The Quest for “Just and Pure Law”: Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870–1924 9781503624764

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the quest for “just and pure law”

social science history Edited by Stephen Haber and David W. Brady Paul W. Drake, Between Tyranny and Anarchy: A History of Democracy in Latin America, 1800–2006 Armando Razo, Social Foundations of Limited Dictatorship: Networks and Private Protection During Mexico’s Early Industrialization Stephen Haber, Douglass C. North, and Barry R. Weingast, editors, Political Institutions and Financial Development David W. Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, Process, Party, and Policy Making: New Advances in the Study of the History of Congress Anne G. Hanley, Native Capital: Financial Institutions and Economic Development in São Paulo, Brazil, 1850–1920 Fernando Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert: Argentina During the Export Boom Years, 1870–1930 J. G. Manning and Ian Morris, The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models Daniel Lederman, The Political Economy of Protection William Summerhill, Order Against Progress Samuel Kernell, James Madison: The Theory and Practice of Republican Government Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, Slavery and the Economy of Sao Paulo, 1750–1850 Noel Maurer, The Power and the Money David W. Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress Jeffrey Bortz and Stephen Haber, The Mexican Economy, 1870–1930 Edward Beatty, Institutions and Investment Jeremy Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets

T he Q u est f o r “ J u st and P u re L aw ” Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870–1924 john p. enyeart

stanford university press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the Social Science History Institute. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Enyeart, John P. ( John Paul)   The quest for “ just and pure law” : Rocky Mountain workers and American social democracy, 1870–1924 / John P. Enyeart.    p. cm.  (Social science history)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8047-4986-2 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. Working class—Rocky Mountains Region—Political activity—History—19th century.  2. Working class— Rocky Mountains Region—Political activity—History— 20th century.  3. Labor movement—Rocky Mountains Region—History—19th century.  4. Labor movement— Rocky Mountains Region—History—20th century.  5. Socialism—Rocky Mountains Region—History— 19th century.  6. Socialism—Rocky Mountains Region—History—20th century.  I. Title.  II. Title: Rocky Mountain workers and American social democracy, 1870–1924.  III. Series.   HD8079.R63E59 2009   331.880978—dc22  2008032386 Typeset by Thompson Type in 10.5/13 Bembo

To k at h ry n r o s ta n and the memories of f r a n k r o s ta n, w i l l i a m e n y e a r t, and c at h e r i n e e n y e a r t, my grandparents. Although most of them would certainly disagree with me on the benefits of a social democratic America, I hope that they would see that it is from them that I gained a sense of history.

contents



Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1. “He Who Would Be Free, Himself Must Strike the Blow”: Joseph Buchanan, Rocky Mountain Knights, and Notions of Working-Class Justice

25

2. To “Strike at the Polls”: Local and State Politics, Regional Unity, and Working-Class Political Action

71

3. The “Militant, Progressive, Liberal Spirit of Western Unionism”: Mutualism, Socialism, and Regional Activism 117 4. “Sabotage, ‘Jackass Tactics’ Indeed!”: Progressive Unionists, Syndicalists, and the Advance of Social Democracy

169

5. “There Is a War Every Day for the Workers—There Always Has Been”: The Persistence of Progressive Unionism

217

Conclusion

247



253 313

Notes Index

vii

m a p, ta b l e s , a n d f i g u r e s

Map Centers of Rocky Mountain Labor Activism

xvi

Tables 1. Total Population and Percentage Change

14

2. Urban Population in the Rocky Mountain West

15

3. Capital Investment in Manufacturing in Arapahoe County, Colorado, 1870–1900

31

4. Cross-Regional Capital Investment in Manufacturing, 1890 and 1900

32

Figures 1. Political Cartoon of 1894 Colorado Governor’s Election

111

2. Political Cartoon Criticizing the Neglect of Injured World War I Veterans

243

ix

ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

This book is the result of the generosity, kindness, intelligence, and critical spirit of the many wonderful people I met as I moved from east to west and then back. I truly appreciate the friends and colleagues who challenged me, encouraged me, and saved me from some very stupid mistakes. The first such mistake I was rescued from came early in my college experience. I went to Ohio State University as an economics major. In the same quarter that I took labor economics from a professor championing Reaganomics, I registered for Warren Van Tine’s labor history class. Warren not only helped deliver me from a life of drawing charts and graphs, he taught me about the class struggle and sparked my passion to study history. Most importantly he convinced me that “regular people” could get a Ph.D. Working on my master’s degree as a Debs Fellow at Indiana State University, I was lucky enough to learn labor and political history under Richard Schneirov’s guidance. Rich’s understanding of the connections between capitalism, liberalism, socialism, and citizenship inspire me to this day. This is a much better book because of the careful reading he gave to an early draft, and the advice he had provided since then. From Terre Haute, I went to Boulder, Colorado, because I wanted to study “mainstream labor politics.” I had decided that I wanted to do something similar to Julie Greene’s work on the American Federation of Labor. Thus, this project started a long time ago, it seems, as a paper I wrote in Julie’s working-class history seminar. She taught me how to study the lives of working people by considering where they labored, what they did, how they spent their off hours, what their family life was like, and, of course, how they practiced politics. Julie remains a great mentor and a better friend. While at the University of Colorado I learned the craft of history from Fred Anderson, Virginia Anderson, Ann Carlos, Phil Deloria, Bob Ferry, David Gross, Martha Hanna, Padraic Kenney, Susan Kent, Patty Limerick, Ralph Mann, Mark Pittenger, and Tom Zeiler. Although we had both moved away from Boulder at the time, I want to thank Phil for xi

xii

Acknowledgments

taking a moment away from fixing his washing machine in the spring of 2007 to help me define political culture. I continue to value and miss the debates and discussions with my fellow graduate students, particularly Carol Byerly, Constance Clark, Nicki Gonzales, Tom Krainz, Todd Laugen, Duke Richey, Mark Power Robison, Gerry Ronning, and Allison Wickens. I want to especially express my gratitude to Todd, Tom, and Constance. Todd answered my many questions on politics in 1920’s Colorado, and he shared chapters of his dissertation with me before he finished. Tom read three chapters of this book, and I continue to learn from his knowledge of western history. As for Constance, I can only offer infinite gratitude. She has dealt with this project as a dissertation and has read multiple drafts of it in its manuscript form. She remains one of the first people I turn to when I have an idea. Last, I would be remiss if I failed to mention my admiration for Scott Miller. Aside from being a scratch golfer and excellent barroom conversationalist, his skills as a graduate secretary are unmatched. As this book developed, it has benefited greatly from those willing to read sections and chapters. I appreciate the insightful comments offered by Eric Arnesen, Thomas Andrews, Julian Bourg, Michael Drexler, Estelle Freidman, Lawrence Glickman, Elizabeth Jameson, Michael JohnsonCramer, Tom Krainz, Scott Meinke, Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Melissa Pashigian, Beth Rostan, John Sillito, Gavin Wright, and Scott Wilson. I want to offer an extra note of thanks to Thomas for sharing draft chapters of his excellent book on Ludlow with me. I am forever indebted to those who read the entire manuscript: Gordon Morris Bakken, Constance Clark, Diana Di Stefano, Jan Doolittle, Steve Haber, Robin Jacobson, Ralph Mann, Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Richard White. I especially want to thank Richard White and Shel. Richard spent more time than he should have answering questions about narrative arcs and how to define regional politics. Shel read multiple versions of this work. His understanding of labor politics is immense and I benefited greatly from his knowledge, compassion, and patience. My colleagues and friends in Palo Alto and Lewisburg offered valuable advice and encouragement at crucial moments. They include Barton Bern­stein, Julian Bourg, Pete Brooksbank, Al Camarillo, Mary DeCredico, David Del Testa, Diana Di Stefano, Elizabeth Durden, Shelley Fischer Fishkin, Zephyr Frank, Dick Gillam, Jay Goodale, Pete Groff, Robin Jacobson, Gavin Jones, Janet Jones, David Kennedy, Jan Knoedler, David

Acknowledgments

xiii

Laitin, Joe Manning, George Matthews, Scott Meinke, Monica Moore, Roger Noll, Leslie Patrick, Jack Rakove, Geoff Schneider, Ann Tlusty, Martha Verbrugge, and Richard Waller. Thanks especially to Ben Marsh for taking my pathetic hand-drawn sketch of the Rocky Mountain West and turning it into a clear intelligible map. Also, my students should know that their questions about this book helped me clarify some crucial points. I do appreciate the newspaper research on Chinese immigrants that Kevin Brown compiled and the key typo in one of my charts that Matthew Saylor caught. Finishing this book would have been impossible without the generosity of three institutions. First, the Charles Redd Center at Brigham Young University, after twice awarding me their Summer Awards for Upper Division and Graduate Students, provided me funding through the John Topham and Susan Redd Butler Faculty Fellowship. Second, during my two year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, the American Studies program provided me with ample travel and research funds. Third, I was lucky to be awarded Bucknell University’s Faculty Research Grant three times. Throughout the process of writing this book I have profited from the assistance of the excellent librarians and archivists at Bucknell University’s Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library, the Colorado Historical Society, the Colorado State Archive, Colorado Spring’s Penrose Public Library, the Denver Public library, the Montana State Library, the Pioneers Museum (Colorado Springs), the Terence Powderly Papers at Catholic University, the Silver Bow County Archives, Stanford’s Green Library, the University of Colorado at Boulder Archives, the University of Utah Archives, the Utah Historical Society, and the Utah State Archives. In particular, I want to acknowledge the efforts of Marty Covey, Ellen Crain, Jodie Foley, David Hays, Candice Hinckley, Walter Jones, Brian Shovers, and Judy Strand. Also, I want to thank Larry Mayo of the Butte Carpenters Union who allowed me access to the Carpenters’ Papers housed in the attic of the Carpenters’ Union Hall. At Stanford University Press Norris Pope has been a wonderful editor, always quick to answer my questions. Steve Haber has been a source of aid and generosity as a series editor. Along with Stanford’s copyeditors, I am also grateful to Tracy Brown for improving my writing style and grammar. Parts of this book were previously published and are reprinted here in revised or expanded form. Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared as “‘The

xiv

Acknowledgments

Exercise of the Intelligent Ballot’: Rocky Mountain Workers, Urban Politics, and Shorter Hours, 1886–1911” in Labor: Working-Class History of the Americas 1 (Fall 2004) and appears here with permission of the editor. Parts of Chapters 3 and 4 appeared as “Revolution or Evolution: The Socialist Party, Western Workers, and Law in the Progressive Era” in Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2 (October 2003) and are reprinted with permission of the editor. Last, parts of the Introduction and Chapter 1 can be found in the entries “The Knights of Labor” and “Terence Powderly,” Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History, ed. Eric Arnesen (Routledge Press, 2006), and they too are reprinted with the permission of Routledge/Taylor and Francis Press. To my family, now you can stop asking: when is that book going to be done? I want my mother, Mary Rostan, and my father, William Enyeart, my stepmother, Sheryl Enyeart, and my brother Jess and sister Jane to know I appreciate the warm wishes they offered me throughout this journey. Diana Di Stefano, my wife, has lived with this book as much as I have. I hope I have met her demands to make it readable to nonlabor historians as well as to those not as interested in the details of political processes as I am. It is a pleasure to be her colleague, and an honor to be her husband. I look forward to walking our dog, Emma, chatting about my next project, and listening to her tell me about her work.

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Centers of Rocky Mountain Labor Activism

Introduction

Silver miners in Utah’s Cache Valley, roughly eighty miles north of Salt Lake City, in 1871, became the first group of noncraftsmen in the territory to organize. The Salt Lake Tribune sent a correspondent to ask them why. One of the miners looked at the reporter and said that he and his fellow workers wanted “to be governed only by laws of their own making.”1 This man meant that these laborers, based on their shared disgust with workplace conditions, desired to reconstruct industrial and social relations. Over the next four decades, Rocky Mountain workers would write and speak of living by “their law” or “the law” in reference to workplace codes, union rules, contract stipulations, municipal ordinances, state statutes, federal laws, and constitutional amendments. For instance, a foreman at the Rocky Mountain News, in 1884, refused to pay a printer for the illustrations that he made. The foreman claimed the drawings belonged to the paper, but at their May 7 meeting members of the Denver Typographical Union (DTU) decided to “state the law” of their organization regarding artwork. Illustrations belonged to the worker who drew them according the union’s contract with the paper.2 Two years later a Butte laborer argued that “working men must learn to use the ballot in such a way” to secure “ just and pure law.”3 A Denver unionist, in 1899, provided a sense of what “just and pure law” meant. In a letter to a labor magazine he proclaimed that the city’s Holden smelter 



Introduction

exemplified employers’ “disregard for human life.” When he and his fellow workers ate their lunches they had to “inhale lead dust and smoke instead of air.” Such conditions, he argued, “can only exist in our republic” when “a law” that protects the health of workers “does not.” “In this respect,” he continued, “the people choose to make it comfortable for the robbers [employers] by granting them unlimited privileges.”4 These differences in the use of “law” did not indicate a lack of shared meaning, but instead suggested that Rocky Mountain workers wanted their sense of justice operating on multiple levels: in customs, written codes, and statutes. Their conceptions of fairness originated with their visceral reactions to industrial realities. Collective anger fed their enthusiasm to transform social relations. They were outraged, for example, at watching co-workers have their fingertips cut off as they tried to link railroad cars; at witnessing friends die while attempting to turn a brake on the top of a moving train; at going home after ten or twelve hours of toil to find little food; at lacking enough money to afford basic necessities; at growing tired of draconian work rules; and at believing that these routine experiences occurred because legislators granted business owners and corporate managers near absolute authority over workplaces and markets. The passionate rhetoric of the region’s railroad laborers and their supporters elucidates this point. Officials at the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics (CBLS), an organization created to provide data on the state’s industrial conditions, became increasingly troubled with what these workers faced, both nationally and in Colorado. They proclaimed: “Twenty thousand able-bodied men are annually sacrificed upon the railroad altar.” CBLS investigators therefore argued in 1890 for states to pass liability measures “to correct this inhuman and monstrous wrong.” These public employees found that switchmen and brakemen encountered the greatest risks for injury because they had to couple and uncouple cars, or climb to the top of moving trains to turn the brake, respectively. Air brakes existed, but owners kept their old cars running as long as possible. From June 1889 to June 1890, outdated equipment contributed to the deaths of forty-five brakemen in Colorado. During the full two years of the state investigation, 1889 and 1890, 9 percent of all brakemen and switchmen employed in Colorado (158 of 1,756) fell from trains. Some were drunk and some were simply tired from working long hours. The CBLS commissioners advised that workers adopt temperance as a habit and called upon the state legislature to pass an eight-hour-day law. For the most part, their recommendations focused on pressuring employers to

Introduction 

create safe workplaces by enacting liability laws. In “this age of progress,” the study concluded, such “deplorable” injuries and deaths had to cease. These “are young men” and instead of having “a nation of stalwart, hard, robust men, we are raising an army of cripples.”5 Likewise, William John Pinkerton, who worked for the Union Pacific Railroad and lived in Montana and Wyoming, among many other places, used his autobiography to call for safety legislation. Rather than reminisce about his triumphs as a labor leader or wax nostalgic over the courage he displayed during armed conflicts with company guards and state militiamen, he wrote of the realities of railroad work. “I am a switchman,” he declared, “and as such am now across the dead-line. I am an old man, in the eyes of the medical examiner and my employers, and must soon give way to new timber.” Employers, according to Pinkerton, fired railroad workers when they turned thirty-eight because actuary tables suggested that trips to the company hospital increased for laborers at that age. Pinkerton knew that his “personal record” stood against him because it “shows that I am thirty-seven.” He wanted the public to know that although the railroad companies had relief plans and ran hospitals, owners did not pay for these services. Workers did through monthly deductions from their wages. By dismissing anyone aged thirty-eight and older, owners rarely had to pay on claims and thus made money. As he put it, “the veteran railroad man, with the tip of a finger missing since he made a coupling in the dark one winter night, is thrown on the rubbishheap undone by his experience.” In “calling for immediate legislation,” an employer liability law, Pinkerton added his voice to all the others who advocated this life-saving reform.6 By acknowledging the constant bloodshed and pain that railroad laborers witnessed and felt by simply going to work each day, we realize that workers’ political awareness did not simply ebb and flow between strikes and other moments of conflict. For these laborers, justice required the ability to obtain the power to alleviate danger. Labor leaders and rankand-file political activists sought to turn the shared anger and revulsion over the events of everyday life into a series of unified actions that would provide all workers with the political power necessary to claim workplace rights, to influence labor-market variables, and to enjoy greater material comforts and more leisure time. The Quest for “Just and Pure Law” contends that through their search for greater rights, Rocky Mountain unionists forged a social-democratic culture and captured enough political authority to turn the principles of that



Introduction

culture into law. As a result, these workers played a central role in reshaping American economic and social relations. We can see the development of this culture by looking at the acts of solidarity and the struggles that took place in the region’s factories, mines, union halls, streets, neighborhoods, saloons, stores, courthouses, city halls, and state legislatures. These were the places where workers formulated their notions of justice and battled to make those conceptions a reality. By looking at voting patterns, legislative aims, and unionists’ ability to implement pro-labor laws, we can measure their success. Ultimately, it becomes apparent that politics were an aspect of workers’ everyday lives. In general, nations that embraced social democracy enacted measures that privileged society over markets. Lawmakers committed to socialdemocratic ends implemented statutes that resulted in a more equitable distribution of wealth, provided social insurance, and favored policies that reduced unemployment over arrangements that lowered inflation. Typically, social democracy is considered an ideology that emerged from the attempts by European labor and socialist parties to update Marx’s ideas in the context of the political and economic realities of the approaching twentieth century.7 In the late 1890s, German Social Democratic Party activist Eduard Bernstein went from being the leading voice of orthodox Marxism in the industrialized world to the founder of what some have called revisionism, but what he referred to as evolutionary socialism. By then, most European Marxists argued that capitalist societies would face mounting economic crises. Based on the poverty and oppression that they would incur during these market collapses, workers, Marxists posited, would eventually unify, revolt, and replace capitalism with socialism. Marx and his followers considered working-class revolutions inevitable because they saw them as necessities for the evolution of civilization. By 1898, Bernstein questioned these assumptions. Specifically, Bernstein challenged the belief that socialism was certain to follow capitalism. He argued that although unregulated markets thrust thousands of people into new levels of poverty and forced nations into economic catastrophes, those periods of tumult were alleviated by cartels, credit systems, and better modes of communication. Furthermore, the liberal state, which most orthodox Marxists considered a tool of the elite, proved willing to mitigate the worst social ills by offering welfare programs. Socialists, Bernstein contended, should not try to advance the cause of socialism by claiming it as some type of natural law, but by presenting it as the most moral and reasonable choice to make for those living

Introduction 

in a modern, urban, industrial society. This line of thinking led Bernstein to argue that a working-class revolution was not necessary. Instead of encouraging workers to act collectively based on their shared experiences of alienation from their labor and exploitation by their bosses, evolutionary socialists called for the extension of workers’ political rights. By gaining political power, laborers could bring about socialism through piecemeal reforms. Orthodox Marxists charged Bernstein with using the language of socialism to advocate liberal ends. He, and those who supported his position, countered that critique by arguing that perceptions and political structures mattered. Even if workers could successfully carry out a revolution, evolutionary socialists reasoned, they still had to create a functioning government that had the support of the conquered bourgeoisie. If, however, socialists united, won greater citizenship rights, exercised political power collectively, and extended liberal reforms into programs that resulted in wealth redistribution and public services, they could establish a precedent for state-administered markets and prove that socialism was a more advanced form of civilization than capitalism. Social democrats conceded that the lines between liberalism and socialism would blur at first, as the orthodox Marxists suggested, but that lack of clarity would mean the general public was becoming increasingly accepting of state involvement in the economy.8 As a result, socialist practices would become naturalized because a collective change in values would occur. Although the United States had its social democratic devotees, such as Milwaukee’s Victor Berger, the making of American social democracy was centered in the Rocky Mountain West, and it was less formal and less ideological than the European model.9 This was largely because Mountain West workers lived the class struggle differently than their fellow laborers east of the Mississippi River. From the 1870s through the 1890s, the Rocky Mountain unionists who came to champion social democracy shared an outlook—antimonopolism—and a set of political tactics with their eastern counterparts. By the late 1880s, differences in organizational practices combined with variations in regional political structures and power relations allowed Mountain West unionists to follow a divergent path from workers elsewhere. Examples of these differences manifested themselves in a number of ways. For instance, between 1870 and 1920, Rocky Mountain unionists earned the highest real wages in the country, obtained the first constitutionally recognized eight-hour-day measures for private employees, and rejected affiliation with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), instead creating their own regional labor federations: the



Introduction

Western Labor Union (WLU) and the American Labor Union (ALU).10 We must account for these important distinctions. A brief overview of Rocky Mountain unionists’ outlook, organizational practices, and political strategies, presented alongside national events, will clarify how this regional social democratic culture emerged. By the 1870s a loose alliance of middle-class and working-class groups and thinkers united in opposition to the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few elites. Often referred to as antimonopolists, these reformers attempted to reestablish the founders’ notion that producers deserved the full value of the crops and goods their labor created. Farmers and artisans served as the ideal Americans under this model. As the industrial economy expanded, factory owners, antimonopolists argued, expropriated much of the wealth those who toiled deserved. Workers wanted to live up to the republic’s principles, but employers prevented them from doing so, and, in the process, business owners subjected workers to all the cruelties that accompanied abject poverty. These opponents of corporate power looked to the state as the only force strong enough to challenge employers’ author­ ity and aid producers in acquiring a larger share of the wealth they helped to generate. Antimonopolist activism led public discourse to focus on the relationship between corporations, the state, and workers to the point that political economy became popular culture. From the 1860s through 1920 the fiction of Edward Bellamy, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair combined with Henry George’s wildly popular Progress and Poverty and the exposés of corrupt businesses and politicians written by Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens to shape public animosity toward “robber barons.”11 Working-class publications added to this literature of dissent and fed the growth of antimonopolism. Three strains of antimonopolism—bimetallism, the single tax, and cooperatives—proved especially popular. Alexander Campbell’s The True American System of Finance (1864) underpinned the arguments of most Gilded Age reformers who favored bimetallism. The book claimed that economic elites used the money supply to skew income distribution. Money, Campbell argued, gained its value from its utility. That meant that interest rates determined money’s worth. By constricting the money supply and inflating interest rates, bankers could profit from producers’ need for specie. These bankers would then lend the wealth they, according to Campbell, appropriated from workers wages to railroad, coal, and other corporation owners. Corporate officials would further deny workers their fair share of the wealth that they created by paying subsistence wages. As a result Greenbackers—as the first incarnation of these reform-

Introduction 

ers called themselves—demanded an expansion of the money supply based on gold and silver reserves and advocated lower interest rates.12 Other antimonopolists focused on land and supported Henry George’s call for a national single tax. In his 1879 Progress and Poverty George demanded that the federal government tax all unearned income, rents or other monies not garnered from work done in the form of farming or manufacturing on that specific site. His plan sought to force speculators to sell their investments to people who would actually produce crops or goods. Still others went beyond antimonopolism and promoted outright anti­ capitalism. Cooperativists, for instance, sought an alternative structure to capitalism that depended on personal relationships and communal ownership, not the logic of profit maximization and private property. Gilded Age cooperativists drew on a number of inspirations including Robert Owen’s model factory in Scotland and the religious communities that espoused this ethic in antebellum America. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) rekindled this movement. In Bellamy’s story, a fictional cooperative common­wealth developed when the government confiscated the trusts and redistributed wealth. A number of farmers and workers, influenced by Bellamy and European writers, engaged in efforts to recreate small-scale production and offered an alternative to the growth of corporate capitalism. They usually met with failure.13 If we accept the common historiographical stance that suggests that anti­monopolists failed to alter employer control over economic relations, then we are left seeing these critics of capitalism as the unsuccessful defenders of an earlier notion of value. Essentially, they lacked the social authority and political might to prevent the elite from defining the nation’s economic agenda and laws.14 This remembering-the-losers approach would make sense if we conceive of antimonopolism as an ideology, a welldefined set of beliefs that united a movement aimed at overthrowing the wage system.15 Such a view, however, ascribes a coherence to anti­monopo­ lists’ actions and thoughts that never existed. Examining the Knights of Labor (KOL) illustrates this point. Philadelphia tailors founded the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor in 1869 as a secret fraternal organization. By 1876, the unskilled laborers in Pittsburgh’s developing industries and a number of Pennsylvania’s coal miners joined the order and altered its character. Two years later, Terence Powderly, an Irish Catholic former railroad worker turned machinist, won the KOL’s top position, grand master workman. Powderly convinced the membership to abandon its commitment to secrecy and to express its growing militancy in a new “Declaration of Principles.” That document



Introduction

claimed that unchecked “aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations” would result in the “hopeless degradation of the toiling masses.” To ensure that workers received “the wealth they create,” Knights favored abolishing the wage system and replacing it with cooperatives. Recognizing that the complete restructuring of the nation’s economic order would take time, the delegates at this gathering also enumerated more immediate changes to limit the inequalities workers faced. Protecting public lands for “actual settlers” instead of granting acreage to railroad companies, promoting workplace safety, ending child labor, and making eight hours the standard workday comprised the Knights’ demands.16 As more and more workers joined the order, Powderly and other leaders urged new members to focus on their similarities, such as their opposition to wage labor, rather than their differences, namely, political beliefs that ranged from socialism to anarchism. Indeed, this commitment to unity can be found in the KOL’s motto, adopted in 1882, that “an injury to one is the concern of all.” KOL rank-and-file members accepted this blend of pragmatism and radicalism because they recognized that it allowed the ideological and strategic flexibility necessary to construct a national labor movement. Most members also realized that much of the KOL’s emerging strength resulted from the fact that power within the order flowed from the bottom up. A hierarchy did exist where local, district, state, and national trade assemblies sent delegates to national general assembly meetings to set the order’s policies. Those elected to represent their fellow Knights at these meetings consulted with the general executive board and the grand master workman on the decisions they had made and sought advice on the problems they currently faced. The members of the local and district assemblies, however, had a great deal of authority over when to strike and boycott; how, if at all, to engage in electoral politics; and how to organize. Some KOL district assemblies, for example, consisted of a single trade. Others were mixed, which meant that they accepted all who wanted to join regardless of their occupation. The Knights did bar lawyers, bankers, speculators, gamblers, and drunkards, as they understood them to be nonproductive workers and immoral human beings. Leaders and members proudly spoke of their acceptance of immigrants, African Americans, and women. At the same time, however, many organizers and KOL leaders, especially in the West, took equal satisfaction in their support of Chinese exclusion legislation and in banning Asian immigrants from their locals.17 Pronouncements and platforms certainly fostered a sense of unity, but victories on the industrial battlefield proved the real engines of expan-

Introduction 

sion. Workers throughout the nation adopted a more militant attitude as indicated by the increasing number of strikes. In 1881, for instance, roughly 101,000 workers participated in 474 strikes, compared to 407,000 workers engaging in 1,432 strikes in 1886. In fact, from 1881 to 1900, at least 22,739 strikes occurred. Officially the KOL opposed strikes except in extreme circumstances. Local union officials, however, followed the wishes of their constituents rather than national officers. Between July 1885 and June 1886, 6,200 new district assemblies formed. For a brief period then workers won strikes, membership rolls swelled, and militant actions determined the order’s course. These strikes centered on the immediate demands of higher wages, union recognition, and shorter hours, not the overthrow of the wage system.18 In fact, KOL members proved far from unified in their reasons for participating in reform actions. For example, the fight for the eight-hour day in 1886 saw New York cigar makers—affiliated with the KOL and belonging to the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) led by Samuel Gompers—combine with Chicago’s Anarchist International members, many of whom also held KOL cards, to plan a May 1 strike. On March 13, Powderly informed local and district assemblies that he opposed the protest. The grand master workman argued that the order did not have the necessary funds for strike relief that such a massive effort would require. By that point, Chicago workers had proven too excited to wait for May 1. They struck early. By May 1, about 200,000 workers, despite Powderly’s objections, were on strike across the nation. Chicago remained the center of this fight as 40,000 workers there participated in the protest. On May 3, police attacked picketers outside the McCormick reaper plant. In the struggle that ensued, at least two unionists were fatally shot and a number of other demonstrators were wounded. In opposition to this act of police brutality, labor activists organized a protest rally at Haymarket Square on May 4. The demonstration ended when a bomb exploded and killed four policemen. Officers responded by firing into the crowd. Employer and police hyperbole, aided by the Chicago Tribune’s antiunion vitriol, stirred the public’s fear that the city teetered on the brink of revolution. Over the next three weeks, Chicago’s district attorney indicted thirty-one people for the bombing and murders. Eventually eight men stood trial for conspiracy to commit murder, and the jury found all of them guilty. After the appeals process, the state of Illinois sanctioned the hanging of four of the convicted men. Workers across the nation marched in opposition to the verdicts, but Powderly, worried about the image of the KOL, refused to authorize an official protest.19

10

Introduction

Already angered by his lack of support for the eight-hour strikes, many Knights became increasingly disappointed in Powderly. The struggle for power that followed saw radicals, especially the leaders of District Assembly (DA) 49 in New York City, attempt to exclude craft unionists from the order. They hoped to turn the KOL into a radical organization and assumed that craft unionists by their very nature lacked the proper militant spirit. Eventually, with Powderly’s help, DA 49 succeeded in purging some specific craftsmen from the order. These expelled skilled workers formed the AFL. Critiques of leadership, factionalism, and failed strikes put the order on the brink of collapse. In July 1888, the once powerful Knights had 220,000 members; by 1890, that number had fallen to 100,000.20 While the KOL declined, the AFL ascended and abandoned anti­ monopolism. The twentieth century opened with Gompers successfully advancing “pure and simple unionism” at the expense of the more bottom-up unionism of the Knights. This meant that between 1886 and 1900, AFL leaders centralized power in the hands of national leaders, largely ignored unskilled laborers, and prevented, as best they could, eastern and southern European immigrants, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and women from joining the ranks of organized labor. AFL chiefs also encouraged members to reject associations with political radicals.21 A number of scholars have claimed that the AFL’s ascent signified the defeat of a radical working-class alternative to capitalism.22 Those who see the fall of the antimonopolist Knights and the rise of the pureand-simple AFL as a crucial example in the larger tale of the decline of American radicalism overstate their case. They ignore the reality that anti­ monopolism represented a general displeasure with the power relations produced by concentrated wealth. In other words, antimonopolism was not a well-defined alternative to capitalism. Antimonopolists had no single plan to resolve the problems they identified. They indeed unleashed a spirit of industrial and social reform that evoked passion, but their schemes lacked consistency. Their views on property rights bear this out. Bimetallists had no problem with the way in which judges and the general public interpreted property rights; single taxers, however, wanted different standards of ownership for individuals and companies; and cooperativists sought drastic changes to popular and legal conceptions of assets. Thus the question should not be what prevented Gilded Age Americans from implementing this alternative to capitalism. Instead we should ask, which groups took advantage of this reform mood, and what kinds of movements

Introduction

11

did they fashion? Because of their attitudes, organizational strength, and political environment, Rocky Mountain unionists proved the most capable social activists to redefine power relations in this period. More than any other individual, KOL organizer and Denver resident Joseph Buchanan laid the foundation for social democracy. Buchanan proved himself the nation’s leading labor organizer between his arrival in Colorado in 1878 and his decision to move to Chicago in 1887. He went to Chicago to fight for the release of the men convicted of the Haymarket bombing. Unlike Powderly and Gompers, Buchanan refused to draw sharp distinctions between the spheres of politics and economics. He recognized that politics had a direct relationship with workers’ fear of poverty and their sense of subordination to employer authority. As editor of the Rocky Mountain West’s largest labor newspaper, the Labor Enquirer, he encouraged unionists to find a vision of political economy that resonated with them, all the while insisting that they privilege pragmatism over dogma. The pages of the Enquirer proved eclectic as readers found there the words of doctrinaire Marxists, proponents of cooperative settlements, and land reformers.23 Buchanan set a precedent that other labor leaders and activist workers followed. By 1900, many Rocky Mountain unionists referred to themselves as socialists, but they used this appellation generically. Calling yourself a socialist in turn-of-the-century Colorado, Montana, or Utah simply meant that you saw the political sphere as a central, if not the central, arena in which to fight the class struggle, and that you demanded state intervention into the economy to mitigate corporate might. Policy ideas ranged from city-owned coal yards intended to prevent owners and suppliers of that essential fuel from freezing the poor by charging too high a price, to Congress purchasing the railroads in order to control fares and redistribute much of the property the various lines received as federal land grants.24 Trade unionists came to such positions through both their individual and collective confrontations with their employers and their attempts to deal with the suffering that unchecked employer rule and poverty created. In the process of devising ways to transform owner-controlled workplaces and markets and to alleviate the tragedies caused by insufficient wages and meager living conditions, these workers also continually evaluated the degree of influence they possessed. They recognized that the state, not natural market forces, played a central role in determining rates of pay, the length of a working day, and the general scope of employer power. By insisting that employer authority grew out of municipal

12

Introduction

­ rdinances, state statutes, and federal laws, workers reasoned that they had o to conceive of their unions as more than bargaining agents charged with improving their material conditions. Their organizations, if they truly wanted better lives, had to represent them in the political arena and attain for them access to power on all levels of government. Over time, Rocky Mountain unionists elected pro-labor candidates to local and state offices, which allowed them to secure better hours, wages, and safety measures. In other words, they converted their influence in the electoral realm into actual social authority. These achievements stemmed from the strategies they devised. During the 1880s, organized workers in the Rocky Mountain West, like their counterparts across the nation, created labor parties, ran nonpartisan slates, and joined cross-class coalitions in hopes of challenging their employers in determining the length of the workday, wage rates, and workplace codes. This quest for strength ultimately led to the creation of union-centered political action—the set of political practices that these workers used to play on party competition and avoid affiliation with the Republicans and Democrats. Unions functioned as Rocky Mountain workers’ political agents. Specifically, members of city and state federations of labor met and established platforms, chose candidates regardless of party, campaigned for those candidates, and monitored those who won. Ultimately it did not matter if they approached local and state elections as a nonpartisan bloc or as a labor party as long as they found a way to put their representatives in office, win prolabor laws, and wield influence in city halls and state legislatures.25 Political structures in the West differed from the other regions of the country, and this was the chief reason why Rocky Mountain unionists had opportunities that workers elsewhere did not. Until recently, studies focused on eastern and midwestern cities have argued that political machines proved too powerful for working-class activists to circumvent. Republican and Democratic city leaders responded to labor-party efforts and workingclass voting blocs by consolidating their machines in order to recapture “lost” votes. In an era with limited social welfare, patronage went a long way in building voter loyalty. Although historians, sociologists, and political scientists differ on exactly how the major parties controlled the labor vote—pointing to workers’ willingness to accept election-day bribes, laborers’ inability to place class interests above religious and ethnic identities, the offer of social services through city governments, or even the major parties’ playing on skill differences as some of the leading reasons—they agree that labor’s collective political efforts proved ephemeral at best.26

Introduction

13

Other studies have shown that the relationship between unions and machines had less to do with parties controlling the labor vote and more to do with the two sides reaching accommodations over patronage and influence. More specifically, unionists increasingly gained patronage appointments within the major parties, especially the Democrats, whenever they engaged in third-party or nonpartisan activism. In 1886, for instance, workers in New York City grew frustrated with the two major parties. They formed the Union Labor Party (ULP) and nominated Henry George for mayor. George lost the election, but Tammany Hall Democrats stopped taking the labor vote for granted. These Democrats shored up this key constituency by providing unionists more jobs with the city and attending to more of their demands.27 Shelton Stromquist and Richard Schneirov have provided further insights into the relationship between parties and unions by arguing that machines may not have been as powerful as once thought. In Cleveland, according to Stromquist, unionists supported the nonpartisan candidacy of Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones for governor. Democrats realized that they had to make labor’s interests central to their platform in order to win workers’ votes. In the early 1880s, Chicago unionists, Schneirov contends, supported candidates based on their willingness to advocate labor’s concerns. Recognizing that they needed labor’s vote, Democrats decided to provide some of the urban reforms that workers demanded in order to bring labor into the party’s fold. From 1886 through the mid-1890s this alliance kept fracturing, and workers continued to participate in thirdparty efforts. These actions usually failed, but they continually reminded Democrats of laborers’ importance, and workers, wanting a stronger political outlet, reintegrated into the party with increased authority. Ultimately, a “new liberalism” emerged. That meant that unionists became one of the main interest groups within the party.28 Instead of seeing workers’ sporadic third-party efforts as a succession of disappointments, these two studies tell us that we should understand unionists’ political activism as part of a series of realignments that forced the major parties to add or strengthen labor planks in platforms, thereby granting more power to workers. By contrast, workers who lived and labored in Colorado, Montana, and Utah took advantage of an unstable political setting caused by population growth, weak parties, and poorly developed or newly emerging state structures to obtain even more political might than their counterparts in Cleveland and Chicago. Industrialization occurred with unprecedented speed in the Mountain West. Between 1880 and 1900, thousands

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14

Table 1 Total Population and Percentage Change Year Utah

Percentage Change Growth from Previous Decade Colorado

Percentage Change Growth from Previous Decade Montana

Percentage Change Growth from Previous Decade

1870   86,786   39,864   20,595 1880 143,963 65.9 194,327 387.5   38,159   85.3 1890 210,779 46.4 412,198 112.1 132,159 246.3 1900 276,749 31.3 539,700   30.9 243,329   84.1 source : United States Bureau of the Census, Ninth through Twelfth Censuses of the United States: Population.

of people, many of them new voters, arrived in the region’s emerging industrial centers and mining towns each year (see Table 1). They especially went to Salt Lake City, Denver, and Butte (see Table 2). Unlike the New York City ward heelers who had established ways of funneling newly naturalized voters into the Democratic Party, western party leaders could not keep up with the ever-expanding electorate they faced because political machines were not as entrenched in the West as in the East. Consequently, western voters did not display the partisan loyalties of easterners. Westerners proved far more likely to cast split tickets than voters in any other region.29 The fact that Colorado, Montana, and Utah were transitioning from territories to states also offered workers access to political power unavailable to activists in other regions. As Chapter 2 explains, unionists elected delegates to Utah’s statehood convention who wrote an eight-hour workday law for miners, along with other pro-labor statutes, into the state’s founding constitution. In Colorado and Montana, the labor movement was in its infancy when statehood conventions took place, but that did not mean critics of capitalism were without influence. Antimonopolist positions regarding taxation, land policy, and freight rates, appeared in both states’ founding documents. More important, the abrupt shift of power from federal officials appointed in Washington, D.C., to people elected from within Colorado and Montana to run state bureaucracies combined with the reality that party control was not deeply rooted meant

Introduction

15

Table 2 Urban Population in the Rocky Mountain West Year 1880 1890 1900

Salt Lake City

Denver

Butte

20,768   35,629   3,363 44,843 106,713 10,723 53,531 133,859 30,470

source : United States Bureau of the Census, Ninth through Twelfth Censuses of the United States: Population; Sheelwant Bapurao Pawar, “An Environmental Study of the Development of the Utah Labor Movement: 1860–1935” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1968), 47-52; Utah’s History, ed. Richard D. Poll et al. (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 687–688; David Brundage, The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver’s Organized Workers, 1878–1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 7–16; Carl Abbott, Stephen J. Leonard, and David McComb, Colorado: A History of the Centennial State (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1994), 392; Michael P. Malone, The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier 1864–1906 (1981; Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1995), 41–64; David Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 13–24, 63; and Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 194, 242.

that well-organized interest groups could wield considerable power. It should be noted that suffragists also took advantage of this situation. Western women possessed the franchise before World War I. Most eastern and southern women, of course, had to wait until 1920, the year the Nineteenth Amendment went into effect, to vote.30 For workers to use this comparatively open situation to acquire greater political power, they had to organize.31 They indeed did. Investigators for the CBLS estimated that 25 percent of Colorado’s wageworkers belonged to a union by 1900. In Montana, Butte became the leading industrial center, and the Butte Miners’ Union (BMU), formed in 1878, led an organizational drive throughout the territory for miners and for the nonmine workforce in their county. By 1891, almost all of Montana’s hard-rock miners held union membership, and Butte’s chief labor periodical, the Butte Bystander, in 1893 proclaimed that every “branch of labor is organized in this city.” The Bystander also reported that the city’s organizations flourished “both financially and in the matter of obtaining living wages for their members.” In other words, Butte had a unionization rate near 100 percent. In Utah, hard-rock miners’ activism produced KOL locals in Eureka, Park City, Bingham, Stockton, and numerous other smaller camps. Also, Ogden’s railroad workers belonged to DA 82,

16

Introduction

a union founded by Buchanan that was centered in Denver and stretched from Omaha to Portland. In Salt Lake City, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, in 1891, one-third of all workers possessed union cards.32 The fact that these well-organized workers employed union-centered political action demonstrated their ability to mobilize and vote collectively. As a result, mayors, city council members, sheriffs, judges, state legislators, and governors proved more receptive to unionists’ demands. One of the era’s most dramatic events, the Pullman strike, demonstrates this point. In the summer of 1894, railroad laborers outside Chicago struck when their employer, George Pullman, cut their wages. Sympathy strikes soon rippled out from the shores of Lake Michigan to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and down to the Gulf Coast. Workers across the nation revealed both their solidarity with Pullman’s employees and their disgust with low pay. A federal judge issued an injunction intended to end the boycott and subsequent strikes. Workers ignored it. Owners and managers then turned to U. S. attorney general Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, for help. Olney agreed to support the railroad managers’ plan to hook U.S. mail cars to Pullman cars. This action forced boycotters to decide if they were willing to break federal law and risk going to jail to maintain their protest. When workers persisted in their opposition, Olney convinced President Grover Cleveland to deploy federal troops. On July 3 the army arrived, crushed the strike, and arrested American Railway Union (ARU) president Eugene Victor Debs. Surprisingly, after receiving a six-month sentence a few weeks later for violating the judge’s order, Debs appeared upbeat. Asked for his thoughts, he told a reporter that the members of the fledgling ARU “will win our fight in the West because we are better organized there.” Workers there “are loyal, fraternal and true. When they believe they are right, they all go out and stay out until the fight is over.”33 His claims of western workers’ strength proved far from exaggerated. The sheriff in Raton, New Mexico, impeded federal deputies who attempted to stop the derailing of Pullman cars. In Montana, the mayors of Havre, Great Falls, Butte, and Helena ardently supported the boycott, while the citizens of Livingston joined unionists as a group of more than six hundred people, holding stones, faced down the army. City leaders in Rawlins, Wyoming, ordered marshals out of town. Deputies at Ogden, Utah, refused to arrest unionists who forcibly removed Pullman cars from trains.34 Colorado’s governor, Populist Davis Waite, conveyed his outrage to U.S. district court judge Moses Hallett and President Cleveland over actions the army took in his state during the strike. On Independence Day,

Introduction

17

southern Colorado railroad workers and U.S. marshal Joseph Israel’s troops fought over keeping a train pulling a Pullman car from moving. The railroad workers won when they surrounded Israel and his men and forced them to surrender their weapons. The army rescued Israel and his detachment from the ARU’s custody. Waite became irate. In letters to Hallett and Cleveland, the governor noted Israel’s disregard for the jurisdiction of local authorities, complained that the marshal arrested strikers without warrants, and expressed his dismay that the federal government’s representative had enlisted “a private army to suppress alleged state troubles.” Waite concluded: “I enter my most vigorous protest against this invasion of the civil rights of the people of this state by the United States court at Denver and its marshal.”35 The army ultimately proved too mighty for these unionists to overcome. Yet the fact that sheriffs, mayors, and one governor rebuked judges, army officials, U.S. marshals, the attorney general, and the president tells us that workers in this region could elect “friends” to office. In turn, they could take action against their employers without fearing that police or their state militias would impede their efforts to strike or boycott. Therefore, their chances of winning higher wages and influence over shop-floor relations increased. Union-centered political action also put the Rocky Mountain labor movement at odds with the nation’s leading labor organization, the AFL, and its leader Samuel Gompers. On the surface, Rocky Mountain labor leaders and Gompers appeared to hold similar views of political action. Gompers, by 1897, had articulated a strategy that sought to avoid political alliances, as he feared that they would turn workers’ attentions away from the economic aims of the federation. Workers, according to Gompers, should vote for “friends” and lobby officeholders to better their conditions. As historian Julie Greene argues, the AFL under Gompers developed a political strategy that placed unions, not parties, at the center of political actions and practiced “antipartyism,” or “a theory that accepted the need for political activity while rejecting partisanship as the road to success.”36 Two main factors, however, separated Rocky Mountain union-centered political activists from Gompers’s pure-and-simple strategy. First, the AFL paid limited attention to unskilled workers and did not aggressively seek to organize them. Rocky Mountain labor leaders committed themselves to a broader based unionism that sought to bring most laborers into the union’s ranks. Aside from a general commitment to higher wages and shorter hours for almost all workers, regional labor activists saw each additional union man and woman (who won suffrage in Colorado in 1893, in Utah in 1895, and in Montana in 1914) as an

18

Introduction

a­ dditional vote. Colorado labor leader David Coates, for example, argued that “the trades unionist, somehow and for some reason, is the aristocrat of the labor movement.” He has no dealings with the man who “works on the section,” yet “the section hand has a vote.” “The labor aristocrat,” referring to Gompers and other AFL leaders, “is as obnoxious to the ordinary wage-earner as the money aristocrat.”37 In Coates’s view the “section hand” and the craftsmen had to engage in collective political action at the grassroots level and use their state federations of labor to link these local centers of activism into a larger network that sought working-class justice. Second, Gompers’s version of political action included centralizing power in the hands of national leaders and avoiding any affiliations with radicals, especially populists and socialists. Most Rocky Mountain workingclass political activists proved far more flexible. They defined their political aims according to workers’ demands for shop-floor changes and community improvements. Therefore, these unionists viewed electoral activity as starting at the municipal level, not with the agendas of AFL leaders. Furthermore, any candidate, as third-party supporters happily learned, could receive labor’s nomination in the region. During the Pullman protests, these unionists’ ability to exercise political power certainly captured the attention of railroad owners, Debs, and federal officials. Rocky Mountain workers clearly could convince at least a plurality of voters to cast their ballots for candidates who refused to sanction the idea that employers had an absolute right to rule workplaces and markets. These laborers articulated the idea that markets did not represent sites where simple negotiations between buyers and sellers occurred. Through labor newspapers, street corner speeches, public debates, barroom arguments, parades, boycotts, and strikes, Mountain West unionists emphasized the point that markets were man-made creations. The rules that governed economic interactions resulted from the laws that politicians passed. As the larger public recognized and accepted workers as market actors, as opposed to people who subordinated their rights to the will of their employers when they sold their time for a wage, labor’s political power became recognized as legitimate. This status allowed these workers to play a fundamental role in fashioning an American-style social democracy. This is not to suggest that Rocky Mountain workers avoided dissension based on their political beliefs. We only need to juxtapose the majority of Rocky Mountain unionists, who by 1901 had started calling themselves progressive unionists and their fellow workers who belonged to the Indus-

Introduction

19

trial Workers of the World (IWW) for examples of factional strife. IWW members, also known as Wobblies, advocated syndicalism—a variant of Marxism that championed the destruction of the wage system through sabotage, or, in other words, direct actions. Direct actions ranged from laborers participating in workplace slowdowns, to damaging machinery, to engaging in armed conflict with company guards. IWW members claimed that sabotage simultaneously built workers’ militant spirit and crippled the capitalist system. Each act of militancy would persuade more and more workers to participate in these small protests until workingclass consciousness peaked and a mostly bloodless revolution resulted.38 John Graham Brooks, an intellectual and reformer, interviewed Wobblies and attended their meetings. He explained that from the IWW’s perspective, the wealthy had used the law to maintain “economic forces safely in their own keeping.” Essentially the rich practiced “indirect action.” Direct action, therefore, “is labor’s weapon against all the astute indirections of capital.”39 Sabotage, as Wobbly Ben Williams explained in simpler terms, represented “a WAR MEASURE made necessary by the nature of the class struggle.”40 By 1910, most Wobblies insisted on the necessity of direct actions and revolution because laws, even the ones appearing to aid workers, only strengthened capitalism. IWW members claimed that capitalism required people to put the accumulation of wealth ahead of the good of the community. Some small reforms might ameliorate the hardships caused by extreme poverty, but laws, they argued, could never change the individualistic ethic that fed the profit motive. As Colorado hard-rock miner and IWW activist Vincent St. John wrote, it “is impossible for anyone to be a part of the capitalist state and to use the machinery of the state in the interests of the workers.”41 Williams, St. John, and other IWW members lost confidence in workers’ ability to use political action to stop owners from usurping the natural law of wealth distribution, where each worker received the full value of what his labor produced. They concluded that violence was not only acceptable, but that it represented the only avenue to working-class economic independence. To progressive unionists, Wobbly declarations that electoral activism and social change through legislation had failed did not square with their experiences. Furthermore, exchanging a strategy that transformed workplace grievances into pro-labor legislation for a commitment to violence in hopes of fomenting revolution seemed a fool’s bargain. That most Rocky Mountain unionists rejected syndicalism and played a central role in advocating social democracy should therefore come as no surprise.

20

Introduction

Yet recognition of the political culture that Rocky Mountain workers produced has been hampered by the dominant narrative of the region, which claims that after 1905 workers shifted their worldview and union affiliation from a commitment to political action under the ALU to a belief in syndicalism under the IWW.42 The ALU originated as the Western Labor Union in 1898 when most Rocky Mountain unionists, led by hardrock miners, grew disgusted with Gompers’s pure-and-simple unionism. By 1902, the members of the WLU decided to challenge the AFL nationally. They changed the name of their organization from the Western to the American Labor Union to highlight their intention, continued to unionize unskilled workers, focused on acquiring greater political power and pro-labor laws, and advocated socialism. The majority of ALU members did not grow averse to electoral politics and disenchanted with their socialist vision. A comparison of local organizations demonstrates that most unionists affiliated with the ALU refused to join or quickly left the IWW after its founding. The IWW originated in 1905. One regional federation, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), one state federation of labor, Utah, and five local unions from the Rocky Mountain West belonged to the Wobblies. But by 1907, only two local unions from the mountain states remained, and in 1908, the WFM left the IWW. Even after the IWW underwent a national resurgence between 1909 and 1912, Colorado, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho had only seven IWW local unions among them. In fact, the Wobblies had their greatest success in the Northeast, where Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania accounted for 69 of the total 170 officially organized IWW unions. The Pacific West—California, Washington, and Oregon—did combine for 40 locals, but that number equaled the total in the four midwestern states (Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio) with the highest number of IWW affiliates.43 When one compares the IWW’s 170 nationwide affiliated locals at its highpoint to the well over 300 ALU-affiliated locals in 1904, centered mostly in Montana and Colorado, it becomes difficult to conclude that the Rocky Mountain West was a bastion of American syndicalism.44 In other words, the majority of unionists who opposed capitalism in the Mountain West preferred to cultivate socialism through piecemeal reforms. Some historians downplay the IWW’s lack of organizational success. They argue that many seasonal laborers likely belonged to the radical federation but never showed up on its membership roles. According to this view, examining the IWW based on numbers misses the fact that a wider percentage of workers held syndicalist sympathies but feared job loss, arrest,

Introduction

21

or vigilante violence if they revealed their beliefs.45 This may be true, but the fact that these workers continued to use their unions as their political agents, even in the worst of times, tells us that they preferred to practice a politics that allowed for flexibility in thought and experimentation in action. This commitment to progressive unionism also explains why they avoided affiliation with the AFL. Montana Federation of Labor president Alex Fairgrieve made that very point during the IWW’s founding convention. He attended the meeting in hopes of helping to create a national radical federation that would challenge the organizational and political policies of the AFL. He left angry and disappointed. He said: “I came here not to be Gompersized, and I am going back the way I came.” Progressive unionists such as Fairgrieve had refused to affiliate with the AFL because they considered Gompers an autocrat, a “labor aristocrat” who limited the political activism of the organization’s members. Because the IWW dictated a universal policy of sympathy strikes, which meant ignoring the uniqueness of each situation and avoiding political actions other than revolution, Fairgrieve saw the organization as similar to the AFL. ALU members had prided themselves on allowing workers to battle employers based on local conditions. In casting his vote against the IWW’s founding constitution, he declared himself “a revolutionist.”46 To Fairgrieve, being a revolutionist started with workers confronting employers on a daily basis and challenging them for control over workplaces and labor markets. Experience taught progressive unionists that dogmatism and rigid codes of behavior impeded rather than advanced workers’ ability to reconstruct the social order. Western historians are not the only scholars who downplay the socialdemocratic culture that Rocky Mountain workers infused into the nation’s laws, political practices, and economic relations. In fact, most historians, political scientists, and sociologists examining political and economic relations during the years 1870 to 1930 argue that labor lacked the political influence necessary to challenge the power that corporations wielded over parties and government institutions. Furthermore, most studies of this period do not even recognize that an American-style social democracy existed. We are told that middle-class women, farmers, muckrakers, intellectuals, corporate liberals, or a broadly defined radical middle class successfully shepherded laws through state legislatures or Congress, which established minimum wages, mothers’ pensions, shorter hours, workmen’s compensation, purer food, cleaner water, an end to monopolies, and fairer elections.47

22

Introduction

Although some of these measures overlapped with the efforts of European social democrats, they should not be considered social democratic, the story goes, because they represented an altered form of liberalism embraced by middle-class reformers who sought to stave off socialism. Liberalism emerged as a critique of monarchical power, and its advocates sought to protect individual rights, promote a meritocracy, and create a classless society. At the center of classical liberalism, Gary Gerstle explains, were the principles of “emancipation, rationality, and progress.” A laissez-faire approach to economics should have fostered these ends. Yet when “free enterprise became corporate monopoly, when freeing the slaves produced a caste system in the South,” and “when America’s free social and political environment failed to dissolve ‘coagulated’ ethnic attachments,” liberals “were forced to concede that the mere release of human nature from unnatural restraints was no longer sufficient to ensure emancipation.” Middle-class reformers decided that they had no choice but to demand that the state step in to protect individual rights by passing laws and creating agencies that served to protect and assist people, even if doing so meant moving away from free-market orthodoxy. In other words, Progressive Era liberalism, as Gerstle put it, served as “a surrogate for socialism.”48 A few historians do, however, argue that an American-style social democracy existed. In a 1968 article, George Mowry sought to demonstrate that Progressivism fit within the larger western social-democratic tradition. Mowry did little more than show the overlap of some laws in Europe and the United States, and employ social democracy as a synonym for progressivism. James T. Kloppenberg used the phrase in its more specific sense as he illustrated how people such as Christian socialist and University of Wisconsin professor Richard Ely were part of a trans­atlantic movement to promote workers’ rights and bring about socialism gradually.49 Importantly, although Martin J. Sklar and those influenced by his work on politics and economics in the Progressive Era do not use the term social democracy, they do argue that a capitalist-socialist mixed economy emerged at the turn of the twentieth century.50 Kloppenberg and Sklar clarify that an American style of social democracy evolved, but neither of them presents workers as playing a significant role in making this political culture and driving the changes to the nation’s economy that it produced.51 Social democracy meant more than public officials enacting prolabor laws. Above all else, it was about the expansion of working-class

Introduction

23

political power. We have to realize that Rocky Mountain workers did not need surrogates in the political arena. They led the charge on the socialist side of the mixed economy that emerged. Their role gets lost for three reasons. First, political historians, especially those writing more broadly about progressivism, typically use national AFL leaders to speak for labor in general.52 The fact that Gompers limited the federation’s political activities is then taken as proof that workers needed help in winning the laws they demanded. Second, the reality that political machines in other regions served as a break on workers’ political demands also leads many scholars to assume that workers’ political influence was circumscribed. Third, studies of American socialism usually center on the Socialist Party (SP) and attempt to explain why it failed. Even when SP members scored impressive victories in city elections across the country from 1910 to 1920, we are told that they acted like reformers instead of socialists. Such a view assumes that there was only one way to act “socialist.”53 Rocky Mountain unionists built their social-democratic culture and moved toward their socialist objectives in a much broader way than simply voting for SP candidates and mouthing party slogans. Incidentally, one reason the region’s workers adopted the moniker progressive unionist, as opposed to simply calling themselves socialists, was because so many competing definitions of socialism existed. “Progressive” better captured these unionists’ general willingness to focus on nurturing a broad-based movement that emphasized the idea that workers had to have political power before they could transform social relations. It does, however, cause a bit of confusion for modern-day historians who are used to applying the term “progressive” to middle-class liberal reformers. Thus, The Quest for “Just and Pure Law” moves the story of American reform from East to West, away from the middle class, and offers a rethinking of Gilded Age and Progressive Era politics. It does so by detailing the ways in which workers in the most rapidly industrializing region of United States, at the moment when America became the world’s richest nation, obtained political influence and infused their values into the larger social structure. More specifically, Chapter 1 traces how Buchanan and others turned widespread antimonopolist sentiment into a larger movement for workers’ rights. Chapters 2 and 3 explain how the region’s unionists devised union-centered political action, shifted their outlook from antimonopolism to socialism, and won laws that reflected their beliefs. Chapter 4 demonstrates how Rocky Mountain unionists—despite some intense battles between socialists and syndicalists and

24

Introduction

significant challenges from employer associations—advanced their social democratic project from 1905 to 1915. Chapter 5 examines how the region’s unionists, from 1912 through 1924, continued their fight for social democracy amid efforts by various employers to break strikes, control local politics, and establish company unions.

Chapter 1

“He Who Would Be Free, Himself Must Strike the Blow” Joseph Buchanan, Rocky Mountain Knights, and Notions of Working-Class Justice

“We shall depend on the ballot box and not the cartridge box to secure justice,” proclaimed thirty-one-year-old Knights of Labor (KOL) organizer and editor Joseph Buchanan in March 1883 as Denver’s city election neared. His declaration was more than mere rhetoric intended to inspire the readers of his Labor Enquirer, the Rocky Mountain region’s leading labor periodical, to go to the polls and cast their ballots for prolabor candidates. These words offered an explanation of exactly what the paper’s masthead, “He Who Would Be Free, Himself Must Strike the Blow,” meant. Since the Enquirer’s first appearance in 1882, Buchanan allowed both advocates and opponents of the Knights to guess if he wanted workers to pursue a more equitable distribution of wealth through violence, the vote, or both. As it turned out, he evoked the phrase that Frederick Douglass had used to demand an end to chattel slavery in order to encourage workers to conceive of their ballots as weapons to wield against the evil of “wage slavery.” Striking “the blow” meant voting on election day.1 To Buchanan, a unified labor movement engaged in political actions could have revolutionary consequences. Prior to his March editorial, and with hopes of inspiring Denver workers to vote as a bloc during the upcoming municipal election, Buchanan invited various working-class organizations to the capital city to commemorate George Washington’s birthday with a parade. Holding banners that declared “We Toil in the Bowels of the Earth but Our Voices 25

26

“He Who Would Be Free”

Shall Be Heard Seeking Liberty, Justice, and Equality,” “A Nation with a Poor Working Class Is a Disgrace to Civilization,” and “An Injury to One Is the Concern of All,” more than four thousand workers assembled at Denver City Hall on February 22 to demand that the state legislature enact prolabor measures. Coal miners, railroad workers, and skilled laborers belonging to the KOL walked with independent craft unionists, including bricklayers, carpenters, and plasterers, as well as antimonopolist groups such as the German Socialists to show their solidarity. As snow fell around them, these workers passed resolutions that called for shorter hours, arbitration, and employer liability laws. The day’s events concluded with speeches by ten of the state’s labor leaders.2 A little over a week later, on March 3, a letter signed by “A. Unionist” appeared in the Enquirer and argued that workers should unite and decide on a set of principles that best represented their political beliefs. Workers needed to vote for “the man that can kick the beam,” or the candidate who supported labor’s wishes, no matter the “party or name—republican, democrat, greenback, or blueback.” After contending that he and his fellow workers could “begin effectually to demand our political right” as “soon as we become self-reliant, and take ourselves, body and soul, out of the political market,” meaning “when we can no longer be bought by bad whisky and beer,” then, the anonymous author concluded, “we can let our representatives see that we stand upon our manhood.”3 Buchanan, in the same issue, argued that by “proper legislation and honest administration” workers could have the “just share of the ease and comfort” that their “labor creates.” He also reminded readers that “the power” to acquire change rested with them.4 Through his words and actions, Buchanan, along with A. Unionist, contradicted laissez-faire rhetoric by refusing to accept the idea that modern market transactions happened because of invisible forces. Instead they argued that the laws politicians enacted and the policies local, state, and federal officials carried out defined the contours of market relations. To win higher wages, shorter hours, safer conditions, and greater control over workplace practices, Buchanan reasoned, workers had to recognize the necessity of class-based political action. He viewed participating in the electoral process only through partisan commitments as a dead end. For workers to experience justice, to “be free,” they had to devise and employ an electoral strategy that would allow them to “strike the blow” and carry the demands that they identified as symbols of liberty—better pay, a shorter workday, and safety at their workplaces—from shop floor, union hall, and barroom speeches to the language of city and state statute books.

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Buchanan’s desire for laborers to recognize their shared economic interests underpinned his appeals for working-class political action. He understood that he lived at a moment when questions of the worth of a day’s labor, the length of the workday, and the role the state should play in regulating the economy had extended beyond the walls of academia, the halls of government, and corporate offices, and into books, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, and lectures. The speaking tours of third-party candidates, workers’ parades, local theater, and, in the 1880s, the writings of Henry George made political economy a subject of widespread concern in the broader popular culture.5 The Enquirer, like the hundreds of other working-class publications across the country, added to this protest literature as its columns exposed readers to the writings and speeches of theorists who ranged from orthodox Marxists to land reformers.6 Buchanan hoped to foment a passionate but pragmatic regional workingclass political movement, rather than a cadre of dogmatists committed to one revolutionary ideology. Leading by example, he joined two different socialist groups and endorsed candidates from the Greenback, Union Labor, and Republican parties. He used the Enquirer to make workers throughout the Rocky Mountain West aware of local protests, gatherings, debates, and campaign speeches. To him, real change would arrive only after workers built institutions that allowed them the opportunity to infuse their values into the larger social structure through prolabor laws and policies. No matter the ideological bent of each individual worker, he consistently reminded those who read and listened to his words that organizing, striking, boycotting, and voting paved the path to greater power. As all who toiled desired the same short-term ends, including higher wages, shorter hours, and safer conditions, it behooved them to vote together. Buchanan’s self-assigned task of fostering working-class unity proved formidable not only because workers differed in their political commitments, but also because they divided over the best means of organizing. Some labor activists wanted to unionize based on craft, all tailors for instance, instead of workers in one industry joining together, such as bringing all garment workers into one body. He saw no reason why the KOL could not accommodate both impulses. This explains why he, a craftunion printer, became the leading KOL organizer in the country. From 1878 to 1887, he created a number of local assemblies throughout the West, formed two district assemblies, helped found the Denver Trades Assembly (DTA), led two major railroad strikes, coordinated various coal miners’ strikes, and engineered a number of boycotts.

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In the end, Buchanan and other Rocky Mountain labor activists wanted to forge cross-union solidarity, promote workplace protests, engineer broad-based political actions, and convince workers to develop a shared political culture in order to persuade the larger public to accept a notion of economic justice that included high wages. In the minds of most workers, politics governed economic relationships because the power that legislators granted corporations caused unnecessary hardships. The degree of political power one possessed correlated with the poverty she or he felt. Buchanan and others recognized that unionists’ motivations for becoming politically active could stem from their collective outrage over being forced to observe rigid work rules, experiencing or watching industrial accidents, and working ten or twelve hours a day simply to subsist.7 Thus, an influential working-class political culture that inspired laborers to vote as a bloc and convinced the larger public to support workers’ vision of wealth distribution, depended upon well-organized unions uniting across skill lines and establishing an effective, pragmatic electoral strategy and a set of protest tactics. Producing this culture, devising this strategy, practicing these tactics, winning laws, pressuring officials to uphold those measures, and ultimately changing social relations started with the region’s labor leaders’ abilities, especially Buchanan’s, to give new meanings to older accepted modes of political expression and action. The Washington Day parade provided one such example. Antebellum Americans defined their collective values in the streets by parading and sometimes rioting, as they expected politicians to accede to their will. Typically these crowds focused their anger at bankers and interest rates, tax collectors and excise laws, and grocers and the prices of goods.8 In this context, parades represented the political act, a deed performed in a public space intended to arouse the sympathy of the citizenry and facilitate change. Buchanan built on this tradition and used the February 22 march not simply as an appeal to politicians to implement greater social equality, but to inform them and the larger public that workers, as a class, intended to engage in the larger discourse concerning fairness in an industrializing and urbanizing America. This spectacle also provided workers with a unifying experience, and it signaled their awareness that reordering the emerging social structure required a series of sustained, overlapping collective actions happening at work, in the streets, and at the ballot box. Using Buchanan’s activism as a touchstone provides the opportunity to understand the emergence and development of the larger Rocky Mountain labor movement and the foundations for workers’ political culture in that region.

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This account of Rocky Mountain unionists’ efforts to define justice collectively and to seek avenues to attain the liberties they envisioned proved neither orderly nor heroic. Nearly all Americans in the late nineteenth century expressed anxieties about the chaos caused by rapid industrialization and urbanization. This was particularly true for workers because the labor question—how should wealth be distributed as the nation’s economic, political, and social structures changed—dominated public debate from the Civil War through World War I. Most Americans agreed upon the necessity of placing checks on corporate power, but they also feared deviating too far from economic orthodoxy. A brief exegesis of the industrializing West is therefore necessary in order for us to fully grasp the discord wrought by the economic transformations of the 1870s and 1880s. Following that overview, this chapter then captures Rocky Mountain workers’ search to define and obtain economic justice by examining workers’ electoral efforts, both in victory and defeat, and by juxtaposing the violence and pettiness spawned from white unionists’ commitments to racism and ethnocentrism alongside moments of racial and ethnic unity. In general, this chapter communicates the moments of confusion, division, and solidarity that unskilled laborers and craftsmen experienced in trying to build a local and regional labor movement at the moment American capitalism blossomed in the West and nationally.

Industrialization and the Meaning of Value Understanding the organizational and political strategies that Buchanan and other Rocky Mountain labor activists employed to combat the rise of corporate capitalism requires that we first comprehend that those benefiting from the arrival of capitalism co-opted the idea of liberty championed by abolitionists prior to the Civil War.9 In the 1840s and 1850s, possessing liberty started with self-ownership and included one’s ability to enter into wage bargains, or contracts, with employers. Choice, not the coercion inherent in chattel slavery, defined labor relations, but selling one’s labor did have its drawbacks. By accepting this contract, a worker suspended his independence because, according to the republican principles under­ pinning American political thought, freedom only existed when one owned his own land or workshop. By becoming a wage laborer, or hireling, an individual accepted a position in the social order between slave and citizen. In fact, many workers and writers referred to toiling for pay as “wage slavery.” As industrialization spread, this status became

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i­ncreasingly common. Workers accepted the role of hireling because it appeared temporary, a condition that lasted until one saved enough money to purchase property or start a business. In the 1870s, popular opinion in the North claimed that the Civil War had occurred because southern planters championed the spread of unfree labor, and the Union battled to maintain the possibility of economic independence for all men, at least white men. With industrialization occurring, however, categories had to be rethought. The hireling—the wageworker— no longer necessarily represented a poor citizen. If he was working toward independence by saving his money to buy property or to open his own shop, he was illustrating the righteousness of the northern cause, not to mention honoring Lincoln’s martyrdom.10 Employers and their supporters, however, worked to reshape this view of free labor. They stopped writing and speaking of wage work as a springboard toward independence, and claimed that superior intelligence had catapulted the rich into positions of power. America, according to corporate leaders, needed a permanent wage workforce. Therefore, free labor now meant that workers could choose between entering into a contract with their employer or not working at all.11 Along with the free-labor ideal, the labor theory of value faced an assault by the advocates of corporate capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, the labor theory of value influenced most Americans’ sense of worth. This idea held that the labor used to extract metals or coal from the land, to plant and harvest crops, or to manufacture goods created value. Those who did not labor, who did not produce value, were social parasites because they lived off the fruits of others’ work. Most Gilded Age Americans contended that those who impeded one’s opportunity to earn a living from his labor violated the laws of nature, God’s laws.12 Economists started to move away from using production to define value because, among other reasons, the rise of factories made it nearly impossible to determine each individual worker’s share of each good produced. Led by John Bates Clark in the 1880s, economists and policy makers offered an alternative to the labor theory of value. Clark argued that wages should not rest with the cost of human labor, but in the last, or marginal, price a buyer would pay for a good. Marginalism, as his philosophy became known, shifted the measurement of a worker’s worth from his skills and effort to consumer choices. It took until the mid-1890s for Clark’s idea to emerge as the dominant way economists and policy makers conceived of value in the nation. Even then, large numbers of people, as evi-

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Table 3 Capital Investment in Manufacturing in Arapahoe County, Colorado, 1870–1900 Year Population

Capital Invested in Manufacturing Per Capita

Rate of Change of Capital Invested in Manufacturing Per Capita from Previous Decade (Rounded up)

1870   6,829   $36.13 1880 38,644   $59.57   65% 1890 132,135 $129.58 118% 1900 153,017 $219.30   69% source:  United States Bureau of the Census, Ninth through Twelfth Censuses of the United States: Manufacturing and Population.

denced by the activism of various antimonopolist and socialist groups, rejected it.13 In recognizing that the free-labor ideal was under assault and the value of work had become a contested notion, a number of Americans decided to go west in hopes of maintaining or reestablishing the social and economic relations they held dear. They not only failed, they encouraged capitalism to follow them. Therefore, the narrative of market expansion that follows serves two purposes. First, it provides a survey of the region’s economic development, technological advancement, and urbanization. Second and more important, it elucidates how corporate capitalism scrambled accepted meanings of value, which in turn forced workers to try to redefine their political rights and articulate a new notion of economic justice. Many of the first white settlers who arrived in the Rocky Mountains hoped to create a Jeffersonian paradise. Instead, industrial centers functioned as the nuclei of regional capitalist growth and thus became key sites of class conflict. A sense of the pace of capitalism’s growth in the Rocky Mountain territories and states emerges by examining the total capital invested in manufacturing per capita in Arapahoe County (Denver), Colorado (see Table 3). Juxtaposing this same measure in Silver Bow County (Butte), Montana; Pueblo County, Colorado; and Salt Lake County, Utah, in 1890 and 1900, with some of the nation’s more established sites of economic activity

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Table 4 Cross-Regional Capital Investment in Manufacturing, 1890 and 1900 Rate of Change of Capital Invested in Capital Capital Manufacturing Invested in Invested in Per Capita Manufacturing Manufacturing from 1890 County, Population Population Per Capita, Per Capita, to 1900 State 1890 1900 1890 1900 (Rounded up) Silver Bow, 23,744 MT Pueblo, CO 31,491 Salt Lake, 58,457 UT New York, 1,515,301 NY Cook, IL 1,191,922 San Francisco, CA 298,997

47,635

$38.29

$215.39

463%

34,448

$101.72

$359.27

253%

77,725

$62.02

$113.84

84%

2,050,600 1,838,735

$218.21 $304.20

$296.82 $297.84

36% -2.1%

342,782

$250.28

$233.69

-6.6%

source:  United States Bureau of the Census, Eleventh and Twelfth Censuses of the United States: Manufacturing and Population.

indicate that economic change happened more quickly in the Mountain West in these years (see Table 4). Obviously the industrial centers outside of the Rocky Mountain West had more total wealth and population, and the economic booms they experienced happened earlier. But, the rapidity with which development occurred in the region meant that recently formed local governments and social organizations did not have the ability to mediate between new and old economic modes of production.14 Looking at the failed efforts of Mormon church leaders in Utah to shape economic growth particularly demonstrates this point. Mormons, unlike others who migrated west in search of gold or land, especially wanted to escape capitalist social relations and create a community of saints dedicated to cooperativist farming. Joseph Smith, however, unwittingly pulled with him the very same eastern capital networks he had tried to break free of when he journeyed west. Mormons in the mid-

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nineteenth century believed in the notion of stewardship, or “the Lord’s law,” which called for an equal distribution of wealth. Like many early nineteenth-century Americans struggling to adapt to the expanding market society, Smith took inspiration from the Second Great Awakening. The Mormons’ social vision included a settlement where craftsmen and farmers would work at their trades and bishops would assume responsibility for the allocation of wealth. Practicing stewardship required church leaders to assign uniform portions of land to church members. Bishops did make this parceling process a reality in Kirtland, Ohio; western Missouri; and Nauvoo, Illinois, the main Mormon settlements prior to the group’s arrival near the Great Salt Lake. When Illinois vigilantes murdered Smith in the early 1840s, Brigham Young emerged as the Mormons’ leader and vowed to continue Smith’s mission. Upon reaching the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, Young and Mormon bishops immediately dispersed property and set up community work schedules.15 In 1849, fortune seekers who needed supplies on their way to California’s gold fields spurred some of the more enterprising Mormon settlers to rethink their devotion to the communal ideal. Although Young forbade his followers to directly involve themselves in mining, he did permit the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to participate in exchanges with the twenty- to thirty-thousand non-Mormons, “Gentiles,” who passed through Salt Lake City between 1849 and 1850. Mormons charged around $200 for horses and mules that normally cost $30. These LDS members also exploited prospectors in need of cash. Salt Lake City’s LDS residents, for instance, purchased coffee and sugar that sold at a $1 per pint before the Gold Rush for $0.10 to $0.15. These exchanges helped turn Salt Lake City into a retail center and inspired church leaders to envision a prosperity that extended beyond a theocratic agrarian paradise. Between 1851 and 1852, church elders sanctioned the building of a paper mill, the planting of beets for sugar production, and the construction of an iron foundry. By 1858, all of these ventures failed, but the commitment to participating in limited market interactions remained.16 Although Mormons helped plant the seeds of Rocky Mountain capitalism through their dealings with prospectors, the region’s conversion to industrial life resulted from New York, Boston, and European investors’ desire to develop mining interests beyond the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Searching for mineral wealth outside of California, a group of speculators led by George Hearst went to Nevada in 1859 and purchased the Ophir Mine near Virginia City. Its silver, along with the silver from surrounding veins, precipitated a boom. Thousands flocked to the Comstock Lode.

