired Colorado, Protestant missionaries made steady inroads into the ecclesiastical framework of the territory and state. By 1914, all major Protestant denominations—Baptist, Congregational, Episcopalian, Methodist, and Presbyterian—as well as African Methodist Episcopalian, Mormon, Christian Scientist, and Lutheran denominations had established congregations.Footnote 21
In addition to supporting churches, Junior helped the YMCA grow stronger in Colorado. Rockefeller had grown up with an appreciation of the YMCA and its potential to act as a liaison between the modern world of corporate capitalism and the traditional morals of youth.Footnote 22 The YMCA's leadership remained staunchly middle class, thus creating a homogenous YMCA message including the perpetuation of negative stereotypes of immigrants, African Americans, and the working class. The secretaries of the YMCA—all white, middle-class men—were filled with what Robert Wiebe identifies as “an earnest desire to remake the world upon their private models.”Footnote 23 In this model, Rockefeller saw his values and a way to remake his workers.
By 1914, Rockefeller was already a longtime supporter of the YMCA ethos and significant financial contributor. Following in the footsteps of his father, Junior began contributing to the YMCA in 1902. Again, some differences between father and son emerged in their charitable contributions. Though both gave generously to the YMCA—Senior's contributions consistently subsidizing 10 to 14 percent of the annual budget—they contributed in different ways. While Senior donated to the annual budget and general funds, Junior decided to earmark his donations to religious development programs. In 1906, when Senior's contribution of $20,000 comprised 10 percent of the annual budget, Junior's contribution helped fund the work of John R. Mott, the national secretary of the Intercollegiate YMCA, Student Bible study, and to create a new position—Secretary of Religious Work.Footnote 24 Junior's fiscal support of the YMCA's evangelism demonstrates his belief that “the time [was] ripe for an aggressive and comprehensive campaign among the North American Associations for the preaching of the gospel to young men, for the promotion of Bible Study and enlisting these young men in definite Christian services.”Footnote 25 Through games, conversations, lectures, Bible studies, and civics classes the YMCA hoped to, as Thomas Winter states, serve as a “key to a revolution in identity” by building a community between men of all classes in the image of the middle class.
Much like the church network that predated the Rockefeller's presence in southern Colorado, Rockefeller identified the long-standing work of Dr. Richard W. Corwin in Pueblo to be instrumental in establishing trust with local workers, while promoting a strong Protestant work ethic in his mines. Connected to CF&I, Corwin served as a physician for the company town and ran CF&I's Sociological Department (SD). Established in 1901, the SD represented an early example of corporate welfare, though in Montgomery's estimation, an elaborate form. Corwin believed that the southern and central European immigrants flooding Colorado were “drawn from the lower classes of foreign immigrants” and that they expressed “primitive ideas of living and ignorance of hygienic laws” that needed to be changed.Footnote 26 To combat these problems, Corwin believed that immigrants needed special help and guidance to become Americanized.
To provide this help, Corwin and the SD established programs that they believed strengthened the worker and his family. Corwin supervised a small medical and research team that provided both general medical care and social betterment programs for the miners and their families. Like the YMCA, the SD held classes in American cooking, English language, set up baseball leagues, held gardening and home decoration competitions, as well as provided temperance dining rooms for the miners and their families. Though Corwin and the SD were centered in Pueblo—the largest CF&I company town—they had branches at all the CF&I camps, and Corwin frequently traveled among the various camps to provide general health care and to observe the miners’ behavior.
