WYTS: Colorado Broncos. Original post here.
Mining! It’s ugly. It’s hard. It’s extractive. It’s
dangerous. From the moment the Colorado Territory's was conquered from Mexico and the Natives, mining was what brought people here. There
was the gold rush in 1858, which is when Denver was founded, followed by a silver
boom in 1879. As the 1800s wore on, the easy minerals at the surface were
pulled out, forcing deeper and deeper extraction methods. That required a lot
of capital and organization, which meant that major corporations began to take
control of the industry. With mass corporate capitalism comes... logical,
efficiencies, and betterment for everybody, right?
Right?
Colorado’s main industry around the turn of the century was
coal, which was the engine of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to these lovely
little black rocks, you get trains, heat, electricity, vast Great White Fleets, and shiny
steel. But also with mass burning of carbon we get global warming going - which was not so bad in the freezing 1800s, but is a problem now. The more the easy coal disappeared, the worse
conditions got. A miner’s life was cheap, a mule was worth more than a human laborer. You could die in a thousand
horrible ways, and that was just a matter of course for the industry.
By the Progressive Era, we are 30 years into the labor
rights movement in the US and we have not had much... progression. One
of the most backwards industries was mining. Miners were paid in company
script, which had to be used in company stores, living in company towns, where
you read company literature, and your family was locked in by company barbed
wire fences. This is effectively serfdom, not all that different from the Black
experience with Sharecropping in this same era. Owners were completely crooked
and shameless with how they screwed you over with wage theft. Many of the
workers were from very poor regions of Southern and Eastern Europe, just one
train ride away from being literally just off the boat. The companies would travel to the
most destitute places they could find to for a diverse and thus disorganized
labor force. These hungry masses still got a better deal with Rockefeller
patronage than under bored incompetent Habsburg rule, but obviously we could
ask for more.
Our (top) villain today is John D. Rockefeller Jr, the son
of the robber baron who built the Standard Oil octopus kaiju from the political
cartoons. By the 1900s, John Sr had largely retired at a reasonable age of 63
to focus on philanthropy and his growing health problems. In 1911, the
Rockefellers had their family control over much of the world’s oil supply
broken apart, leading to today's beloved companies such as ExxonMobil and parts of BP. However,
that didn't make the Rockefellers poor, they could still put on the ritz, their wealth only increased. The
Rockefellers took a controlling interest in Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I)
in 1903. That was a conglomerate that controlled the Colorado steel industry,
and much more: it included the coal mines, iron mines, and even a railway. The
whole Colorado business seems to have been a birthday present from John I to
John II.
As a classic failson, John Jr had to prove himself an equal
to his stern hard-working no-nonsense no-thrills Mainline Protestant half-mummified
father. He could build great monuments to the family name in Manhattan, Rockefeller Center, while
his agents made America a place where hundreds of workers could die at once.
John Jr was the prince of the elites, far away from the ugliness happening
under him, such as kidnapped grandmas or whole families being burnt alive. I
don’t think I like this guy.
The first major strike took place in the gold mines in Cripple
Creek, Colorado in 1894. The overtly socialist union, Western Federation of
Mineworkers (WFM) were the main organizer in this battle. The WFM are distinct
from another major union in our story, the United Mine Workers of America
(UMWA). The UWMA had fewer ambitions about class warfare and revolution, so
were the more "moderate" option. The WFM focused on hard rock mining: zinc, iron, gold, that kind of stuff, while the UWMA focused on coal mining.
These are different trades and require different skills. Coal dust could
explode, it killed your lungs, but coal lives in softer rock and needs fewer sticks
of dynamite to pull out. Really both unions were active in every one of these
battles, miners from different sectors would strike in allegiance with their brethren. But in certain eras the UMWA would lead, or the WFM would lead, and then there's the IWW at the end, I can't get into that right now. They're another very socialist union, but the WFM were even more extreme. The UMWA was
also compromised by Pinkerton infiltration in the early 1900s, that might be
why they started quietly. Coal mining was a side-story at first but would be
the main front by the 1910s.
In 1894, the big labor man was the WFM's leader Big Bill
Haywood. The Pullman Strikes and Haymarket Affair had inspired his hatred of
the wealthy. Big Bill was a giant, cruel-looking, cyclops of a man who fought
for a unified worker class across crafts and ethnic lines. In 1894, Haywood had
the support of the Populist governor, Davis Waite, so the five-month strike
ended with a victory, the much-dreamed-of 8-hour workday. However, Governor
Waite lost his re-election. He was the best political leadership we'd see for
decades. The next round would not go so easily.