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From 1860 to 1880, northern Nevada silver provided $300 million in profits and drew financing from the East Coast and Britain. These investments fueled a technological revolution in the mining industry and facilitated the expansion of railroads. Also, the growing population around the Comstock Lode encouraged settlements in Nevada, Utah, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. Commercial farmers moved closer to the Comstock to sell food to the flood of migrants who came to work in the mines. Smelting, rail, retail, and banking centers emerged to convert, transport, and exchange Comstock yields into other forms of wealth. Roads and, later, railroads allowed the flow of goods from Virginia City west to San Francisco and east to Salt Lake City. Business activity generated by the Comstock Lode resulted in the creation of 280 towns.17 As corporations and investors sought the next Comstock, the public funded the extension of the railroad, the army killed and removed Indians, and the peripheral settlements around the Virginia City mining industry became core towns of new capital networks. White settlements that started as hinterlands became gateway cities. In the Rocky Mountain West, Salt Lake City, Denver, and to a lesser degree Butte linked the sources of raw materials, beef, and crops to consumers east and west. Exchange houses and banks turned ore, livestock, and crops into commodities to be invested in and traded.18 Each of these cities had slightly different but overlapping stories in transitioning from sparse settlements to urban centers. In the early 1860s, U.S. army officer G. B. Ogilvie, part of a detail sent to repel Indians and report on Mormon activities, did not despair over missing his chance for glory on Civil War battlefields. He arrived in Salt Lake City with hopes of finding gold and silver after hearing of the riches in Nevada and then seeing the growth in business that local merchants enjoyed. In September 1863, Ogilvie found ore in Bingham Canyon south of the city, and by December he and other officers stationed at Camp Douglas had staked the Utah territory’s first mining claim. General Patrick E. Connor also used his time in Utah to explore for minerals, and in 1867 found silver on the Wasatch Range. In 1869, he established the Tintic Mining District and began exploring southern Utah for potential hard-rock mining ventures. That May, the transcontinental railroad arrived near Ogden. The combination of railroad growth and discovery of minerals sparked the migration of non-Mormons to the territory. Utah’s population more than doubled between 1860 and 1870, soaring from 40,273 people to 86,786. By the end of 1870, mining and railroad towns made Salt Lake City a hub of commerce. The territory had over five

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hundred manufacturing enterprises, mostly near Salt Lake City, which provided more than fifteen hundred jobs. Lumber workers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, flour and gristmill laborers, and carpenters represented the top five nonagricultural professions.19 Rather than embrace Salt Lake City’s emergence as a commercial center, however, Young tried to reestablish Mormon self-sufficiency. As hard-rock mining ventures expanded, he called on his followers in 1866 to boycott Gentiles unsympathetic to Mormonism. Church leaders understood that the federal government’s sponsoring of competition between railway magnates posed an even greater threat to their economic control and social authority than the non-LDS soldiers, merchants, and prospectors did. Young knew that the arrival of the railroad signified the establishment of corporate capitalism. Meanwhile, railroad executives sought to maximize profits by controlling expenses. They looked for ways to standardize freight rates and wages. In attempting to better define costs, businessmen had integrated markets. After initial successes, managers then tried to refine this practice by pushing crews to work harder and make faster deliveries and pick ups. This logic of capital, this commitment to making efficiency the central value of business in hopes of better controlling time to produce quicker service from one rail stop to the next at the lowest cost possible, underpinned the process of capital accumulation. Capital accumulation started when an individual or a group invested in the materials, workers, facilities, and technologies necessary to make a product. Then capitalists focused on controlling the labor process, which turned inputs such as composite ore into outputs such as copper. Selling this output, or product, completed the final step of accumulation, as the good was turned back into money. As both employers and workers knew, the relationship between the productivity of labor and its cost determined the pace of accumulation.20 Railroads, of course, also brought eastern commodities west. For the Mormons this meant that freight rates and the demand for wheat and other products in outside communities, not church elders, would establish the prices of the goods they produced. Homespun clothes would quickly appear unappealing to many settlers, and industrial mining, not agriculture, would shape Utah’s economic character. In 1869, Young tried to again stem this tide by establishing the Zion Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI), an LDS-controlled cooperative intended to keep Mormons from entering into agricultural markets with Gentiles. Although ZCMI remained a place to shop in Salt Lake City, Young’s attempt at avoiding market integration not only failed, it spawned fissures within the

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Mormon community. A number of LDS members, businessmen in particular, quit the church, started their own anti-Mormon newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune, and promoted capitalist development. Beyond the divisions fostered by the desire for profits, Mormon leaders could not prevent capitalism’s emergence because, as evidenced by their desires for eastern fashions such as silk, LDS members increasingly substituted modern consumer values for the subsistence lifestyle Young promoted.21 The Mormons are often thought of as a unique or strange variant of western settlers. Yet like the prospectors who went to California afflicted with Gold Rush fever or the would-be farmers who journeyed along the Oregon Trial to the Willamette Valley inspired by promises of rich soil, LDS members sought to experience the free-labor ideal and uphold the labor theory of value. Eastern anarchist Dyer D. Lum recognized this fact. He wrote two pamphlets that pointed to Mormon cooperative efforts as evidence that an alternative to capitalism could succeed in late nineteenth-century America. In his first work on the topic, Utah and Its People, Lum insisted that politicians and journalists friendly to capitalism promoted the view of Mormons as religious fanatics engaged in the “barbarism” of polygamy to mask the challenge that LDS members posed to proponents of laissez-faire values. Mormons’ collective practices, he contended, had led to economic stability and growth. He provided statistical comparisons showing the moderate tax rate of Salt Lake City, the lack of city debt, elevated property values, and the high profit margin merchants experienced as proof of his claim. Lum wanted the public to move beyond their outrage over polygamy and consider how Mormon society functioned. As he put it, the object of his pamphlet was “to consider a civilization in which the exaltation of material wealth is not the chief end of man.”22 His second work on the Mormons, Social Problems of To-Day; or, The Mormon Question in Its Economic Aspects, was a polemic. Instead of using statistics and measured arguments to show that the free-labor ideal and labor theory of value remained viable in modern society, he argued that the “whole Mormon system, social, religious, industrial, is essentially based on two fundamental principles: cooperation in business and arbitration in disputes.” These tenets, he added, were antithetical to those who favored “monopoly-restricted competition.” As in his earlier work, he claimed that many of the politicians and pundits who raised the issue of multiple marriages when discussing Utah sought to divert the public’s attention from the dominant social issue of the day: cheap labor.23

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Lum correctly captured Mormon leaders’ desire to avoid capitalist social relations and live by pre–Civil War economic ideals. He missed, however, the Mormons’ inability to impede the subtle ways in which capitalism pervaded communities despite their lack of affinity for its values. Capitalism was as much a revolution in thought, a change in how people perceived their relationship to production and exchange, as it was a transformation in social relations. Adapting to capitalism did not mean a wholesale substitution of one set of ideas and practices for another. Instead it represented attempts by assorted individuals to update their conceptions of the worth of work to a new economic reality. Although industrial development and urbanization in the rest of the Rocky Mountain West did not start with migrating masses who wanted to serve God, a similar pattern of small communities giving way to urban centers with businesses, corporations, and industrial workforces did occur. Denver, for example, transitioned from an isolated outpost in the mid-nineteenth century to the largest urban area between San Francisco and Kansas City. A minor gold rush in 1858–59 at Cherry Creek led to the creation of Denver. In the 1870s other gold strikes at Clear Creek, Boulder, Central City, and Idaho Springs enticed fortune seekers. These finds produced limited wealth, and compared to California, Colorado’s gold was far more difficult to extract. The inability to efficiently remove the precious metal from the zinc it had fused with, combined with the Civil War and battles between Indians and whites, dashed the hopes of many prospectors. Colorado had 34,277 inhabitants in 1860. By 1870, the territory counted 39,864 people and only about 2,200 of them were involved in mining.24 Circumstances changed for Colorado when Brown University chemist Nathaniel P. Hill, after receiving a sampling of the territory’s gold, believed that he could improve upon the existing smelting methods and make the ore worth mining. In 1869, he acquired the support of eastern investors and built a smelter at Black Hawk, located in Gilpin County. By 1874, Black Hawk became a leader in smelting technology and produced $3 million worth of gold. Colorado’s true “bonanza,” however, occurred at Leadville. In 1877, Leadville, a failed gold town, had only 200 people. By 1880, it grew to 14,820 residents. Silver strikes turned the mining camp into the nation’s leading silver producer.25 Denver benefited from Leadville’s success as it evolved into a city for supplies and a transportation hub. After its initial gold rush, Denver had grown slowly as Union Pacific (UP) Railroad officials chose to run their

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transcontinental line through Cheyenne, Wyoming. When the railroad did arrive in the 1870s, the city expanded exponentially. By 1876, a territorial census revealed that Colorado’s capital had 20,000 inhabitants. Easterners invested in extending the railroad lines in order to bring coal north from the abundant fields of the southern part of the state. Along with the railroad, mining companies opened smelters in Denver, manufacturers built machinery for the mines, and banks dotted the downtown landscape. Flour milling, brewing, and carriage and wagon companies also opened in the 1860s and 1870s.26 The search for gold also brought white settlers to the Montana Territory, but silver and then especially copper precipitated the development of what would become the Treasure State. In 1858, James and Granville Stuart found gold at Gold Creek in the Deer Lodge Valley. The Deer Lodge discoveries enticed other prospectors to explore western Montana. Mineral finds in the Yellowstone Valley and at Last Chance Gulch, which soon after became Helena, lured thousands to come to Montana in the 1860s and early 1870s. Unfortunately for these settlers, the wealth the gold boom produced dissipated with the Panic of 1873. Although the railroad reached Montana in the early 1870s, economic development remained paralyzed. Silver finds near Silver Bow Creek in present-day Butte revived Montana’s economy briefly in the late 1870s and 1880s.27 In Butte, prospectors came searching for gold during the 1860s. Roughly 5,000 people lived in the area of what would become Butte in 1867. By 1870, that number had dwindled to 241. A persistent pair still looking for the precious metal, William L. Farlin and William J. Parks, found manganese-stained silver ore instead. Without the technology to separate the silver from the ore, the two men could not turn their discovery into riches. They sold their claim. Investors William Andrews Clark, Samuel T. Hauser, and Andrew J. Davis, knew they could raise the capital necessary to finance the machinery that would make mining Butte’s silver worthwhile. When silver production began, Clark noticed copper in the ores being extracted. Although copper had limited value at that point, and exporting it proved difficult, as the closest railroad was 400 miles away in Utah, Clark decided in 1879 to take the risk. He created the Montana Smelting Company and financed a line from Ogden to Butte. In 1881, Butte entered the copper market.28 A new competitor soon emerged to challenge Clark’s dominance. Marcus Daly, an Irish immigrant, had worked as a foreman on the Comstock Lode. His employer then sent him to Butte in 1875 to investigate the potential for mining silver. Daly opened a mine and mill for his em-

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ployer, and then he purchased his own property, the Anaconda. By 1883, the Anaconda was 600 feet deep. Clark and Daly sought greater efficiency in getting their silver to market, so both men opened smelters. In 1885, Butte surpassed Leadville as the nation’s leader in silver production. As the Butte Inter Mountain boasted, “Butte is not only the Leadville of Montana, but it proposes to be its own Denver.” Silver remained key to the city’s survival, but it would be copper, not silver, that made Butte rich. Copper, starting in the 1880s, allowed electricity to flow and voices on telephone lines to carry. By 1895, Butte produced 25 percent of the world’s copper. Butte’s emergence as the territory’s center of commerce gave rise to a new service sector including grocery stores, banks, hotels, and laundries.29 On the surface, this overview of market growth and economic development suggests that technological advancement, industrialization, and urbanization brought increasing order to social relations in the Rocky Mountain region. The people living through these transformations, however, faced instability and unrest because of the difficulties they experienced in reconciling established notions of the value of labor with the newly emerging economic logic that adherents of capitalism advocated. A January 10, 1873, editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune about the city’s recent growth illustrated the burgeoning concern over the labor question. The piece began by lauding the fact that the “transition from the barter system to a cash basis is nearly consummated, and all regulated by the natural laws of supply and demand.” Unfortunately, it seemed that “the lack of a proper scale of prices” meant that some mechanics failed to earn full compensation for their efforts. The author wrote that he heard “some talk of forming Trades Unions here,” and acknowledged that such actions would better protect workers and allow “for the better regulation of prices.” He worried, however, that the mechanics who organized might “fall into the common error of being tyrannical,” of forcing employers to pay more than the value of their labor.30 The Tribune editor’s fear of union tyranny appeared linked to the organizing efforts of semiskilled hard-rock miners and unskilled railroad workers since craftsmen’s organizations predated this expression of anxiety and did not elicit such negative reactions. Salt Lake City’s printers, for instance, unionized in 1852 with a “feast” that demonstrated to all their feelings of fraternity. The 1860 U.S. census reported only eighteen compositors in the city, making the gathering, not to mention the printer’s society, rather small. In 1854, the fraternity gave way to the territory’s first union, the Deseret Typographical Association, which in 1886 became the Salt Lake Typographical Union. Salt Lake City’s July 4, 1861,

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parade offered evidence that the city’s carpenters, painters, and boot- and shoemakers had also organized, as members of these unions joined the printers in carrying banners that called for “strength through unity.”31 Such displays of solidarity did not elicit columns of concern. Yet when the Cache Valley silver miners united in 1871, vowed to spread their organization to the other emerging mining areas, and proclaimed that they wanted to be governed by laws of their own making, unions received a great deal of attention in the Tribune. By 1876, editorials appeared that reminded readers to approach market interactions with caution. The editor acknowledged that “the law of supply and demand is hindered” when workers who want to labor are “living in enforced idleness.” Those seeking reforms initiated by the territorial assembly, however, needed to remember that legislation “creates nothing, it can only regulate forces that already exist.” Furthermore, legislators “are not the men to grapple intelligently with such subjects as the rate of wages, the relation of employer and employed, associations against competition, and endless other social and industrial problems.” Ultimately the paper showed its proemployer leanings by arguing that to earn higher pay, workers should seek to create “abundance.”32 The Tribune’s editor agreed with the early nineteenth-century maxims that labor created value, that natural economic laws existed, and that those who worked hard deserved decent pay. Unions, if moderate in their behavior, could correct the skewed distribution of wealth that increasingly defined post–Civil War social relations. Should workers engage in political action and win measures that altered market relations, however, they could end up threatening the health of the republic by defying natural law. Through all of the economic turbulence that territorial residents faced, they had to bear in mind that “man is not permitted to invent laws, he must discover them. Machinery for carrying the laws of nature into practical effect is the most he can invent.”33 Legislators, especially those sympathetic to workers, the Tribune concluded, needed to consider reforms cautiously, lest they obscure the natural order. In 1871, even Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who in 1884 would become president of the UP Railroad, expressed fears about the changes happening to the concept of value, displayed concern over the effect of industrialization on the larger culture, and cautiously advocated for state intervention to prevent unchecked corporate power over markets. Specifically, he focused on the influence railroads wielded over social relations and argued that the “political system” was “not calculated to deal with” such corporations. He explained: “Here then are two systems growing

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and expanding side by side—the representative, republican system of government, adapted to a simple and somewhat undeveloped phase of society; and the corporate industrial system, the result and concomitant of a complex artificial civilization.” He accepted the fact that “the effects of political morality” can injure economic development, but concluded that the government should have some power to deal with railroad monopolies. Ultimately, Adams would promote uniform freight rates and government investigations of charges of unfair competition. Conversely, he would also complain about excessive regulation and the power that Rocky Mountain unionists in his employ exercised over workplace practices and wage scales.34 For example, in 1891 he stated that the Denver members of KOL District Assembly (DA) 82, which was organized by Buchanan and stretched from Omaha to Portland, “are running the properties.” Adams added that whenever a manager approached Denver unionists about amending pay rates or work rules, he did so “with the feeling that he is whipped in advance.”35 UP employee, Salt Lake City union organizer, and later San Francisco labor leader Frank Roney offered a more impassioned observation than had Adams. He argued that throughout the 1870s, the “laborer began to pinch himself and upon waking up found” that the “glamour of becoming an employer had faded into the reality of perpetual servitude and the boasted freedom of American citizenship had become as mythical as any fairy tale told in a nursery.”36 To Roney, corporate owners had not only disregarded the labor theory of value, they had distorted the significance of the Civil War by perverting the free-labor ideal. Roney knew that the 1870 census revealed that wage workers now outnumbered selfemployed entrepreneurs. If the citizenry and public officials simply accepted the decline of social mobility, workers would find themselves unable to transition from “wage slavery” to independence. He also seemed to realize that despite the claims of some nineteenth-century economists and employers, the natural state of the market did not create this new reality. Owners did. Like Roney, Denver’s Joseph Buchanan voiced his outrage at the assaults on the labor theory of value and the free-labor ideal. In 1878, he decided to seek his economic independence by moving to Leadville in hopes of discovering his own silver mine. When he and his wife started their journey, he recalled, they did not fear train robbers or claim jumpers. Their “fancied security received a rude shock,” however, when they encountered “thieves.” Rather than falling victim to the typical western outlaw depicted in frontier novels, the bandits Buchanan met used

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“a seventy-ton locomotive as a battering-ram.” Also, Leadville did not resemble the mining camps made popular in gold and silver rush lore. Instead of a meeting place of prospectors, Buchanan found mine managers setting work rules, establishing wage rates, and promoting efficiency. In other words, he found an industrial mining center where railroad and mine owners, whom he labeled “thieves,” drove down wages by transporting nonunion workers who offered a supply of “cheap” labor. Miners’ pay decreased but, Buchanan argued, ore still came out of the ground and profits increased. The “rule ‘live and let live’ had been succeeded by the rule of ‘Every fellow for himself, and the devil take the hindmost’”—or, the “Iron Law of Wages.”37 Posited by early nineteenth-century English economist David Ricardo, the iron law of wages contended that the forces of supply and demand usually dictated that workers’ pay found equilibrium at the level of subsistence. To varying degrees, the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, Lum, Adams, Roney, and Buchanan remained attached to the free-labor ideal and the labor theory of value. All five men expressed apprehension over how the new social order affected these concepts. Yet the concern that Adams and the Tribune’s editor felt was quite different from the worries that Lum, Roney, and Buchanan voiced. The industrialist and the newspaperman sought balance. They wanted to figure out a way to have fair remuneration for hard work and promote social mobility while not impeding the expanding economy. To Lum, Roney, and Buchanan the new economy itself represented a threat to the independence of the vast majority of Americans. The three labor activists viewed the rise of capitalism as tyranny not progress because they saw the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands as its most defining characteristic. Divisions also existed among the five men regarding their views of the state. The Tribune’s editor considered politicians incapable of devising policies that would reward toil and advance economic expansion. In his mind, people could only discover, not invent, laws because the laws governing the economy were natural. As a result, the sole solution to this dilemma involved unions working with management in deciding both fair wages and acceptable workplace practices. To his way of thinking, managers would guide this process. Lum, the anarchist, assumed the government to be an agent of capital and therefore incapable of assisting labor in obtaining justice. He advocated cooperatives such as the early Mormon model as the best means of reestablishing nineteenth-century economic principles. Roney supported working-class political action but worried about unionists putting too much faith in elected officials. He champi-

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oned a strong labor movement that limited its political participation and concentrated on the use of collective actions, such as strikes and boycotts, to attain justice.38 Only Adams and Buchanan considered state intervention essential. Adams and Buchanan saw political power as the only force capable of preserving republican values. Adams understood capitalism as positive for America’s advancement as a world power and simply wanted to keep its most dangerous side effect, greed, checked by minimal regulation. For Buchanan, the issue was more serious. Redistributive policies, or the government sanctioning various union activities that produced the same end through prolabor laws, had to be enacted to prevent wage slavery. Buchanan, by paying attention to what the region’s workers had done before he arrived in the Rocky Mountain West, having an open mind, and encouraging workers to experiment with different forms of political action, would provide a blueprint for a working-class-centered political movement. Creating this coalition proved no simple task. As his differences with his fellow labor activists suggested, workers who shared a similar view of post–Civil War capitalism and its promotion of an unequal distribution of wealth often differed in their solutions of how to acquire the wages they demanded. Building unity in the face of these differences—not to mention confronting the opposition to labor’s view of justice posed by the defenders of free markets and supporters of minimal regulation—began by taking traditional forms of protest and altering them slightly.

“Power Put in Motion” The mostly Irish miners Buchanan met in Leadville provided him with his first exposure to labor militancy. These silver diggers repudiated their employers’ notions of the worth of their work by taking action. In 1880, they organized and struck after rumors of an impending wage cut circulated and mine managers banned smoking and unnecessary talking under­ ground. The KOL-affiliated Miners’ Cooperative Union demanded a recall of the new restrictions and insisted on a dollar-per-day pay increase. Union president Michael Mooney led a brass band and more than three thousand strikers and supporters through the town’s main streets. Buchanan counted himself among the union’s supporters as he cheered the parade and gave street corner speeches attacking the greed of employers during the strike.39 Silver-mine owners revealed that they shared workers’ sense of the significance of civic celebrations. They arranged an antiunion

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“Law and Order” parade, which had nearly two thousand marchers. Buchanan recalled that “each parader” in the owner-organized demonstration “carried some sort of weapon; about half of them had rifles or shot guns, the rest had to be satisfied to look brave with pick-handles, clubs, and the like.”40 Tensions in Leadville increased as unionists attempted to stop strikebreakers from entering the mines. Owners wrote letters to Colorado Governor Fredrick Pitkin that exaggerated fistfights into riots, and based on these reports, Pitkin declared martial law, sent the state militia to forcefully end the strike, and allowed mine owners to maintain old wage rates. Although workers lost this battle, news of their struggle fueled hard-rock-miner activism. Consequently, 6,588 of 7,163 employed miners in Colorado, from 1881 through 1888, engaged in forty-six recorded strikes, scoring thirty-five victories and eleven defeats.41 Although new to Buchanan, industrial miners in the West had started practicing this blended form of protest—parade and strike—in 1863 when mine owners controlling Nevada’s Comstock Lode cut wages. Silver miners in Virginia City formed the Miners’ Protective Union, marched down city streets, and demanded $4 per day. In Colorado, workers had embraced this practice as early as 1873. That year, the Rocky Mountain News attempted to clarify rumors circulating around Denver that miners in nearby Central City “had broken out in bold defiance of [the] law,” that “blood had been shed,” and that “the rebels had taken possession of the town.” The Cornish immigrants and “a few Irishmen” who made up the local workforce did hold town meetings and demonstrated in city streets, but all appeared “sober.” These miners, the editor concluded, simply wanted their wage rates restored to $3, not a revolution.42 By 1877, militant parades appeared ubiquitous in the urbanizing West. The Colorado Miner, published in the small silver camp of Georgetown, reprinted an article from the San Francisco Mining Press, which informed readers that “agitation on the question of the reduction of miners’ wages,” complete with “torch-light procession[s], music and banners,” was “not confined to one locality.”43 More than a demonstration of workers’ dissatisfaction with pay cuts, these civic displays exhibited a growing class sensibility, as they typically fostered union organization. Butte’s metal miners’ parade in 1881, for example, not only resulted in the creation of the Butte Miners Union (BMU); it also established an annual event. Every June 13, workers in the city and the surrounding areas celebrated Miners’ Union Day by parading, listening to speeches, attending concerts, dancing, and participating in greased-pig contests.44

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Parades politicized economic issues and made them battles over competing notions of justice. In workers’ minds, wage cuts represented an attack not only on their sense of remuneration for hard work, but also on their political rights. If laborers could not earn enough to eventually have freedom, to buy land or a workshop, they would never enjoy full citizenship. Parades demonstrated workers’ collective effort to challenge employers and solicit the larger public’s assistance in pressuring owners to recognize their freedom. Parades typically proved peaceful enough that laborers could demonstrate control over their passions, while at the same time displaying a militancy that threatened employers. Marching shoulder to shoulder in the street allowed workers to exhibit their anger, but by playing music and holding banners and flags, they highlighted their intent to avoid violence. If they so desired, as the rumormongers feared, laborers could exchange their banners and instruments for clubs, rocks, and possibly guns. Thus, parades signified both the workers’ search for a political voice as well as the tone in which they wanted to be heard. Silver miners who lived and worked in the Pine Valley Mountains of Washington County, Utah, located in the territory’s southwesternmost corner, further illustrated the pervasiveness of Rocky Mountain workers’ willingness to communicate their shared sense of justice through expressions of controlled militancy. After a few hours of digging on February 1, 1881, the two-hundred fifty to three hundred men employed there watched as mine managers posted a notice. The company decided to cut its workers’ daily wage rate by fifty cents. In response, the miners, who had recently organized, held an impromptu meeting where they unanimously voted to strike. The union’s president, identified in court documents only as O’Loughlin, mounted his horse as the rest of the men assembled in columns of two behind him. A miner named Hanley stood second in line carrying a large American flag as the men marched toward the nearest town, Silver Reef City. When the disgruntled ore diggers passed the only open mine, the Savage, they forced it to shut down. The miners then declared themselves in control of local affairs, or as Salt Lake City’s Deseret News reported, the “Miner’s Union was the government of the county.” Federal marshals eventually arrived, arrested the strikers, and ended the revolt.45 By June, the territory’s district court had found these Silver Reef unionists guilty of violating Utah’s 1878 statute prohibiting riots. Arthur Brown, the miners’ attorney, filed forty-one assignments of error against the district court—all offering different examples of how his clients had

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failed to receive a fair trial—with the territory’s supreme court. To engage in a riot, according to the law, these workers had to have used force or violence against “public liberty” or private property. The court defined force as “power put in motion,” which then was “employed against common right.” Members of the Silver Reef Miners’ Union, their lawyer claimed, had merely paraded in a militant fashion. The justices rejected Brown’s version of events. Members of the court interpreted the miners’ decision to vote before closing down their employer’s properties “full of significance” and ruled it an expression of “unlawful purpose.” Also, one witness testified that O’Loughlin told the men at the Savage “to cease all work,” and “not start up until ordered by the union.” The unionists’ actions and the witness’s account convinced the justices to uphold the district court’s convictions. Each man who participated in the parade faced up to two years in jail for rioting, and union leaders received longer sentences after being convicted of additional charges.46 The members of the Silver Reef Miners’ Union had briefly become the government of the county by putting “power into motion.” They had indeed violated the statute prohibiting rioting by destroying property. When the miners decided to follow O’Loughlin and the flag, they stopped the pumps that kept the mines from flooding. Water filled the underground shafts. Yet from the miners’ perspective, they had not used violence against “public liberty” or force against “common right.” By taking a stand against lower pay, they considered themselves liberty’s champions. To these miners, voting and parading with the flag, shutting down the mines, and briefly taking control of their local government did not mean that they necessarily wanted to replicate the Paris Commune in the desert. Rather, they hoped their fellow citizens would recognize their efforts to pressure mine owners to accept their version of the natural laws of economics. In other words, those who labored deserved the lion’s share of the profits that companies earned, because their toil created wealth. In a collective letter to the Salt Lake Tribune, the miners explained that they did not wish to dwell on the fact that capital “is the ungrateful offspring” of labor, which “we all know,” but instead wanted readers to under­stand why they fought for a $4 wage. This rate of pay represented fair value for the skills required to become a master of their trade, and the strength and endurance necessary to extract silver from the earth. They added that $4 was just compensation considering the dangers they faced every day that they went below ground. The letter ended by linking the company’s failure to appreciate their skills, knowledge, and willingness to risk their lives to eastern colonialism. “Other tradesmen,” they explained,

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“usually work under the supervision of a foreman who understands his business.” Managers and owners, they argued, who knew little about the silver-mining industry and lived on the other side of the Mississippi River got rich off their daily toil.47 Interestingly, the editorial page of the progrowth, mostly antiunion Tribune, which referred to the Silver Reef miners’ actions as “criminal,” did argue that mine owners had adopted a wage scale that advanced an unnatural distribution of wealth. The editor feared the consequences for the territory and the nation if such transgressions continued.48 Mine owners’ refusal to pay “fair wages,” from the miners’ perspective, signaled their intent to prevent workers access to social mobility, the full promise of independence. By denying miners the justice of fair wages, owners had acted politically because they infringed on these workers’ ability to eventually claim full citizenship. Had these workers truly rioted, had they put “power in motion” against public liberty, they would have destroyed the mines with dynamite or committed other violent acts. Instead, they responded with their own form of political action. They voted on how to protest, and then they paraded in hopes of making the larger public aware that by cutting wages, ignoring unsafe working conditions, requiring ten- to twelve-hour workdays, and implementing harsh work rules, employers had practiced wage slavery. If the larger public accepted labor’s position, then community pressure, the collective voice of democracy, would have insisted that owners change their behavior. If the Tribune can be counted as a measure of public sentiment, the parade succeeded in its primary aim. Yet parades could no longer function as a public-policy directive and alter the conduct of private entities. Corporations now competed within national and global markets, and therefore became increasingly less concerned with community values. Workers needed a stronger form of political action. Fearful of employers’ growing political influence, inspired by the Leadville miners’ display of civic action, and aware that similar parades elsewhere represented a larger phenomenon of class unity, Buchanan committed himself to a life as a union organizer and political activist. He moved from Leadville back to Denver in 1880, and decided that printing a labor paper offered the best means of organizing workers and uniting them into a larger political movement. Along with tailor John Lennon, he devised a strategy to make unions, rather than political parties, workers’ primary political agent. In 1882, Lennon and Buchanan brought members of the Typographical, Bakers’, and Iron Molders’ unions along with those belonging to

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KOL local assemblies into the DTA with the express notion of promoting “unity of action among the working class” through “a central body.” More specifically, DTA-affiliated workers felt “a duty to use influence with the law-making power to secure the adoption of proper laws regulating the hours constituting a day’s work” as well as gaining fair wages, ending the stranglehold of company stores, and requiring employers to develop minimum safety standards on shop-floors and in the mines.49 In seeking to advance these goals as the 1883 city election neared, Lennon and Buchanan proposed that the city’s workers gather in a mass meeting to collectively articulate a legislative agenda and then find candidates, regardless of party, who would champion their aims. Although these unionists could not offer “friends” the financial support of corporate backers, they could promise these candidates a bloc of votes in a city where close elections appeared the norm, and where the number of working-class voters and labor organizations expanded each year. Under Buchanan and Lennon, the DTA functioned as a political body. Organizing a meeting of the city’s union members and getting them to pledge themselves to participating in political actions represented the first step in building a working-class-based political movement. Mobilizing these workers had to follow. The 1883 Washington Day celebration served this function. Instead of envisioning parades as passionate displays of democracy, as ends in themselves, Buchanan wanted workers to conceive of this march as a new beginning where their willingness to call for prolabor measures in the cold and snow culminated in the election of politicians who supported their legislative demands. He wanted to convince workers to construct an alternative to the two-party system and establish a new political culture rooted in the values of the region’s labor movement. Following the parade, he argued that “if the issue were only between the republican and democratic parties of to-day, we should emphatically say no political action for us as a unionist,” but “the question is not so confined. The only parties to the contest that should be considered by any conscientious laboring man are the monopolists and moneyed aristocrats on the one hand and the toiling class on the other.”50 He insisted that if unionists acted collectively, they could use their votes to revolutionize current political practices and acquire prolabor measures despite the confines of the two-party system. On March 24, 1883, seventy-one of the seventy-two delegates elected by their unions to the DTA met in hopes of developing a unified workingclass voice in the municipal campaign. At the gathering, unionists created

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the Workingmen’s Political Committee, chose Lennon as its chair, and vowed to vote for candidates, no matter their party affiliation, who supported their aims. Those assembled devised a platform that included calls for ending the corruption of both parties, guaranteeing equal protection under the law to all classes, and reducing tax rates for workers.51 DTA delegates also nominated candidates for mayor, auditor, city treasurer, police judge, city attorney, city engineer, and the nine open city council seats. Workingmen’s nominees captured the offices of city attorney, treasurer, city engineer, police judge, and one city council seat. While workers’ ability to elect those friendly to their interests represented an accomplishment, their actual successes proved more difficult to determine. Republicans won the majority of offices in the city election. Of the five labor-endorsed candidates who won, four were Republicans. Frank Tilford, elected city attorney on the Citizen’s Party ticket, was the exception. In all likelihood, the Republican candidates endorsed by the DTA would have won without the support of the Workingmen’s Committee. Yet Republican and Democratic Party leaders perceived union backing as essential for success at the polls, and they courted the union vote thereafter.52 The results of the 1883 election convinced Buchanan and others that their union-centered strategy represented the best path for workers’ entry into the political sphere. This tactic meant that the Denver labor movement refused to take major parties as a whole, but instead picked the candidates who favored the DTA’s agenda and supported them. In creating a ticket that consisted of candidates who favored prolabor legislation, unionists—like businessmen—secured friends. Unlike their corporate counterparts who used large campaign contributions or even bribes to acquire political allies, workers used votes.53 In an editorial written after the municipal contest, Buchanan pointed out that when workers discussed politics in the past, many “were of the idea that if a society took any action it would be to pledge support to the candidates . . . of one of the corrupt political parties.” Now, he believed, this experiment showed that laborers could enter the political arena and not pledge their support to a party. In fact, he argued, “unions and all labor organizations are instituted and maintained for mutual protection and to aid in bettering the condition of members thereof.” He then asked, “What more potent means of bettering the condition of any class of workingmen can be employed than the repeal of prejudicial laws and the enactment of just ones?”54 He encouraged Colorado unionists to form more organizations like the Workingmen’s

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Political Committee. That fall, the DTA created a Workingmen’s County Ticket. As he had done the previous spring, Buchanan attacked the major parties and insisted that workers elect “friends” and representatives from their own ranks.55

“Making a Respectable Living Wage” Even before developing his idea of organizing a workingmen’s ticket, Buchanan recognized that individual laborers had to belong to a large voting bloc to have political influence. So, in addition to his commitment to overt political activism, he spent a great deal of his time writing and organizing. In the first issue of the Enquirer, in December 1882, Buchanan combated potential antiunion sentiment by instructing readers that in “nine cases out of ten,” those who denounced labor organizations most likely had “been expelled from unions for some low, sneaking action, such as is not countenanced by any upright man in any walk of life.” He added, “Do not heed these men; they are the vipers and warts and scabs on decency and honesty.”56 Ultimately, Buchanan, with the help of others, proved so successful in organizing workers that the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics (CBLS) reported in 1888 that “during the last six years,” unionization “has been so rapid that to-day Colorado has more labor organizations, in proportion to its population, than any State in the Union.”57 Buchanan’s insistence that workers focus on the immediate problems they faced, which included concentrating on their shared objectives instead of their points of disagreement, appeared the chief reason for his exceptional record as a labor leader. The way he dealt with workers’ shifting conceptions of value provided one example of his ability to forge common ground among unionists who expressed different perspectives. Buchanan concluded his 1882 call to organize with an appeal to the labor theory of value: Joining a union, he asserted, meant fighting for an “equal share of the prosperity” one created.58 A week later, he ran an article contending that workers ought to have fair wages. According to the article’s author, who used the pseudonym Kicker, fair wages included the ability to afford “comfortable lodging, respectable clothing, wholesome and palatable food, with a margin for saving.”59 Kicker’s position reflected an adherence to the ideas of KOL-affiliated intellectuals Ira Steward and George Gunton, who encouraged workers to focus on acquiring “living wages” instead of recouping the fruits of their labor. Steward and Gunton suggested that the rise of large firms, integrated national and international markets, and technological innovation did not nec-

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essarily mean the onset of a dependent relationship with employers, which workers called “wage slavery.” Rather than conceiving of wealth as crops and the goods produced in a craftsmen’s shop, Steward argued that workers’ wants determined wages. He insisted that reduced hours would push laborers to fight for higher wages and give them more leisure time to spend their money. Wants would change, grow, and fuel greater spending, which would continually advance the economy. Gunton, building on Steward’s work, insisted that by recognizing value in consumer demand and unionists’ ability to use their organizations to command high wages, the demand for goods would continually expand along with profits and workers’ living standards.60 The living wage argument prefigured John Bates Clark’s concept of marginalism. According to Clark, the amount a consumer was willing to pay for something, not the labor required to produce that good, should establish the price of the item. In an 1883 editorial, Buchanan offered his own thoughts on what workers deserved. He argued that even though “the press, the pulpit, and [the] political economist” claimed that the laborer was “much better off now than were his ancestors and the workingmen of a hundred years ago,” it “must be borne in mind that production has increased a thousand fold.” He then asked, “Friends, the question is not—Are we better off than our ancestors?—but are we as well off as the advanced condition of society warrant[s] us in being?”61 Both Kicker’s argument and Buchanan’s editorial suggested that working-class notions of value in the early 1880s sat in between a belief in the labor theory of value and a commitment to obtaining living wages. Buchanan’s piece revealed a labor theory of value sensibility by identifying production as the essential determinant for setting wage rates. Kicker proved closer to the living-wage ideal, as she or he focused on workers as consumers, on their ability to afford decent things and have savings. Buchanan’s contention also contained hints of livingwage principles. He appeared to accept the reality of a permanent wage workforce, which represented a clear shift in thinking from his Leadville days. Furthermore, his words on increased productivity hinted that he did not view technology as the greatest foe workers faced. This public discussion over how to define value was no trivial matter, because in workers’ minds, wages along with safety, power on the shop floor, and hours of work, were symbols of justice and the leading reasons they organized and struck during the Great Upheaval. Between 1881 and 1900, working men and women sought the wages they believed their employers owed them by engaging in at least 22,739 strikes.62 The Great Upheaval, as this period of violent class conflict has

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become known, signified a contest over who determined value. In most parts of the country, employers eventually succeeded because they turned their surplus workforce into strikebreakers. In fact, 40 percent of strikes during this period included the use of scabs.63 In the Rocky Mountain West, however, weak institutions, absentee ownership, and an inability on the part of employers to create a permanent oversupply of labor, at least until 1900, offered a well-organized workforce the opportunity to use the instability that economic change had created to their advantage.64 A Denver bricklayers’ representative, for instance, explained that when he and his fellow workers decided to unionize in 1884, they made $4.50 for a ten-hour day. By 1886, they earned $4 for an eight-hour day, and by 1888 their pay had increased to $5 a day for the same eight hours. The city’s carpenters reported a change in wages and hours from $2.50 per ten hours in 1884 to $3.25 for nine hours in 1888. Unskilled building laborers made $2.25 for a ten-hour day in 1887, but after unionizing and winning a strike in 1888, they made $3.00 for an eight-hour day. Belonging to a union, in the words of a Denver cigar maker, meant the difference between receiving “a mere pittance” and “making a respectable living wage.”65 The same year that Denver Bricklayers organized, 1884, the city’s railroad workers engaged in a massive strike that spurred an uprising along the UP line. On May 4, UP officials slashed wages for all of its workers. Over twelve thousand railroad laborers from Nebraska to Oregon struck in protest. In Denver, a committee of UP employees came to Buchanan’s office for help. “In ten minutes,” he found himself “in a horse-car en route to assume for the first time leadership in a labor strike.” Upon arriving, he heard militant rhetoric that revealed both workers’ anger and their spirit of collectivism. “No gathering of union men,” he later wrote, “can compete with a crowd of unorganized strikers when it comes to radicalism, denunciation of employers, threats, and incendiarism.” He hoped to provide a means for workers to express their raw passions by creating the KOL’s DA 82, which represented all UP laborers from Omaha to Portland. The machinists, yardmen, freight handlers, firemen, and engineers in Denver and throughout the region achieved victory in a few short days. Their pay rates were restored. Over the next decade, DA 82 proved one of the KOL’s strongest affiliates, and its workers earned the highest wages on any railroad line.66 The next year, these railroad workers, led by Buchanan, claimed another success against the UP in Denver after owners tried for a second time to lighten pay envelopes. Knights and their supporters displayed the

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bonds of solidarity that existed throughout the city by staging a militant parade. The housewives and female laborers belonging to both of Denver’s all-female KOL local assemblies, appeared on Monday, May 18, the first day of the strike, to halt strikebreakers by pushing them into irrigation ditches. Buchanan quipped that a “scab tried to get through the line” and “half a dozen women gave him the ‘ditch degree.’” Those “house wives of labor,” he wrote, “were fervent believers in the virtues of water.”67 Later that evening, protestors marched two miles “loudly singing the battle hymn of organized labor in the West, ‘Hold the Fort, ye Knights of Labor!’” Buchanan remembered that the singing stopped twice. First, the crowd held “a little bonfire” outside the office of the Rocky Mountain News, burning recent issues that had condemned the strike. Second, the “nearly two thousand voices” stopped singing to issue “cat-calls, groans, and hisses” at Shed’s Cheap Store. The Knights organized a boycott of the store because it refused to recognize the local clerks’ union.68 Unity, however, was not complete. Some members of the Denver Typographical Union (DTU) denounced the protestors.69 The DTU’s aversion to the destruction of property made them the lone critical voice from within the labor movement. As Buchanan’s experiences illustrated, union leaders, labor editors, and rank-and-file activists—the people who accepted the responsibility for communicating and promoting the demands workers sought—faced a difficult task. DA 82-affiliated Knights in Ogden, for instance, argued that workers are “slaves to those who live upon the creation” of their labor, and called for Congress to enact measures to provide everyone “the result of his labor.” Groups like the DTA proclaimed themselves for “fair wages.” 70 In other words, workers agreed that wages signified justice, but differed on the meaning of justice and how to achieve it. Some of the region’s unionists wanted to abolish the wage system. Others, especially skilled workers, claimed hard work entitled them to a living wage, to pay that allowed them the ability to purchase a home, enjoy good food, and afford leisure activities.71 Buchanan attempted to smooth these tensions by using the rhetoric of the labor theory of value, while at the same time advocating the living wage as a short-term solution. Buchanan was not alone in mixing economic theories and advocating that workers and their supporters focus first on the immediate improvement of wages and then figure out their conceptual differences later. In 1888, CBLS investigators examined the conditions that women workers in Denver faced. Their report read as if it could have come from the Enquirer. The CBLS commissioners asserted that the pages “of history are

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full of deeds of heroism of women, not only within the confines of their homes, and in the discharge of their sacred domestic duties, but also on the field of battle in defense of their country, their homes, their religion, and their honor, as well as the honor of their sex.” Therefore, the report continued, “the time has gone by for women to look upon men alone as defenders and fighters of their battles.” Women now demanded “equal recognition and equal compensation” for “equal services,” and they deserved it.72 Yet they not only lacked equality, but their “days and nights of ceaseless toil” forced many into “the bitterest depths of despair,” which in turn led some women to “lay down their honorable lives.” Employers, “living in luxury on the result of their [women’s] labor” and “seeking a depression of the scanty wages upon which it is impossible for many to exist in decency and honor,” are to blame for this tragic condition. The commissioners concluded by finding themselves “forced to admit that a great source of immorality is directly attributable to the evil consequences that come of a system, the principle of which seems to be: The greatest amount of labor” for “the smallest wages.” 73 By critiquing business owners for acquiring “luxury” by taking the fruits of these women’s toil, and attacking them as so lacking in honor and decency that they forced female laborers into states of despair, even suicide, the CBLS commissioners clearly evidenced a labor theory of value sensibility. These bureaucrats also, however, argued that if people “would only refuse to bedeck themselves in cheap-made good[s], products of the labor of their half-clad, shivering and half-starved sisters, struggling to keep the wolf of moral degradation, as well as the wolf of hunger, from the door, they then would do much towards bringing about revolution in the social condition of those who are compelled to toil early and late for the necessaries of life.” 74 By acting as attentive consumers willing to buy better goods at higher prices, CBLS officials concluded, workers and others would champion living wages and aid laborers in attaining some justice. Unionists could also engage in consumer activism when they decided not to purchase goods and services. The DTA, for example, had a boycott committee. In 1883, the DTU came before the city’s central body and reported that the Rocky Mountain News had hired “rat,” or nonunion, printers. The boycott committee called upon all the city’s laborers to refuse to buy the News, and reminded them of “Workingmen Who Recognize Their Right to Organize and Take Any and All Lawful Steps Which Will Benefit Their Condition and Protect Them from the Injustice of Unscru-

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pulous Capitalists.” The boycott succeeded, and by the summer of 1884, the typographical workers had established a closed shop at the News.75 Workers not only boycotted to help their fellow unionists organize, they also refused to purchase goods in order to make labor organizations stronger. In July 1890, for instance, Butte grocer Owen Williams refused to recognize the work rules of the butchers’ union. In making his opposition to their shop floor codes known, he also called the meat cutters a bunch of “drunks and loafers.” The Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly (SBTLA), the central body of county unionists headquartered in Butte, declared a boycott against Williams that eventually forced him to change his mind. On September 8, 1890, he sent the Butchers a letter apologizing “for any language used or utilized by me against any labor organization,” and promised “that henceforth and hereafter my place of business will be conducted on union principles, and that I will employ only union help.” 76 Across the nation, incidents such as this one spurred business owners to file lawsuits, arguing that unionists usurped their property rights by interfering with their profits. Many justices not only accepted this argument, but started to issue injunctions against labor boycotts.77 DA 82 charged that court rulings gave owners an unfair advantage because railroad executives, to name one example, set fares, wages, and hauling rates. This power, according to Julius N. Corbin, editor of DA 82’s UPEM, amounted to a boycott over consumers and employees. “Corporations,” he wrote, “have so long conspired against the mass of the people, and have been so successful, they are evidently fearful that some one will infringe on what they consider their monopoly.” If boycotts indeed made workers “guilty of conspiracy,” he concluded, then “every workingman” had a duty to “become a conspirator.” 78 By pointing out that the courts understood boycotts as conspiratorial acts, Corbin simply highlighted the fact that markets represented political constructions, and that those who built these sites of economic exchange, the politicians and judges who created and defined the laws that shaped the contours of market inter­ actions, skewed the rules toward employers. In calling on workers to become conspirators, to act collectively in defiance of these laws, he pointed out that the fight for higher wages and better conditions was as much a political as an economic struggle. Rocky Mountain workers’ high rates of unionization as well as their strike and boycott victories had material consequences. A regional comparison of earned income reveals that Rocky Mountain workers averaged

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$3.25 per day, excluding farm laborers, while the next-closest grouping of workers, those on the Pacific Coast, made $3.02 per day. By combining these two regions, one economist found that western workers earned 15 to 25 percent more, in real wages, than workers in the Northeast. Labor shortages in the West had some impact on the variance, but these stark differences resulted largely from the fact that Rocky Mountain unskilled workers made far more than their counterparts in the rest of the nation. Common laborers in the Mountain West made $2.15 per day while the next-highest paid workers in this category, those on the Pacific Coast, made $1.76, or 39 cents less per day. In New England, common laborers took home just $1.47 per day, while the lowest-paid workers in this group, those in the South Atlantic states, made only 97 cents per day.79 Buchanan had a great deal to do with this success. Politically, he attempted to convince workers to use their unions as their political agents by creating workingmen’s tickets. Through the Enquirer, he tried to prevent ideological divisions by presenting an array of thoughts on how to determine the value of labor and achieve a working-class form of justice. He united both skilled and unskilled workers in the DTA; he served as chief organizer for the KOL in the region; and he represented all Knights west of the Mississippi River on the KOL executive council. The fact that he issued union cards to women who worked as domestics, seamstresses, and office workers also helps explain the expansion of this movement and the comparatively high wages Rocky Mountain common laborers earned. Essentially, Buchanan attempted to make local and regional labor organizations the centers of working people’s lives. He believed that workers should study political economy together, articulate a unified set of goals, vote as a bloc, and support each other to earn high wages.

A “Foolish Prejudice” Buchanan’s self-assigned task of creating common ground among workers in order to build a truly unified and politically effective regional movement led him to advocate the lowering of ethnic and racial barriers. In a speech he gave on Independence Day 1886, for example, he insisted that to attain justice, American-born white workers had to abandon their animus toward immigrants and welcome foreign-born laborers into their unions. He chastised those in the audience who possessed the “absurd idea” that “a man who was born in a foreign country is not as good, is not entitled to the same respect and rights as he of American birth.” He insisted that “‘all men are born equal,’ no matter [in] what country they

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may have first seen the light.” Anti-immigrant sentiment was a “foolish prejudice,” he continued, and anyone who disagreed only insulted “the memory of his [own] ancestors.” Buchanan then asserted that the “struggle which is upon you is not one of races, but it is a class war.”80 In closing, he urged all workers, in the city, state, region, and country, to see that they belonged to the same side when it came to battling capitalism. Immigrants from China and Europe stood among the first wageworkers in the industrializing West. The initial wave of Chinese immigrants left the coastal province of Kwangtung in southeastern China and arrived in California with hopes of finding fortune during the Gold Rush. After turmoil resulting from the Opium Wars and the collapsing Ch’ing dynasty created economic hardships and political instability in China, and American employers pushed for a new source of labor to build railroads, the U.S. and Chinese governments signed the Burlingame Treaty in 1868. This agreement relaxed immigration laws and led a new wave of migrants, at least 168,644 people mostly from Kwangtung, to leave China for the United States between 1870 and 1880. The majority in this second group of Chinese immigrants came as some type of unfree laborer. Most had arrived via the credit-ticket system, which was an arrangement where a merchant paid a person’s passage and the immigrant paid him back with interest. These workers typically landed in San Francisco and received aid in finding jobs from members of Chinese fraternal organizations. Others in the post-Burlingame era agreed to a contract, some lasting as long as ten years, with a Chinese broker working with an American employment agent. In exchange for transportation fare, they received reduced wages and had to work where the contractor sent them. An extreme form of this contract model developed whereby people unwittingly agreed to become what amounted to indentured servants, or “coolies.”81 The vast majority of Chinese immigrants remained in California. Census takers found just 7 Chinese-born inhabitants in Colorado in 1870, 612 in 1880, and 1,398 in 1890. In those same three censuses, investigators found 1,949, 1,765, and 2,532 Chinese residents in Montana, and 445, 501, and 806 members of this immigrant group in Utah.82 Most European immigrants living in the region between 1870 and 1890 came from Ireland, England, Scandinavia, and Germany. Beginning around 1900, Rocky Mountain cities and mining camps saw increases in the numbers of Italians, Finns, and Greeks. They too came in search of gold, better-paying jobs, or in attempts to avoid political turmoil. Like the Chinese, many of the Greeks and Italians in the region arrived as contract laborers. Demographic compositions varied from place to place. For

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example, Irish and British newcomers dominated Butte’s immigrant population between 1890 and 1910. The Irish made up 21.7 and the British (mostly from Cornwall) 26.5 percent of the city’s total population in 1890. These percentages changed slightly in 1900 to 24.2 percent Irish and 19.4 percent British, and then remained roughly the same at 24.3 percent and 20.5 percent, respectively, in 1910. Conversely, late nineteenthcentury Denver saw Germans rank first among the city’s foreign born, followed by the Irish, Swedes, English, and Canadians.83 Since 1883, Buchanan had attempted to convince workers who spent more time seeking greater rights through their ethnic organizations, rather than the KOL, that employers and managers belonging to those associations did not have their best interests at heart. Examining the Denver chapter of the Irish Land League demonstrates Buchanan’s point. Michael Davitt and John Devoy started the Land League in Ireland in 1879 to fight for peasants’ rights and independence from the English government. Davitt came to the United States in 1880 to raise money for his movement and helped to create the American Land League. The Missouriborn Protestant Buchanan regularly printed columns in the Enquirer that updated readers on the group’s activities, and attacked the antiunion Rocky Mountain Celt, which proclaimed itself the voice of Irish nationalism in the city. Buchanan also liked to remind readers that Colorado governor Frederick Pitkin, a founding member of the Land League, used the state militia to attack the mostly Irish-immigrant Leadville silver miners when they paraded and then struck against a wage cut in 1880.84 Buchanan’s call for workers to pay attention to the motives of some of their fellow ethnic-club members was not geared solely at the Irish, nor was it an attempt to make them choose between their union and their ethnic association. He praised ethnic organizations for offering aid, such as death benefits and food baskets, to members in times of crisis, and often attended fairs, dances, and speeches that immigrant groups sponsored. As historian David Brundage has pointed out, Denver’s leading labor organizer used the Enquirer to take over “the functions of the ethnic press.” In addition to the various Irish organizations he reported on, Buchanan informed his readers of the events and activism of German and Scandinavian groups that had formed.85 Put simply, he viewed the KOL as the best vehicle to manufacture class unity, but recognized that ethnic fraternities could play a central role in helping workers attain better wages, hours, and rights. He likely gave a bit more space in his paper to the efforts of the Irish and Irish Americans because the reforms proposed by the Land League

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dovetailed with the single tax program that Henry George championed. Furthermore, the nationalism advocated by the radical wing of the Land League served as a jumping off point to call on workers to unite in an international battle, “a class war,” against capitalism. We must recognize that various strains of nationalism existed. Some nationalists called for group solidarity based on a hyper patriotism, and others appealed for unity by making claims of superiority over all other races. Many Irish nationalists, however, argued that all oppressed groups represented the “people,” and all people deserved liberation.86 This latter variety of nationalism informed Buchanan’s 1886 address. The sentiment and some of the language he used, especially the line that workers must realize that they were fighting a “class” and not a “race” war, came from his friend and fellow labor activist Joseph Murray. Murray had left Dublin to work in the mills of Manchester, England, at midcentury. With his consciousness raised by Irish nationalists and union radicals, Murray vowed to support all workers who battled for liberty. He demonstrated this commitment by taking up arms and fighting with Giuseppe Garibaldi’s forces for Italian independence in 1859, and then arriving in the United States to join the Union army, specifically the Irish Brigade, to conquer slavery. In 1869, he moved to Colorado as part of a colony of utopian agrarian socialists. When that effort failed, he joined the Greenback Party in the 1870s and the KOL in the early 1880s.87 At a Land League meeting in November 1883, one speaker called for all Irishmen to battle for the success of their “race” against English subjugation. Murray rose and challenged the speaker’s position. He insisted that more people than just “the poor of Ireland” were “suffering from the tyranny of despotic and capitalist rule.” The “poor of all countries,” he declared, “were enslaved thereby.” He told the people seated in the Tabor Opera House that night that if they truly wanted to end the repression of the Irish peasantry, they had to side with workers throughout the world who engaged in an international “class war” to win the “equality of all mankind.”88 Many, if not most, Rocky Mountain workers failed to share Murray and Buchanan’s notion of cross-ethnic solidarity. On Sunday night, February 27, 1887, for example, a group of Italian immigrants sat anxiously in their favorite saloon in the little town of Granite, Colorado, outside of Leadville. A week prior, they had reacted to a mob attack on one of their countrymen by seizing a “German” and thrusting him into a hole they had cut in the frozen Arkansas River. They feared retaliation. As the sun set, their anxiety gave way to terror as they witnessed a group of men

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approaching with guns drawn. Earlier in the day, some Chinese workers had arrived from Denver, and most of the white men comprising this band had greeted them. The Denver Republican reported that a “committee promptly notified them [the Chinese workers] of the laws against the[ir] nationality that governed the locality.” They “were told to leave, and they boarded the east-bound passenger train” a “few hours later.” Now, at dusk, these defenders of white supremacy wanted blood. As the bar’s patrons fled, a cacophony of screams and discharging six-shooters filled the air. The crowd then burned the empty saloon to the ground. The Republican explained that an “uneasy feeling prevails in the town at present, as the effort to lynch the dagos may be repeated at any moment.” The reporter concluded that the “German who was ducked in the icecovered stream is not expected to live, and should he die the penalty will doubtless be a shocking one, as there is intense feeling against his tormentors.”89 By the late 1880s, tales of ethnic violence in the Rocky Mountain region proved all too common. Yet incidents of cross-ethnic unity also occurred. On June 13, 1887, roughly four months after the attack on Granite’s Italian railroad workers, members of the BMU decided to close the only open shop mine in town. The miners picked this day because it was Miners’ Union Day, the annual city holiday that celebrated the founding of the BMU. Employers gave their employees the day off knowing that, at best, a one-day strike would ensue if they refused. The Bluebird mine, the one exception, employed unorganized Italian immigrants for wages below union scale. A parade typically served as the highlight of every Miners’ Union Day. That year, the route included a stop at the Bluebird. Around noon, the procession arrived at the mine, the band ceased for a moment, and BMU leaders demanded that the superintendent pay respect for the holiday and close the mine. He refused. Then, as he attempted to rebuff his visitors, “a noose . . . carelessly thrown into the air . . . [landed] upon the head and shoulders of the superintendent.” The marchers then surrounded the nonunion miners and forced them through town until they reached the BMU’s hall. There, these men took an oath to the BMU and went back to work for union wages.90 These two examples demonstrated that notions of ethnic identity, and race for that matter, varied from place to place within the Rocky Mountain West. White working-class racism and ethnocentrism was informed by the larger racism and ethnocentrism found in popular culture and the writings of pseudoscientists, but local circumstances and personal interactions shaped the specific beliefs and behaviors of these workers. Some

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white unionists favored opening their organizations’ doors to various ethnic workers and African Americans. They reasoned, as BMU members exhibited with regard to Italian immigrants, that if all workers belonged to a union, that organization could have more influence over wage rates and shop-floor practices within a specific labor market.91 Others called for white-only unions. Sorting out these views becomes all the more complicated by the fact that individual unionists called for the inclusion of some ethnic and racial groups and not others.92 By juxtaposing white unionists’ attitudes toward African American workers and Chinese laborers we can better understand this point. A year before his 1886 Independence Day speech, Buchanan claimed that no color line existed within Denver’s labor organizations. The secretary of the Denver Cigar Makers’ Union seemed to concur. He reported that no distinction “on account of color” existed in his union, as it included “every cigarmaker in Denver, except a few Chinamen.”93 In Helena, Montana, white DA 82 leaders welcomed African American railroad laborers into the regional assembly from its inception.94 Beyond accepting African Americans into DA 82, the assembly’s periodical, the UPEM, printed articles and editorials attacking instances of racism against blacks. For example, after the KOL’s annual gathering in Richmond, Virginia, in 1886, one DA 82-affiliated Knight reported that the Richmond Whig critiqued KOL leaders for allowing “Mr. [Frank] Farrell,” an African American unionist from New York City, to speak. Some southern Knights, the piece stated, wanted to block Farrell from attending the theater in Richmond. The column then quipped: “Our minds have certainly been disabused” of the idea that “social equality” existed in the South.95 Despite these examples, Rocky Mountain white workers proved far from being champions of African Americans’ equality. In Cripple Creek, Colorado, organizers brought African Americans into the local service employees’ unions that existed, but white union leaders made deals with employers to limit the jobs that they could hold. Most black men worked as porters, janitors, and laborers, while African American women toiled as washerwomen, cooks, and servants. Essentially, black laborers found themselves barred from higher-paying jobs, specifically as gold miners.96 The Salt Lake Building Laborers’ Protective Union (BLPU) illustrates the difference in opinion among individual unionists regarding the abolishment of the color line. In 1902, the BLPU took the initiation fee of $2.50 from an African American construction worker. As the union membership stood ready to vote on “J. Draper’s” candidacy, the credentials committee pointed out that the union’s constitution refused to admit

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“Negroes.” With some delegates protesting the decision and calling for a change in the constitution, “the colored question was then taken up” the next week. Those wanting to exclude African Americans won, as the union’s secretary explained that members “agreed the best thing to do was to keep them [African Americans] walking.” In the end, inclusionists did have the final say. In July 1903, union members changed their constitution and granted working permits and union cards to black construction laborers.97 Racial tensions remained high within the BLPU, as Chapter 5 will demonstrate, as some white unionists argued that a just society meant that all workers had to unite at the workplace and the ballot box in an effort to alter the larger social structure. Others, it appeared, attempted to claim that their right to a good standard of living rested on a racial hierarchy rooted in white supremacy. Examining white unionists’ perceptions about an ethnic or racial group’s willingness to demand economic independence by battling for living wages, and by extension political freedom, enhances our understanding of racism in the Rocky Mountain West. Historian Moon-Ho Jung argues that in order to grasp anti-Chinese sentiment, and the eventual passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, we must recognize that members of Congress debated exclusion amid their efforts to agree on the meaning of African American emancipation from slavery. Exclusionists used the “coolie,” the Chinese immigrant contract laborer who arrived in the United States as a type of indentured servant, to link all Chinese people to slavery. Politicians took this racialized image, suggested that all Chinese immigrants (and later all Asians) were “coolies,” and declared exclusion consistent with the goal of establishing free labor in all corners of the nation. Those opposed to exclusion, including some eastern unionists, accepted the stereotype of the “coolie,” but argued that the issue was one of importation versus immigration, of separating the unfree from the free Chinese migrants. Proponents of exclusion countered that unscrupulous labor agents and employers would immediately exploit any measure that outlawed “coolies” but allowed entry to the Chinese who came freely, and eventually a new form of slavery would emerge. Thus all Chinese immigrants were deemed a race of unfree laborers and therefore a threat to the struggle for high wages.98 Rocky Mountain labor leaders, white workers, and their supporters not only embraced this argument, they attacked Chinese immigrants rhetorically and physically because of it. Buchanan, for instance, saw no contradiction in calling for European immigrant unity, supporting African American admittance into Colorado’s unions, while at the same time ad-

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vocating Chinese exclusion. In fact, a week after making his declaration against xenophobia in July 1886, he printed the details of Denver’s next Anti-Chinese League meeting in the Enquirer. He frequently covered and supported anti-Asian thoughts and protests. Although Buchanan helped fuel this animosity, Denver’s white workers displayed anti-Chinese sentiments long before he arrived. In 1871, a group of laborers set fire to an Asian immigrant’s house, and this kind of violence persisted throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. In fact, Democratic Party leaders decided to appeal to anti-Chinese sentiments in hopes of securing a white working-class voting base. By 1880, the Rocky Mountain News, the party’s paper, adopted the motto “Chinese Must Go!” With passions high, and the paper fueling racism, a riot erupted on October 31 that year. While playing pool in a downtown saloon, an argument ended with an unidentified white man striking a male Chinese immigrant. By the middle of the afternoon, three thousand whites had gathered to assault Chinese men and women and burn their property. Hoping to stop the violence, the mayor ordered the fire department to disperse the crowd with their hoses. The water only fed the mob’s rage, as cries of “burn them out” filled the air.99 The mob destroyed Denver’s Chinatown. Fearful of losing votes to the Democrats, Governor Pitkin addressed the Chinese question before the state legislature. Although he condemned the riot, he recognized that a problem existed with “the unwholesome social and personal habits of the Chinese,” and understood that “evil consequences” resulted when “their labor [is brought] into competition with American labor.” He concluded his remarks by asking legislators to unite with Californians in demanding that Congress ban Chinese immigration.100 Organized anti-Asian political activism started in 1870s San Francisco with Dennis Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party of California. Claiming that “Judge Lynch is the judge wanted by the workingmen of California,” and arguing that the “dignity of labor must be sustained, even if we have to kill every wretch that opposes it,” Kearney openly promoted violence against Chinese laborers and anyone who defended them. He added that the Chinese were uncivilized “beasts” who stole white jobs.101 Colorado workers appeared to have developed a similar mentality, and insisted that the Chinese would always live in a permanent state of degradation. Buchanan, in 1883 alone, printed more than twenty articles in the Enquirer opposing the rights of Asian immigrants. Columns typically claimed that vast racial differences made it impossible for the Chinese to

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adhere to the American standard of living.102 The UPEM in 1888 further promoted this anti-Asian sentiment by reprinting an article from Scientific American distinguishing “the Chinaman from the European.” The “Chinaman,” the piece contended, “can write all day, work all day, stand in one position all day, weave, beat gold, carve ivory, do infinitely tedious jobs for ever and ever, and discover no more signs of weariness and irritation than if he were a machine.”103 By dehumanizing the Chinese, Rocky Mountain workers found it easy to follow Kearney and express their anti-Chinese attitudes viciously. In hopes of cementing laborers’ support for upcoming elections, members of Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. After railroad lobbyists and other opponents used their influence with representatives, the law had many loopholes and left those opposed to Asian immigration demanding stiffer legislation.104 Rocky Mountain unionists engaged in further violence to get their point across. At Rock Springs, Wyoming, in September 1885, for instance, UP coal miners, belonging to DA 82, marched from their union hall to the outskirts of their small town. Earlier in the day, a fistfight between white and Chinese miners saw the whites go on strike. Although the Chinese outnumbered white miners 331 to 150, whites still surrounded Chinese homes with rifles and revolvers. Many of the Asian immigrants fled by train, as did two white foremen who received death threats. As evening settled upon Rock Springs, the white KOL members set fire to the local Chinatown. They then shot at those exiting their burning homes. In the end, twenty-eight Chinese died, fifteen were wounded, and the fourteen white miners arrested for the murders were eventually acquitted.105 Attempting to capitalize on the situation and rid Rock Springs of all Chinese workers, DA 82 Master Workman Thomas Neasham issued a list of demands, including a ban on Chinese workers and the reinstatement of all white laborers fired after the massacre. Charles Francis Adams, head of the UP, had no intention of negotiating and attempted to reopen the mines with Chinese labor. Chinese workers, however, were themselves on strike for back pay or train fare out of Rock Springs. Manager D. O. Clark ordered the company store to “cut-off ” Chinese miners until they returned to work. They did go back, and Neasham attempted to call a general strike. The strike showed some promise at first, but white scabs and a refusal of UP engineers to join the protest and aid unskilled KOL members spelled a quick defeat.106 Anti-Asian sentiment remained high after the massacre, which suggested that white workers and their supporters lacked any sense of re-

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morse. The commissioners of the CBLS in 1890 proclaimed that Chinese immigrants “directly and indirectly” are “the cause of more suffering and crime than any other class of people in our State.” They “are the leeches that are gradually sucking the financial life blood from the arteries of commerce and polluting and destroying society.”107 Beyond their willingness to drive down wages by accepting low pay, the report added, they spent little money in this country. “It is also claimed,” the commissioners added, “that they are under the control of the Emperor of China and are compelled to send all of their surplus earnings back to the Flowery Kingdom.”108 Chinese immigrant laborers, according to the CBLS, not only functioned as slaves to their employers but also to the emperor of China. Whereas some white male workers found African Americans oppressed by the tyranny of southern segregation, and envisioned women, European immigrants, and themselves in danger of being denied the liberty of high wages by “tyrannical” employers, they refused to view the Chinese in the same light. They considered the Chinese complicit in fashioning corporate hegemony for having signed contracts that ceded any opportunity to earn higher wages and thus to claim economic independence and by extension political freedom. CBLS commissioners further articulated this view in their 1892 report. The Chinese laborer, they argued, remained “a standing menace to white labor,” and because of his willingness to be a “cheap” laborer, he was “to blame for this existing prejudice.”109 Denver and Rock Springs proved far from exceptions in white workers’ acting on “this existing prejudice.” Anti-Chinese riots occurred in Caribou and Leadville, Colorado, in the 1870s; in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 1891; and in Butte in 1897. By the 1880s, most Chinese immigrants were barred by law and through intimidation from working as hard-rock miners and in a number of other trades. Also, their restaurants and laundries faced constant boycotts.110 This anti-Asian sentiment continued well into the twentieth century. In attempting to promote a class war, not a race war, while simultaneously advocating Chinese exclusion, Buchanan demonstrated his inability to surrender his own racist ideas. To him and most Rocky Mountain unionists, contract laborers did not appear to be the worst victims of capitalist exploitation. Instead they represented business owners’ allies in an attempt to destroy high living standards and erode non-Chinese workers’ chances for enjoying full political freedom. Buchanan, along with other KOL activists, did argue that because European immigrants and African Americans sought the same freedoms as native-born white laborers, the region’s unionists had to enlist these workers in their fight for justice.

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­ ebates over inclusion and immigration laws divided Mountain West D workers throughout the Progressive Era and beyond.