IN THE AFTERMATH OF SO MUCH PAIN
Receiving letters that attacked his sense of Christianity shocked Rockefeller. In his efforts to reconstruct the miner, Rockefeller concentrated on three areas: funding preexisting local churches, civic projects, and social organizations; expanding the YMCA in Colorado; and promoting and developing the Bureau of Social Hygiene (BSH). From the demographic data, he recognized that Catholics comprised the majority of the miners living and working in the CF&I company towns. Working with community missionaries and priests, Junior decided it was better to support efforts to expand the Catholic outreach in his attempt to “arrest the natural tendencies of the foreign element to become the prey of the socialistic agitators” than to concentrate on converting them.Footnote 27
One such advocate, Father A. Foster, S.J., of Trinidad, Colorado, wrote to Junior that it was the particular interest of his mission to “help Americanize the foreign element.” He argued that it might be to the advantage of the ethnic Catholic Church to “gently assure the men that it is good for them to become American citizens and to identify themselves with the rest of the people.”Footnote 28 Junior eventually supplied the Trinidad church with a new roof and a car for Foster's outreach programs. Both he and Foster agreed that the problems of Ludlow stemmed not from real grievances with CF&I, but instead from the miners themselves. It was their “natural foreign tendencies” that drew them to socialism, not inadequate wages or working conditions. Americanizing the miners through religion was not unique to Colorado, but it was an appealing solution that Junior supported. Like Foster, Rockefeller believed that increasing religious options in southern Colorado would result in declining “immoral, un-American behavior.”Footnote 29
Public praise for Rockefeller's efforts meant that his family and companies served their patriarchal duties of corporate welfare capitalism. On April 30, 1919, an article appeared in the CF&I circular, Industrial Bulletin, entitled “Churches Active in Mining Towns.” The article reported on the significant rise not only in church attendance since Junior built the Catholic church in Primero, but also on the steady rise in baptisms, which had increased to two hundred the previous year. In addition to church attendance, the article cites several examples of church volunteers responding to the needs of people suffering during the 1918 influenza outbreak.Footnote 30 The article was in the company bulletin and would therefore not likely critique Junior's plan to increase the churches in the area. It is clear, however, that all of the half dozen congregations listed in the article had become deeply involved in the community.
Junior preferred to imagine that “with the close proximity of a variety of churches, there is no excuse for miners not to attend on a regular basis,” and that all miners would begin to attend church. Yet he realized that he also needed a way to share his Americanization message in other ways. Rockefeller might not have been the first industrial capitalist to apply welfare capitalism to his company, but the ERP garnered the most attention and therefore became the model of corporate welfare of the twentieth century.Footnote 31 As a life-long teetotaler and temperance advocate, however, Junior believed restricting or eliminating alcohol led to more middle-class behavior and would reduce dramatically the level of unrest in his mines. Not satisfied with curbing alcohol, Rockefeller also expanded his reforming scope to include other aspects of the miners’ behavior. In several letters to CF&I's Denver manager, Jesse Welborn, Rockefeller relayed concerns about the “true nature and natural inclinations of the foreign miner.”Footnote 32 He wondered if it was enough to concern him with the spiritual well-being of the miners. Junior also worried that “improper socialization” was going on in the mines. He feared that the miners were not hearing the Rockefeller message, and instead were adopting a version of American culture that “prized gambling, carousing, fisticuffs, and visiting dens of immoral sexual behavior.”Footnote 33 He wanted his workers to understand the principle of hard work as he saw it, not in short-term rewards, but in terms of the long-term prizes of upward mobility: more independence and financial stability. While the realities that CF&I workers faced often limited their ability to advance unscathed, Rockefeller provided them the words of his father: that they must “learn to obey orders before you can hope to give them.”Footnote 34 In every message, articulated or implied, Rockefeller reaffirmed his belief that long-term rewards required hard work, discipline, and adherence to authority, not unionization and equal bargaining.
Rockefeller also provided money for secular improvements, such as bandstands, civic centers, and outdoor pavilions. Under Lee's watchful eye, Rockefeller supported the development of civic activity that “expressed the best attributes of democracy and America” and a Protestant middle-class definition of manhood.Footnote 35 In a memorandum dated January 31, 1916, he acknowledged his previous agreement to furnish bandstands at Primero, Cameron, and Sopris mining camps. In addition, he agreed with the Cameron camp committee's suggestion to use extra space for an outdoor dancing pavilion.Footnote 36 He went on to write that he “desire[d] to do whatever will best meet the needs of each community.”Footnote 37 By building bandstands, Rockefeller provided a civic space for concerts and performance, suitable activities for women and children. Through his financial pressure, Rockefeller moved southern Colorado mining camps and company towns away from activities that men shared alone, outside of the family structure, such as drinking and carousing at bars, dancehalls, or even union meetings. For Junior this shift also served as a for him to mend relations with miners. These improvements would replace socialist inclinations in his miners, establish and enforce a sense of democracy, and temper their thoughts and actions toward Junior and CF&I. In the middle-class value system espoused by Rockefeller, these activities fostered a masculinity defined by work, family, and company loyalty through recreation. By changing leisure activities Rockefeller wanted to shape the miners’ thoughts on democracy, and to reconfigure commonly held perceptions of masculinity in the camps without a display of force.
