The Strike

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1:08Ivy Lee was 36 and lived in Philadelphia, where he worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He did PR for them. He'd started out as a reporter, but later realized he could use what he knew about journalism to the advantage of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He's really developed something of a reputation. He's hosted the first ever press conference for the Pennsylvania Railroad. And he's really kind of shaking things up in terms of how the media works and how corporations deal with the media. Journalist Amy Westervelt. Up to that point, there'd been a pretty adversarial relationship between the media and industrialists.

1:50Companies in general would just try to avoid talking to the media or would hide information. And Ivy Lee was like, no, you should be forthcoming. And that will actually help you to shape the story and tell people what you want them to hear. Ivy Lee had created what's been called the world's first press release. And it was so new that when he first started sending them out, papers would just run them, including the New York Times. Amy Westervelt says media outlets weren't used to having executives offered to them for interviews. So it took the media a minute to kind of realize that this wasn't being done in good faith.

2:34Ivy Lee was interested in the job with the Rockefellers. They were one of the richest and most powerful families in America. They wanted to bring him on as a consultant. They said they would let him keep his day job. The Rockefellers had a problem. People were protesting in front of their offices. They were saying John D. Rockefeller Jr. was responsible for the murder of two women and 11 children who'd been found dead in an underground room underneath some floorboards near a coal mine in Colorado. John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s father had always told him not to engage with the press or the public. But he was starting to doubt his father's way of doing things.

3:19He wanted people to hear his side of the story. He told Ivy Lee that he felt misunderstood. He had asked friends for advice. They either told him to say nothing or to take out ads in major newspapers and explain himself that way. But Ivy Lee said those were all terrible ideas. He had something completely different in mind. And that's sort of the genesis of corporate PR. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

4:02John D. Rockefeller Sr. was born in 1839 in Richford, New York. And he became America's first billionaire. He started one of the biggest companies in the world, Standard Oil. And it's interesting when you talk to sort of historians of oil, They always talk about Rockefeller as being sort of a particular type of oil man. He was very kind of East Coast Protestant approach to oil versus like later on you get what they call the Texas wildcat approach to oil. I mean, I kind of have this idea of, you know, even very successful oil guys being out there, right, in the fields, being like those Texas guys, You know, getting themselves covered with oil for a couple of years before they really strike it big.

4:52But this wasn't the case with Rockefeller. I mean, he was never covered in oil. He wasn't always rich. I think that's important to note. But yeah, he's like in a suit in every single picture there is of him. Growing up, John D. Rockefeller's father was often gone for long periods of time. He sold different types of treatments and potions to people with cancer. And sometimes he pretended to be deaf and blind so people would give him money. Rockefeller's mother was strict and very religious. After he dropped out of high school, he worked as an assistant bookkeeper. And then, along with his brother, he got involved in the new oil industry.

5:35His way in was doing deals with people who had land that had reserves on it and then buying up as much land as possible. And really kind of, like, he really thought through the idea of owning as much of the supply chain as he could. And that being sort of the ticket to making it big. He and his wife had four daughters and a son. They were also religious and strict about money. He really felt like his religiousness and his kind of rigidity was responsible for his success. He also was a little bit of a believer in the idea that God was rewarding him with these oil discoveries that he was having so much luck with.

6:22And then, in the early 1900s, a journalist named Ida Tarbell published a 19-part exposé detailing Rockefeller's monopoly on the industry. Ida Tarbell was one of the pioneers of long-form investigative journalism. She was born in a log cabin in Pennsylvania. Her father's oil business had started doing well until the Rockefellers started taking over local gas and oil companies. Ida Tarbell wrote that her father started to come home with a grim look on his face. His business partner died by suicide. In her expose, she described John D. Rockefeller Sr. as someone who was money mad, and she wrote about Standard Oil, They've never played fair.

7:11People all over the country read her reporting. Rockefeller Sr. became very unpopular and has been described as the most hated man in America. At 58, he mostly retired. His son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., had grown up in New York. He was shy and insecure, and since he was a teenager, he'd experienced so-called breakdowns. He was a good student. And after he graduated college, he joined his father's company. In 1904, the Rockefellers took over the biggest coal company in southern Colorado, called Colorado Fuel and Iron, which was supplying the expanding railroads. Thousands of coal miners worked for them.