In 1903, the new governor, a Republican, James Peabody, was
not at all friendly to the union. When the mining companies suddenly demanded
their employees work 10 hours – with no pay increase – the battle was back on.
The strike would continue from May 1903 into summer 1904, not officially ending
until 1907. It happened in various mines across the state, in places like Idaho
Springs, Durango, Colorado City, and again in Cripple Creek. Eventually the
labor fight became quite literal, Governor Peabody found a tin pot dictator
through which to install military rule. That was General Sherman Bell, a former
Rough Rider, with an ego so huge he designed his own extravagant uniform
complete with lace, tassels, and cords, as if he was a High Seas Admiral. This guy
wanted to be Nelson at Trafalgar while he ran a single state’s militia. He
would not get a column built to his greatness in Denver, however.
"To hell with the constitution, we aren't going by the
constitution!", said a Guardsman officer. Hundreds of strikers would be
rounded up in mass arrests, and some spent weeks in pens without legal
recourse. While Bell paraded around in his dress uniform, the actual dirty work
and combat command went to John Chase, a former football player, who put up Gatling guns (drink!) in front of court houses in case any writs of habeas corpus were
actually issued.
Bell would later add, "Habeas corpus be damned, we'll
give 'em post mortems." The WFM made a poster asking “Is Colorado in
America?”, and the answer they got was “not right now”.
There were several terrorist bombings, the worst of which
killed 13 people at a train platform in Independence, CO. Sherman deported
hundreds over the state lines without a trial. Two strikers were killed, 17
strikebreakers died in return, all claimed by a pro-union terrorist named
Albert Horsley, alias Harry Orchard. Another 15 scabs died in a mining accident
again in Independence in June 1904. By the end, the bosses had won. It was a
complete defeat for the WFM, who would remain under government watch for
decades. They were just too Communist for the mainstream CIO or even the IWW.
Haywood would later flee the country during the Red Scare of 1919. He died a
guest of the USSR in 1929. Orchard meanwhile went on to assassinate the
governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg in 1905. That governor had flipped
positions on labor rights so received a traitor's justice. Orchard might have been nuts. I can't prove he made up his terrorist claims, but I suspect he might have exaggerated his body count.
Governor Peabody would lose the election in 1904, but would
also resign, in a weird political mix-up that saw Colorado have three governors
in a single day. That also cost Sherman his military commission. Lacking the
funds to make himself $1000 custom uniforms, he left Colorado. In 1909, the
fascist tactics of the National Guard finally made their way up to the US
Supreme Court. In Moyer vs Peabody, they decided that a governor can just
suspend the Constitution whenever they personally felt threatened enough.
Unanimous decision too.
So that’s the end of the story, right? Umm… no. Not even
close! This is a long one. Let’s go to 1913.
Over the next ten years of CF&I domination, safety
standards in Colorado only continued to deteriorate. In 1910, three separate
explosions in Colorado coal mines killed about 50-75 miners each. Most deaths
were less spectacular but no less horrible. Colorado's fatality rate was twice
or thrice that of other states. Even in these barbaric times, the safety
standards were blatantly illegal.
The main UMWA leader was Elias Anastasios Spantidakis,
Anglicized to 'Louis Tikas', a former Cretan revolutionary. He had joined a
revolt in 1905 against Crete's Ottoman overlords, hoping to unify with Greece.
Once that revolt had been crushed, Tikas traveled to the US, gaining his
citizenship in 1910. In late 1913, Tikas got to read about his old political
dream coming true in the papers. However, he was busy fighting another war in
his new home, now against John Jr Rockefeller. He'd compare CT&I frequently
to "the Turks". Through 1912 and 1913, Tikas and the UMWA had been
infiltrating Colorado mines, and gaining support for the union. On September
23rd, 1913, the strike began.
Since CF&I policy was to immediately fire any worker who
unionized, that meant 20,000 miners and their families were evicted from
company towns, sending these people off with nothing. They had to move en mass
to tent colonies set up between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. There they did their best to fight against hunger and typhus, while harassing scabs
and protesting. The miners did all they could to make the settlements livable,
many dug fox holes under their tents to expand the space and survive the
winter. Most had nothing to do, so they played a lot of baseball while
pro-company armies were watching with guns ready. The newest governor, Elias
Ammon, called the Guard in early, but the real battle was a long way off.