In addition to his support of churches and bandstands, he also supported the YMCA and its efforts “to develop young men physically, socially, mentally, and spiritually,” what Clifford Putney identifies as “muscular Christianity.”Footnote 38 Montgomery and Thomas Winter argue that as corporate welfare found its niche in the American workplace of the early twentieth century, owners like Rockefeller found the YMCA a perfect organization through which to filter their philosophies of workplace democracy and Protestant, middle-class behavior.Footnote 39
This long-standing relationship between Rockefeller and the YMCA was exactly the type of philanthropic endeavor that Ivy Lee wanted to exploit on behalf of his fallen client in the spring of 1914. Lee used Junior's years of fiscal contributions to bolster Junior's image as a Christian humanitarian, but also encouraged him to continue, and if possible increase, his contributions. By 1914 Junior's overall contributions amounted to $22,500, or roughly 5 percent of the annual budget. As in earlier years, he continued to earmark his donations, focusing on Bible study, student outreach, and—an increasingly important department for Junior—the Industrial Department.Footnote 40
The Industrial Department was one of the largest YMCA departments and with his financial influence, Rockefeller used it successfully to provide necessary tools for his workers, while making certain that they developed a work ethic and sense of manhood that reflected Junior's values and corporate needs. Not only was it the distinct purpose of the Industrial Department to mold foreigners into citizens, with Junior's influence, it also established programs to attempt to “promote right relationships between management and labor.”Footnote 41 By 1913 it enrolled over 23,000 immigrants in classes to study English and American citizenship. Teachers and volunteers from the Industrial Department would identify ports of entry, such as Ellis Island, and important railroad destinations where immigrants traveled, and meet them when they disembarked. Industrial Department secretary W. S. Richardson stated:
the importance of this work can hardly be over-estimated when we realize the necessity of training the multitude of immigrants, which are constantly coming to this country. What the Christian Church may not do for obvious reasons, the YMCA can readily do, both in leading to an understanding of the English language and of our political and civic life.Footnote 42
The members of the Industrial Department wanted to let the newly arrived immigrants know of the assimilation and instruction options available to them immediately, before too many potentially negative influences could take hold.
The YMCA's language on manhood and character development also intrigued Rockefeller. Winter points out that the secretaries wrote the YMCA's language on manhood to reflect their middle-class ideas, to hold up the relationship between managers and laborers as ideal, to increase the loyalty of the worker to the company, and to decrease what Junior believed was “a natural impetus to social and labor unrest.”Footnote 43 In several editions of the YMCA publication Railroad Men and Industrial Magazine, workers could read articles entitled “Where A Man Spends His Money and His Leisure, Determines His Efficiency” and “An Industrial Worker's Efficiency Depends Upon His Living, Working, and Recreative Conditions.”Footnote 44 True men, according to the YMCA philosophy, not only showed their loyalty to their company by way of declining to participate in activities that could lead to social or labor unrest, but they conformed to a middle-class model by becoming efficient workers with clean and productive living and working conditions. This final message was as much for the employers as it was for the workers. The employers were responsible for creating environments that reinforced these ideas about manhood and cordial relationships between themselves and their workers. Through managers’ diligent attention, the YMCA professed, socialist agitators would have less of a chance to recruit naïve newcomers and to corrupt them.Footnote 45 This philosophy was very much in line with Junior's own desires for reconstructing the men in his mines. While he did not write it, his public support opened avenues to increase his workers exposure to the YMCA's version of manhood.