Buchanan and Powderly Beyond trying to deal with racial tensions, organizing the region’s workers, and mobilizing a working-class voting bloc, Buchanan also attempted to hold the KOL together nationally. Knights across the country had started to divide into factional wings because of KOL Grand Master Workman Terence Powderly’s handling of the events of 1886. Specifically, fissures emerged within the Knights for two reasons. First, Powderly refused to support anarchists accused of detonating a bomb in Haymarket Square. Then he decided to expel cigar makers from the order after they argued for the opportunity to organize members of their trade into local craft unions. Buchanan opposed both of these choices. His determination to challenge Powderly’s leadership led him to move from Denver to Chicago. Before understanding this confrontation, we must first begin with a brief examination of Powderly’s rise to power. Born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, in 1849, the deeply Catholic Powderly left school at thirteen, worked on the railroad, and in 1866 began an apprenticeship as a machinist in Scranton. Politics sparked his interests during the 1870s, and he joined the Irish Land League and the Republican Party. In 1878, he switched his allegiance to the Greenback Party, ran for mayor the next year, and won. His election to Scranton’s top office came one year after he won the KOL’s highest position, grand master workman. Under Powderly’s leadership, the Knights abandoned secrecy and committed themselves to democracy. Power flowed from the bottom up as local and district assembly leaders ran day-to-day affairs.111 The story of the KOL, as typically told, ends as a tragedy, and Powderly, who served as grand master workman for fourteen years, receives much of the blame for the order’s demise. Over the course of its existence, the KOL claimed over 12,000 local assemblies in roughly 3,000 communities. At its peak, between 1885 and 1886, the order grew from 110,000 to 729,000 members, but by the end of the decade only 250,000 workers still belonged to the Knights. Portrayed by his detractors as moralistic, disloyal, dictatorial, and even pusillanimous, Powderly was questioned about his seemingly contradictory beliefs. His commitment to acquiring a more equitable distribution of wealth did not match his desire to

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avoid strikes, his reluctance to engage in class-based political action, and his general opposition to radicalism. Essentially, much of the scholarship dealing with Powderly portrays him as increasingly out of step with the men and women he represented and thus unable or unwilling to fashion a powerful workers’ movement at the very moment corporate capitalism took off. According to his defenders, the KOL declined not because of his poor character or inability to lead, but due to workers’ divisions over issues of race, ideology, and skill, along with the Knight’s lack of centralization, and the fact that powerful corporate foes had the support of politicians, judges, police forces, state militias, and the army. No one person, suggested his advocates, could have managed a relatively new national labor movement in this era of industrial expansion and class struggle with a small treasury and limited power.112 Ultimately, the events of the spring and summer of 1886, specifically the controversy stemming from the Haymarket protest and the decision of some craftsmen to form the American Federation of Labor (AFL), continued to define Powderly’s career. Recall that Chicago police charged eight suspected anarchists with the May 4 bombing at Haymarket Square. Some of the anarchists had ties to the KOL. Although city officials offered no proof of the anarchists’ involvement in the bombing, a jury found them guilty based on circumstantial evidence, and the judge sentenced them to death. Although most Knights favored cooperativism, socialism, or a type of social democracy, as opposed to anarchy, they understood this trial as an attack on their right to protest. To many Knights, the incident begged the question: Did opposing corporate power mean that public officials could ignore the Constitution and arrest and potentially convict workers for dissent? A number of Knights called on Powderly to oppose this injustice. He wanted to distance the KOL from the taint of radicalism, however, and refused. Opposition to Powderly grew within the order as a result. Powderly’s decision came at the moment that Knights started to lose strikes, and skilled workers debated whether they should join Samuel Gompers’ new union for craftsmen, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), which remained loosely affiliated with the KOL.113 Furthermore, the leaders of DA 49 in New York had long pushed their fellow Knights to follow a more radical path, which included organizing laborers into mixed locals (organizations of skilled and unskilled workers) only and forbidding unionization exclusively along craft lines. They had fought with Gompers and the cigar makers over this issue

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since 1875. With Powderly weakened by his refusal to defend the Haymarket anarchists, DA 49 members saw their opportunity to take control of the Knights. They proposed that the KOL abolish craft unions. Powderly responded by calling a meeting, which lasted from May 25 to June 3, to discuss this issue and the growing instability within the order. A group led by Buchanan and Frank Foster of Massachusetts argued that the KOL must include the skilled unions to maintain its commitment to battling for worker rights. The gathering ended without any decisions being reached.114 The KOL General Assembly discussed the issue a second time in October in Richmond, Virginia. Buchanan found himself at the center of this controversy, as he again warned that dissolving craft unions would destroy the KOL. Instead of siding with Buchanan, Powderly, who held a similar outlook, attacked him. The thin-skinned grand master workman harbored resentment toward the Denver printer because Buchanan had critiqued Powderly’s failure to support the accused Haymarket bombers. Powderly charged Buchanan with injuring the order’s image because of his support for the “conspirators” and his membership in socialist organizations. Buchanan expected this assault, because between the May and October meetings, DA 82 master workman and fellow Denverite Thomas Neasham, a Powderly supporter, attempted to smear Buchanan. Neasham sent a circular to DA 82 cardholders and to the subscribers and advertisers of the Enquirer calling on them to boycott Buchanan’s paper. Buchanan demanded that Powderly reprimand Neasham. When Powderly did not respond, Buchanan sent a second letter. Ignored again, Buchanan attacked DA 49 and defended the right of KOL-affiliated craft unions to exist.115 At the Richmond convention, Buchanan advocated that the craft unions become their own district assemblies, as opposed to one of many local unions belonging to a district assembly. Such a plan would end the emerging craft versus mixed assembly debate, and refocus activists’ attention on building cross-union solidarity, advocating working-class definitions of value, and devising strategies to control labor markets. Instead, a majority of delegates supported the Powderly-DA 49 proposal to expel the Cigar Makers International Union from the order. When he returned to Denver, Buchanan criticized Powderly in the Enquirer, and convinced a majority of DTA members to ignore the expulsion order and maintain the membership of the local cigar makers’ union with the city federation.116 On New Year’s Day 1887, Buchanan proclaimed: “Brother Knights, the order is ours; we have made it great in the eyes of the world, and it is

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capable of helping us in our war for the emancipation of the wage slave.” The union existed because of workers’ mass desire to experience greater democracy, and not due to its leaders. Emphasizing his point, Buchanan concluded, “the principles for which we contend are everlasting and will triumph, though Judases appear with every hour, and the mills of superstition grind with a double-shift.”117 He then headed to Chicago to assist the alleged Haymarket bombers. Buchanan saved neither the men jailed for Haymarket nor the KOL. Powderly probably does get too much blame for the order’s decline, but he refused to consider his leading organizer’s advice, which was rooted in successfully building cross-union solidarity in the Rocky Mountain region. As for Buchanan, he left Denver knowing that unionists there, and throughout the region, realized that regardless of the world they hoped to build, they had to unite based on their overlapping aims and shared experiences. Haymarket provided just one more example of how indistinguishable the boundaries between politics and economics were. Employers and the commercial press supported the prosecution of men because of their ideas. A jury convicted them without proof because they shared this fear of labor radicalism. Workers had to acquire greater political influence or else face the consequences of allowing employers and their allies to define freedom, free labor, and the value of work. Thus, workers did not need simply to become politically active; that had already happened. They needed to become politically effective.

Conclusion Rocky Mountain labor leaders and those workers committed to the labor theory of value understood the development of industrialization and the logic of capital that accompanied it as an affront to their version of the natural laws of economics. When owners attacked workers’ sense of morality by offering subsistence wages, thereby promoting wage slavery, workers sought justice. Yet the meaning of justice, once the fruits of one’s labor, had changed in a world where capitalism defined the mode of production. While some workers called for a return to the free-labor ideal, others accepted the labor market as permanent, but refused to see it as the property of their employers. This anger over being denied a fair wage, no matter how one defined the value of work, along with the fear of unemployment, pushed workers to parade and strike. For labor leaders, such as Joseph Buchanan, these displays illustrated a collective desire for a

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different social arrangement than the one emerging as America industrialized. Maintaining solidarity when protests ended, and channeling collective outrage into a sustained movement represented a great challenge. Buchanan accepted that task and wanted Rocky Mountain workers to conceive of the class struggle as a succession of battles fought on multiple fronts that required constant vigilance, patience, and a willingness to experiment with various forms of collective action. He left a legacy of pragmatic radicalism. The next step was for the region’s workers to turn the values that underpinned his vision into laws that reshaped market and social relations.

Chapter 2

To “Strike at the Polls” Local and State Politics, Regional Unity, and Working-Class Political Action

The “vast amounts of corruption funds that are used in every campaign” by “corporations and gigantic monopolies” threatened liberty. At least that was what Julius N. Corbin, Knights of Labor (KOL) member and editor of the Denver-based Union Pacific Employes’ [sic] Magazine (UPEM), argued during the fall 1892 election season. Workers could strike and boycott to fight low wages, Corbin further contended, but any workingman who did not realize that “the power that opposes” him “was gained in politics” was “stupid.” The “proper place to strike, to boycott, to demand his rights and strengthen his own power is at the ballot box.”1 In October 1894, Butte unionists, according to Corbin’s standards, proved that they were not stupid. They collectively agreed that “courts, troops, marshals and mercenaries of law are now organized to defeat the toiler and enthrone money in absolute despotism.” Yet they also asserted that some hope for workers to experience justice still remained. The “one way left” for labor to attain the liberty they sought was to collectively “strike at the polls.”2 Striking at the polls started with workers trusting their local and state labor leaders to manage the political variables that shaped the elections, lobbying effort, and general protests designed to provide them with greater power at their workplaces and throughout society. Unionists made their KOL district assemblies as well as their city, state, and regional federations of labor their primary political agents. Rocky Mountain workers 71

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adopted this strategy of union-centered political action after a number of failed electoral experiments in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Specifically, when unionists created labor parties and the candidates on those parties’ tickets lost elections, the region’s workers returned to Joseph Buchanan’s workingmen’s ticket idea from the early 1880s. In this updated version of Buchanan’s approach, workers continued to use central labor bodies at the local, district, state, and regional levels to articulate their legislative aims, determine which candidates to support, mobilize campaigns for those candidates, and cast their votes to acquire pro-labor laws and exert public influence. The labor leaders and politically active unionists who promoted and shaped this strategy in its initial phases made sure to adjust its use to local conditions. Sometimes the members of these federations and assemblies chose candidates from the major parties and ran nonpartisan slates. At other times, union leaders served as heads of a third party. In the end, labor leaders had to rank the reforms union members wanted, balance ideological, ethnic, and religious differences among workers, pick the best means of running candidates (third parties or nonpartisan slates), and deal with the challenges posed by other political actors, governmental institutions, and corporate opponents. All the while, these leaders remained committed to the task of organizing the unorganized. The success of union-centered political action depended on bringing unskilled workers into the labor movement, because those workers, including women in Utah and Colorado, had a vote. By 1898, the writings of labor editors and speeches of union leaders highlighted the pervasiveness of this strategy. These activists continually referred to unions as political organizations. In November of that year, for example, the Pueblo Courier, a leading labor paper in the Rocky Mountain West, professed that “the trades union movement is essentially a governmental movement.” The Courier’s editor further argued “that the protest of the laboring men against unfair and corrupt wage conditions must also be a protest against the unfair manipulations of the laws of the state and the land.”3 In 1902, Daniel McDonald, a Butte iron molder and the president of the Western Labor Union (WLU), a regional federation of workers that rejected affiliation with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), echoed this sentiment. McDonald declared, “While the Western Labor Union is not a party organization, it is a political and social body that realizes that the rectification of the wrongs that exist must come through channels different from that of brute force or, in other words, the exercise of an intelligent ballot.”4

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In the 1890s and early 1900s, labor activists offered rank-and-file union members a simple message. Corporate power flowed from the laws and policies crafted at the meetings of city councils, mayoral staffs, state legislators, governors and their administrations, congressmen, the president and his cabinet, and the various agencies, commissions, and bureaus run by political appointees. To not vote as a bloc, to refuse to strike at the polls or cast intelligent ballots, was stupid because corporate might rested in laws and governmental policies. Thus voting, for many Rocky Mountain workers, signified the most essential act of solidarity because of the chain reaction it caused. Only through electing “friends” could workers foster a new culture in which the citizenry collectively achieved sovereignty over state institutions. Through the exercise of that authority, the people could then use the power of the law and the influence they had over their representatives to administer markets, oversee workplace relations, and care for those affected by the social ills related to capitalism. Although workers in other regions employed variations of unioncentered political action, Rocky Mountain unionists appeared to be the most successful practitioners of this approach. For example, they used this strategy to acquire the first eight-hour-day laws for private employees upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Crucial differences in regional political landscapes explained this divergent outcome. Specifically, labor leaders had to negotiate with the political bosses who ran party machines in eastern and midwestern cities just to get the reforms they wanted in a given party’s platform. This political collective bargaining forced workers to limit their demands in order to fit within a larger coalition. Accepting coalition politics meant submitting, somewhat, to party authority.5 Party structures proved weaker in the West. The increasing number of people who came to work in the cities, railroad towns, and mining camps beyond the Mississippi River generated political instability by heightening party competition for their votes. A rise in population also occurred in the East and Midwest, but established party machines proved capable of incorporating new voters into already existing electoral arrangements. Political scientists have supported this notion of regional variation by pointing out that westerners split their tickets in far greater numbers than voters elsewhere.6 A quick glance at the inability of any one party to control the mayor’s office in Butte during the 1890s provides just one example of this regional contrast. Over the course of that decade, the city’s population increased by 184 percent. Republicans captured Butte’s executive position in 1888–89,

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1892–93, and 1895–97. Democrats held the office in 1890–91, 1891–92, 1893–95, and 1897–99.7 Denver, during the 1880s, did resemble the East politically, as machine politicians, in this case Republicans, dominated city affairs. This dynamic changed, however, after the 1889 mayoral race. That year, investigative journalists discovered that various liquor distributors and retailers had provided saloon owner and election winner Wolfe Londoner with as much as twenty thousand dollars to draw from when bribing citizens willing to sell their votes. Various reform groups outraged by this corruption responded by demanding alternations to the city’s electoral system. According to local periodicals and a reporter from Harper’s Weekly, the election of Democrat Platt Rogers to the city’s executive post in 1891 signaled the beginning of clean races. Fair elections lasted in Denver for a little over a decade.8 Weak party structures, new voters encouraging party competition, and a well-organized workforce indeed meant that Rocky Mountain workers had a better chance than their eastern counterparts to achieve the reforms they sought. Yet one can easily point out that despite having to filter their demands through machine politicians, workers all over the country had some successes when they engaged in local-level politics. Therefore, in order to truly grasp the differences that existed across regions, we must also examine workers’ political activism at the state level. The starkest example of Rocky Mountain workers employing unioncentered political action in ways that would have been impossible for eastern and southern unionists to duplicate came during Utah’s transition to statehood. In 1895, the citizens of the Utah Territory elected delegates to write a constitution and establish the forty-fifth state. Workers vowed to vote as a bloc, interrogated candidates, and eventually claimed victory when the major demands of the Federated Trades, the central body of Salt Lake City’s workers, served as the underpinnings of the labor section of the new state’s founding document.9 In Colorado and Montana, statehood came before the labor movement had developed effective political tactics. Yet the larger opportunity to play on party competition remained. Those running for assembly, governor, judge, and other state offices did so in places where federal control had only recently been removed. Entrenched incumbents taking orders from machine bosses rarely occurred. As with local-level politics, well-organized activists could capitalize on the situation. Labor did just that. So too did advocates of women’s suffrage. Between 1893 and 1914, women in virtually every state and territory west of the Mississippi River won the right

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to vote. It would take six years and an amendment to the U.S. Constitution for women in other regions to enjoy the same right.10 Importantly, the lack of strong party structures only meant that Rocky Mountain workers, along with other groups interested in using the power of the state to reorder social relations, had a greater possibility to effect change as compared to their counterparts in other regions. Opportunity certainly did not guarantee success. Rocky Mountain unionists had to translate their vision of a more just society into platforms that would capture the attention and support of the larger public. Next, they needed to devise a strategy that would result in ballot box victories. Once pro-labor politicians took office, workers then had to remind the new officeholders of their promises and pressure them to live up to their word. Developing their strategy was no easy task. Unionists had to first agree on a set of aims, which meant overcoming ideological, ethnic, religious, and other differences. Then workers had to demonstrate the patience necessary to find the most effective form of political expression. Success depended upon workers’ shared commitment to experimentation, pragmatism, and crossunion solidarity. Ultimately, the search for the most effective political form sharpened unionists’ mutual values and pushed them to more clearly articulate their vision of justice.

The Labor Party Experiment Through the debates within the Rocky Mountain labor movement over how to determine fair wage rates, the organizational structure that the national labor movement should take, and the role of radicalism within the Knights, along with the tensions caused by racism, Joseph Buchanan continued to advocate union-centered political activism. In January 1885, for instance, the Denver Trades Assembly (DTA) called upon the Colorado State Assembly to enact measures that would outlaw both convict labor and child labor, provide state employees an eight-hour day, create a state bureau of labor statistics, and establish a stricter mechanics’ lien law.11 Advocacy for these measures slowed, however, when Colorado unionists had to turn their attention to state senator M. B. Carpenter’s proposed bill that, in essence, would have outlawed strikes and unions. The potential law declared that if one person compelled “any [other] person hired or employed in any trade or business” to “depart from his employment or hiring, or obstructing him from returning to or continuing his work before finished” a fine of up to $1,000 and imprisonment up to one year would result. The same penalty applied if a union protest stopped someone

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from working. Beyond these clauses intended to impede strikes, the bill also sought to criminalize union actions. Labor organizations, under Car­ penter’s measure, would not be allowed to “regulate or interfere with” daily business operations relating to wages, hours, or production.12 “Friendly” Republicans and Democrats responded to workers’ vocal opposition by defeating the Carpenter bill. Yet the Denver labor movement’s political clout had limits. With the exception of a mechanic’s lien measure, workers disappointingly watched as the state legislative session came to a close without passing any of their other demands.13 By the mid-1880s, Rocky Mountain unionists had committed themselves to setting legislative goals and voting collectively. Their minimal successes, however, pushed them to explore options beyond labor slates. In January 1887, Buchanan announced that he favored a labor party so that unionists could avoid “political bummers and tricksters.”14 Workingmen’s tickets produced only limited victories because, as Buchanan and rank-and-file workers recognized, they could not enforce party discipline. Buchanan could expose officeholders’ bad faith acts by portraying them as traitors to labor’s cause in his Labor Enquirer, which he did. Also, unionists could vote for the other candidate in the next election, which they did. Yet, union officials knew that even the most sincere friend of labor had to answer to party leaders. As a result, many unionists determined that they should create their own party. It appeared to many a logical step, considering they already used their city federations to establish platforms and campaign for candidates. New York City’s Central Labor Union in 1886 provided a model. Its members united with independent craft unionists and local Knights to create the United Labor Party (which later changed its name to Union Labor Party [ULP]). They nominated journalist and antimonopolist Henry George as their candidate for mayor. In his Progress and Poverty, George argued that the “recklessness and immorality engendered by the inequality in the distribution of wealth show themselves in the imbecility and corruption of government.” This “immorality,” “corruption,” and “imbecility,” according to George, resulted from the failings of politicians, not the power of government. He ran on the ULP ticket because he believed that a true party of producers could achieve electoral success and end political corruption. He came in second to Democrat Abram Stevens Hewett, but did finish ahead of Republican Theodore Roosevelt.15 That year, the UPEM printed a letter from George proclaiming that “politics has become a trade, and the management of elections a business. The organizations that call themselves political parties are little better

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than joint-stock companies for assessing candidates and dividing public plunder, and even judicial positions are virtually bought and sold.”16 In January 1887, Buchanan, who also printed a number of George’s letters and speeches in the Enquirer, called on unionists to create their own local branches of the ULP.17 That month, Denver Knights John Lennon and Burnett Haskell organized the Union Labor Club. Haskell had come to Denver from San Francisco to take over Buchanan’s editorial duties at the Enquirer. Buchanan had decided to move to Chicago and aid in the defense of the convicted Haymarket bombers. Haskell and Lennon immediately announced that Denver’s ULP would enter candidates in the next city, county, and state elections. By February, the club held weekly meetings, adopted the national ULP platform, devised a municipal platform, and nominated candidates for the upcoming local election in April.18 Key proposals included higher taxes on landowners, cheaper water rates, and an eight-hour day for city workers. A crowd of workers that had gathered to participate in creating the party’s program also chose nominees for city offices, including workers from the shoemakers’, typographical, and carpenters’ unions, along with laborers belonging to local KOL assemblies.19 On March 31, five days before the city election, ULP members marched through city streets singing labor songs. The Enquirer claimed that more than a thousand people gathered at a party rally held that day. Refusing to disperse when the celebration ended, the crowd chanted for the ULP mayoral nominee, Gilbert Shove. The union shoemaker climbed to the top of a nearby lumber pile and spoke for an hour. Unfortunately for Denver unionists, these civic displays did not translate into ballot box victories. Out of five candidates, Shove finished third with only 1,512 votes. Republican W. Scott Lee won the election and received 4,628 ballots in his favor. The fact that the Denver ULP failed to elect a single candidate only compounded this overwhelming defeat.20 Despite this poor showing, Colorado’s ULP leaders remained upbeat. They hoped persistence would allow the party to grow and eventually claim victories. ULP mayoral candidates in the Colorado mining towns of Las Animas and Idaho Springs won their races and provided the foundation for this optimistic outlook.21 Haskell and Shove insisted that if “women wage workers” enlisted in the next campaign effort, if organized workers proved willing to “reach out for their unorganized brethren[’s]” votes, and if all workers would “bury old hatchets” and “reach out their hands alike to workingmen, whether they be ‘Irish[,] Dutch or devils,” in other words, avoid ethnic divisions and partisan allegiances, success

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would follow.22 To further this effort, ULP members from all over the state met on April 16, 1887, to create the Colorado Union Labor Party. At that gathering, delegates adopted a state platform that denounced monopolies, demanded tax increases for the rich, established the Enquirer as the official organ of the state party, and vowed to help abolish poverty. State leaders hosted weekly party meetings from April 1887 through most of 1888. Better organization did not improve the party’s results. As in the Denver city election, ULP candidates lost all of their state races.23 Although the ULP experiment failed to provide Colorado workers the degree of political power they desired, it proved far from worthless. Leaders of the major parties paid more attention to workers’ political wants. Democrats, for instance, called for stronger mine-safety legislation, stiffer mechanics’ lien laws, and restrictions on companies’ rights to private police forces. Republicans announced their support for key items on the DTA’s legislative agenda, including opposition to convict labor, the creation of a state bureau of labor statistics, and anti-child labor laws.24 An editorial in the Denver Republican further evidenced the Republican Party’s sense that members needed to appeal to workers for their support. Last “spring this vote [the ULP’s] in Denver alone was nearly 1,600” the piece reminded readers. The editor then turned his focus to unionists. “We believe that these movements are ephemeral,” he asserted, and added “that they will pass away so soon as their advocates,” who “are novices in politics, shall have learned that the two great parties are in the main representative of the best political thought of the country.” Workingmen, according the Republican, should reform the major parties from within. They also needed to remember that the “Republican Party is opposed to monopoly.”25 Rocky Mountain unionists remained unconvinced that Republicans, or Democrats, opposed monopoly. Although the Republican’s editor framed his comments to ULP supporters in an avuncular way, he proffered his advice from a position of worry, not benevolence. His claim that the leaders of the dominant parties provided “the best political thought” belied his opposition to unionists’ radical shift in outlook. More specifically, in demanding higher taxes on the rich, cheaper water rates, and an end to poverty, ULP supporters articulated their desire to go beyond favoring laws and policies that championed a return to the free-labor ideal or reassertion of the labor theory of value. By moving their political goals beyond the workplace and insisting that local and state governments had a responsibility to redistribute wealth through taxes, provide municipal services, and end poverty, these unionists wanted to pave the way for a socialist urban industrial America.

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It is important to point out, as Columbia economist Edwin R. A. Seligman did at the time, that in the 1880s, “perhaps no term in the whole vocabulary” was “more abused than the word socialism.” For some, Seligman continued, socialism was “tantamount to organized revolution and fraught with the direct possibility of violence.” In reality, he argued, “the word is in itself harmless.” “True socialism,” he explained, simply connoted “a fuller appreciation” of the “common moral element” that “underlies all collective action.”26 To Seligman and other political economists of his day, such as Richard T. Ely and Henry Carter Adams, socialism seemed one possible and plausible answer to the labor question. To fully grasp what Seligman, Ely, Adams, and other public intellectuals meant by socialism, we must first recognize that they approached the labor question as an ethical dilemma. Like the English Fabians and German Marxist revisionists, these American academics wanted to rethink socialist theory based on the political realities they confronted each day. They advocated taking the principles of equality and democracy found in American political thought and applying those concepts to market interactions and workplace relations. To them, socialism came to mean using the power of the state to redistribute wealth. Socialism was not static. It evolved as social needs changed. Equality and democracy always had to be recalibrated to the current social conditions.27 Policies that fostered socialism in the 1880s, according to Seligman, Ely, and Adams, included the arbitration of strikes, profit-sharing plans, workingmen’s insurance, public-works projects, and municipal services. Taxes aimed at the wealthy could also signify an advance toward socialism. During most of the nineteenth century, the government only assessed physical property, such as land holdings and livestock, not abstract assets such as stocks and bonds. As a result, the tax burden fell most heavily upon farmers, craftsmen, and small landowners as opposed to those benefiting most from industrial development. In calling for higher excises on the wealthy, as the ULP platform did, workers and these reformers favored a radical departure from the economic orthodoxy of laissez-faire and championed what would have seemed a drastic reshaping of social relations.28 Not surprisingly, Joseph Buchanan was among the first Rocky Mountain residents to champion socialist ideas. He used the pages of the Enquirer and the meetings of the two socialist organizations he belonged to, the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) and the Rocky Mountain Social League (RMSL), to promote various strains of anticapitalism. Karl Marx founded the IWA in 1864 in hopes of spreading socialism across the

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world. In the late 1860s, the IWA had scattered branches in the United States. By 1876, it had all but died. Former members revived it in the 1880s. In 1883, Buchanan agreed to head the Rocky Mountain division, which included Colorado and the territories of Utah, Dakota, Montana, and Idaho. The IWA functioned as a secret organization, making exact membership numbers difficult to calculate, but it appears that Buchanan’s section had roughly five hundred members with the primary goal of encouraging laborers to read socialist and anticapitalist works. In late 1885, philosophical disagreements splintered the group. By that point, however, Buchanan and others had created the RMSL. The social league met every Sunday evening from 1885 to early 1888. Like the IWA, the RMSL functioned largely as a discussion group. Its members read various antimonopolist and radical works, and they sometimes gave public addresses and street corner speeches, and lobbied city leaders. Also, the RMSL proved family friendly, as its members opposed the men-only policy of the IWA. Buchanan’s wife Lucy and other female KOL activists led discussions about women in the workplace and female suffrage. Even “little Belle Cheesewright, an eight-year old Socialist recited a little poem” at one meeting. Singing songs, organizing picnics, and encouraging children to participate at meetings facilitated a sense that anticapitalist political activism represented a working-class political culture.29 Buchanan’s eclectic, nonviolent socialism frightened major-party politicians in general, and the editor of the Republican in particular. The leaders of the major parties in Colorado understood that a larger critique of capitalism existed across the country, that Buchanan had proven himself an excellent organizer, and that the RMSL’s open discussion and promotion of education might advance radical notions of justice far more effectively than the ULP did. Therefore, the day after he called on the Republicans to welcome labor into the party’s fold, and asked workers to recognize the leaders of the major parties as the best political thinkers, the Republican’s editor red baited Buchanan. He attempted to dissuade Denver workers from promoting class-based political action by reminding them that the KOL’s leading organizer had left town. Then in his October 25, 1887, editorial, he asserted that although “the Colorado Knights were at one time, to a large degree under the influence of the Socialists,” he meant Buchanan, “the majority of them are now in sympathy with” the KOL’s more moderate faction.30 To suggest that Buchanan was a strict socialist, which to the Republican included advocating violence, distorted both Buchanan’s and his follow-

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ers’ electoral practices and their political beliefs. During the IWA’s short existence, Buchanan endorsed Greenback, Republican, and slates of nonpartisan candidates. When he led the RMSL, Buchanan again backed a nonpartisan list of candidates created by the DTA, and then called for the formation of the ULP. The Republican’s claim might have registered with recently arrived workers, or those unfamiliar with the RMSL’s pre1888 catholic approach to socialism. When Buchanan moved to Chicago in 1887, Denver’s emerging Socialist Labor Party (SLP) took over the RMSL. The SLP originated at an 1876 gathering of working-class political activists in Newark, New Jersey. Over the next two years, it claimed branches across the United States. By the 1880s, the SLP was rife with internal tensions. Moderates, who argued that the development of socialism would occur gradually, constantly squared off with the anarchointernationalist wing of the party, which called on party members to do everything in their power to spark revolution immediately. In the 1890s, the dogmatic Marxist Daniel De Leon would take over leadership of the SLP and end the party’s in-fighting by purging those who did not agree with him.31 Buchanan’s socialism, and that of Denver workers sympathetic to his views, overlapped with Seligman’s conception of socialism. In other words, they all agreed that the nation moved toward socialism when activists forced elected officials to accept greater responsibilities on behalf of the government for the perceived social good. Denver ULP members attempted to advance the cause of this type of socialism when they decided to demonstrate their commitment to ending poverty, which was one of the planks in the party’s platform. They participated in a “no-rent campaign.” During the May 10, 1887, Denver ULP meeting, Gilbert Shove, who had lost his bid for mayor a month earlier, argued that while speculators had fueled a recent boom and made landowners richer, conditions for the working class had worsened. Shove pointed out that rents had increased by 20 percent, but wages had remained at the pre-boom level. Party members then passed a set of resolutions condemning the “so-called boom as a piece of commercial gambling and robbery.” Then ULP members agreed to buy tents and organize a camp of laborers who wanted to participate in a rent strike.32 The strike apparently collapsed, as the Enquirer did not address the issue again. Although it seemingly did not end well, the rent strike revealed workers’ broader understanding of politics. Denver unionists showed that they conceived of political action as extending beyond the formal activities of

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voting, lobbying, and advocating a platform. They displayed an unwillingness to establish boundaries between the functions of party and union. And, they exhibited their ability to turn abstract socialist principles, such as the desire to end poverty, into a tangible public demonstration with well-articulated policy goals. In this case, they demanded that the city government place a check on real estate speculation, and they called for subsidized housing for the poor. By the fall of 1887, Denver Knights agreed that they had to engage in political activism at the local and state levels to obtain higher wages, better working conditions, and improved living conditions. As UPEM editor Julius Corbin explained: the “principles of the Knights of Labor are all political in their nature, there is not one of them that will ever be brought about without the direct or indirect aid of governmental legislation.”33 Although workers articulated a set of shared values and policies, they continued to face the problem of finding the right outlet to acquire power in the electoral arena. The unwillingness of most workers to abandon their major-party affiliations, the ULP’s continued failures at the ballot box, and the rise of the SLP created factionalism. Many workers did not mind advancing the cause of socialism, but most had little interest in joining a socialist party. Ultimately, by engaging in political experimentation without unity, Colorado workers ended up with confusion. By the summer of 1888, Corbin, trying to encourage ballot box solidarity, argued that if the region’s workers were “practical in their politics they would soon have less cause to complain.” They had to find a way to “abolish party lines” and “be for workingmen’s interest[s] all the time.”34 He wanted his readers to realize the extent to which local and state officials would go to obtain the labor vote. “Labor organizations,” he added, “are doing some good in shaping public opinion, their efforts can be seen in the planks of party platforms, but those planks amount to nothing unless there are men standing on them.”35 One only needed to read the Republican for confirmation of Corbin’s assertions. The paper of the city’s leading party not only supported the creation of the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics (CBLS), its editor proposed that the bureau’s commissioner have “the right to act as an arbitrator in strikes and lockouts.”36 In other words, Republican politicians, in order to get the support of workers, committed themselves to having taxpayers fund a state agency that would examine workplace conditions and investigate workers’ claims of poor treatment and labor-law violations. Furthermore, Republican Party leaders also appeared willing to upset the pro-business wing of the party by promising

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that the head of the CBLS, who would be an appointee of the governor, would have the authority to settle disputes between owners and workers. Local merchants advertising in the Republican also demonstrated the accuracy of Corbin’s claim that workers’ issues captured the attention of the general public. A. W. Waters and Company attempted to use class tensions to get KOL members to buy margarine. More specifically, the Waters Company wanted Knights to know that if, due to their “irrepressible conflict” with capital, they had missed the attempt by dairy farmers across the nation to get state legislatures to outlaw margarine, they might want to pay closer attention to this issue. Margarine, according to the ad, saved consumers 25 cents a pound compared to butter, and because “the average wages of the workingman in the United States is only forty to forty-five [cents] per day,” this benefit could help laborers until they succeeded in winning higher pay.37 Corbin hoped the readers of the UPEM shared his sense that they verged on ushering in real changes. Colorado workers still had to find a strategy to create solidarity at the polls. Labors’ quest for unity and search for political form was aided by state officials in 1888. That year, the Colorado legislature responded to unionists’ demands for a state-funded agency to examine the conditions of workers by establishing the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics. CBLS officials immediately assigned themselves the task of surveying the opinions and attitudes of the state’s workers. Included among the questions bureau investigators asked was an open-ended request to write “freely on matters of interest to wage-workers.” One Arapahoe County worker focused on hours. He explained that “ten hours’ work is pure slavery.” Another laborer from Clear Creek County wanted “eight hours’ work” and to “make a living at those hours.” He also advocated government ownership of the railroads, telegraphs, and telephones. A Gunnison County man agreed that he wanted measures that would alter his relationship with his employer, but realized that before “we can have just and pure legislation, we must make it possible to elect pure men to office.” Another worker added, “I would like to see the laboring men take an interest in the men they elect to office. If wise officials work for the laboring man, re-elect them, and if they work for monopolies, never elect them to office again.”38 When published, these responses allowed workers throughout the state to read the words of those who shared their experiences and wanted to amend workplace and social relations. The survey results also implied that many of the state’s laborers wanted to use the power of government to

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earn better wages, work fewer hours, and have better lives in general. Furthermore, the last participant in particular spoke for those who had given up on the ULP and wanted to return to Buchanan’s nonpartisan Workingmen’s Ticket strategy. That is, he captured the sentiments of rank-and-file political activists who favored voting for the politicians, regardless of party, who supported labor’s agenda. The best means of entering the political arena remained a point of debate. Nonpartisan slates left labor open to a situation where an officeholder elected by the labor vote would give into the demands of party leaders instead of keeping his word to unionists. Supporting labor parties presented a different set of concerns. The chief issue was the ability of labor candidates to get elected. Labor parties also seemed to attract contingent groups committed to an ideological stance. While those types of activists typically proved dynamic organizers, they also often accepted factional strife over compromise. In Colorado, we saw how Buchanan’s catholic socialism and Corbin’s plea for workers to remain practical in politics failed to unify unionists who roughly shared the same set of core values. A working-class political culture existed where unionists sought to have higher wages, shorter hours, safer workplaces, and a society in which the state accepted responsibility for alleviating poverty. Many workers appeared to view alternations to industrial and social relations as a process that would happen gradually, and they cared less about the ideological label ascribed to what they wanted and more about achieving their goals. Despite these points of agreement, the majority of Colorado workers by the end of the 1880s had not found the best means of capturing political power. Therefore, these unionists turned to their counterparts in Montana and Utah for direction in forging unity at the polls.

Finding Political Power Winning statehood, which would officially occur on November 8, 1889, intensified the already fierce competition for votes between Republicans and Democrats in the Montana Territory. On October 1, the people of Montana prepared for their admittance into the Union by going to the polls to determine representatives for state and national offices. The Democratic candidate for governor defeated his Republican rival by less than a thousand votes, but the Republicans sent their nominee, who won by less than two thousands votes, to the U.S. House of Representatives. The sixteen state senate seats and fifty of the fifty-five state house seats were evenly split, with party leaders contesting five seats from Silver Bow

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County. Amid emphatic charges and countercharges of ballot box stuffing and real and imagined incidents of electoral chicanery, compromise proved unthinkable because the state assembly determined who went to the U.S. Senate. Ultimately, the Republicans and Democrats both sent two choices to Washington. This allowed the Republicans, who controlled the U.S. Senate, to end the controversy and increase their majority by two.39 Workers’ ability to use these tight electoral margins to steadily gain political influence has long been ignored. Histories of Montana politics in the late nineteenth century remain focused on the feud between mining magnates and fellow Democrats Marcus Daly and William A. Clark. Frequently found eating lunch, drinking at his bar, and sharing stories with the workers who mined and smelted his copper, the Irish immigrant Daly appeared to be one of the nation’s last employers committed to a pre–Gilded Age entrepreneurial republicanism. Conversely, Clark, who collected art, vacationed in Europe, and wore fine clothes, preferred clear lines of distinction between himself and those whom he employed. Almost no record of interaction exists between the two Silver Bow County residents prior to the 1888 election. That year, Clark won the Democratic Party’s nomination for territorial delegate to Congress. All concerned considered the office a steppingstone to the senate once statehood was conferred. Based on Clark’s finances and the fact that Montana’s voters typically chose Democrats, he emerged as the favorite over the littleknown Republican nominee, Helena lawyer Thomas H. Carter. In a stunning upset, Carter won by a vote of 22,486 to 17,360.40 One version of Carter’s success claimed that Daly, who faced a number of charges in federal court for illegally harvesting timber, had brokered a deal with the Republican. Daly would deliver his employees’ votes in exchange for Carter’s protection from prosecution. As circumstantial evidence of this claim, proponents of the story point to Carter’s 1,537 vote victory in the overwhelmingly Democratic Silver Bow County. Republicans insisted that Carter’s win stemmed from his promise to support high tariffs on foreign goods. Advocates of high tariffs argued that by taxing foreign goods, demand for domestic goods would grow, and the wages of American workers would rise as a result. Also, Daly denied all claims that he coerced his workers into choosing the Helena lawyer.41 A more recent examination of the feud suggests that ethnic ties determined the election. This version of events offers two important correctives to the older narrative. First, it points out that the embittered Clark never listed Daly’s illegal acquisition of timber among the reasons he lost.

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Clark may have been just as willing as Carter was to assist Daly with his legal problems. Second, Daly could not have controlled the votes of all his workers. The actual reason for Clark’s victory, according to this view, was that the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Clark, who was rumored to be a member of the anti-Catholic American Protective Association, gave hiring preference to Cornishmen. Thus, the second-generation Irish Catholic Carter likely seemed a better choice to both Daly and Butte’s Irish Catholic miners.42 A third possibility, rooted in working-class political action, also demands consideration. Ethnicity no doubt played a role in this and other elections, but its significance has been overstated. Candidates increasingly broke traditional ethnic-party alliances, as the candidacies of Carter and Clark demonstrated. Furthermore, labor editors and politically active workers had pushed for a working-class-centered approach to politics, which played on party competition throughout the 1880s. Butte’s Legh Freeman published the Inter-Mountain Freeman, which celebrated the emergence of craft unions and promoted the KOL. Covering the spring 1882 city elections, Freeman argued that “we want men to manage the affairs of the city who, whether they are politically labeled Republicans or Democrats, have an interest in the prosperity of the city; have its welfare at heart.” He urged readers “to cross party lines in order to obtain the best men for the management of local affairs.” 43 A Butte railroad worker, in September 1886, explained that six of Silver Bow County’s KOL assemblies had entered “into politics” by choosing legislative committees. “We have trusted too much to the two old parties to do our work for us,” the laborer wrote. He argued further that “it invariably happens that they work to the interest of the rich and the poor must take the consequences, but now we have concluded to look after ourselves and send those men to fill the different offices that we can fully trust to work for the best good of the multitude of their constituents.”44 In May 1888, six months before Carter’s electoral success, Butte’s unionists appeared to have followed Freeman’s advice. They created their own labor party. The pro-labor Butte Mining Journal, edited by a Cornish Protestant former miner named William J. Penrose, asserted, “Since the two political parties nominated their candidates for city offices without consulting anyone outside the jobbers and political tricksters, the workingmen of Butte have felt it incumbent upon themselves to make an effort in behalf of good government.”45 The Workingmen’s Party emerged. Although delegates nominated some candidates exclusively from their party’s ranks, Workingmen’s Party members also endorsed office seek-

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ers from the major parties. The election provided minimal success: One labor-backed candidate, an incumbent, won. The Republicans proved the real victors, capturing nine of the possible fourteen offices in the contest. Tradition likely led some Irish unionists to maintain their loyalty to the Democratic Party and some Cornish workers to keep their commitments to the Republicans, but the difficulties associated with constructing a unified working-class voting bloc extended beyond overcoming ethnic ties to party organizations.46 Calls for unity and a demonstrated willingness to play on party competition by splitting tickets revealed unionists’ dissatisfaction with their political choices. Yet, as Colorado unionists established, no matter how often labor editors and union leaders expressed their hopes for a labor bloc, organized labor parties, or workingmen’s tickets, collective voting required rank-and-file consensus on objectives and candidates. Through a series of events, including ideological disagreements, political betrayals, a murder, and a near general strike, Butte workers, and Montana unionists in general, better defined their political objectives and decided that their labor organizations represented the best outlets to express their aims. The year the Clark-Daly feud began, 1888, Republican Will Kennedy, from the typically pro-Democratic town of Boulder, Montana, won a seat in the territorial legislature by eighty-four votes. Before his election, Kennedy served in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. He then moved around the West as a teacher. Eventually he learned the printing trade and arrived in Montana in 1881 as a member of both the Typographical Union and the KOL. After living in Butte, Missoula, Deer Lodge, and Helena, he settled in Boulder, which rested between Helena and Butte. There he started a newspaper, the Age. When Kennedy announced his candidacy, he argued that Montanans had to limit the political influence that railroad owners and other employers possessed. He claimed the Australian (secret) ballot would provide the people a greater voice. Finding most of his fellow legislators opposed or indifferent to his proposal, he started a petition drive. Thousands of Montanans let their representatives know that they supported Kennedy’s bill. Public opinion forced the assembly to pass, and the governor to sign, a secret-ballot law in March 1889. This victory was not beginner’s luck. Although new to Boulder, Kennedy had represented Missoula County in the state legislature in 1884 and again in 1886. During his two terms, he succeeded in creating a three-person territorial arbitration board comprised of one employer, one laborer, and one independent citizen.47 Kennedy did not stop with this triumph. He then called for legislators to enact the single tax. This effort bore no fruit.

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Kennedy’s commitment to Henry George’s land redistribution scheme was so strong that he continued to champion it after leaving the legislature. In fact, his passion for this particular reform led him to play a central role in splintering Montana’s labor movement at a crucial moment. In the summer of 1890, members of KOL District Assembly (DA) 98, headquartered in Butte, organized a meeting with the Helena Trades and Labor Assembly and the Farmers’ Alliance. Those assembled created the Independent Labor Party and issued a platform calling for an eighthour day, a more stringent mine-inspection law, equal wages for men and women, stronger enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and government ownership of the railroads and telegraph lines. Before the convention ended, Kennedy, who appeared willing to leave the Republican Party, insisted that his fellow delegates amend the platform to include a single-tax plank. When the majority of delegates rejected the change, Kennedy and his supporters left the meeting and formed their own Single Tax ticket. DA 98 grand master workman Peter Breen also impeded the Independent Labor Party effort. Breen won a seat in the territorial assembly in 1888 as a Democrat. Switching parties would have alienated his fellow Democrats in the legislature and limited his ability to win reforms. In the end, divided leadership meant that workers split their loyalties and doomed the labor party experiment from the beginning. Not surprisingly, the party’s convention ended in turmoil and delegates backed only William T. Field, a railroad engineer who sought a U.S. congressional seat. He finished fourth out of four candidates, claiming only 162 of a possible 31,000 votes.48 The failure of Butte and Montana unionists to unite at the ballot box led politicians to doubt workers’ ability to vote as a bloc. As a result, some officeholders calculated that they could disregard workers’ legislative demands without fear of a labor bloc punishing them when they sought reelection. Understanding the murder of William Penrose illustrates this point. In 1891, Breen did his best to represent Butte’s workers, who had helped elect him to the Montana legislature. He introduced a bill to grant miners an eight-hour workday. Penrose, one of Butte’s state representatives and editor of the pro-labor Butte Mining Journal, promised his support for the proposed measure. But when the time came for legislators to determine the fate of the bill, Penrose changed his mind. He voted with the majority of assemblymen, thirty-one to twenty-one, to table the measure. Party affiliation had little to do with the outcome. Sixteen Demo-

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crats and fifteen Republicans opposed the bill, while ten Democrats and eleven Republicans supported it. Members of the Butte Miners’ Union (BMU) responded by hanging a twelve-foot-high sign with the names of those who had rejected the measure outside the union hall. They also called for a boycott against all of the “traitors” in the state assembly. Penrose, a Protestant who had emigrated from Cornwall and helped start the union, found his name featured at the top of the list. Happy to trade insults, he called the BMU a rest home for union bureaucrats. Next, he organized a local chapter of the Sons of St. George, an English Protestant organization, and claimed it would assist its members in acquiring jobs. To the predominantly Irish Catholic unionists, Penrose’s actions seemed a betrayal. Not only had he let them down as their state assemblymen, he now threatened their employment. On June 9, 1891, two weeks after his declaration of job assistance for British descendents, an unknown assassin gunned him down on a busy Butte street. While no evidence links Butte workers to his murder, and the police failed to identify convincingly those involved, it appeared Penrose should have realized how seriously unionists wanted the eight-hour day.49 Although scholarly attention surrounding the Penrose incident focuses mainly on his murder, more specifically whether the BMU had him killed, it is as important to question why he voted against the wishes of his constituency. Based on his editorials in the Mining Journal and his behavior before his murder, he seemed to have determined that most workers would privilege their ethnocultural loyalties above their sense of class solidarity when picking candidates. That meant assuming that the two largest groups of miners, Irish Catholics and Cornish Protestants, would split their votes between the Democrats and Republicans, respectively. During the failed efforts of the Workingmen’s Party in 1888, however, the Cornish Methodist Penrose urged workers to use their unions as their political agents. Just before the election, he informed unionists: “You are to blame for your present condition.” He added that “you have the votes necessary to control legislation and if legislation is bad it is your fault.”50 When the Workingmen’s Party collapsed, Penrose attempted to become labor’s representative by seeking office himself. In 1889, he ran as a Democrat. As Clark had a year earlier, Penrose broke Butte’s assumed political arrangement that Protestants run as Republicans. The Republicans countered by nominating an Irish Catholic, former BMU president Patrick Boland.51 When Penrose disregarded the wishes of the BMU and voted against the eight-hour day measure, he appeared to end his quest for being the voice of labor. Instead, he sought

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to become the patron of Cornish Protestant workers. His behavior and editorials revealed his doubts that Butte workers could unify at the ballot box, and it exposed his inability to fully grasp workers’ belief that better workplace and social conditions depended on laws and state-mandated policies. Ethnic tensions and splits over issues such as the single tax were not gaps in Butte unionists’ sense of class identity or signs of an apolitical attitude. During this period of frustrated electoral activism, these workers successfully battled to raise wages. The BMU, by the late 1880s, declared $3 per day the standard “living wage” in the city, and set out to help all male workers, with the exception of Chinese immigrants, acquire this pay rate. When fifteen laborers excavating a cellar discovered, on May 3, 1890, that contractors planned on paying them a rate of only $2.50, they stopped working. That night, a hundred workers met and agreed to send a committee to inform the city’s contractors that no building laborer would work for less than the $3. The next night, 236 men heard the committee present its findings. Contractors agreed to negotiate, but the assembled workers decided to carry on the strike until every laborer in the city “who [had] been working for less than $3 per day” received a raise. By May 6, the strikers numbered five hundred, and those demanding the $3 day formed the Butte Laborers’ Union. The BMU provided assistance to the new organization by running the strike and contributing financial support. Later that month, members renamed their body the Butte Workingmen’s Union (BWU) and affiliated it with the KOL. By June, virtually every male laborer in the city earned at least $3 a day.52 By 1891, more than four-thousand Montana miners belonged to a union, and Butte’s chief labor periodical, the Butte Bystander, declared that every “branch of labor is organized in this city.” The Bystander also proclaimed the city’s unions to be “in a flourishing condition, both financially and in the matter of obtaining living wages for their members.”53 It was unlikely that all wage workers had a union in Butte, but one can assume that the number of organized workers well exceeded 50 percent because 80 percent of Butte’s copper miners, the city’s primary occupation, belonged to the BMU.54 This high rate of unionization, the accompanying commitment to cross-union solidarity, and politicians’ desire for votes in a city and state with highly contested elections suggested that collective voting would yield greater political power. In fact, even without a well-established electoral strategy, local politicians revealed their recognition of labor’s political might. Almost immediately after chartering their organization in 1890, BWU members

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attempted to gauge their strength. They asked the city council “that all persons working for the city be paid at the rate of $3 per day.” Councilmen granted the request immediately.55 The fact that workers organized a near general strike to win this demand in the private sector certainly could not have been lost on municipal officials. This action meant that Butte’s local leaders sanctioned labor’s claim to the living wage. Workers understood this as an important victory because, as the Bystander later argued, they wanted lawmakers and judges to recognize their “social and economic legitimacy by putting them on the same legal basis with organized capital.”56 Granting city workers the $3 wage signaled a shift in that direction, and proved that labor wielded significant political influence. Thus, Butte workers were not debating whether they should embrace or avoid political action, as Penrose appeared to assume. Their problem, like that of their counterparts in Colorado, was finding agreement among themselves on their collective aims and defining the form their political activism should take. By 1891, possibilities included working within one of the major parties, creating a labor party, becoming part of a broadbased antimonopolist coalition, or agreeing on a nonpartisan slate of prolabor candidates at union meetings. When legislators failed to pass the proposed eight-hour law for miners, which the state’s unionists hoped would result in a host of pro-labor measures that redefined labor-market relations, workers felt increasing pressure to find a more powerful political agent. Kennedy recognized this and demonstrated his commitment to the cause when he backed away from his single-tax fundamentalism. He continued to believe, based on his faith in the labor theory of value, that a natural law of economics existed and that any legislation that provided privilege to any group upset that innate balance. Therefore, he doubted “that the eight-hour law or any other form of special legislation [would] bring permanent relief to the laboring classes. The evil of the unequal and unfair distribution of the wealth” called for “a much more radical remedy.” He meant, of course, that only the single tax would adequately redistribute wealth and make workers’ lives better. Yet he also understood that when the Butte carpenters, among other unions, sent letters to newspapers and state assemblymen demanding that the legislature pass the eight-hour-day law for miners, workers’ adherence to cross-union solidarity made the moment ripe for class-based political mobilization.57 This one-time dual unionist, reform editor, pro-labor politician, and champion of the single tax subordinated his views for the good of the whole and demonstrated his devotion to building a cohesive voting bloc through union-centered political action.

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Juxtaposing their successes at the local level—such as petitioning the city council to support higher wages for city contracts—with their failures to acquire an eight-hour-day bill in the state legislature, Montana workers, specifically those in Butte, reasoned that they had to use their unions as their political agents and work from the local level up. An 1892 editorial in the Bystander, titled “The Labor Movement as a Political Movement,” further illustrated this point. The piece contended that all endeavors seeking to advance “freedom for the masses” were political. Since unions organized for this very reason, the editor claimed all “labor movements are political movements.” He added that whether “indirectly or directly,” the fight for “the extension of right and justice” was political. Politicians willing to pass legislation that tilted property rights in employers’ favor along with judges who advanced those notions without any concern for the greater good made “tyrannical employers.”58 Put another way, class conflict resulted from the contest between employers and workers to define the value of work and the distribution of profits. Laws helped determine the winner. Since most politicians and judges refused to restore the natural economic order, at least according to workers who held the labor theory of value dear, workers had no choice but to fight for manmade laws to improve their material condition and alter the post–Civil War social structure dominated by corporate interests. Workers needed to articulate a new vision of society, agree upon laws and policies that would make that vision a reality, and find a way to elect pro-labor candidates to office who would enact those laws and advocate those policies. By 1893, most Montana workers shared, to some degree, the antimonopolist views of the reformers of their day. They wanted dramatic changes, such as land taxes or bimetallism, that required acts of Congress, but they also understood that municipal ordinances and state statutes offered the most expedient path to making everyday life better. These workers, through experimentation, had sharpened their definition of a just society. For these unionists, greater liberty started with workplace regulations. Workers’ answers to an 1893 survey by the commissioner of the state’s Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry demonstrated that they focused on improving their immediate conditions first. In other words, they looked at the acquisition of justice as a gradual process. Railroad employees and hard-rock miners offered a representative sample of the larger pool of answers to the bureau’s question, which asked workers to list the wrongs that existed at their workplaces and then to suggest a remedy. Fifteen of the fifty railroad workers, in nine different occupations, advocated

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the free coinage of silver. Others demanded statutes that shortened hours, regulated wages, made workplaces safer, and placed ceilings on the rents that company boarding houses could charge. Of the eighty-seven hardrock miners who replied, forty wanted an eight-hour-day law passed and thirty-eight wanted the free coinage of silver. Concerns also focused on some aspects of health, including ventilation laws, better-lined shafts, and mine inspection. A number of the railroad workers, miners, and other respondents also called for a ban on immigration. Unskilled workers proved even more focused on issues that local and state officeholders could affect. Of the eight restaurant employees who filled out the survey, only two called for free coinage. Two others commented on poor ventilation and wanted safety measures, while four respondents sought shorter-hours statutes. Ten general laborers requested steady employment and higher wages. The majority championed shorterhours laws, but only one laborer included free coinage among her or his answers.59 Wanting better pay; tired from working ten- to fourteen-hour days; angry at employers for their lack of concern for workplace safety; fearful of dying due to a mine explosion, falling off a moving railroad car, or using damaged machinery; and generally disgusted by corporate hegemony, the workers who filled out this survey demanded immediate change. With the recognition that Montana laborers’ political concerns stemmed from their workplace experiences, the question becomes: If cross-union solidarity and a general agreement regarding the necessity of political action existed, what stood in the way of collective voting? Unionists’ unwillingness to break ethnic and religious ties that linked them to the major parties, as some Butte editors and modern-day historians argue, seemed to play a minor role. Also, most workers did not want to vote for candidates who privileged the single tax above acquiring a shorter-hours law. More important, it stands to reason that some workers, especially in Butte, did not see the need for a formal voting bloc. Vote totals suggested that workers had doubts about the labor parties’ prospects for success. Between 1888 and 1890, the lack of an agreed-upon slate of candidates did not prevent pro-labor office seekers from claiming victory. DA 98 leader Breen and pro-labor (at the time) editor Penrose, both held office. Prior to Penrose’s “traitorous” act, the threat of a workingclass voting bloc in an era of intense party competition and a growing pool of laborers forced Butte politicians to continually consider workers’ concerns. If unionists had entered into an all-out effort to elect labor party candidates and failed, they would have held almost no political

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influence. Penrose forced them to change their outlook. In 1892, the year before the survey appeared and the year after the eight-hour law for miners failed, Breen and Kennedy led an effort to refashion working-class activism in Butte and all over Montana. Breen left the Democratic Party and accepted the position of chair of the state’s Populist, or People’s, Party. The antimonopolist movements of the immediate post–Civil War period paved the way for the emergence of Populism in the early 1890s. Farmers and some workers in the Midwest and the South built a political culture of reform through community gatherings, circuit lectures, and ultimately the creation of the People’s Party. Populists devised the Omaha Platform, their 1892 manifesto, which sought to challenge corporate authority by winning the unlimited coinage of silver; a graduated income tax; government ownership of the railroads, telephone, and telegraph; the return of lands given to railroads by the federal government; immigration restrictions; shorter hours for workers; and a host of electoral reforms. Farmers, not workers, many scholars argue, successfully challenged corporate power in this era because business owners possessed such extensive influence over legislators and justices that they blocked labor’s political efforts and halted the working class from building a vibrant political culture.60 Rocky Mountain workers, however, are typically held up as the exception to this rule. Populism in this region is largely considered a workingclass movement.61 Montana populism, as Breen’s leadership suggested, was labor based. The party’s platform demanded a mine inspector elected by the people, an eight-hour day for all workers, the elimination of company stores, and the revocation of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s land grants. Also, the Bystander became the party’s official organ.62 Yet this understanding of Rocky Mountain unionists’ political activism simplifies workers’ political outlook. Most unionists cared less about political form, mobilizing under the banner of a political party or a nonpartisan ticket, and more about acquiring the influence necessary to win legislation that would alter social relations. Political outlook did, however, matter in the long run. In their effort to solve the immediate problems that wage earners faced, labor leaders and rank-and-file activists started to reorient the political vision of the region’s labor movement. As Colorado unionists evidenced in the late 1880s, Rocky Mountain workers began to move from antimonopolism toward socialism. This departure was subtle, because American socialists maintained the same commitment to understanding justice in ethical terms that they had held under antimonopolism. Those who remained

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wedded to antimonopolism and those who favored socialism shared a set of values that grew out their opposition to the social conditions that capitalism created. Long hours for little pay and the fact that those who toiled found themselves in poverty outraged these critics of capitalism. Ultimately, a difference emerged between the two positions when workers started championing and winning measures that socialized capitalist relations as opposed to trying to construct an alternative to capitalism. Most laborers did not immediately recognize this shift. It would take until the late 1890s and early 1900s, as the next chapter reveals, for a significant number of Rocky Mountain unionists to call themselves socialists. Butte workers continued the momentum of this evolution, even though they mobilized under the banner of the Populist Party. Montana Populists entered electoral contests for the first time in 1892. Although the results proved disappointing throughout most of the state, Butte’s returns provided hope. In the state house, Republicans and Democrats each captured twenty-seven seats to the Populists’ three. All three People’s Party victors came from Silver Bow County. The major parties responded to this emerging threat by adding labor planks to their platforms. Republicans offered to strengthen the state’s commitment to arbitrating strikes and to back stronger anti-Chinese laws. The Democrats called for bimetallism and measures barring foreign laborers.63 Over the course of the rest of the 1890s, Montana workers mobilized for political action through their unions and voted for Populists selectively. At root, workers engaged in political activism to obtain the power necessary to alter social relations. Two events, the demand for unemployment relief and calls for public support for depression protesters, demonstrated how workers in Butte and Helena articulated Populist sentiments differently but shared a commitment to union-centered political action. In 1893, Americans experienced the nation’s worst economic collapse theretofore. Bankrupt railroads, overproduction, and a depleted gold reserve resulted in over 583 bank failures, roughly sixteen thousand business closures, and the unemployment of approximately three million people.64 By the end of 1893, one-third of Montana’s workers had lost their jobs. A year later, Butte’s mayor estimated the city had five thousand unemployed workers out of a total population of twelve thousand.65 Butte Knights called an industrial conference for all of Montana’s unionists in 1893 and again in January 1894. At the 1894 meeting, Breen gave an impassioned speech, telling delegates that “starvation is playing havoc among the families of strong and honest workingmen, who are begging for work, but are unable to procure it.” He added that “in behalf of the downtrodden

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millions of human beings, in behalf of the American Constitution, and in behalf of liberty itself,” they had a responsibility to convince those they represented to “take united and decisive political action.”66 Delegates passed resolutions asking city councils to hire the unemployed, demanding bimetallism, insisting upon the eight-hour day, and supporting women’s suffrage.67 Populist vote totals climbed quickly, and workers gained political influence. In Butte, People’s Party candidates received only 12 percent of the vote in the 1893 local election, but that number rose to 30 percent in the 1894 race.68 The growth of a labor bloc of votes pushed major-party politicians to demonstrate their support for labor’s causes. Butte’s unionists appeared to be in the process of transferring their passionate displays of solidarity from the streets to the voting booth. Instead of focusing on spreading the living wage and winning the eight-hour day, however, they now had to concentrate on unemployment relief. In the spring of 1894, Ohio small businessman Jacob Coxey suggested that out-of-work Americans march to Washington, D.C., on Easter Sunday and demand that the federal government fund road-building projects that would provide jobs for the unemployed. Thousands of workers throughout the country heeded Coxey’s call. One newspaper claimed that thirteen units of Coxey’s industrial army attempted to take their message to Congress. Most never made it. As the division led by Coxey neared Washington, President Grover Cleveland ordered police to enforce a law prohibiting parades on the Capitol grounds. Many historians depict the Coxeyite movement as a chapter in “the history of the Populist revolt.” They have good reason for this assessment. Coxey did support the Populist Party, ran for Congress on the Populist ticket, and even named his son Legal Tender. Furthermore, many Coxeyites identified themselves with the Populist movement and carried signs and banners supporting People’s Party planks.69 Yet to simply label Coxey’s protest Populist misses the subtleties of working-class political practices. In Montana, for instance, both Republicans and Democrats sought workers’ votes to the point that they responded with surprising, even generous, support for the state’s Coxeyites. William Hogan, an out-of-work Butte teamster, and his three hundred followers stole a locomotive and cars in the early hours of April 24. Later that morning, Federal Marshal William McDermott gathered a posse.70 Meanwhile, crowds of thousands at Bozeman and Livingston cheered the protesters when they stopped for supplies. In fact, some supporters in Bozeman boarded the train, bringing the total membership in Hogan’s army to roughly four hundred.

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The two stops as well as cave-ins on the tracks allowed the federal agents to catch up with Hogan near Billings, 221 miles east of Butte. On April 25, the deputies started shooting at Hogan’s army. Two bystanders died, and an angry mob turned their wrath on the federal agents. Grabbing any potential weapon—bricks, bottles, railcar-coupling pins—the crowd attacked the lawmen. Taking cover in the town’s roundhouse, the deputies found themselves surrounded. The local sheriff then arrested the federal agents and allowed Hogan and his men to escape. They did not get much farther, however, as an army unit arrested them outside of Miles City, 144 miles from Billings.71 Although federal authorities opposed Hogan and his army, local politicians did not. Butte’s mayor and the Silver Bow County commissioners tried to acquire a train for Hogan and his men to use before they left on their adventure. Helena leaders demonstrated their support for Montana’s Coxeyites after the army took them there on April 28, to await trial. Hogan went to the county jail for six months for stealing a train and violating an injunction, but the judge freed about 275 of his followers when they promised not to seize any more locomotives. Upon exiting the courthouse, a crowd cheered and urged the Hoganites to continue their journey. They now faced the problem of how to travel east without breaking their word. Helena mayor John C. Curtin, a Democrat, and the city council agreed to help. They arranged financing for the construction of flatboats. Two hundred fifty of Hogan’s remaining soldiers planned to navigate the Missouri River from Fort Benton, Montana, to Omaha, Nebraska. At Omaha they hoped to join up with other units of the Coxeyite movement and continue toward the nation’s capital. The reassembled army, which gained more troops on the way to Fort Benton from Helena, numbered around four hundred men when it began its quest anew on June 6. Amazingly, on July 9, they arrived in St. Joseph, Missouri, past Omaha, and blended in with other western Coxeyites.72 The reaction of Helena’s city leaders demonstrated a mix of genuine compassion and recognition of labor’s growing organizational strength. Ten days before Hogan and his men arrived in Helena, Mayor Curtin, former mayor and Democrat James Sullivan, and Republican mayor-elect E. D. Weed collectively chaired a city meeting. Over 2,500 local residents gathered to inform Northern Pacific Railroad officials that the people of Helena supported the KOL and American Railway Union workers striking for higher pay. The crowd voted on a set of resolutions, including one that proclaimed the city’s “deepest sympathy” for these railroad workers

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“in their struggle for living wages.” 73 Helena’s political elite recognized that they lived in a railroad town with an active labor movement, not to mention a growing contingent of possible Populist supporters. Their responses to local railroad workers and the Hoganites illustrated that Montana unionists had power beyond Butte. In Butte, Democrats reacted to the Populist threat and labor’s growing interest in the movement by proposing an accommodation. In 1896, Populist leaders and Democratic officials agreed to limit the number of candidates in the spring city election so as to compete in only one ward. When the votes were counted, the local Republican newspaper complained that its party had been betrayed by this corrupt bargain. Surprise defined the reaction of the Bystander’s editor as he witnessed “the unusual spectacle of Irishmen and Cornishmen” voting for the same candidate.74 In the fall election that year, this same compromise extended to the state level. Helena resident Robert B. Smith, who had spoken at the April 1894 meeting in support of the city’s striking railroad workers, ran as the DemocraticPopulist candidate for governor. He won. Many Butte workers had always understood their unions as a type of political agent, but it took the 1893 economic crisis and cooperation by union leaders to push them to overcome the ethnic and ideological commitments that bound them to the major parties. By controlling the People’s Party and demonstrating a willingness to run fusion candidates, Butte’s labor leaders crafted a strategy that finally led workers to exercise class unity at the polls. Utah workers arrived at a similar point, but experienced a very different journey.

Mormonism, Unemployment, and the Eight-Hour Fight In 1890, Utah labor leaders decided to advance the cause of those “who carried dinner pails for a lifetime” by organizing a labor party.75 That meant that workers had to challenge the political might of the Mormon Church. The church owned most of the property in Utah, and many of its leading members ran the stores that laborers used. Mormon leaders selected the candidates they wanted in office and told church members to vote for those nominees. Furthermore, the citizens of Utah had their own two-party system. The Latter Day Saints (LDS)-run People’s Party (not to be confused with the Populists) squared off in local and territorial elections against the anti-Mormon Liberal Party. Liberals rarely won.76 In July 1890, R. G. Sleater, head of the Utah Federated Trades and Labor Council (UFTLC), an organization consisting mostly of Salt Lake

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City’s skilled and unskilled workers, suggested that the members of the federation create their own ticket for the Salt Lake County election in August. The Independent Workingmen’s Party resulted. Party leaders quickly turned rank-and-file enthusiasm into dread, however, when they chose a slate of candidates consisting of a realtor, builder, bank teller, lawyer, and college professor. LDS elders, who considered groups like the Knights as radicals and unions as a threat to the church’s authority, endorsed the Workingmen’s ticket.77 Based on the party’s nominees and the Mormon Church’s support of those candidates, many of the city’s workers concluded that anti-labor forces had corrupted the new party. The letters of angry unionists appeared in the August 2 edition of the Salt Lake Herald. A carpenter explained that he favored “a workingman’s ticket,” but opposed “the Mormon Church nominating” it. Referring to his ballot, a tinner proclaimed that he would not “think of depositing such a libel” in the ballot box because “I am not such an ass.” Another laborer remarked: “I am a union man, but unequivocally opposed to this misnamed workingman’s ticket.” A bricklayer declared: “I do not consort with loud and blatant demoagogues [sic] who pose as the friend of labor, while their breath is strong enough from whisky that it is capable of pulling a train of fifty cars all the way from Denver.” Two days later, printers charged: “We do not believe the workingmen are in sympathy with the ticket, and we as individuals, members of the Salt Lake Typographical Union No. 115 hereby express . . . our disapproval of any such transparent fraud and deception.” 78 Unionists wanted a class-based political outlet, a “real” labor party. Building a real labor party proved difficult in Utah because of religious differences. Bishops informed workers that their loyalty had to be to the church above their unions. This led non-Mormon workers to distrust the political loyalties of their LDS brothers and sisters. It also did not help matters that the year before the labor-party fiasco, Federated Trades leader Sleater had arrived at a labor ball with a wife on each arm.79 A real labor party had to confront LDS attitudes toward unions, politics, and economic relationships, and workers had to believe in their leaders’ commitment to union-centered political activism. Following the 1890 county election, workers found renewed hope for their political futures because of changes in the territory’s electoral environment. Class-conscious voters recognized an opportunity for power when LDS leaders pushed for statehood. Some church elders had wanted admittance into the Union since the mid-nineteenth century, but Congress had always refused to consider the matter because of the Mormons’

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insistence on practicing plural marriage. In September, church officials finally surrendered to the federal government’s wishes and outlawed polygamy. Bishops also agreed to stop telling church members whom they should elect. In 1891, the church abandoned its People’s Party and instructed saints to vote for either Republicans or Democrats.80 Having no base, both parties, especially in the industrializing centers of Salt Lake City and Ogden, had to appeal to well-organized groups, and unionists knew this. In 1891, the Federated Trades established a list of political demands that included an eight-hour day for miners, an employers’ liability law, the creation of a state board of arbitration, a ban on convict labor, and limits on women’s and children’s work. Despite the UFTLC platform’s concentration on territorial-level reforms, bricklayers, stonemasons, and stonecutters belonging to the city federation pushed fellow unionists to focus on municipal politics first in order to build momentum. Office seekers could not ignore the fact that out of the 9,196 people employed in the city’s industries, 2,886, or a little over 31 percent, belonged to a union.81 In early 1892, these craftsmen met in a joint session and invited city-council candidates, regardless of party, to answer questions during face-to-face interviews.82 The next year, they promised to keep records of how “all members of [the] city council” voted while in office.83 By 1891, workers decided that supporting a nonpartisan slate of candidates made up of nominees from the major parties made more sense than organizing a labor party. The opportunity to play on party competition offered a more direct route to power. The influence workers wielded during the panic of 1893 to 1897, which some claim was America’s worst economic crisis prior to the Great Depression, revealed the benefits of this strategy. Salt Lake City workers in 1894 experienced a near 50 percent unemployment rate, twice that of the nation.84 In February 1895, the Salt Lake Workingmen’s Association, an organization of unemployed men, petitioned the city council to hire their members to construct city sewers at a rate of 20 cents per day. The Committee on Sewage responded that “it [was] not within the province of the City Council to fix the rate of wages” for public works. Yet the committee did recommend that contractors only hire members of this group and pay them every week in cash.85 Although the council refused to legitimize what the workers considered a living wage, it did grant the Workingmen’s Association a closed shop. A year earlier, in the spring of 1894, Ogden unionists demonstrated that they too could effectively employ union-centered political action

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when they assisted a group of unemployed protestors. Charles T. Kelley hoped to lead a group of Coxeyites from Oakland, California, to the banks of the Potomac. On April 7, he and over a hundred men arrived in Ogden, where they would stay until April 11. The Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation had agreed to transport the men to Utah for $600, and as they neared the city’s depot, the state’s well-armed militia surrounded them. Utah governor Caleb West had tried to prevent the Kelleyites’ arrival, as he wanted them to return to California. The Southern Pacific now demanded $35,000 to take them back to Oakland, and the Union Pacific wanted $40,000 to transport the men to Denver. While engaged in negotiations with the railroads, West refused to remove the militia and kept the Kelleyites confined. Ogden’s unionists, along with the city’s Republican newspaper, the Standard, denounced the governor for his treatment of the protesters and called upon city and state officials to provide aid. Unionists then paraded through city streets in support of the captives. Mayor Charles M. Brough, after attempting to negotiate with the governor, met with the Kelleyites and informed them that the city of Ogden would assist them in getting to Wyoming if they were willing to walk. Kelley and his men agreed. Brough led them past the militia through town. Nine wagons filled with food, clothes, and blankets caught up to the men as they headed east. At Uintah, curiously, a UP freight train with twenty-seven empty cars slowed and allowed the Kelleyites to board. It took them to Omaha, where federal troops awaited their arrival. The Oakland natives were then sent back to California.86 The Railroad Gazette, a pro-railroad corporation paper, critiqued railroad owners and officials throughout the Coxeyite episode for failing “to demand protection from municipal and county officers.” Those who opposed the army of the unemployed, such as the Gazette’s editor, wanted greater force used by state militias and local police forces to quell this movement. This raises the question, why did elected local officials in the West especially, such as Ogden’s mayor and city council, aid the Coxeyites? One letter to the Railway Times, the newspaper of the newly created American Railway Union (ARU), argued that in “the West workingmen’s organizations and farmers’ societies received the pilgrims with open arms and gave them food and help” because “Wall Street” and “the press” did not control politicians and public opinion. One historian added that in the West local officials and the general public grew tired of the railroad corporations’ business practices and the political power they possessed.87 Both assessments understated the ability of workers to craft a strong political presence that allowed them to influence the decisions local politicians made.

