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history lesson: The history behind current events.

The Rockefellers and the Angry CommonersA century ago, the super-rich had to contend with class warfare.

By Beverly Gage
Posted Friday, Oct. 19, 2007, at 12:45 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

The following year, however, his father's chickens came home to roost. In the spring of 1914, armed guards at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. fired on striking workers and then set fire to their tents, killing 11 children and two women cowering in a pit below. The Rockefeller family, the press soon revealed, owned a controlling interest in the company's stock, and Rockefeller Jr. sat on the board. The outcry was instantaneous. "Mr. Rockefeller is the monster of capitalism," Helen Keller (a socialist as well as a hero to the disabled) told reporters, according to Ron Chernow's Titan. "He gives charity and in the same breath he permits the helpless workmen, their wives and children to be shot down."

In the months that followed, protesters held regular vigils in front of Rockefeller's Standard Oil offices, his 54th Street mansion, and his country estate in Tarrytown, N.Y., demanding that he condemn the murders and respect their right to free speech. When he failed to heed their pleas, a few prepared to deliver a less subtle message. On July 4, 1914, three New York anarchists accidentally blew themselves up in a Lexington Avenue tenement while allegedly preparing a bomb to assassinate the "tyrant of Ludlow."

Rockefeller Jr.'s first instinct was to lash out against his critics. "There was no Ludlow massacre," he wrote in a private memo, according to Chernow. "While this loss of life is profoundly to be regretted, it is unjust in the extreme to lay it at the door of the defenders of law and property."

Rockefeller Jr. changed his stance, however, after consulting with Ivy Lee, a public relations strategist (these were pioneering times for the P.R. industry, too). Called the following year to testify about the affair before the Commission on Industrial Relations, he adopted a conciliatory tone, promising that he was moderating his social views. He also tentatively offered CFI workers the right to join a company-controlled union, a scheme known as the Rockefeller Plan. Even his father, who abhorred any concession to labor, took pains to ameliorate his image by the 1920s. Possibly on Lee's advice, he began to hand out dimes to poor children.

Both father and son performed other, more substantive good works as well, of course, establishing not only the Rockefeller Foundation, but also the Rockefeller Institute, Riverside Church, and the University of Chicago, among other institutions. Many of today's CEOs-turned-philanthropists look to such accomplishments as models of philanthropic behavior. As they do so, however, it's important to understand that this earlier generation turned to philanthropy at least in part as a matter of self-defense. Indeed, measured against the political pressures facing the tycoons of the early 20th century, the charitable activities of the Slate 60 seem decidedly selfless: They are giving away their fortunes even though nobody is threatening their lives.

On the other hand, as this recent New York Times magazine and other articles show, the new rich are also spending their money on $40 million Manhattan apartments and $120,000 birthday parties for their kids. The Times package, like much of the reporting on the rich of the new Gilded Age, smacks vaguely of voyeurism. ("Econ porn," you might call it.) More importantly, the attention being lavished on the ways of the contemporary rich misses a larger point about our current politics of inequality.

The real question of today's Gilded Age, highlighted by the comparison to its predecessor, is not why the rich became rich, or whether they behave well with their billions. It's why the rest of us seem to feel we can do so little about it.

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Beverly Gage teaches American history at Yale University. Her book on the 1920 bombing of Wall Street, The Day Wall Street Exploded, will be published in 2008.
Photograph of John D. Rockefeller Jr. by Underwood & Underwood, ca. 1915/Library of Congress.
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Remarks from the Fray:

One reason the exploited don't believe there is any alternative to the class system is that the ruling classes have successfully equated socialism and communism with Stalinism in the public imagination. Any attempt to imagine alternatives to class society is immediately met with horrified references to Stalin's crimes----which is ironic given that many of the people Stalin killed off in the Gulag were Trotskyists and others who actually BELIEVED in socialism rather than just using it as a slogan to justify autocracy and corruption.

Be that as it may, Stalin is still the bourgeoisie's best friend a half century after his death. Not only was he always ready to betray the class struggle and team up with the bourgeoisie for his own advantage, as in the Hitler-Stalin pact or the later alliance with Roosevelt and Churchill, but he continues to function as the greatest enemy of the socialist cause even in death. If mankind is ever to find its way out of the historical dead end of capitalism, it will first have to recognize that Stalinism was not equivalent to, but rather was a deviation from, the natural path of socialist development.

--Herbert Meyers

(To reply, click here.)

Face it, we aren't living in tents in the snow outside the dangerous factory. It isn't the degree of income disparity as much as the floor that is experienced by the working men that matters. White collar workers, blue collar workers, they are getting by - unlike back then. The gaslight era made the cost of lighting and heating a home several times more than it is today, at the cost of much more pollution in residential neighborhoods.

The ultra-rich back then were perceived quite differently, and actually, the fact that they made their money more slowly (it seems) made workers less hopeful of aspirations to wealth, short stories aside.

Times have changed at least in the US. What happens in China, on the other hand...

--BenK

(To reply, click here.)

Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, there was a social phenomenon that fueled the money making machines of those 15000 families that you describe and it was the hordes of poor European immigrants that came to the USA by the millions. Hungry and cold, they would work for nickels and dimes during ten or more hours a day. Little brothers and sisters joined the family effort just the same. Everybody's labor was bought as cheap as those 15000 families could have it, and they made sure to keep it like that for as long as they could. Of course, as soon as the workers could get their noses out of the mud of extreme poverty they began making more demands for benefits in exchange for their sweat and years of working in terrible conditions. Shamefully, child labor laws had to be written, passed, and institutionalized to protect little kids from the unhealthy environment of industry. Worker unions had to be formed so that the workers had a way to protect themselves from the leonine way of their employers.

Nowadays, the same phenomenon continues, except that now the immigrants come from the south, but they are still hungry and cold. Unlike the Europeans, they have brown skin and eyes, but they also work for nickels and dimes and that makes them very desirable to have. The problem with many of these immigrants is that they actually work a lot and are able to move up the economic ladder within their own generation. Just like those immigrants of European origin.

--abraxas

(To reply, click here.)

I don't see how anyone who apparently has read Ron Chernow's excellent biography can present such a distorted picture of Rockefeller. The idea that he gave away huge amounts of his own money in order to fend off some sort of popular uprising is laughable. Rockefeller had no fear of the common man, Congress, or anyone else. His philanthropies came out of his lifelong membership in the Baptist Church, and his belief that it was the right thing for a Christian to do. An old-fashioned point of view, perhaps, but after all, this was over 100 years ago. He even retired at an early age from the oil business so he could devote more time to his charities.

And the article mentions his founding of the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Foundation, etc., almost parenthetically, as if these were mere trifles. You might also have mentioned that he was the principal benefactor of Spelman College and other historically black colleges. Meanwhile Sanford Weill gave away $37 million last year -- a pittance by comparison.

There are plenty of things you can accuse Rockefeller of (his ferociously monopolistic business practices, for example), but having hypocritical motives for his philanthropy isn't one of them.

--slobone

(To reply, click here.)

(10/21)

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