Increasing the YMCA's presence in Colorado mining communities was a popular idea with the CF&I executives, as well as with Lee and Junior. Lee advised Rockefeller to increase his donations with the caveat that the additional contributions go directly to building YMCA programs and facilities in Denver and Pueblo, near the site of the strike. After the Colorado Coal Wars, Junior's YMCA contributions did increase by a substantial amount: in 1916 Junior increased his contributions from $22,500 to $30,000, the following year to $32,5000, and in 1918 up to $40,000.Footnote 46 In a letter to Starr J. Murphy, Richardson emphasized that Junior's donation would be allocated to fund programs that underscored “the Americanization of foreigners, with an emphasis on religious work.”Footnote 47 Richardson understood Rockefeller's desire to use the YMCA programs to help reconstruct the character of the miners with the hopes that they would shed their previous “socialistic views” and adopt American ideals that would align more closely with Junior's and allow the mines to operate without threat of agitation. Moreover, Richardson notes Junior's specific request to allocate $6000 of his contributions to fund the Home and Works Department's efforts in the Pueblo area after Ludlow. This portion of his contribution also went to pay the secretarial salary of Mr. Minear, the Executive Secretary of the CF&I-YMCA. On December 20, 1916, C. J. Hicks, Rockefeller's executive assistant, wrote to Junior and laid out the details of the financial arrangement with “$1000 of this amount [used] to pay some of the expense of supervision of the CF&I-YMCA for 1915, and $5000 for the expense in 1916.”Footnote 48
Hicks further publicized Rockefeller's substantial contributions to the YMCA efforts in the strike-ridden areas of southern Colorado, as well as emphasized the role that the YMCA, and by extension Rockefeller, played in spreading industrial democracy through his workforce. In an article entitled, “The Relationship of the Young Men's Christian Association to Industrial Democracy,” Hicks related the improvements in Denver to the opening of the first YMCA, attributing the YMCA for “introducing democracy into an industry and single handedly sweeping vice and destitution from the streets of Denver.”Footnote 49 Not only did the YMCA boast of a nearly 12,000-man membership at its Denver branch, it averaged a 5,000-man membership at each of its mining camp facilities. To emphasize the connection between democracy and the presence of the YMCA, Hicks noted a decline in worker unrest and agitation “of the kind we knew in ’14” that he attributed to the “remarkably improved conditions in the mining camps through the positive influence of the YMCA.”Footnote 50 Though it was true that industrial violence and death had not occurred on the same level since 1914, Hicks provides no statistics or factual evidence to support his claim. According to Hicks, not only did the number of members increase, but also nearly 8 percent of the Pueblo branch attended Bible study and the new boys’ camp had nearly one thousand attendees in the first year.Footnote 51 Combining the YMCA and Rockefeller missions, the YMCAs in CF&I communities held discussion groups to talk about the Rockefeller Industrial Plan, thus exposing the miners to the ideology of the YMCA, as well as to the Rockefeller Plan. Blurring the lines between CF&I and the YMCA, Rockefeller used the YMCAs as part of his larger strategy to control the environment of CF&I and turn his workers into “a big family.”Footnote 52
Rockefeller's “big family” philosophy may have incorporated new YMCA programs that specifically targeted labor unrest, but it also rested on a foundation of nearly fifteen years of social betterment, hygiene, and Americanization programs that existed in and around CF&I company towns. In a 1902 edition of the in-house publication, Camp and Plant, the author touted the commitment the company had to “social betterment in the Rocky Mountains,” writing:
For years the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company has done much for the betterment of its employes. It has aided schools, supported churches, established kindergarten, and maintained hospitals. It is now spending thousands of dollars to improve the conditions of men and their families. It may be of interest to our readers to know that it is spending a quarter of a million of dollars on a hospital plant exclusively for its employes [sic].Footnote 53
The author emphasizes the size and breadth of commitment the company had to its employees. The use, however, of words, such as “exclusively” and phrases like “it may be of interest to our readers” demonstrated that the company wanted the employees and other readers to know that it funded the programs.
Additional articles approached the subject of “social betterment” in different ways. Instead of touting the good deeds of the company, they reminded readers to enter contests to judge the best lawn and gardens in the Minnequa mining camp as well as provide up-to-date statistics from the YMCA baseball league.Footnote 54 Other articles encouraged the miners’ wives “to take their children to the YMCA buildings for bathing facilities,” reminding them that not only is regular bathing the first step to reduce epidemics in the camps, but that the YMCA is vigilantly looking for the first signs of contagion.Footnote 55 Still other titles, such as “From Poor Cooking to Drunkenness” and “Hygienic Conditions of the Mines” give a sense of the full-court press the YMCA gave on the subject of hygiene and social betterment. These constant reminders—both large and small—exemplify the social hygiene and betterment messages miners and their families received on a consistent basis. Miners could not overlook the YMCA philosophies on cleanliness, hygiene, order, efficiency, beauty, and health—they pervaded every edition of the in-house magazine.
