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October 1913, he wrote to the Colorado Fuel and Iron bosses that “we feel
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. Whatever the outcome, we will stand by you to the end.” After
the massacre, Rockefeller stood his ground and was not apologetic. “There
was no Ludlow massacre,” he said. He shifted blame away from Baldwin Felts
and blamed the miners; the conflict was a “desperate fight for life by two small
squads of militia against the entire tent colony,” he argued. “There were no
women or children shot by the authorities of the State or representatives of
operators,” he added. Rockefeller found the loss of life “profoundly to be
regretted” but thought it was “unjust in the extreme” to blame it on the
detective agency and militia, who were “defenders of law and property” and
“in no slightest way responsible for it.” Woody Guthrie also wrote the song
“Ludlow Massacre” to commemorate the event. In the final stanza, he sung
“We took some cement and walled that cave up/Where you killed those
thirteen children inside/I said ‘God bless the Mine Workers’ Union/And then
I hung my head and cried.”
Americans were used to violence against workers by 1914—indeed the first
decades of the 20th Century were often called the “age of industrial vio-
lence”—but Ludlow was striking, with its images of fire, children dying, and
the great tycoon Rockefeller being forced to testify about the episode.
Industrial violence was certainly a solution to the “problem” of labor, but now
the ruling class recognized its limits as well; class war was not good for busi-
ness. This idea was not necessarily new. When Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
[often just called “TR”] became president after McKinley was assassinated in
1901, he spoke for many of his colleagues in the corporate and financial world
when he said he wanted to eliminate “class consciousness.” But to TR, this
meant the consciousness of workers as an oppressed and impoverished group,
not the understanding among the ruling class that it should run the economy
and, hence, the country. So TR, for instance, sent arbitrators—federal “refer-
ees” who were supposed to be impartial—instead of troops to address a major
coal strike in 1902. Workers got some changes in their wages and work hours
but the coal operators were not required to accept unions or bargain with
them, and the arbitrators upheld the right of mine owners to have “open
shops,” meaning that workers could not be made to join a union or pay dues,
an arrangement that made it even more unlikely that workers could organize.