Representation and Rebellion: The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914-1942

Preface

xi Saints have their crosses, the Rockefellers have Colorado Fuel & Iron. —“Rockefeller’s Cross,” Time Magazine, August 14, 19331 The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) came into existence as a result of the merger of the Colorado Coal and Iron Company and the Colorado Fuel Company in 1892. By 1910 it employed approximately 15,000 people, about one-tenth of Colorado’s entire workforce. By the 1920s it was the largest industrial corporation in the state. Its mines produced 30 percent of Colorado’s coal, while its Minnequa Works in Pueblo produced about 2 percent of all U.S. steel. CF&I owned two lime quarries, a calcite mine (both substances necessary for making steel), and iron ore mines in New Mexico and Sunrise, Wyoming. CF&I also owned a railroad, the Colorado and Wyoming, which transported elements needed for production to the company’s far-flung facilities and its finished products to market. In short, the company was a prototypical vertically integrated corporation. CF&I’s preeminent historian, H. Lee Scamehorn, has written that the company “played a key role in shaping the history of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region.”2 Like many other American steel and mining concerns, Colorado Fuel and Iron struggled during the late twentieth century. Its last mines closed in the early 1980s. The remaining steelmaking operation suffered Preface P.1. Map of southern and western Colorado coal fields, ca. 1920. Courtesy, Bessemer Historical Society. xiv P r e f a c e greatly from the increase in imported steel that began during the 1960s and accelerated in subsequent decades. CF&I declared bankruptcy in 1993.3 Many of the firm’s records were simply abandoned in a circa 1900 office complex across Interstate 25 from the steelworks in Pueblo. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Archives contains approximately 21,000 linear feet of records related to CF&I. That is larger than most major archives devoted to collections that cover many topics (such as the Colorado Historical Society), let alone collections devoted to just one company. Yet what makes this collection particularly special is that CF&I was not just any company. It is probably best known to historians because the Rockefeller family (of Standard Oil fame) was CF&I’s largest shareholder between 1903 and 1945. Reflecting that position, John D. Rockefeller Jr. (the oil baron’s first child and only son) served on the firm’s board of directors. Because Rockefeller represented his family’s interest in the firm, he played a major role in determining how the company conducted its business. When many CF&I employees and their family members died in the infamous 1914 Ludlow Massacre, the association with the Rockefeller name kept the incident in the headlines for years. In response to the massacre , the company instituted an employee representation plan (ERP) among its workers that was quickly dubbed the “Rockefeller Plan,” since Rockefeller was the plan’s chief proponent. The plan’s author, William Lyon Mackenzie King, a former Canadian minister of labor, later became the longest-serving prime minister in that country’s history. Countless other firms would use the Rockefeller Plan as a starting point for similar arrangements over the next twenty-plus years. I first wrote about the Rockefeller Plan in my dissertation on labor relations in the American steel industry between 1892 and 1937.4 In that work I offered a cursory examination of the ERP at CF&I. When I began teaching at what is now Colorado State University–Pueblo, located in the town where CF&I had its main base of operations, I had no plans to revisit that subject in any form.5 Yet the CF&I Archives contained so much interesting and previously unseen material on the Rockefeller Plan that I decided to revisit the plan in depth. In 2000 I became a founding board member of the Bessemer Historical Society,6 which now owns and administers the CF&I Archives in the company’s Pueblo headquarters complex.7 I am no longer involved in managing the collection, but I have advised archivists working there and have been fortunate enough xv P r e f a c e to get updates when they found one set of remarkable documents after another.8 The accounts of the Rockefeller Plan cited in the work I did prior to moving to Pueblo were all from outside observers. Therefore, I wondered what the workers themselves thought about the plan. How did they really feel about an arrangement supposedly created...