After the Ludlow strike, Rockefeller not only continued to support preexisting YMCA programs, but increased his support in two important ways. First, he increased his financial support allowing for a new Mining Department organized by the YMCA for the State of Colorado, one new YMCA branch, and six new camps to be built in the southern mining region of Colorado.Footnote 56 Second, the new branch at Minnequa was built “for the benefit of its employees at the Minnequa Steel Works in Pueblo” at a total expense of $225,000 jointly born by Rockefeller father and son.Footnote 57 It consisted of a state of the art “modern, well equipped Association building adjacent to the Steel Works … with one or two small buildings to be added later.”Footnote 58 Finally, Rockefeller helped fund the erection of six YMCA camps near the Morley, Sopris, Segundo, Primero, Rouse, and Lester mines. The Mining Department, CF&I-YMCA branches, and southern Colorado YMCA camps represented a new, more focused commitment by Rockefeller that perpetuated his standing commitment to social improvement and reform.
Rockefeller also turned to the work of fighting prostitution and vice by the Chicago-based Committees of Fourteen and Fifteen. Rockefeller took many of their philosophies and strategies and applied them to his mines in Colorado. He believed that reducing sexual temptation and vice would help curb his miners’ baser instincts: instincts he believed threatened the stability of his mines. In addition, he threw his support behind the local branches of the Anti-Saloon League and reform organizations throughout the state. Junior, through the Rockefeller Foundation, also spent time, energy, and money conducting studies and passing anti-vice laws in New York and Illinois that not only served as examples for his future reform work in Colorado. Moreover, these endeavors transformed social policy on a nationwide scale, culminating in the establishment of the Bureau of Social Hygiene in 1913 and the passage of the Chamberlain-Kahn Act in 1918, an act that gave local boards of health the authority to detain and examine any suspected carrier of venereal disease.Footnote 59 While Junior did not author or create these changes, his support—both financial and verbal—opened doors for local social reformers. Thus, Colorado organizations that had struggled to gain numbers and support outside Denver now saw Junior's national interests meant a new dawn in the Colorado progressive movement.
Rockefeller believed that combining long-standing studies with local organizations held the key to understanding the problem of vice and venereal disease, and thus would lead to redefining masculinity in his southern Colorado mines. Though he partnered with the Committee of Fifteen and financially supported studies throughout New York, Rockefeller also realized that if reformers were ever going to make headway in tackling these problems, they needed to conduct studies outside of the two largest American cities. Cities in the West held particular interest for Junior, not only because they remained understudied, but also because he believed that he needed to eliminate vice and prostitution in the region to reconstruct his southern Colorado miners properly. Therefore, in 1917 Rockefeller commissioned the BSH to conduct two multi-city investigations of prostitution and vice. For the first study, the Bureau sent Dr. H. B. Woolston to cities throughout the United States. Covering all regions and a range of cities, Woolston investigated how cities dealt with vice from Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and Denver in the West; to Tulsa, Dallas, and El Paso in the Southwest; to Norfolk, Savannah, Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans in the South; Philadelphia, Paterson, New Jersey, and Baltimore in the mid-Atlantic region; and even to the nation's capital.Footnote 60 Comprehensive in its focus, Rockefeller intended this study not only to pinpoint regional and local problems that each city addressed, but also to identify how local law enforcement communities dealt with vice outside of New York and Chicago. The second study focused specifically on how western cities dealt with prostitution and vice. Under the direction of Raymond Fosdick, the Bureau sent Joseph R. Mayer to visit cities in the West including Oakland, Portland, Vancouver, Seattle, Butte, Salt Lake City, and Denver.