7:57What was the coal mining industry like in the early 1900s? It was dirty and dangerous and coal miners were really down a mine for multiple hours a day. This is also pre any kind of limits on work days. So you're looking at 10 to 12 hours a day and there's no mechanized help at this point either. So they're using pickaxes and hauling stuff out in wagons. It's definitely rough work. They're not getting a lot of breaks. And, you know, the idea of being paid for working overtime is kind of not even a glint in anyone's eye at this point. Coal miners were usually paid by the ton for the coal they produced, not by the hour or day they'd worked.

8:54A lot of people died on the job, sometimes from explosions caused by natural gases inside the mines. sometimes from falling rocks. The roof of a mine could cave in, trapping everyone inside the mountain. When miners got off work, everything was shaped around the company. These coal mines are in the middle of nowhere. People need a place to live. And coal miners were often in the position of having to live in company towns and really having every aspect of their lives kind of controlled by the company. Coal miners had to pay rent to the coal companies for the shacks where they lived near the mines, some of them with their families.

9:38The coal company opened saloons and stores in the camps where they often charged high prices. Everything was being deducted from their pay back to the companies. And this was a great situation for coal companies. They had to provide a limited amount of sort of housing and food, and it greatly reduced their labor costs. But this was not great for coal workers. The Rockefellers hired a man named Lamont Bowers to oversee the mines in Colorado. Lamont Montgomery Bowers. Author, Scott Martell. And he was a hard driver of men, a racist, openly disdainful of the miners who were working for them. And he was in a large way responsible, if not for making conditions bad, for not doing anything to make conditions better.

10:32So he knew full well what life was like in those coal mines and in those coal camps. And that was perfectly fine with him. There was an observation made back around that time that the coal mine operators valued the mules more than the men, because if a man died on the job, they could hire somebody else. If a mule died, well, they had to buy a new mule. So they treated the men with pretty much open disdain. It was very, very cold-hearted. Coal companies hired mine guards to keep an eye on everything. They were far away from any kind of law enforcement, so managers had complete control of the camps.

11:08Coal miners in Colorado had walked off the job several times. Mines, where workers had managed to unionize, were generally safer. They tended to be in better physical shape because the union was there to sort of argue on behalf of the men that this place isn't safe. We're not going to go in there. You need to do X, Y, and Z before our workers will actually take part in mining that shaft. But it was very difficult for workers to unionize. They knew if their people were found out, they'd be summarily fired, in some cases beaten, maybe even killed. The coal company placed spies among the workers to report back on what workers discussed and hired people who spoke different languages.

11:52If they brought in a bunch of people from other cultures in other countries who didn't share common languages, it would make it harder for the union organizers to be effective. So by the time 1913 came around, there was, I don't know, more than a dozen different languages, I suppose, being spoken in the camps. But in 1913, most of the people in the mines in Colorado agreed that things had to change. They announced that they were going to go on strike. They'd put together a list of demands for the mine operators. All of them kind of quaint in retrospect. Not exorbitantly long work days to have the right to collective bargaining, the right to belong to a union.

12:29That was the main flashpoint. But the mine operators refused. So one morning in late September, in the middle of a big rainstorm, long lines of people walked out. There were more than 12 ,000 of them, coal miners, their wives and children, carrying their belongings or pushing wagons and carts. They knew that as long as the strike went on, they couldn't return to their homes in the mining towns, which were owned by the companies. They'd bought a whole bunch of tents and kind of camp equipment, including mess tents and that kind of thing, and set up some tent colonies. So as these folks were coming out of the canyons, after being evicted from their homes, they were settling into these tent colonies.

13:18The biggest of the tent colonies was at Ludlow, where there was a small train station, over a thousand people moved into tents there. One of them was a young woman named Mary Thomas. She'd grown up in a pro-union mining family in Wales, but her husband had left her and their two children and gone to America. Mary Thomas decided to track him down and give him a message. She found him in Colorado. I just wanted to meet him to tell him that I was quitting him. He never quit me, and I quit him right there. And I became very popular with the men, and that killed him. Because that flaming red hair of mine really brought him home.

14:07This is an oral history of Mary Thomas, recorded in 1974. Mary had nowhere to go and moved into a tent at Ludlow with her children. She refused to stay with her husband. She described how people tried to make themselves comfortable in the tents. They put down wooden floorboards, and Mary used old orange crates as shelves. Quote, I put my bright bedspreads on the cots with curtains to match, which I hung over the two small windows. Every morning, someone raised the American flag in the tent colony. They had a big tent for union meetings where Mary Thomas would sing. She had a beautiful singing voice by all accounts.

