Making an American Workforce

The Rockefellers and the Legacy of Ludlow

Fawn-Amber Montoya

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781607329008, 9781607323099
• eBook ISBN: 9781607323105
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the policies of the early years of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, Making an American Workforce explores John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s welfare capitalist programs and their effects on the company's diverse workforce.

Focusing on the workers themselves—men, women, and children representative of a variety of immigrant and ethnic groups—contributors trace the emergence of the Employee Representation Plan, the work of the company's Sociology Department, and CF&I's interactions with the YMCA in the early twentieth century. They examine CF&I's early commitment to Americanize its immigrant employees and shape worker behavior, the development of policies that constructed the workforce it envisioned while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the strike that eventually led to the Ludlow Massacre, and the impact of the massacre on the employees, the company, and beyond.

Making an American Workforce provides greater insight into the repercussions of the Industrial Representation Plan and the Ludlow Massacre, revealing the long-term consequences of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company policies on the American worker, the state of Colorado, and the creation of corporate culture. Making an American Workforce will be of interest to Western, labor, and business historians.

Three

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Governor Elias Ammons and the 1913–1914 Southern Colorado Coal Strike

ANTHONY R. DESTEFANIS

On November 7, 1913, Roady Kenehan, the state auditor of Colorado, left Denver on a train bound for Seattle where the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was holding its annual convention. Kenehan went to the convention as a labor supporter, but getting out of town served another purpose. Kenehan was trying to stymie efforts to raise the funds needed to pay the expenses of the Colorado National Guard. Ten days earlier, Governor Elias Ammons had called the Guard to police a strike by approximately nine thousand coal miners in southern Colorado. The state, however, did not have the money to pay the expenses of a National Guard call out. To solve this problem, Governor Ammons and southern Colorado’s coal mine operators, led by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), reached an agreement with several Denver-based banks to make a loan to the state. Roady Kenehan was the monkey wrench in this plan. As state auditor, Kenehan had to authorize dispersal of the loan money and otherwise administer the Guard’s expenses. Kenehan skipped town because he thought this financing plan was illegal, but also because, as a union supporter, he strongly suspected that the Guard would try to break the coal miners’ strike. Indeed, the National Guards were established during the late nineteenth century for the explicit purpose of having an effective strikebreaking force on hand, and they collectively played a crucial role in breaking hundreds of strikes between the end of the Civil War and World War II. In Colorado, the state militia was formed in 1879 and over the next fifty years, the Colorado National Guard was called out on duty twenty-three times. Seventeen of those call-outs brought the Guard into a strike situation, where it almost always acted to break the strike. Kenehan’s stunt left Governor Ammons and the mine operators with no choice but to wait for him to return and then haul him into court, where they hoped a judge would force the rebellious state auditor to do his job.¹

Roady Kenehan’s efforts to stop the coal mine operators from using their alliance with Denver’s bankers to fund National Guard strike duty highlights the influence that the mining industry enjoyed over Colorado state government by 1913. As we will see, Kenehan’s efforts to check this influence failed because he did not, as state auditor, have sufficient authority to stop the mine operators from carrying out their plan to finance the National Guard. Governor Ammons, however, had the sole authority in the state to call out the Guard, and only he could approve the mine operators’ financing plan. The Guard, furthermore, acted effectively to break the strike. Thus Ammons is the single most important figure for understanding both why the Colorado National Guard ended up on strike duty and why the 1913–14 southern Colorado coal strike ended in defeat for the miners.