By 1914, Corwin and the SD also provided Colorado's public schools with a uniform curriculum steeped in Protestant, middle-class ethics, so that children's education remained consistent when families moved among the mines. Established thirteen years before Ludlow, the SD, and Corwin by proxy, experienced a financial windfall in the post-Ludlow years when Rockefeller increased his funding and supported facility upgrades and expansions. In fact, Murphy wrote to Corwin shortly after his visit with Rockefeller to Colorado in the summer of 1915 and expressed how impressed he and Rockefeller were with the SD and Corwin's clinic.Footnote 61 Corwin also maintained a cordial correspondence with Junior: sending him notes of congratulations on speeches given and papers delivered that mentioned the work of the SD, as well as the CF&I-YMCA. Never wanting to appear on the frontier of the medical community, Corwin, however, was always quick to point out the ways in which his work relied on and connected to larger research projects and grants around the country, such as the distribution of influenza and pneumonia vaccines to the company employees and their families.Footnote 62 By 1918, however, Corwin was competing with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (RIMR) for Junior's attention and money. Established in 1901, the RIMR struck Junior as the perfect vehicle to bring his local and regional work on social vice and disease to the larger national and international communities under a uniform umbrella, thus further enhancing his public profile. Though Rockefeller never fully abandoned Corwin and his work, by 1920 he encouraged Corwin to apply to the RIMR for clinic funding and research monies.
Rockefeller also used municipal and state laws to transform and mold his miners’ behavior. In January 1916, Rockefeller voiced his support for a bill, adopted by Colorado voters, to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol in the state. Though by 1916 Junior was by no means alone in his commitment to prohibition, or his keenness to legislate behavior, his enthusiasm held specific relief from one of the factors he believed most detracted from his workers, alcohol. Rockefeller, a longtime supporter of the Anti-Saloon League and other dry organizations, believed that by controlling their bodies and their impulses, miners’ would be more susceptible to the messages of middle-class muscular Christianity that dominated the YMCAs. Eliminating alcohol from mining towns, however, also marked a significant shift in control. As fledgling camps on the mining frontier, these towns had competed for population. In order to entice miners, towns often advertised the best saloons, the cheapest alcohol, and the most beautiful prostitutes. Ridding the town of these vices demonstrated the power Rockefeller held over southern Colorado and in the state as a whole. Mining towns no longer catered to the needs of miners, they listened to Rockefeller. Using hard reform measures, Rockefeller also demonstrated his multifaceted commitment to transforming behavior and vice in southern Colorado.
With the absence of alcohol, Rockefeller wanted to fill the void in his miners’ lives with activities that emphasized his vision of middle-class masculinity. Once again, Rockefeller turned to the YMCA as an alternative location for his miners to gather. Reassuring his workers, he wrote that they did not need to think “the closing of the saloon will deprive you of a place of amusement, or drive you to leave your camp and seek some illegal ‘dive.’”Footnote 63 Instead Junior urged employees to make use of new or updated buildings and recreation rooms at the camps where they could find “soda fountains, with also a good assortment of bottled soft drinks and ice cream, tobaccos, candy, piano Grafonola, pool tables, small games, a very complete list of magazines and papers and writing facilities, minstrel shows, tournaments, educational clubs, Bible classes, and other varied activities being promoted by aggressive leaders of the respective interests.”Footnote 64 Through the YMCA, he was able to build recreation halls that, in his eyes, would provide a bevy of suitable activities that, he hoped, would show his workers the way to a more harmonious relationship with management. Most striking, though, is the heavy-handed approach and pressure surrounding leisure. For Rockefeller leisure was serious business and needed “aggressive leaders” to help his workforce recreate appropriately.
To say that the YMCA had “cured the worker of thoughts of agitation” represented a gross misunderstanding not only of the complexity of the issue, but also of the power of the YMCA. It also reflects a Rockefeller ethos of integrating social reconstruction programs from the top down. Albert W. Stone, a writer for the YMCA publication, Association Men, wrote an article in 1924 commemorating the decade of change since the Ludlow strike. He observed that the men no long talked about socialism, grievances, or strikes. Instead, they “talk of ‘dividends,’ ‘common stock,’ and such matters among the fifty-four nationalities of the company's family.”Footnote 65 In just under a decade, Junior believed that he had helped transform the mining communities into towns that reflected the values that he thought necessary to decrease unrest. Other factors, such as an increasingly stable population and the proliferation of social and reform organizations, persisted in transforming Colorado. These factors, matched with the vast resources Rockefeller provided the YMCA-CF&I and the implementation of the Rockefeller Industrial Plan, quickened the pace of change in Colorado.
