Criminal - The Strike

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

When people started saying that John D. Rockefeller Jr. was responsible for the deaths of two women and 11 children near a coal mine in Colorado, he decided to do something unusual. He hired “the father of public relations.” Scott Martelle's book is Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. Amy Westervelt's podcast is called Drilled. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, members-only merch, and more. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. In the spring of 1914, a man named Ivy Lee received a job offer to come work for the Rockefellers. They said they could really use his help. Ivy 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 Westerveld. Up to that point, there'd been a pretty adversarial relationship between the media and industrialists. Companies 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. Ivy 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. He 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. John 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. But 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. His 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. And then, in the early 1900s, a journalist named Ida Tarbell published a 19-part expose 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. People 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. What 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. A 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. The 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. So 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. Coal 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, 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. If they brought in a bunch of people from other cultures and 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. That 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 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.

The 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 comfortable with the men, and that killed him, because that

flaming red hair of mine really brought him home. This 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. So 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 happy, but they figured it was better than 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 on some of these mountain towns. It 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 were moving out of poorly constructed shanties in the company towns into tents with wooden floors on the high plains. By the end of the first week or 10 days or so, the strikers who are left were folks who were determined to have Union representation. They get 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.

Both 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, which 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. But 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. We'll be right back. I'm sorry. one series worth your attention, and they call these Series Essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters,

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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. Mother 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 said something to the effect that if you guys won't fight for yourselves, send the women and let them do it. Mother 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. 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. Gorn 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's 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. People 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 and women? Down with the buggers and up with the lords. Oh, we're coming for the rather. We're coming all the way.

Singing the pathetic cry of union. I'd rather let something all the way. So you let that require you again. The violence continued. And the mine operators decided to bring out a weapon they'd made out of an old car. If 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, it was 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. Scott 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 Martel 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 Lamont 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, they didn't need that many soldiers. The 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 Bartell 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 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. So 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. Mary Thomas remembered the moment she realized something was wrong. And one morning we just got up and hid my children and they opened up and here I heard a bomb.

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 them they had to leave the camp. 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. She 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 the 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. In the tent camp, a seven-year-old girl named Helen Corch 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 shocked. Helen said, I remember how quiet everything was, except for the shooting. Some people hid in the trenches that had been dug under the tent's floorboards. A group of women, one of them was pregnant, hid in the underground bunker with their children. It was large enough to fit a pregnant woman who was giving birth and the midwives, whoever was helping her with it.

And as the gunfire broke out, four mothers and 11 children slid underneath the wooden floor. All day, reinforcements kept arriving for both sides. But then, in the evening, some of the militiamen moved into the Ludlow tent colony, looting the tents and carrying torches. And eyewitnesses saw National Guardsmen with torches going from tent to tent to tent, setting these things up, lighting these things up. Scott Martell says there's no evidence that the National Guardsmen had been ordered to set fire to the colony.

But they seem, based on eyewitness accounts, just bent on destroying this thing. The day was over, the gunfight was pretty much done, and they moved in and torched it. The National Guard tried to blame it on an errant bullet or a coal stove that got knocked over by a bullet. And then the flames were fanned by the wind, but there was hardly any wind that day. We'll be right back. Thank you. New year, new me? How about same year, new me? You just need a different approach. According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and building sustainable eating habits. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach. Noom takes into account your unique biological factors, which also affect weight loss success. The program can also help you understand the science behind your eating choices and why you have those specific cravings,

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You raise your glass to another guest because you both know the holiday's just beginning. Passengers, please proceed to gate five. And you're only in Terminal 3. Welcome to Virgin Atlantic's unique upper-class clubhouse experience, where you'll feel like you've arrived before you've taken off. Virgin Atlantic. See the world differently. The tent with the bunker under the floorboards started burning. And the women are arguing among themselves, debating among themselves whether they should get up and, you know, out of the hole and make a run for it, or if they'd be safer there.

And they finally decided they'd be safer where they were. But they weren't anticipating what the burning tent above them would do. It began getting hot. The floor began smoldering. A couple of the kids reached up to the floor and got their fingers burned. So they're huddling in the bottom of this hole, not realizing that the fire was taking all the oxygen out of where they were hiding. And fairly soon, it began slipping into unconsciousness.