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Ogden Knights, like their fellow workers in Salt Lake City, understood that they could play on party competition by offering a wellorganized bloc of votes to a candidate willing to support their demands. Between 1880 and 1890, Ogden’s population grew from 6,069 people to 14,889. Many of these new arrivals came to work for the Union Pacific Corporation. These laborers, like the skilled and unskilled workers in the town’s small industries, joined the KOL. During the 1880s, at least three Knights’ local assemblies formed in Ogden. One of them affiliated with DA 82, the organization headquartered in Denver that represented all UP workers and coal miners from Omaha to Portland.88 Furthermore, Ogden workers had joined the Federated Trades’ labor-party movement of 1891. In fact, Herbert Button—carpenter, future statehood delegate, and soon-to-be leading proponent of the pro-labor legislation found in Utah’s first constitution—came from Salt Lake City to help organize the party.89 With a multiplying organized workforce, along with the weak party structures created by the transition from the anti-Mormon Liberal Party and the Mormon-run People’s Party to the Republicans and Democrats, Ogden unionists had the same opportunities to acquire political power as their fellow Salt Lake City workers. They did just that. In fall 1893, Brough, a Republican, won the mayor’s race by just seventy-five votes. His campaign focused on the party’s commitment to workingmen. On the eve of the election, he spoke mostly about his opposition to free trade. Brough supported tariffs, he claimed, because they promoted wage growth. He wanted workers to have a high standard of living. Adding to Ogden Republicans’ general claims of being the party of labor, the Standard reminded the city’s unionists that the Sun, the voice of the Democrats, had employed “scab labor” during a strike the previous year.90 While he may have been sympathetic toward the Kelleyites, Mayor Brough must have weighed the consequences for reelection. If workers opposed his candidacy, he would lose. Therefore, he stood up to a governor who sent the militia to greet unemployed protesters during an economic crisis, and he met labor’s demands by providing the Kelleyites with food, blankets, and clothes. During the depression of 1893, Rocky Mountain workers in Montana and Utah used their unions as their political agents. They overcame differences, such as ethnic alliance and religious commitments, to collectively cast ballots for mayors, city council members, and sheriffs. Then they pressured these officeholders to pass and uphold municipal laws, and to recognize their right to strike, boycott, and protest for jobs and higher wages. They found that their unity at the ballot box translated into politi-

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cal power. As a consequence, the region’s unionists decided to embark on a project to reconstruct society by seeking pro-labor laws that redefined labor-market relationships. Through the electoral experiments that lent them varying degrees of political power, Rocky Mountain workers changed their expectations. More than using union-centered political action as a desperate tactic to prevent pay cuts or win unemployment relief, they wanted to embark on a project to acquire justice. Their exact definition of justice would remain contested and therefore elusive in the late nineteenth century, but all workers could agree that it included shorter hours, higher wages, safer conditions, and fighting poverty. Utah laborers in particular provided the model of how to make unioncentered political action a means of achieving greater rights. Specifically, Utah workers used union-centered political action to obtain the nation’s first constitutionally upheld shorter-hours statute for private employees. They accomplished this task by electing delegates to the constitutional convention that created the state of Utah, thereby infusing their values into that document. The citizens of the Utah Territory were scheduled to choose the delegates who would author Utah’s founding constitution in November 1894. Three months before the election, members of the Salt Lake Building Trades Congress (SLBTC) agreed to unite “the workingmen’s vote” in order to advance labor’s interests. By September, the SLBTC and the Federated Trades had created a political club that met on Tuesday nights.91 No records of the political club’s endorsements remain, but the results of the convention suggested that their strategy worked. From March through May 1895, a number of passionate debates occurred in Salt Lake City, as representatives met to create the forty-fifth state. Two Republicans from Salt Lake City, William F. James and Herbert Button, entered into an especially heated argument over a proposed eight-hour-day law for miners and smeltermen. James, the chief opponent of the measure, declared, “I am a working man.” He told his peers that he had “filled every position in a mine from a shoveler” to “the manager and owner of property.” These experiences, he insisted, had taught him that workers would choose a ten-hour workday over an eight-hour one. When questioned about his statement, James arrived at the crux of the debate: wages. He asked if mine workers preferred “to work eight hours a day and get eight hours’ pay or work ten hours a day and get ten hours’ pay?” Contractor and carpenter Herbert Button, an enthusiastic advocate of the proposed statute, responded, “I belong to labor unions. I

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never belonged to one yet that did not want eight hours for a day’s work.” Button then explained that granting mine workers shorter hours did not mean lowering their wages. The miner “will be paid for ten hours’ work although he only works eight.” Button and the other supporters of the measure carried the day by a vote of 79 to 11, with sixteen delegates absent.92 Utah’s founding constitution not only provided miners an eighthour day but also enacted the 1891 legislative agenda of the Federated Trades, which included a state board of arbitration, a ban on convict labor, limits on women’s and children’s work, and compensation for jobrelated injuries.93 The eight-hour measure for miners and smeltermen justified the shorter workday based on the hazardous nature of the jobs. In writing the law this way, unionists wanted to establish the principle that health and safety superseded liberty of contract. Refusing to acknowledge the realities around them, most judges in this era assumed that workers and employers entered into negotiations over wages and hours equally, and that each individual made the best deal for him- or herself. To uphold a law restricting hours of work, therefore, would mean violating an individual’s right to deal with his or her employer. Counting on this precedent, Albert F. Holden immediately challenged his state’s eight-hour law by hiring a miner to work underground for ten hours per day in Bingham on June 20, 1896. Sheriff Harvey Hardy arrested Holden. Found guilty, Holden appealed to the Utah Supreme Court. The Utah justices agreed with earlier rulings and fined him $50 and court costs. The case then reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1898, where Justice Henry B. Brown delivered the seven to two majority opinion, which held that “a limitation” of hours “for the preservation of the health of employees” was reasonable.94 Union-centered political action rested on the ability and willingness of Western labor organizers to bring a growing working-class population into the labor movement, mobilize those workers as a voting bloc, and take advantage of the relative organizational weakness of the Republicans and Democrats. These factors permitted politically active workers and labor leaders to construct a flexible electoral strategy that granted workers an increasing share of political power, which they used to redefine workplace relations. Securing that political power mattered more than the form workers embraced to get it. For example, unionists in Utah, unlike their Montana counterparts, never found an affinity for the Populists. Butte workers in particular supported the People’s Party, but that was because they controlled the People’s Party. Workers’ relationship to Populism in the

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Rocky Mountain West had more to do with strategy than ideology. This is not to deny that many, if not most, workers felt comfortable supporting antimonopolist positions. They did. More important, however, these unionists privileged their immediate political goals, which centered on restructuring their workplaces and general living conditions, over an illdefined cooperativist future. Currency reform, government ownership of the railroads, and the other general economic restructuring issues that Populists favored required acts of Congress. Rocky Mountain workers wanted to start with the right to negotiate collectively with employers over wages, to have a say over how many hours a day they worked, to insist on safe workplaces, and to assist the unemployed. These aims could be accomplished at the local and state levels, where these workers could accumulate power more quickly. In the process of trying to achieve these more attainable goals, Rocky Mountain workers collectively and unintentionally rethought their ideological position. They moved closer to a socialist vision of the future, as opposed to an antimonopolist or Populist stance. It would take most workers another decade to articulate this change. Again, however, the region’s unionists focused their attention on defining their shared values and turning those principles into laws. In fact, their political efficacy resulted because they avoided hardline ideological stances. These workers committed themselves to being pragmatic in order to alter what they considered the unacceptable set of social arrangements that had arisen with the emergence of capitalism.

Populism and Pragmatism During the pinnacle of Populism, Colorado unionists offered further evidence of how Rocky Mountain workers privileged being pragmatic—accommodating various views by focusing on points of overlap in order to win pro-labor laws—over committing to one worldview and exhibiting an unyielding party loyalty. They did so by occupying a middle ground between their fellow unionists in Utah and Montana. Specifically, they sometimes mobilized under the banner of the People’s Party, while at others they ran nonpartisan slates. Often, the flexibility of their approach gets obscured because of the success some workers had in helping to put a Populist governor, Davis Waite, in office. In September 1891, Waite, a former KOL member and then Aspen journalist, chaired the first meeting of Colorado’s Populist Party. Much of the party’s focus was on bimetallism, as it attracted the interests of workers,

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farmers, mine owners, and the silver wings of the major parties. In its first year, the People’s Party elected twenty-seven candidates to the state assembly and twelve to the state senate. The next year, 1892, Waite won his bid for governor. Much of his support came from the mining camps and grazing regions.95 Despite the party’s successes, union leaders and labor editors encouraged their fellow workers to remain committed to the emerging regional practice of union-centered political action instead of fully committing to Populism. As early as July 1888, Julius N. Corbin, Denver resident and editor of the UPEM, had called on his fellow Knights to adopt a practical outlook, to ignore partisan affiliations, and to vote for politicians who supported laborers’ interests. As the Populist movement emerged, Corbin maintained this stance despite the fact that DA 82’s declaration of principles paralleled the Omaha Platform. Both documents championed the free coinage of silver, government ownership of the railroads, and the eight-hour day for all workers. When the fall 1892 elections neared, Corbin stated that DA 82 officials and the UPEM refused “to tell anyone how to vote,” and the organization did not endorse any candidates. The next year, DA 82 maintained its nonpartisan position, and People’s Party newspapers claimed the assembly’s leaders lacked the nerve to stand up for their principles. Corbin acknowledged that the party represented “a great improvement” over the Republicans and Democrats, but pointed out that “the old parties have from year to year promised many things which the People’s Party now offers.” The major parties, he concluded, “have invariably failed to keep their word. Union men are leery of promises and do not propose to jump at conclusions.” Interestingly, at the moment Corbin wrote this response, he was running for Denver city clerk on the Populist ticket.96 When editing his regional magazine, Corbin had to consider the political situation beyond Denver. Both Ogden and Butte railroad laborers belonged to local assemblies affiliated with DA 82. Local organizers sent him monthly reports that made him aware that workers throughout the region shared similar goals but approached elections differently. He knew that if Utah laborers affiliated with the Populists, for example, they would have taken a public and principled stand without any real chance of turning their desired ends into social realities. Instead, they voted in a nonpartisan fashion, and at that point elected Button and others who advocated the eight-hour-day law for miners. Corbin also knew that in Butte, Peter Breen had turned the People’s Party into an outlet for working-class activism. In Colorado, the Populists remained a party of various antimonopolist groups. Labor’s message and political influence could be watered

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down in such an environment. Furthermore, Corbin, being a railroad worker and city clerk candidate, well understood that workers’ political influence started at the municipal level. The fact that Rocky Mountain workers during the Pullman strike in the summer of 1894 received support from mayors, city-council members, and sheriffs further highlighted this point. Maintaining a nonpartisan stance meant forcing office seekers to continually consider labor’s demands. Workers belonging to the region’s largest labor federation, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), also took a practical stance regarding Populism. Typically, scholars identify hard-rock miners as the chief supporters of the People’s Party in the region. Such assumptions ignore the WFM’s founding. Most metal miners belonged to the KOL. As the Knights declined, gold and silver diggers looked to create their own federation. Their desire for unity intensified following an 1892 strike for higher wages in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Local residents, including law enforcement officers and city leaders, supported the peaceful strikers. Denied the cooperation of municipal authorities, mine owners turned to Idaho’s governor, who asked President Benjamin Harrison for assistance. When federal troops arrived based on spurious charges of insurrection, they arrested picketers, placed them in a massive outdoor prison, and broke the strike.97 Outraged miners from Montana, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and other states and territories sent representatives to Butte in May 1893 to formulate a response. These delegates created the WFM to represent all workers involved in hard-rock mining. They demanded that Congress promote bimetallism and take control of railroad and telegraph lines. Also, they called upon state legislators to repeal conspiracy and anti­ boycott laws, to forbid the maintenance of state militia companies, to make eight hours a legal working day, to provide mine-safety laws, and to employ state mine inspectors to uphold those laws. They did not, however, endorse the Populist Party.98 The Coeur d’Alene strike and the miners’ convention that followed it are typically presented as a moment when workers were radicalized and started on their eventual path toward syndicalism. Alternatively, we can read the strike and the subsequent birth of the WFM as evidence of miners’ developing sense of political scale. Their involvement in local politics proved successful, but an antiunion governor clearly limited the power of local officeholders. In creating the WFM, Rocky Mountain miners wanted to link hard-rock camps into a network that boosted these unionists’ political power and broadcast their message into state assemblies and the halls of Congress.

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When miners’ voiced their demands, they sounded almost indistinguishable from the Populists. Many of these workers voted for People’s Party candidates in local, state, and national elections. But workers’ electoral decisions depended on where they lived and the political practices of urban unionists in their state, because they had to work together to win state statutes. In Colorado, miners who advocated a Populist agenda found common cause with Denver and Pueblo skilled craftsmen and factory workers. By deciding to commit to cross-union solidarity, they prioritized gaining political influence and scoring legislative victories above party building. As in Butte, Helena, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, this proved especially true for Colorado workers during the 1893 depression. Out of a total population of roughly 402,000 in Colorado, 45,084 people lost their jobs from July 1 to August 3, 1893. In Denver, business closings and layoffs meant that 14,000 of 43,000 members of the industrial workforce found themselves out of work.99 The DTA organized a meeting of the unemployed and lobbied city officials for relief. At a July 26, 1893, gathering, workers and community leaders called on the city to provide public works projects. Denver’s city council responded by employing contractor J. B. Hindry and instructing him to hire the unemployed. Workers expected $2 for an eight-hour-day’s work. Hindry paid $1.20, and three hundred laborers responded on August 15 by meeting with the city council and demanding higher wages. Hindry sought police protection for those who were willing to work at the reduced rate. Before the confrontation could escalate further, the city body announced that funds no longer existed for Hindry’s project.100 Denver workers continued to insist upon assistance for the unemployed. City leaders then opened a relief camp on July 27. Local councilmen expected camp residents to cut lumber to justify the aid they received. The camp experiment ended quickly as unemployed people from all over Colorado headed toward Denver and exhausted the budget.101 Workers in Denver and Colorado’s other urban areas, like laborers in Butte, Helena, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, played on party competition, elected pro-labor city-council members, and received support before and after the panic. Politics for Rocky Mountain workers meant acquiring the power to obtain life-changing reforms, such as shorter-hours measures and not building antimonopolist parties. Three weeks before the DTA succeeded in pushing city officials to open the relief camp, John Calderwood, president of the Cripple Creek WFM local and Populist leader in the mining district, and David Coates, a Pueblo Typographical Union of-

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ficer, invited unionists throughout the state to gather at a labor congress. At the July 4 meeting, delegates passed resolutions that included the free coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1; public ownership of the railroads, telegraph, and streetcars; electric lighting and irrigation of ditches; a progressive income tax; and women’s suffrage.102 In their final statement, those assembled declared “that the legislative committee of our organizations prepare bills for acts covering our demands and present the same to all candidates for our votes.” The resolution concluded: “We will support none who will not pledge themselves to vote for such measures without amendment or evasion and condemn all who have or will obtain their election through false pretenses and pledges.”103 Although maintaining a Populist outlook, the labor congress made it clear that all candidates— whether Republican, Democrat, or Populist—had to toe labor’s line if they wanted the labor vote. Davis Waite proved himself a pro-labor Populist and deserving of workers’ support. When owners slashed miners’ wages at Cripple Creek in 1894, the miners struck. Waite refused to use the state militia to break the strike.104 Colorado Republican Party chairman and mine owner ­Irving Howbert, along with other leading investors, then provided the local sheriff with financial backing, weapons, and supplies to create a private army of over twelve hundred deputized strikebreakers.105 On June 8, the soldiers for hire prepared to attack the strikers’ camp on top of Bull Hill. Recalling the climactic day, Emil Pfeiffer wrote that, as he and his fellow miners faced overwhelming odds, they prepared their “Johnny Wagon,” or “a wagon rigged with an electric battery, spools of wire and a supply of dynamite.”106 These WFM members planned on pushing the wagon down the hill when the owners’ army charged. As the strikebreakers assembled at the foot of Bull Hill, they encountered the Colorado State Militia. Under Waite’s orders, the militia intercepted the sheriffs’s recruits and promised to “open fire upon them.” The “deputies heeded the warning, turned about face, and marched back to their camp.”107 After using the militia to prevent violence, Waite went to Cripple Creek to meet with owners and to negotiate a settlement. The governor, representing the WFM in the talks, and the employers’ representatives agreed on the $3-per-day wage at eight hours a day. This meant that strikers had won their key demands.108 The month after Waite had sent the militia to Cripple Creek, the WFM declared the governor a “true friend of the laboring people.”109 WFM members, however, realized that not all Populists shared Waite’s outlook. Farmers complained that Waite “forgets that one good Colorado

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farmer pays more in taxes than a dozen of these miners who are making so much fuss.” Lute Wilcox, the leader of the agrarian wing of the party, wrote during the battles at Cripple Creek that strikes should be illegal, and that “farmers are not riotous, but busy.”110 This segment of Colorado’s People’s Party wanted the governor to focus on securing fair railroad rates for all shippers, ending stockyard monopolies, creating publicly owned grain elevators, settling water-rights claims, building irrigation ditches, and helping them get out of debt. Essentially, they wanted farmers’ concerns to trump labor’s demands on Waite’s agenda. Another key constituency of the party, currency reformers, also critiqued Waite’s actions. Rocky Mountain News editor and former Democrat Thomas Patterson, for example, argued that Waite had acted irresponsibly by aiding “those who were engaged in violating the law.”111 With party leaders like Wilcox and Patterson offering unionists little support in their legislative demands and no sympathy in their confrontations with employers, workers had little choice but to remain skeptical of the party’s ability to represent their interests. Ultimately, the Cripple Creek strike revealed class fissures within the party. Colorado labor leaders recognized the opportunity to take an energized bloc of class-conscious voters and offer its ballots to the candidates who supported pro-labor legislation. For the rest of the 1890s, labor leaders called upon rank-and-file workers to follow their lead and to use their unions, not parties, to articulate and advance their political concerns. In fact, at a second labor congress in July 1894, which occurred after the Cripple Creek strike and during the Pullman protests, delegates adopted a plan to back a “nonpartisan” slate of candidates that supported unionists’ legislative aims.112 In the fall of 1894, Waite lost his reelection bid to Republican Albert W. McIntire. Many assumed that labor had betrayed Waite and failed to vote collectively. Ella Ames, for example, wanted the governor to know how personally she took his defeat. After asking that “God forgive” her fellow workers and fellow women for their ingratitude to him, she wrote, “I feel so bitterly the blow that has fallen upon us.” She ended her letter reminding Waite “that Christ was crucified by those whom he had come to save.”113 Under Waite’s leadership, Colorado had become the second state in the Union, after Wyoming, to pass a women’s suffrage amendment. More than using the state militia in miners’ defense at Cripple Creek, Waite had secured food and travel funds for unemployed workers attempting to win a federal public works bill by joining Jacob Coxey’s

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. FRANK AND FAIR.

. . . ..

· Ln~,._.;Now, Mr. J:u1:1es, :1s :1 caritalist and cl~iminz to . represent the busi· ness int1:rests, vou prori1ised labor al sorts of f'ood things should Mcintire be elected We are ready to worl.: :1nd we '''ant. you to redeem your pledges."

Figure 1.  Political Cartoon of 1894 Colorado Governor’s Election. source: Rocky Mountain News, November 8, 1894.

march on Washington, D.C. He had also denounced President Cleveland’s use of federal troops to put down the sympathy strikes of railroad workers supporting the Pullman boycott. Although he avoided casting himself in the messianic role Ames presented him with, he shared her view that workers and women abandoned him. In a speech shortly after the election, he told the audience, “Again the poor man, on his way to Jerusalem from Jericho has fallen among thieves, is robbed and left half dead on the highway, and again, the priest and the Levite pass by on the other side.”114 The Rocky Mountain News, which endorsed Waite in the 1894 election, reinforced the sense that workers had voted incorrectly. The editor ran a front-page cartoon showing a laborer exchanging his ballot for the false promises of a capitalist (see Figure 1).115 The fact that Waite did not do as well in urban areas as he had expected does suggest that a number of workers did not fully

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commit to union-centered political action. It is difficult to discern why urban workers failed the governor. Some did cast their ballots for him, and suspicions of vote tampering surely added to the trouble. Hard-rock miners, it should be noted, did provide Waite a majority of their votes. Farmers and women appear the key constituents that the governor counted on who proved most responsible for not returning him to office. He did not win any precincts in agricultural areas.116 Regardless of the reason for Waite’s poor showing in Denver, his election totals did not mean that workers reverted to trading favors or promises for votes, as the News suggested. As the decade progressed, union leaders grew more capable of organizing workers into a collective voting bloc, and the state’s workers became more powerful. In 1896, for instance, labor leaders from Pueblo, Denver, and Cripple Creek decided to solidify their commitment to intrastate political unity by forming the Colorado State Federation of Labor (CSFL) and establishing union-centered political action as their electoral strategy.117 Stronger institutions meant better political organization, especially in state-level contests. At the CSFL convention in 1897, Calderwood, Coates, and Coates’s fellow Pueblo Typographical Union member Otto Thum, advocated the formation of an independent political party. A minority of delegates, led by members of the Denver Typographical Union (DTU), countered by moving to abolish political action within the CSFL. Those assembled voted 41 to 17 in favor a CSFL-run political party.118 With this victory, Coates emerged as the leader of those who advocated union-centered political action. Born in England in 1868, he immigrated to the United States in 1881. After briefly living in Pittsburgh, he moved to Pueblo and worked as a laborer in the Pueblo Steel Works. Seeking a better living, he learned the printing trade and joined the Pueblo Typographical Union in 1887. With Thum, he started the Pueblo Courier in 1896, and used it to advocate cross-union solidarity and promote union-centered political action.119 Despite CSFL members’ clear preference for Coates and his ideas, some critics did attack him for his political activism. One opponent charged him with compromising the state federation’s image because he used his position as CSFL secretary “for political purposes.” Coates responded to the attacks by arguing that his job as an officer of the CSFL required him to battle anti-labor politicians. He singled out Henry R. Wolcott, who supported acts of state repression against striking workers. During Wolcott’s run for governor in 1898, Coates wrote, “If I did nothing else during my term of office for the upbuiliding of the Federation and the

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welfare of its members, I would consider . . . the defeat of Mr. Henry R. Wolcott for governor as ample reward for all the many honors the members of organized labor have bestowed upon me.”120 More than defeating Wolcott, Coates demonstrated the efficacy of union-centered political action. As the fall 1898 election season neared, Coates used the Courier to announce his plan for working-class political action. Federation leaders argued that despite the support for a labor party, “a straight labor ticket” would encounter too many difficulties to succeed at the polls. But a fusion ticket, a slate of candidates from the Populist, Democratic, and Silver Republican parties, could elect “friends” and obtain the CSFL’s most cherished goal that year: an eight-hour-day law for miners. Coates devised the Pueblo Plan, a strategy in which the Pueblo Central Trades and Labor Union (PCTLU), an affiliate of the CSFL, endorsed candidates who agreed to support labor laws. The PCTLU sent letters to all candidates who announced their intention to run for city, county, and state offices. After the candidates responded, the PCTLU met and announced its slate.121 The races for the state house and senate especially interested Coates and the PCTLU, because those eventual officeholders would determine the strength of the CSFL’s eight-hour-day campaign. The Pueblo Plan proved overwhelmingly successful, as the PCTLU’s four nominees for the state house and one of its two choices for the state senate not only won, but also helped to pass Colorado’s 1899 eight-hour-day measure. Most CSFL-affiliated city federations adopted the Pueblo Plan, and despite intense lobbying by the mining industry against the measure, the state house passed the bill fifty-one to one, with thirteen members being absent. The outcome in the state senate proved closer, twenty-one to five, with nine members not voting. Clearly Colorado workers had acquired a newfound political might. In fact, it should be noted that eighteen legislators elected in the 1898 election and serving in the 1899 session of the assembly carried union cards.122 To ensure against a gubernatorial veto, Coates, in his official capacity as CSFL secretary, wrote to the three gubernatorial candidates asking their stance on the eight-hour day. He reported that only Democrat Charles Thomas replied favorably. Most important, in answering whether he would sign a law limiting the workday for mines and smeltermen, Thomas wrote that “if the general assembly should enact such an eighthour law as exists in Utah . . . it will receive executive sanction.” Coates then wrote that Republican nominee Henry Wolcott refused to reply

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to the questions “and only treats our great organization with silent contempt.” Simon Guggenheim, the third candidate, dropped out of the race.123 CSFL leaders gave Thomas labor’s endorsement. Coates’s success led CSFL members to nominate and elect him president of the state federation in 1899. Unfortunately for Coates, his first year as CSFL president proved less successful than his term as secretary. Colorado unionists’ fight for the eight-hour measure did not end with Thomas’s signature on the bill. Indeed, the bill passed the legislature in early 1899. Mine owners, however, responded by taking the matter to court. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Lawyers representing the mining firms argued that differences existed between the state constitutions of Colorado and Utah. The Utah constitution, they claimed, specifically allowed for statutes that regulated employment for miners. Conversely, while allowing for legislation to provide for the health and safety of citizens, Colorado’s constitution, they claimed, did not specify any class. On July 17, the Colorado high court declared the shorter-hours law unconstitutional. Colorado’s Chief Justice John Campbell held that labor contracts had to contain a constitutional provision allowing the health and safety of workers to supersede employers’ rights.124 Denver smelter worker and WFM organizer John Wright told the U.S. Industrial Commission in the summer of 1899 that the Colorado “legislature is an unnecessary expense, on account of the courts setting aside anything the legislature may do.”125 Colorado workers had used their unions as their political agents, played upon party competition, and elected labor supporters to key offices. They employed the language of health and safety to overcome the court’s usual fondness for the liberty of contract principle. The court, however, had limited the effectiveness of their strategy. Colorado unionists refused to surrender the shorter-hours fight. Their efforts to elect pro-labor candidates who would secure pro-labor legislation continued throughout the early twentieth century. In fact, Coates would, in 1900, win his bid for lieutenant governor.

Conclusion Between 1888 and 1898, Rocky Mountain workers understood that they lived in a region with a growing working-class population, high rates of unionization, and a citizenry that resisted party loyalties. If they voted as a bloc, they could take advantage of the organizational weaknesses of the

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Republicans and Democrats and infuse their sense of justice into the law. In searching for that cohesiveness, they engaged in a series of political experiments, such as organizing labor parties, running nonpartisan slates, and flirting with Populism. They ultimately discovered that as long as the majority of union members met and established a platform, chose candidates, campaigned for those candidates, and monitored those who won, and as long as local, district, and state federations of labor served as workers’ primary political agents, the eclecticism of form provided a powerful weapon. The story of Rocky Mountain politics in the 1890s was more than a tale of union leaders and labor editors seeking and winning public office. Will Kennedy, Peter Breen, Herbert Button, Davis Waite, David Coates, and William J. Penrose did find success, but they, with one exception, accepted the responsibility of making union-centered political action work and wielded power as best they could on behalf of their constituents. At the early stages of their class-based political efforts, workers convinced city and county officials to provide public works projects for the unemployed. Mayors and sheriffs elected by labor’s ballots supported, or at least tolerated, strikes and protests for higher wages, shorter hours, and safer workplaces by refusing employer requests to have police arrest picketers. Despite the fact that union-centered political action at the municipal and county levels yielded some positive results for workers, activists recognized the limits of their political might. In order for the ballot to become a weapon of social change, workers had to have influence that extended beyond city hall and the handful of representatives their city federations could influence. To attain an eight-hour day guaranteed by law, an employer-liability measure, neutral arbitration procedures, and a host of other desired reforms, city and district union heads organized state and city federations of labor. Through the struggles of the early 1890s, union leaders and rankand-file activists gained a sense of political scale and recognized the need for flexibility. John Calderwood, for example, served as the chairman of Cripple Creek’s Populist Party while simultaneously functioning on the CSFL’s labor-party committee to choose a nonpartisan slate. Power mattered. He reasoned that running the People’s Party on the local level gave miners the best chance of winning municipal offices, but recognized that the same did not hold true at the state level. As Rocky Mountain workers extended their political efforts beyond the city and county levels, they built new institutions. State federation leaders managed elections on the

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state level and coordinated with local union officials. All remained committed to organizing the unorganized and expanding the ever-increasing electoral base. As the twentieth century dawned, Rocky Mountain workers faced new challenges to maintaining their regional identity, expanding their political strength, and influencing the rules and laws that structured their lives. They also redefined their larger political view in the process. Through emphasizing their shared values above their ideological commitments, they unintentionally shifted their worldview from antimonopolism to socialism.

Chapter 3

The “Militant, Progressive, Liberal Spirit of Western Unionism” Mutualism, Socialism, and Regional Activism

Rocky Mountain working-class critics of capitalism, progressive unionists as many of them called themselves, did not hunger for a violent revolution. Nor did they seek to commit random acts of anarchy as some of their most vehement opponents claimed. They did, however, advocate socialism. Socialism to turn-of-the-century Rocky Mountain miners, factory operatives, domestics, service-industry laborers, and craftsmen included a belief that voting rights offered workers the best opportunity to usher in a new political and economic order. These unionists sought to make markets more socially responsible. They demanded city and state lawmakers— people who were accountable to the electorate—to directly administer the markets that dealt with the goods and services, such as heat and water, which were essential to each individual’s survival. Some of these workers went even further and called on officeholders also to oversee labor markets in order to guarantee the payment of fair wages, mandate that laborers have more leisure time, and punish employers who maintained unsafe workplaces. Achieving these ends meant redistributing wealth through higher taxes on the wealthy, establishing binding arbitration as the dominant means of ending industrial conflicts, protecting the right to strike, passing shorter-hours laws, and enacting employer-liability measures. Workers who favored socialism wanted the measures that local and state governments passed to reflect the wishes of the majority of citizens. They insisted that real justice only existed when the law promoted a 117

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humane society. According to the laborers who demanded public ownership of coal, for instance, municipal and state officeholders had a responsibility to not only make sure that people had heat in the winter, but that the larger citizenry had control of the fuel that drove the engines of the industrial economy. Shorter workdays, old-age pensions, and education for all children also distinguished a just society from a world dominated only by profit seekers. Examining some of the responses that workers offered to an 1899 survey issued by the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics (CBLS) provides a glimpse of their broad understanding of socialism. One question asked: are you in favor of “national, state, and municipal ownership of public utilities, railroads, telegraphs, telephones, electric light, water and gas plants, street car lines, etc.?” An overwhelming majority of workers— 681—answered yes, while just 47 opposed government control of these essential services. Colorado’s labor force also supported pensions for the aged and those injured at work (603 to 132), wanted an amendment to the Colorado Constitution that would “permit the adoption of the single tax by law” (596 to 107), advocated state ownership of coal mines (598 to 104) as well as municipal ownership of coal yards (604 to 111), demanded a legislated eight-hour day for all workers (657 to 82) and called for the implementation of the initiative and referendum (713 to 19). These workers decided to champion these issues after considerable thought. State investigators found that “many of the unions have regular night schools, where the writings of Henry George, Edward Bellamy and other standard authors are taken up chapter by chapter and discussed in a capable and intelligent manner.”1 The CBLS’s survey also included a blank section that allowed workers to elaborate on their yes or no answers or to address other issues that state officials had neglected to ask. Workers’ responses demonstrated a clear conception of how, in their opinion, democracy should function in an industrial society. Frustration with the Colorado Supreme Court was one of the most popular topics. The state’s highest court had recently struck down an eight-hour-day measure for miners. A Pueblo plumber, who identified himself as “a student of social economy,” argued that the founders “never contemplated” that “the [Colorado] Supreme Court should arbitrarily set aside the expressed wish and desire of 75 per cent of the people as they did in the eight-hour case.” He added, “I believe that the people should have the direct power to make their own laws.”2 This plumber’s response revealed more than just his advocacy for eight-hourday statutes and his disappointment with the court’s decision to negate

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an act that Colorado workers had fought so hard to win. He also wanted a direct-legislation measure so workers could embed their values, “their own laws” as he put it, into the larger social structure. A Lake City miner offered more detail on how democratic actions could reshape market exchanges. He demanded that the Colorado legislature endow state agencies with the authority to enforce their own policy proposals. Specifically, he wanted the state’s board of arbitration to have the “power to do something.” Instead of being a body appointed by the governor and possessing the ability only to offer recommendations to aggrieved parties, he asked that the people elect arbitrators. That way, if the board ruled against a corporation, and the corporation did not abide by the decision, then state officials, if so inclined, could “go forward and operate the industry itself.” These workers understood reform measures and their enforcement as essential to maintaining justice in an industrial society. A Denver carpenter explained that the “law should reflect enlightened sentiment. It is what the masses say they want.”3 In calling for an expansion of governmental power, many workers recognized that they could be courting danger. A Williamsburgh oil worker pointed out that there was “municipal ownership and municipal ownership.” The distinction, he argued, should be “made between the municipality controlled by workmen imbued with the Socialist spirit and eager for the emancipation of the worker, and that controlled by the dying middle class, who use its benefits for their own preservation.” A Denver carpenter agreed. He declared himself in favor of state ownership, specifically of the coal mines, but not “while the present politicians remain in control.” He advocated the initiative and referendum. That way the people would have oversight of state ownership of vital industries.4 Both men saw the values of public officials as part of the reason poverty and exploitation accompanied the unprecedented wealth that defined the Gilded Age. If lawmakers adopted a socialist spirit, or the people already imbued with this sensibility had the power to create their own laws through initiatives, the state could then administer the exchange of commodities that the people deemed essential for survival. The CBLS’s findings revealed that a large number of Colorado workers identified themselves as a type of socialist—as students of the social economy, as single taxers, as Bellamyites, as members of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), or simply as socialistic in orientation. Realizing socialism, according to most Rocky Mountain workers, depended above all else on labor winning a set of legislative aims that reflected workers’ values. If these respondents had been more precise, they would have

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labeled themselves social democrats. As a representative republic, socialism in the United States, barring a revolution, would emerge if ever the people owned the means of production through the government, as the citizenry comprised the government. Social democracy, according to many turn-of-the-century Americans and Europeans, meant the socializing of markets, or public officials passing laws and promoting policies that redistributed wealth, made priorities of workplace safety and social insurance, increased leisure time, and, in general, attempted to mitigate the brutalities and inequalities that accompanied the rise of capitalism.5 A formal transnational social democratic outlook developed at this time as intellectuals retheorized socialism to meet the nuances of both corporate capitalism and liberal political practices that were unforeseen by Marx. In Europe, social democracy represented an ideology expressed in tracts written by the German Marxist revisionist Eduard Bernstein, English Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and the French editor and political activist Jean Jaurès. In the United States, at least in the Rocky Mountain West, social democracy was more of a culture.6 The type of social democracy that the region’s workers promoted did not grow out of a well-articulated set of beliefs. Rather, it sprouted from individual workers realizing that they shared a sense of outrage with their fellow laborers. After collectively identifying the policies and practices of employers that they considered unfair, and the social conditions they deemed unjust, these workers then updated their notions of how social reform, politics, and economic exchanges should function. Their critiques of poverty, employer authority, and free-market ideology were originally informed by the labor theory of value. Their realization of the permanence of a waged workforce and their general life experiences forced them to sharpen and alter their conceptions of work, value, fairness, and what they could accomplish in their lifetimes. As a result, they moved away from this nineteenth-century ideal of social relations. They formed study groups and called themselves students of social economy because they did not have all the answers they needed to remedy the injustices they faced. Their vision for a better world came in fragments, as they cobbled together political platforms that reflected their changing values and new understandings of law, public policy, economics, and power relations. As the 1899 CBLS survey demonstrated, the Rocky Mountain workers who took the time to express their views did not envision themselves as part of an army of ideological warriors bent on building a socialist state. Instead, they identified themselves as a collection of hard-working people who believed they deserved a better fate.

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Too often those with flexible views of socialism get lost in the works of early twentieth-century American left politics. The story of American socialism typically focuses on party leaders and organizers who held dear a strain of Marxism or some republican-Marxist mix.7 Such people, determined Socialist Party (SP) loyalists, existed in the Rocky Mountain West, but they usually joined with the majority of workers who called for city-controlled power plants, government ownership of the railroads, laws that guaranteed high wages, measures that provided shorter hours, and statutes that sanctioned safer workplaces. These two types of socialists—those who cared little about party affiliation and more about candidates’ willingness to support pro-labor laws, which would in themselves move the country toward socialism, and those who instead insisted that socialism could arrive only through electoral victory and governance by officeholders belonging to the SP—did at times disagree over tactics. But both groups shared a set of values. Ultimately, Rocky Mountain workers had a great deal of success in making their social democratic vision a reality. The distinct differences that existed between the political environments of the West and the rest of the country offered one reason for this triumph. Recall that in the Rocky Mountain West in particular, Republicans and Democrats failed to erect strong party structures. This lack of party control over the political process allowed the region’s workers to practice union-centered political action. Through this strategy, workers turned their unions into their political agents. They used their city, state, and regional federations of labor to articulate their collective legislative aims, determine which candidates to support, mobilize campaigns for those candidates, and vote as a bloc to acquire pro-labor laws. The fact that Rocky Mountain workers had by the late 1890s rejected affiliation with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and opposed its pure-and-simple philosophy also helps to explain their success in ushering in social-democratic reforms. Pure-and-simple unionism, especially before 1910, centralized power in the hands of national leaders, organized workers mostly by craft, rejected alliances with office seekers regarded as “radicals” (Populists and socialists), and largely neglected unskilled workers. Rocky Mountain workers created their own regional federation, the Western Labor Union (WLU), which they renamed the American Labor Union (ALU) in 1902, to aid unskilled laborers, especially women (who in Colorado and Utah could vote), in winning closed shops. The ALU organized clerks, grocery employees, factory operatives, lumbermen, ash haulers, mattress makers, musicians, cooks, and waiters, to name a few.8

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More than an urban movement dominated by craftsmen, workers in Rocky Mountain cities constructed a regional labor network that allowed for the acquisition of greater and greater political influence and improved material conditions for almost all who labored. It should be noted that Rocky Mountain unionists continued to limit their democratic vision by excluding Asian immigrants. As this network expanded through organizing drives and legislative successes, these unionists enhanced their influence on shop floors, over labor markets, and within local and state governments. They employed sympathy strikes, collective voting, boycotts, and union-owned cooperative stores as tools to build their version of what some called justice and others called socialism. Although their successes in socializing markets proved far from universal, the region’s unionists did, by 1904, implement social democracy as more and more workers had greater authority at work, higher real wages, toiled fewer hours, and exercised a significant degree of political influence. Aside from confronting hostile employers during the process of building this network, these workers also struggled against themselves. They divided over perceptions of power and progress. The lack of a shared definition of socialism—of what constituted the redistribution of wealth or adequate market influence—among Rocky Mountain unionists who considered themselves socialists of some sort could and did interfere with their efforts to advance social democracy.

Building a Regional Movement Rocky Mountain progressive unionists’ sense of class identity throughout the 1890s emanated from their organizational growth and political victories at the local and state levels. To win elections, these workers built city, then county, then state networks to elect candidates. They also recognized that in order to redefine the power relations that informed market exchanges, this network had to have regional and national dimensions. Yet these workers rejected the pure-and-simple outlook advocated by Samuel Gompers and the other leaders of the nation’s largest labor organization, the AFL. Rocky Mountain workers preferred “the benefits of the old K. of L. [Knights of Labor] plan of organization,” or having power flow from the bottom up.9 They favored a movement in which union leaders and rank-and-file activists coordinated workplace actions, consumer revolts, and electoral activities through their city and state federations of labor. That meant that local and regional labor leaders accepted the task of organizing all the workers they could (skilled and

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unskilled), arranging cross-union demonstrations, solidifying class-based voting blocs, and expanding labor’s political power through lobbying. Strengthening and spreading this network also required that members maintain unity by abiding by work rules, submitting to internal discipline, contributing to strike funds, observing boycotts, campaigning, and voting in elections. The rift between Rocky Mountain unionists and the national AFL began in 1894. Gompers demurred when workers asked him to call a sympathy strike to support Eugene V. Debs and the Pullman boycotters. Later that year, he employed parliamentary procedures at the federation’s convention in Denver to obstruct the vote on the popular “plank 10.” In passing plank 10, AFL members would have declared themselves in favor of “the collective ownership by the people of all the means of production and distribution.”10 Finally in 1896, Gompers refused to provide financial support for striking silver miners in Leadville, Colorado. Western Federation of Miners (WFM) leader Edward Boyce left that year’s convention determined to withdraw his organization from Gompers’s “autocratic” control. Recognizing how serious the situation with Boyce and the WFM had become, Gompers attempted to heal the rift with a letter. The AFL president claimed that he never received Boyce’s request for aid. Boyce replied that “there is little sympathy existing between laboring men of the West and their Eastern brothers.”11 Most of the region’s unionists shared Boyce’s attitude and advocated the creation of a separate Rocky Mountain labor movement. In October 1897, Denver labor editor Willis Hall informed AFL officials that the “west is no doubt the greatest center of opposition to Gompers.”12 By 1898, Rocky Mountain workers were regularly sending letters to labor periodicals, especially Denver’s Industrial Advocate, calling for western unionists to form their own central labor organization. A Butte worker wrote simply, “We want western men to direct western labor movements.”13 The Advocate also printed objections to the formation of a regional federation. Hall, who edited the Advocate, sided with those opposed to breaking away from the AFL. He made two assertions. First, he argued that skilled workers “are bound together” beyond geographical ties. And he pointed out that by joining a federation dominated by the WFM, which was the alternative to being affiliated with the AFL, workers would be in “isolated organizations” with “no other affiliations.” Former Denver labor leader turned Gompers supporter John Lennon agreed with Hall. Lennon contended that a separate western federation was a “suicidal policy” that would “divide the labor movement of the country.”14

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Unconvinced by Hall or Lennon, WFM delegates, anti-Gompers craft unionists, and other interested Rocky Mountain workers met in Salt Lake City on May 10, 1898, and created the WLU. Butte iron molder Daniel McDonald won the presidency of the new federation, and organizers immediately sought to spread what McDonald called the “progressive” spirit. Although never clearly defined, “progressive” appeared in labor periodicals for the next two decades as shorthand for the practices and actions of the region’s labor activists. Essentially, progressive meant unionists committing themselves to organizing almost all workers and then uniting local unions to participate in strikes, boycotts, and collective voting efforts in order to build a society in which workers had the power to socialize markets. During its four-year existence, the WLU embarked on this path by unionizing waiters, waitresses, cooks, clerks, laundry workers, and lumbermen—workers usually ignored by the AFL.15 Rank-and-file trade unionists also proved crucial to the WLU. By 1902, the state federations of labor in Colorado, Montana, and Utah refused to affiliate with the AFL, as did the major city federations, with the brief exception of the Denver Trades Assembly (DTA).16 When the region’s workers created the WLU, Gompers went west in 1898 and again in 1899, during the joint WLU-WFM conventions. Each time he urged unionists to reaffiliate with the AFL. He also held separate meetings with craftsmen’s locals. On both occasions, miners and craftsmen would not change their minds.17 These rejections should have come as little surprise to Gompers. The Utah Federated Trades and Labor Council, the city federation of labor for Salt Lake City that expanded to Ogden and the nearby mining camps, first rejected affiliation with the AFL over political differences. The Federated Trades formed in February 1889 for the purpose of “framing such laws” as “would be of benefit to the working classes.” In 1891, its members had adopted union-centered political action and made obtaining an eight-hour-day law for miners their primary goal. AFL leaders also favored a shorter workday, but most officials insisted that local unions should negotiate hours of work in contracts. By 1897, the AFL did support federal eight-hour legislation, but only for government employees. Federated Trades leaders represented a well-organized voting bloc in a city with relatively weak political parties. Just as the discussion over affiliation with the AFL began, eight hundred new dues-paying members belonging to the WFM, the greatest beneficiaries of the proposed eighthour measure, joined the Federated Trades. There would have been little sense battling both AFL leaders and mine owners over this issue.

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This bond between Salt Lake City craft unionists and WFM members in the city federation only grew stronger over time. On Labor Day 1896, the Federated Trades collaborated with Park City and Eureka miners in the restructuring of the organization. Members renamed the city’s central body the Utah Federation of Labor (UFL), and WFM president Boyce gave the welcoming address. To ensure the solvency of the UFL, Boyce donated $500 from the WFM’s treasury to the renamed federation. UFL members, among their first matters of business, voted against joining the AFL.18 Montana unionists never seriously considered affiliating their local and state federations with the AFL. KOL locals there had defied the national trend and grew stronger in the late nineteenth century. Between 1882 and 1893, twenty-two KOL local assemblies and one district assembly (DA 98) formed. Even workers belonging to local craft unions held dual membership in both the Knights and the AFL. Knights, members of the Butte Miners’ Union (BMU), tailors, and typographical workers formed the Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly (SBTLA) in January 1887.19 KOL locals in Anaconda, Great Falls, Helena, Kalispell, and Lewistown also expanded through the mid-1890s. In November of 1895, led by the Butte-based DA 98, the Montana State Trades and Labor Council emerged (it became the Montana Federation of Labor in 1903). Montana unionists, like their fellow Utah workers, refused to affiliate their central labor bodies with the AFL, because the AFL was not politically active enough for their liking. Montana unionists committed themselves to cross-union solidarity and understood their central body as a vehicle for political activism. Butte Knights, for example, called an industrial conference of all the state’s union members in 1893 and again in January 1894. At the 1894 meeting, delegates passed resolutions that encouraged KOL and AFL members to consolidate, asked city councils to hire the unemployed, demanded bimetallism, insisted upon the eight-hour day, supported women’s suffrage, and advocated independent political action. Workers adopted these same platforms when they created the state trades and labor council and added planks calling for the public ownership of municipal utilities, mines, and railroads.20 Rocky Mountain unionists, led by industrial organizations such as the BMU and KOL locals, championed solidarity and political action as the best means to acquire shorter workdays, better pay, safer workplaces, and reordered social relations. When Gompers announced he would tour Montana in 1899, members of the SBTLA stated that they did “not recognize any authority” of the

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AFL. They further informed the AFL leader that his visit was not “in the interests of organized labor of Butte and vicinity.” “Butte and vicinity,” they insisted, “is ably and efficiently managed” by “the Western Labor Union and the Western Federation of Miners.”21 The state federation also refused to affiliate with the AFL. Aside from their personal dislike of Gompers due to his refusals to support Debs, plank 10, and the Leadville strikers, Rocky Mountain unionists rejected affiliation with the AFL because AFL leaders had failed to aggressively unionize unskilled workers. Mountain West unionists reasoned that organizing unskilled workers was essential for collective voting and lobbying to produce pro-labor laws and policies. Put simply, the more workers in the labor movement, the more votes in labor’s bloc. The 1890s had also taught the region’s workers that political success started with strong city federations. Political and industrial conditions varied from place to place, and local union leaders had to have the flexibility to devise electoral strategies, workplace protests, and consumer actions that took those differences into account. But between 1886 and 1902, national AFL leaders increasingly required city- and state-affiliated organizations to clear with them any decisions to strike, bargain, and boycott.22 These restrictions led Rocky Mountain labor leaders to continually insist that the AFL was ruled by an autocrat who impeded workers’ ability to unleash their political might. A May 1902 piece by Pueblo Courier editor F. H. Richardson provided a typical example of this sentiment. When Gompers announced that he would send a representative to address a joint meeting of the WLU and WFM, Richardson started his column by acknowledging that the AFL had organized some workers “and secured the passage of some federal labor legislation.” But he then added, “its history of usefulness stops” there. According to Richardson, Rocky Mountain workers had no patience for Gompers’ nor his vice president’s authoritarianism. The AFL leadership, Richardson stated, retained “authority over their membership ABSOLUTELY.”23 In another attack, Richardson explained that Colorado’s unionists advocated collective “action at the ballot box.” Therefore, they would not settle for “a great big spongy body without one iota of power” attempting to use “’moral influence’” by lobbying Congress.24 Most Rocky Mountain workers decided that they could only attain justice by acquiring political authority and using that power to pass laws that would socialize market relations. When Gompers made it evident that he did not share their political vision, commitments to solidarity, and devotion to organizing unskilled workers, Rocky Mountain union-

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ists chose to break away from the AFL. To adopt pure-and-simple unionism would have meant giving up some gains they had already made and passing on the chance to build on those victories. For some workers, the move away from the AFL and toward the WLU did not occur without consternation. At the turn of the twentieth century, the DTA remained the only major labor body affiliated with the AFL in the mountain states. In 1900, WFM members voted to move both the WFM’s and the WLU’s headquarters from Butte to Denver. This made Denver the hub of the Rocky Mountain regional labor network. The change also served notice to AFL leaders that progressive unionists intended to take over the DTA. AFL leaders countered by sending organizer J. D. Pierce to spy on the WLU and disrupt its organizing drives.25 Longtime DTA member and AFL supporter W. H. Montgomery proclaimed the forthcoming fight to control the Trades Assembly a “contest for supremacy.”26 In October 1901, DTA members, led by the pro-AFL faction, passed a resolution requiring local unions not affiliated with a national or international craft union to win a two-thirds majority vote to join the assembly. This essentially meant that no WLU-affiliated union could join the DTA. Without the newly organized WLU unionists belonging to the DTA, progressives feared that the advocates of pure-and-simple unionism would retard their advance toward justice. Five months later, in March 1902, after seemingly endless debate and pressure from AFL members who supported the WLU, progressive unionists believed they had enough votes to win a two-thirds majority. On March 9, out of the ninety-one delegates present, sixty voted to admit the WLU-affiliated unions into the DTA. Gompers’ supporters had won by a single vote. Prepared for the defeat, progressive unionists proposed that the DTA disaffiliate from the AFL. To enact this motion, progressives needed only a majority of members to vote yes. In a rapid turn of events, the WLU faction had taken control of the DTA. That evening, Gompers’ loyalists formed their own rival assembly and chartered that organization with the AFL.27 A controversy emerged over which assembly legitimately represented Denver’s workers. Many Denver typographical unionists exploded with anger when their own former president and then president of the Colorado State Federation of Labor (CSFL), Harvey Garman, ruled the WLU-chartered assembly the official representative of Denver’s organized laborers.28 In a last desperate attempt to regain some footing in the Rocky Mountain states, Gompers sent AFL secretary-treasurer Frank Morrison to the joint WLU-WFM convention in Denver in June 1902. Morrison tried to

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persuade delegates that if they continued to build the WLU, they would cause chaos within the national labor movement. Dual unions, he argued, would result and two organizations in the same field could not coexist. The convention’s guest speaker, Eugene Debs, followed Morrison. Debs praised the WLU for organizing unskilled workers, for attacking Gompers’s outlook, and for furthering the efforts of the labor movement in general. America’s best-known socialist then suggested that those assembled change the name of their organization to the American Labor Union and begin organizing workers across the nation. Debs told the region’s workers that they had revealed that a politically conscious, in fact radical, alternative to the AFL could succeed. Debs then asked delegates to commit their organization to supporting the SP by endorsing the party’s platform.29 Those assembled granted the Socialist leader’s requests. Furthermore, they voted to keep Daniel McDonald as the organization’s president. Among their last pieces of business, WLU delegates decided to move the headquarters of their organization, now the ALU, from Denver back to McDonald’s hometown of Butte. By 1902, most Rocky Mountain unionists had rejected pure-andsimple unionism and committed to constructing a new federation rooted in the principles of progressive unionism. In other words, the region’s workers increasingly adopted pro-socialist leanings. Debs wanted to further encourage this shift. He wrote glowingly of Rocky Mountain workers’ efforts. In December 1902, for example, his article titled “Western Labor Movement” appeared in the International Socialist Review and was reprinted in the Miners’ Magazine, which was the official journal of the WFM. Commending the region’s unionists on their shared “conception of class conscious and progressive trades unionism,” he called them model socialists. He declared, “This is the militant, progressive, liberal spirit of western unionism—now reenforced with a class-conscious political program—that could not brook the ultra-conservative policy of the eastern movement and seceded from it with motives as loyal to labor as ever prompted men to action.”30 Debs’s words captured the three essential characteristics of the Rocky Mountain labor movement. First, he grasped that the region’s workers believed that attaining and exercising political power was the only way that workers could ever redefine market and social relations. Second, he recognized that they had built a small but successful alternative to the AFL. Third, he rightly labeled them socialists. Yet he also looked past the workers’ differing formulations of socialism and their disagreements over the importance of voting for SP candidates. In fact, at the very mo-

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ment Debs wrote this article, these points of contention threatened to tear the progressive movement apart. But before discussing these factional tensions, we must first understand the various conceptions of socialism Rocky Mountain workers held.

Mutualism Although nourished by attending reading groups, and watching and participating in public debates, Rocky Mountain workers’ sense of justice, the underpinning of their socialist vision, grew out of their culture of mutualism. Mutualism united these unionists through their shared experiences and their willingness to submit individual desires to the good of the whole.31 By practicing mutualism, workers learned both how to perform collective actions and how effective those unified efforts could be. Examining the ways in which the Butte Carpenters’ Union Local 112 received support from other unionists and provided assistance to their fellow workers gives us insights into how mutualism functioned. In 1897, Local 112 leaders purchased advertising space in a KOL program. Their notice asked readers to avoid the city’s racetrack. The carpenters called for this boycott after racetrack owners attempted to pay them below the wage scale the two sides had previously deemed fair. The boycott succeeded. Organized workers in Butte gave up an afternoon at the racetrack because they understood that the carpenters’ fight was their fight. They also knew that the carpenters had in the past, and would again, perform acts of solidarity on their behalf. In the summer of 1894, for instance, Local 112 contributed money to help pay the legal fees of American Railway Union (ARU) members on trial after the Pullman strike. Then at a meeting in December 1898, the carpenters fined one member $10 for purchasing clothing at a “scab” tailor shop. Local 112 members also donated $20 to the United Mine Workers of America’s strike fund in April 1899, and in March 1900, they voted to handle only union-label goods.32 Butte workers had learned that by paying attention to what they purchased and caring about the vitality of fellow workers’ local unions, they were galvanizing cross-union solidarity and giving themselves significant influence in setting wage scales. The maintenance of mutualism also depended on an adherence to union principles and internal discipline. The number of “trials” that Rocky Mountain workers held when individual members broke established codes highlights this point. At their January 31, 1899, meeting the Denver carpenters, for example, sat in judgment of “S. Hammerick” for

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“breaking the work rules of the order.” A five-man trial committee found Hammerick “guilty as charged” of working in a nonunion shop. Because of his past good behavior, the trial committee opted for leniency. They fined him $5 and then suspended the fine. Unfortunately, Hammerick proved himself unworthy of such compassion. When he was caught for a second time working in a nonunion shop roughly a month later, the trial committee placed a $20 fine on him. Then the committee reinstated his previously suspended $5 punishment. Considering that carpenters earned $3.50 per day, Hammerick likely learned his lesson.33 Workers forged their sense of justice on the shop floor, and codified their values in the work rules they adopted. They realized that in order to mobilize politically and win the measures that would transform social relations, they had to punish those who transgressed union codes, because those codes were the marrow of socialism. Unionists would be hard pressed to convince the larger citizenry of its responsibility to provide food, shelter, heat, and water for the needy via taxes if unionists themselves ignored the very ethics that, in their view, should serve as the foundation for a reordered society. Before Rocky Mountain unionists could worry about convincing the larger public to adopt their values, they first had to remind some of their fellow workers of the connections between shop-floor mutualism and collective political activism. Breaking workplace codes had consequences that extended beyond the shop floor. Ignoring mutualism could injure the health of other unions and the political power that workers wielded. The story of Rae Lemert’s commitment to mutualism shows the central role that shop-floor codes played in shaping the solidarity and political outlook of the region’s workers. Lemert worked as a proofreader at the Montana Daily Record, and he belonged to Helena Typographical Union #95. Albert Hawkins, the Record’s managing editor, despised Lemert because of Lemert’s union activism. According to Lemert, tensions started between him and Hawkins in early 1901. Lemert insisted that Hawkins follow union work rules, or what Lemert called “I.T.U. law.” Specifically, the Record’s employees were to have one day off a week, but Hawkins scheduled everyone to work every day. In response to Lemert’s protests, Hawkins attempted to eliminate Lemert’s position. Hawkins, in May of that year, claimed that management should perform the final proofreading of articles. The union blocked the change. Union officials informed the Record’s owners that Hawkins’s proposal clearly violated the agreement between the printers and the paper. By January 1902, tensions heightened when Lemert won the presidency of Local 95. Hostilities increased still

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further when Lemert extended his labor activism beyond his workplace and his union. In February, Lemert demonstrated his commitment to cross-union solidarity by serving on the committee that ran the organizing drive for Helena’s laundry workers. When employers refused to recognize the mostly female organization, unions throughout the city funded a laundry cooperative and encouraged all of the city’s workers to take their dirty clothes there. In April, Lemert helped run the East Helena smeltermen’s strike. According to Lemert, Hawkins admonished him for not providing inside detail of the walkout. Later that month, Lemert chastised two of the paper’s reporters for eating at a Chinese restaurant that the city’s labor movement had placed on its boycott list. Hawkins, “forcibly” and “unmistakably” told Lemert that “a Chinaman is as good as a Caucasian, and perhaps better.” Lemert considered this an insult of the highest magnitude, revealing that his and other unionists’ racist beliefs circumscribed the democratic visions progressive unionists claimed to hold. As the fall election season approached in September, Lemert distributed flyers advocating a direct legislation bill. He gave one to Hawkins, and Hawkins printed it in the Record in order to ridicule it and the labor movement. Hawkins argued that workers overestimated their political might. He also claimed that the “few” union leaders who created the city’s industrial strife really just wanted to hurt the Anaconda Copper Company. In December, Lemert accepted the position of official lobbyist to the state assembly for the State Trades Council (which became the Montana Federation of Labor the next year). He again fought for the initiative and referendum bill. It lost, but barely. He also worked for the “eight-hour constitutional amendment” for miners, which passed, and the “fellow servant bill,” which did not. Lemert insisted that his activities on behalf of labor’s cause led to his boss’s decision to try to fire him. In early March 1903, he filed charges with the union against his foreman and fellow Typographical Union #95 member Edward Killfeather for “conduct unbecoming a union man.” Lemert claimed that Killfeather had entered into a conspiracy with the Record’s owners to have him dismissed from his job. A key witness supported this accusation, telling the union’s trial committee that Killfeather had asked him to place articles on Lemert’s desk near the paper’s deadline. Lemert, as a result of this tactic, would have been prevented from doing his job on time. Hawkins then would have grounds to terminate his tenure with the paper. The man refused. During his testimony, Lemert added that in January 1903, “Edward Killfeather, in a burst of confidence,

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told me” that “I was antagonizing the powers that be.”34 Beyond the four-month suspension from the union, which meant being barred from the printing trade, the typographical workers also admonished Killfeather for carrying out grudges, and held him in contempt for working out “a personal hatred” by resorting “to the lowest form of vilification and lying to attain his end.” The committee added that Killfeather had forgotten “what a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay is,” and that all union members must remain committed to the fight for just compensation, “day by day” and “week by week.”35 Rae Lemert exemplified the type of labor leader the region’s employers feared. In order to implement the democracy that workers sought, Lemert performed the tasks of local union president, organizer, strike leader, and lobbyist. He participated in, and at times engineered, a multifront offensive against Helena’s employers by battling in the city’s workplaces, in its local labor markets, in its shops, in the streets, at its ballot boxes, and in the state assembly. He insisted that employers observe union work rules, and demanded that unionists gain economic and political power by organizing the unorganized, boycotting, striking, bloc voting, and lobbying. Through his actions, he revealed that the bonds of unity fashioned at one workplace extended throughout an entire city, and the whole state, and made solidarity real. Through that solidarity, unionists could change power relationships and begin to socialize markets.

Socialism and Socialists Even when workers shared a political vision and adhered to the principles of mutualism, differences emerged that made maintaining solidarity, especially at the ballot box, difficult. Specifically, disagreements erupted over political tactics and to a lesser degree over ideology. Beginning with Joseph Buchanan, most Rocky Mountain labor leaders encouraged workers to foster an active class-centered political culture that avoided sectarianism. Buchanan, Peter Breen, and David Coates all favored a leftist political outlook while building a mostly inclusive movement in which workers recognized their unions as their political agents. As long as unionists collectively determined platforms and voted as a bloc, labor leaders did not care if individual workers advocated the single tax, populism, or socialism. Workers throughout the 1880s and early 1890s learned that possessing power meant, at times, subordinating one’s ideological outlook and individual tactical preferences to pragmatism and the electoral strategy chosen by the whole. As a voting bloc, unionists could

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command the attention of candidates and officeholders. After the populist moment passed and Utah unionists won the eight-hour day for miners, workers seemed to have recognized this reality. Yet as the Socialist Party grew in the region, debates over the best vehicle for working-class representation emerged. Most unionists wanted socialism, but some insisted that only publicly elected SP members could implement it. In 1899, Pueblo Courier editors David Coates and Otto Thum cautioned readers to avoid factionalism by reprinting an article from the Indiana periodical the Coming Nation. The piece, written by Herbert M. Casson, examined the relationship between socialism and unionism. Casson pointed out that at the most recent AFL convention, delegates voted four to one against a socialist resolution. He explained to readers that it “was not in reality Socialism that trade unionists objected to, but the unwise tactics of too many Socialists.” Often Socialists “were swept off their feet by revolutionary zeal” and forgot “the value of trades unionism.” He further argued that unionists had fought for years for “practical reforms.” Veteran workers “felt suspicious of men who failed to appreciate what had been done, and who sought by some ‘Presto, change!’ method to reconstruct the whole industrial system.”36 Casson wanted workers to recognize that advocating socialism required a long-term commitment to fighting workplace struggles and battling for pro-labor legislation each day. If workers lived in places where union-friendly politicians held office or where reform candidates could win, they had to use that environment to their advantage. According to Casson, acquiring greater democracy did not depend on unionists’ establishing a socialist party and voting for that party’s candidates, but rather on fostering a sense of solidarity and the implementation of pro-labor laws. The first battles between those who insisted that socialism could only arrive via members of a socialist party and those who cared only about an officeholder’s willingness to pass pro-labor laws, not his or her party affiliation, occurred in Butte. Following the Pullman strike, Debs decided that Populism did not accurately convey the social divisions that workingclass political activists needed to address. The Populists, in his opinion, did not focus enough on the class struggle. The people, Debs claimed, faced a simple choice: socialism or capitalism. Choosing socialism, Debs joined the Social Democracy, a party comprised mainly of Midwestern unionists, which was led by Milwaukee’s Victor L. Berger. Debs called on unionists across the country to form Social Democratic clubs, and in May 1899, a number of Butte workers responded. The first members of the Butte club included railroad workers, carpenters, laborers, hard-rock

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miners, and a mine engineer. By 1900, more than a hundred people belonged to the Social Democrats. Later that year at the national level, the Social Democrats joined with members of the SLP. Across the country, SLP members renounced their increasingly dogmatic leader, Daniel DeLeon. The SLP defectors and Social Democrats decided to run candidates on the SP ticket. In Butte that meant that the Social Democrats became the SP.37 In 1902, Butte’s SP members organized a full slate of candidates to run for state and county offices. None of the party’s hopefuls won. They only received 6 percent of the vote statewide. Ten percent of the ballots cast in Butte’s home county, Silver Bow, went to SP members. The party did, however, start making inroads with organized workers, as nine of its candidates held union cards in the 1903 local elections. On election day that year, only one candidate won, but the party’s vote totals increased. In nearby Anaconda, a Socialist captured the mayor’s office, and three other party members won city-council seats. Unfortunately for the SP, the party declined the next year and remained dormant for the next seven years.38 The Socialists’ collapse resulted from unionists’ recognizing that union-centered political action offered them the best option to acquire the justice they sought. While the SP remained in its infancy in 1900, Montana’s union leaders created a Labor Party that endorsed candidates from all parties, including their own, who championed pro-labor legislation and stood a good chance of winning. Daniel McDonald, SP member and president of the WLU, helped lead the Labor Party effort as he sat on its platform committee.39 The Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly and the Montana State Trades Assembly ran the party. Seeing an opportunity to acquire a bloc of labor votes, industrialist F. Augustus Heinze, who had a number of legal disputes with the Rockefeller brothers over mining properties, used his newspaper, the Reveille, to attack the Rockefellers as easterners trying to colonize Montana. Heinze and local mine owner and politician William Andrews Clark, no stranger to the power of the labor vote, announced that they would support workers’ most pressing demand: an eight-hourday law for miners. As the fall 1900 election neared, Labor Party officials agreed that a mix of unionists and Heinze’s nominees would constitute the Labor Party ballot. Party candidates captured a majority of seats in the state legislature, the governor’s chair, and two spots on the district bench. Unionists received their reward, as the state legislature passed the eighthour day for miners in February 1901.40

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In choosing the Labor Party over the SP, Montana unionists not only won a statute, they acquired real power. Two Montana court rulings illustrated this point. In October 1901, lawyers for the Robert Mitchell Furniture Company filed suit in the Montana Supreme Court against Governor Joseph K. Toole, Attorney General James Donovan, and Secretary of State George M. Hays. Toole, Donovan, and Hays, among their other duties, made up the state’s furnishing board. They had the responsibility of buying furniture for the capitol. On August 6 that year, Donovan informed the Mitchell Company that among six competitors for the state furniture contract, they had submitted the lowest bid. Mitchell Company officials assumed they had won the contract. The Mitchell Company, however, had a history of refusing to recognize unions. Upon discovering what the furnishing committee was about to do, the state’s labor movement mobilized to prevent the contract from becoming official. On August 23, prior to the board signing the final agreement, McDonald arrived at the governor’s office with a petition signed by the WLU, the Montana State Trades and Labor Council, the Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly, the Western Montana Trades and Labor Council (Missoula), and a number of local unions. The furniture board promptly decided by a vote of two to one (the one being the governor) to cancel the contract. The Mitchell Company sued. Their lawyer argued that McDonald simply showed the board that the WLU listed the Mitchell Company among its “scab” companies, and Donovan and Hays moved to reconsider the contract. In court, the company’s lawyer pointed out that Governor Toole had asked the other two members of the furniture board if they had any objections to granting the Mitchell Company the contract, other than its nonunion policy. He was told “that there was no objection to the contract save the one in respect of union labor.” Judge William Trigg Pigott found that “the reason given at the time of the attempted cancellation is not recognized by the law as valid.” Pigott, however, then stated that the advertisement asking for bids from furniture companies should have run in two newspapers. It ran in only one. The Mitchell Company’s lawyer responded that the “assembly had no power to require the publication of the advertisement to be made in any newspaper other than the Helena Independent.” Pigott argued that Section 705 of the political code clearly stated that when asking for bids, state officials had to advertise in two newspapers. The case ended with the clerk writing, “Writ quashed and proceeding dismissed.”41

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Toole, the Labor Party’s 1900 nominee, knew that he owed his election, in part, to workers. They endorsed him, campaigned for him, and cast their ballots for him. Although he voted against voiding the contract, the attorney general and secretary of state did not. Donovan and Hays must have recognized that if McDonald could so quickly assemble a petition signed by all of the state’s central labor bodies over a furniture contract, he certainly could make reelection bids for the governor and others quite difficult. Furthermore, Pigott’s decision revealed that Montana unionists had a very real degree of power, since state courts had rarely sided with labor before the 1930s.42 The case of Flathead County mining manager John Branigan further highlighted workers’ growing political influence. After the passage of the eight-hour workday, Branigan immediately challenged the 1901 law. He ordered one of his employees to work ten hours. This seemed a good gamble for him, as courts usually concluded that workers and employers entered into negotiations over wages and hours equally, and, therefore, each individual made the best deal for him- or herself. Thus, to uphold a law restricting hours of work would mean violating an individual’s right to deal with his or her employer. The Flathead County court ignored this precedent, found the statute constitutional, and fined Branigan $150. Company officials at first appealed their manager’s case, but quickly sensed that the state supreme court would uphold the new measure. They conceded, and Branigan paid his fine.43 Despite these examples of unionists using the Labor Party to gain real power and socialize markets, Butte SP loyalists condemned the Labor Party. SP activists called the party a Heinze creation and claimed that it betrayed the workers’ larger political agenda. When McDonald again served on the Labor Party’s platform committee in the fall of 1902, the pro-Socialist Labor World attacked him.44 The World called McDonald and other Labor Party leaders machine politicians who “have the price of their treachery stowed away in their pockets. They are rattling the thirty pieces of corporation silver for which they betrayed their people.” 45 The editor also argued that although voting the Labor ticket would deny Rockefeller political power over the state, it meant that a different monopolist, Heinze, would be given the power to expand his interests. The World disregarded the fact that the eight-hour day represented the central goal of workers in the Rocky Mountain states for well over a decade. McDonald identified himself as a socialist. He, however, understood that one did not have to vote the SP ticket to advance the cause of socialism. Dealing with Heinze provided workers with their best chance of acquiring

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power. The labor movement’s victories in the Mitchell and Branigan cases underscored this point. In helping to win the eight-hour day for miners, McDonald had not forfeited Montana unionists’ political independence or their convictions. In fact, by not being tied to one party, workers took advantage of the mounting competition between the Heinze-Clark and Rockefeller forces. In Colorado, the division between advocates of union-centered political action and SP loyalists proved far more harmful to workers’ overall political interests than in Montana. As in most parts of the nation, the SP emerged in the Centennial State as a result of the amalgamation of members of the SLP and the Social Democrats. The SLP had taken over the Rocky Mountain Social League and had been entering candidates in local and state races since the late 1880s. Colorado’s Social Democrats, conversely, grew out of workers’ admiration for Debs and were a new organization in the 1890s. Nationally, in 1896, some Populist Party activists encouraged Debs to run for president on their ticket. Many Rocky Mountain workers supported this proposal. During the CSFL convention that year, some members moved that “There is want and destitution everywhere among the people of this country . . . We, as laboring men and voters . . . do most earnestly demand the nomination of that noblehearted patriot, Eugene Victor Debs, as our choice for President.”46 The motion failed 36 to 31, but it sparked Debs’s supporters to follow his advice and start a Social Democratic Club. In 1898, Colorado Social Democrats surfaced and started bringing disaffected SLP members into their organization.47 By 1902, the two groups had united, and the Colorado branch of the Socialist Party emerged. Most SP supporters came from the Cripple Creek area. Of the five people on the party’s state executive board that year, four were from Cripple Creek or Victor, which was in the Cripple Creek mining district. The fifth member lived in Colorado Springs. By May, the state committee reported that nineteen locals existed throughout the state and that membership had already increased. Most SP members lived in towns where mining or smelting dominated the local economy.48 That year, intense fighting over electoral strategies developed between Socialist Party loyalists and advocates of union-centered political action. Pueblo’s 1902 spring and fall elections offered the most dramatic examples of these differences. On May 2, the Pueblo Courier started printing a regular column called the “Socialist Department.” Later that month, the Courier championed the party’s message that “unionist and Socialist interests are identical and therefore should work with one another in

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harmony.” Richardson, who took over editorship that year, regularly attended and reported on SP meetings and delivered lectures on the virtues of socialism. Although widely acknowledged as a party activist, Richardson that year endorsed Democratic incumbent mayor J. Edward Rizer’s bid for reelection. Richardson defended his choice in a number of columns. He reminded his readers that they had backed Rizer in his previous campaign, and that Rizer had delivered on his promises to them. Specifically, Richardson pointed to the city’s recent cooks’ and waiters’ strike to make his case. When the sheriff aided restaurant owners by arresting picketers, Rizer condemned the sheriff ’s actions. More important, the pro-labor mayor ordered the immediate release of the demonstrators. Richardson wrote that “Mr. Rizer has proven himself favorable to the cause of labor and also has proven himself a painstaking and faithful public official.” He then argued that Rizer “should receive the vote of every laboring man in Pueblo regardless of politics.” Unfortunately, from Richardson’s point of view, the labor vote split between Rizer and the SP candidate, and a probusiness Republican became Pueblo’s mayor.49 Richardson continued to advocate union-centered political action over voting solely for SP candidates. In autumn, he declared that the “pushing of a socialist ticket this fall will be a mistake and will not be for the best interests of the socialist or the labor cause in the long run.” As in the spring, he argued that the party lacked the proper structure and could not command the vote totals necessary to win. He endorsed the Democrats because businessmen had mobilized under the banner of the Republican Party. Richardson realized “that in supporting an old party ticket I shall reap the abuse of many people and suffer heavy financial loss to the paper.” He ended his editorial by cautioning unionists not to “be led by enthusiasm to do something you will regret.”50 Richardson wanted Rocky Mountain workers to vote with their heads, not their hearts. On a more immediate level, he realized that voting for the Democrats gave workers a better opportunity to maintain their political influence. Both he and McDonald admonished workers who advocated using the SP and not their unions as their political agent. Richardson and McDonald not only feared a loss of labor’s political power, but they also worried about the unraveling of the entire progressive union movement. The fierce debates over endorsing the SP among the delegates attending the 1902 WFM convention further revealed the expanding fissures over tactics within the progressive union movement. Between May 26 and June 7, the hard-rock miners’ federation met in Denver. WFM Presi-

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dent Edward Boyce, who had decided to retire that year, started the convention by turning his final presidential address into a plea for members to back the SP. Unionists, Boyce declared, have “too frequently elected” men “who proved to be our worst enemies.” He further argued that “we have the power to defeat such men and to force legislation that will be beneficial for the protection of men engaged in the hazardous vocation of mining,” but we do not use it. Then he arrived at his main point: “The most important action which you can take at this convention is to advise the members of your organization to adopt the principles of socialism without equivocation.” Boyce expected workers to surrender the practice of union-centered political action for an alliance with the SP. He wanted miners to do so because their current strategy, he claimed, had failed them. Throughout his speech, Boyce presented the WFM as an organization in crisis, largely due to the power wielded by antiunion governors. He claimed that only the substitution of socialism for capitalism by voting SP members into office would reverse this trend.51 Boyce’s speech captured the essence of the SP supporters’ position. Put simply, things were getting worse. A militarized plutocracy had emerged, and most people either did not know it or did not care. According to Boyce, the “smelter trust, lead trust, amalgamated copper trust, metals selling trust, steel trust, and railroad trust” all claimed unprecedented “power to coerce and exploit the people” through laws. He predicted that because the “hoarders of wealth are to-day intoxicated with their power and, knowing that they can control a majority of the officers elected through the present system of bribery, will experience no difficulty in obtaining the standing armies to hold the people in subjugation.” The “people,” he added, were “hypnotized by party idolatry and hero-worshipping” and therefore unlikely to “view the situation with sufficient intelligence to own and operate all their industries without a conflict.”52 In other words, politicians belonging to any party except the SP could not be trusted to advance labor’s interests. Those supporting the resolution that the WFM endorse the SP echoed these themes throughout the rest of the convention. Boyce and the pro-SP faction’s assessments of labor’s political power and capital’s might distorted the vitality of the WFM. By 1902, the miners’ federation membership had increased significantly. Although no number of total members was reported, organizer and president-elect Charles Moyer brought twenty new locals into the federation when the convention started. From Moyer’s efforts alone, an additional twenty seemed likely to join the WFM within the next six months. Also, the fact that the

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WFM, just before this meeting began, paid off all of its debts for the first time in the organization’s history spoke to its increased strength.53 This is not to claim that the WFM had no trouble maintaining the locals that already existed. Miners certainly encountered strong employer opposition in various forms and faced repression from local and state politicians who sided with corporations during labor conflicts. Boyce raised these issues in comparing the outcomes of strikes at Rossland, British Columbia, and Telluride, Colorado. In juxtaposing these two events, he wanted to highlight the ferocity of class conflict and insist that to claim victory in its struggle against capital, labor had to display great courage. Courage, in his mind, meant not only demonstrating a desire to confront one’s employer, even to the point of engaging in violence, but also exhibiting a willingness to assert one’s political convictions by supporting the party that best represented labor’s interests, regardless of that party’s ability to win elections. The Rossland strike began in July 1901. Managers had cut miners wages from $3 per day to $2.50, prompting the walk out. With no resolution in sight, Boyce, in January 1902, sent a subcommittee composed of members of the WFM’s executive board to assess the situation. The subcommittee reported that the miners and their employers had reached a stalemate. Boyce then offered to go to Rossland and aid the miners in determining their next course of action. WFM vice president James Baker, acting as the intermediary, informed Boyce that the strikers did not want him to intervene. They feared that his presence would suggest that “radical measures” were about to be used to end the conflict. Boyce did not deny their accusation. In February, he declared the strike a failure.54 After recounting this tale of defeat for the delegates assembled in Denver, Boyce then spoke of the Telluride strike. This confrontation began on May 2, 1902, and dealt with pay rates. As the strike extended into July, tensions mounted. On July 3, a company guard shot and killed a striker, John Barthella, after a group of 250 WFM members demanded that the “scabs” stop working. “The death of Barthella,” as the biannual report of the CBLS noted, “fired the blood of the strikers and they opened up a furious fusillade upon the company’s buildings, in which men [strike breakers] were supposed to be sheltered.” The gunfire continued until late into the evening. At the end of the battle, three men, including Barthella, lay dead and a number of others injured. The WFM claimed victory in this fight. Both the mine’s manager and WFM leaders wanted to avoid further bloodshed, so they negotiated a ceasefire agreement. With the nonunion

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replacement workers gone, and the Telluride miners remaining resolute in their demand, the company conceded.55 In his recapitulation of these events, Boyce declared that unlike the Rossland miners, the men from Telluride “were cognizant of their power” to “secure living wages.” Even though nonunion men arrived in Telluride to work, these unionists remained committed, as they were “determined to win regardless of the consequences.” He suggested that if every local would elect officers as tough as those in Telluride, then “the Federation would be respected by friends and enemies.”56 To Boyce, the shop floor and the political arena remained connected, and practicing mutualism now encompassed picking up a gun and killing scabs. The miner who did not display militancy at both the workplace and the ballot box—the worker who would not include violence among the tactics he used to enforce union demands and who refused to vote the straight SP ticket— betrayed the class struggle. Boyce was challenging the manhood of any delegate who both advocated union-centered political action and opposed pitched battles. Opponents of the endorsement refused to allow Boyce’s appeal to manliness intimidate them. William Davidson of Sandon, British Columbia, warned his fellow delegates that “we are not all of the same mind.” The recording secretary noted that Davidson “favored independent political action, but said he opposed these conventions endorsing the platform of any party. He was here to represent unionism and not any other ism.” B. M. Lindsay of the Butte Mining Engineers’ Union called himself an SP member, but wanted his fellow delegates to recognize that “trades unionism is not a failure,” and that it is “the only barrier between us and poverty.” Charles Whitely of the Butte Miners and Smeltermen’s Union “did not believe anything could be accomplished by declaring for straight political action” because “too much division along political lines in our own ranks” exists.57 Davidson, Lindsay, and Whitley reflected the voices of those about to vote no. In general, they supported a broad-based reconstruction of the economy through working-class political action. They also recognized that not all workers shared the same definition of socialism; they resented the claims that union activism had failed; and they wanted their fellow delegates to offer a more accurate assessment of the real power workers possessed. By mischaracterizing workers’ political strength, WFM members could easily annoy unionists in other occupations who had helped build the progressive movement. Proponents of union-centered political action

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reminded their fellow delegates that workers in other trades had made winning the eight-hour-day law for miners their top legislative priority. Knowing that public opinion supported such a measure—in other words, by being committed to pragmatism, tactical flexibility, and mutualism— progressive unionists outside the WFM recognized the logic of privileging miners’ wants above their own. Voting to endorse the SP, advocates of union-centered political action argued, had the potential to fracture both the WFM and the entire regional labor network. The supporters of union-centered political action opposed Boyce’s assessment of the WFM’s strength, his view of labor’s political power, and his lack of consideration for workers in other unions. Also at issue during this meeting was Boyce’s credibility. In making his case that the Telluride miners represented the kind of militant workers needed to make socialism a reality, Boyce failed to provide an accurate portrayal of all that had transpired during that strike. In the midst of the July 3 battle, O. D. Downtain, the sheriff in nearby San Juan County, claimed that the situation in Telluride, located in San Miguel County, had grown out of control. He asked that Governor James B. Orman send the state militia. Similarly worded telegrams flooded the governor’s office even after the WFM and mining company negotiated the ceasefire. Unsure of the level of violence occurring at Telluride, the levelheaded Orman considered a request offered by Boyce and the lieutenant governor, David Coates, who was also a former CSFL president and current WLU member. Boyce and Coates asked the governor to assemble a fact-finding team to determine the validity of the sheriff ’s charges. Orman agreed. Coates, WFM attorney John H. Murphy and Telluride district judge Theron Stevens made up the committee. Murphy presented the results of the investigation to the delegates. His findings demonstrated the efficacy of union-centered political action. Despite Murphy’s report, delegates still voted to have the WFM officially back the SP. The federation’s lawyer held little sway because he was not scheduled to speak until after the vote on the endorsement resolution. When Murphy did address the convention’s delegates, he started by singling out Vincent St. John for his bravery. The Telluride union leader encountered a group of citizens, none of whom belonged to the WFM, exchanging gunfire with company guards after the ceasefire agreement. St. John risked his own life in convincing both sides to stop shooting. The guards had hassled the local residents to the point where non­miners decided to take action. St. John had arrived with the San Juan sheriff, but the sheriff took cover when he saw bullets flying. Coates, Murphy,

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and Stevens found that the company guards deserved all the blame for the violence that had occurred after July 3. They thus concluded that the governor should not send the state militia to Telluride. Orman followed their advice.58 The Telluride strike, at least as far as labor’s political practices were concerned, should have led Boyce to the opposite conclusion from the one he had drawn. Because of union-centered political action, Colorado workers possessed real power. The governor had won his office in part due to the labor vote, and he served workers’ interests by sending an obviously pro-labor committee to investigate the claims of a local sheriff. Instead of using the state militia to break the strike, as the sheriff had hoped, the governor followed the recommendation of the committee that comprised the WFM’s attorney and one of the architects of progressive unionism. Those who advocated union-centered political action found Boyce’s omission troubling. They also considered St. John’s proposed resolution— that the WFM as a body chastise Orman for even considering sending the militia to Telluride—foolish. St. John, who favored endorsing the SP, argued that Orman owed his office “to the votes of the laboring men who trusted him because he solemnly promised to accord them simple justice.” He considered Orman’s actions a betrayal. From the pro-SP perspective, it seemed, politicians had to side in both thought and action with workers at all times. Delegates tabled the motion, but not the sentiments of those who supported it. In the end, 63 percent of delegates voted to endorse the SP.59 All progressives favored a redistribution of wealth, supported state and municipal ownership of public utilities, and championed measures to lessen hours and promote safety. Yet workers rarely agreed upon what constituted a redistribution of wealth, or a reconstruction of market relations. Some insisted that a socialist society only existed when the cooperative commonwealth replaced the wage system, whereas others argued that each advance of labor’s agenda brought justice closer. The division over voting a straight Socialist ticket or maintaining a commitment to unioncentered political action enveloped these tensions. Importantly, delegates from Butte and Cripple Creek, two of the leading centers of SP activity in the region, offered the most resistance to the WFM’s endorsement of the Socialists. They understood better than miners and smeltermen from areas with weak SP organizations that by supporting only Socialist candidates, workers could render the progressive union movement impotent. Even if all workers would vote the SP ticket, which they would not, Socialists would not likely win, because labor could not manufacture a plurality.