Ammons’s actions are also important for understanding why this strike became one of the most violent labor conflicts in US history.² At least seventy-five people were killed during this strike and by helping the mine operators break the strike, Guardsmen made themselves the sworn enemies of the striking miners. The Guard’s alliance with the mine operators poisoned the relationship between the striking miners and the Guard and led to the Ludlow Massacre, in which fourteen women and children and six striking miners and union officials were killed during a day-long battle between the Colorado National Guard and residents of a tent colony near the Ludlow, Colorado, railroad depot.³

Governor Ammons clearly had a tremendous impact on charting the course of this strike. Previous scholarship on the 1913–14 coal strike has portrayed Ammons as hapless and weak, and thus an easy mark for the coal mine operators, who were unrelenting in their determination to break the strike. In essence, these scholars have said that Ammons, who like Roady Kenehan was a Democrat and a supporter of organized labor in Colorado, had the authority to resist the operators that Kenehan lacked, but that the governor lacked the strength of mind and strength of spine that Kenehan displayed in his efforts to stop the National Guard call out.⁴

This critique of Ammons is certainly valid. The governor was indecisive, and he did succumb to the unrelenting pressure from the mine operators to call out the National Guard. This chapter, however, seeks to complicate our understanding of Ammons by exploring two related issues. First, I will explain why Governor Ammons called out the National Guard and then helped perform the financial gymnastics necessary to pay for the Guard’s strike duty. This section will indeed show that Ammons was no match for the mine operators, but it will also show the extent to which the mine operators and their allies acted as a class to protect their interests. Placed in this context, it’s not at all surprising that the operators were able to compel Ammons to do their bidding.

Second, I will explain why the governor likely abandoned the striking miners and threw his support behind the National Guard once the troops were in the field. Previous scholars of this strike have not addressed this question, but it is an important one because Ammons’s support gave the Guard’s officers the latitude they needed to help the mine operators break the strike. This question is all the more important because it is surprising that Ammons, a Democrat who was elected in 1912 with labor’s support, became an avid defender of the National Guard.⁵ One might argue that Ammons’s support for the Guard stemmed from the same weaknesses that made him an easy target for the mine operators as they pressured him to call out the National Guard. The record, however, suggests that Ammons decided to back the Guard not because of pressure from the mine operators, but because he thought it was what was best for his political future and because he was not comfortable backing the striking miners, many of whom were recent immigrants, in a showdown with a National Guard that was entirely white, mostly native born, and commanded by an officer corps that was middle and upper class. The governor’s discomfort with the immigrant working-class miners, furthermore, also demonstrates that labor was not a helpless victim of his decision to call out the National Guard. Ironically, the labor movement likely played a role in forming the governor’s perception of the immigrant miners who suffered from his decision to call out the National Guard and throw his support behind his soldiers once they were on strike duty.

That the Colorado National Guard would be able to break the 1913–14 southern Colorado coal strike was by no means a given. Lack of state funding was a chronic problem that only intensified when the Guard was on active duty. In his history of the Colorado National Guard, longtime Guard officer John Nankivell wrote that during the 1913–14 coal strike, the Guard had to cover “an uninviting country larger than the state of Rhode Island . . . All of this vast territory had to be occupied by the military forces . . . to protect the numerous small mining properties and their inhabitants, to maintain the lines of communication, and to checkmate the movements of the roving bands of belligerent strikers.”⁶ Nankivell served in the National Guard during the 1913–14 coal strike and his biases are obvious, but he was right that the Guard faced a significant challenge in Las Animas and Huerfano Counties, where the strike was centered. Meeting that challenge would require a significant cash outlay to pay, feed, clothe, house, arm, and otherwise equip the Guard. The state of Colorado, however, was in no position to provide this funding in the fall of 1913. According to Governor Ammons, only twenty million of Colorado’s sixty-six million acres were on the tax rolls, and just one-eleventh of this territory generated almost all of Colorado’s tax revenue. This low level of taxation was, in part, a result of the many sweetheart deals that state officials had cut with industrialists like southern Colorado’s coal mine operators. These deals meant that mine operators paid little or no taxes on the land they owned or leased from the state. During the strike, Governor Ammons observed that as a young state...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One. Learning from Ludlow
• Two. Dr. Richard Corwin and Colorado’s Changing Racial Divide
• Three. Governor Elias Ammons and the 1913–1914 Southern Colorado Coal Strike
• Four. In Order to Form a More Perfect Worker
• Five. Field Days, YMCA, and Baseball
• Six. A Tale of Two Employee Representation Plans in the Steel Industry
• Seven. Putting the “I” in CF&I
• Eight. The Legacy of Ludlow
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index