Killing for coal: America's deadliest labor war 9780674736689, 9780674031012, 9780674046917

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KILLING FOR COAL |

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Killing for Coal AMERICA’S DEADLIEST LABOR WAR

| Thomas G. Andrews

| - HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS | Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

| 2008

Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America : ,

_ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Andrews, Thomas G., 1972- | Killing for coal: America’s deadliest labor war /Thomas G. Andrews.

I. Title. oe Includes bibliographical references and index. | ISBN 978-0-674-03101-2 (alk. paper)

1. Coal Strike, Colo., 1913-1914. 2. Strike and lockouts—Coal mining—Colorado—History. HD5325.M631913 C736 2008

331.892’ 82233409788—dc22 2008020757

To my parents, for loving me through thick and thin

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Contents

List of Tlustrations ix | Introduction: Civil War, Red and Bloody 1 1. A Dream of Coal-Fired Benevolence 20

2. The Reek of the New Industrialism 50 3. Riding the Wave to Survive an Earth Transformed 87

4. Dying with Their Boots On | 122 5. Out of the Depths and on to the March 157

| 6. The Quest for Containment 197

Epilogue : 287

7. Shouting the Battle Cry of Union 233

Notes 295 Acknowledgments 371

Abbreviations 293 -

Index 7 377

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Illustrations

.I.2.Figures : The White City 5 I.1. Miulitiamen in Action , 4

1.3. Ludlow in Ruins | 7 | I.4. Guardsmen Firing from the Ruined Colony 8 I.5. Strikers in the San Rafael Camp following the Attack on Forbes 13

1.1. William Jackson Palmer, ca. 1870 | 22

2.1. William Henry Jackson’s Denver, early 1890s 58-59

2.2. City of Coal: Denver from the North Side 65

2.3. Chinese Denverites at Home, November 1914 67 2.4. “Gas Is Nice”: Middle-Class City Dwellers at Home 69

2.5. “The Best-Lighted Building in the World,” 1910s 72 2.6. Boiler Room, Sugar Beet Factory, Fort Collins, Colorado, ca. 1900 82

3.1. Italian Family, Las Animas County gO 4.1. Charles Graham, The Disaster at Crested Butte, Colorado 124 4.2. Entering the Mine Workscape, 1910 126 |

4.3. Mine Mules, Rouse | 132 | 5.1. Partners at the Face, Western Colorado, 1915 165

. 5.2. Coxeyites in Camp, March 1894 177

6.1. ‘Redstone ) 203 } 6.2. Company Housing as Progress 210

5.3. Little Italy, Sopris: A Vernacular Landscape 189

: Illustrations } 6.3. New Rouse: A Political Landscape 213

, 6.4. Colorado Supply Company Store, Primero, 1916 218

7.1. Strikers in Ludlow : 249 7.2. Lending a Hand at the Ludlow Commissary , 253 : 7-3. Striking Mining Families in Front of the Zanetell Tent, Forbes Colony 256 7.4. Speakers at Ludlow | 269 7.5. Colorado National Guardsmen Mustering for Inspection 278 7.6. Funeral Procession for Louis Tikas, April 27, 1914 279 Mabhs

I.1. The Southern Coalfields 3 1.1. The American West | | 36

5.1. The Marching Strike of 1894 , 180

7.1. The Great Coalfield War 274 :

x||

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Introduction Civil War, Red and Bloody

The shooting started around nine o’clock on a bright, breezy morning in a broad valley where the broken foothills of the southern Rockies tumble down

, onto the high plains. No one has ever determined who shot first, but partici, pants and witnesses all agreed that within seconds of the initial gun blast,

bullets began to fly thick and fast. Occupying the high ground was a small — detachment of Colorado National Guardsmen. Thirty-four strong, this force and the dozen other militiamen encamped in the flats below consisted mostly of men formerly employed as guards by the largest coal mine operator in the West, the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.’ Seven months of shootouts and assassinations, executions and ambushes, had already earned the Colorado coalfield war the dubious distinction of be-

ing the deadliest strike in the history of the United States. On the morning of . April 20, 1914, however, the conflict between Colorado state militia allied

, with the West’s largest coal producers and mineworkers organized under the auspices of the nation’s largest union erupted into open warfare, in what - would become known as the Ludlow Massacre.’

Returning the guardsmen’s fire were hundreds of striking coal miners of more than a dozen nationalities, all of whom resided in the Ludlow tent col-

ony, “the largest of its kind in the history of this country,” according to a

KILLING FOR COAL

| United Mine Workers (UMW) official, John Lawson. Union leaders had named the 1,200-person camp after the railroad depot about a mile away. The strikers, however, nicknamed it the White City, an apt description of the settlement’s gleaming canvas facades, as well as an ironic reference to the dreamlike buildings that had housed the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.’

~ The sounds of exploding powder and shrieking bullets echoed between

| pifion-covered canyon walls, rousing the many strikers who had decided to sleep in, following Orthodox Easter festivities that had run late into the night. Women grabbed the children and hid with them in cellars dug into the

, | hard adobe soil below the colony. The men of the camp, meanwhile, took their weapons, hurried to defensive positions via a nearby arroyo and re-

turned fire in hopes of drawing the assault away from the colony.‘ , In the early afternoon a bullet hit Private Martin in the neck, inflicting a fatal wound that “smashed” his face “as if hit.” Rifle fire also killed several strikers over the course of the day, including Frank Snyder. Just twelve years old, Frank had left the safe haven of his family’s cellar either in search of food .

or to relieve his bladder—on this as on so many things eyewitness accounts difter—only to have a bullet tear off his head; “practically nothing above his eyes” remained. At some point in the late afternoon or early evening—here recollections again diverged—Ludlow’s canvas dwellings caught fire under suspicious circumstances; soon the whole camp was ablaze. Two women

and eleven children perished in their cellar hideout—asphyxiated when flames devoured the tents over their heads. Militiamen had also arrested and

killed three men, including Louis Tikas, leader of the Greek strikers, who died of multiple gunshot wounds to the back.° The family names of the eighteen strikers killed over the course of the day—Snyder and Tikas, Costa and Valdez and Pedregone—hinted at the diverse paths they had followed to the coalfields, as well as their unusual success at forging a common cause despite differences in race, ethnicity, and nationality. Back in September, the Denver journalist Don McGregor— a swashbuckling figure who would later join Pancho Villa’s forces in the Mexican Revolution—had described the creation of Ludlow’s sister tent col| ony at Walsenburg as “the outward sign of civil war, red and bloody, with its hates and its assassinations, its woes and its suffering.” On April 21, 1914,

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