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Moreover, having not received workers’ votes to claim their office, the politicians who did win would have no incentive to support labor legislation. The various labor party efforts of the late 1880s and early 1890s had already proven this to be the case. Overall, Richardson, McDonald, and those socialists who championed union-centered political action assailed SP hardliners for their naïve conception of power. Boyce, St. John, and others who argued that only Socialists could make socialism did not acknowledge that the network collectively constructed by the region’s unionists depended on allowing local-level union leaders flexibility in choosing political tactics. SP-only supporters did not see the contradiction in their current position and their earlier decision to reject affiliation with the AFL. They had agreed with their fellow progressive unionists that workers should have the ability to determine political tactics based on local conditions without having to clear their decisions with one of Gompers’s lieutenants. Union-centered activists charged that sacrificing this well-tested strategy could lead to the destruction of the region’s union movement. Their claim was neither hyperbole nor part of a hypothetical debate about tactics. Richardson consistently printed articles about the coal miners who lived in the company towns in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. These workers proved themselves just as committed to their unions and to political action as their fellow workers in Butte, Helena, Denver, Pueblo, Salt Lake City, and the hard-rock mining camps that existed throughout the West. The struggles of these miners revealed that employers and political opponents of progressive unionism could render workers’ legislative successes irrelevant and deny them justice by preventing unionists’ access to local political power. To Richardson, dividing the labor vote, as Pueblo workers had in the 1902 mayoral election, meant abdicating municipal influence and moving closer to the subjugation coal miners faced.

Company Towns As the rise of the company town illustrates, if workers held no political power on the local level, employers could stymie progressive victories. Beginning in the 1880s and becoming more prevalent after a failed 1894 coal miners’ strike, railroad companies, including the Denver and Rio Grande (D&RG) and the Union Pacific, turned their mining camps into company towns. In over half of its coal towns in southern Colorado, the D&RG owned virtually every inch of property and every building on the land. Mine managers also served as town superintendents. Operators

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paid miners by the amount of coal they dug. Those tending the scales often adjusted weights in the companies’ favor or simply read the numbers wrong. Employers used scrip instead of cash to pay miners, forcing them to shop at company stores where inflated prices led to a subsistence living at best.60 Workers responded to these conditions by attempting to create unions. They had only limited success. Laborers who engaged in collective actions such as striking in a company town forfeited their paychecks, encountered a ban from the company store, and faced eviction from company housing. A miner in Almy, Wyoming, in 1893, compared his existence to that of a slave. “While I was reading about the horrors of slavery,” he wrote, “I learned that on many of the plantations,” the “slaves were allowed to choose the site for the cabin in which they were to live.” He continued, “Just think of a man not being allowed to live where he likes.” The miner concluded that he and his co-workers would “soon envy the lot of the slave.”61 The repressive nature of company towns stood in sharp contrast to the freedoms many workers had established in Salt Lake City, Pueblo, Denver, and Butte. The proliferation of these closed camps after 1894 revealed employers’ growing fear of worker’s organizational and political power. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CFI) emerged in 1892 from a series of consolidations and mergers. CFI set the standard for managing company towns in the Rocky Mountain West. The new corporation controlled 69,000 acres of land, ran fourteen mines, and maintained four coking plants. By the turn of the twentieth century, CFI dominated the coal industry in the region and attempted to stop union development by using company guards and local law enforcement officers to intimidate organizers and employees.62 CFI also created a sociological department in an attempt to use paternalism and propaganda to convince its employees not to unionize. The company, for example, printed its own magazine, Camp and Plant. The magazine would commonly feature one of its mines in an issue and discuss the history of the area, its landscape, its schools, and its contribution to the growth of the company.63 Interestingly, no issue of Camp and Plant contained any pictures of miners working, as most images captured the sun shining off coking plants, churches, or schools.64 After reading an issue of Camp and Plant, union organizer John Simpson argued that the company journal only interviewed CFI “stooges” who “don’t know what a day’s poverty is.” He noticed that articles failed to mention the miners’ “homes that did not have two days provisions in them,” and that contributors omitted the fact that most boys spent their days digging coal instead of learning in town

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schools.65 Although not as sophisticated as CFI, the region’s other coal companies—particularly the Utah Fuel Company and the Victor Fuel Company—mimicked its practices. Simpson hoped to alert the public to the realities faced by the region’s coal miners and to remedy those hardships by enlisting CFI employees and other Rocky Mountain coal diggers into the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Nationally, the UMWA emerged in 1890. In 1898, the UMWA created District 15, which included Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Miners feared joining local affiliates of the UMWA because challenging company authority meant losing one’s job, being blacklisted, and experiencing eviction. As the cost of living increased and fatalities mounted, union leaders became more vocal and called for a full-scale unionization drive. District 15 leaders met and published their demands. Miners wanted all four state legislatures to pass pay laws that guaranteed “lawful money” instead of scrip, payment in a timely fashion, “the preservations of life, health and limbs of all mine employes [sic],” and that certified eight hours as a day’s work, prohibited child labor, and forbade employers to hire Pinkerton guards. Miners also insisted on the enforcement of these laws once they were enacted.66 Those opposed to the UMWA’s efforts attacked the miners’ call for better pay by portraying anyone who failed to make a living digging coal as lazy. A Salt Lake Tribune reporter claimed that when “a man makes less than $2.50 per day the trouble is in the man not the mine.” Utah coal miners struck for union recognition and to change the pay structure, but failed.67 In Colorado, the miners’ fortunes looked brighter. In 1901, the lobbying efforts of the UMWA, the CSFL, and labor leader David Coates, the then lieutenant governor, succeeded when the Thirteenth Colorado Assembly passed a payday law that would go into effect in July of that year. The measure required employers to pay workers every two weeks “in lawful money,” and mandated that any operator who allowed the two-week deadline to pass without paying his workers had to add 5 percent interest to his employees’ wages. The statute also held employers responsible for all legal fees should laborers have to sue for their pay. Despite its good intentions, enforcement of this law depended on local authorities acting upon workers’ complaints. With mine managers also serving as town super­intendents and local sheriffs carrying out the companies’ wishes, such state acts proved virtually meaningless. The Courier, in December, reported that employers continued to pay laborers late and in scrip.68

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Rocky Mountain coal miners also sought protective legislation. In Colorado, 1,708 coal miners died in mining accidents from 1884–1912. In this period, the average death rate for coal miners nationally was 3.12 per thousand, while Colorado’s rate was 6.81. Coal mining in Colorado was more dangerous than hard-rock mining. Between 1896 and 1902, metal miners averaged 3.08 job-related deaths per thousand, while coal diggers suffered a rate of 6.14 per thousand. In New Mexico, the average accidental death rate between 1893 and 1912 was 6.42 per thousand per year. Wyoming’s average fatality rate between 1886 and 1912 was 6.27 per thousand per year, and Utah coal miners died at a rate of 10.08 per thousand between 1893 and 1912.69 Employers placed the blame for accidents on the shoulders of miners because, as one Camp and Plant article stated, injuries “are directly traceable to the miners taking unnecessary risks.” 70 The CFI-controlled magazine forgot to mention that they paid workers by the ton of coal they mined. Providing a daily wage, as some UMWA miners demanded, would have saved many lives because coal diggers would have slowed the pace of their labor and been less reckless. Mine owners had little incentive to ensure safe workplaces. The few liability laws that existed went increasingly unenforced as coal companies’ control over their mining camps grew. Also, mine inspectors had no mechanism to force mine owners to remedy hazards or repair broken machinery. Between September and December 1902 alone, the Courier reported three cases in Colorado mining camps where owners knowingly ignored inspectors’ warnings. In Aguilar, the fan house burned down in September because of faulty wiring. Cited for the danger once before, managers disregarded the problem and watched fire erupt for the second time in a four-month period. Likewise, one miner near Walsenberg had both legs broken when the rope holding the cage that lowered workers into the ground snapped. According to the Courier, mine inspectors had already listed the cage as a safety hazard. In Bowen, an explosion occurred because owners refused to water down the coal dust on the roads and also would not run the fan at night.71 Watering was a common practice in the summer and was recommended by the state mine inspector. Even when coal miners had the law on their side, their inability to exercise power through local government rendered their legislative victories at the state level virtually useless. The workings of company stores demonstrate another way in which employers kept workers in a state of poverty. In Louisville, Colorado, for example, mine owners forced laborers to buy their own supplies, and

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made them use the company store. Company merchants sold a keg of gunpowder for $2.50, while Denverites could purchase the same amount of the explosive substance for $1. Other price checks reveal that the company stores charged “from 20 per cent to 100 per cent” more for goods. The Courier reported that “steak has doubled in price. Sugar is 14 pounds for $1 (16 in Denver).” Canned fruit went “from 15 cents to 20 and 25 cents. Ham and bacon have gone from 10 cents to 14 cents a pound.” When Simpson and other UMWA leaders succeeded in organizing a local at Aguilar, miners immediately attempted to start a cooperative store. District 15 members first met on March 29, 1903, and agreed to sell shares of the store at $5. The UMWA hoped the store would serve the entire southern part of the district. By April 10, over a hundred union members had bought shares in the venture.72 Unlike cooperatives in the region’s urban centers, however, such ventures in coal mining towns had little chance of succeeding. Miners indebted to their company stores had their wages garnished to pay their bills. They had to keep buying on credit, leaving them little income to spend at a competing store. Also, because employers violated the law by paying their workers in scrip, few miners had real money to spend. If a cooperative store accepted scrip, the shareholders disadvantaged themselves. One rarely received full value when he exchanged scrip for dollars. Owners stifled political experimentation in the corporate-controlled closed mining camps. Town superintendents (mine managers) forbade parades and labor celebrations. Strikes resulted in eviction, loss of credit at the company store, and unemployment. Lobbying local officials fell on deaf ears, and open political agitation produced the same results as striking. Even when the coal diggers of District 15 won beneficial measures as a result of urban unionists acting on their behalf, they still had to depend on local authorities to enforce those statutes. The hardships that the region’s coal miners faced in addition to their lack of local political power prevented workers from enjoying, or in this case even openly advocating, much-desired reforms. Coal miners could not appeal to local police, political leaders, or county courts because companies such as CFI and Utah Fuel controlled those public bodies. Fair wages, shorter hours, safer conditions, and affordable goods all shaped coal miners’ understanding of what the law should provide to those who worked hard. District 15 members attempted to engage in the same types of political actions as their counterparts in the region’s cities and hard-rock mining camps. Yet CFI and other coal companies literally owned every section of the property where these workers lived. Those

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charged with enforcing the law placed their loyalties to coal owners above the mandates of the state legislatures. The growth of company towns served as examples to hard-rock miners and urban workers of what could happen should they lose influence over local politics and markets.

“Anarchy and Hell” By the turn of the century, employers outside of the coal camps decided that they had to dismantle workers’ regional political network. The fight for the governor’s office in Colorado offers a key example of this struggle. Rather than mimic workers’ strategy and play politicians against one another, owners and their allies sought control of the Republican Party. Colorado proved the first battleground for the party’s renewed quest for political might. During the 1890s, the Colorado Republican Party had split over the silver issue. In 1902, as disagreements over bimetallism died down, the party’s two factions reconciled and sought greater influence in state politics. Pro-capitalist forces, led by businessman James C. Craig, insisted that the Republican Party would regain its stature if it catered to its original base, the monied elite. Craig responded to Rocky Mountain workers’ rising influence over market relations and growing political power by calling on fellow employers to join him in creating the region’s first branch of the Citizens’ Alliance. Dayton, Ohio, businessmen started this organization in 1900 in hopes of curbing union activism by promoting open shops. Although businessmen joined the alliance immediately, and some smaller locals formed by 1902, it took until 1903 for Denver employers to officially charter their own branch. In the meantime, Republican leaders agreed with Craig that those employers forming a consolidated antiunion bloc should serve as the party’s foundation. The 1902 gubernatorial contest provided the stage for the revamped Republican Party to display its new attitude. Craig helped select the candidate who would embody this pro-business stance: James Peabody. Peabody, a banker and businessman from Canon City, had organized and led one of the state’s first Citizens’ Alliance locals. He had also served as the town’s mayor. He promised to run Colorado as a business.73 Both business and labor leaders understood the 1902 election as crucial. Business owners wanted to make the Republican Party unfriendly to labor’s demands, thereby short-circuiting union-centered political action. Workers sought to maintain their growing influence. They demanded an eight-hour-day measure for miners to replace the one struck down by the

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state supreme court. State legislators, elected by unionists’ votes, placed an eight-hour-day amendment on the November ballot.74 By enshrining protections for the health and safety of those toiling in dangerous occupations in the Colorado Constitution, the state supreme court could not overturn a law that granted miners a shorter workday. Thus, the ballot initiative legislators proposed would both create an amendment and also require officeholders to pass a shorter-hours measure for miners. A great deal was at stake, and Richardson knew it. He recognized that the debate within the labor movement over supporting the SP had surfaced at the worst possible moment. He insisted that pushing “a socialist ticket this fall will be a mistake and will not be for the best interests of the socialist or the labor cause in the long run.” He further argued that the party lacked broad support and by jumping into the fall election, workers would only “defeat the democratic ticket.” The Pueblo Courier editor realized his stance would win him few friends. Speaking for himself and the owners of the paper, he wrote, “All we can say for the future is this, we shall, as in the past, continue to preach socialism in the COURIER.” He apologized for his endorsement of the Democrats and explained that “it hurts deeply” to “go squarely against some of our very best friends.” But he reminded his readers that by choosing candidates who would champion labor’s cause, they had won important victories and prevented the expansion of corporate political power. During this election, he asserted, the CSFL had successfully placed a constitutional amendment on the ballot. If approved by voters, that measure would require the state legislature to pass an eight-hour-day law for miners. He argued, “There is the eight hour amendment, you can pass it but how in the name of God will you GET THE LAW if you elect a republican legislature? ? ?” He concluded by cautioning, “You are standing over a powder magazine, handle your matches carefully.” 75 In the last issue of the Courier published before the election, Richardson alerted readers to the dangers a Peabody administration would pose, by running stories from Canon City workers. A Canon City union leader explained that as mayor, Peabody clearly opposed union wages, and as proof gave the example of the city seeking out a nonunion contractor to install its sewer system. A letter from Samuel Holtz, president of the Denver Smeltermen’s Union, followed these pieces. Holtz reiterated the threat that Peabody posed to the eight-hour-day amendment. He reminded his fellow unionists how hard they had worked to get the measure on the ballot, and ended his letter with a simple request: “Let us not throw away that which has been so nearly accomplished.” 76 Richardson, like Holtz,

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stressed the grave consequences workers’ faced, and reminded his readers that a split ticket between Socialists, other pro-labor third-party candidates, and the Democrats meant a Republican victory. A frustrated and worried Richardson warned readers that this Republican Party, mobilized by the Citizens’ Alliance, wanted to destroy the labor movement. If Peabody won the governor’s race, Richardson argued, he “will turn loose the troops and assist the employers to disrupt the unions of this state.” Richardson and the Courier’s staff believed “that a definite plan is on foot looking to that end and we believe it is a plan that WILL WORK if they can get the troops.” He implored workers throughout Colorado to vote the Democratic ticket; otherwise, the result would be “anarchy and hell in this state and the setting back of the labor movement.” 77 Richardson’s apocalyptic vision proved prophetic. Once in office, Peabody immediately sought to implement his pro-employer agenda. Ticket splitting allowed Republicans to win all major offices and take control over the state house. Democrats did, however, claim a majority in the state senate. During the campaign, Peabody made vague statements about his view of the eight-hour measure. With the election behind him, he started voicing his outright objection to the law.78 Richardson asked workers to vote the Democratic ticket based on the danger Peabody posed to organized labor, as opposed to the strengths of the Democratic Party’s candidate. He did this because the Democratic nominee possessed absolutely no appeal for union workers. In none of Richardson’s numerous and intense pleas for pragmatism does one find the name Edward C. Stimson, the Democrats’ choice for governor. When labor agreed to cast their ballots for James Orman two years earlier, they knew he supported their demands. Furthermore, in order to win unionists’ support, Orman and Democratic Party officials agreed to make labor leader and socialist David Coates the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor. With labor threatening to vote for the SP, and the withering but not completely dead Populist Party still entering candidates into state races, the Democratic leadership made a terrible blunder. Instead of shoring up labor’s support, they chose a man who in 1894 had joined the deputized force that intended to end the Cripple Creek strike with deadly force. In fact, WFM members claimed that Stimson had “captained a bunch of deputies at Bull Hill,” the epicenter of the conflict, as they prepared to charge the entrenched, well-armed, strikers. Stimson denied this accusation but admitted, according to the paraphrasing of a Telluride reporter, that “the sheriff enrolled him with others and they started for the scene,

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but when they were half way there the deputation was ordered back home and all were honorably discharged.” 79 Whether at Bull Hill or not, Stimson picked up a gun with the intent to break a miners’ strike. To make matters worse, as a lawyer, he had worked for the Mine Owners’ Association (MOA). The MOA, like the Citizens’ Alliance, was an employers’ organization formed to destroy unions. The MOA specifically focused on demolishing the WFM. If the Miners’ Magazine actually represented the sentiments of its readers, then hard-rock miners despised Stimson, whereas they only felt contempt for Peabody. As the election neared, one article, a screed really, asked, “Will it be said after the 4th of November that the ex-captain of a thug mob armed to enforce the anarchy of mine owners in 1894, reached the goal of his political ambition in 1902?” Ultimately, the piece concluded, labor faced a no-win situation. Whether the citizenry picked Stimson or Peabody, “labor has nothing to hope for. The corporations have named the tools in both parties, who are mortgaged to cancel their obligations through official remunerative service.”80 In the article following this attack on the Democrats, the magazine’s editor, John M. O’Neill, conceded that few of the SP’s candidates “expect to be crowned with the victory of an election.” This campaign, he argued, now represented “a declaration of political independence.” Labor would lose at the polls, but by voting the Socialist ticket, unionists would acquire a new political sensibility. Eventually, O’Neill hoped, this change in perspective would allow workers to increasingly mobilize under the Socialist banner and usher in “the downfall of plutocracy.”81 For all its optimism in looking to the future, this article also unintentionally provided a sense of just how futile O’Neill thought the 1902 election was. Although he introduced readers to some of the men running on the SP ticket, he surprisingly never mentioned John C. Provost, the SP candidate for governor. Making this growing factionalism all the more intense was Coates’s shift to a Socialist-only position. Coates ran for lieutenant governor on a fusion ticket. When he left public office, he started a socialist newspaper, the Colorado Chronicle, with Otto Thum. During the Denver-based paper’s brief existence, from October 16, 1901, through July 22, 1903, the two men went from advocating the use of union-centered political action to win socialist ends in 1901 to taking up an SP-only position during the 1902 election. Like O’Neill, Coates and Thum announced that they thought it better for workers “to vote for principle and not get it this year than to vote for and elect politicians who have no principles.” As a result of this stand, they

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further declared that the “Chronicle will not support a single member of organized labor for public office unless he is on the socialist ticket.”82 They were intent on building the SP one election at a time. Both Richardson and the supporters of an SP-only ticket had legitimate points of view. Stimson and Peabody had proven themselves enemies of labor. According to the dictates of union-centered political action, workers could not cast their ballots for either of them. Provost, or possibly the Populist candidate, deserved labor’s endorsement under this strategy. Union-centered political action was intended to be an active expression of labor’s political power. The point of playing on party competition was to allow unionists the opportunity to place a pro-labor candidate in office. Voting for Stimson would have merely been a defensive tactic to deny Peabody the governor’s office. Advocates of maintaining this pragmatic approach offered three points to support their position. First, party dynamics had changed. Because antiunion employers had successfully taken over the Republican Party, Republican candidates had to be punished at the polls for becoming so blatantly pro-corporate. Second, voting for the Democrats represented the only way to immediately advance labor’s quest for a shorter workday. Only Democrats would write the eight-hour-day measure the way workers wanted. Third, the fact that the Democrats would need workers’ votes in the future would force party leaders to keep Stimson’s anti-labor tendencies in check. Even though they split their ballots between the Democrat, the Socialist, and probably the Populist, workers, as in previous contests, again proved the importance of their bloc of votes. The election tally read: Peabody 87,774; Stimson 80,186; and Provost 7,395. When we factor in that some workers, who had not given up their old antimonopoly ties, cast their ballots for Frank W. Owers, the Populist, who garnered 6,403 votes, we are reminded why union-centered political action had been so successful.83 The labor vote had determined the difference between candidates. With workers splitting their votes three ways, power on the state level shifted to anti-labor forces. As expected, Colorado’s citizenry supported labor’s amendment that promised to grant miners an eight-hour workday. Pro-labor Democrats attempted to meet the spirit of the initiative by writing a bill that resembled Utah’s 1896 law. The Republican majority rebuffed their effort. Republicans countered with a proposed measure that followed guidelines provided by CFI lawyers. The coal giant’s attorneys made sure to meet the constitutional requirements stipulated in the initiative, while making the statute virtually meaningless. Employers who forced miners to

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labor more than eight hours a day would receive nothing more than token punishments. The state assembly enacted the CFI-influenced bill in 1904. Colorado’s new eight-hour law covered less than 20 percent of the state’s coal and hard-rock laborers.84 Those workers who had abandoned union-centered political action and instead voted for Socialists upheld their principles. But they also retarded the advance of their own democratic vision, and jeopardized the entire labor network by ignoring the reality that power came in degrees. Beyond thwarting the eight-hour-day law, the story of Peabody’s tenure as governor, as Richardson predicted, was largely a tale of state repression. In compiling their 1903–04 report on strikes, CBLS commissioners stated that “Colorado seemed to have been selected as the battlefield between organized capital, represented by the various corporations, Citizens’ Alliances and manufactures associations on the one side, and organized labor on the other.”85 Whenever organized capital could convince local officials to call on the governor for help, labor lost. Although examples could be drawn from Colorado City, Telluride, Idaho Springs, Salida, and Durango, two battles—at Cripple Creek and in southern Colorado’s coalfields—demonstrated the significance of possessing political power at the local level and why it mattered that labor use the influence of bloc voting pragmatically. WFM members in the Cripple Creek mining district walked off their jobs in August 1903. They demanded that employers stop sending the ore that they had mined to nonunion mills. Peabody looked for any reason he could find to send the state militia to Cripple Creek and prevent this exercise in mutualism from continuing. When local officials refused his assistance in ending their labor troubles, he sent a committee to investigate. Understanding their role, the committee members only interviewed residents opposed to labor activism. Knowing that the committee’s findings of striker misconduct were fabricated, Peabody still sent the militia. On December 4, 1903, the governor used incidents of violence, mostly perpetrated by mine owners, to declare martial law. Soldiers arrested strike leaders and forced miners to board trains headed for Kansas and New Mexico. By the summer of 1904, Peabody—a member of the Citizens’ Alliance—had used his position as governor to usurp the constitution and marshal the power of the state to destroy one of the strongest local unions in America.86 The second strike of the Peabody era that highlighted owners’ efforts to impede, and if possible counter, workers’ expanding political power and influence over markets occurred in the coalfields of southern Colo-

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rado. By October 1903, District 15 miners—essentially those members of the UMWA living in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico—had grown tired of CFI’s refusal to recognize and negotiate with their union. Also, they remained angry that coal operators continued to subvert prolabor laws, and expressed disgust with their daily hardships in general. District 15 miners decided to confront their employers by striking. They hoped to win an eight-hour day, wages paid in lawful money, a pay increase of 20 percent, better ventilation of the mines, and recognition of the UMWA. The Pueblo Labor Advocate (formerly the Courier) reported that “the biggest surprise party in the history of the West occurred last Monday when the strike order of the executive board of the United Mine Workers of America went into effect.” Employers expected that only about one-third of the district’s laborers would walk off their jobs. But as the Advocate put it, “nearly every man employed in the southern coal fields laid down his tools. Union and nonunion, white and Mexican, all obeyed the order.”87 Southern Colorado proved the key area of contention. The coal diggers in southern Colorado pushed for arbitration before they voted to strike. Owners refused. Company managers argued that miners should take up their complaints with their supervisors at the mines.88 When the strike began, the Victor Fuel Company not only evicted picketing miners, but also sued the UMWA for $85,000 in damages. CFI and Victor Fuel officials immediately requested that Peabody send the militia to defend the company’s property, protect nonunion workers, and, in general, maintain order. In reality, unionists faced the greatest danger during the strike. Deputized company guards shot and killed three strikers between December 7, 1903, and March 13, 1904. During this same period, guards wounded a number of picketers. Masked company operatives attacked peaceful strikers. And unnamed assailants pistol-whipped the financial manager of District 15. The joint efforts of Peabody and mine owners to oppose workers’ notion of justice and crush the coal miners’ union hit a snag in March. Due to Peabody’s attacks on labor, the state treasury ran out of money to fund the militia. Not wanting to lose their state-sanctioned strikebreakers, CFI and Victor Fuel donated $80,000 and $70,000, respectively, to the governor to maintain the militia. On April 27, 1904, the executive board of the UMWA decided that the miners could not win this battle. They moved strike funds elsewhere and called off the protest.89 This assault on coal miners extended beyond Colorado. Miners in Carbon County, Utah, experienced a fate similar to that of their counterparts in southern Colorado. On November 9, 1903, more than two hundred

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miners struck in the Utah Fuel Company’s coal camps. Utah Fuel discounted the workers’ claims that the injustices of their workplace were too much to bear. Company officials instead claimed that some Carbon County workers had fallen under the spell of foreign agitators, while others had walked out in sympathy with Colorado’s miners. Carbon County miners again restated their reasons for striking. First, they wanted Utah Fuel to stop cheating them out of the money they earned. The company paid the miners according to the amount of coal they dug. Miners discovered that the company’s scales were broken, and the weights they registered favored Utah Fuel. Also, these unionists wanted the company’s continued violation of the state’s eight-hour-day law to end. Tensions rose. On November 17, after employer efforts to force laborers back to work failed, the company fired and evicted all striking miners. The miners then paraded daily through the streets of the camps. They had some success in keeping scabs out of the mines. Near the Sunnyside mine, UMWA members posted signs warning those considering crossing the picket line that scabbing there meant that “you had better be buying a coffin.”90 Sheriff Hyrum Wilcox countered this militant rhetoric by deputizing company guards. With emotions high, pro-company Republican Governor Heber M. Wells sent the state’s coal-mine inspector, Gomer Thomas, to investigate the strike. Thomas reported back to Wells that the Utah Fuel Company would grant all of the strikers’ demands except recognition of the UMWA and biweekly paydays. When the miners insisted on union recognition, Wells, inspired by Peabody, sent the Utah National Guard to restore “order.” By early December, guardsmen had arrested picketers and generally forced an end to protest activities. In mid-January the defeated miners went back to work.91 Although Peabody’s, and to a lesser extent Wells’s, willingness to work in concert with mine owners convinced some unionists that class-based political action had failed, most Rocky Mountain workers recognized that the assaults on organized labor, especially at Cripple Creek, represented a counterattack. In other words, progressive unionists were socializing markets, and the general public accepted workers’ arguments that they deserved more leisure time. Owners saw violence as their best and most effective means of slowing the expansion of the public’s acceptance of labor’s values. To see these employers’ victories as definitive would miss the successes that workers in other parts of the region enjoyed. Labor’s triumphs demonstrated that the larger regional labor network still functioned and that workers’ values, such as a greater distribution of wealth, increased leisure time, and safety at the workplace, continued to gain wide

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acceptance. Examining the efforts of ALU-affiliated unionists, especially in the Rocky Mountain West’s more urban areas, confirms this point.

The ALU, Metropolitan Unionism, and Unskilled Workers Described as “insubstantial” and a “stillbirth” by one historian, the ALU receives scant attention by scholars examining western workers. When it does get noticed, it appears as a socialist organization that bridges the “populist” WLU with the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).92 In reality, the ALU signified the success of progressive unionists to organize many unskilled workers, especially in the region’s urban centers; to push for unions to seek power through lobbying in order to challenge employers; and to show the rest of the nation that a labor federation rooted in grassroots activism could challenge and at times defeat its most vicious enemies. The ALU, for example, revived the old western locals of the ARU through a new affiliate, the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees (UBRE). The conservative railroad brotherhoods, unions that accepted only the most skilled workers, refused to grant membership to the thousands of laborers who had not held union cards since the collapse of the ARU. George Estes, a telegrapher for the Southern Pacific in Oregon, asked that the brotherhoods include unskilled laborers and present a united front to owners in order for all railroad workers to receive raises and better hours. They denied his request. In 1899, Estes became chairman of the telegraphers’ union for the Southern Pacific system. After a failed strike in 1900, largely due to the unwillingness of the brotherhoods on the Santa Fe line to assist those on the Southern Pacific, Estes and others met in Roseburg, Oregon. On January 27, 1900, they created the UBRE and petitioned the AFL for a charter. When Gompers refused, claiming that the brotherhoods had already organized the industry, Estes turned to the ALU. The American Labor Union Journal (ALUJ ) explained that members “must not look upon the A.R.U. as a thing of the dead past and as of no consequence now.” It “is now being revived through the” UBRE. UBRE locals emerged throughout the Rockies, where branches of the ARU (and before it Knights of Labor District Assembly 82) had once existed. By 1903, this 38,000-member organization, headquartered in Denver, had reestablished industrial unionism among railroad workers in Canada and the United States.93 The UBRE engaged in strikes that challenged employers’ authority over hours, wages, hiring practices, and safety issues. The first major

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struggle for the new organization in the United States happened on the Colorado and Southern Railway line (C&S).94 In late winter 1903, blacksmiths on the C&S protested the hiring “of a notorious scab.” Company officials ignored workers’ calls to fire the man. UBRE members then struck. Knowing firsthand the danger of such an action, the ALUJ argued “that whosoever makes the laws of a country are most likely to win the strikes of a country.” The Journal wanted readers to realize that true independence would not come from one strike, but only after workers had united both on the industrial battlefield and on the legislative front. When the railroad capitulated after three weeks, the Journal’s editor, Clarence Smith, suggested a cautious celebration. Although the “success which has attended this great effort for the emancipation of those who toil has met with infinitely grander results than were anticipated,” the ultimate aim of the organization remained to “awaken the workingmen of the country to the necessity for combining politically as well as industrially, to the end that a system of government may be established that will place the MAN above the dollar.”95 In commenting on this victory, Smith called upon his readers to remember that the ALU wanted to use both strikes and political activism to secure greater liberties. Although railroad workers and hard-rock miners played important roles in the ALU, urban affiliates’ commitment to assisting each other in order to control local and regional labor markets explains why the number of progressive unions grew, social democracy gained greater influence, and businessmen’s anxieties heightened at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, in urban centers across America during the first half of the twentieth century, a metropolitan political economy developed. Within this setting, those employed in local and regional labor markets— especially building-trades workers, teamsters, brewery workers, municipal employees, waitresses, and small factory operatives—could, through strong unions, shape the economic relationships between themselves and their employers and among employers in a given market. Workers, by reaching agreements with small- to midsize-business owners in these industries, won closed shops. Closed shops allowed laborers to earn high wages and work eight- to ten-hour days instead of ten- to fourteen-hour days. Under this arrangement, businessmen sometimes conceded closed shops in order to stabilize both competition and market prices.96 Between 1880 and 1900 in the Rocky Mountain West, butcher shops, bakeries, grocery stores, department stores, hotels, movie theaters, newspapers, laundries, breweries, and saloons emerged to meet the wants and needs of the growing populations of Denver, Salt Lake City, Butte,

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Pueblo, Ogden, and Helena. With the demand for buildings to house these businesses, streetcar lines to move people between their homes and these establishments, and sewer systems to make the cities livable, the metropolitan political economy had arrived in the region. Denver, for instance, had no sewers in 1880. By 1910, over 250 miles of pipe lay hidden below freshly paved sidewalks. Colorado’s capital, to offer just one more example of this precipitous growth, had only 259 establishments engaged in manufacturing in 1880. By 1900, Denver claimed 1,474 local businesses employing roughly eleven thousand people.97 In recognizing the expanding economic activity of urban areas, it is also important to remember that in the Rocky Mountain West, most city workers held union cards, and most unionists belonged to ALU-affiliated unions. Among these union members were many of the service-industry employees who labored in the flourishing small industries that defined metropolitan growth. In Butte, for example, members of the Brewery Workers Union, the Bartenders Union, and the Women’s Protective Union (WPU), which functioned as a catchall union for unskilled female workers, certainly benefited from city’s extensive alcohol trade. By 1915, Butte had three breweries and 250 saloons to meet the high demand of the town’s committed drinkers.98 By analyzing the 1902 Salt Lake City Cooks’ and Waiters’ Union fight for higher wages, we can get a better sense of how by continuing to practice mutualism Rocky Mountain workers gained a greater opportunity to reshape social relations. The ALU-affiliated cooks and waiters demanded a six-day workweek and higher wages. Employers responded by forming their own association. The UFL, which included AFL- and ALUchartered locals, offered to help the Cooks’ and Waiters’ Union negotiate with the restaurateurs’ organization. The owners refused to bargain because they found the union’s request “unreasonable.” They argued that there “are not six towns in the United States where the waiters work only six days in a week.”99 In defending their position, the restaurant owners never mentioned the cooks. Their employers’ association unashamedly refused to negotiate with the UFL because of the waiters. Denying unskilled workers a say over their hours and wages represented a key goal of the Citizens’ Alliance and other owner organizations. Owners capitulated because the cooks supported the waiters’ demands and the city’s restaurant owners, unlike their counterparts in hard-rock and coal mining, could not afford to bring in trainloads of scabs. Committing to unity and understanding the size and dynamics of the market one worked in allowed progressive unionists to defeat employers’ associations.

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Denver unionists proved that they could replicate the success of Salt Lake City workers. In early May 1903, the Denver Teamsters Union struck for a closed shop. Recalling the event nine months later in February 1904, Citizens’ Alliance leader James Craig explained to Congress that nearly ten thousand of the city’s workers, including “bakers, cooks, waiters, clerks, barbers, bartenders, engineers, firemen, cigar makers, brewers, beer bottlers, mattress makers, horseshoers, coopers, tailors, electrical workers, paper makers and pulp makers,” showed their support for the Teamsters by joining in a sympathy strike.100 All the unionists who participated in this near-general strike belonged to the ALU. This display of mutualism helped the Teamsters Union win the closed shop. It also revealed to all just how united labor remained, even after workers divided over which political approach to use during the 1902 election. This case, more than the Salt Lake City example, brings to light the degree to which businessmen actually feared workers’ solidarity within localized markets. Craig recollected this demonstration before the U.S. Congress when he testified against an anti-injunction bill. Clearly he had wished that labor had less influence over Denver’s judges since the city’s justices refused to grant the businessmen’s request to enjoin the strike. During his testimony, Craig portrayed Rocky Mountain workers as out-of-control radicals who had fallen prey to the canards of demagogues. He summed up these sentiments best in an article he wrote the year after the strike. The labor movement, he argued, “in its present day application, controlled by Socialistic leaders, dominated by lawless walking delegates, its peaceable and law-abiding majority subdued and suppressed by the element which thrives on disorder and destruction” represented a danger to civilization.101 To Craig, labor militancy equaled anarchy. When he addressed Congress, he claimed that the Citizens’ Alliance had no desire to obstruct the rights of workers or oppose their quest for economic vitality. All he and his followers wanted was for workers to adhere to “law and order.”102 Despite the fact that strikes were indeed legal, a fact Craig seemed to ignore, he presented this battle and other acts of mutualism as the products of radicals, unreasonable people who thrived “on disorder and destruction.” He feared that the general public would see labor’s demands not only as acceptable, but as sound policies upon which society could be restructured. Evidence of his worry can be found in what he did not say to Congress or write in his article. Craig neglected to acknowledge that when the Teamsters’ strike started, a joint committee of Denver unionists approached Citizens’ Alliance leaders in hopes of negotiating a settlement. Union officials even suggested submitting the dispute to a neutral

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arbitrator. Only after Alliance leaders refused to bargain did labor leaders order a citywide sympathy strike.103 Craig also omitted the fact that he had called a meeting of all citizens opposed to the strike “with the implied understanding that action will be taken to run out of town certain agitators who have been conspicuous in the recent labor troubles.”104 As Craig helped build Alliance branches in cities throughout the region and the nation, he instructed his followers to embrace red baiting, and, if possible, convince local or state officials to employ force to win the open shop. He, not workers, favored violence over law and order. Craig realized that these strikes represented contests over ethics, political power, and conflicting notions of justice. His willingness to use violence stemmed from his sense that owners were losing these battles. In this regard, he resembled Boyce and the Socialists who claimed that victory in the class struggle required the willingness to employ any means necessary. Importantly, he and other owners did not fear the Socialists who adopted Boyce’s point of view. The “socialistic” labor leaders Craig worried about included Richardson, Coates, and McDonald. Instead of functioning as agents of corruption who perverted the wishes of rank-and-file workers, as he claimed in his effort to shape public opinion, Craig knew these men had won union office, and in Coates’s case public office, precisely because they championed and implemented the demands of average workers. By returning to Craig’s February 1904 Congressional testimony, we find that mutualism, not workers’ violent actions, proved his real source of trepidation. When asked how his organization originated, Craig told the House panel that he and his fellow Citizens’ Alliance members realized during the many strikes “caused” by the WFM from 1893 to 1903 that they had a collective obligation to combat the growing tyranny that organized labor represented. He attempted to further answer the question by submitting his book, The History of the Citizens’ Alliance in Denver, into evidence. The book should have raised questions about Craig’s veracity. He wrote that the open shop movement originated after the 1903 Denver general strike, not because of “radical” miners engaged in the destruction of property at places such as Cripple Creek. In other words, the “red menace,” masquerading as the WFM, did not frighten Craig and his compatriots, but the unity of Denver’s unionists did.105 Craig and his supporters understood that mutualism served as the building block of socialism. It fostered a sense among unionists that each worker had a responsibility to aid other workers in securing living wages, leisure time, safe workplaces, and an overall good life. By turning their unions into their political agents, workers were transplanting their mutualistic ethic

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into the political sphere. The labor movement was claiming that each citizen had a responsibility to his fellow citizens to make sure they had enough to eat, adequate clothing, shelter, and in general could enjoy the comforts of life now available in modern society. Outright aid helped provide these ends, but so too did high wages. And the pro-labor laws that advanced these ends represented these values. When the larger public supported prolabor laws, they demonstrated their willingness to accept Rocky Mountain workers’ version of social democracy. By 1904, state federations, containing both ALU- and AFL-affiliated unions, became the catalysts for advancing these values and advocating these laws. Local Citizens’ Alliances became the greatest adversaries of these unions. Alex Fairgrieve, president of the ALU-affiliated Montana Federation of Labor (MFL), kicked off the state federation’s 1904 convention by expounding on one more example of this battle. Fairgrieve said that the “trouble between the unions of Helena and the Citizens’ Alliance received” much of his attention over the past year. Fairgrieve pointed out that the MFL had helped “the unions of Helena in their fight against this conglomerated gathering of legal lights, parasitical chair warmers and light-brained businessmen whose very existence depends on the industrial warfare of the community.”106 In the fall of 1903, the Helena Light and Traction Company attempted to break the teamsters’ and clerks’ unions by demanding that employees either renounce their union membership or quit their jobs. Aided by the MFL, the ALU-affiliated Helena Trades and Labor Assembly published a list of merchants who had joined the Citizens’ Alliance and instructed union men and women not to support these shops. “This plan proved very effective,” argued MFL secretary Howard Smith, because “when the merchants saw their trade being diverted they began to publish in the daily papers their resignations from the Alliance.”107 In early June 1904, Helena’s electrical workers and clerks found themselves locked out of a number of businesses. The MFL embarked on a statewide publicity campaign, and unionists across Montana punished Citizens’ Alliance members by boycotting all businesses affiliated with the Helena employers’ group. “Union men refused to ride on the street cars, also their friends; sympathizers ordered lights out of their homes, and money was drawn from the Montana National Bank.” By June 14, all but three companies belonging to the Citizens’ Alliance that summer signed an agreement with the MFL. The employers conceded that they would reinstate union members without punishment and, most important, they would recognize unions and negotiate with labor leaders. The Helena Trades

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and Labor Assembly and the MFL, in turn, agreed to remove “UNFAIR” signs and to end all boycotts.108 Through cross-union solidarity, urban workers—whether in the form of sympathy strikes, as happened in Denver in 1903, or through boycotts, as the Helena example revealed—could help each other create a high-wage economy with shorter workdays. ALU activists not only promoted fair wages, shorter hours, safer conditions, and better lives for men, they also focused their energies on raising the standard of living for unskilled women. After examining the 558 surveys used in his 1902 study of female laborers, Colorado Labor Bureau head James T. Smith found that the average female operative in the state earned $371.63 a year, or $30.97 per month—a bit more than $1 per day. Only 143 respondents had some savings, and 444 rented. Renters paid an average of $9.83 per month.109 On the survey’s final page was a blank space for respondents to express any thoughts they might have. The women who filled out Smith’s questionnaire wrote extensively. Although these female workers listed acquiring an eight-hour-day law as their top priority, many of them commented on wage and cost-ofliving issues. One Cripple Creek stenographer saw little distinction “between the chattel slave and the wage slave.” Of “these slaves who work for wages,” she explained, “the market, the law of supply and demand is their master.” The only actual difference she noticed between slavery and capitalism was that one “system of exploitation is simple and direct in its execution,” and “the other is complex and roundabout.” A Denver stenographer explained that wages for women in general were too low. The remuneration women earned allowed them to purchase only “absolute necessities,” and left no “reserve for sickness.” Women were one illness away from absolute destitution. Most of these women argued that they needed to turn to politics to remedy their situation. A waitress wrote that the “women of Colorado who work for a living have made a great mistake in the past by not organizing.” She believed that they must now collectively fight for “better hours and better wages” and “vote right.”110 Voting right proved complicated. Colorado women workers, like their male counterparts, held different notions of the best way to cast ballots. A Denver seamstress, for instance, wanted to abolish poverty through political action. Although she did not feel “unkindly to the socialistic regime,” she doubted that “it will work” and claimed that only the single tax would do “away with the monopoly born of the private ownership of land.” Conversely, a housemaid from Cripple Creek expressed an SP-only attitude. She explained that workers and employers had “no interest in

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common, none whatever.” Therefore the “working people must become class conscious and enter politics through the Socialist movement. There can be no compromise, and there must be no fusion with any political party.” Those who wanted nonpartisan slates “do not understand that it is not a political government that we want at all, but an industrial government.” Her vision of government included workers possessing “control [over] production and distribution.” She supported the eight-hour amendment on the ballot that year and higher taxes for corporations, but only expected these measures to “help a little.” Not “until we get the cooperative commonwealth will the question be settled so that it will stay settled.”111 For the most part, when the women who responded to this survey shared their political concerns, they focused on the laws they wanted, not on the parties they supported. Most advocated the passage of reforms that would better their lives immediately. Specifically, they called for eighthour-day measures, usury laws, minimum-wage statutes, taxes on the rich, and prohibition. Above all else, these women laborers wanted socialized markets. ALU organizers helped move attitudes in this direction. Butte Telephone operators provide one example. In the spring of 1903, the Rocky Mountain Bell Telephone Company paid its operators $35 a month, an unlivable wage. The company expected its operators to work between nine- and twelve-hour days. When talk of organizing began, the Salt Lake Citybased company offered free soup for lunch in order to placate its workers’ dissatisfaction. The telephone workers formed an ALU-affiliated local in December 1902. Management raised wages, as the new unionists threatened collective action. Rumors started to spread that the higher pay rate would last only until replacement operators arrived from Utah. After a few weeks, company officials fired the head operator at Butte. Her co-workers struck immediately. They demanded “Miss McDermott’s return,” the eight-hour day, and $50 per month. As the strike continued, these unionists posted a circular calling for a citywide boycott of telephone service. In the midst of this struggle, ALU president Daniel McDonald attempted to negotiate by mail with telephone executives. The ALUJ informed readers that McDonald had succeeded in bargaining with the company, and it proclaimed victory for the operators on April 23, 1903. Bell recognized the union and agreed to pay chief operators $55 per month with an eight-hour day; consented to pay toll operators $60 a month, at nine hours a day; and allowed all discharged employees to return to their former positions.112

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Although male unionists threatening a general strike could aid women workers in their quest for union cards and closed shops, exercising mutualism in the consumer sphere proved even more effective in bettering the lives of female laborers. As the Helena case demonstrated, workers could put an actual price on a businessman’s decision to support the Citizens’ Alliance. ALU members engaged in boycotts and union-label campaigns to organize waitresses and garment workers, but in some instances being a class-conscious consumer for the progressive cause required an even greater commitment. Fighting employers at the point of consumption at times meant that workers had to start their own businesses. Rocky Mountain workers created a number of cooperatives around the turn of the century. The region’s labor leaders transformed these ventures from replicating the KOL’s vision of building the larger cooperative commonwealth one business at a time to functioning as another weapon of workers in the fight to socialize markets. In the first years of the twentieth century, many progressive unionists acknowledged that cooperatives could never compete against the well-financed corporations that dominated the economy. Small business ventures, however, could be used as a short-term strategy to politicize the plight of unskilled laborers and serve as mechanisms to organize new unions, raise wages, and decrease hours of work. Workers could aggressively shape the emerging metropolitan political economy of the Rocky Mountain West. Sparked by the refusal of local merchants to negotiate with the Clerks’ Union, for instance, Pueblo laborers united to run their own department store in 1903.113 On September 22, Arnold Rosenthal, a member of the ALU-affiliated Pueblo Clerks’ Union, went before the city’s trades assembly and proposed that all the unions unite “to carry on a gents’ furnishing, clothing, shoe, and hat store.” Trades assembly members voted unanimously to support Rosenthal’s plan. The next week, the store incorporated as the Union Co-operative Mercantile Company, and vowed to sell only goods possessing union labels. The store immediately capitalized for $4,000, as four-thousand unionists each bought a share of stock for $1.114 The Union Co-operative Mercantile Company opened on November 1, 1903. By January 1904, the cooperative men’s clothing store served as a model to other cooperatives in the city. The city’s railroad workers formed the Pueblo Co-operative Mercantile Company, a grocery store and butcher shop that modeled itself on the clothing store. Only union workers could buy stock. Feeling that they lacked the proper business acumen, the railroad workers hired a member of the clerks’ union to

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run their enterprise. Eventually, these businesses failed. Pueblo unionists, however, made the city’s merchants recognize the demands of the Clerks’ Union by denying store owners their regular customer base and a knowledgeable workforce.115 Pueblo workers proved that cooperatives could serve as a short-term tactic to achieve their goals. Laundry workers in Kalispell, Montana, offer further evidence of Rocky Mountain unionists’ use of cooperatives as a tool to make daily life better for women workers. In the summer of 1903, the virtually all-female Laundry Workers’ Union, which was chartered with the ALU, struck for higher wages, shorter hours, and union recognition. The union, aided by ALU organizers, raised funds throughout the community, purchased “modern laundry machinery,” and started its own cooperative. When their picket duty shifts ended, strikers worked at the cooperative. Kalispell unionists in other trades observed a boycott of the city’s two laundries that refused to negotiate with these workers in the first place. Losing their workforce and their customers, owners recognized the union and acquiesced to the workers’ demands.116 Strategic cooperatives proved so effective that workers could merely threaten to go into business for themselves in order to compel employer capitulation. In February 1903, for instance, fifteen women and five men working at a Butte candy factory struck to force owners to fire their “obnoxious foreman.” When the owner refused, the employees informed him that they would now have to open a cooperative candy store. These twenty laborers not only won their chief demand, but the company also recognized their newly created union, agreed to a pay raise for the women and girls, and placed the union label on the candy produced there.117 Victories such as this one led CSFL president John C. Sullivan to call union cooperatives “one of the best weapons” against capital.118 Cooperatives, along with boycotting and union-label campaigns, helped urban workers move toward socialized markets. In essence, these tactics simulated socialized markets because they allowed workers to win higher wages, acquire shorter hours, and gain greater control in general over their shop floors. For these markets to actually be socialized, however, workers needed lawmakers to codify these gains in statutes, shorter-hours laws, and minimum-wage measures, and then to pressure officeholders to make sure employers observed those acts. To again translate their commitment to mutualism and the successes it produced into pro-labor legislation, these workers had to rebuild their political momentum by reassembling their voting bloc. This is not to suggest that workers’ consumer activism lacked a political dimension. For mayors not to call on city police forces

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to break a strike, or judges not to issue injunctions to end boycotts, reflected labor’s political influence. In the early twentieth century, labor’s political presence at the local and state levels would again become more concentrated and more effective. This success would happen only after the pragmatists and the pessimistic socialists had a significant confrontation that resulted in a majority of the region’s workers making AFLaffiliated bodies their primary political agents.

Conclusion Incensed with owners who promoted an economic system that failed to pay laborers a living wage despite their toiling ten to fourteen hours a day, and disgusted by managers who demanded that miners and railroad workers risk their lives each day but refused to address safety issues, Rocky Mountain unionists developed a sense of justice from their visceral reactions to industrial realities. Labor leaders across the nation sought to turn this shared anger and revulsion into a series of unified actions that would provide laborers with workplace rights, influence over the labor market, and political power. By attending union meetings, reading labor papers, and going to night school to discuss works of political economy, Rocky Mountain workers started to call their quest for justice a “progressive spirit,” or simply “socialism.” Most Rocky Mountain unionists considered the national labor movement led by Samuel Gompers too centralized and politically limited. They did have overlapping goals with the AFL’s leader, such as the desire to control labor markets, but municipal politics and spontaneous local actions—including sympathy strikes, boycotts, and the opening of cooperative stores—were the weapons that Colorado, Montana, and Utah workers wielded to capture authority over those markets. They did not want to clear their decisions with Gompers or one of his lieutenants. By successfully breaking away from the AFL, these unionists strengthened their conception of themselves as regionally exceptional, and labor leaders felt pressure to further advance the labor network they coordinated. Although McDonald, Richardson, Coates, Boyce, and St. John concurred that Gompers was an autocrat and that the AFL was not politically active enough for their liking, they did not agree on the progress their movement had made. Boyce and St. John considered political victories, whether electoral or legislative, as inconsequential. They and others like them determined that socialism could only come through the SP electing its candidates to office. Conversely, McDonald and Richardson contended

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that the acquisition of market influence had occurred and that workers were advancing toward socialism. Coates stood somewhere in between these two views. He saw the movement as succeeding, but in 1902 believed he had a responsibility to build the SP. That meant encouraging workers to vote Socialist. By 1903, he again agreed with McDonald and Richardson. Owners, especially Craig, shared the McDonald-Richardson view and attempted to destroy workers’ ability to play on party competition. In Colorado, reactionary employers took control of the Republican Party. At that same moment, Colorado SP loyalists provided unintentional aid to Craig’s cause by splitting the labor vote. These socialists rejected Richardson’s warnings and refused to consider the difficulties faced by coal miners in company towns as evidence of what could result if they put devotion to party above pragmatism. Differences over both strategy and perceptions of power did not mean, however, that the Rocky Mountain labor network short-circuited. Workers in Butte, Helena, Denver, Pueblo, and Salt Lake City maintained their political might, and unionists throughout the region used consumer actions to continue to gain authority on the shop floor and socialize market relations. Taken together, loyalty to union, organizing the unorganized, boycotting, sympathy striking, looking for the union label, asking clerks for their union card, shopping at cooperative stores, collective voting, lobby­ ing, and suing to uphold labor laws all expressed the values that made up workers’ social-democratic culture. More than that, these activities inculcated the progressive spirit into the larger social structure. Finally, Peabody’s actions at Cripple Creek reminded many Rocky Mountain workers of exactly what they had accomplished, while others decided that only an escalation of violence on their part would foster the expansion of socialism. Solidarity and socialism flourished at the turn of the twentieth century, but their meanings remained contested within the labor movement. The ability of rank-and-file workers to better define these concepts and act on their collective decisions would determine the direction in which progressive unionism would go after 1904.

Chapter 4

“Sabotage, ‘Jackass Tactics’ Indeed!” Progressive Unionists, Syndicalists, and the Advance of Social Democracy

In March 1906, a fierce battle erupted. The adversaries were the Colorado Citizens’ Alliance, a group of businessmen intent on crushing unions, and the predominantly female members of the Denver Garment Workers Union. Unlike the often-told tales of “labor wars” where unionists and company guards fought the class struggle with Winchester rifles, this clash occurred in court. I. Rude, calling himself the “little tailor,” advertised his clothing shop in the Clarion Advocate, the official news­paper of the Denver and Pueblo trades assemblies. He claimed to support organized workers by carrying apparel that possessed union labels. The garment workers discovered that Rude had forged their label, and sewed it into “scab”-made clothes. In doing so, he had broken Colorado’s 1899 unionlabel trademark law, which made copying a union’s label a violation of that organization’s property rights. After discovering the “fakes,” the Garment Workers and the Denver Trades Assembly (DTA) sued Rude. The Denver Municipal Court ruled in favor of the garment workers and fined Rude $25 plus court costs. The Citizens’ Alliance came to Rude’s rescue. They provided him with a new attorney and presented him in the press as a small businessman victimized by the “tyranny” of organized labor. His new lawyer filed an appeal in county court. The county not only concurred with the city, but also forced him to choose between paying an increased fine of $100 or serving a ten-day jail term. Rude paid the fine.1

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The I. Rude affair provides a glimpse into how Rocky Mountain workers attempted to make socialism, at least social democracy, through piecemeal reforms. These workers knew that they collectively wanted public officials at the local and state levels to mitigate the cruelties of capitalism by administering markets. They advocated that officeholders, who were accountable to the voters, provide oversight of economic relations so that those who toiled earned high wages, enjoyed some leisure time, experienced safe workplaces, had access to affordable shelter, and did not worry about securing heat in the winter. The region’s workers argued that by embracing their values and democratizing markets, politicians would reorder social dynamics for the vast majority of citizens. Lawmakers, by adopting an ethic that placed concerns for each individual’s health and safety above the profits of a corporation and the aggrandizement of wealth for the few, for example, would not only pass measures such as workers’ compensation acts to make job sites safer, they would also improve public health by levying taxes to provide clean water and regular garbage collection. In the case of the union trademark law, workers, by convincing consumers to purchase only union-label goods, had persuaded people that the living wage was a value worth promoting and thus protecting. They were also preventing Rude and those who shared his mindset from abusing the general public’s willingness to support a high-waged economy. The union-label trademark law was not socialism. It did not lead to the state directly overseeing the labor market and guaranteeing a higher wage for workers. The measure did, however, legitimize the high wage as a symbol of a better society and opened the door for more expansive legislation that would directly regulate wealth distribution. The dispute between Rude and the garment workers also reveals that despite the setback that Citizens’ Alliance member and Colorado governor James Peabody dealt workers at Cripple Creek in 1904, unionists maintained the labor network they had constructed. Partly due to Peabody’s attack, however, that network took on a very different cast in the twenty months that passed between the end of the Cripple Creek strike and the beginning of the Denver garment workers’ fight to defend their property rights. Many of the Rocky Mountain workers who insisted that the labor movement had made few gains and demanded that their fellow unionists act more militantly had soured on political action. They moved toward syndicalism. Syndicalists claimed that pro-labor laws had failed to sufficiently curb employer control over workplaces and markets. They reasoned that so-

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cialism would only arrive through revolution. Some unionists had expressed such sentiments prior to this split. In 1900, a coal miner from Rockvale, Colorado, declared that after seventeen years as a union man and wageworker he had come to the conclusion that workers must “organize into a class conscious body” for “the final conflict” or “be doomed to a condition of serfdom.” He considered it “futile to attempt to legislate” monopolies “out of existence.”2 Again in 1902, a hard-rock miner at the Western Federation of Miners’ (WFM) annual convention proclaimed, “Laws have been made in the interest of capital and been enforced by the servants of capital.” He went on to state that a “working man in political power in a capitalistic system is of no more value to us than to the capitalist.”3 This miner considered political participation pointless, even if it resulted in the election of pro-labor candidates and the passage of wage, hour, and safety statutes. After Peabody used the state militia to break the WFM local at Cripple Creek and subverted the intent of the eight-hourday amendment for miners, which the state’s voters had overwhelmingly supported, more Rocky Mountain workers started to agree with these two miners. Socialism, contended this contingent of syndicalists, could emerge only after the violent destruction of the wage system. Although they offered varying degrees of support for Socialist Party (SP) candidates over the next two decades, syndicalists in 1905 sought to foment revolution through the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). IWW members, called Wobblies, claimed that by performing acts of sabotage or engaging in direct actions, which included anything from breaking machinery to gun battles with company guards, workers would simultaneously unleash a spirit of militancy and impede capitalist development. By 1909, most IWW members had distanced themselves from political action, except for revolution, and argued, as Wobbly editor James Wilson did, that the “employing class respect[s] nothing but physical force.” From Wilson’s point of view, the “employers all belong[ed] to the enemy,” as did “the law[s] they” made. He credited various socialist parties with having “awakened class consciousness,” but, paraphrasing Napoleon, added that “providence is always on the side that has the most artillery.” He concluded his comments by insisting that the “class struggle is a physical struggle and depends on physical force.”4 The overwhelming majority of Rocky Mountain workers rejected syndicalism. They remained committed to reconstructing power relations both at work and throughout society by obtaining political influence, winning laws that favored labor and the public good, and engaging

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in various protests, such as boycotts and strikes. By maintaining their faith in political action, the majority of the region’s workers now had to figure out how to deal with the militant minority who favored syndicalism. Between 1905 and 1911, the majority decided to reject the newly organized IWW, and chose, although reluctantly, to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In fact, the women belonging to the Denver Garment Workers Union who had battled Rude, as well as their fellow DTA unionists who had supported them, held AFL charters. Delving more deeply into the ways in which Rocky Mountain workers preserved progressive unionism, the reasons they rejected syndicalism, and their decision to affiliate with the AFL means rethinking our standard assumptions of Western labor activism. Scholars mistakenly trace the IWW’s lineage back to the American Labor Union (ALU) and its precursor, the Western Labor Union. They claim that a radical progression from populism to socialism to syndicalism accompanied these organizational name changes.5 Labor radicals across the country considered the ALU the model alternative to the pure-and-simple unionism of the AFL. In 1905, unionists and anticapitalist groups from outside the West met with ALU leaders in hopes of creating a national federation that resembled the ALU. Instead of establishing an alliance of city and state federations determined to combine political actions with strikes, boycotts, and union-label campaigns, however, the IWW was born. At the Wobblies’ first convention, ALU leaders Daniel McDonald and David Coates—dissatisfied with the revolutionary rhetoric of most dele­ gates, dismayed by the strong sentiment to marginalize skilled workers in the new federation, and disappointed in the assertion that political activism was worthless for workers—voted against the founding constitution. Given that the ALU had a greater membership than the IWW, most rank-and-file workers clearly agreed with McDonald and Coates. In 1904, the last full year of the ALU’s existence, its leaders counted 284 non-WFM locals. The WFM represented the largest contingent of unionists in both the ALU and IWW. Therefore, excluding WFM affiliates—which belonged to the ALU from 1902 through 1904, the IWW from 1905 through 1908, and then the AFL from 1911 through 1916— helps to highlight the contrast between the ALU and the IWW. Recall that at its peak in 1912, the combined number of IWW local unions in Colorado, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho was seven. In fact, the total number of Wobbly locals that year was only 170.6 We do need to take into consideration that the IWW would often group all the workers in one city into a single union. Even then, however, we must remember

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that in 1911, IWW leaders found that their organization had just 13,000 total members across the United States and Canada, while the number of organized workers in Colorado alone that year totaled 20,213 belonging to 282 different unions. If we add to that the railroad brotherhoods and women’s auxiliaries, Colorado’s total union membership reached 33,852. In 1904, with the exception of the railroad brotherhoods, almost every Colorado union worker would have belonged to the ALU.7 Put simply, the IWW never had many members in the Rocky Mountain West because its leaders expected laborers to abandon successful organizing strategies and to disregard tactics that raised wages, shortened hours of work, increased workers’ authority on the shop floor, improved general living conditions, and expanded labor’s political power for engaging in direct actions and the right to eventually participate in one big strike. With the ALU disbanded, WFM members initially deciding to join the IWW, and groups such as the Citizens’ Alliance organizing and fighting for open shops, workers outside the hard-rock mining camps had to quickly find a way to maintain the lines of solidarity they had built. Affiliating with the AFL appeared reasonable to most Rocky Mountain workers because of recent transformations within the Gompers-run organization. The expansion of capitalism had forced a restructuring of craft unions—what Socialist William English Walling had in 1904 called a “new unionism.” New machinery and the subdivision of labor, Walling contended, had led to the deskilling of craftsmen and thus to a “new importance of unskilled labor.” He wrote that the dilution in skill level made it easier for employers to substitute one laborer for another. Some craftsmen started to recognize that they would benefit from organizing all workers even remotely connected to their trade. “New” unions resembled Knights of Labor (KOL) mixed locals, which were organized bodies that contained skilled and unskilled workers.8 In 1910, WFM executive board member Guy Miller concurred with Walling’s assessment. As WFM-affiliated workers debated joining the AFL, Miller, also an SP member, argued that “giant strides toward industrial unionism within the ranks of the A. F. of L. in the past five years” have been made. He pointed to the building and metal-trades councils and railway departments as examples of a move toward greater cross-union solidarity within the AFL.9 Importantly, Rocky Mountain workers continued to consider Gompers and the other top leaders of the AFL conservative. The region’s workers, along with unionists throughout the nation, saw that Gompers had to accept new unionism, and they pushed the federation toward engaging in more frequent and broader political actions. In fact, socialists who

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belonged to the AFL started openly challenging Gompers’s authority and encouraged other like-minded workers to join the federation so they could collectively “bore within.” They wanted to turn the AFL into a progressive labor organization. Those Rocky Mountain workers who decided to “bore within” not only played a key role in reshaping the AFL, but they continued to win broader public acceptance of their core values. By continuing to assume that the Wobblies were the unionists most committed to organizing the unskilled and to challenging capitalism, studies of working-class political activism have largely neglected groups such as the AFL-affiliated DTA, who actually did the most to assist unskilled operatives in attaining higher wages, shorter hours, safer conditions, better living arrangements, and greater political power. More important, historians, sociologists, and political scientists have ignored the reality that the majority of unskilled workers preferred to affiliate with AFL unions. Rocky Mountain progressive unionists, both in their own regional federation and under the banner of the AFL, also opposed capitalism, but they used the courts, voted collectively, struck, boycotted, and opened cooperative stores. They advanced their region and the nation toward socialism by fighting for the working class each day and on many fronts.