Early the next morning, one of the women, her name was Mary Petrucci, woke up in the bunker. She tried to wake up her three small children, but none of them moved. Mary Petrucci and one other woman were the only ones who'd survived the night in the underground bunker. Mary Thomas and her children got out of the camp and survived. Later, she went back to the tent colony. When I went back, all I saw was old sticks from the ground and iron beds, just look like ghosts. News of what had happened at Ludlow started spreading. For a couple of days, the militia didn't move the bodies of people who'd been killed by gunshots on the prairie.

People traveling past Ludlow by train would look out the windows and see the bodies on the ground. They were horrified. And then the union issued a call to arms. And armed men began making their way to southern Colorado. Their argument was that clearly they were getting no protection from local police. They were getting killed by the National Guard, you know, a state agency. So it was going to be up to them to protect themselves, their wives, and their children. And nobody has a clear estimate of how many folks came into the district, but it was scores, if not hundreds, of men who came in to help.

And over the next 10 days, it was just relentless gunfire and bloodshed. Then President Woodrow Wilson realized he had to get involved. He'd contacted John D. Rockefeller Jr. and urged him to settle things with the strikers. But John D. Rockefeller Jr. refused. So eventually, the president sent in the federal army and dismissed the state militia. The president said he was not sending in the army

to end or settle the strike, but to keep peace. And once the U.S. Army got in there, all the violence just kind of drifted away. From the miners' standpoint, their enemy was the National Guard, not the U.S. government or the U.S. Army. Several months later, the strike ended. So at least 75 people were killed over the course of this thing, and nobody was held criminally accountable for any of it.

People started calling it the Ludlow Massacre. The Rockefellers didn't really respond at all at first, but as the national outrage spread, even the New York Times called out the National Guard for what they had done. And the New York Times was notoriously anti-Union at the time. Public pressure began mounting, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. spoke at a congressional hearing and just came across horribly. I mean, didn't make a good defense of what they had done, seemed unconcerned about the violence, about the carnage. He was excoriated in the newspapers at that point.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. went looking for someone who could help him manage the bad press. So Ivy Lee gets on a train and he goes all the way from Pennsylvania to Colorado to see what's going on on the ground in Ludlow. And then he started writing a type of newsletter or a news bulletin that he would send to what he called leaders of public opinion all over the country, including newspaper editors. His mailing list had 19,000 names.

The newsletter would present the situation in Colorado in a way that might gain support for Rockefeller Jr. and the mine operators. Ivy Lee put together the newsletters in Pennsylvania, but he wanted it to look like they were coming straight out of Colorado. So he first sent them there, where they were postmarked and sent out. And in those little newsletters,

he claims that most of the people striking were not even really coal miners, that they were hired actors who are part of a national labor campaign, and that Mother Jones has orchestrated the whole thing. And then for some reason, he works in this idea that Mother Jones was actually running a brothel in town. At the time, she was quite old and, you know, had spent quite a long time being a labor organizer, never had run a brothel. So the idea that that would be somehow a way to discredit her was an interesting choice on his end. But he kind of throws everything he can at it. Amy Westervelt writes that Ivy Lee's biographers disagree on whether he was well-intentioned. You know, he's written a whole book about how important it is for companies to be honest and forthcoming

in their communications with both the media and the public, and that they should never hide things or spin things because it's inauthentic and it will never work. But then he also has this really famous quote, what are facts but my interpretation of the truth? In one of his newsletters, Ivy Lee detailed how much the Rockefellers personally profited from their coal company.

He wanted to show people that most of the money went back into the company, which he said was good for the state, too. I mean, this is like the first crisis control. Yes. So, you know, Ivy League starts to do PR in the late 1800s, and you have this confluence of factors in the U.S. at that time, right? You have the first regulations being passed on business. You have the vote expanding to people who don't necessarily share the interests of like

the Rockefellers. You have journalists who are doing big investigative pieces. All of that stuff is happening kind of around this time. And companies are a little bit caught off guard by it you know they've not really had to deal with any restrictions on their activities or any criticism from the public or anything like that and ivy lee kind of goes aha i can help them solve this problem and communicate to the public in a way that helps to shape things in their direction. But the newspapers had printed photographs of dead bodies near the Ludlow tent camp, and people were shocked.