In 1924, Dr. Peter Roberts of the YMCA's Industrial Department conducted an in-depth survey and compiled them into a statement entitled “Report upon the Service by the Young Men's Christian Association in the Mining Communities of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.” Roberts examined the towns and camps in the Trinidad Mining District, the chief mining district of CF&I and the heart of the unrest in 1914. For each mining town he broke down the mine employees by nationality and race, type of housing, working and living conditions, and social life. According to Roberts, much had changed in the way that the mine related to its workers, and though he was not physically there, Roberts detected a stronger influence from Rockefeller.
Each camp—Primero, Frederick, Sophis, Morley, Berwind, and Tobasco—produced similar statistics. Roberts found that nearly 70 percent of the miners originated from southeastern Europe and Mexico and 84 percent worked inside mines. Every camp had a company store, but allowed peddlers to sell goods in town to provide a sense of competition. Each camp had provided education through the eighth grade, had a bathhouse, several churches of various denominations, a YMCA, and a baseball team to develop “democratic camaraderie.” He also observed “the whole town revolve[d] around CF&I, but the social life revolve[d] around the baseball club.”Footnote 66 He concluded that the popularity of the baseball team and the presence of the YMCA and churches allowed for “little to no crime.” Roberts also notes “Sexually suspect and undesirable citizens are eliminated as soon as possible. They are a threat to the stability of the community. Anything that threatens the stability of the community threatens the efficiency of the work week and the company.”Footnote 67 Here we can see a clear shift in policy dealing with sexual activity. Though Roberts does not provide a definition or context for the vague phrases “sexually suspect” or “undesirable citizens,” the meanings can be partially implied by Rockefeller's strong support for the social hygiene and sexual education polices of the YMCA, both of which were fully integrated into the YMCA-CF&I by 1924. This statement also marks a departure from earlier regulation in mining communities that consistently ignored sexual behavior in order to attract people to their towns. Mine owners now understood sexual behavior outside of marriage as powerful and potentially destructive to their communities.
Though Rockefeller and the YMCA-CF&I held similar goals for inculcating the workers into the philosophy of the middle class, the workers had mixed feelings about the changes. Many did not participate in the programs; baseball teams formed, Bible groups discussed, English classes met; but behind the scenes, some miners did not feel that their needs were met by either CF&I's new Industrial Plan or the YMCA's socialization programs. According to the Roberts's report, the pressure to shop at the company store decreased after the Industrial Plan took effect in 1915. The miners, however, continued to voice their discontent with the monopoly the company store held, claiming that the only alternative was a monthly visit from a single, poorly stocked peddler. The same complaints arose concerning company housing. Though they were never as violent as those in 1914, strikes occurred regularly in the post-Ludlow years, showing that there remained unresolved issued between CF&I and its miners. Roberts also found miners resistant to the social activities. Instead of clamoring to join the company baseball teams, workers felt pressured to participate in the baseball program after work, and to give up their lunch hours to attend weekly or even biweekly Bible classes. The heavy-handed implementation of these socialization programs reflected Rockefeller's belief that strong measures needed to be taken to reconstruct the miner himself. Though they did not change the conditions in his Colorado mines completely to his image, they did reflect a more active presence of control from Rockefeller and his management team at CF&I.
This control led to a higher vigilance in controlling social behavior in all of the CF&I communities. In Pueblo, arrests for public intoxication, prostitution, and cross-dressing increased between 1916 and 1922. During the same seven-year period, the fines for public intoxication increased from $1.25 to $2.00 and fines for prostitution increased by $.75 and more frequently resulted in a night in jail. The arrest of two men, John Darby and Daniel McCourt, for the “crime against nature” requires a bit more explanation.Footnote 68 The reference to the Colorado state sodomy law was also notable for the lengthy debate recorded in the police docket. The notes are limited and there is no trial transcript because there was not a trial. The fact that the “crime against nature” was being used, however, created an argument. One officer wanted to “Invoke Colorado's law specific to this crime,” while another officer wanted to deal with Darby and McCourt locally. The solution was to have them pay a fine of twenty dollars each, spend a week in the local jail, and at the end of the week move outside the town's limits. In the end, Pueblo used the suggestion as punishment, but it is clear that sodomy was no longer a crime that could be ignored as it, too, could cause unrest. The Pueblo Chieftain wrote a brief opinion piece about the arrests, declaring Darby and McCourt a “disgrace to Pueblo and all that Mr. Rockefeller has done for us!”Footnote 69 While not every reader supported Rockefeller's changes, the desire to curb sexual nonconformity finally held sway.
