October 8, 2016 is the 100th anniversary of the strike at Standard Oil’s Bayonne refineries. In the course of the ten-day strike, 4 people were killed and 86 wounded. The free press demonstrated collusion between the corporation and the city authorities in what John Reed described as a police riot. Yet, not a word of this is mentioned in the Rockefeller biographies.
Since the publication of his Reminiscences in 1909 and the incorporation of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, that great “gift to the nation,” the common opinion of John D. Rockefeller had begun its metamorphosis from the devil incarnate to grace-endowed benefactor, philanthropist, and all-round great American. Though the vast number of ordinary people succumbed to the propaganda, most anti-capitalists were not fooled. In London, G. K Chesterton reviewed the memoir:
In the late Autumn of 1913 the Herculean effort to deodorize his reputation was embarrassed by a strike by coal miners at a Rockefeller investment in Colorado which led to the Ludlow Massacre. After months of denying family responsibility, John D. Junior reacted with an industrial relations policy at Rockefeller controlled companies that was highly praised as “enlightened” by every business journal in the land and the family reputation rebounded. Yet, a far more significant step was the hiring of Ivy Lee as public relations manager for the Rockefeller interests.
Catholics cheat and bargain and hoard money; they do it stubbornly, sullenly, as they do any other wicked thing. Mr. Rockefeller does it vastly, magnificently, poetically, because in his religion it has often been counted an admirable thing. Avarice is a sin of Christians; it is an ideal of individualists. Millionaire worship is as much a mark of a Protestant country as Ancestor worship of China.Rockefeller’s undying conviction that God had blessed him with success and wealth conflicted with his ungodly treatment of his workers who endured scanty wages, dangerous conditions, miserable housing and persistent debt to the company store.
In the late Autumn of 1913 the Herculean effort to deodorize his reputation was embarrassed by a strike by coal miners at a Rockefeller investment in Colorado which led to the Ludlow Massacre. After months of denying family responsibility, John D. Junior reacted with an industrial relations policy at Rockefeller controlled companies that was highly praised as “enlightened” by every business journal in the land and the family reputation rebounded. Yet, a far more significant step was the hiring of Ivy Lee as public relations manager for the Rockefeller interests.