14:51So she would entertain the people in the camps and in the meetings with songs and leading sing-alongs and that kind of thing. Mary Thomas had made friends with some of the other women in the camp. Lots of them were quite happy there. Not quite, but they figured it was better for nothing. And it was. She would meet two of her friends for coffee in the morning, and they would sometimes sit outside in the sun. Mary recalled, what a bleak view. For miles and miles, there was uneven prairie, with small hills scattered all about. Things got more difficult as the months wore on. That winter, there was a blizzard that dropped like four or five feet and some of these mountain tents.

15:37It was difficult. I mean, there were a lot of coal stoves and wood stoves in the tents themselves, and they tried to keep warm, but it was not an easy thing. But life in that part of the country in that era wasn't easy to begin with. These are guys who are moving out of poorly constructed shanties in the company towns into tents with wooden floors on the high plains. At the end of the first week or 10 days or so, The strikers who were left were folks who were determined to have union representation. They got the sense that the folks who decided to stick it out had a deep sense of resolve, so they weren't going to go away easily.

16:14Both sides saw this as kind of a protracted battle. Nobody saw an easy victory. Rockefeller was by no means going to capitulate. John D. Rockefeller Jr. wrote to his mine operator in Colorado, Lamont Bowers, whatever the outcome, we will stand by you to the end. He later said, The records show that the conditions have been admirable. A strike has been imposed upon the company from the outside. They ignored the strike and began hiring new people to continue operations. My production took a hit in the immediate aftermath of the walkout, but slowly over the next two or three months, it began getting back to near-normal production.

17:00which was one of the big problems that the union organizers were facing, because if you couldn't shut down production, then you really didn't have much of a bargaining position with the mine operators. In December, Rockefeller Jr. wrote to Lamont Bowers, I feel hopeful the worst is over and that the situation will improve daily. But there was a lot of violence. Two men had turned up dead, and gunfights were breaking out between strikers and mine guards. Local gun shops were running out of guns, and people were bringing them in from elsewhere. A lot of weapons. A lot of them were brought in by the mine operators and the mine guards for their side.

17:37But the union was procuring weapons also. And there was a guy for the Red Cross who happened to be in the district doing a report. And he witnessed a whole bunch of strike supporters moving rifles from a hotel into the back of a car and driving that into the strike district. So there was a lot of illicit arms dealing going on to support these guys. And then mine operators began ordering machine guns.

18:06We'll be right back. Thank you.

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20:13One morning in January 1914, months into the strike, a woman in her 70s got off the train at Trinidad Station, near the Ludlow tent camp. Members of the state militia immediately detained her. They'd been waiting for her. Her name was Mary Harris Jones, but everybody called her Mother Jones. Mother Jones was a fantastic figure in that era. She was a radical union supporter, union organizer. So wherever there was a labor fight going on, somehow Mother Jones would magically appear in the midst of it and act as an agitator. She'd give speeches to rile up the Union forces. She was almost a semi-mythical figure.

20:58Mother Jones usually wore glasses, a hat, and a long black dress. She was known for her powerful speeches. Lots of people came to see her. Newspapers called her the most well-known woman in America and a folk hero. Before the Colorado strike had officially started, Mother Jones had toured the area, giving speeches and encouraging miners to strike. And she's just cursing up a blue streak and exhorting the men, there were primarily men in the mines, to fight for themselves, fight for their lives. And at one point it had some of the effect that if you guys won't fight for yourselves, send the women in and let them do it.

21:42Mother Jones often focused on the women and children who lived in coal towns. She wanted families to be involved in the strikes. She'd grown up in Ireland during the Great Famine, when about one million people, mostly poor farmers, died. After immigrating to America, she worked as a teacher and dressmaker. She lived in Memphis with her husband and four children when a yellow fever epidemic broke out in 1867, which killed her family. She wrote, One by one my four little children sickened and died. I sat alone through nights of grief. She also wrote, The rich and the well-to-do fled the city. Author Elliot J.

22:28Gorn writes that as a poor aging immigrant widow, Mary Jones invented the character of Mother Jones and that it freed her from expectations of how a woman should behave. Quote, she wore antique black dresses in public, and she began exaggerating her age. She was just very much an agitator and a provocateur, so much so that she wound up getting arrested pretty much wherever she showed up. In Colorado, Mother Jones was eventually locked up in a local hospital. Authorities said she was, quote, dangerous to the peace of the community. Their lives would be a lot easier if she wasn't in the strike zone, so they wanted to get her out of there.