The Rockefellers look really bad. None of their justifications are working. Really, no one was buying anything that the Rockefellers were selling during this period, probably because of Mother Jones. She had done a really good job of getting a lot of information out about what was really going on at Ludlow, and she was a very trustworthy source at this point. So he sort of realizes, oh, the bigger problem here is that people don't trust the Rockefellers. The reason I didn't win this information war is that people trust Mother Jones and the workers more than they trust the Rockefellers. So how do I get the public to trust the Rockefellers? And so he kind of pivots and says, let's have Mother Jones and some of the leaders of this miners' strike come and meet with the Rockefellers.

Ivy Lee convinced John D. Rockefeller Jr. to go on field trips to meet with miners in their homes, where he could talk with them and their families and ask them questions. And Ivy Lee made sure that a team of reporters were present. They really bend over backwards to make amends with the labor unions, and he gets Rockefeller going on quite a few different philanthropic efforts. And that's where things kind of start to turn in favor of the Rockefellers after Ludlow. Ivy Lee sent a leaflet to mine workers, letting them know that the company now had an employee representation plan, and he put up posters at the mines.

One of them read, We want every man who works for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company to feel that the company is his friend. Ivy Lee's name wasn't mentioned in the newsletters he wrote, but people started talking about this PR consultant who was working with the Rockefellers. Some people thought he was very smart. Others thought he twisted the truth to please his employers.

The writer Upton Sinclair nicknamed him Poison Ivy. Other critics have called him the master of staged public opinion. He kept working with the Rockefellers. They end up hiring him to work on both Standard Oil and as sort of their personal PR guy for the rest of his life. And part of what he does for them is this whole philanthropic endeavor where he really starts to position the Rockefeller name as being synonymous with philanthropy. Before Love, though, Rockefeller Jr. had already been focused on philanthropy. He supported organizations like the YMCA.

Ivy Lee wanted to make sure people knew about this, to boost Rockefeller's image as a Christian man. Rockefeller Jr. earmarked his donations to Bible study and something called the Industrial Department, which aimed to, quote, promote right relationships between management and labor. After Ludlow, he particularly focused on the YMCA Colorado, which opened new programs specifically for minors.

Some say that Ludlow made John D. Rockefeller Jr. more committed to philanthropy. He really turns the Rockefellers from being sort of the evil rich guys to kind of benevolent benefactors in about a decade. Four years after the Ludlow Massacre in 1918, there was a ceremony in Ludlow to memorialize the dead. The First World War hadn't ended yet, and people weren't talking much about Ludlow anymore. The coal miners and union organizers had collected enough money among themselves to build a monument in Ludlow. Mary Petrucci, who had survived in the underground bunker but lost her three children, unveiled it,

a granite monument of a miner and a miner's wife who holds a small child in her arms. The ceremony had already started when a car came up the dirt road and a messenger got out. He went straight to some of the event organizers and quietly explained why he was there. He handed them a card. It said, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Rockefeller got out of the car with his wife and one of his advisors. Scott Martell writes that he stayed in the background, listening to the speeches. People were remembering the dead in different languages, and Rockefeller was barely noticed.

He hadn't been invited to the event. When the ceremony was almost over, he got in his car and left. The strikers' main demand, union representation, was not met. And Scott Martell writes that little changed for mine workers. The Ludlow Massacre has been called one of the bleakest and blackest episodes of American labor history. Some reporters have said that Ludlow changed the nation's attitude toward labor and capital. It became a cause that helped put a lot of energy into the union organizing movement, and it became a huge rallying cry for the union movement. Woody Guthrie did a song, Ludlow.

So it sort of entered its way into the consciousness of the nation. It was early springtime and the strike was on. It drove us miners out of doors, out from Out from the houses that the company owned We moved into tents up at Old Ludlow I was worried bad about my children Soldiers guarding the railroad bridge Every once in a while a bullet would fly Pick up gravel under my feet with a slow afraid

you'd kill our children Doug is the king of the world Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Gabrielle Burbey. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. This episode was mixed by Emma Munger and Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com and sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

Scott Martell's book is Blood Passion, The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. Amy Westervelt's podcast is Drilled. Season three of the show is called The Mad Men of Big Oil, and it includes several episodes on Ivy Lee. We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to Criminal episodes without any ads, and you'll get bonus episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, too.

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