One of the first labor organizers on the scene was the
famous and beloved activist, Mother Jones, a little old lady and "the most
dangerous woman in America". She would get arrested by General John Chase,
now the big man (presumably not wearing that wild poncy uniform though), and he
kicked her out of Colorado. When Mother Jones came back, Chase put the
76-year-old woman under armed guard for two months. She described him as having
“ice water in his veins”.
The National Guard and Chase were not the problem. The
problem was the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. They are what happens if the
Pinkertons are even more psychopathic. Their main strikebreaking tactic
involved simply murdering people. They would drive around in a custom box-shaped armored car with a mounted machine gun, the “Death Special”, firing at the tents to spook people. Meanwhile,
on October 22nd, in Dawson, NM, just to the south, 263 miners died in an
accident at a Phelps Dodge mine (Cardinals fans may remember that company). That
made the strike seem like literally a case of life or death, and the miners dug
in further. All through the fall and early winter were small skirmishes and
murders. Things quieted down in 1914, but the stand-off continued until April
without major attacks. That is until the events at the main strike in Ludlow,
CO, on April 20th, 1914.
This event is called the Ludlow Massacre and is the worst
moment of Colorado's long bloody mining history. Louis Tikas was meeting with
National Guardsmen that morning to discuss a truce when shots began to ring
out. Tikas was grabbed by the enemy, smashed over the head with the butt of a rifle,
shot in back three times, and murdered. Meanwhile, the Ludlow camp became a
running fire fight, with miners and pro-company forces shooting back at each
other, only interrupted by a train running through the center of the
battlefield. That gave cover for many to escape. When the Guardsmen took the
camp, they burned everything. However, this also included 12 women and
children, hiding in a fox hole when the tent around it went up in flames. In
total, 19 people were killed. Maybe the attackers lost one.
After Ludlow, the strike ceased to be really a labor action
and became a guerilla war. For hundreds of miles there a long front of combat,
extending from Las Animas County to well north of Denver. Some historians call
it the largest uprising since the Civil War. This period is called the
"Ten-Day War", where the company took dozens of casualties.
Eventually about 1,500 federal soldiers made their way to Colorado, the
undermanned US military was a little busy fighting in Veracruz during the
Mexican Revolution at this same moment (so many tangents we have to avoid!). President Wilson kept trying to
organize a proper truce and a clear end to the strike. But what actually ended
things was simpler: the UMWA ran out of cash. The miners had to give up and go
back to work. The strike was largely over by November 1914, the last holdouts
were gone by January, and Colorado returned to "normal".
Including Ludlow, both sides took over 30 casualties. Again, the company came out worse in terms of total deaths, 37 to 32, both very rough estimates. Many of the company forces were court-martialed after the fact for various crimes. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the Ludlow Massacre.
Rockefeller Jr had won. 2-0 in his favor in the mining wars
so far. However, this time the imagery was so bad he had to make concessions.
In the CF&I, there was expanded labor rights, they actually started
following the safety laws, and they instituted a "company union",
which was surprisingly effective at fixing problems. John Jr hired Ivy Lee, an
early pioneer of pro-corporate spin to help him rehabilitate his image. That
included meeting Mother Jones in 1915, making more promises of philanthropy,
and also not hiring Detective Agencies to murder people. (Ivy Lee would work for
many interesting clients such as the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Nazi Party.)
However, coal battles just kept happening in the US.
In the early 1920s, UMWA tried again in West Virginia, with a lot of success. But after Baldwin-Felts agents murdered a mayor, it all led to the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest single labor battle in American history (but again, something we don't have time for). Colorado itself only had peace for 15 years.
The WFM was too spicy for the larger unions in the 20th century, and it ceased to exist by 1963. A distant remnant of it is part of the Canadian Auto Workers Union today. The UMWA is the largest coal mining union in the country, though coal mining has been in vast decline for decades. (And that's a good thing, read up on mountaintop removal mining sometime if you want to not sleep at night.) The union has a fantastic health insurance plan, and coal miners need it based on that line of work. The IWW barely survived the Cold War, but it is still working to this day in the radical frontlines of labor, and their small surviving numbers have been growing lately. They just started unionizing fast food workers a few years ago.
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