Rockefeller Testifies Before Walsh Commission: Three Days of Public Humiliation Over Ludlow Massacre

John D. Rockefeller Jr. endured three days of grueling public testimony before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, chaired by Progressive lawyer Frank Walsh, regarding the April 1914 Ludlow Massacre in which Colorado National Guard troops and private guards employed by Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company killed 21 people, including two women and 11 children. Throughout a hot day in stifling air made more intolerable by a large crowd stretching into the corridors, Rockefeller remained on the witness stand as Walsh publicly chastised him. Journalist Walter Lippmann observed “an atmosphere of no quarter” as Walsh subpoenaed and questioned Rockefeller. The Commission on Industrial Relations, created by Congress on August 23, 1912, was studying work conditions throughout industrial America when the southern Colorado coal strike erupted in late 1913. After the Ludlow massacre shocked the nation, the commission held public hearings in Colorado hearing horror stories about the brutality and rapacity of the Rockefeller-owned company.

Rockefeller denied knowledge of his company’s brutal actions against the Ludlow strikers, claiming ignorance despite managing the company from his offices at 26 Broadway in New York. He had recently appeared before Congress on the strikes and was widely blamed for orchestrating the massacre. During his Walsh Commission testimony, Rockefeller’s father, John D. Rockefeller Sr., testified that even after knowing guards in his pay had committed atrocities against strikers, he “would have taken no action” to prevent them. This stunning admission of indifference to workers’ lives exemplified the callous attitude of America’s industrial titans toward labor organizing. The commission’s investigation documented how Colorado Fuel & Iron mixed immigrants of different nationalities in mines to discourage communication and organization, severely underpaid and cheated workers of wages, charged them for essential safety equipment, and maintained working conditions where the 1912 death rate in Colorado’s mines was 7.06 per 1,000 employees compared to a national rate of 3.15.

The public humiliation led Rockefeller to push for “company unionism”—employer-sponsored unions as an alternative to independent labor organizing. While representing a concession forced by public outrage, company unions were designed to undercut genuine worker organization by creating the appearance of representation while maintaining corporate control. The Commission’s final report, published in eleven volumes in 1916, contained tens of thousands of pages of testimony from workers, reformers, and titans of capitalism including Daniel Guggenheim, George Perkins of U.S. Steel, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie. The commission’s findings influenced passage of the Adamson Eight-Hour Act and later New Deal labor legislation. However, the episode also established the template for how corporations would respond to labor violence scandals: temporary public embarrassment followed by “reforms” like company unions that preserved corporate power while defusing public anger. Rockefeller’s willingness to endure three days of testimony rather than face criminal prosecution demonstrated how America’s wealthiest families could buy immunity from accountability for mass violence against workers—a pattern of impunity for corporate killing that would persist throughout the 20th century.