“Industrial Suicide” As the attack on Cripple Creek’s hard-rock miners, ordered by Peabody, neared its end in June 1904, members of the WFM gathered for their annual convention. United Brotherhood of Railway Employees’ (UBRE) president George Estes, ALU leader Daniel McDonald, and Socialist Labor Party (SLP) head Daniel De Leon all attended as special guests to discuss creating a national progressive federation. The ALU had sought that role since members voted to change its name from the Western Labor Union to the American Labor Union. While affiliates existed in Massachusetts, California, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, and Washington, the strength of the organization remained in the Rocky Mountain states, particularly in Montana and Colorado.10 Also in June, the ALU moved its headquarters from Butte to Chicago, and called a series of meetings over the next year. At these gatherings, William D. “Big Bill” Haywood, Charles Moyer, and John O’Neill represented the WFM; McDonald served as the voice of the ALU; and a host of radicals, including SP leader Eugene Debs and De Leon, championed their respective organizations’ views. These meetings resulted in a convention held the first week of January 1905 in Chicago. These labor activists started

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calling themselves the Industrial Union Movement and issued a pamphlet titled Manifesto.11 Modeled on the ALU, the new federation sought to unite the “textile workers of Lowell, Philadelphia, and Fall River, the Butchers of Chicago,” the “machinists on the Santa Fe,” and “the long struggling miners of Colorado.”12 The leaders of the Industrial Union Movement, who soon changed the organization’s name to the Industrial Workers of the World, argued that craft divisions, as currently constituted by AFL unionists, only aided employers. Yet the Manifesto did not forbid craft unionists from joining this new movement. In fact, virtually half the pamphlet focused on deskilling as the greatest weapon in the arsenal of the “monopolists.” Divisions among workers, it contended, only weakened labor solidarity by isolating workers in the fight against bosses.13 ALU representatives arrived at the founding convention of the IWW on June 27, 1905, with great hopes. They left disappointed. William Trautmann, a labor editor, gave the opening address, which he called an “Indictment Against the American Federation of Labor.” Trautmann claimed that AFL members had “never recognized the fact that an economic organization of the working class must be based upon the recognition of the class conflict.”14 Throughout his speech, Trautmann assumed an inherent conservatism in craft unions, and he suggested that an a priori radicalism underpinned industrial organizations. Based on their experiences in the ALU, progressives rejected this dichotomy. Reminiscent of Joseph Buchanan’s argument with Terrence Powderly over craft unionism in 1887, Rocky Mountain workers did not see the value in claiming that one form of organization was superior to another. Rocky Mountain workers had broken from the AFL because Gompers and the federation’s leaders embraced authoritarian positions that inhibited cross-union unity and refused to embrace widespread political action. To most workers in Colorado, Montana, and Utah, the practices and policies of an organization mattered more than its form. At the IWW’s founding convention, David Coates, the devoted socialist organizer, onetime president of the Colorado State Federation of Labor (CSFL), former lieutenant governor of Colorado, and in 1905, the recently elected president of the ALU, reminded his peers of this principle. He had come to Chicago, he said, to create “a practical industrial organization,” and he feared that too many delegates were getting “carried away in the deliberations of this convention with a purely idealistic condition.” Objecting to those who spoke in violent tones—a number of convention attendees called for a constant display of industrial union “MIGHT”

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in challenging employers—Coates appealed for reason. The structure for the new organization and the strategies for bringing forth a new set of social relations that most delegates proposed, he argued, would cause the immediate destruction of the IWW. At that point in the convention, the majority appeared to favor an organization with thirteen divisions that paralleled the country’s leading industries—miners, metal workers, and agricultural laborers, for example. When any union in a given group struck, all workers in that division would be required to engage in a sympathy strike. Coates wanted his fellow radicals to recognize that a weak union forced to participate in a sympathy strike would provide employers the opportunity to hire nonunion workers, impose an open shop, and negate any advances those workers had made up to that point.15 Ignoring the logic of Coates’s argument, Charles Sherman, an easterner and officer of the International Metal Workers’ Union, charged Coates with wanting to create an “old-line craft organization.” The Rocky Mountain labor leader responded by reiterating his belief that America needed a “practical organization,” a national federation that “will go out here to-morrow and begin the struggle for the bread and butter question of to-morrow; an organization that will battle, if you please, for a reduction of the hours of labor to-morrow, for an increase in wages to-morrow, and for the right of workers of the world to organize to-morrow.”16 Eastern militants demonstrated a complete unwillingness to debate progressives on the substance of their critiques of the proposed structure and policies of the IWW. De Leon, for instance, spoke after Coates and presented the ALU leader as a sympathizer of pure-and-simple unionism. Rocky Mountain progressive unionists refused to surrender their vision of a pragmatic, politically active national federation of labor without a fight. Alex Fairgrieve, ALU member and Montana Federation of Labor (MFL) president, chastised those who did not find Coates’s vision sufficiently radical. Fairgrieve referred to himself as “a revolutionist,” and told his fellow delegates that he refused to be “Gompersized.”17 To Fairgrieve, being a revolutionist started with workers confronting employers on a daily basis and challenging them for control over workplace practices and labor-market governance. Eleven months earlier, in his August 1904 MFL presidential address, Fairgrieve had argued that the “industrial system is such that at the present time a few individuals practically control the labor market of the entire country and when they desire they can close industries, thereby throwing upon the already glutted labor market a greater surplus of workmen, who are compelled, by the necessity of want, to compete for a job.” This competition lowered wage rates and

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increased poverty. “Our whole energy,” he contended, “should be bent in an endeavor to amalgamate every branch of trade unionism into one vast army of producers.”18 That army then needed to engage in boycotts, strikes, and political actions in order to make markets, particularly the labor market, more socially responsible. His leadership in defeating the Helena Citizens’ Alliance through consumer action that year provided evidence that progressive unionism still worked. Fairgrieve’s comment about being “Gompersized” also proved telling. Like Coates, he objected to delegates’ hostility toward craft workers, as such actions could curb cross-union solidarity. Furthermore, progressive unionists had created a regional labor movement because Gompers preferred centralization to local autonomy and rejected political action as the underpinning of working-class social power. By dictating a universal policy of sympathy strikes, which meant ignoring the uniqueness of each situation, and encouraging workers to avoid political action other than revolution, Fairgrieve saw the IWW as similar to the AFL. ALU members, like their KOL ancestors, had prided themselves on belonging to an organization that understood when to boycott or to organize a cooperative store instead of striking. In his final remarks, Fairgrieve told his fellow delegates that the IWW did not represent the progressive federation most delegates equated with industrial unionism. Instead, they were obstructing solidarity and preparing to commit “industrial suicide.”19 He then voted against the ratification of the IWW’s proposed constitution. Coates and McDonald joined Fairgrieve in opposing ratification of what became the IWW’s founding document. Although these three men were in the minority on that day, most of the region’s workers came to share their view of the IWW over the next three years. The idea that skilled workers should be ignored was one of the essential points of difference between syndicalists and progressives. Other issues, such as defining the value of work, engaging in violence to secure demands, obtaining pro-labor legislation, entering into contracts with employers, promoting closed shops, and engaging in union-label campaigns, also produced contentious battles between progressives and syndicalists, and ultimately convinced rank-and-file Rocky Mountain workers that joining the AFL, not the IWW, represented the best way to advance toward socialism. Immediately following the 1905 IWW convention, key members of the Wobblies remained in Chicago to organize new locals. Their gatherings continued to cultivate antipathy toward skilled laborers, and AFL members in particular. In July 1905, for example, Haywood told an audience, “I do not care the snap of my finger whether or not the skilled workman joins

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this industrial movement at the present time . . . As strange as it may seem to you,” he continued, “the skilled worker to-day is exploiting the labor beneath him, the unskilled man, just as much as the capitalist is.”20 He explained that by excluding the unskilled laborer from the “pure and simple trades union,” craft unionists simply assisted employers in maintaining a low-waged workforce. What the unorganized laborer needed was “not an organization that demands that you shall serve a three years’ apprenticeship to any trade for the benefit of a member of the Citizens’ Alliance, but an organization that has the doors wide open so that any man that is working at any calling can come in and join hands with us.”21 By equating skilled workers and craft unionism with pure-and-simple unionism and, even worse, the Citizens’ Alliance, the Wobblies alienated thousands of workers in the AFL who wanted an ALU-style national federation. Rocky Mountain skilled tradesmen such as Coates, a printer, and McDonald, an iron molder, who had spent their working lives creating an alternative to the AFL felt trapped. They could either hope for the best under the IWW, or join the AFL and try to reform it. Returning to the ALU was not an option because the delegates of the WFM, recalling their bitter fights with Gompers in the 1890s, had decided to give the IWW a chance. The WFM was the largest organization in the region. Without the metal miners, progressives did not have the members or financial support necessary to revive their own regional organization. Ultimately, they and the vast majority of Rocky Mountain unionists would reject the IWW, join the AFL, and try to make Gompers’s organization their own.

Violence, Wages, and Hours Rocky Mountain workers’ decision to reject the IWW was influenced by more than just the threat posed to cross-union solidarity by the Wobblies’ opposition to craft unionism. Their choice also had a great deal to do with how the region’s workers conceived of violence. Violence, even if only used rhetorically, according to IWW members, would fuel workers’ revolutionary spirit. To most Rocky Mountain workers, violence was to be employed only as a tactic of last resort. Attacks initiated by labor typically led to state-sanctioned brutality against workers and the loss of public support for unionists’ aims. Workers wanted to create a more democratic society. For that to happen, they needed to persuade people that their ideals—living wages, for example—made for a healthy republic. The use of force would usually destroy any consent that labor had won.

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Prior to the IWW’s inception, a tradition of direct action did exist in the region. Those who paraded in the streets of mining camps and cities in the 1870s and 1880s certainly destroyed property, engaged in fistfights, and wielded rifles in an effort to win justice for the working class. Anyone paying attention to industrial relations in the 1890s could easily find further evidence of violent class conflict. In February 1899, for example, roughly seventy-five miners working at the Vulcan Mine near Gunnison County, Colorado, struck when their boss started hiring nonunion miners. On February 26, eighteen of their fellow WFM members from nearby Baldwin arrived to arrange picket lines, negotiate, and, in general, offer any assistance they could. When Superintendent Davidson refused to discuss matters with WFM leaders and continued to hire nonunion miners to replace strikers, Sam Carter and William Waugh led well-armed strikers in taking over the mine. Confined to the company bunkhouse under armed guard, Davidson and the nonunion miners received three meals a day and later acknowledged good treatment. After two days in captivity, Davidson capitulated and fired all the nonunion miners. WFM members “escorted the scabs” to the closest rail station, watched them leave, and then returned the rifles they had stolen from the mine superintendent’s office. In the months that followed, Carter and Waugh found themselves in court facing stiff punishments for inciting a riot. Their first trial concluded when jurors informed the judge that they would never find unanimity. The second trial ended with acquittals for both men.22 Davidson had threatened the livelihood of Vulcan’s miners by hiring nonunion workers and driving down wages. Although these WFM members decided that an armed occupation represented their best option, they had no intention of promoting revolution. In fact, they returned the guns they had stolen to conduct their uprising to Davidson’s office. That management had such a large cache of weapons suggested that owners, too, counted violence among the accepted possible responses to industrial conflict. Furthermore, Carter and Waugh surrendered themselves to the local sheriff and went through the court system. Their courthouse victories likely bolstered unionists’ faith that they could find justice within the confines of America’s constitutional government. Direct action for Vulcan’s miners represented an extreme negotiating tactic to maintain high wages, not their primary avenue to building class-consciousness and fomenting social change. That same year, members of the San Juan District of the WFM, mostly the hard-rock miners of southern Colorado, revealed a similar attitude.

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They sent a list of demands to their employers, which included stopping the workday after eight hours, recognizing the union labels of other organized workers, and creating an insurance plan for older laborers. Their declaration also included a passage that read, “looking over the history of recent Labor [sic] troubles, [we] find the corporations and employers of labor always ready to shoot down, with their hirelings, the workingman if he does not submit to their tyranny.” Therefore, they argued, “we believe that in [the] future the miners of our western states should prepare themselves to take radical action should the emergence arise.”23 These miners favored negotiation over direct action, but prepared for the latter. Rocky Mountain workers and labor sympathizers became guardedly optimistic that negotiations would prevail over violence in providing those who toiled with better conditions, especially living wages. The growing acceptance of marginalism contributed to this hope. Economists, calling themselves marginalists, contended that the price a buyer would pay for a good should serve as the prime determinant of wage rates. Social reformers built on the marginalists’ view and argued that since the health of the economy depended on people purchasing goods, workers should have living wages in order to encourage economic growth. U.S. Bureau of Labor director Carroll D. Wright took this argument a step further as he started referring to the combined expenses of rent, food, and clothes as the cost of living. Wright wanted to provide the public with statistics detailing corporate profits, the hours employees toiled, and the prices of goods. Through the data he gathered, he hoped that government agencies and officeholders would devise policies and laws that linked the cost of living to wage rates. As a result, workers would always earn living wages.24 Employers and their political allies limited Wright’s efforts, but his idea inspired officials in state bureaus of labor statistics and unionists to point to the cost of living index as one way to gauge the progress of their efforts. For example, J. H. Calderhead, the onetime president of Butte’s American Railway Union local, chairman of Montana’s Populist Party Central Committee, and in 1897, commissioner of the state’s Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry, explained that although low wages are “a seductive thought to certain employers,” they resulted in “a curtailment of consumption, checking production, throwing more men out of employment,” and ruining “both employer and employed.” He added that the “margin of a liberal wage is the very life of commerce.”25 J. A. Ferguson, who succeeded Calderhead, proved even more emphatic in his call for the living wage. He asserted that the “country depends largely upon the

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power of the producers to consume or purchase that which they produce or its equivalent.” He argued that no “merchant would be willing to exchange the patronage of a community of high wage mechanics for that of even a much larger number of low-paid wage earners; or the so-called tyranny of the labor unions for the deadly” competition “of a company store in a corporation town.”26 Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics (CBLS) deputy labor commissioner James T. Smith agreed with his Montana counterparts. In 1900, he matter-of-factly stated that CBLS-gathered data in the future should function to raise all workers’ income levels, because in order for the nation to continue upon its current path of progress, wages “must be adjusted to the cost of living.” In fact, he asked the state legislature to pass a measure requiring all business owners to supply statistics to the deputy commissioner’s office so he could accurately offer an index by which employers could set wage rates. Smith clearly emulated Wright. And like Wright, he failed to win such a statute.27 Workers also advocated using the cost of living as a means to support their arguments for the redistribution of wealth through living wages and acquiring more leisure time. At a November 1904 meeting, members of the DTA proclaimed that to “raise wages, to shorten hours, to insure payment of wages at stated reasonable times, to restrain unprincipled employers from oppressing their workmen, and, in short, to give the workers a measure of control over the industry which they follow” constituted the city federation’s primary functions.28 They decided, as the masthead of the DTA’s official newspaper, the Clarion Advocate, declared, that “The standard of living is the measure of social progress.”29 Class-conscious consumption, as the court battle with I. Rude revealed, represented one way in which the DTA sought to peacefully raise workers’ standard of living and advance their notion of justice. The city federation’s decision to fight for a women’s shorter-hours measure offers an example of a second strategy that Denver workers employed. The larger social beliefs about women’s fragility at the time—that they were weaker than men and therefore should work fewer hours— made female operatives a smart choice to regain the momentum for shorter workdays. In 1903, DTA and CSFL officials marshaled their political influence and pushed state lawmakers to pass an eight-hour act for women and children under the age of sixteen.30 In some industries, such as the garment trades, employers put up little resistance. Denver’s laundry owners, however, ignored the law and, over the next three years, foiled the DTA’s various efforts to organize their mostly female workforce.

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In the midst of this fight, the ALU dissolved and the IWW emerged. The ALU-affiliated DTA members decided that the IWW’s antiskilled worker rhetoric and, at that point, skeptical attitude toward politics, made the AFL a more appealing choice. Denver’s unionists did not view the AFL as ideal. They had disaffiliated from it three years earlier and joined the ALU’s predecessor, the Western Labor Union. The city’s unionists knew that AFL leaders remained wary of organizing unskilled workers and less than enthusiastic about the potential of political action. In the end, however, Denver workers chose to affiliate with the AFL for two reasons. First, Gompers shared their belief that justice paralleled an increased standard of living. Second, the AFL president proved willing to make dispensations to them that he had refused in the past. Nationally, Gompers became the leading advocate of one version of the living-wage outlook. In responding to those who asked what precisely the labor movement hoped to achieve, he repeatedly declared “more.” “More” meant more money and more leisure time so workers could sustain a higher quality of life. He told an audience at the Denver Coliseum in 1891, “You can judge the condition of men by what they want.” The man who “is walking the street without shelter” wants “a square meal more,” and the “man who earns $1 a day” wants “25 cents more.” These calls for more, he argued, revealed workers’ discontent with their present economic situation, but “discontent,” contrary to accepted thought, “is an indication of progress.”31 Although Gompers and many Rocky Mountain unionists agreed that the standard of living marked social progress, they continued to differ on how to make social progress happen. Progressive unionists at base argued that labor markets were political constructions. Therefore, workers had to engage in political activism, starting at the local level, to win the laws that would allow local and state officials, not employers, to have the final say in how the labor market functioned. Gompers, in his autobiography, argued that pay “increases, reductions in the hours of labor, [and] at least one rest day in the week” meant more in the “progress of the workers of our country than the voting for any candidate of any political party.”32 Even through Gompers orchestrated the AFL’s political activities and understood that workers had to involve themselves in the political process, he saw political and economic actions as interrelated but separate. He and followers of his pure-and-simple approach wanted to further social progress through minimum political participation. With the opportunity to bring at least some Rocky Mountain workers back into the AFL fold in 1905, Gompers offered an accommodation

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for these workers’ organizational practices. In September, Colorado labor leaders agreed to join the AFL if workers belonging to some of the independent unions that they had organized—that is, local unions without AFL ties at a national or international level—could remain members of the CSFL. Gompers consented. In 1906, the CSFL looked virtually no different than it had since its inception. Its member organizations included former ALU affiliates and new industrial unions such as the Beer Bottlers and Drivers, Bill Posters and Billers, Bindery Women, Bookbinders, Broom Makers, Laundry Drivers Protective Association, Musicians, Stage Employees, and Bartenders. This same agreement applied to the DTA.33 As AFL members, DTA unionists in 1906 launched a two-pronged attack they hoped would end with female laundry workers enjoying union membership and an advancement in their living conditions. More precisely, the DTA attempted to assist the city’s laundry workers in winning a shorter workday and higher wages. First, organizers mounted a publicity campaign, printing flyers and articles asking, “Would you like your mother to work or iron steadily for ten hours? . . . How would you like to work at such back-breaking, steam suffocating, heat exhausting work three hours even!” The city federation reasoned, “You may not like labor unions but IF YOU ARE A MAN you will not care to be responsible for making A WOMAN work longer than she can work without in­human cruelty.” The DTA stated that businesses such as the Colorado Towel Company cared little about maintaining the health and virtue of female workers. The city federation then publicized the story of Harriet Seippe. The September issue of the Union Label League Bulletin, printed by the city’s workers and distributed throughout the region, told readers that “Miss Seippe, the 16-year-old girl whose arm was amputated on account of having it crushed in a machine in the White Swan laundry, July 17, expects to be able to leave the hospital on Labor Day.” This unfortunate laundress would forever be reminded of her employer’s “inhuman cruelty” by the “stub of about two inches below the elbow” left from her operation.34 The negative publicity hurt the laundry owners’ reputation. Instead of recognizing the new union, however, owners created the Laundrymen’s Club and pledged to defeat the DTA’s organizing drive. The DTA responded with the second part of its strategy and financed a laundry cooperative. One of the city’s laundries, the Central Laundry, had recognized the union. The Laundrymen’s Club, in turn, pressured suppliers to stop selling to Central. Having to buy more expensive soap and equipment

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elsewhere, Central’s owners faced bankruptcy. The DTA stepped in and bought the laundry. The city federation capitalized the business for 5,000 shares of stock, and sold the stock to its members for 70 cents per share. 35 Acting on washday as they would on election day, Denver’s teamsters, cigar makers, and barbers collectively took their dirty clothes to the DTAowned facility. Because the DTA had engaged in creative strategies that included publicizing Harriet Seippe’s story and buying the Central Laundry, Denver’s laundry workers had union representation, an eight-hour day, and a pay raise by October 1907.36 Labor still had the strength to win legislation, and city federations still had the power to enforce those measures. Thus, Rocky Mountain workers had the ability to uproot onceembedded social beliefs, as in employers’ absolute authority to set hour and wage rates, and to reorder social relations by practicing mutualism, political activism, and collective action. Their success had national consequences. By the turn of the twentieth century, the AFL had abdicated its position as labor’s chief agitator for shorter-hours laws. As a result, scholars claim that middle-class women’s groups, such as the National Consumers’ League, took command of the quest for a state-sanctioned shorter workday. These groups, known as maternalists, building on the Utah eight-hour law for miners, argued that Congress needed to designate women and children a protected class and exempt them from the traditional liberty of contract rulings, which declared most shorter-hours statutes unconstitutional. They succeeded when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Muller v. Oregon in February 1908. Louis Brandeis and Josephine Goldmark presented the case for the state of Oregon and made two key arguments. First, they contended that because women were physically weaker than men, they should not be expected to work as long. Second, Brandeis and Goldmark reasoned that all women were potential mothers. Therefore, if forced to labor long hours and exhaust themselves, women put their health at risk. Scores of unhealthy women meant unhealthy children or worse yet, women who could not have children at all. Essentially, no less than the creation of future generations was at stake. In February 1908, the high court upheld the Oregon law based on these two arguments.37 Unfortunately for maternalists, they did not create an “entering wedge” for male workers to win shorter-hours measures, as they had hoped. They merely continued the precedent set by the 1898 Holden decision. In other words, if for reasons of health, shorter workdays were more suitable, then employers were mandated to comply; whereas, the workers’ ultimate goal was to win an eight hour day for all laborers, regardless of sex and regardless of occupation. It would seem that

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Rocky Mountain workers led the charge to make markets more socially responsible, and maternalists followed. The case of Denver’s laundry workers also illustrated why unskilled women workers would reject the IWW. With the assistance of the AFLaffiliated DTA, these female operatives won a living wage and a statemandated eight-hour day. The IWW’s refusal to fight for immediate improvements for unskilled workers through political action or through joint collective actions with AFL unions proved the central reason these laborers forged an alliance with progressive unionists. Put another way, Rocky Mountain unionists advanced democratized markets because they fought the class struggle as best they could each day. Although they employed direct action when absolutely necessary, they typically challenged corporate hegemony through cross-union protests, especially when employers refused to recognize the pro-labor laws they had already won.

Closed Shops, Contracts, and Labels For a more comprehensive understanding of how Rocky Mountain unionists infused their values into the larger social structure, and why they overwhelmingly rejected the IWW and joined the AFL, it is important to investigate the demands of unskilled workers beyond Denver. Laborers throughout the region wanted closed shops, demanded contracts that legally guaranteed living wages, and agitated for recognition of union labels. The Wobblies opposed all three of these tactics. IWW leaders considered the closed shop “a crime against labor as a class,” and claimed “it does not and it cannot give protection even to the laborers or workers in the closed shop.”38 One contributor to the Industrial Union Bulletin, the official newspaper of the IWW from 1906 to 1909, argued that closed shops hurt all workers because their success raised the prices of goods. Other IWW members contended that closed shops signified “job trusts” that protected the wages of only skilled craftsmen and promoted a general disregard for “that army of men” who are unorganized. “Such unions, therefore, maintain their wages . . . not at the expense of the employing class, but at the expense of the working class.”39 Many workers must have found this critique confusing. The IWW advocated that all miners, railroad laborers, and factory workers take over their workplaces in order to control production, or seemingly to achieve the ultimate closed shop. When other unionists did exercise significant influence over relations at their job sites through work rules, or laws, however, the IWW contended that those workers acted simply in self-interest.

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In February 1904, members of the Women’s Protective Union (WPU) of Butte—an organization representing waitresses, chamber maids, scrub girls, and other female laborers—prepared to battle their employers. The WPU opposed private employment offices and asked the city council “to effect their discontinuance by revocation of their licenses.”40 These women wanted a closed shop. Banning private employment offices would allow the WPU to serve as the hiring hall for most of Butte’s female workers, and as a result, would force employers to recognize union work rules. City officials decided the WPU’s petition had merit and sent the request to the licensing committee. The petition, however, went un­answered.41 Although the WPU’s attempt to enlist the city government’s aid in establishing a closed shop failed, the union remained strong. From 1903 through 1905, members lobbied the city council and state legislature for laws regulating the hours of working women, expanded their organizing efforts to nearby Anaconda, and spearheaded the Montana Federation of Labor’s drive to unionize a local broom factory.42 The WPU’s demand for closed shops and shorter hours, and its general advocacy of cross-union solidarity, signified the dynamism of the larger regional movement. On October 19, 1905, the WPU joined the IWW. Over the course of the next year, Wobbly leaders critiqued WPU members for maintaining alliances with AFL locals. The WPU belonged to the Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly, the county federation, which had affiliated with the AFL. Of greater consequence, the IWW denounced these waitresses, dishwashers, and domestic servants for their continued advocacy of the closed shop. Again, Wobblies believed that closed shops represented “job trusts.” In 1907, the catchall organization for Butte’s working women responded to this harassment by taking out a charter with the AFL’s Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union.43 Wobblies also condemned progressive unionists for advocating unionlabel leagues. By insisting that workers only buy goods with union labels, workers could influence prices by shaping consumer habits. The label strategy should have won IWW support, because in critiquing closed shops, Wobblies claimed that employers passed on the cost of higher wages to nonunion workers when they bought goods. In purchasing only unionmade goods, workers not only engaged in another form of cross-union cooperation, they accepted the responsibility of supporting higher prices. According to the Industrial Worker, another leading IWW periodical, a union label “merely means that PART of the work put into an article, or thing to be sold was done by union labor . . . Such a line of thought leads naturally to ONENESS,” as the maker of the item cares only about

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his craft.44 The Industrial Union Bulletin claimed the label was “one of the many schemes and devices concocted by the officials and business agents” of the AFL to promote individual unions and their employers.45 To the IWW, the label represented a conservative union practice because it united the unionist and employer. The label, in their view, impeded solidarity because workers cared only about the products they made, and helped owners acquire greater profits since the unions were essentially advertising for their employers. Wobblies levied these charges after label advocates suggested that the “easiest man in the world to talk to is the shrewd business man—if you talk business. If you talk sentimental rot you are rightly classed a bore.”46 To progressives, labels did increase profits, but they expected those profits to lead to higher pay rates. Also, labels helped to organize unskilled workers and aided them in maintaining their unions. Last, in convincing the larger public to support high wages by buying label-made goods, unionists reshaped consumers’ sense of social responsibility. San Francisco cigar makers first championed the label in the 1870s, largely as a means of opposing Chinese-made cigars. In the 1890s, workers across the country started using the label to promote union-made goods.47 In 1902, the Butte carpenters passed a resolution “that any material shipped to this city not having the union label be not handled by the members of this union.”48 Salt Lake Typographical Union workers went further. They decided that “no member of this union be allowed to hold any office in this union unless said member . . . have and [is] wearing union-made shoes, clothes, and hat.”49 Similarly, the Missoula County Trades and Labor Council checked members’ hats as they arrived at the union hall. At the September 23, 1915, meeting, the committee found four hats “not bearing the union label,” and the owners received fines.50 By only purchasing label-marked goods, organized workers strengthened closed shops and forced employers to recognize labor’s power to shape markets. Rocky Mountain workers not only looked for their fellow unionists’ labels, they also made sure to buy their goods from a union clerk, waiter, or waitress. The Retail Clerks Union of Salt Lake City sent letters reminding members of other unions of their “obligation” to “demand the Union Card of the Clerk who waits upon you.”51 Denver workers argued that the “Cigar Makers’ Union is affiliated with the Carpenters’ Union and the Painters’ Union and all of the other Unions. A Union Cigar Maker must have his house built by Union Carpenters and painted by Union Painters, wear Union made clothing and see that the Union

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Label is on everything he buys.”52 Essentially, no matter how much one supported his own union by paying his dues, going to meetings, and upholding work rules, ignoring union labels meant scabbing. The region’s workers also politicized the label to get around antiboycott laws. In 1899, unionists in Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming pressured lawmakers into passing “Trade-marks of trade unions’” measures that made labels trademarks of unions and forbade employers from copying them.53 The I. Rude case highlighted the success of this measure. In fact, after the victory in April 1906, an editorial in Denver’s Union Label League Bulletin argued that the label “commands the respect and protection of the courts and state. It is invulnerable to the injunction, the lockout, and the blacklist. It supersedes the boycott by concentrating the purchasing power upon union products.” In short, it “is a weapon that profits the employer equally with the employe [sic], but only so long as both aim at the same object. It can never be turned against the employe [sic], because it is the latter’s exclusive property to be given or withdrawn with pleasure.”54 Labels allowed unionists to act as class-conscious consumers. Closed shops became stronger, and employers had to allow workers a central role in defining market relations. More specifically, wages rose, hours declined, and the standard of living, especially for unskilled women workers, improved. Contracts represented another example of how Rocky Mountain workers transformed market relations, pushed the nation toward socialism, and found themselves forced to rebuke IWW policies. One IWW rule stated that “no contract shall ever be made by any division or part of the Industrial Workers of the World with any employer.”55 Contracts resulted in closed shops, and closed shops, they claimed, led to a willingness to ignore fellow workmen. In 1909, Great Falls IWW members established a wage scale through a contract that would go into effect on April 1.56 The Industrial Worker chastised the Great Falls unionists by asserting that this agreement displayed “ignorance on the part of the membership.” According to the Worker, the “union decided it was not strong enough to force a rise in wages.” The editor meant that Great Falls workers must have doubted their ability to win a strike. IWW leaders immediately sent J. H. Walsh, an organizer in Montana’s lumber camps, to Great Falls to inform the local unionists that signing contracts violated the organization’s principles. IWW officers gave the Great Falls workers the option of disaffiliating or ignoring the contract. They chose to send their charter back.57 In the IWW’s estimation, Great Falls unionists were “ignorant” because they chose a contract over striking. Later issues of the paper then

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attacked the union and altered the story. The Worker claimed that the union’s charter “was revoked because of the fact that the so-called I.W.W. men in Great Falls started out on the A.F. of L. scab breeding route by signing contracts with the employers regardless of the welfare of other workers.”58 To the Great Falls laborers, striking for higher wages made no sense when employers had accepted their demands. By considering skilled workers inherently conservative, believing that the union label impeded solidarity, and arguing that contracts meant unionists accepted capitalism, the IWW alienated Rocky Mountain laborers who had spent their adult lives opposing both capitalism and the AFL. The Wobblies’ attitude revealed their shortsightedness in recognizing the difficulties involved in building a unified labor movement, and an apparent callousness to the hardships that constant poverty caused unskilled workers. Most laborers, especially female operatives, worked within the confines of local and regional labor markets. They purchased their goods and services primarily from small businesses, such as Denver’s laundry operators, that could not afford to alienate their consumer base. A labor movement united across skill lines meant that most employers in Denver, Butte, Salt Lake City, Pueblo, Helena, and Ogden had to give in to labor’s demands or face financial ruin. Furthermore, as long as these workers voted together, they could elect municipal and county judges who would uphold pro-labor measures, as I. Rude and the Citizens’ Alliance found out. Workers, both skilled and unskilled, experienced real changes in their lives, such as working fewer hours and earning higher wages. These advances meant that they slowly redrew social lines and gained some control over markets. Direct actions, especially if undertaken by workers in the region’s cities would have limited, if not destroyed, labor’s power because employees would have literally eliminated their employers’ business operations and turned public opinion against them. This is not to suggest that the Wobblies were not appalled by the consequences of poverty. They were. Nor did IWW members advocate only direct action. They spoke of sabotage far more often than they employed it. Haywood, for example, would expound on the virtues of direct action during speeches. But when he led strikes, such as the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers’ strike in 1912 and the Akron, Ohio, rubber workers’ strike in 1913, he instructed workers to avoid violence in order to maintain public support.59 This militant rhetoric, however, had consequences for the IWW’s image outside of the labor movement. Within union circles, their strict stance on what constituted proper socialist behavior and the subsequent unyielding critiques of pragmatic approaches to

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facilitating social change, which accompanied this call for purity, made the IWW seem out of touch with workers’ wants and not a useful organization to join.

The WFM The IWW’s unwillingness to recognize the accomplishments of progressive unionists in altering industrial and social relations affected no organization more than the WFM. The WFM had been the core of the Rocky Mountain labor movement since the 1890s. It gave birth to the WLU, funded most of the ALU’s budget, and led the call for the IWW. WFM members played a prominent role at the founding convention of the IWW. At first glance, it appeared that WFM members favored continuing this alliance during their 1906 convention, as members ratified the executive board’s decision to join the Wobblies by a vote of 2,418 to 772. A closer look, however, reveals some trepidation. Of the 27,000 members of the hard-rock miners’ organization, only 3,190 voted on the referendum to align with the IWW. The Butte Miners’ Union (BMU), the largest and most powerful local, did not send in its ballots. Of the four largest locals that did vote, all having a membership of more than two hundred people, two voted for affiliation with the Wobblies and two against.60 The issue of affiliation became more complicated when police arrested key leaders of the WFM for the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg. Authorities jailed Charles Moyer, Bill Haywood, and George Pettibone in February 1906, and the three men remained behind bars for well over a year. The prosecution’s case rested on circumstantial evidence. A jury acquitted Haywood in July 1907. Pettibone won his trial in January 1908, and the state dropped charges against Moyer following the jury’s decision on Pettibone.61 Moyer and Haywood, men who had helped establish the WLU, ALU, and IWW, missed the 1906 and 1907 WFM conventions. These two meetings established the attitude of the hard-rock miners’ organization toward the Wobblies. As the 1906 WFM convention approached, Haywood seemed to sense the developing factionalism from jail. He sent a letter to delegates praising the successes of local unions in establishing “a minimum wage which secures to all organized mine workers a decent living,” and suggested that the union prepare for the next step in the evolution of working-class strength—“the workers themselves organizing an industrial government” through the IWW. He then encouraged these union representatives to send “radical and rational men” to the 1906 IWW convention.62 Re-

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sponding to Haywood’s request, WFM members appointed Vincent St. John and Albert Ryan, militants who believed in promoting revolution through the IWW, and C. E. Mahoney and John McMullen, who sought to challenge employer authority through shop-floor protest and legislative action, to represent progressives.63 The IWW’s convention occurred in September 1906. Fissures emerged immediately. The Trautmann–De Leon, or revolutionary, wing battled IWW president C. O. Sherman and his supporters for control of the organization. The defining moment occurred when the revolutionaries tried to remove Sherman from power by bringing forth a motion to abolish the office of the president. Mahoney, serving as chair of the convention, attempted to keep the peace by ruling the motion out of order. The Trautmann–De Leon supporters overrode his ruling. Mahoney and McMullen left, arguing that the revolutionary wing had usurped the IWW’s constitution. St. John and Ryan remained.64 Two IWWs emerged after the meeting, and each group claimed that the other was an imposter. Haywood, again from jail, attempted to negotiate a peace. He sent WFM secretary-treasurer James Kirwan a letter dated October 16, 1906. “Big Bill” agreed with Mahoney and others that the Trautmann–De Leon wing had usurped the constitution. He assumed that De Leon had acted the way he had in order to get “a lot of cheap advertising” because his party, the SLP, could hardly “muster one thousand” votes. He also criticized Trautmann for his mishandling of the IWW’s funds and his poor organizing skills. Yet he praised both St. John and Mahoney as loyal members of the WFM. He concluded by writing that he was “finally opposed to the Western Federation of Miners withdrawing from the Industrial Workers of the World at the present time, or at all, if the squabble is satisfactorily adjusted.”65 The Miners’ Magazine spoke for a majority of WFM members when it sided with the Sherman wing.66 From winter 1906–07 until the July 1907 WFM convention, many hard-rock locals contemplated whether they wanted to work through these differences or disaffiliate from the IWW altogether. The WFM’s executive board refused to pay the organization’s dues to the IWW in October 1906. Virtually the entire 1907 WFM convention focused on one issue: whether the IWW truly represented the “progressive” view of the WFM. This was no simple debate. Members possessed different notions of what progressive unionism meant. St. John, for example, favored a relationship with the Wobblies. He argued that the WFM had to unite under the banner of the IWW so that it would not have “to appeal to any high courts of craft organizations

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or organizations tied up with contracts and sacred agreements with the employing class.” He further contended that “realizing these truths, realizing that the fate of the Western Federation of Miners as a progressive organization is the real question that hangs in the balance here.” 67 To St. John, an alliance with craft unionists and a willingness to support contractual agreements represented conservatism. Mahoney answered St. John’s call for affiliation with the IWW by arguing for “an industrial organization that will not recognize the autocracy of a leader or the autocracy of a handful of men.”68 Mahoney saw the IWW as a federation controlled by ideologues who placed radical visions above the wishes of the rank and file. After its 1907 convention, WFM members still wanted to create a national federation that promoted progressive unionism. The miners tried two different strategies. First, WFM leaders called a peace conference. Second, some members sought to ally with progressive AFL-affiliated national organizations, namely, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), in an attempt to lead the anti-Gompers wing of the AFL into a new organization. Officials of both the WFM and the IWW called for a peace conference in 1907, but such talks never took place.69 The WFM’s executive board stalled, and the revolutionary IWW leaders did not push the matter. The executive board then recommended another attempt to foster harmony and suggested the two groups meet in Chicago on April 6, 1908. A new manifesto titled “To Believers in Industrial Unionism” accompanied this call for negotiation. More than just inviting the members of the wings of the IWW, the conference invitation also asked three AFL-affiliated organizations—the United Brewery Workers, the United Mine Workers, and the Lithographers—and “all other labor organizations that believe in the spirit and principles of the following manifesto” to attend. Using much of the original language of the first call for an industrial convention in 1905, WFM officials reiterated that deskilling represented the greatest problem the labor movement faced. They further contended that the entire working class had to come together to establish “an industrial democracy wherein there shall be no wage slavery.” After voting that this second manifesto represented their beliefs, board members further resolved to include a letter with this convention call to the two factions of the IWW. The letter would reaffirm “our allegiance to the principles of Industrial Unionism and [urge] upon them the necessity of doing likewise by settling the existing differences and to point out the conditions existing in the West.” 70 The meeting never occurred. The WFM’s executive

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board ignored the matter until the June 1908 WFM convention. At that meeting, delegates voted to cut the federation’s ties with the IWW.71 WFM leaders now intensified their efforts to ally with the UMWA and other progressive AFL affiliates. Discussions of an amalgamation of the two miners’ unions had occurred as early as 1896. In 1904, UMWA president John Mitchell sent delegates to the WFM convention to “bring a better feeling” between the two groups.72 The Miners’ Magazine attempted to nurture this growing relationship by depicting the struggles of coal miners, especially in the Rocky Mountain region, and touting the progressive nature of the UMWA’s rank and file. As the Cripple Creek strike raged in 1903–04, so too did a violent battle between coal operators and miners in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah.73 The coal miners’ strike ended in a crushing defeat. At the UMWA convention in 1904, Robert Randall of Wyoming took the floor and criticized Mitchell for his poor leadership during the strike. Randall found himself suspended from the Mine Workers as a result, but his case became a means for the WFM to promote unification. The Miners’ Magazine depicted Randall as a hero, “a David that challenged the Goliath to combat, and with truth in his sling, dimmed the luster that clustered around the King of unionism upon his throne.” 74 The article then pointed out that Mitchell, like Gompers, ate “at the tables of millionaire parasites” because of his membership in the National Civic Federation. The Civic Federation favored arbitration as one of its main goals, but many workers throughout the nation considered it a pro-employer group. The piece then argued that “no matter what may be the edict of ‘labor leaders’ the membership of the United Mine Workers of America and the membership of the Western Federation of Miners will come closer together.” It concluded that “INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM is the slogan and the battle cry of the future, and Mitchell will be forced to put his shoulder to the wheel or be relegated to oblivion.” 75 WFM members initially hoped that the coal miners would leave the AFL, and together the two miners’ organizations would build a national industrial union movement. Adolph Germer and Duncan McDonald of Illinois entertained the idea, but Mitchell blocked further talks.76 Max Hayes, socialist and vice president of the UMWA, then suggested that the WFM affiliate with the AFL and join the anticonservative wing’s efforts to bore within. Boring within was the strategy used by the UMWA and other unionists who typically identified themselves as socialists and wanted to form a unified anti-Gompers bloc within the AFL. Their goals included voting Gompers out of office and restructuring the AFL. In the summer of 1909,

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WFM delegates approved the creation of a committee to seek reaffiliation with the AFL.77 Although discussions of unification with the UMWA brought talks of boring within to a head within the WFM, some hard-rock miners had subtly suggested the strategy since the formation of the IWW in 1905. An article that year in the Miners’ Magazine, titled “For the Benefit of Samuel,” argued that AFL affiliates in places such as Brockton, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky, shared the WFM’s political outlook and feelings toward Gompers and his conservative followers. The author wanted “Samuel” to “know that there is a spirit of independence growing among laboring men of this country that refuses to yield obedience to the dictum of ‘labor leaders’ who tremble for their jobs when aggressive men are making an effort to pull organized labor out of the old rut of impotent craft autonomy.” 78 By 1910, members of the executive board argued that deskilling had forced a new unionism to emerge in the AFL and that the WFM could help foster that movement. The next year, WFM members voted 260 locals to 5 to accept a charter from the AFL.79 Discontent swelled among the minority. In a 1910 letter to the Industrial Worker, one miner still committed to the IWW explained that he could “keep quiet no longer.” He favored a “great industrial organization of mine workers [both coal and hard rock],” but not “with the American Separation of Labor.” Boring within made no sense, he argued, because it “would be just as much logic to say that an infidel should join a church to make the congregation all infidels, or for a Socialist to join the Republican party to make Socialists out of the Republicans.”80 St. John, in 1911, proclaimed that the WFM represented a “FAKE Industrial Union.” He added that the UMWA’s “kind of ‘industrial unionism,’ “ which “proposed to have the workers use their power to enforce legislation of the mine workers for the safeguarding of life and limb in the place of employment,” had failed. Real industrial unionism, in his view, would lead to the ability “to legislate the mine operators out of their positions,” because workers would use their power to take over the mines and the government through a nationwide general strike.81 Between 1909 and 1911, as St. John’s words illustrated, Wobbly leaders increasingly rejected political solutions and called for one big strike. Both the advocates and opponents of boring within agreed that markets were political constructions, and that the state needed to intervene in those markets if workers were ever to enjoy a more equitable distribution of wealth. Syndicalists opted for revolution because they believed that the current political system made impossible the institutional and cul-

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tural changes necessary to move the United States away from capitalism and toward socialism. Progressives insisted that those transformations had already begun. The demand for union-label goods, the growing acceptance of the notion that wages should keep up with the cost of living, the public’s backing of eight-hour-day laws, and the larger citizenry’s willingness to support pro-labor candidates at the polls proved that notions such as laissez-faire and liberty of contract were not as embedded within the larger social structure as once thought. Employers’ constant counterattacks on worker’s gains and the IWW’s insistence on purity of industrial unionism blinded the Wobblies to the fact that even businessmen and managers had started to accept, in a limited way, the validity of labor’s vision of justice. The divide over collective bargaining and contracts within the WFM highlighted the fact that workers had indeed influenced owners and managers’ conceptions of fairness. In December 1906, the WFM’s executive board received a telegram from a Montana worker informing them that company officials where he worked wanted future differences between employees and employers decided by arbitration. The company proposed that they and the union pick two men, and together these two sides would “pick [an] umpire.” The board responded that the WFM’s constitution did not allow for such an agreement.82 Various locals kept pressing the issue, because they saw it as a way to win the demands they wanted without striking. Growing dissatisfied with the WFM’s official position, local unions started to withdraw or, if they were powerful enough, voted to ignore the executive board, sign contracts, and disregard the fines the executive board levied. Between 1903 and 1905, WFM locals in McCabe, Arizona, and Horr and Aldridge, Montana, signed agreements. They recognized that they could now sue their employers should those bosses violate the agreement. In all three cases, the WFM’s executive board nullified the agreements and reminded members that the federation rejected signed contracts.83 In 1906, the BMU, the WFM’s first and largest local, negotiated a five-year contract with mine owners. The agreement guaranteed a closed shop for Butte’s miners and linked wages to the price of copper. As a result, only union miners would extract copper from the world’s wealthiest copper mines. When profits increased, so too would wages.84 At the 1907 WFM convention, delegates criticized the BMU for agreeing to a contract. At the time, the WFM belonged to the IWW, and the IWW’s stance on signed agreements was inflexible. IWW bylaws forbade contracts. Delegates then passed a resolution, by a vote of 325 to 25, that

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the BMU had to void its contract. The twenty-five votes supporting the agreement all came from the BMU’s delegation. The BMU not only dis­ regarded their fellow unionists’ rebuke, they negotiated another five-year agreement shortly after the convention. The desire on the part of WFM members for legally guaranteed higher wages and better conditions proved the rule rather than the exception. When the WFM left the IWW, the federation made collective bargaining agreements common practice.85 In its December 17, 1906, report, the WFM’s executive board argued that the organization’s first concern had to be “to take advantage of the opportunity to improve immediate conditions” by finding ways “to enforce eight-hour legislation, and bring wages, of the most dangerous of all occupations, up to a living standard.”86 IWW advocates agreed. Haywood’s letter to delegates earlier that year not only appealed for cooperation with the Wobblies, it demanded that unionists fight for a guaranteed minimum standard of living. By that point, the board had questioned whether the WFM should pay its dues to the IWW, and tensions clearly existed between supporters and opponents of affiliation with the radical organization. Hard-rock miners had used their federation to battle pureand-simple unionism, and served as the catalyst for cross-union solidarity across the Rocky Mountain West. Some of the WFM’s most dynamic organizers, such as Haywood and St. John, emerged as the leaders of the IWW. Although the two groups held similar values, disagreements over tactics and implementing justice through laws and collective action made unity impossible. Most WFM members by 1908 had reached the same conclusions that other unionists had after the founding of the IWW; that it was not the progressive federation they had hoped to create. To those who risked their lives each day in the gold, silver, and copper mines, contracts, not sabotage or strikes, seemed to be among the best ways to improve immediate conditions and get employers to uphold these demands. As a result, hard-rock miners decided to become a powerful minority within the AFL and to try to remake the AFL into the progressive federation they desired. They continued to insist, as did the workers in the region’s urban centers, that creating a society underpinned by social democratic values depended upon unified political activism.

City Politics Even though they shifted their affiliation from the ALU to the AFL, Rocky Mountain workers continued to see political power as essential to their ability to socialize markets. This belief is illustrated by various col-

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lective actions taken between 1899 and 1906, including Colorado unionists’ efforts to enforce a label property-rights law for garment workers and a shorter-hours measure for women, and the Butte WPU’s attempt to secure a closed shop by asking the city council to outlaw employment agencies. Yet by 1904, progressive unionists faced multiple obstacles to their ability to wield influence. The Citizens’ Alliance control of the Colorado Republican Party made even considering GOP candidates unthinkable. IWW members critical of political action threatened to convince a portion of workers not even to cast their ballots. And a resurgent SP meant that another segment of labor’s traditional bloc of votes might refuse to vote for candidates belonging to other parties. The shared regional strategy of union-centered political action appeared on the verge of total collapse. Denver union members prior to 1902 played on party competition. In 1902, a divide emerged between unionists who advocated that workers vote only for SP candidates and those who wanted to maintain unioncentered political action. The disastrous consequences of this rift, which included the election of Peabody and the state militia’s attack on Cripple Creek miners, pushed workers to solve their differences and agree upon a strategy that would allow them to reassert their political might. Some in the labor movement proposed that the SP function as the voice of the working class, but most Denver workers recognized that the party had never been particularly strong in their city. Picking a nonpartisan slate of candidates was not an option because the Citizens’ Alliance controlled the Republican Party. In the end, DTA members decided that they had no choice but to ally with the Democrats. Denver unionists in 1903 supported the wing of the Democratic Party led by Denver Public Works Board leader Robert Speer. Speer aspired to revive the machine style of politics that had been largely dormant in Denver since the 1880s. He sought to build a power base by appealing to those interested in maintaining control over the local economy. Specifically, he wanted to craft an alliance among the leaders of the local utility companies, bar owners, and the city’s unionists. Fearing the emergence of eastern-style political corruption, middle-class reformers fought for an amendment to the Colorado Constitution that would grant the state authority over city government. When Speer agreed to support the DTA’s quest for a shorter workday and workweek, Denver unionists helped defeat the proposed amendment by collectively voting against it when the state assembly placed it on the ballot for voter approval that September. Then, in 1904, the labor vote helped make Speer mayor. Under Speer,

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the city built new roads, public bathhouses, and, in general, carried out a “city beautiful” campaign that gave hundreds of union workers jobs. By 1908, DTA members had become so intertwined with the Democrats that they started winning seats on the city council.87 Although less ideal than playing on party competition or running their own party, because it meant sharing influence with local business owners and accepting the corruption that occurred when Speer handed out city contracts, Denver workers did possess real power under this arrangement. The Denver Barbers Union, with the help of DTA members, provided one example of success under this new found unity with the Democrats. In 1902, workers pushed the city council to pass an ordinance that required Sunday closings of barbershops. The measure passed and went largely unnoticed until the spring of 1906. When T. A. McClelland “scabbed” on union haircutters by keeping his shop open, police arrested him. He challenged the ordinance in city court and lost when Judge Ben Lindsey, an opponent of the Speer machine but in need of working-class votes to keep his job, upheld the measure. McClelland appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court and still met with defeat as the justices ruled 7–0 in favor of the Sunday-closing ordinance. When the court announced its decision, John Connelly, a member the Barbers Union, declared “Sunday Slavery” abolished. He also offered a thought to McClelland: “When your poor carcass and mine have returned to Mother Earth, when the worms are marching in and out of our bodies whistling ‘St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning,’ the barbers will still be enjoying the fruits of their victory that they won on May 9 1906.”88 Obtaining a Sunday-closing law represented a creative way of challenging liberty of contract interpretations. Rather than demand a working-hours law, they shortened the workweek. Whereas Denver workers had to change their electoral tactics largely due to the Citizens’ Alliance, Salt Lake City and Ogden unionists lost their political momentum because of internal divisions. In 1904, the Utah State Federation of Labor (USFL) grew out of Ogden, Salt Lake City, Park City, and Eureka city federations and a number of WFM locals. That year, delegates voted 34 to 17 to refuse an AFL charter, as most unions in the state federation belonged to the ALU. Under the ALU, workers throughout Utah practiced union-centered political action. In 1905, however, the USFL became the only state federation in the country to affiliate with the IWW. Tensions over the Wobblies’ critiques of skilled workers led AFL-affiliated locals to leave the USFL and try to form their own state body. After the WFM withdrew from the IWW in 1908, Utah

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laborers overcame their differences, but not before factionalism destroyed any chance for political success at the local level during those years.89 In 1906, workers in both Salt Lake City and Ogden opposed to affiliation with the IWW decided to organize city federation–run labor parties. Salt Lake City cigar maker Daniel Elton explained that workers wanted to remind politicians that they could “act as a unit.” It seemed that some “friends” had accepted workers’ votes but failed to deliver on their promises.90 Members of both the Salt Lake City and Ogden federations of labor wanted their respective county governments to control public utilities, to tax corporations at higher rates by assessing property values at their “actual” cost, and to enforce labor laws more vigilantly. Pro–IWW Salt Lake City unionists refused to support Labor Party nominees. In addition to critiquing those unionists who affiliated with the AFL, members of the Wobbly faction argued that they could not trust Mormon unionists in the Labor Party to oppose the authority of the Mormon Church. At that point, Wobblies were predisposed to supporting SP candidates, but they recognized that Socialists had little chance of winning. Hoping to attract as many votes as possible in order to defeat the Labor Party, IWWaffiliated unionists created the avowedly anti-Mormon American Party. SP officials endorsed American Party candidates and claimed that despite its name, the Labor Party actually took its direction from Mormon elders. All American Party nominees lost their contests. Only one candidate on the Labor Party’s ballot, a fusion nominee with the Republicans, won.91 In Ogden, the United Labor Party proved less divided, as its slate of candidates included Democrats and Socialists. The Weber County workers, however, did even worse than their counterparts to the south, as not one nominee claimed victory. With their differences over federation affiliation solved by the 1908 county elections, Salt Lake City and Ogden workers returned to playing the major-party candidates against each other.92 Unionists from the state’s biggest cities indeed regained political influence, winning a number of local ordinances over the course of the next decade and spearheading successful drives for state measures that guaranteed women a minimum wage and provided all workers with compensation for job-related injuries. In the midst of this political turmoil, many hard-rock miners decided to support the SP. Although Utah Socialists claimed their first victory in 1901, when the citizens of the city of Elsinore elected a Socialist justice of the peace, the party remained weak both in membership and votes until 1906. In 1906, Bingham hard-rock miners mobilized under the SP banner and elected a number of local candidates to office. Their fellow WFM members

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in Eureka followed their lead the next year. Importantly, these miners went to the voting booth as members of the IWW. Wobbly leaders supported the SP at this point, but doubted that party activism could do little more than stir class consciousness. SP propaganda, even at the local level, suggested that their skepticism was warranted, as it called on workers to vote the party ticket in order to bring forth the cooperative commonwealth as quickly as possible. Yet despite the realities of what local officials could accomplish and despite the IWW’s increasing antipathy for political action, these miners remained committed Socialist voters. In fact, they started demanding that SP officeholders act like pro-labor politicians in larger urban centers. For instance, Socialist city council members in Eureka responded to union demands for cleaner neighborhoods by implementing street cleaning and regular garbage collection, while party members in Bingham purified the city’s water system and put in the first sewer system.93 Most historians have presented the stories of municipal socialism as tales of unfulfilled promises in which Socialist officeholders acted as reformers instead of radicals.94 Such assertions neglect what workers actually wanted. Unionists sought pro-labor city governments that provided services, aided the poor, and did not interfere with their attempts to control local and regional labor markets. Workers promoted a culture that promised an increasingly better standard of living. That social democratic mission not only included acquiring higher wages and shorter hours, but also allowed the working class to enjoy better neighborhoods. SP candidates realized this and replaced their insistence on purity of consciousness in party platforms with a focus on the immediate concerns of workers. The more that SP officials acknowledged workers’ daily hardships, the more the party grew. In Utah, the SP peaked in 1911, the year the WFM joined the AFL, with thirty-seven members elected to office. The state federation, the Salt Lake Federation of Labor, and the Salt Lake Building Trades Council all endorsed the SP between 1911 and 1913. The party had a strong working-class base, with 33.5 percent of its members being semiskilled or unskilled laborers, and 26.2 percent working at skilled jobs. Between 1900 and 1923, one hundred men and seven women won office on the SP ticket throughout the state. Five Utah towns elected SP majorities seven times.95 To consider cleaner streets a betrayal of radical promises, or merely a minor reform, is to ignore the filth and squalor people had to deal with every day. The rise of the SP in Utah mirrored its ascendancy in the rest of the region and the nation. In the United States, SP membership doubled between 1909 and 1911, and shot up another 40 percent in 1912 to reach

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roughly 118,000 members. In 1911, seventy-four cities elected at least one Socialist official. In 1912, over twelve thousand SP candidates were elected in 340 cities, and Eugene V. Debs, as the party’s presidential candidate, polled 6 percent of the popular vote.96 In the Rocky Mountain West, the Colorado Socialist Bulletin in 1910 reported that 683 members had paid their dues for the month of August, and 75 more promised to pay. In 1911, the citizens of Nederland and Victor elected party candidates to municipal office, as did Buena Vista, Edgewater, Grand Junction, Lafayette, and Longmont two years later.97 In 1909, not one Socialist held office in Montana, and the party had few members. By 1911, the SP claimed more than five hundred members and twenty-two locals, and Butte Socialists won a number of city positions, including the mayor’s office. In fact, the International Socialist Review, a leading SP periodical, over the next four years repeatedly referred to Butte as the model Socialist-run city government.98 This transformation requires explanation, because unlike in Colorado and Utah, where union-centered political action faltered and workers’ political influence diminished, in Butte workers remained committed to using their unions as their primary political agents. After their failure to appeal to large numbers of working-class voters during the 1909 election, SP leaders decided to move away from their emphasis on ideological rigidity and toward cultivating an alliance with unionists. Essentially, Socialists recognized that to get labor’s vote they had to become unionists’ best option. Lewis Duncan, who won his bid for mayor in 1911, along with other Socialists that year, ran on a platform that championed the eight-hour day for city employees, promised free water for women who earned a living as laundry workers, and mandated that the city attorney give free legal advice to workers. Furthermore, Socialists vowed to open a host of city-owned facilities, including a coal yard, ice plant, loan office, and dance hall.99 Aside from these demands, which Butte unionists had long called for, workers also wanted a city government that made all neighborhoods livable. A state health inspector’s report found the city’s working-class sections detestable, as odors from outhouses, overcrowding, and a dead dog that seemed to have been in an alley for at least three days overpowered one’s senses, namely, smell and decency. Laborers wanted clean water, better zoning, and paved sidewalks. Duncan and Socialist city-council members met all these demands and instituted regular garbage pick up.100 The SP rose in Butte because the party promoted and advanced measures and policies that reflected workers’ values. Butte SP candidates did

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not lure workers away from union-centered political action. Instead, they agreed to implement labor’s political agenda. Unions remained workers’ primary political agents. Looking at a single union over time, in this case the Butte Teamsters, demonstrates this point. Prior to 1909, the Teamsters typically informed the city council of work-rule changes and sought to legitimize those alterations through that body. Once city officials agreed, workers could pressure private employers to do the same. On March 2, 1901, for example, the Teamsters sent a petition to the city council encouraging the “honorable body to pass an ordinance making a workday for all teamsters in the employ of the City of Butte not more than eight hours, at no reduction of wages.”101 The city agreed, and then the Teamsters forced private employers to do the same. Private employers knew they could not count on the city’s help, in the form of political pressure or police assistance, if they rejected the demand and a strike resulted. By May 1, all Butte Teamsters had an eight-hour day with no pay reduction.102 Again in February 1907, these wagon drivers increased their wage scale to $3.50 an hour and sent notice to the mayor and city council.103 To the Teamsters, the city’s recognition of their new work rules and wage rates legitimized their sense that building a social-democratic America started on the shop floor. When Duncan took office, this pattern continued. In 1913, the Teamsters informed the mayor that they knew two new nonunion teams of horses now worked for the city. “Putting said teams to work,” they argued, “necessitated the discharge of a corresponding number of teams, whose owners are residents and tax payers and members of our Union.” The Teamsters had heard from the public works department that the change “was made for economy” but contended that the practice established “a very bad precedent,” as the city “could work their prisoners and lay off a corresponding number of $3.50” men in the name of saving money. The petition ended, “We protest against the above and earnestly request . . . [that you] take steps to abolish the same.” Duncan wrote back to the Teamsters explaining that the Commissioner of Public Works and the Superintendent of Streets had informed him “that two of the city’s teams, namely those made up of three superannuated fire horses and one ex-police-patrol horse, were no longer fit for service.” The mayor then “directed that two of these horses should be killed and the other two sold.”104 He had no intention of eliminating jobs, just unproductive horses. Butte’s executive officer further explained that a Mr. Borden had volunteered his horses to the city for use through the winter. The city only

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had to feed and board the animals. Yet the Socialist mayor conceded, “If the terms of the agreement work any injustice to citizens of Butte who are owners of teams, I should certainly be in favor of giving Mr. Borden notice of termination of the agreement; also, if the agreement does violate, in any respect, the scale or the established rules of the teamsters or any other body of organized labor” the city would void the contract.105 The mayor’s response revealed his understanding not only of the Teamsters’ work rules, but also of their expectation that he would live up to his promise of being a friend to labor. Workers in Denver, Salt Lake City, Ogden, Butte, and many of the region’s hard-rock mining towns remained insistent that attaining justice depended on wielding political influence at the municipal level. City unions continued to set a political agenda based on workers’ demands, and with the exception of Denver, the region’s labor force continued to maintain their unions as their primary political agents. Even in Denver, the DTA remained at the center of workers’ political lives, but they did have to filter their demands through the Speer machine. Recognizing that these workers refused to abandon the belief that the acquisition of greater liberties would arrive through electoral activism also points to another reason why the Wobblies appeared so unappealing to most Rocky Mountain workers: Political action was working. Persistence, not revolution, appeared likely to provide workers with the state-administered markets that they craved.

State Politics When it came to state-level politics at the turn of the twentieth century, the region’s unionists attempted to maintain their union-centered strategy, speaking directly to the electorate by using the initiative and referendum. After differences between workers who favored a nonpartisan slate of candidates and those who insisted on voting only for Socialists opened the door for Peabody’s 1902 election, nearly all Rocky Mountain workers realized how effective union-centered political action had been. They also recognized that their opponents would now try to limit their ability to play on party competition. The initiative and referendum—in other words, direct legislation—offered them the opportunity to take legislation straight from the union hall to the electorate without having to worry about first electing pro-labor candidates. They, of course, still needed the support of politicians to effect significant change, but winning laws would mitigate the failure of pro-labor candidates to win at the polls

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and would highlight the depth to which their values resonated with the larger voting public. Colorado unionists had used their state federation to demand direct legislation even before Peabody’s rule. Between 1896 and 1902, the CSFL pushed for the passage of an initiative and referendum amendment to the state’s constitution. When union-centered political action started to falter between 1902 and 1904, however, labor leaders stepped up their efforts to secure this measure. The state federation’s legislative committee submitted a direct-legislation bill to the 1904 Colorado legislature.106 Although defeated, the public showed its support for the idea by sending letters to politicians and newspapers. Emboldened by this encouragement and determined to advance labor’s legislative agenda, CSFL secretary H. B. Waters contended that direct legislation “can destroy the private monopoly of legislative power and establish public ownership of government.” He demanded, “Shall the people rule or be ruled? Shall they own the government, or be owned by it? Shall they control legislation, or merely select persons to control it? Shall the laws passed and put in force be what the people want or what the politicians and monopolists want?” Waters of course answered that he wanted the people to rule, and that the initiative and referendum allowed them that power. He further contended that direct legislation “makes for political purity, stopping corrupt legislation, and destroying the concentration of temptation which exists where a few legislators can take final action.” He then concluded, “The power of bribery will be infinitely diluted . . . The lobby will die; rings and bosses will lose their power; blackmailing bills, and franchise-steals will go out of fashion; the age of private legislation will pass away.”107 Pressure from the CSFL and supportive public reformers finally forced Colorado legislators to pass a direct-legislation law that permitted the citizenry the right to present and vote on laws they petitioned for, and to reform the state’s constitution. It proved a conduit to success. In 1911, Colorado unionists finally acquired the eight-hour-day statute for miners that they had long championed. It included fines and jail time for violators.108 Utah’s workers also agitated for a direct-legislation act but had little success. The state senate passed a bill in 1901, but it failed in the house. Again in 1903, politicians seemingly friendly to labor proposed an initiative and referendum law, but it too met with defeat. In 1915, a bill made it through both assembly branches only to perish under the weight of the governor’s veto.109

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In February 1903, Miners’ Magazine, which regularly published articles promoting the initiative and referendum, championed a direct-legislation bill written by the Montana Federation of Labor. The editor argued that “organized labor is demanding that every citizen of the state shall be, to a certain extent, a member of the Legislature and shall have a voice in the enactment of bills into laws.”110 The MFL wanted to make their state federation “supreme in all industrial affairs” in order to “have charge of matter relating to the welfare of the workers.”111 In October 1906, the Montana legislature finally responded to the MFL’s lobbying effort by passing a bill, pending voter approval that November, which would allow for the initiative and referendum. Surprisingly, the Socialist Montana News, which originally supported such a measure, attacked this bill. The editor argued that because the proposed law did not give the people the authority to amend the state constitution, it was not worth passing.112 Voters disagreed with the SP’s position. The law passed and progressive unionists claimed victory. As they had done in 1900 and 1902, most Montana workers continued to support the state’s Labor Party over the SP. Some of the legislative successes of Rocky Mountain workers at the end of the nineteenth century resulted from being pragmatic, winning one reform at a time, and building upon those triumphs. Once a direct-legislation law existed, they reasoned, it could subsequently be strengthened. To most Rocky Mountain workers, the class struggle occurred as a series of daily battles on multiple fronts. Therefore, incremental gains mattered, because they signified the steady socialization—or in this case, a means to achieve the socialization—of markets. The Montana direct-legislation fights help explain why SP activists started tailoring their platforms to match Butte workers’ legislative demands. Although securing the ability to use direct legislation to advance their social-democratic agenda meant a great deal to Rocky Mountain workers at the turn of the twentieth century, statutes that provided them with safer workplaces represented, after shorter-hours measures, the state-level reform they most desired. Two precedents barred American workers’ efforts to attain safety laws: the fellow-servant doctrine and the assumption-ofrisk rule. Established in an 1842 Supreme Court ruling, Farwell v. Boston and Worcester Railroad Company, the fellow-servant doctrine meant that if one worker injured another, the worker at fault, not the employer, was responsible. This case also introduced the assumption-of-risk rule, which held workers accountable for their own safety. According to the Court, all things being equal, higher pay would accompany jobs with higher risks,

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because people would otherwise avoid employment that placed them in harm’s way. But as we all know, things were never equal. Employer demands for speedy work and lack of concern for safety forced workers in all professions to use damaged equipment. When pay depended on the number of pieces made or amount of coal mined, laborers’ need for more money trumped a safe pace of work.113 Beginning in the 1870s, Rocky Mountain Knights had attempted to assign some responsibility to employers for safe workplaces. Their efforts produced only weak measures that contained few penalties for those who refused to follow the recommendations of inspectors. In 1893, Colorado workers achieved a small victory when legislators made an exception to the Farwell ruling. Colorado’s measure awarded compensation to workers injured by defective machinery.114 Then, in 1901, a CSFL-authored bill passed, which required employers to compensate injured workers (or their family, in the case of death) who had been physically harmed by the actions of a colleague.115 These measures, unfortunately, did little to improve unsafe workplaces. For the most part, progressive unionists made little headway in marshaling state power to force employers to make safety a priority. But they and their supporters persisted undeterred. The 1902 report of the Montana Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry (MBALI) openly advocated a law that would hold employers liable for workplace accidents. Lawmakers largely ignored the recommendation. After quoting statistics on railroad deaths and injuries, these state officials argued that if corporations knew “that the common law rule relating to fellow servants had been superseded by an employers liability law, the corporations [would] exercise more care in the selection of experienced, careful and reliable men, adopt better and safer appliances[,] institute a more thorough inspection, . . . and eliminate, or at least curtail, the horrible and promiscuous maiming and slaughtering among their employees, which is now so prevalent.”116 Both in Montana and nationally, unionists and employers started to seek a permanent system of compensation. Liability laws that provided exceptions to the fellow-servant rule remained unsatisfying because court decisions proved inconsistent. Across the country, jury trials by the first decade of the twentieth century saw workers succeed in suing their employers. Yet appeals courts typically overturned such rulings.117 In 1908, however, Congress passed the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, which granted railroad workers the right to recover damages for in-

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juries. Railroad unions had shaped public opinion by equating their work with military service. They argued that they belonged to the army of employees who made this vital industry work. They further claimed that their jobs were so dangerous that working on a train was the equivalent of going into battle. As deaths and injuries mounted, popular periodicals could do little except agree with these assertions. In passing this legislation, the federal government had negated the fellow-servant rule for railroad workers. Those who labored in other professions started calling on their state governments to follow suit.118 That year, the MBALI advocated that all workmen receive “compulsory insurance” for workplace accidents. Such a measure, the bureau argued, “should appeal to every humanitarian.”119 Compulsory insurance contradicted employers’ claims that workers assumed the risks of the jobs they accepted. But to owners and company managers, a law such as this one would end the threat of a jury granting a big award to an injured employee.120 Yet not all employers willingly accepted this developing notion of workingmen’s compensation. Progressive unionists had to maintain their pragmatic strategies of electing friends, lobbying, and using their new weapon of direct legislation to make workingmen’s compensation a reality. MFL delegates, in 1909, assembled and wrote a workingmen’s compensation bill.121 A state senator agreed to sponsor the measure at the legislative session that year, but opponents defeated it after the floor debate. MFL activists continued to support the law each time they met. In 1913, Butte workers helped to elect Butte Miners’ Union president Dennis Murphy to the state assembly. Murphy brought the bill before the state’s lawmakers and again saw it fail.122 By 1914, the MFL, supported by the Montana Socialist Party, took advantage of the state’s initiative and referendum law and obtained enough signatures to place workingmen’s compensation before the people of the Treasure State. The citizenry rewarded the MFL’s efforts and passed the measure. Montana had a workingmen’s compensation law in 1915.123 Like their Montana counterparts, Colorado workers, led by the CSFL, sought a workingmen’s compensation act. As in Montana, the Colorado legislature reacted slowly to the CSFL’s calls. In 1914, the CSFL took matters into its own hands and used direct legislation. Unionists, going door to door, acquired enough signatures to place a workingmen’s compensation bill on the November ballot. It passed, and Colorado lawmakers enacted the workingmen’s compensation measure in 1915. The statute required employers to pay for “medical, surgical and hospital treatment,

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and to grant compensation to injured employes [sic] and to provide for their dependents in case of death.”124 In Utah, progressives did not have direct legislation at their disposal. USFL members had to rely on electing friends in order to get what they wanted. In 1913, state senator D. O. Rideout, a pro-labor politician, proposed two bills that would have made workplaces safer. They failed.125 Other such measures were either defeated by one of the assembly bodies or vetoed by the governor.126 Finally, in 1917, a workingmen’s compensation act passed both legislative bodies and was signed into law by labor-endorsed Democrat Simon Bamberger, Utah’s first non-Mormon governor.127 The measure created an industrial commission that oversaw a state-insurance fund for injured workers and their dependents.128 These workingmen’s compensation victories illustrated how the region’s workers, through dedication to local and state political actions, translated their demand for safe workplaces into laws aimed at promoting safety. As a result, state governments took on the responsibility of overseeing the collective health of workers. Clearly a new, more humane view of how economic affairs should function had emerged.

