Undoing the Sins of the Fathers

Abstract This chapter traces the ideological, emotional, and political underpinnings of how John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Josephine Roche developed their contrasting but structurally parallel visions of labor reform. Both began in New York City’s progressive circles. Rockefeller started the Rockefeller Foundation, an institutional response to his family’s accumulated wealth, which was designed to rationalize charitable giving through scientific expertise. By contrast, Roche’s ideology emerged from the settlement house movement, which emphasized neighborhood-based sociological surveys and the cultivation of cross-class empathy through shared experience and social observation. When labor unrest exploded in Colorado following the Ludlow Massacre, both reformers tried to repair the social contract using these rival systems of expertise. Rockefeller developed the Industrial Relations Plan (IRP), a company union for Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I). Roche immersed herself in Colorado’s progressive politics. Their failure to impose lasting industrial peace reveals the limits of technocratic reform that ignored worker’s voices.