In response to the tragedy of the Ludlow Massacre, John D. Rockefeller Jr. introduced one of the nation's first employee representation plans (ERPs) to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1915. With the advice of William Mackenzie King, who would go on to become prime minister of Canada, the plan - which came to be known as the Rockefeller Plan - was in use until 1942 and became the model for ERPs all over the world. In Representation and Rebellion Jonathan Rees uses a variety of primary sources - including records recently discovered at the company's former headquarters in Pueblo, Colorado - to tell the story of the Rockefeller Plan and those who lived under it, as well as to detail its various successes and failures. Taken as a whole, the history of the Rockefeller Plan is not the story of ceaseless oppression and stifled militancy that its critics might imagine, but it is also not the story of the creation of a paternalist panacea for labor unrest that Rockefeller hoped it would be. Addressing key issues of how this early twentieth-century experiment fared from 1915 to 1942, Rees argues that the Rockefeller Plan was a limited but temporarily effective alternative to independent unionism in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre. The book will appeal to business and labor historians, political scientists, and sociologists, as well as those studying labor and industrial relations.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the policies of the early years of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, Making an American Workforce explores John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s welfare capitalist programs and their effects on the company's diverse workforce. Focusing on the workers themselves—men, women, and children representative of a variety of immigrant and ethnic groups—contributors trace the emergence of the Employee Representation Plan, the work of the company's Sociology Department, and CF&I's interactions with the YMCA in the early twentieth century. They examine CF&I's early commitment to Americanize its immigrant employees and shape worker behavior, the development of policies that constructed the workforce it envisioned while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the strike that eventually led to the Ludlow Massacre, and the impact of the massacre on the employees, the company, and beyond. Making an American Workforce provides greater insight into the repercussions of the Industrial Representation Plan and the Ludlow Massacre, revealing the long-term consequences of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company policies on the American worker, the state of Colorado, and the creation of corporate culture. Making an American Workforce will be of interest to Western, labor, and business historians.