Final Renunciations: Free Speech, Sabotage, and Joe Hill Between 1906 and 1911, AFL leaders did not impinge upon Rocky Mountain unionists’ determination to use politics to transform industrial relations. The Wobblies, conversely, more and more insisted that those who supported industrial unionism had to repudiate political action. For workers to do so would have meant abandoning what they understood to be their most effective weapon in the class struggle—and at the very moment the larger population appeared willing to accept the working-class argument that a better society depended on higher wages, shorter hours, safer workplaces, and cleaner neighborhoods for workers. Thus, the IWW’s contention that justice would come only through purely industrially organized unions committed to direct action became untenable. Ironically, the free-speech fights, which occurred from 1909 through 1913, pushed the majority of the region’s workers to conclude that forging an alliance with the IWW was nearly impossible. In 1909, Wobbly leaders considered Missoula, Montana, an ideal site to organize migratory workers. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn explained that Missoula represented “a gateway to many lumber camps and mining areas.” Flynn, along with her husband, Jack Jones, as well as Frank Little

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and two or three other IWW members convened street meetings that quickly raised the ire of employment agents. These agents—whom Wobblies referred to as “sharks” and “slave market” administrators—charged laborers exorbitant fees in exchange for low-paying work. In Missoula, for instance, each lumberjack paid $2 to get his job. Agents responded to the Wobblies’ criticisms by convincing local merchants to join them in petitioning the city council to pass an ordinance making street speeches illegal. The council acquiesced to this clear violation of the First Amendment. Deciding to defy the new law, the organizers and their supporters built a stage and made their voices heard. When police “dragged off ” a logger “for attempting to read the Declaration of Independence,” a bystander who worked for the Forestry Department “jumped on the platform and continued to read until he was arrested.” Flynn and her comrades turned this free-speech fight into a massive demonstration. “IWW members began to flock in, by freight cars,” and as soon as one speaker was arrested another took his place.” By filling the jails, the Wobblies received national and regional attention. Wisconsin Progressive Republican senator Robert La Follette, Montana Socialist editor Ida Crouch Hazlett, members of the BMU, and other unionists throughout the Rocky Mountain West and the whole country demonstrated their support for the Wobblies’ free-speech rights by writing letters and arranging public demonstrations. According to Flynn, the citizens of Missoula eventually grew tired of the national publicity their town received and the cost they bore to house the incarcerated protestors. Also, those arrested demanded individual jury trials, which would have tied up the county courts for an undetermined period. Eventually, “the authorities gave up,” all “cases were dropped,” and the Wobblies continued their organizing drive by resuming their street-corner denunciations of employment agents.129 Beyond Montana’s lumber camps, the free-speech fight provided an opportunity for progressive unionists and radicals to overcome their differences and engage in collective actions together. Instead, most Wobblies refused to acknowledge the support they received from groups like the BMU and denied that the battle for free speech confirmed the effectiveness of working-class political action. IWW periodicals presented their triumph at Missoula as proof that direct action worked, and claimed that only constant confrontation could advance labor’s interests. An Industrial Worker editorial asserted that workers could now speak freely because “the bosses and police of Missoula” were “learning to respect us.” He added

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that “the appeal of the I.W.W. is to those men and women who are still able to stand up straight and who are not afraid to fight.” Therefore, he concluded: “Let’s fight!”130 Free-speech fights continued over the course of the decade. Although the circumstances differed in each place, non-IWW-affiliated workers and SP members (who were often one in the same) constantly came to the IWW’s defense. For example, in Salt Lake City, after IWW opponents shot into a crowd and attacked one Wobbly while he spoke, various groups gathered to champion the First Amendment rights of all citizens. William M. Knerr, an SP leader, told the crowd: “I do not approve of the I.W.W. tactics and have taken issue with them many times. But that does not mean that I have the right to organize a band of citizens” and “use violence to break up their meeting.”131 Each time progressive unionists and SP members sought common ground with the IWW, Wobblies rebuffed their advances. The Wobblies believed that the SP could not escape the original sin of the “capitalist” political system. Legal and electoral reforms might lessen workers’ hardships, but only physical struggle could end class oppression. Although calls for violence may have stirred the passions of some unionists for revolution, when direct actions actually happened, unionists typically responded by deciding that boring within and the tactics of progressive unionism represented their best options for obtaining justice. On October 1, 1911, the Los Angeles Times building exploded. Police arrested John and James McNamara, members of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. At that time, the union faced an intense battle with the National Erectors’ Association, an employers’ organization that aggressively promoted the open shop. At first, the McNamaras declared their innocence. But on December 1, 1911, in the middle of his trial, James changed his plea. Employers and antiunion newspapers used this admission of wrongdoing to argue that a commitment to violence pervaded the labor movement. Therefore, it was reasonable for the public to consider all unionists potential agents of destruction.132 Although the McNamaras did not belong to the IWW, the public’s response to their actions supported those who argued that sabotage could only hurt the labor movement. In fact, SP candidate Job Harriman, the frontrunner in that year’s Los Angeles mayoral race, saw his campaign derailed by the explosion. He went from leading in the polls to having no chance to win.133 After the events in Los Angeles, articles, editorials, and letters admonishing proponents of direct action appeared in the labor press. The August 1912 edition of the Miners’ Magazine ran a piece titled “Sabotage,

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‘Jackass Tactics’ Indeed!” The author explained that these “explosions” had produced two detrimental results for workers. First, direct action made workplaces more dangerous for laborers. This miner asked rhetorically, “And who is hurt by this direct action? Who gets killed when the rust-eaten boiler explodes?” The answer: “The working class!” Direct action “sounds decisive, bold, [and] aggressive,” but it destroys machinery, leading to the operators’ lay-offs or deaths. Second, this commitment to violence only “threw the employing class into a panic,” which made them more “determined to resort to extreme measures to crush the labor movement.”134 This unionist understood the saboteur as a criminal who endangered workers’ lives and the labor movement’s ability to effect real change. After the destruction of the Times building, SP members began insisting that advocates of sabotage be banned from holding SP leadership positions. By 1912, Haywood, who sat on the party’s national executive board, became the first target of this purge. Scholars often present this episode as a contest to define the SP, as the party’s “conservative,” or gradualist, wing confronted members of the “left” faction for power. Led by New York lawyer Morris Hillquit and Milwaukee editor and politician Victor Berger, the gradualists envisioned socialism emerging slowly as America went from a nation with little or no state involvement in the economy, to a social democracy with state regulation of corporations and protections for workers, and finally, to a socialist state in which a government elected by the people managed the economy. These socialists pointed to the growing public concern over poverty and the regulatory measures that resulted—especially the statutes at the state and local levels dealing with wages, hours, and safety—as evidence of their claims. As Hillquit argued, the “modern principle of control and regulation of industries by the government indicates the complete collapse of the purely capitalist ideal of noninterference, and signifies that the government may change from an instrument of class rule and exploitation into one of social regulation and protection.” He also asserted that like “the industries, the government is being socialized. The general tendency of both is distinctly towards a Socialist order.”135 Haywood emerged as their chief target because he continually provided fodder for the adversaries of the labor and SP movements, and he opposed the generally accepted view of socialism. In early 1912, he told an audience assembled at New York’s Cooper Union college that he used to believe in political action, when Davis Waite was governor of Colorado. Since Waite left office, however, Haywood had only seen a sustained

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attack on unions by pro-capitalist politicians. The time for action had come. Haywood did not want “to waste time” working with “the ‘immediate demanders’ or the step-at-a-time people.” He exclaimed, “I believe in direct action.” And like other Wobblies, he claimed that direct action would lead to a socialist revolution. Haywood’s vision of socialism included a state run by industrial councils of working men and women. In this society, he said, “we will have no congresses, such as exist today, nor legislatures, nor parliaments, nor councils of municipalities. Our councils will not be filled with aspiring lawyers and ministers, but they will be the conventions of the working class.” He added, “We will have control then of whatever forces of government can give us, but we will not use them to continue to uphold and advance this present system, but we will use the forces of police power to overthrow this present system.”136 Debs, who often fought with the gradualists, offered a critique of Haywood’s address. America’s preeminent Socialist argued that unionists had to challenge capitalism through the law. Sabotage and violent revolution, he explained, are “the tactics of anarchist individuals and not of Socialist collectivists.” The former railroad laborer pointed out that workers “are law-abiding” and would use “proletarian political power” to achieve victory in the class struggle.137 Debs typically remained aloof from party factionalism, but he could not stand by while Haywood defined socialism in a way that most Socialists rejected. Debs’s critique signaled that Haywood would receive little support from party moderates. In fact, the 1912 SP convention ended with Haywood’s expulsion from the party’s National Executive Committee.138 SP membership increased exponentially, both regionally and nationally, between 1909 and 1911, the period in which the IWW grew more antipolitical and party rules prevented advocates of sabotage from holding Socialist leadership positions. The strategy of “boring within,” or Socialists taking over the AFL, seemed promising in this period too. For example, a quarter, or roughly a hundred, of the delegates at the 1912 AFL convention belonged to the SP.139 Despite Haywood being their native son, Rocky Mountain workers appeared far more interested in supporting the SP after national leaders attacked syndicalism and expelled him. By reexamining the well-told story of Joe Hill, we get an even clearer sense of working-class socialists’ opposition to syndicalism. Near ten thirty at night on January 10, 1914, two masked men shot and killed Salt Lake City grocer John G. Morrison and his oldest son, Arling. In his last living act, Arling grabbed the revolver hidden beneath the counter and fired. Morrison’s younger son, fourteen-year-old Merlin, watched the

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murders as he hid behind some shelves. About a half-hour or so later, between eleven o’clock and eleven thirty, IWW organizer Joseph Hillstrom, better known as Joe Hill, called on Doctor Frank McHugh to dress a gunshot wound. McHugh summoned the police. When the officers arrived, they arrested Hill, charging him with two counts of murder. The Wobbly activist pled not guilty, claiming that the jealous boyfriend of his most recent lover had shot him. His trial began in June 1914. Hill defended himself through most of the proceeding. On June 26, the jury convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to death. Hill did get to choose the means of his own execution: either hanging or a firing squad. After exhausting his appeals and gaining a great deal of public support, Hill picked the latter. He fell dead in the yard of Sugarhouse State Prison from four bullets to the heart on November 19, 1915.140 Many questions surrounded the conviction and execution of Hill. Although Merlin saw the crime, the men he watched kill his father and brother wore masks. Essentially, the jury convicted Hill based on his wound. Not only did IWW members protest Hill’s death sentence, but Socialists, union members, and middle-class reformers across the country wired Utah’s governor, William Spry, asking him to commute Hill’s sentence to life in prison. As the Wobbly activist’s execution neared, his defenders got a boost when both Gompers and President Woodrow Wilson asked Spry for a stay of execution.141 Immortalized in song and fiction, and used by historians to detail the antiradical sentiment of the Progressive Era, the conservative nature of the courts, and the courage of IWW militants, Hill’s story continues to receive extensive coverage. Scholars, however, have ignored the reaction to his trial by the workers in his own state. Although prominent government and union officials, as well as rank-and-file workers protested Hill’s fate, the members of the USFL declared that they “did not share in the popular misconception existing outside the state that Hillstrom was not given a fair trial.”142 The USFL pledged not to interfere with the governor’s refusal to commute the court’s ruling. One would expect this reaction from a conservative state federation. IWW members suggested that when Rocky Mountain unionists rejected the IWW and decided to affiliate with the AFL, which the USFL did in 1908, they traded progressive unionism for Gompers’ pure-and-simple approach.143 USFL members, however, proved committed to the insurgent movement within the AFL that sought to “bore within.” From 1911 through 1913, the USFL officially endorsed the SP, making it one of only a handful of state federations in the country to do so.

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Although USFL unionists ended their unqualified backing of the SP after 1913, they continued to advocate legislation intended to foster socialism in the United States. At the 1916 USFL convention, for example, delegates started the Utah Labor Political League and demanded that Congress pass a measure that would force companies to redistribute their earnings among employees. Specifically, they wanted to improve workers’ standard of living by limiting each corporation’s profit margins with a mandate that all revenues exceeding 10 percent be used to increase wages. At that meeting, USFL members endorsed some SP candidates, and they maintained the Intermountain Worker, an SP periodical, as their official newspaper.144 When Wobblies denied that their fight for free speech demonstrated the power of cross-union political action, stopped offering even tepid support for SP candidates, and lauded violent acts despite public reaction, most progressive unionists decided that they had no choice but to differentiate themselves from the IWW. Debates over industrial unionism and contracts could be tolerated, because they did not betray the larger socialdemocratic culture the region’s workers had built. Once Wobblies emphasized violence and repudiated political action, however, they largely rejected social democracy. That USFL members distanced themselves from Hill and the struggle to commute his sentence revealed the extent of the gulf between progressives and Wobblies. Utah workers’ refusal to oppose Hill’s execution, aside from the fact that they thought him guilty, represented both a pragmatic political decision—making sure they were not connected to the IWW in the public’s mind—and a philosophical stand against syndicalism.

Conclusion Union-label trademark laws, Sunday-closing measures, and informal agreements between workers and city government officials to recognize union work rules and wage scales appear as ephemera in the larger story of working-class political activism if we look at them individually. But if we see these ordinances, statutes, and arrangements as pieces of a larger social democratic-mosaic, our perspective changes. Living wages, more leisure time, safe and clean streets, all seemed reasonable to middle-class Americans. Workers’ call for living wages, for instance, did not sound as ominous as their nineteenth-century demand for a redistribution of wealth. This proved especially true when workers and their supporters suggested that employers tie pay increases to the cost of living. Workers

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appeared to be supporting economic growth and progress while offering a reasonable means of getting a fair share of profits. In other words, when workers’ logic for altering market dynamics, which involved greater government intervention into those markets, did not seem to deviate too far from economic orthodoxy, the public supported labor’s position. In a similar vein, the union-label law that progressive unionists acquired appealed to the sanctity of property rights. Other measures, such as shorter hours for women and workingmen’s compensation, placed widely held beliefs about economics and social responsibilities in conflict. In fighting for these acts, labor put common-law doctrines in tension with notions of family life and people’s rights to safe neighborhoods and workplaces. This juxtaposition allowed the labor press to portray advocates of the liberty-of-contract tenet, the assumption-of-risk rule, and higher taxes as heartless and greedy businessmen who cared about nothing but profits. By the early twentieth century, progressive unionists sounded mainstream, because in some ways they were. They had retheorized socialism to fit the realities of the world they inhabited. Members of both the Citizens’ Alliance and the IWW understood what progressive unionists were doing, and both groups challenged these workers’ efforts. The opposition Rocky Mountain workers faced from the Citizens’ Alliance and other champions of free markets made sense. Labor threatened their power. In fact, even before municipal socialism became pervasive, the Wall Street Journal in 1903 editorialized that “once the people become accustomed to one form of socialism, it is easy for them to move to another, and thus a great revolution may be brought about by means so peaceful and gradual that the transition is scarcely noticed.”145 That was certainly what many Rocky Mountain workers hoped would happen. Contrary to progressive unionists and pro-business forces, Wobblies did not see label laws, consumers who only bought label-made goods, eight-hour-day statutes, workingmen’s compensation acts, city-owned coal yards, and other city-funded services as the march toward socialism. They thought workers were merely trading the promise of a new society for moderately better living conditions. Most laborers did not accept this point of view, because IWW leaders offered few tactical alternatives with which to bring about the labor-run government they desired. By marginalizing political action and refusing to work with craftsmen, Wobblies made it difficult for workers to do anything other than strike and give street-corner speeches. To many Rocky Mountain workers, the Wobblies appeared to represent little more than a group of passionate idealists.146

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IWW leaders’ insistence that members demonstrate purity of belief and adhere to one set of tactics led progressive unionists to decide that joining the AFL and updating political strategies for local conditions were their only options. In hard-rock mining towns, workers could vote the Socialist ticket and win; the same was true in Butte. In Denver, workers had to work within the Democratic Party, and in Salt Lake City and Ogden, they returned to the strategy of union-centered political action. Progressive unionists, by focusing on the importance of power instead of the meanings of Democrat, independent voter, or Socialist, navigated a political system unfriendly to a class-based ethic, and had some success in reconfiguring social relations.

Chapter 5

“There Is a War Every Day for the Workers— There Always Has Been” The Persistence of Progressive Unionism

When a lack of money forced part-time middleweight boxer and University of Minnesota football player William Francis Dunne to drop out of college, he took on various low-waged unskilled jobs to survive. Eventually, Dunne secured an apprenticeship as an electrician, and after working at his craft and organizing for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Vancouver, British Columbia, he moved to Butte in 1916. Although a member of the Socialist Party (SP), he joined the Non Partisan League (NPL)—a group of farmers, middle-class reformers, and socialists hoping to facilitate immediate changes by supporting reform candidates regardless of party affiliation—and won a race for the Montana state legislature as a Democrat. He also served a term as vice president of the State Federation of Labor. Like his friend and mentor William Z. Foster, soon after World War I, Dunne became a member of the Communist Party (CP). He agreed with Foster and the majority of Rocky Mountain unionists that politically active workers committed to broad-based unionism should change the character of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) by boring within.1 Although Dunne would avidly support Joseph Stalin at the end of the 1930s, his outlook and actions during the early 1920s fit the mold of Rocky Mountain labor leaders and editors beginning with Joseph Buchanan and continuing through Peter Breen, R. G. Sleater, Julius N. Corbin, David Coates, Daniel McDonald, Rae Lemert, F. H. Richardson, 217

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and Alex Fairgrieve. In other words, Dunne was a pragmatic radical. He sought to unify workers based on their shared social-democratic values, to help them craft those ethics into a well-articulated set of legislative and workplace demands, and to devise strategies and lead collective actions to attain the political power necessary to make their values the governing principles of market and social relations. When he took over editorship of the Butte Bulletin in 1921, he published the writings and speeches of Eugene Debs and other socialists, provided updates on the murder trial of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and offered news of the actions taken by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), all the while advertising and sponsoring talks by Communists. He also reported on and took charge of union meetings, strikes, boycotts, and social gatherings, and spearheaded efforts to reorganize Butte’s hard-rock miners who, it will soon be shown, selfdestructed and inadvertently aided mine owners in their quest to create an open shop. Since the Bulletin served as the official paper of the Montana State Federation of Labor (formerly the Montana Federation of Labor), the State Metal Trades Council, the Metal Trades Council of Butte, and the Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly, most workers likely had little problem with Dunne’s sympathies for a communist revolution, despite their belief in building a socialist America through piecemeal reforms. Dunne’s tenure with the paper ended in 1924, when he became the editor of the CP’s main organ, the Daily Worker, and moved to Chicago. To suggest that Dunne emerged in the late teens and early twenties as the region’s next militant pragmatist who believed in and advanced progressive union tactics and social-democratic ideals might at first seem inconsequential. But the assertion takes on more weight when we consider that between 1914 and 1924, aggressive employers across the nation used their political influence to blunt the effectiveness of pro-labor laws, exploited the internal weaknesses of the union movement to fragment the fragile bonds of solidarity between the AFL and some of its recently organized “new” unions, and played upon middle-class desires for industrial peace and fears of radicalism. Add to that the attacks on labor by attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer—preventing “subversive” literature from being distributed through the U.S. mail, arresting union leaders deemed too radical, and deporting militant immigrant workers—and the significance of the assertion grows further still.2 Dunne and other Rocky Mountain workers found themselves at the forefront of this conservative backlash. In the tumultuous spring and summer of 1914, for example, tensions within the Butte Miners’ Union

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(BMU), precipitated by ethnocentrism, led to intralabor movement confrontations, which culminated in the dynamiting of the BMU hall. To make matters worse, the Anaconda Company, which aggressively sought to create an open shop, used the workers’ fight to convince the governor to declare martial law and suspend Socialist mayor Lewis Duncan’s rule. In less than three months, Butte went from being a model of how workers could wield political influence, to a place where soldiers carried out the will of corporate executives. Earlier that year, in April, Colorado national guardsmen massacred miners and their families at Ludlow. Afterward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the head of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CFI), navigated his way through negative press and a federal hearing by appearing to accept workers’ demands. The catch, however, was that Rockefeller forced laborers into company unions and created welfare capitalism, a series of incentives and programs intended to win worker loyalty through paternalism. Welfare capitalism allowed employers to avoid acknowledging miners, through their unions, as market actors with the right to negotiate pay, hours of work, and workplace conditions. Utah employers and corporate executives throughout the nation followed Rockefeller’s lead. The story of the emergence of welfare capitalism and the fact that laborers’ efforts to alter industrial relations were typically stymied from the end of World War I until the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935 are well known.3 Indeed, by the 1920s, workers’ power, both regionally and nationally, had declined. Decline, however, did not mean defeat.4 Workers in the Rocky Mountain West and elsewhere remained committed to battling for shorter hours, living wages, and safer conditions.5 In the Mountain West region, unionists and former unionists continued to fight the class struggle from 1914 into the 1930s by trying to organize as many workers as possible, striking, engaging in class-conscious consumption, and voting for pro-labor candidates. Their scorecard was simply not as impressive during this period as it had been in earlier years, with their victories from the 1890s through the 1910s and the passage of the various workingmen’s compensation acts. Dunne summed up this reality succinctly: “There is a war every day for the workers—there always has been.” 6 He meant that although the labor movement had suffered setbacks locally, regionally, and nationally, workers remained in a constant battle for justice. In the past, success had allowed members of the labor movement to broaden their struggle to include cleaner and healthier neighborhoods, for example, as part of their larger project to reconstruct social relations. When employers gained the

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upper hand in the everyday war, however, workers’ aims had to change accordingly. “Power is relative,” Dunne asserted, and then explained that “it varies inversely as the power opposed to it.” 7 Before 1914, these Rocky Mountain unionists had not only advocated that public officials administer markets, but they successfully implemented laws that accomplished that end. Furthermore, they engaged in collective actions to uphold those measures. Employers attacked them because of their successes. In the post-1914 period of union decline, Dunne advocated that workers continue calling for and carrying out efforts to reacquire justice. He and others also insisted that laborers assess their flaws and examine their own role in allowing owners to defeat strikes, to establish open shops, to create company unions, and to retard labor’s political progress and weaken its political might. In recognizing their own weaknesses, progressive unionists realized that they had to build a polyglot working-class movement, find a way to attain political power at the federal level, and have more patience for the tactics that worked in the past.

Ethnocentrism, Racism, and Corruption With the significant exception of the near-uniform support for Asian exclusion, the racial and ethnic outlook of Rocky Mountain white workers from 1870 to 1900 varied greatly from town to town and union to union. Some organizations, such as District 15 of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), welcomed all but Asian workers, and insisted on equality for each laborer within that union. By contrast, many hard-rock miners’ locals affiliated with the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) organized African Americans and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, but demanded that mine owners restrict the nonwhite and immigrant members to the above-ground, lower-paying positions. From 1900 through the 1920s, the racial attitudes of the white majority remained in flux. Thus, the potential existed for organized workers to broaden their regional labor network by increasing the number of advocates for social-democratic values, and to strengthen the solidarity that already existed across skill and gender lines. Nevertheless, union members sometimes divided over the admission of immigrants and people of color, the inclusionists and exclusionists hardened their positions, and factional strife grew. By looking at examples involving the UMWA, the Salt Lake City Building Laborers’ Protective Union (BLPU), and the WFM, we see the crucial role that notions of race and ethnicity played in determining the effectiveness of progressive unionism in the early twentieth century.

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UMWA District 15 comprised coal miners from Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, and included descendants of the Knights of Labor members who massacred Chinese miners at Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885. In 1902, this local asserted that “fully one-half the coal miners in this state [Colorado] are foreigners,” and although many thought that “foreigners do not make good union men . . . we say right here they do.”8 Their proimmigrant stance, however, included only Europeans. That year, District 15 members demanded that Congress renew the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. They claimed that Asian workers lowered “the purchasing power of the wage earner.” They further asserted that the Chinese represented a “subhuman race” of people who could not understand the principles of unionism.9 In juxtaposing Chinese miners with the European immigrant and African American workers whom white unionists welcomed into their ranks, we find a conception of racial hierarchy that privileged one group of wage earners over another based on skin color. But who were “good union men”? Asians did not measure up, according to UMWA members, because they accepted the contract-labor system that forced them into a period of service for a low wage in exchange for travel to the United States. Therefore, the unionists’ thinking went, Asian immigrants willingly surrendered their claim to high wages, which signified their inability to seek an American standard of living.10 Instead of requesting that the federal government uphold the 1885 Foran Act, which outlawed corporations importing contract workers from labor agents, UMWA members simply marked Asians as a race of dependent laborers unworthy of belonging to the new social order they had started to construct. In 1907, however, UMWA members in Rock Springs admitted Japanese and Chinese miners into their local union. This local became the first AFL affiliate in the country to accept Asian workers. That year, the Union Pacific Railroad Company (UP), which ran the Rock Springs mines, replaced striking union members with Japanese laborers. The strike succeeded, as the union-affiliated miners won a 20 percent wage increase and the eighthour day. When the conflict ended, Japanese coal diggers still employed by the UP asked to join the union. After some deliberation, union members voted to accept Japanese, Chinese, and all other miners employed in the area into their ranks. This decision proved more than a token gesture. Harry W. Fox, editor of the Wyoming Labor Journal, used his paper to promote interethnic and interracial gatherings. Labor Day festivities and an annual celebration of winning the eight-hour day were two such efforts to promote a sense of

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solidarity that extended beyond the membership rolls. The Labor Journal also ran columns critiquing the AFL on its exclusionist practices and unfriendly attitude toward African Americans.11 Such a fundamental change in demeanor by white workers proved far from typical. An inclusionist sensibility touched a number of the region’s workers, but a significant, if not larger, percentage of white unionists remained wedded to older racist and ethnocentric beliefs and practices. These divisions exacerbated other points of contention, particularly the debate over whether to join the IWW. This struggle was especially intense from 1905 through 1907. Salt Lake City construction laborers belonging to the BLPU, for instance, divided over the issue of admitting African Americans to their organization in 1902. Those in favor of inclusion eventually amended the union’s constitution, and in 1903 the BLPU admitted African Americans. The inclusionists’ success did not spell the end of tensions within the union over conceptions of race and union membership. In 1905, hostilities reemerged when proponents of exclusion captured some of the union’s leadership positions. The majority of workers, who favored inclusion, attempted to avoid another fight over this issue and voted to charter the union with the newly organized IWW. The Wobbly constitution forbade affiliated locals from barring workers from membership because of race. On March 5, 1906, the old BLPU became IWW Local 262, but the combativeness between exclusionists and inclusionists did not recede.12 On May 1, L. J. Trujillo, lead organizer and recording secretary, informed F. Wiseman that he was suspected of uttering racist views and that union officers were going to schedule a hearing to examine the matter. Such behavior under the IWW constitution could result in Wiseman’s expulsion. A fellow union member reported to Trujillo that Wiseman, a former elected official in the old BLPU, had “made remarks that if we allow in, such members as Spaniards and Italians (Degos as [he] call[ed] them) the union will be ruined.” Trujillo’s fight against discrimination was not only predicated on his sense of right and wrong, but also informed by his personal experiences. The leadership of the BLPU had ignored a grievance he once filed. Although the union’s minutes captured only vague details of Trujillo’s case, they did convey his anger over his family being “deprived from their bread and butter” when “a discrimination was made on [him] under the charter of BLPU of A.” Previous leaders appeared to have ignored Trujillo’s appeal for action.13 The conflict within Local 262 further intensified when executive officer Gus Anderson, representing the union’s racist element, attempted to appoint

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Wiseman treasurer amid Trujillo’s efforts to discipline Wiseman for violating the IWW’s constitution. During a debate over whether Wiseman’s utterances barred him from holding local office, Anderson exclaimed, if “the I.W.W. interferes with my rulings as to” Wiseman’s holding the office of treasurer, “they can stick their charter up their ass.” Trujillo responded to Anderson’s outburst by filing charges against him for defaming the local charter.14 Affiliating with the IWW clearly did not mean that these construction laborers had resolved their disputes over race. To further confuse our understanding of this struggle, Local 262 disaffiliated from the Wobblies the following year. Does this mean that the exclusionists won the battle? That would seem a reasonable assumption if the workers had based their decisions only on membership eligibility. But when we also include their desire to pass laws that would lead to stateadministered markets, it becomes evident how difficult it was for these unionists to belong to an organization that represented both their political beliefs and their desire for an inclusive labor movement. Some historians assume that immigrants and people of color favored the IWW over the AFL. This is a logical position considering that AFL leaders avoided, as best they could, organizing eastern and southern European immigrants, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. Conversely, Wobblies proclaimed their unions open to all who wanted to join.15 Presenting workers’ choices this starkly, however, obscures the context within which inclusionists had to decide their course of action. The concerns of these construction workers had less to do with national affiliation and more to do with building greater solidarity and advancing their legislative agenda. From 1905 through 1907, Rocky Mountain workers hotly debated whether boring within the AFL or attempting to create a new labor movement through the IWW offered the best means of redistributing wealth and reordering power relations. Unlike their fellow workers in Colorado and Montana, unionists belonging to the Utah State Federation of Labor (USFL) voted to affiliate with the Wobblies. That relationship lasted only one year because Utah workers could not accept the IWW’s official policy of refusing to sign contracts, leaders’ opposition to union-label campaigns, and the general skepticism of engaging in political action. In the case of these building laborers, we do know that after disaffiliating from the IWW, they existed as an independent union until 1914, when they affiliated with the AFL. From 1906 through 1914, they continued to work with the city and state federations of labor by participating in collective actions such as boycotts and union-label campaigns.

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Furthermore, they endorsed SP candidates throughout the Progressive Era. This behavior suggests that they continued to find political action viable.16 Therefore, the choice they faced, whether to remain part of the IWW, was not based solely on the Wobblies’ policy of racial inclusion, but also on how well their political beliefs and electoral strategies would be welcomed. Both inclusionists and exclusionists appear to have seen themselves as socialists or social democrats, and not as syndicalists or pure-and-simple unionists. Racists forced white advocates of a politically active, polyglot labor movement into the position of either supporting an organization that did not represent their political aims, the IWW, or agreeing to a limited, white-only version of progressive unionism. Those on the excluded list either had to accept banishment from the labor movement or fight to change racist views and pursue pro-labor laws through other organizations. Trujillo and the other nonwhites in the BLPU, along with the Japanese coal miners at Rock Springs, attempted to deal with racists within the progressive union movement, as opposed to becoming syndicalists. Although the Rock Springs coal miners and the Salt Lake City building laborers reveal that some of the region’s workers battled to make their organizations more open, it would be a mistake to believe that inclusion was becoming the norm. Commitments to solidarity in its broadest sense varied greatly within organizations. In fact, some white workers grew more vocal in their support for exclusionist practices just as their organization’s official position advocated inclusion. The WFM provided one such example. Beginning in 1905, the WFM’s executive board declared that the federation would grant membership to all miners who wanted to join the organization, regardless of race or ethnicity. The board also sanctioned ethnic working-class periodicals to serve as official voices of the organization, and hired organizers who could speak Italian, Finnish, and Slovene. These efforts to build an inclusive union spanned the WFM’s affiliation with the IWW (1905 to 1908), its time as an independent federation (1908 to 1911), and its association with the AFL (1911 to 1916). Throughout these years, a number of local union leaders, based on the wishes of the men they represented, wrote letters to the board protesting this policy. Board members almost always replied with a sharp insistence that local leaders enforce inclusion.17 Local unions more firmly committed to exclusion did not question or formally oppose the board’s directives. They simply ignored them. When

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organizers from Trinidad, Colorado, for instance, met with their fellow unionists in Bingham, Utah, they discovered that the Bingham miners had adopted a policy of “unfair treatment of Italians.” The Coloradoans filed a formal complaint with WFM leaders.18 Notions of race, ethnicity, and class unity obviously varied from mining camp to mining camp. The proponents of exclusion failed to grasp that their opposition to a polyglot labor movement interfered with the expansion of labor’s network, impeded the rise in living standards for the whole working class, and limited the effectiveness of strikes and boycotts by preventing potential allies from partaking in these collective actions. Advocating nativist and white-only unions also allowed employers opportunities to play on these divisions and slow, if not stop, the advance of workers’ efforts to socialize markets. Events in Butte from 1912 through 1914 starkly demonstrated this reality. In March 1912, the Anaconda Mining Company fired about five hundred Finnish miners without warning. The Finns turned to the BMU to avenge this wrong, but the BMU’s membership voted not to strike. BMU members cited Finnish miners’ willingness to use direct action as a central reason why they distrusted these new immigrants. Union leaders referred to Finns as “transient hoodlums” and called their advocacy of sabotage “extremely repugnant and absolutely abhorred by the great majority of this union.”19 Although not all Finns advocated direct action, of course, a significant number did belong to the IWW. They did so because the BMU left them no choice.20 A key point of friction between the Finns and the Anaconda Company was the rustling-card system. Anaconda officials issued rustling cards, or work permits, to its employees in 1912. In filling out these documents, miners had to provide their work histories. Many unionists feared that owners were using this information to blacklist activists and to spy on their meetings. A majority of BMU members voted to have demonstrations against the new hiring system, but BMU officers ignored the members and did nothing.21 Finns, Wobblies, and some progressives became increasingly critical of these leaders. To make matters worse, rumors circulated that BMU officials stole money from a fund for striking copper miners in Michigan. Some members started to suggest that the Michigan miners never received the funds. Others pointed out that union president Bert Riley lived rather extravagantly for his salary.22 Whether the charges of corruption had merit or not, a significant number of miners believed these accusations. By May 1914, talk of creating a new miners’ union had surfaced.

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This challenge to corruption did not occur peacefully. On June 13, each BMU incumbent officer won reelection. Supporters of the victorious slate marched in the city’s annual Miners’ Union Day parade to celebrate. During the festivities, a group of dissidents rushed the paraders. Fistfights broke out. As the melee began, another band of dissatisfied miners started tossing furniture from the windows of the Miners’ Union Hall. In the midst of this chaos, city councilman Frank Curran entered BMU headquarters in an attempt to restore order. Insurgents responded to Curran’s pleas for calm by pushing him from a second-story window onto the street. The mob then stole the union’s safe. They opened it with dynamite and took an estimated $1,600.23 The palpable factionalism that produced the June 13 riot grew worse as the sun set that evening. A group of miners who were gathered in the union hall mistook a fellow BMU member for a saboteur. Instead of first ascertaining the man’s identity, huddled miners immediately drew their guns and shot. The unidentified man fell wounded. Mayor Duncan tried to convince all aggrieved parties to end the violence, but none would listen. Dejected, he ordered the police to clear the area. Duncan knew that the anonymous workers who vowed to dynamite the Miners’ Union Hall would carry out their promise. That night, they did.24 On June 21, in the wake of the riot, still disgusted by the treatment of the Finns, angered by the rustling-card system, and convinced of the leadership’s corruption, roughly eight thousand progressives and Wobblies allied to create the Butte Mine Workers’ Union (BMWU). Although WFM officials claimed the new organization was an IWW front, it was indeed a union born of compromise, as evidenced by its first officers’ credentials. Neither president-elect Muckie McDonald nor secretary-treasurer Phil Christian belonged to the IWW. But the BMWU’s vice president Joe Bradley and its recording secretary Jack Sullivan were Wobblies. McDonald claimed that the BMWU did “not intend to affiliate with the I.W.W.,” and added that BMWU members were “the real union men. We believe in labor unions, but think that they should be controlled by the will of the majority.”25 Being “real union men” in the Rocky Mountain West meant insisting that unions operate democratically, and that the members of these organizations constantly battle for control over markets, better workplaces, more leisure time, a higher standard of living, and increased political power. Achieving these ends depended on unity during strikes, boycotts, and elections. The Anaconda Company, which played on the miners’ internal dissent by sacking the Finns and introducing the rustling card, now refused to recog-

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nize the new union. They claimed that the BMWU belonged to the IWW, and that Wobblies had destroyed the union hall. Managers then mounted a publicity campaign to persuade the larger citizenry of these assertions. Unfortunately for Butte’s workers, a number of Wobbly leaders publicly celebrated the fall of the BMU’s hall. Big Bill Haywood, for example, wrote, “Direct Action was employed as no other means could have been used to rid” Butte workers “of the incubus—the boss controlled union—that had fastened itself upon them and was sapping their life blood.”26 With the foundation organization of arguably the strongest local labor movement in the country in shambles, Anaconda Company officials immediately turned their attention to destroying the social-democratic culture that defined Butte’s social relations. With little effort, company leaders convinced Governor Samuel Stewart that the BMWU now intended to destroy company property. On August 30, 1914, the hiring office of the Parrot Mine, one of the Anaconda Company’s buildings, exploded. The governor, without notifying Mayor Duncan, sent the National Guard to Butte to promote “law and order.” On September 1, Stewart declared martial law. After the guard arrived, Anaconda officials charged BMWU members with trespassing and promised to arrest anyone from the organization found on the company’s land. Next, the state began impeachment hearings against Duncan and Sheriff Tim Driscoll. A group of businessmen, at the behest of Anaconda officials, had filed a complaint against the two, charging them with dereliction of duty. These business owners swore that the mayor and the sheriff had failed to protect private property. Instead of a hearing in the county or state court to resolve the issue, as state law demanded, Duncan and Driscoll went before a military court in late September. The National Guard officers who sat on the jury found the mayor and the sheriff guilty. SP leaders responded to the verdict by suing the National Guard for overstepping its jurisdiction. In October, the Montana Supreme Court overturned the convictions. The high court supported the SP’s position and found that a military court could not convict civilians. By that point, however, the ruling did little to alter the momentum of events. Guardsmen had submitted to the wishes of the Anaconda Company since their arrival. They acted as an antiunion force that kept BMWU organizers away from the Anaconda’s increasingly nonunion workforce.27 By October 1914, progressive unionists in Butte and their powerful ally, the mayor, could do little. In 1913, the National Municipal Review, a nonpartisan periodical that focused on urban development, reported that Butte had “suffered from

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misgovernment” in the past. Duncan’s Socialist administration, however, had “made the city clean morally and physically.” The article further pointed out that “the city itself [had been] lifted out of bankruptcy to a position of good credit.”28 Duncan opened the city’s books to auditors and proved that the previous practices of graft by other Butte executives had given way to “honest” government. Furthermore, police arrested grocers and restaurateurs for violating health codes, and city employees paved streets and alleys and cleared them of garbage. Duncan’s commitment to cleaning up Butte, both figuratively and literally, resulted in a dramatic drop in cases of various diseases—from 745 in 1910 to 78 in 1911. The death rate among children under twelve fell by 60 percent.29 The Socialist mayor had followed the wishes of his constituents and made Butte a better place in which to live and work. Now divisions within the BMU, stemming from ethnocentric attitudes and corruption, set in motion a series of events that culminated in the removal of an administration committed to governing by the social-democratic values that workers had struggled so hard for. Betraying solidarity, even for a moment, allowed other festering concerns to proliferate into a factional war. BMU officials not only provided Anaconda Company managers the opening to divide one of the progressive union movements’ essential organizations, they allowed a hostile state government to reverse the advance toward working-class justice. Collective action at the ballot box by the city’s workers had long provided unionists the power to repulse all previous incursions. As progressive unionists had feared since 1905, Anaconda Company leaders simply had to claim that the progressives were radicals. The IWW openly advocated direct action, and union opponents used any opportunity they could to label all activist workers saboteurs and Wobbly sympathizers. In convincing the governor that the BMWU belonged to the IWW, the Anaconda Company used the power of the state to create an open shop and remove the mayor. White workers who allowed their racism and nativism to guide their actions, and syndicalists who insisted on violence, made inclusive progressives’ task of battling for pro-labor laws all the more difficult. Progressive unionists’ tactics to reshape social relations—organizing, voting, boycotting, buying union-label goods, supporting cooperatives, and striking—all depended on a commitment to local-level solidarity. When white workers employed a racial hierarchy, or adopted the view that immigrant contract laborers represented an inferior group of people, they sabotaged their own social-democratic project.

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Ludlow and Industrial Peace The spring before Butte’s metal miners lost their battles with the Anaconda Company, coal miners in Colorado faced an onslaught from the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CFI) and the state militia. On September 23, 1913, the coal miners who worked near Ludlow grew tired of company control over their living and working conditions. They went on strike. After engaging in a series of physical confrontations with company guards and surviving a harsh winter outdoors because they were evicted from company housing, these workers experienced the full fury of the Colorado National Guard. Near nine o’clock in the morning on Monday April 20, 1914, a guardsman instructed strike leader Louis Tikas to bring out a miner for questioning. When Tikas turned to comply, guardsmen began indiscriminately firing their weapons at the tents where miners and their families lived. The shooting continued until the soldiers ran out of bullets at four thirty that afternoon. That evening, the guardsmen set fire to the tents. A memorial to the five men, two women, and eleven children massacred at Ludlow on that day serves as a reminder of working-class courage and the lengths to which taxpayer-funded soldiers would sometimes go to support employer control over labor markets.30 A visit to the recently refurbished landmark off Interstate 25 will stir emotions—sympathy for the miners, anger at John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the CFI managers for the terrible workplace and living conditions they subjected their workers to, and disgust with the guardsmen’s willingness to slaughter innocents. What often gets forgotten, however, is why these miners were striking in the first place. They did not want CFI officials to adopt new policies. Instead, they demanded that their employer observe the measures the Colorado State Federation of Labor (CSFL) had shepherded through the state assembly, which required safer mining practices, established eight hours as a legal workday, and mandated the timely payment of wages in legal currency. Ludlow, in other words, was about the law. Helen Schloss, who led a women’s picket line before the massacre, passionately emphasized this point to readers of the Wyoming Labor Journal. She reported that CFI’s control over the towns in which workers lived allowed managers to violate state laws by forcing miners to work extended hours, withholding workers’ pay, and having company stores gouge their paychecks. As a result, she argued, when the strike commenced, CFI’s political power grew. The soldiers who arrested her for picketing allegedly came to restore “law and order.” Order in a company mining camp

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meant “obeying the laws of the invisible government, which was Rockefeller.” She further explained that “Uncle Sam’s boys are neutral, that is what a free American citizen might think, but let not the workers forget that way down deep under the government is this invisible power, and it is the unseen hand that will murder women, and children.”31 Workers who possessed state-sanctioned rights, but lacked the political influence necessary to have those rights recognized, had little recourse. Striking seemed to be the only option they had to try and make their employers adhere to Colorado’s statutes. Although the strike failed, it appeared that the widespread press coverage and a federal investigation that followed the massacre might actually produce the results Colorado’s coal miners wanted. Ludlow occurred at a crucial moment. It represented one more example of rising class warfare in early twentieth-century America. Immigrant women and girls in the garment trades of New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago struck in 1909 and 1910; railroad workers on the Harriman line united in a general strike in 1911; West Virginia coal miners fought bloody battles with their employers in 1912; and textile workers, in 1912 and 1913, walked picket lines in Paterson, New Jersey, and Lawrence, Massachusetts.32 President William Howard Taft responded to public calls to end this violence by creating the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (USCIR). His successor, Woodrow Wilson, charged the body with discovering the reasons for industrial unrest. From 1913 to 1915, the USCIR held hearings and questioned roughly 740 witnesses, including IWW organizer Vincent St. John, SP leader Morris Hillquit, AFL president Samuel Gompers, a host of rank-andfile laborers, and wealthy industrialists such as Rockefeller. Commission members discovered that conditions for wageworkers across America were worse than most academics, pundits, and politicians had imagined. One-third of the country’s workforce took home less than $10 a week, and 65 percent of the people owned just 2 percent of America’s wealth. Long hours, bad working conditions, and the widespread use of company guards and spies to intimidate workers all became a matter of public record.33 Thanks to USCIR chair Frank Walsh, Rockefeller and CFI became the most visible representatives of this greed and cruelty. On January 25, 1915, Walsh started a three-day interrogation of Rockefeller. After the massacre, Rockefeller claimed that his managers had not informed him of the conditions in his towns. Rockefeller’s responses to Walsh’s questions, however, demonstrated that he controlled every aspect of life in his

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coal camps, and that he knew of the rising tensions at Ludlow.34 When released in 1916, the USCIR’s findings, popularly referred to as the Walsh Report, argued that the “unequal distribution of wealth,” “unemployment and [the] denial of opportunity to earn a living,” the “denial of justice in the creation, in the adjudication, and in the administration of law,” and the “denial of the right and opportunity to form effective organizations” caused industrial unrest.35 WFM activist Guy Miller praised Walsh for pointing out “the evils of autocracy in industry, the necessity for democracy, [and] the impossibility of industrial peace without justice.” Miller predicted that “the truths” Walsh “ha[d] revealed will never be hidden nor forgotten. An enlightened people will act upon them, and labor will come into its own.”36 In mentioning industrial peace, Miller was referring to the efforts of middle-class reformers to find policies that fostered economic growth and allowed federal and state officials to regulate businesses in order to protect citizenship rights.37 As industrial violence became more prevalent, industrial peace advocates promoted negotiated settlements between unionists and employers. Their solution mirrored Walsh’s findings, as he concluded that industrial peace could only come with an expansion of workers’ rights. He favored collective bargaining as the best means to accomplish this end. Rocky Mountain workers concurred with these findings as long as their unions functioned as their bargaining agents, which the USCIR favored. Walsh’s tough questioning of Rockefeller, and the wave of public scrutiny it created, forced Rockefeller to craft a version of industrial peace that would be beneficial to him. With the help of publicist Ivy Lee and former Canadian labor minister W. L. Mackenzie King, Rockefeller devised the Colorado Industrial Plan in 1915. The three men decided that they would improve CFI’s public image by creating a workers’ grievance committee. In January 1915, CFI informed miners that they could vote on representatives for a committee that would air their concerns at monthly meetings. No unions outside the firm, however, had permission to negotiate on the miners’ behalf.38 Rockefeller presented his plan in the January 1916 issue of Atlantic Monthly. Throughout the piece, titled “Labor and Capital—Partners,” Rockefeller used the term “cooperation.” He wrote that wealth would continue to grow and that both workers and owners would benefit if the two could learn to cooperate. “If these great forces co-operate, the products of industry are steadily increased; whereas, if they fight, the production of wealth is certain to be either retarded or stopped altogether.”

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Rockefeller further claimed, “The right of men to associate themselves together for their mutual advancement is incontestable; and under our modern conditions, the organization of Labor is necessary just as is the organization of Capital.” He then outlined how his vision would work. Those employed for more than two years would receive a wage increase; all underground workers would have an eight-hour day; wages would be paid biweekly; and production schedules and wage rates would be posted. He neglected to point out that these measures represented the UMWA’s demands during the Ludlow strike, and that these changes simply meant that CFI would now comply with state law. CFI officials instead boasted that the company union and Rockefeller’s paternalism, not the UMWA, granted miners these improvements.39 Although clearly self-serving, Rockefeller’s invention of welfare capitalism served as an admission that the social-democratic values championed by Rocky Mountain workers had become mainstream. In earlier moments of violent class conflict in the 1880s and 1890s, the public sided with the workers, and business owners tried to counter those sympathies with public appeals to the natural laws of economics. By the early twentieth century, the living wage and determining the cost of living had supplanted older conceptions that wealth distribution should and could occur naturally. In fact, the USCIR released its findings at a moment when middle-class reformers assumed that maintaining a healthy society depended on assessing social problems and the extent of a crisis through interviews and quantitative analysis. Once they diagnosed a social ill, these reformers then attempted to prescribe a solution based on the facts they had gathered. The Walsh report, using those methods, demonstrated that class conflict was profound and that owners were largely to blame. The proposed solution, negotiation, worried men like Rockefeller, because it meant recognizing that unions had the right to participate in setting wage rates, hours of work, and shop-floor rules. Rockefeller and most employers feared the consequences of publicly acknowledging unions as legitimate market actors. By engaging in collective bargaining, employers would not only bolster the influence unions held over markets, they would cement labor organizations as the agents through which the working class could obtain greater rights. This would encourage organizing drives, strengthen the ability of city and state federations of labor to implement measures that reflected workers’ values, and promote the collective actions that unionists used to enforce the laws and policies they had secured. Rockefeller traded high wages, shorter hours, and safer conditions, for supplanting unions. He did this because

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unions functioned as the organizations that turned cultural beliefs into social ­ realities. In other words, with these concessions he would rehabilitate his public image while seriously impairing the engines that would otherwise have continued to drive wages ever higher, shorten work hours even more, and mandate costly workplace safety measures. In Colorado, corporate welfare by itself did not weaken union power. The Industrial Commission Law that emerged simultaneously with the industrial plan, however, did. This measure gave a committee of three people, appointed by the governor, the power to arbitrate strikes. The commission also had the authority to suspend strikes for a thirty-day cooling-off period, which the authors of the law claimed would allow for better negotiations.40 In this new model, forced arbitration replaced collective bargaining. National AFL leaders feared that such measures would spread to most other states. They published the pamphlet Involuntary Servitude in Colorado in 1917. It outlined the threat this statute posed to the labor movement, explaining that commissioners could “invade union meetings,” “prohibit workmen from leaving their employment” for thirty days, fine “workmen $10 to $50 per day for violation of anti-strike provisions,” and “fine workmen $50 to $1,000 and also imprison them for advising other workmen to leave their employment.” Colorado unionists argued that these powers transcended and overshadowed the “authority conferred upon all other political departments of the state.” The AFL and CSFL contended that by allowing the commission the right to keep laborers at work, state officials had sanctioned the violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. Specifically, the measure granted the commission the ability to hold workers in involuntary servitude. The authors went on to argue that “Government by commission is not a government of or by the people” because the “Industrial Commission is not directly responsible to the people of the state.”41 With the authority to pronounce strikes illegal, state legislators had given the commission the right to declare strikers criminals. Progressive unionists succeeded in passing eight-hour-day laws and workingmen’s compensation acts from the 1890s through 1917 because of their ability to gain public support for such measures with their sound arguments. In attaining the Industrial Commission Law, employers showed that they too recognized that shaping public opinion was the first step in waging class warfare in the political sphere. By adopting the rhetoric of industrial peace, Rockefeller influenced the passage of a law that appeased the citizenry and made him appear to have accepted the conclusions of the Walsh report. He raised wages, shortened hours, and seemed to accept

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negotiation as the solution to finding industrial peace. In actuality, Rocke­ feller provided a model for other employers of how to use paternalism and manipulate public opinion to impede the progressive union movement.

From Company Town to Urban Centers Labor’s loss at Ludlow and the passage of the Industrial Commission Law did not necessarily mean that employers had taken the upper hand in the battle for power between owners and workers. Company towns, especially coal towns, had been the Achilles heel of the Rocky Mountain labor movement since unions had first formed in the region. Employers knew that in order to make the industrial commission measure an effective weapon, they needed to use it to defeat workers in a powerful working-class enclave. Between 1918 and 1920, they made Denver their target. When the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America formed in 1918 to demand higher rates of pay, Denver Tramway Company officials turned to the Colorado Industrial Commission (CIC), the state body created by the Industrial Commission statute, for help. The CIC established a subsistence wage for the city in order to determine if the tramway unionists’ assertion that they did not make enough money to purchase basic necessities was mere hyperbole or a terrible reality. The commission ruled that a male worker with a wife and three children should be able to afford rent, food, utilities, and other provisions if he made $1,016.25 a year. Since this wage-rate dispute occurred during the First World War, however, the case went to the National War Labor Board (NWLB) instead of the CIC. Woodrow Wilson had created the twelve-member NWLB in order to maintain production during the war. The board accomplished its mission by forcing employers and unions to accept mediation instead of engaging in lockouts or strikes. After looking at the CIC’s study, the NWLB ruled in favor of the workers. Tramway officials raised wages from $0.40 to $0.48 an hour. As a result, trainmen earned $1,368.40 per year, well over the CIC’s defined level of minimum subsistence. Yet even after the raise, tramway workers continued to claim they could not afford essential goods and services. But before they could start the process for a new hearing, the war ended and Wilson dismantled the NWLB.42 Workers now had to take their grievances before the CIC. They feared, rightly as it turned out, that the CIC would oppose their demands. Denver unionists knew that prior to the war, the CIC had sided with owners

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in every case it heard, and they also recognized that not one “friend” of labor sat on the three-member board. In the summer of 1920, Tramway Company officials tried to destroy the union by forcing a strike. Suspecting that workers would defy the Industrial Commission Law, which required labor to file a grievance with the state and wait thirty days before striking, managers cut pay rates and hired renowned strikebreaker John “Black Jack” Jerome to incite physical confrontations. As anticipated, on August 1, the Tramway employees did indeed ignore the industrial commission statute and went immediately on strike. On August 3, Jerome tested the trainmen’s vow that no cars, except those hospital bound, would carry passengers until employers met their demands. He piloted a car out of the Fourteenth and Arapahoe station. The strikers overturned the car and cheered briefly. Black Jack’s mercenaries, lying in wait, sprayed gasoline into the trainmen’s eyes and laughed at their screams. A riot ensued. Strikers and their sympathizers attempted to burn down a barn where the company housed its streetcars. Prepared for this move, Jerome and his well-armed force burst out of the barn and fired randomly into the crowd. Seven people died, including women and children. Around the same time, a mob angered by the Denver Post’s proTramway stance ransacked the paper’s building. The rioters destroyed furniture, smashed windows, and burned print paper.43 Denver’s Republican mayor Dewey Bailey, who had ascended to the city’s executive office with the help of many labor votes but without labor’s endorsement, assisted the Tramway Company. Bailey allowed Jerome to deputize members of the American Legion. Legionnaires acted out vigilante fantasies, beating workers at will. The strike proved a sound defeat for the Tramway employees. In its final assessment, the Post blamed the battle on unnamed radicals who supposedly belonged to the IWW.44 Some of the city’s middle-class reformers, calling themselves the Denver Commission of Religious Forces, conducted their own independent investigation to determine the reason for the violence. The commission went back to the trainmen’s 1918 assertion that they could not subsist on their wages even after the NWLB’s favorable ruling and the subsequent raise they received. The Commission on Religious Forces discovered that the CIC and labor board had used the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculations for New York City to determine subsistence rates. The CIC and NWLB simply assumed that New York City’s cost of living would surpass that of Denver. The Commission on Religious Forces, however, determined that the price of essential goods, dry goods, light, rent, and coal in Denver equaled or exceeded prices for these same items in New

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York City. Furthermore, their research revealed that only Philadelphia had higher food costs than Denver. In their final estimate, a family consisting of a husband, wife, and three children needed $1,400 a year to survive.45 Vindication did little to advance worker’s basic existence. Unionists blamed Mayor Bailey for their defeat. In 1918, Denver workers attempted to return to their pre-1904 strategy of union-centered political action, or supporting a slate of pro-labor candidates regardless of party affiliation. Recall that Denver workers joined Robert Speer’s Democratic machine in 1904 after the disastrous 1902 election. In 1902, a divide between workers who supported the Socialist Party and those who favored union-centered political action allowed the Citizens’ Alliance to capture the Republican Party and install one of its members, James Peabody, as governor. At both the municipal and state levels, Denver and Colorado unionists secured a number of pro-labor laws between 1904 and 1916. Beginning in 1911, however, the rise of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party saw some workers detach themselves from the Speer machine. When the Twenty-First Colorado General Assembly, which met in 1917, failed to pass a single meaningful pro-labor law because Governor Julius Gunter, a Speer loyalist, refused to work with independent Democrats and Progressives, union activists rethought their electoral strategy. When Speer died in 1918, his organization completely collapsed.46 Labor officially backed Bailey’s opponent in the 1919 mayoral race, but unlike the pre-1904 years, workers split their votes. Union leaders and members alike hoped that Bailey would at least be fair if a dispute arose. They were disappointed. He not only sided with the Tramway Company, but he challenged unionists’ claim to a living wage. Denver workers would have to punish him during the next election, which they did. The mayoral election of 1923 would gauge the political power of Denver’s workers. As the 1923 election season dawned, Denver workers had reason for hope. In 1922, they joined with their fellow unionists across the state to endorse Democrat William E. Sweet for governor. Sweet understood and supported progressive unionists’ values. In fact, abolishing the Industrial Commission Law was among his campaign promises. Once in office, Sweet proclaimed, “The day will come without a doubt that the policies of William E. Sweet which are now considered socialistic will be considered good business, good statesmanship, and good sociology.”47 His rhetoric proved stronger than his abilities to shape policy. A hostile state legislature blocked his attempted repeal of the Industrial Commission measure. He did, however, do the next best thing. He became the first governor to appoint a pro-labor member to the commission.

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Sweet not only supported socialized markets, he championed the municipal ownership of public utilities, public education, and other statesponsored public goods. He realized that all of these reforms “are examples of Socialism in the sense that private profit is eliminated from their management.”48 Unfortunately for Sweet, and the Rocky Mountain progressive unionists he represented, his opponents in the state legislature impeded the passage of the reforms he proposed. Workers did still have friends in the state assembly, but that bloc proved too small a minority to aid Sweet. Opponents, it appeared, could please their middle-class constituents by using the language of industrial peace without providing actual reforms. Crucial to understanding Sweet’s politics is recognizing that he belonged to the NPL. North Dakota farmers started the NPL in 1915. Led by socialist Arthur C. Townley, the group sought to unite voters who wanted reform, but did not want to join the SP. The organization then spread to Minnesota, and St. Paul eventually became the league’s headquarters. NPL activists appeared in the Rocky Mountain West in 1918, and the movement grew. It fit well with older traditions of nonpartisan electoral efforts intended to infuse workers’ values into the social fabric without pledging loyalty to a particular party. As Sweet’s election demonstrated, NPL activists, CSFL leaders chief among them, experienced success in the early 1920s.49 Despite Sweet’s inability to get pro-labor laws through the state assembly, Colorado workers in 1923 still hoped to rebound from the effects of the Industrial Commission Law and to restore their political influence. They turned their attention to city politics. Specifically, they focused on defeating Bailey, a Republican, whom the Colorado Labor Advocate labeled “our Pilate.” Denver unionists endorsed Democrat Benjamin Franklin Stapleton.50 Stapleton won, but his success was a Pyrrhic victory for labor. The city’s workers appeared to have restored their old strategy. But once Stapleton took office, he proved a conservative in disguise, literally. During the first months of his administration, the new mayor revealed his ties to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).51 At its height, the Colorado Klan had 35,000 to 40,000 members. John Galen Locke, a Denver physician, first organized the Colorado KKK in 1921, and by June 1922, Denver KKK Local 1 had 2,000 members. Locke soon became the state’s grand dragon, and most of the Klansmen he recruited belonged to the middle class. They owned some of the city’s small businesses or worked as factory managers. Colorado Klansmen claimed that African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and Bolsheviks threatened America’s Protestant values. They echoed the Citizens’ Alliance and other antiunion

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groups by calling for law and order. Other than supporting Prohibition, however, the organization failed to win many substantive reforms.52 Reacting to the news that Stapleton had Klan ties and that he had handed patronage appointments to Klansmen, a number of the mayor’s former supporters demanded a recall. Stapleton’s opponents, including workers, succeeded in winning a special election in the summer of 1924. Unfortunately for labor, Bailey won the nomination as the anti-Klan candidate. Feeling stuck, the Labor Advocate grudgingly endorsed Stapleton. To make matters worse for workers and their allies, the KKK took control of the state’s Republican Party.53 Thus union-centered political action continued to stall at the municipal level. The rise of the CIC signaled a shift in political momentum. The call for industrial peace dovetailed with the rise of the politics of white Protestant virtue promoted by the KKK. Employers took advantage of this new mood and pushed for measures that restricted labor’s rights. Furthermore, they allied with the KKK in order to redefine their own electoral options. Sweet’s victory demonstrated that the Colorado labor movement’s political influence had not been crushed. The choice between Bailey and Stapleton, not to mention the rise of the KKK in general, however, suggested that difficult times lay ahead. Although fissures divided the KKK and led to its collapse in 1925, conservatives who advocated limited government involvement in economic and social relations replaced Klan-friendly politicians. Workers spent the 1920s having to guard the pro-labor policies already on the books instead of being able to build upon them.54 Utah workers suffered through an experience similar to that of their Colorado counterparts. Employers, especially in Salt Lake City, followed Rockefeller’s lead and lobbied for measures that prevented strikes. In 1918, Utah businessmen created the Utah Associated Industries, an organization that promoted the open shop and antilabor laws. Their first victory came in 1919 when the state legislature repealed a picketing statute. This measure had guaranteed workers the right to demonstrate outside of businesses. By revoking this right, the legislature enabled employers to have peaceful protesters arrested. Nearly 2,500 workers attended the meeting of the state assembly on October 4, 1919, which debated the repeal of this law. These unionists hoped that their presence would push lawmakers into rejecting the Associated Industries’ request. Instead, assemblymen not only repealed the protections of the original law, but they rewrote the measure to make picketing illegal. It became a misdemeanor to walk a picket line in Utah. Moreover, it became a felony to advocate

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or teach picketing.55 Picketing, this revised law suggested, represented the first step in industrial violence. Strikers interfered with the ability of owners to operate their businesses. In this so-called age of industrial peace, many assumed a new social contract had emerged, giving workers better conditions and owners higher profits. Utah Associated Industries’ member businesses refuted charges of union busting and claimed public interest and industrial peace as their objectives. The state’s employers did not limit their activism to lobbying. They, like business leaders throughout the United States, also advocated company unionism and corporate welfare plans. On March 12, 1920, contractors and builders from Logan, Ogden, Provo, and Salt Lake City met in Salt Lake at the Hotel Utah. These contractors claimed that organized labor interfered “in their activities” and made their businesses less profitable. They argued that the public was “made to pay dearly” due to owners charging higher costs.56 By appealing to consumers with lower prices and promising to provide workers with a just livelihood, proponents of corporate welfare sought to substitute paternalism for union-centered political action and fair wages, and to gain public favor in the process. The Associated Industries, after obtaining the support of contractors and builders, pushed their antiunion efforts into other industries.57 As in Colorado, Utah owners discovered that by using the law to impede strikes, speaking in terms of cooperation and industrial peace to shape public opinion, and appearing to take a paternalistic attitude toward their employees, they could force a decline in union membership. In fact, M. P. Bales, president of the USFL in 1921, seemed surprised that organized workers could even hold a convention. He said, “In the face of the combined assaults of the Associated Industries and all other enemies of organized labor, I believe that the showing made by the Utah State Federation at this time is little short of marvelous.”58 By the 1920s, employers clearly understood that working-class political power was directly related to union membership. Colorado and Utah unionists’ political influence did wane in the 1920s, but they did not give up the battle. Most workers did not lose faith in their experimental collective political activism. They still believed it would produce a society in which the state administered markets and privileged public health over profits. Rocky Mountain workers started gaining power in the late 1890s because they operated within a more open political environment than workers elsewhere. But so, too, did employers, Klansmen, and middle-class reformers.

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From 1914 through the early 1920s, these workers found themselves forced to scrutinize their past practices. They did not reconsider their values, abandon their commitment to organizing workers in all industries, or reject politics as the central arena in which the class struggle had to be fought. Instead, they concluded that success depended on building a more inclusive labor movement and reestablishing their political power by extending their influence to the federal level. William Dunne and Butte workers led the charge for these modifications. By examining their efforts, we can see how energetically Rocky Mountain workers continued to fight the class struggle during this period of employer assault.59

William Dunne By 1917, Butte’s progressive copper miners had no union. Anaconda Company officials and their supporters had successfully kept the BMWU from flourishing. After a fire on June 8 at the Speculator Mine resulted in the deaths of 164 men, reorganization efforts took on a new dynamism. Most of the deaths occurred because the Speculator had no escape tunnels, as state law required. Once the public learned of this, general support for the miners grew. On June 12, Butte copper workers decided they had a golden opportunity to reorganize and announced the creation of the Metal Mine Workers’ Union (MMWU). The MMWU demanded an end to the rustling card system, a $6-per-day wage rate, frequent mine inspections, and company adherence to all state workplace safety measures. Mine owners immediately portrayed the new union as an IWW affiliate. Local papers supported this claim, calling the union’s organizers “dangerous.” At the same time, members of the local electrical workers union, led by William Dunne, went on strike against the Montana Power Company. Both organizations adopted the same set of demands, and Dunne ran the joint strike.60 The miners and electrical workers started publishing the Joint Strike Bulletin to tell their side of the story. They also turned to Republican congresswoman and NPL member Jeannette Rankin for help.61 Rankin, the first woman elected to the House, proved sympathetic and supportive. The MMWU press committee, chaired by John Doran, explained to Rankin that their organization was “not dominated by the I.W.W. nor any other National Organization.” They asked her to launch a federal investigation into the June 8 disaster. She responded by introducing a bill that would have placed Congress in control of the city’s mines. The measure

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failed. Then, at the end of July, Rankin even tried to enlist the support of President Wilson. She forwarded him a telegram from Butte resident Mary O’Neill, who had explained to the congresswoman that the Butte miners would end their strike if Rankin would serve as an arbitrator. Mine owners refused the offer, and Wilson did not push the issue.62 Amid this fight, in which Anaconda Company officials hired thugs to beat up strikers, IWW leaders saw an opportunity to try to bring Butte’s miners into their organization. They sent organizer Frank Little to town in late July. Anaconda Company managers demanded that Burton K. Wheeler, U.S. district attorney and Butte Democratic Party activist, arrest Little for a speech he gave. They claimed that Little had violated the 1917 Espionage Act, which, for all intents and purposes, forbade speech critical of the government’s conduct in the Great War. Wheeler refused. Vigilantes then took matters into their own hands. According to the New York Times, these bloodthirsty “patriots” carried Little out of his boarding house at 3:05 a.m., tied him to the rear bumper of a car, and dragged him until the flesh came off his knees. Then they lynched him on a railroad trestle. National coverage mirrored that of the Times, quoting Wheeler, who stressed the injustice of such an action but then pointed out that the unpatriotic Little and his radical federation had “slurred American Troops.”63 Despite Little’s tragic death, it is important to remember that Butte workers, for the most part, continued to eschew syndicalism. In turning to Rankin, Butte unionists hoped they could shine the national spotlight on Anaconda’s policies in the same way that the Walsh Report had on CFI. This time workers anticipated that a federal investigation would reveal that company calls for industrial peace masked an effort to block unions from being the agents of political change. In 1918, Rankin decided to run for the U.S. Senate, and Butte’s workers served as her leading supporters. She lost both the Republican primary and her bid to be the NPL’s nominee.64 Still, by backing her, labor had shown its commitment to acquiring influence at the federal level. Butte workers joined the NPL because they still considered political action essential to collectively creating better lives for themselves and their children. Labor did claim a few victories in local and state races that year. Dunne, for example, ran for a seat in the Montana House of Representatives, and he won. Unfortunately for his constituents, he found few colleagues to vote for the bills he proposed. Most of his fellow representatives were put off by his open sympathies for the revolutionaries fighting for control of

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Russia. The next year, 1919, he decided he could do more good as Butte’s mayor. Running as a Democrat, it appeared he had won the March primary. The Bulletin reported that the unofficial results had the radical electrician winning by 113 ballots. When the board of elections announced its count, however, Democrat William Cutts had 102 votes more than Dunne. The Bulletin claimed the election was a fraud. The paper’s reporters provided readers and city officials with evidence that tally sheets had been altered, and that the Anaconda Company had hired toughs who attacked Dunne’s poll watchers. Local and state courts then blocked Dunne, based on technicalities, from filing as an independent. Dunne responded by calling for a boycott of the city’s general election. The protest had modest success, as the number of voters between the two contests fell by 3,024.65 Although Montana’s NPL fell apart after the 1919 election, Dunne and others persisted in their political activism. Butte’s labor leaders set two goals as they entered the 1920s. First, they wanted to find new ways to expand the labor movement’s base. Second, they insisted that workers remain committed to placing friends in national offices. Dunne attempted to accomplish this first goal by encouraging laborers to think about their class identities beyond the workplace. He also insisted that all workers embrace the idea of a polyglot labor movement. The Bulletin’s support of a group called the World War Veterans provided one example of Dunne’s attempt to expand the number of people who considered themselves part of an activist working class. The World War Veterans emerged as an alternative to the American Legion. They argued that those who had fought in Europe went through “fire and blood for American humanity on the pledge of the rulers of America that after the war America would be made right.” Instead the “rulers” have declared “industrial war.” As a result, “the World War Veterans have made Labor’s fight their own,” and they wanted the laborer “to make our fight his own.”66 Although the group had its own magazine, the Soldier-Worker, the Montana branches of the World War Veterans made the Bulletin their official organ. The group’s platform demanded that “all public utilities and basic industries be conducted for public benefit and not for corporate profit.” The Veterans also refused to “draw the color line,” unlike the Ku Klux Klan, which they identified as their “chief rival.” Dunne and the Veterans thought Americans should be ashamed and angered that those who had fought in the war were walking “the streets of industrial centers in search of employment.”67 More than simply offering rhetorical sup-

The Persistence of Progressive Unionism

Bonus or no Bonua-Private l'rto(Jinnia 1a going to have to rrow one.

243

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wooden leg,

if he has

Figure 2.  Political Cartoon Criticizing the Neglect of Injured World War I Veterans. source:  Butte Bulletin, August 19, 1921.

port, Dunne and the Silver Bow Trades and Labor Council lobbied for World War veterans to immediately receive the bonuses Congress had promised them for their service. Former soldiers were not scheduled to get this benefit until 1945. In addition to facing unemployment and the high cost of living resulting from the war, many returning soldiers had debilitating injuries that required costly medical care. Dunne, not so subtly, pointed this out in political cartoons (see Figure 2). Dunne’s support of the World War Veterans helped illustrate workers’ sacrifice on behalf of the nation and challenged the notion that radicalism was un-American. He and the Veterans argued that the actual traitors to democracy—the protection of which was

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the stated reason for fighting the war—were those who denied laborers the opportunity to fight for jobs and high wages. The owners and managers of the Anaconda Company and the members of both the American Legion and the KKK were malcontents betraying American ideals. Dunne’s attack on the KKK served as a second example of how he attempted to foster greater working-class solidarity. He wanted his readers to realize that although corporate hegemony was primarily to blame for the destruction of the miners’ unions, white workers’ commitment to racism and ethnocentrism had played a significant role. In various editorials, he argued that southern and eastern European immigrants, African Americans, Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Asian immigrants had to be included in the labor movement, or else unionists would be accepting a vision of the nation constructed by the KKK, A. Mitchell Palmer, and the American Legion.68 In the August 31, 1923, editorial “Sizing Up the Ku Klux Klan,” for instance, Dunne explained that three Klansmen from Oklahoma who belonged to the working class had recently been arrested for flogging a farmer. Their actions revealed their “ignorance” and promoted the “actual degeneracy” of society. The sole point of the KKK, Dunne explained, was to “oppose all progress.”69 Dunne also continued to advocate union-centered political action. As Daniel McDonald had with the SP, Dunne, in 1922, declared his support for the (Communist) Workers Party of America. In the 1922 city elections, however, he and the Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly endorsed non-Communists Charley Whiteley and Jack Stewart for city council. Stewart won. Dunne proudly declared in the Bulletin that although the defeated candidates ran on the colors of the flag, claiming to be “100 per cent Americans,” they actually ran “under the colors of the copper stable [the Anaconda Company].” He went on to write that workers should “find consolation in the election returns,” as 5,266 were “unafraid to vote for Jack Stewart, free speech and free assembly.” By the fall election, Dunne had given up editorship of the Bulletin, although he remained a frequent contributor. He had decided to join William Z. Foster on a midwestern speaking tour to build the CP. In his absence, the Bulletin maintained both its pro-Communist outlook and its pragmatic electoral stance. The paper and the city’s unionists supported Sheriff Duggan, for example, because he had been fair to workers and opposed the KKK.70 Butte workers also remained resolute in having a voice in national politics. In 1922, they supported Burton Wheeler, a Democrat, for U.S. Senate because he had refused “to do the bidding of the profiteers and the copper

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crowd.” Wheeler had also “defended the editor of The Bulletin when he was facing the penitentiary, being maliciously persecuted by unscrupulous interests who feared the truth.” The district attorney did not charge a fee, and he even paid Dunne’s court costs. On Tuesday, August 22, that year, candidates appeared before the Silver Bow Trades Council. In a scene reminiscent of the 1890s, Republicans, Democrats, and various third-party candidates attended.71 The copper miners, whose unions had been smashed, could still show their class unity by voting for Wheeler and Duggan. Both candidates won.72 Wheeler would go on to become an ardent New Dealer, and at times a left-wing critic of FDR. He also acknowledged labor as his key constituency. Butte workers under Dunne’s leadership agreed to fight the class struggle every day, and as a result, they enjoyed some victories in the 1920s. This is not to suggest that the 1922 election turned things around. Workers did not recapture their pre-1917 positions of authority over their shop floors or their collective command over city politics. The copper miners would not again secure union recognition until 1934. And Butte workers continued to have internal problems. The AFL, for example, purged Dunne and other Communists in 1924. Dunne, however, continued to preach unity and urged workers to transform the AFL. It was no coinci­ dence that when those who had tried to bore within finally decided to break from the AFL and form the CIO in 1933, the International Union of Mine Mill and Smelter Workers, formerly the Western Federation of Miners, helped lead the way.73 Importantly, the sorts of victories that seemed minor before 1917 proved later to be significant accomplishments. In 1923, for instance, a number of Butte’s local firms—including department stores, restaurants, and the telephone company—fired their female laborers in hopes of breaking the Women’s Protective Union (WPU). The women countered with citywide strikes in Butte and Missoula, and they won.74 Clerks, waitresses, telephone operators, and domestic servants remained united and replaced miners as the foundation of Butte’s labor movement throughout the 1920s. Solidarity remained alive in this decade of decline, and workers, whether they belonged to a union or not, continued to vote together and were able to keep some pro-labor politicians in office. Above all else, Butte’s workers and their counterparts throughout the region knew that the class struggle would continue as long as they remained committed to fighting for the redistribution of wealth and reorganization of society.

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Conclusion By 1914, Rocky Mountain workers had triumphed over business owners and champions of laissez-faire in the public debate over values. The larger citizenry accepted the idea that high wages, shorter hours, and safer conditions made society better. Moreover, pro-labor measures resulted in greater social benefits for all, and worker-friendly politicians proved to be good city and state administrators. Fearing that public support of labor’s demands and the growing political influence that accompanied it would fuel the transition from social democracy to socialism, employers concluded that they had to change their tactics. By accepting workers’ demands but attacking unions, employers attempted to destroy the regional network that made social democracy a reality. Although effective, their efforts failed to produce a total victory. Labor’s power continued to reappear, albeit intermittently. In having their values affirmed but their institutions weakened, workers had to take stock of their internal problems. Racist and ethnocentric attitudes sat atop the list of issues to address. Inclusionists urged exclusionists to consider the consequences of their positions and fought for, and sometimes won, the opening of their unions to all workers. Many exclusionists, however, refused to surrender their beliefs. The rise of the KKK provided advocates of a polyglot labor movement, especially William Dunne, the opportunity to emphasize exactly whose values the exclusionists mirrored. Thus, when the CIO emerged in the 1930s, it was not so much the embodiment of a new labor militancy as it was the product of workers solving some of their external and internal problems. Rocky Mountain workers had helped cast the mold for the CIO. They had forged a sense of solidarity through the parades of the 1880s, labor-party gatherings in the 1890s, and socialist victories in the early 1900s, as well as the boycotts and cooperative store ventures they participated in from the 1880s through the 1920s. The region’s unionists had ignored skill lines from their earliest activist days, and women were almost always key players in organizing drives and other fights for working-class rights. The legislation they passed and the people they elected in the 1920s became central to ushering in a new era of reform during the 1930s. Rocky Mountain workers were not alone in their efforts, but as Eugene Debs and many employers continually recognized, they provided a model of how politically active, class-conscious workers could redefine society.