23:09People were furious when they heard that Mother Jones had been arrested. A group of women organized a march which turned violent. Mary Thomas, who lived in the Ludlow tent camp, was arrested after arguing with an officer. She was in prison for 11 days. At night, she would stand by the window and sing the song Union Forever. The men in the jail would sing along with her. Union forever. Who are our boys? Who are we? Down with the boundaries. And up with the law. Oh, we're coming for the matter. We're coming all the way. But that required union. The violence continued. And the mine operators decided to bring out a weapon they'd made out of an old car.

24:07If you can sort of envision an early model of a Humvee with no windows or roof, that's kind of what it was. It was like a flatbed truck with no top and with a machine gun bolted to the back. Someone came up with a nickname for it, The Death Special. And they would drive along the roads, quite often not even firing. It just, you know, as a physical presence, that thing was a threat. To protect themselves and their families from gunfire, some of the strikers in Ludlow removed their tent's wooden floorboards and dug trenches so they had a safe place to hide inside the tent. In one tent, they dug a larger trench.

24:48Scott Martell describes it as an underground bunker, which was meant to be a safe place for the camp's pregnant women to give birth. The local sheriff wrote to the governor. Scott Martell writes that the sheriff expressed a, quote, growing sense of helplessness in maintaining the peace. Mine operators wanted the governor to send in the National Guard militia. And eventually, that's what he did. Once the National Guard arrived, things seemed to quiet down. And the Mont Bowers wrote in a letter to John D. Rockefeller Jr., the strike, we believe, is wearing itself out. The governor began withdrawing some of the National Guard units, thinking that things had calmed down, didn't need that many soldiers.

25:36The state budget really couldn't afford to keep paying these guys. So he began withdrawing units over the winter. But there was still a small group of soldiers in the area. Many of them were former mine guards. Scott Martell writes that the strikers were nervous. And the remaining militiamen worried that the strikers would attack them, now that they were a smaller group. April 19th was Easter Sunday for the Greek Orthodox Church, and while the Ludlow tent colony celebrated, many of the miners were Greek, militiamen showed up with their rifles to watch. Things were tense, and members of the militia had heard rumors that a man was being held against his will at the tent camp.

26:21So the day after Easter Sunday, they went looking for him. Soon, a group of militiamen started moving towards the Ludlow colony, carrying a machine gun. The striking coal miners saw them and came out of their tents with rifles. One of the camp leaders was just outside the tent colony and saw what was happening. He started running back towards the tents, waving a white handkerchief. This was in the early morning. The National Guard had moved in machine guns, doing a huge show of force. And like in most skirmishes, both sides say the other one fired first, but gunfire began ringing out. And then soon bullets were flying in both directions.

27:05Mary Thomas remembered the moment she realized something was wrong. And one moment we just got up, I'm feeding my children, I'm eating. And they'll promote me. And here I heard a bomb. And we all rushed out to see what was wrong. Someone came running up to them, telling them they had to leave the camp. They're going to, they claim they're going to clean this camp up today. And we were all stunned. We didn't know what to do, where to go. She gathered her own and a friend's children and started running. She wrote, The prairie was covered with human beings running in all directions, like ants. We all ran as we were, some with babies on their backs, in whatever clothes we were wearing.

28:02She saw a friend who was trying to run with her three small children, wearing only slippers on her feet. Mary took her baby, and they kept running until she dropped a shoe. When she stopped to pull it back on, a bullet clipped her wrist. They made it to safety and hid. Mary's friend, whose baby she had carried, tore a piece of her petticoat to wrap around Mary's bleeding wrist. The armed strikers began moving out of the camp to draw fire away from the tent colony itself. And they were moving up into the edges of a hillside and down into a ravine, which gave them a little bit of protection from the National Guard.

28:43In the tent camp, a seven-year-old girl named Helen Corritch watched as her father got out his gun to go join the fighting. Helen, who was still wearing her Easter dress, didn't want him to leave and clung to him outside their tent until her sister came out to get her. She pulled me by the hair until I let go of him, Helen later recalled. I knew my dad was going to get killed. Helen and her mother, brother and two sisters, ran out of their tent and towards a water well where a group of women and children were hiding. The family dog followed them. Bullets were flying everywhere. The dog was shot.