The Pueblo editorial expresses so much about sexual attitudes and mores in post-Rockefeller Colorado. As Thomas Andrews argues, managers had replaced miners as the most important customer, with negative consequences for the miners.Footnote 70 Though miners remained the most frequent consumers of in-town dry goods and general supply stores, mine owners, such as Junior, won increased loyalty away from the miners because of his ability to fund large civic projects and the control his purse strings had on the daily lives of people living in towns even if they did not work for CF&I. Aiding in the building of churches, libraries, bandstands, YMCAs, and city halls not only allowed Junior to oust miners as the influential party in town business, but also drove a wedge between merchants and miners who did not support the Rockefeller Plan.Footnote 71
Rockefeller's miner reconstruction plan did change the physical appearance and daily habits of his mining communities. According to Roberts's report to the YMCA, by 1919 the Pueblo area had more churches with higher levels of attendance, more schools with a greater percentage of men completing the eighth grade, and more men participating in “industrial democracy” programs at the YMCA, than before the strike. The internalization of the YMCA and Rockefeller's message remain less clear, however, than new buildings and programs. As Colorado moved into the 1920s, the economic unrest of 1914 appeared to be dampened, but not entirely over. Miners still grieved and went on strike for higher wages, more control of their work environment, and the ability to unionize, but never to such a devastating pitch of 1914. Junior believed that his Industrial Representation Plan contributed to this decline in worker violence, but he also wrote of the “overwhelming achievement of remaking the miners in our image.” He continued, “they were only yearning to be taught how to be Americans.”Footnote 72 Though it is difficult to gauge how much the miners’ wanted to be taught to be Americans, it is clear that Junior's ideas on masculinity, social improvement, and the trust he placed in the YMCA helped to change the parameters of acceptable behavior in southern Colorado in the early twentieth century.
CONCLUSION
In later years, Rockefeller's influence on social issues and sexual behavior reached beyond CF&I and Colorado, affecting public policy in the United States and around the globe. While Rees argues that Rockefeller's Industrial Plan “held considerable influence in Canada, and it effects can still be seen in industrial relations practiced in the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Australia,”Footnote 73 Rockefeller also supported transforming the miners’ manhood in order to maintain industrial peace. Though Junior's commitment to social hygiene began prior to the Colorado Coal Wars, it was the incident in 1913–14 that solidified his commitment to social change and provided him a testing ground for this Progressive Era reform.
In the post-Ludlow years, one way that Junior maintained his interest in the Progressive Era project of perfecting humanity was through expanding his work with the BSH. Its mission was to combat the social diseases and crimes endemic of the early twentieth-century city, and took Rockefeller's ideals about masculinity, sexuality, behavior, and democracy to broader American and global audiences that contributed to what historian Daniel Rodgers identified as the transnational chatter of progressive reform.Footnote 74 For example, the BSH helped develop programs to combat sexually transmitted diseases during World War I—a policy that remained intact though not administered by the BSH during World War II—as well as addressed more general issues of sexuality, promiscuity, and prostitution.Footnote 75 Though its main battleground was New York City, the Bureau's policies toward sexuality and sexual behavior had long-lasting effects on social policy throughout the nation, most notably by increasing the reliance on the municipal and corporate state to regulate sexual behavior.
Through the creation and implementation of the Rockefeller Plan, Montgomery argues that we can see the relationship between the state and the workplace transforming. I suggest that the same principle applies to the contest between the state, non-state organizations, and the worker over applying Protestant, middle-class values in order to form a more perfect worker.Footnote 76 What may be one of the most interesting results of Rockefeller's attempts to change the character of his workforce remains the depths and lengths to which he involved himself, his family, and the Rockefeller philanthropic organizations in the ongoing conversations about masculinity, sexuality, class, and culture throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