Conclusion

The United States, by 1914, had become a socialist nation. At least that was what the Wall Street Journal would have had people believe. On June 12, the voice of American finance printed a speech given the day before by banker E. L. Richards. Richards railed against government intervention into the financial industry. Federal officials were imposing a “new tyranny” on the “barber, baker,” and “banana merchant,” he declared. The only groups exempted from this despotism, “of course,” were farmers and workers. Richards called for a “statesman” to come forward who “has courage enough to make them [farmers and workers] take their discipline,” to accept the law of supply and demand. He then bellowed: “When that day comes the terrors of legislation will fall off to nothing.” Essentially, Richards argued that Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom policies, which consisted of antitrust, tariff, banking, and industrial relations laws, were “a misdirected effort to terrorize Capital into compulsory equalization of prosperity.” In fact, he suggested that Wilson change the name of his program to “the New Tyranny.” The “new Tyranny is that of the many over the few, the tyranny of guillotines and of mobs guided by the demagogues and fakirs marching through the sham-ridden land, emitting cries of: ‘He has more money than you.’” By reacting to these agitators, politicians, in this banker’s opinion, ignored “the real temper of the people.”

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The Journal’s editors and reporters agreed with Richards that America had plunged into socialism. A September 1914 editorial asked: if the New Freedom “is not Socialism, what is it?” The “dearest doctrines of Democracy,” the author insisted, used to be “states rights and individual rights.” To accentuate his point he concluded: the “ ‘New Freedom’ has become Socialism pure and unadulterated.”1 The contributors to the Journal viewed the world from a staunch laissezfaire position. Their beliefs led them to abhor all state involvement in business affairs and to claim that any attempt at regulation was a violation of economic orthodoxy. Many, especially those on the left, would insist that the Journal was overstating the extent to which the United States had adopted socialism. Advocates of pure capitalism, such as Richards, however, correctly recognized that working-class political activists had grown powerful enough that politicians could not ignore their demands. Cities and states since the 1890s had increasingly passed the very types of legislation proponents of free markets feared so much. Now it appeared that the federal government would follow suit. Rocky Mountain unionists, acting on their shared vision of pragmatic radicalism, had played a central role in ushering in the changes that frightened Journal readers. Small victories at the local level provided unionists with the sense that taking collective action both in the streets and at the ballot box would allow them the opportunity to alter the larger social structure. In 1894, for instance, Ogden’s railroad unionists recognized that they had a degree of social authority when Republican mayor Charles Brough, who had won his seat largely because of labor’s support, responded to workers’ demands and provided food and blankets to protesters on their way from Oakland, California, to Washington, D.C. Over the course of the next two years, these unionists remained politically active, joined with Salt Lake City workers, and helped elect prolabor delegates to Utah’s constitutional convention for statehood. Their efforts proved fruitful, as the state’s founding document included a host of measures that provided miners shorter hours. Over time, workers throughout the region recognized that their political influence allowed them to set legislative and policy goals that were both attainable and pushed the region, and at times the nation, to move toward socialized markets. By using their unions as their political agents, Rocky Mountain workers took advantage of the close local and state electoral margins to force politicians, who desired labor’s votes, to support measures that altered how Americans conceived of workers’ claims on wealth, determined wage rates, defined property rights, set the length of

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the workday, established workplace safety rules, and developed community health standards. Mountain West unionists were not the only laborers to agitate for and foster these acts and policies. They did, however, create labor federations that operated differently from their eastern, midwestern, and southern counterparts. In committing themselves to crossunion solidarity, the women and men of Butte, Helena, Salt Lake City, Ogden, Denver, and Pueblo fought to make their values mainstream. The actions and anger of Citizens’ Alliance members, John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Anaconda Company, and other corporate officials certainly suggests that corporate elites understood workers’ accomplishments as significant alterations to the social order. Labor leaders such as Joseph Buchanan, David Coates, Daniel McDonald, Peter Breene, Rae Lemert, Alex Fairgrieve, William Dunne, and R. G. Sleater, played the most essential role in orchestrating this reconstruction of power relations. They understood that political action, public policy, and market outcomes were interwoven. They argued that for workers to achieve the new social order they wanted, the working class had to reconfigure the lines of power that linked neighborhood concerns, city ordinances, state statutes, work rules, and consumer habits. The class struggle therefore had to be fought at workplaces, on city streets, at the ballot box, before local and state judges, and in stores. Although impressive, these activists’ ability to coordinate simultaneous multifront attacks on employers and conventional notions of economic relations represented one of the easier responsibilities they accepted. To get to those moments of confrontation, labor leaders had to settle disputes among workers over goals, ideas, and ideologies. Grasping the magnitude of the transformations that these socialdemocratic, pragmatic workers fostered requires us to reconsider our understanding of Samuel Gompers’ control over the mainstream labor movement, the significance of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the Rocky Mountain West, and the effectiveness of municipal socialism. Unionists in Colorado, Montana, and Utah stood shoulder to shoulder with the militant minority of American Federation of Labor (AFL) members who challenged Gompers’s authority, and they showed their fellow socialists that they could disregard the AFL president’s dictates against sympathy strikes, ignore the limits he placed on political participation, and sidestep traditional organizing practices. Furthermore, most Rocky Mountain unionists rejected the Wobblies because the IWW’s strategies, tactics, and rules furthered the rhetoric of revolution but did little to extend workers’ rights. For most of the early

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twentieth century, the region’s unionists belonged to the AFL, voted for candidates sympathetic to socializing markets, won higher wages, attained shorter hours, organized unskilled workers, and pressured local leaders to make their neighborhoods cleaner and safer. When employers mounted a counterattack between 1914 and 1924, these laborers examined their own shortcomings. Many started to see the debilitating effects that racism had on building a fully inclusive working-class movement, and realized the need for power on the federal level. And so they retooled and steeled themselves to continue fighting the class struggle each day.

notes and index

note s

Notes to Introduction 1.  Salt Lake Tribune, 19 April 1871, 2. 2.  Denver Typographical Union (DTU) Local 49, Minutes, 7 May 1884, University of Colorado at Boulder Archives. 3.  Union Pacific Employes’ [sic] Magazine (hereafter UPEM) 1 (April 1886): 79 (my italics). 4.  UPEM 4 (February 1889): 26. 5.  Second Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado 1889–1890 (Denver: The Collier and Cleaveland Lith. Co., 1890), 23: for the overall report on railroad conditions see 17–24. For more on railroad accidents, see Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870–1939 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 6.  William John Pinkerton, His Personal Record: Stories of Railroad Life (Kansas City, MO: Pinkerton Publishing Company, 1904), 18, 9–10, 109. 7.  Ira Katznelson, “Considerations on Social Democracy in the United States,” Contemporary Politics 11 (October 1978): 77–79; Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 37–77, 209–18; James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 3–56; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in the Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1–75;

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Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1–12 and 171–223; James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 145–297; Mary O. Furner, “Knowing Capitalism: Public Investigation and the Labor Question in the Long Progressive Era,” in The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences, ed., Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 241–86; and Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; repr. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 242. On Europe, see Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955); James Joll, The Second International, 1899–1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974); Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press), 3–82; and Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), xxii–xxix,177–79. 8.  Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 217–27, 237–66; H. Tudor, “Introduction” in Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896–1898, ed. and trans. by H. Tudor and J. M. Tudor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1–37; and Manfred B. Steger, The Quest For Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 9.  Although I agree with James T. Kloppenberg’s explanation of social democracy, I disagree with his view of how it developed in the United States. He credits intellectuals with formulating these ideas. I do not contest his claim that people such as Richard T. Ely did indeed offer social democratic visions. Ely and other academic socialists, however, had little success in implementing social democracy, whereas Rocky Mountain workers did claim key victories as will become clear later in this work. 10.  For wages see: Philip R. P. Coelho and James F. Shepherd, “The Impact of Regional Differences in Prices and Wages on Economic Growth: The United States in 1890” Journal of Economic History 39 (March 1979): 69–85; Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Looking For Work, Searching for Workers: American Labor Markets During Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 122–26; and Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 277–80, xiv–xv, 3–20. 11. On the perseverance of republican political economy in the nineteenth century, see James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), xi–28, 84–151. On political economy as popular

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culture see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 38–69; Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 15–16; John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Shelton Stromquist, Re-Inventing “the People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 39–48. 12.  Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy, 106–12; and Gretchen Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, 1865–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–55. 13.  Thomas, Alternative America; Robert E. Weir, “A Fragile Alliance: Henry George and the Knights of Labor,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 56 (October 1997): 421–39; David Scobey, “Boycotting the Politics Factory: Labor Radicalism and the New York City Mayoral Election of 188[6],” Radical History Review, nos. 28–30 (1984): 280–325; John K. Whitaker, “Enemies or Allies? Henry George and Francis Amasa Walker One Century Later,” Journal of Economic Literature 35 (December 1997): 1891–1915; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, ed. Daniel H. Borus (1888, repr. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995); and Samuel Haber, “The Nightmare and the Dream: Edward Bellamy and the Travails of Socialist Thought,” Journal of American Studies 36 (December 2002): 417–440. 14.  Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks, 280. 15.  Although many definitions of ideology exist, I see it as more formal, more organized than culture. For various ways to think about ideology, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 1–31. 16.  Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Richard Jules Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 176–210; Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Weir, Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000); and Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–1897 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 17.  Weir, Knights Unhorsed, 14–15. 18.  Ibid., 14–20; and P. K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 36–45, 84–133.

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19.  James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 3–14, 145–299. For a recent discussion of the bombing that asks if the Chicago anarchists were possibly guilty, see Timothy MesserKruse et al., “The Haymarket Bomb: Reassessing the Evidence,” Labor: Working-Class History of the Americas, 2 (Summer 2005): 39–51; Bryan D. Palmer, “CSI Labor History: Haymarket and the Forensics of Forgetting,” Labor: Working-Class History of the Americas, 3 (Spring 2006): 25–36; and Timothy Messer-Kruse, “Response to Bryan Palmer,” Labor: Working-Class History of the Americas, 3 (Spring 2006): 37–40. 20. On the Knights during Haymarket and their decline, see Weir, Knights Unhorsed, 47–71; and Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, 183–210. 21.  Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19–36. 22.  The literature on the exceptionalism question is voluminous. Key works include Failure of a Dream?: Essays in the History of American Socialism, ed. John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); John H. M. Laslett, Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881–1924 (New York: Basic Books, 1970); Eric Foner, “Why is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop 17, no. 1 (1984): 57–80; Sean Wilentz, “Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790–1920” International Labor and Working Class History no. 26 (Fall 1984): 1–24; William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration” American Quarterly 45 (March 1993): 1–43; Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). 23.  Joseph R. Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator (New York: The Outlook Company, 1903); John Enyeart, “ ‘By Laws of Their Own Making’: Political Culture and the Everyday Politics of the Mountain West Working Class, 1870–1917” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 2002), 41–62, 103–126; David Brundage, The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver’s Organized Workers, 1878–1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994),

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47, 64–65; and Weir, Knights Unhorsed, 73–96. On page 74 Weir called Buchanan “the single-best organizer in KOL history.” 24.  Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1899–1900 (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., State Printers, 1900), 53–55. 25.  John P. Enyeart, “ ‘The Exercise of the Intelligent Ballot’: Rocky Mountain Workers, Urban Politics, and Shorter Hours, 1886–1911,” Labor: Working-Class History of the Americas 1 (Fall 2004): 45–69; Paul Kleppner, “Voters and Parties in the Western States, 1876–1900,” Western Historical Quarterly 14 ( January 1983): 59, 49–68; and Martin Shefter, “Regional Receptivity to Reform: The Legacy of the Progressive Era” Political Science Quarterly 98 (Autumn 1983): 463, 459–83. Elizabeth Jameson recognized a similar pattern in Cripple Creek to the one I present for the whole region. She argued that workers often agreed on issues but differed on which party could best deliver the pro-labor laws they sought. Eventually, Cripple Creek unionists placed a commitment to tactics above partisanship as they realized that they could acquire greater political gains through broad-based coalitions. The differences in her book and this work are that I see the unionists’ efforts as more calculated, I look at a larger area, and I trace this quest for political power over a longer period of time. See Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 161–70. 26.  Richard Oestreicher, “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940,” Journal of American History 74 (March 1988): 1279; Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (New York: Free Press, 1970); Kleppner, The Third Electoral System: 1853–1892 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1886–1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Alan DiGaetano, “The Origins of Urban Political Machines in the United States: A Comparative Perspective,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 26 (March 1991): 324–53; and Christopher K. Ansell and Arthur L. Burris, “Bosses of the City Unite!: Labor Politics and Political Machine Consolidation, 1870–1910,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Spring 1997): 1–43. 27.  Scobey, “Boycotting the Politics Factory,” 280–325; and Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 275–79. For a similar example in New Orleans see Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 74–118. For more on “patronage democracy,” see Terrence J. McDonald, “The Burdens of Urban History: The Theory

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of the State in Recent American Social History,” Studies in American Political Development 3 (1989): 3–55. 28.  Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class: Cleveland Politics and the Origins of Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Urban History 23 ( January 1997): 192–220; Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864– 1897 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 3–5, 152–58; and “Voting as a Class: Haymarket and the Rise of a Democrat–Labor Alliance in Late Nineteenth Century Chicago,” Labor’s Heritage 12 (Spring–Summer 2004): 6–21. 29.  For a more in-depth analysis of the changing electorate and majorparty politicians trying to craft their messages to win laborers’ votes in the West, see Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 248–60. Martin Shefter clearly demonstrates the differences in regional party loyalties in his “Regional Receptivity,” 459–83. 30. On women’s suffrage in the West, see Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 1–72, 151–73. On the constitutions of Utah, Colorado, and Montana, see Gordon M. Bakken, “The Impact of the Colorado State Constitution on Rocky Mountain Constitution Making,” Colorado Magazine 47 (Spring 1970): 152–75; Bakken, Rocky Mountain Constitution Making, 1850–1912 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 3–49; Howard Roberts Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 237–61; Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 92–113, 172–200; and White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 155–78. 31.  Recognizing that San Francisco was the largest city in the West, a logical question becomes: Why not look at San Francisco as opposed to the Rocky Mountain West to study the differences between labor politics in the East and West? Michael Kazin’s study of San Francisco’s ULP did show that western workers took advantage of this political environment. The ULP candidate won the 1901 mayor’s race; however, this case offered a poor measure of what a class-based politically active movement could do in this environment. ULP leaders did not bring unskilled workers into the party’s fold, and they alienated voters of all classes sympathetic to reform by taking kickbacks and engaging in other forms of corruption. The Rocky Mountain West, therefore, offers a better example of how western workers developed a method for taking advantage of the West’s political environment. See Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union

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Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 145–214; and Thomas Ralph Clark, Defending Rights: Law, Labor Politics, and the State in California, 1890–1925 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 44–49. It should also be noted that farmers in Iowa had limited successes with a similar strategy during the 1880s and early 1890s. They, however, faced stronger party structures. See Jeffery Ostler, Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, 1880–1892 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993). 32.  Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics, First Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado (1887–88), 107 and 70; and Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics, Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado (1889–1900), 39–40. Butte Bystander, 1 April 1893, 2. The problem with finding the exact percentage of union members in Montana is that the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry reported higher numbers of organized workers than the number of total workers claimed by the state’s Manufacturing Census. Examples of organizational numbers include the Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of the State of Montana for the Year Ending November 30, 1898 (Helena: State Printers, 1898), 138, which estimated that the state had 16,144 union members. The Ninth Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of the State of Montana for the Year Ending November 30, 1904 (Helena: State Printers, 1904), 151, claimed that Montana unions, mostly in Butte and Great Falls, represented 20,000 men and women. For more on union membership in Montana, see Paul Andrew Frisch, “The ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’: The Working Class at Butte, Montana, 1878–1909” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1992), 109; Jonathan Garlock, Guide to the Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 262–63; Thomas A. Clinch, Urban Populism and Free Silver in Montana: A Narrative of Ideology in Political Action (Missoula: University of Montana Press, 1970), 6–7; and the reports of the Montana Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry from 1893–1904. For the number of organized Butte miners, see David Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 187. For Utah, see Sheelwant Bapurao Pawar, “An Environmental Study of the Development of the Utah Labor Movement: 1860–1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1968), 56–57, 64–66, and 92–104; John Ervin Brinley Jr., “The Western Federation of Miners” (Ph.D. diss. University of Utah, 1972), 26, 20–21; Salt Lake Tribune, 15 August 1891, 5. 33.  The New York World, quoted in Almont Lindsey, The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 235. Lindsey gives the Rocky Mountain states some notice, but only Shelton Stromquist, in his A Generation of

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Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), recognizes that the ARU was primarily a western labor organization. For the Pullman strike, see Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 126–46; Lindsey, The Pullman Strike, 90–175, 203–35; and Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, eds., The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 34.  For the Pullman strike and boycott in the Rocky Mountain West, see Clayton D. Laurie, “Extinguishing Frontier Brushfires: The U.S. Army’s Role in Quelling the Pullman Strike in the West, 1894,” Journal of the West 32 (April 1993): 54–63; Lindsey, The Pullman Strike, 241–53; James H. Ducker’s, Men of the Steel Rails: Workers on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, 1869–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 143–64; Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers, 86; Richard J. Bonney, “The Pullman Strike of 1894: Pocatello Perspective,” Idaho Yesterdays 24 (Fall 1980): 23–28; and Jerry M. Cooper, “The Army as Strikebreaker—The Railroad Strikes of 1877 and 1894,” Labor History 18 (Spring 1977): 179–96. 35.  Denver Times, 29 June–6 July, 1894. Waite’s protests can be found in the 6 July 1894, 6 issue. 36.  Greene, Pure and Simple Politics, 66; for Greene’s discussion of the AFL’s larger political outlook, see pages 48–70. 37.  Pueblo Courier, 19 August 1898, 1. 38.  Melvyn Dubofsky, “The Origins of Western Working Class Radicalism, 1890–1905,” Labor History 7 (Spring 1966); Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969). 39.  John Graham Brooks, American Syndicalism: The I.W.W. (New York: Macmillan Company, 1913), 130. 40.  Ben H. Williams, “Sabotage,” in Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, ed. Joyce L. Kornbluh (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 52. 41.  Vincent St. John, “Political Parties and the I.W.W.,” in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 43. 42.  Dubofsky, We Shall Be All. We Shall Be All remains central to the field of labor history. The symposium on this work in the August 1999 issue of Labor History reaffirms its impact on the field. Before Dubofsky scholars claimed the labor wars, the violent strikes between mine owners and miners, fueled an inherent Western radicalism. See Vernon H. Jensen’s, Heritage of Conflict: Labor Relations in the Nonferrous Metals Industry up to 1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950); Robert L. Tyler, “The I.W.W. and the West,” American Quarterly 12 (Summer 1960): 175–87. After We Shall Be

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All appeared George C. Suggs, Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism: James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972); and Carlos A. Schwantes, Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in Washington and British Columbia, 1885–1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973) offered their versions of how the labor wars created western labor radicalism. Brundage, in his The Making of Western Labor Radicalism, continued to emphasize the idea that the region’s workers embraced syndicalism, but pointed to the apolitical nature of craft unionists, not the labor wars, as the underpinning of this radical movement. Elizabeth Jameson, in her study on Cripple Creek, Colorado, presented a far more complex picture than previous histories of radicalism. She found that workers’ quest for immediate gains did not always match their loftier goals. In her account, a disconnect sometimes emerged between rhetoric and actions. Yet she still leaves us with the impression that those belonging to the ALU joined the IWW; see Jameson, All That Glitters, 77. It should be noted that David Emmons is the exception to these works, as he argues that western worker militancy arose not from a radical bent, but from Irish ethnocentric conservatism. In essence, when these workers acted collectively, they did so to protect their jobs or the rising status of their countrymen; see Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). 43.  For Rocky Mountain membership in the IWW from 1905–1907, see Paul Brissenden, The IWW: A Study of American Syndicalism, 3rd ed. (1919; New York: Russell and Russell, 1957), 68–69, 134–35. A few more locals may have belonged as the IWW never published a list of its member organizations in these years. Brissenden used the IWW’s convention proceedings to find these groups. Phil Mellinger, in his “How the IWW Lost Its Western Heartland: Western Labor History Revisited,” Western Historical Quarterly 27 (Autumn 1996): 303–24, gives examples of the inability of the IWW to maintain an organized presence in the region. For the 1912 numbers, see the Industrial Worker, 26 December 1912, 7. Salvatore Salerno’s, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), points out that immigrant radicalism played at least as important a role as western influences; see pages 45–67. 44.  I claim that well over three hundred ALU locals existed because the American Labor Union Journal listed, in its 13 August 1903, 3 and 8, 284 local unions in good standing. The paper did not list the locals affiliated with the WFM, the United Association of Hotel and Restaurant Employees, or the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees. Thus, claiming over three hundred locals is a very conservative estimate.

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45.  For a justification of the low numbers, see Salerno, Red November, Black November, 25–42. On the virtues of militant industrial unionism, see Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 57–170; Stewart Bird, Dan Georgakas, and Deborah Shaffer, Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW (Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1985), 1–18; Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 4, The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917 (New York: International Publishers, 1965); Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of the IWW and Syndicalism in the United States (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1967); Nigel Anthony Sellers, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905–1930 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); and Staughton Lynd, “Introduction” in “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 1–26. 46.  Proceedings: The Founding Convention of the IWW (1905; New York: Merit Publishers, 1969), 507. 47.  Political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel, for example, argues that because the process of capital accumulation and the subsequent market integration that followed outpaced the rise of parties as truly national institutions, groups that sought a more equitable distribution of wealth could not acquire the political power necessary to obtain statutes that would challenge the claims that industrialists made on wealth. Bensel explained that class “alignments were inverted because, in the North, the Republican party represented industrial and financial elites, while the Democrats drew support from immigrant workers and subsistence farmers.” In the South, “the Republicans were aligned with freedmen and poor mountain whites and the Democratic party was heavily influenced by the planter elite.” See Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 421. He expands this discussion in his The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a sampling of the works that favor the groups mentioned above see Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 175–76; Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1, 5; Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1790–1920,” American Historical Review 89 ( June 1984): 620–49; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992); Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Historical Foundations of Women’s Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830–1930,” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of

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Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York: Routledge, 1993), 44; and Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist De­mocracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton University Press), xi. 48.  Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 1045, 1046. It should be noted that Kathryn Kish Sklar argued that middle-class women “served as a surrogate for working-class social-welfare activism” because “women were able to provide systematic and sustained grass-roots support for social-welfare programs at a time when the working-class beneficiaries of those programs could lend only sporadic support.” See Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Historical Foundations of Women’s Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830–1930,” 44. Alan Dawley and Daniel T. Rodgers both arrived at conclusions similar to Gerstle’s. Dawley described the dominant outlook of the period as social liberalism, and Rodgers claimed that progressives built the social economy. They saw socialism as having a greater influence on middle-class reformers than Gerstle did, although Gerstle did note that many reformers flirted with socialism. Significantly, all three agreed that Progressive Era liberalism impeded actual socialist development in the United States. See Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 136; and Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 1–75. More recent works also solidify this point. Michael McGerr, in A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), went beyond the claim that middle-class progressives wanted to maintain a version of liberalism. He argued that they actually sought to “remake the nation’s feuding, polyglot population in their own middle–class image” (xiv). Shelton Stromquist’s Re-Inventing “the People” makes the key point that “liberals have largely continued to deny the relevance of class to reform. Unable or unwilling to recognize and confront the sources of class power in American life, they have pursued a politics of amelioration. Enlisting the state, they nevertheless sought to limit the scope of its initiative, circumscribe its power, and leave in place the structures of corporate property and influence that continue to reproduce inequality and dominate American life” (viii). 49.  George E. Mowry, “Social Democracy, 1900–1918,” in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 271–84; and Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory. For more on Kloppenberg’s approach, see footnote 7. 50.  Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1992), 37–77, 209–18; Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 4–40, 401–12; James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 3–56; Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History ( New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–14, 35–114; Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics; and Schneirov, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1878–1898,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 ( July 2006): 189–224. Importantly, Living­ ston actually does use the term social democracy to describe this arrangement in Pragmatism, Feminism and Democracy. Other works that point out how capitalism developed include Michael Merrill, “Putting ‘Capitalism’ in Its Place: A Review of the Recent Literature,” The William and Mary Quarterly 52 (April 1995): 315–26; and Paul A. Gilje, “The Rise of Capitalism in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (Summer 1996): 159–81. For an example of a current work that upholds the older notion that the United States was a capitalist nation from its origins, see Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,” Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 437–61. 51.  Schneirov’s work on new liberalism, which builds on Sklar’s mixed economy thesis, is one exception. 52.  This view is particularly troubling considering that Kazin’s Barons of Labor and Gary M. Fink’s Labor’s Search For Political Order: The Political Behavior of the Missouri Labor Movement, 1890–1940 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1974) show that the politics of AFL affiliates did not simply follow the positions of AFL national leaders. 53.  For Socialist Party historiography, see Lipset and Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here; and Richard Schneirov, “Editor’s Introduction: The Socialist Party Revisited” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2 ( July 2003): 245–52. For municipal socialism see: John T. Walker, “Socialism in Dayton, Ohio, 1912 to 1925: Its Membership, Organization, and Demise,” Labor History 26 (Summer 1985): 304–404; Richard Judd, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Errol Wayne Stevens, “Labor and Socialism in an Indiana Mill Town, 1905–1921,” Labor History 26 (Summer 1985): 353–83; and Douglas E. Booth, “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform: The Milwaukee Experience, 1910–1940,” Journal of Urban History (November 1985): 51–74. For suggestions on how to rethink how we study American socialism, see essays in the October 2003 issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

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Notes to Chapter 1 1.  Labor Enquirer, 24 March 1883, 4–6. 2.  Labor Enquirer, 28 February 1883, 1. 3.  Labor Enquirer, 3 March 1883, 1. 4.  Labor Enquirer, 3 March 1883, 4. 5.  Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 38–69; Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 15–16; John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Shelton Stromquist, Re-Inventing “the People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 39–48. 6. One must look at the whole run of the Enquirer under Buchanan to understand his commitment to variation. To get a sampling of his eclecticism, see 15 March 1884, 2, for an example of scientific socialism; 17 May 1884, 1, for evolutionary socialism; 5 December 1885 for an exposé on Marx and Marxism; 9 October 1886, 1, and 23 October 1886 for his examples of different European socialist movements; and 8 January 1887, 1, for the Paris Commune. 7.  Joseph R. Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator (New York: Outlook Company, 1903); and Robert Weir, Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 73–96. 8.  E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (February 1971): 76–136; Sean Wilentz, “Artisan Republican Festivals and the Rise of Class Conflict in New York City, 1788–1837,” in Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society, ed. Michael Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 33–77; Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 113–53; Michael Kazin and Steven J. Ross, “America’s Labor Day: The Dilemma of a Workers’ Celebration,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992), 1294–1323; Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 15, 94–131; David Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Science History 4 (February 1980): 87; and Philip Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977).

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9.  I agree with those who argue that capitalism should not be understood as a static concept, but as an economic system with its own set of historically determined social relations. The central characteristic of capitalism, as Marx pointed out, is the creation of abstract social labor. Capitalism existed when class relations—instead of, for example, kinship relations—dominated social relations. That happened when the bulk of the goods produced and services provided within a society resulted from a workforce whose labor power was commodified and measured in wages. Capitalism was continually redefined as the cultural notions of work changed, the process of commodification occurred, the size of corporations expanded, new ways to finance ventures emerged, and managerial practices developed. Thus, capitalism happens in stages. The years this chapter covers saw the transition from monopoly to corporate capitalism. Monopoly capitalism defined the era from roughly 1840 through 1900, when single firms dominated markets. The rise of oligopolies, because of state regulation of competition and financial markets and the rise of a new managerial class that oversaw day-to-day production, marked the era of corporate capitalism (1890 through 1930). To better understand the dynamism of capitalism, see Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1–40; Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 37–77, 209–18; James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 3–56; James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of History (New York: Routledge, 2001), 3–6; Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820– 1920 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1–12, 171–223; and Richard Schneirov, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873–1898,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 ( July 2006): 189–224. 10.  William E. Forbath, “The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age,” Wisconsin Law Review ( July–August 1985): 775–76. 11.  Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–10; and Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 273–81. 12.  James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 3–28.

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13.  John Bates Clark, The Philosophy of Wealth (Boston: Ginn, 1887); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 116–22; Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 49–62; and Stromquist, Re-Inventing “the People,” 22–24. 14.  Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1969), 19–22. In this work, Dubofsky first pointed out that the unrest resulting from rapid growth shaped workers actions. He and I, however, draw opposite conclusions. In his view, social instability led to the state putting down strikes and pushing workers toward an apolitical attitude (34). I show in this chapter and the next that these changes provided Rocky Mountain workers the opportunity to build a class-based, politically conscious movement. 15.  Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 7–28, 46–57; Howard Roberts Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 272–80; Nels Anderson, Desert Saints: The Mormon Frontier in Utah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942); and Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 116–21. 16.  Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 64–68, 112–27. It should be noted that not all of Young’s followers listened to him, as a number of Mormons did invest in mining ventures. Thomas G. Alexander, “Generating Wealth from the Earth, 1847–2000,” in From the Ground Up: The History of Mining in Utah, ed. Colleen Whitley (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2006), 37–57; and Kerry William Bate, “Iron City, Mormon Mining Town,” Utah Historical Quarterly 50 (Winter 1982): 47–58. 17.  Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California 1849–1870 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982); Dean L. May, Three Frontiers: Family, Land, and Society in the American West, 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85–97; and Eugene Moehring, “The Comstock Urban Network,” Pacific Historical Review 66 (August 1997): 337–62. 18.  D. W. Meinig, “American Wests: Preface to a Geographical Interpretation,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62 ( June 1972): 159–84; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994), ix–21, 61–102; Eugene Moehring, “The Civil War and Town Founding in the Intermountain West,” Western Historical Quarterly 28

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(Autumn 1997): 317–41; David Igler, “The Industrial Far West: Region and Nation in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review 69 (2000): 159–92; and Kathleen A. Brosnan, Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change along the Front Range (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 1–38. 19.  Sheelwant Bapurao Pawar, “An Environmental Study of the Development of the Utah Labor Movement: 1860–1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1968), 47–52. 20.  Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 81–93; Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 3–20; David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 22–23; and Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 5–20. 21.  Robert C. Sidford, “‘To The Devil By Any Road They Please’: Cache Valley’s Entrepreneurial Challenge to Cooperation,” Utah Historical Quarterly 72 (Spring 2004): 119–35; and Greg (“Fritz”) Umbach, “Learning to Shop in Zion: The Consumer Revolution in Great Basin Mormon Culture, 1847–1910,” Journal of Social History 38 (Fall 2004): 29–61. 22.  Dyer D. Lum, Utah and Its People: Facts and Statistics Bearing on the “Mormon Problem” (New York: R. O. Ferrier and Company, 1882), 8. For his overview of Mormon economic success, see 18–24. 23.  Dyer D. Lum, Social Problems of To-Day; or, The Mormon Question in Its Economic Aspects (Port Jervis, NY: D. D. Lum and Company, 1886), 6–7. 24.  Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1998), 97–178; Kathleen A. Brosnan, Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change along the Front Range (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 1–38; and Rodman Wilson Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1880 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Wilson, 1963), 114–21. 25.  Paul, Mining Frontiers, 123–34. 26.  David Brundage, The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver’s Organized Workers, 1878–1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 7–16. 27.  Clark C. Spence, Montana: A Bicentennial History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 20–36. 28.  Michael P. Malone, The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier 1864–1906 (1981; Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1995), 5–9; and Paul, Mining Frontiers, 145–47. 29.  Laurie Mercier, Anaconda: Labor Community, and Culture in Montana’s Smelter City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 10–20; Mary Mur-

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phy, Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914–41 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 1–41; David Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 13–24; Malone, Battle for Butte, 24–64 (the Inter Mountain is quoted on 40); and Paul, Mining Frontiers, 147–48. 30.  Salt Lake Tribune, 10 January 1873, 2. 31.  Pawar, “Utah Labor Movement,” 53–55. 32.  Salt Lake Tribune, 21 April 1876, 2. 33.  Salt Lake Tribune, 2 August 1877, 2. 34.  Charles Francis Adams, Jr., “The Rail Road System,” in Chapters of Erie and Other Essays by C. F. Adams, Jr., and Henry Adams (1871; New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1967), 418, 414–15. For his general argument for state regulation of railroads, see 414–22. For more on Adams’s reform views, see Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, and Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 3–79. 35.  Quoted in Brundage, Western Labor Radicalism, 91–92. 36.  Frank Roney, Irish Rebel and California Labor Leader: An Autobiography, intro. and ed. Ira B. Cross, (1931; New York: AMS Press, 1977), 235. 37.  Buchanan, Labor Agitator, 9–12. 38.  Roney, Irish Rebel, 228–29. 39.  First Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1887–1888 (Denver: Collier and Cleaveland Lith. Co., 1888), 136–38 (hereafter, First CBLS, 1887–1888); and Carroll D. Wright, Report on Labor Disturbances in the State of Colorado, from 1880–1904, Inclusive, with Correspondence Relating Thereto (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905), 69–74. 40.  Buchanan, Labor Agitator, 22. 41.  Wright, Report on Labor Disturbances in the State of Colorado, 74; Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 158, 162–67; and Richard E. Lingenfelter, The Hard Rock Miners: A History of the Mining Labor Movement in the American West, 1863–1893 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 143–56. 42.  Rocky Mountain News, 12 November 1873, 4. 43.  Colorado Miner, 24 March 1877, 4. 44.  For coverage of Miners’ Union Day celebration, see Butte Bystander, Pueblo Courier, Labor World, and Miners’ Magazine every June. 45.  People v. O’Loughlin Et Al., 3 Utah 133 (1881), and Deseret News, 10 March 1881, 4, and 21 September 1881, 1. 46.  People v. O’Loughlin Et Al., 3 Utah 133 (1881). 47.  Salt Lake Tribune, 8 February 1881, 4.

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48.  Salt Lake Tribune, February–March 1881. 49.  First CBLS, 1887–1888, 91. 50.  Labor Enquirer, 14 April 1883, 2. 51.  Labor Enquirer, 3 March 1883, 1. 52.  James Edward Wright, The Politics of Populism: Dissent in Colorado (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 70–71. 53. Owners such as Jay Gould admitted to bribing officeholders. Beyond illegal behavior, many objected to the undue influence owners had as they made sizable campaign contributions and placed politicians and influential members of both the Democrats and Republicans on corporate boards. For a larger analysis of corruption in this period, see Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), especially 46–61. To understand the excessive nature of the subsidies Congress and state governments provided to railroad owners, see Heywood Fleisig, “The Central Pacific Railroad and the Railroad Land Grant Controversy,” Journal of Economic History 35 (September 1975): 552–56. 54.  Labor Enquirer, 14 April 1883, 2. 55.  Labor Enquirer, 20 October 1883, 2, and 28 June 1884, 2. 56.  Labor Enquirer, 16 December 1882, 4. 57.  First CBLS, 1887–1888, 107 and 70. 58.  Labor Enquirer, 16 December 1882, 4. 59.  Labor Enquirer, 23 December 1882, 5. 60.  Ira Steward, “A Reduction of Hours, an Increase of Wages,” and “The Power of the Cheaper Over the Dearer,” in A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, ed. John R. Commons et al. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), 284–301 and 306–29; and George Gunton, Wealth and Progress: A Critical Examination of the Wages Question and Its Economic Relation to Social Reform (1887; New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890), vi, 5–10. This was originally Ira Steward’s project, but Gunton finished it because Steward died before completing his manuscript. For a fuller examination of living-wage thought, see Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1997), 2–5, 33–36, 102–04; Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–1897 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 181–205; and John R. Commons and John B. Andrews, “Introduction to Volumes IX and X,” in A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, ed. John R. Commons et al. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), 20–32. 61.  Labor Enquirer, 29 December 1883, 1. 62.  P. K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 36–45, 84–133; Leon Fink, Workingmen’s De­ mocracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of

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Illinois Press, 1983); Richard Jules Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit 1875–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 176–210; Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1989); Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 63.  Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Looking For Work, Searching for Workers: American Labor Markets During Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2002), 4–9. 64. On the issue of labor supply, see Stromquist, Boomers, 268–70; on absentee ownership in the region, see Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 22–23. 65.  First CBLS, 1887–1888, 72–80. 66.  Buchanan, Labor Agitator, 73. For the story of the strike, see 70–99; and for DA 82, see Stromquist, Boomers, 66–69; and Brundage, Western Labor Radicalism, 91–92. 67.  Buchanan, Labor Agitator, 193–194. 68.  Ibid., 194–97. 69.  Denver Typographical Union (DTU) # 49 Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, minutes, 19 May, 1885. 70.  Ogden Standard Examiner, 18 September 1886, 4; and First CBLS, 1887–1888, 90–91. 71.  Glickman, Living Wage, 3, 61–91; and Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, 181–205. 72.  First CBLS, 1887–1888, 314. 73.  Ibid., 316. 74.  Ibid., 319. 75.  Labor Enquirer, 26 May 1883, 1. 76.  Paul Andrew Frisch, “The ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’: The Working Class at Butte, Montana, 1878–1909” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1992), 112, 135–36. Williams’s quotes are from 135–36. 77.  Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, 67–97; Victoria C. Hattam, “Courts and the Question of Class: Judicial Regulation of Labor Under the Common Law Doctrine of Criminal Conspiracy,” in Labor Law in America: Historical and Critical Essays, ed. Christopher L.

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Tomlins and Andrew J. King (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 60–61; and Karen Orren, “Metaphysics and Reality in Late Nineteenth-Century Labor Adjudication,” in Labor Law in America: Historical and Critical Essays, 170–172; and Daniel R. Ernst, Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 71–76. 78.  Union Pacific Employes’ Magazine (UPEM) 3 (May 1888): 97–99. 79.  Philip R. P. Coelho and James F. Shepherd, “The Impact of Regional Differences in Prices and Wages on Economic Growth: The United States in 1890,” Journal of Economic History 39 (March 1979): 69–85; Rosenbloom, Looking For Work, 122–26; and Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), xiv–xv, 3–20, 277–80. Some scholars see this reality as a product of the short supply of laborers in the West. Initially this was the case, but by the mid-1890s, the situation had changed. Strong unions served as the agent of high wages. See the Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1899–1900 (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., State Printers, 1900), and the Eighth Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of the State of Montana for the Year Ending November 30, 1902 (Helena: Independent Publishing Company, 1903) for confirmation of this point. 80.  Labor Enquirer, 24 July 1886, 1. 81.  Arnoldo De Leon, Racial Frontiers: Africans, Chinese, and Mexicans in Western America, 1848–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 10–14; Liping Zhu, A Chinaman’s Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1997), 7–36; and Edna Bonacich, “Some Basic Facts: Patterns of Asian Immigration and Exclusion,” in Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II, ed. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 60–77. 82.  De Leon, Racial Frontiers, 19. 83.  Wyman, Hard Rock Epic, 37–60; Jerry W. Calvert, The Gibraltar: Socialism and Labor in Butte, Montana, 1895–1920 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1988), 59; Stephen J. Leonard, “The Irish, English, and Germans in Denver, 1860–1890,” Colorado Magazine 54 (Spring 1977), 126–29; Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). 84.  David Brundage, “Irish Land and American Workers: Class and ­Ethnicity in Denver, Colorado,” in “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on

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Working-Class Immigrants, ed. Dirk Hoerder (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 52–55. 85.  Ibid., 62. 86.  Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 16–17. 87.  Brundage, “Irish Land and American Workers,” 60–63. 88.  Labor Enquirer, 15 December 1883, 1. 89.  Denver Republican, 1 March, 1887, 1. 90.  The story of the Bluebird incident and the quote can be found in Lingenfelter, Hard Rock Miners, 188. 91.  Frank Roney was the best example of this view, as he wanted to include all workers, even Chinese immigrants, in the labor movement; see Irish Rebel. 92.  I am building on the arguments of Barbara Fields, Eric Arnesen, and Daniel Letwin here. These scholars presented white racist and ethnocentric beliefs and actions as occurring along a spectrum. They have gotten beyond the older dichotomous view that a minority of egalitarian whites battled racist and nativist whites for the soul of the labor movement. See Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 143–77; Arnesen, “ ‘Like Banquo’s Ghost, It will not Down’: The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 99 (December 1994): 1605–06; and Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1–7, 31–87. Alternatively, I could have embraced the whiteness model. As many recent scholars have pointed out, the free-labor ideal was not simply underpinned by the notion that property ownership conveyed political freedom, but that one also had to be “white.” Nineteenth-century Americans understood race as the product of biologically determined differences, which created a natural hierarchy. As a result, a “color” scale emerged where whiteness offered a psychological wage, a sense of privilege upon which whites claimed a right to have better jobs and higher wages. White workers, therefore, played a central role in fashioning white supremacy, which ultimately meant that they helped, even if unintentionally, to support the dominant power structure. For example, when white unionists refused to allow African Americans into their organizations, they fostered antiunion sentiment at best, and encouraged a pool of strikebreakers at worst. In either case, they provided employers the means to impede class unity.

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Whiteness scholars further support their argument by pointing to the efforts of various immigrant groups, especially the Irish, Italians, and Jews, to claim their white privileges. The 1790 Naturalization Act declared that only “white people” could become American citizens, but the founders did not offer guidelines on how to determine whiteness. In fact, from 1878, when Chinese immigrant Ah Yup sued to become a white citizen, until 1952, the year Congress ended racial restrictions on naturalization, the U.S. Supreme Court heard fifty-two cases that required the justices to define and redefine the meaning of “white people.” Rulings varied as judges changed the basis upon which they determined whiteness from what the pseudo­ science eugenicists wrote to the “common knowledge” they had gathered throughout their lives. Of course the Fourteenth Amendment established “Black” as a category upon which new arrivals could also seek citizenship, but immigrants coming to a Jim Crow society saw this option as less than appealing. If we situate the two examples I just offered of Italian immigrants in the Rocky Mountain West within the whiteness paradigm, then we can conclude that Butte miners accepted Italians as white and Granite’s Germans did not. This assertion proves problematic, however, because further examination of ethnic and race relations throughout the region reveals that in some local and regional unions, white unionists accepted African Americans into their organizations, contradicting the idea of a color scale. As any student of the West knows, and I will shortly show, Chinese immigrants bore the brunt of white worker hostility in the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, the whiteness model does a poor job of dealing with variation in white racist outlooks and actions for three reasons. First, it offers little room to examine the disagreements individual union members had over race, as it establishes a one-dimensional process where European immigrant groups arrived without racist notions and then adopted a white supremacist attitude to better their social position. Some clearly did follow this trajectory, while others obviously did not. Second, it ignores the fact that most “white” immigrant workers did not usually define themselves as white, but as Irish, German, and Cornish. Buchanan’s effort to make the Enquirer not only the voice for Rocky Mountain workers and anticapitalist politics but also an organ for ethnic organizations highlighted that fact. Third, the whiteness model remains predicated on the notion that white workers claimed their privileges based on the republicanism of the Revolutionary generation. That republicanism, specifically the meaning of the free-labor ideal, was being rethought as immigrants poured into the nation and the region and became part of a permanent wage workforce. For works on whiteness, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso Press,

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1991), 3–87; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9–13; Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Ian F. Haney Lopez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1–36. For critiques of whiteness, see Frank Towers, “Projecting Whiteness: Race and the Unconscious in the History of 19th-Century American Workers,” Journal of American Culture 21 (Summer 1998): 47–57; Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 60 (Fall 2001): 3–32; and Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89 ( June 2002): 154–73. 93.  First CBLS, 1887–1888, 74–75. 94.  Jonathan Garlock, Guide to the Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 262. 95.  UPEM 1 (November 1886): 290. Ferrell spoke after governor Fitzhugh Lee. In organizing the schedule this way, KOL leaders hoped to challenge the color line. African Americans in Richmond appreciated this gesture and turned out in large numbers to support a labor parade. Powderly, however, convinced delegates to back away from their push for egalitarianism as local Knights and business leaders complained and grew more militant. For the full story of the Frank Ferrell incident, see Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy, 162–64. 96.  Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 150. 97.  Building Laborers’ Protective Union, Salt Lake City, Minutes 12 May and 19 May, 1902, and 20 July, 1903, in Miscellaneous Labor Union Records. University of Utah Archives. On the “unlearning” of racism, see Ellen Schoening Aiken, “The United Mine Workers of America Moves West: Race, Working Class Formation, and the Discourse on Cultural ­Diversity in the Union Pacific Coal Towns of Southern Wyoming, 1870–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, Boulder, 2002). 98.  Moon-Ho Jung, “Outlawing ‘Coolies’: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation,” American Quarterly 57 (September 2005): 677–701; and Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1–38, 242–59. 99.  The motto occurs often during the 1880 election season: Rocky Mountain News October–November 1880, and Deseret News, 1 November 1880, 8. Also see Roy T. Wortman, “Denver’s Anti-Chinese Riot, 1880,” Colorado Magazine 42 (Fall 1965): 276.

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100.  Appleton’s Annual Cyclopædia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1881, vol. 6 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1882), 116. 101.  Quoted in Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 18. For an understanding of the Workingmen’s party of California, see ibid., 113–37; and Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 265–86. 102.  Labor Enquirer, January–December 1883. 103.  UPEM 3 (December 1888): 338. 104.  Craig Storti, Incident at Bitter Creek: The Story of the Rock Springs Chinese Massacre (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991), 30. 105.  Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 202–03. For a detailed history of the Rock Springs Massacre from a UP company perspective, see Storti, Incident at Bitter Creek. 106.  Storti, Incident at Bitter Creek, 146–58. 107.  Second Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado 1889–1890 (Denver: Collier and Cleaveland Lith. Co., 1890), 50–51. 108.  Second CBLS, 1889–1890, 55. 109.  Third Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1891–1892 (Colorado Springs: Gazette Printing Company, 1892), 129. 110.  Wyman, Hard Rock Epic, 37–60; Emmons, The Butte Irish, 13–30; and the articles by Liping Zhu, Daniel Liestman, Don C. Conley, Gerald E. Rudolph, Robert R. Swartout, Jr., Larry Barsness, and Stacy A. Flaherty in Chinese on the American Frontier, ed. Arif Dirlik (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). 111.  Weir, Knights Unhorsed, 10–20. 112.  Ibid., 161–83. Also see Richard Oestreicher, “Terence Powderly, the Knights of Labor and Artisanal Republicanism,” in Labor Leaders in America, ed. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil. For a defense of ­Powderly, see Craig Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000). 113.  Labor Enquirer, 8 May 1886, 2; Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 170–74; Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil, 170–90; Weir, Knights Unhorsed, 80–96; and ­Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, 243–44. 114.  Knights of Labor, Record of the Proceedings of the Special Session of the General Assembly, Held at Cleveland, O., May 25 to June 3, 1886, Powderly Papers, Catholic University Archives, Washington, DC.

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115.  Labor Enquirer, 14 August 1886, 2; and Terrence Powderly to Joseph Buchanan, 13 August 1886, Powderly Papers. 116.  Gene Ronald Marlatt, “Joseph R. Buchanan: Spokesman for Labor During the Populist and Progressive Eras” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1975), 230. 117.  Labor Enquirer, 1 January 1887, 2.

Notes to Chapter 2 1.  Union Pacific Employes’ Magazine (UPEM), 7 (November 1892): 290. 2.  Butte Bystander, 1 October 1894, 1. 3.  Pueblo Courier, 11 November 1898, 1. 4.  Labor World (Butte), 5 May 1902, 7. 5. On political collective bargaining, see Richard Schneirov, “Voting as a Class: Haymarket and the Rise of a Democrat-Labor Alliance in Late Nineteenth Century Chicago,” Labor’s Heritage 12 (Spring–Summer 2004): 6–21. 6.  Paul Kleppner, “Voters and Parties in the Western States, 1876–1900,” Western Historical Quarterly 14 ( January 1983): 59, 49–68; and Martin Shefter, “Regional Receptivity to Reform: The Legacy of the Progressive Era,” Political Science Quarterly 98 (Autumn 1983): 463, 459–83. 7. On Butte’s population changes, see Paul Andrew Frisch, “The ‘Gi­ braltar of Unionism’: The Working Class at Butte, Montana, 1878–1909” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1992), 34. 8.  Thomas J. Noel, The City and the Saloon: Denver, 1858–1916 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1996), 95–110. 9.  This example will be treated in far greater detail below. For more on Utah workers and their success in winning reforms during the statehood process, see John P. Enyeart, “ ‘The Exercise of the Intelligent Ballot’: Rocky Mountain Workers, Urban Politics, and Shorter Hours, 1886–1911,” Labor: Working-Class History of the Americas 1 (Fall 2004): 55–59. Oklahoma workers also realized the significance of influencing their first state constitution by carefully choosing and then endorsing pro-labor delegates; see Keith L. Bryant, “Labor in Politics: The Oklahoma State Federation of Labor During the Age of Reform,” Labor History 11 (Summer 1970): 259–76. 10.  Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 1–72, 151–73. 11.  Labor Enquirer, 7 January 1885–21 February 1885. Mechanics’ lien laws allowed a contractor or craftsmen to put a lien against a customer’s property to guarantee payment for work being done. 12.  Labor Enquirer, 24 January 1885, 3.

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13.  Gene Ronald Marlatt, “Joseph R. Buchanan: Spokesman for Labor During the Populist and Progressive Eras” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1975), 107–08. 14.  Labor Enquirer, 1 January 1887, 1. 15.  Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truber, and Company, 1890), 313. For more on the ULP in New York, see David Scobey, “Boycotting the Politics Factory: Labor Radicalism and the New York City Mayoral Election of 188[6],” Radical History Review, nos. 28–30 (1984): 306–07; and Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 294–302. 16.  UPEM 1 (November 1886): 293. 17.  Labor Enquirer, 1 January 1887, 1. 18.  Ibid., 26 February 1887, 2. 19.  Ibid., 5 March 1887, 2. 20.  Labor Enquirer, 2 April 1887, 3; 9 April 1887, 2; Denver Republican, 8 April 1887, 2; and David Brundage, The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver’s Organized Workers, 1878–1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 96–97. 21.  Labor Enquirer, 9 April 1887, 3. 22.  Denver Republican, 8 April 1887, 8. 23.  Labor Enquirer, 16 April 1887, 3; 30 April 1887, 3. Virtually every ULP meeting began with members singing labor songs. At most meetings, new proposals for action came up often. For meeting reports, see Labor ­Enquirer, January 1887–November 1887. 24.  James Edward Wright, The Politics of Populism: Dissent in Colorado (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 70–71. 25.  Denver Republican, 24 October 1887, 4. 26.  Edwin R. A. Seligman, “Owen and the Christian Socialists,” Political Science Quarterly 1 ( June 1886): 207. 27.  James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 199–246; and Dorothy Ross, “Socialism and American Liberalism: Academic Social Thought in the 1880s,” Perspectives in American History 11 (1977–1978): 7–79. 28.  Seligman, “Owen and the Christian Socialists,” 206–49; Henry C. Adams, “Relations of the State to Industrial Action,” Publications of the American Economic Association 6 ( January 1887): 7–85; and Francis A. Walker, “The Basis of Taxation,” Political Science Quarterly 3 (March 1888): 1–16. For recent histories dealing with taxation in the late nineteenth century, see R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson, The Price of Progress: Public Services, Taxation, and the American Corporate State, 1877 to 1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

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University Press, 2003), 12–24, 39–51; and Richard J. Joseph, The Origins of the American Income Tax: The Revenue Act of 1894 and its Aftermath (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 1–29. It should be noted that Seligman was the leading tax theorist at the turn of the century. 29. On the IWA, see Joseph R. Buchanan, The Story of a Labor Agitator (New York: Outlook Company, 1903), 265; Labor Enquirer, 8 May 1886, 1; Howard H. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 3–20; and Marlatt, “Joseph R. Buchanan,” 146, 151, 171–76. Labor Enquirer, 26 December 1885, 4. For RMSL meetings, see Labor Enquirer, January 1886–January 1888. For Belle Cheesewright’s poem, see Labor Enquirer, 1 October 1887, 5. On the RMSL, see Buchanan, Labor Agitator, 254–64; Marlatt, “Joseph R. Buchanan,” 180; and Brundage, Western Labor Radicalism, 73–74. 30.  Denver Republican, 25 October 1887, 4. 31.  Quint, Forging of American Socialism, 142–74; and L. Glen Seretan, Daniel De Leon: The Odyssey of an American Marxist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 82–140. 32.  Labor Enquirer, 14 May 1887, 5. 33.  UPEM 2 (October 1887): 264. 34.  UPEM 3 ( July 1888): 167. 35.  UPEM 3 ( July 1888): 168. 36.  Denver Republican, 24 January 1887, 4. 37.  Denver Republican, 1 January 1887, 11. 38.  First Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1887–1888 (Denver: Collier and Cleaveland Lith. Co., 1888), 255, 256, 259. 39.  Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 195–99. 40.  K. Ross Toole, “The Genesis of the Clark-Daly Feud,” The Montana Magazine of History 1 (April 1951): 21–33; Michael P. Malone, The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864–1906 (1981; Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1995), 80–92; and David Emmons, “The Orange and the Green in Montana: A Reconsideration of the Clark-Daly Feud,” in Montana Legacy: Essays on History, People, and Place, ed. Harry W. Fritz, Mary Murphy, and Robert R. Swartout, Jr. (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2002), 79–102. 41.  Toole, “The Genesis of the Clark-Daly Feud,” 21–33; Malone, Battle for Butte, 80–110. 42.  Emmons, “The Orange and the Green,” 79–102. 43.  Inter-Mountain Freeman, 26 March 1882, 7. 44.  UPEM 1 (September 1886): 255.

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45.  Butte Mining Journal, 15 May 1888, 1. 46.  UPEM, 3 ( July 1888): 188; Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 248–51; and David Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 97–103. 47.  William L. Lang, “One Path to Populism: Will Kennedy and the People’s Party of Montana,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 74 (Fall 1983): 77–81. 48.  Thomas A. Clinch, Urban Populism and Free Silver in Montana: A Narrative of Ideology in Political Action (Missoula: University of Montana Press, 1970), 45–47, and Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 254–56. 49.  The Age, 25 February 1891, 3. For varying accounts of Penrose’s murder, see Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 189–92; Emmons, Butte Irish, 206–08; and Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 282–84. 50.  Butte Mining Journal, 19 May 1888, 1. On ethnic voting patterns in Butte, see Richard E. Lingenfelter, The Hard Rock Miners: A History of the Mining Labor Movement in the American West, 1863–1893 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 189–90. 51.  Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 282–83. 52.  Quoted in Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 118. For the full story, see pages 115–25. 53.  Butte Bystander, 1 April 1893, 2. 54.  Jonathan Garlock, Guide to the Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 262–63; Clinch, Urban Populism, 6–7; and the reports of the Montana Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry from 1893–1904. 55.  Butte Workingmen’s Union, Knights of Labor Local Assembly 223, to Butte City Council, in Butte City Council Minutes, 20 May 1890, Silver Bow County Archive. 56.  Butte Bystander, 24 June 1893, 2. 57. United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Union, Butte Local #12 Minutes, 25 February 1891. 58.  Butte Bystander, 17 September 1892, 1. 59.  First Annual Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of Montana (Helena: State Publishing Company, 1894), 133–43. The nine occupations of railroad workers were: railroad clerks, conductors, locomotive engineers, locomotive firemen, brakemen, hostlers, car repairers, switchmen, and miscellaneous employees. For railroad workers, see pages 138–39; for miners, 134; and for restaurant employees and laborers, 142. 60.  “People’s Party Platform,” in An American Primer, ed. Daniel J. Boorstin (New York: Mentor Press, 1968), 533–41; John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party (Lin-

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coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1931); Robert C. McMath, Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); and Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 175–76. Elizabeth Sanders argued that “agrarian movements constituted the most important political force driving the development of the American national state in the half century before World War I.” She further insisted that because of “labor’s ambivalence, the threat that might have been posed to northern capital by the coalescence of its two great antagonists [farmers and workers] was muted.” By focusing on the legislation passed during the first two decades of the twentieth century, she concluded that farmers deserved credit for Progressive Era reforms. See Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1 and 5, respectively. 61.  Robert W. Larson, Populism in the Mountain West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 156; Clinch, Urban Populism; Wright, Politics of Populism; and David B. Griffiths, Populism in the Western United States, 1890–1900, 2 vols. (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). 62.  Clinch, Urban Populism, 48. 63.  Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 261, and Clinch, Urban Populism, 59–61. 64.  Charles Hoffmann, The Depression of the Nineties: An Economic History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 47–110; Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 32, 384–86; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1865–1918, vol. 3 (1949; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), 215–305. 65.  Clinch, Urban Populism, 101; Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 268; Butte City Directory 1893. 66.  Populist Tribune, 20 January 1894, 1. 67.  Butte Bystander, 27 January 1894, 1. 68.  Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 287–94. 69.  Carlos A. Schwantes, Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), x–21, 149–50, 246; and Clinch, Urban Populism, 106–07. 70.  Butte Bystander, 28 April 1894, 2. 71.  Ibid.; Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of Montana for the Year Ended November 30, 1894 (Helena: State Publishing Company, 1895); Populist Tribune, 28 April 1894, 1 and 8; Dave Walter, “Hogan’s Army: ‘A Petition with Boots On,’” in Montana Legacy: Essays on History, People, and Place, 65–71; Clinch, Urban Populism, 107–12; and Schwantes, Coxey’s Army, 149–65.

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72.  Walter, “Hogan’s Army,” 72–75. 73.  Helena News, 19 April 1894, 3. 74.  Butte Bystander, 7 April 1896, 1. 75.  Deseret News, 26 July 1890, 3. 76.  Howard Roberts Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 329–52. 77.  For a more detailed discussion of the party, see John R. Sillito, “‘A Party For All Toilers’: The Labor Party Movement in Utah, 1890–1910,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession, n.d.; and J. Kenneth Davies, Deseret Sons of Toil: A History of the Worker Movements of Territorial Utah, 1852–1896 (Salt Lake City: Olympus Publishing Company, 1977), 143–66. 78.  Salt Lake Herald, 2 August 1890, 8; 4 August 1890, 6. 79.  Sheelwant Bapurao Pawar, “An Environmental Study of the Development of the Utah Labor Movement: 1860–1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1968), 104–05; Davies, Sons of Toil, 17–141, 151. 80.  Lamar, Far Southwest, 341–52; and Edward Leo Lyman, Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 7–40; and 124–149. 81.  Salt Lake Tribune, 31 October 1891, 5; 15 August 1891, 5. Also, see Pawar, “Utah Labor Movement: 1860–1935,” 160. 82.  Salt Lake Journeymen Stone Cutters of North America, Minutes, 6 February 1892, University of Utah Archives, Salt Lake City. 83.  Salt Lake City Building Trades Congress, Minutes, 10 June 1893, in Miscellaneous Labor Union Records, University of Utah Archives. 84.  Pawar, “Utah Labor Movement,” 164–65. 85.  Salt Lake City Council Minutes, Book Q, 19 February 1895, Utah State Archives (microfilm). 86.  Ogden Standard, 8 April 1894–12 April 1894; and Schwantes, Coxey’s Army, 102–12. 87.  Railroad Gazette quoted in Schwantes, Coxey’s Army, 102–03. Railway Times, 15 June 1894, 4. 88.  Richard D. Poll et al., eds., Utah’s History (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 687; Garlock, Guide to the Local Assemblies, 514. 89.  Ogden Standard, 4 October 1891, 1 and 8 September 1893, 3. 90.  Ibid., 31 October 1893, 2; 7 November 1893, 1; and 8 November 1893, 4. 91.  Salt Lake Building Trades Congress Minutes, 4 August 1894, and 15 September 1894. 92.  Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention Assembled at Salt Lake City on the Fourth Day of March 1895, to Adopt a Constitution for the State of Utah (Salt Lake City: Star Printing Company, 1898), 2:1171–73,

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available at the Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City. Jean Bickmore White, Charter for Statehood: The Story of Utah’s State Constitution (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996), 107–22. It should be noted that 107 delegates attended the convention, but this vote total equals 106. John Henry Smith, the president of the convention, had no vote recorded and was not listed as absent. 93.  For the Federated Trades agenda, see Salt Lake Tribune, 31 October 1891, 5. 94.  Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention Assembled at Salt Lake City on the Fourth Day of March 1895, to Adopt a Constitution for the State of Utah, 2:1171; and Holden v. Hardy, 169 US 366 (1898). For more on liberty of contract, see Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 335–571; Herbert Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 1836–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 207–38; Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 25–58; Daniel R. Ernst, Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 90–109; and Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97. 95.  Wright, Politics of Populism, 128–56. 96.  UPEM 7 (November 1892): 289; UPEM 8 ( June 1893): 144 and 200. For Corbin’s candidacy, see UPEM 8 (April 1893): 94. 97.  Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Quadrangle, 1969), 28–35. 98.  Butte Bystander, 20 May 1893, 2. 99.  Forest Lowell White, “The Panic of 1893 in Colorado” (M.A. thesis, University of Colorado, 1932), 61–71; Wright, Politics of Populism, 166–67; and U.S. Department of the Interior, Compendium of the Eleventh Census, 1890, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897). 100.  Denver Republican 24 July–30 September 1893; and Rocky Mountain News, 23 July 1893, 13 and 3 August 1893, 5. 101.  Rocky Mountain News 27 July–30 July 1893. 102.  Rocky Mountain News, 17 July 1893, 8; UPEM 8 (August 1893): 206; and Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 162–93. 103.  UPEM 8 (August 1893): 206. 104.  M. F. Bowers to Davis H. Waite, 17 March 1894, Davis H. Waite Papers, Colorado State Archives, Box 26693.

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105.  Eben Smith Papers, Denver Public Library, Boxes 1, 2, 3, and 7. 106.  Emil W. Pfeiffer, “The Kingdom of Bull Hill,” Colorado Magazine 12 (September 1935): 171. 107.  John Calderwood, “The Strike of 1894,” in Emma F. Langdon, The Cripple Creek Strike: A History of Industrial Wars in Colorado, 1903–04–05 (Denver: Great Western Publishing Company, 1905), 43. Carroll D. Wright, Report on the Disturbances in the State of Colorado, from 1880 to 1904, Inclusive, with Correspondence Relating Thereto (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905), 79–82. 108.  Wright, Report on the Disturbances in the State of Colorado, 80–85. 109.  Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention of the Western Federation of Miners, 1894, WFM Papers, University of Colorado at Boulder Archives. 110.  The farmer and Wilcox are both quoted in Wright, Politics of Populism, 181. 111.  Rocky Mountain News, 25 September 1894. 112.  UPEM 9 (August 1894): 200–03; Preamble of the Colorado State Federation of Labor in Official Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the Colorado State Federation of Labor, 1896, CSFL Papers, University of Colorado at Boulder Archives. 113.  Ella Ames to Davis Waite, November 17, 1894, Davis Waite Correspondence, Box 27022, Colorado State Archives. 114.  Davis Waite, “What is the Mission of the People’s Party?” 1894 speech, Davis Waite Scrapbook, Colorado State Archives. As Waite had time to digest the vote totals, his critiques of workers dissipated. He realized that hard-rock miners had overwhelmingly cast their ballots for him. As a result, his criticisms of female voters grew more vindictive, and he started to rescind his longtime support for a national women’s suffrage amendment. In one speech, he claimed the “only just basis of suffrage is intelligence. There is no such deadly foe to liberty on Earth, as the emancipated Russian serfs, who devoutly believe that the voice of tyranny of the Czar, is the voice and act of God.” This quote can be found in a speech he saved in his scrapbook, which also includes letters from Eugene V. Debs and John P. Altgeld, who both tried to calm Waite down and attempted to convince him to remain an advocate for national women’s suffrage. 115.  Rocky Mountain News, 8 November 1894, 1. 116.  Wright, Politics of Populism, 197–225. 117.  UPEM 9 (August 1894): 200–03; Preamble of the Colorado State Federation of Labor, 1896; and on continuing this practice in 1897, see Industrial Advocate, 11 June 1897, 1. 118.  Industrial Advocate, 11 June 1897, 1; 9 July 1897, 1; 8 October 1897, 4; and Brundage, Western Labor Radicalism, 122.

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119.  Brundage, Western Labor Radicalism, 123–24; Pueblo Courier, 12 October 1900, 1. 120.  Pueblo Courier, 28 October 1898, 1. 121.  Ibid., 30 September 1898, 1, 3; and 28 October 1898, 3. 122.  Ibid., 30 September 1898, 3; Rocky Mountain News, 10 November 1898, 2; House Journal of the General Assembly of the State of Colorado Twelfth Session (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Company, 1900), 450; Senate Journal of the General Assembly of the State of Colorado, Twelfth Session (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Company, 1900), 580; and Wright, Politics of Populism, 227–33. 123.  Pueblo Courier, 30 September 1898, 1; 28 October 1898, 3. 124.  David L. Lonsdale, “The Fight for an Eight-Hour Day,” Colorado Magazine 43 (Fall 1966): 342–44. 125.  Report of the Industrial Commission on the Relations and Conditions of Capital and Labor Employed in the Mining Industry, Including Testimony, Review of Evidence, and Topical Digest, vol. 12 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901).

Notes to Chapter 3 1.  Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1899–1900 (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., State Printers, 1900), 53, 55, 10. 2.  Ibid., 111, 55. 3.  Ibid., 111, 100, 101, 104–05. 4.  Ibid., 101–02. 5.  Morris Hillquit, Socialism in Theory and Practice (New York, 1909); John Spargo, Socialism: A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles (New York, 1912), 75; Irving Howe, Socialism and America (New York, 1985), 3–48; Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 37–77; Mary O. Furner, “Knowing Capitalism: Public Investigation and the Labor Question in the Long Progressive Era,” in The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences, ed., Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 241–86; Richard Schneirov, “Editor’s Introduction: The Socialist Party Revisited,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2 ( July 2003): 245–52; and Schneirov, “Editor’s Introduction: Socialism and Capitalism Reconsidered,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2 (October 2003): 351–60. On social democracy, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in the Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 10–32.

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6.  James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 199–246. It should be noted that Kloppenberg also includes American Christian socialists among his list of architects of social democracy. They, however, ceased to advocate social democracy once their ideas received opposition. Thus, to see them as the bearers of American social democracy seems misplaced. Rocky Mountain workers, by contrast, not only came up with their own version of social democracy, they battled to make it a reality despite the rhetorical and physical attacks employers waged against them. 7.  For a comprehensive review of Socialist Party historiography, see Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Richard Schneirov, “Editor’s Introduction: The Socialist Party Revisited” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2 ( July 2003): 245–52; and Schneirov, “Editor’s Introduction: Socialism and Capitalism Reconsidered” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2 (October 2003): 351–60. 8. On pure-and-simple unionism, see Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19–36. On “new unionism,” see Colin Gordon, “The Lost City of Solidarity: Metropolitan Unionism in Historical Perspective,” Politics and Society 27 (December 1999): 561–65; Christopher T. Martin, “New Unionism at the Grassroots: The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in Rochester, New York, 1914–29,” Labor History 42, no. 3 (2001): 237–53; Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf, “Rank and File Rebellions and AFL Interference in the Affairs of National Unions: The Gompers Era,” Labor History 35 (Spring 1994): 237–59; Staughton Lynd, “Introduction,” in “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s, ed. Staughton Lynd (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 1–18; Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); David Montgomery, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 1909–22,” Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974): 509–29; and Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). It should be noted that many of the scholars mentioned in this note argue that semiskilled and unskilled workers did become part of the metropolitan, or what some have called “new,” unionism, but not until after 1910. For WLU and ALU affiliates, see American Labor Union Journal (ALUJ ), 2 July 1903, 1, and 14 May 1903, 5. 9.  Pueblo Courier, 8 May 1903, 2.

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10.  A Verbatim Report of the Discussion on the Political Programme, At the Denver Convention of the American Federation of Labor, December 14, 15, 1894 (New York: Freytag Press, 1895), 1. 11.  Ed Boyce to Samuel Gompers, 16 March 1897, in “Coeur d’Alene Mining Troubles,” 56th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Document 42, 8. 12.  Industrial Advocate, 8 October 1897, 4. 13.  A look at the Industrial Advocate throughout February and March ­provides numerous examples. Two especially strong letters appeared on 4 February 1898, 1, and 11 February 1898, 5. The letter quoted here is from 11 March 1898, 1. 14.  Ibid., 17 December 1897, 4. 15.  Pueblo Courier, 18 July 1898, 4; Miners’ Magazine 1 ( January 1900): 24–26; John Ervin Brinley, Jr., “The Western Federation of Miners” (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1972), 130–33; and David Brundage, The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver’s Organized Workers, 1878–1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 135–37. 16.  Industrial Advocate, 11 June 1897, 1; 9 July 1897, 1; 8 October 1897, 4; and Brundage, Western Labor Radicalism, 122. 17.  Salt Lake Tribune, 14 May 1899, 5; and Sheelwant Bapurao Pawar, “An Environmental Study of the Development of the Utah Labor Movement: 1860–1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1968), 176–82. 18. On the politics of the Federated Trades, see Chapter 2. On the AFL and the eight-hour day, see Greene, Pure and Simple Politics, 86–88; Sidney Fine, “The Eight-Hour Day Movement in the United States, 1888–1891,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40 (December 1953): 441–62; and David R. Roediger and Philip S. Foner, Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989), 158–65. For the debate on AFL affiliation in Utah, see Pawar, “Utah Labor Movement,” 108–09, 159–77. 19.  Thomas A. Clinch, Urban Populism and Free Silver in Montana: A Narrative of Ideology in Political Action (Missoula: University of Montana Press, 1970), 6; David Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 180–248; Norma Smith, “The Rise and Fall of the Butte Miners’ Union, 1878–1914” (M.A. thesis, Montana State University, 1961), 1–21; and Paul Andrew Frisch, “The ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’: The Working Class at Butte, Montana, 1878–1906” (Ph.D. diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1992), 111–14. 20.  Butte Bystander, 27 January 1894, 1; and Report of the Proceeding of the First Annual and Second Convention of the State Trades and Labor Council and the Butte Industrial Conference, 32–46. The Butte Bystander printed an article

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critiquing the AFL for even having to debate “a question of principle . . . which would decide that one of the great factors of production [land] should belong to the producer” (25 June 1895, 1). 21.  Pueblo Courier, 5 May 1899, 2. 22.  Greene, Pure and Simple Politics, 19–36, 46. 23.  Pueblo Courier, 2 May 1902, 1. 24.  Pueblo Courier, 15 August 1902, 3. 25.  Harvey Schanel and Henry Walker to Samuel Gompers, 14 September 1901, in Stuart Kaufman, Peter J. Albert, and Grace Palladino, eds., An Expanding Movement at the Turn of the Century, 1898–1902, vol. 5, The Samuel Gompers Papers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 394; and Brundage, Western Labor Radicalism, 144–45. 26.  Denver Typographical Union (DTU) #49 Minutes, 5 January 1902, Archives, University of Colorado–Boulder Libraries, Series I, Box 1. 27.  Miners’ Magazine 3 (April 1902): 2–5; 12–13. DTU Minutes, 6 April 1902. 28.  DTU Minutes, 4 May 1902. 29.  Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 218–19. 30.  Miners’ Magazine, 3 (December 1902): 33 and 36 (my italics). 31.  David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 10–15; and The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13–44. 32. United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Union, Butte Local #112 Minutes, May 1897, 22 July 1897, 26 July 1894, 15 December 1898, and 20 April 1899. 33.  Ibid., 31 January 1899 and 28 February 1899. 34.  “Reply of Respondent in the Case of Edward Killfeather versus Helena Typographical Union, No. 95,” in Helena Typographical Union, #95, Helena, Montana, Montana Historical Society Archive (MHSA), Box 1, File 36, 5–9. 35.  “In the Matter of the Charges Against Edward Kilfeather [sic], Preferred in Helena Typographical Union No. 95,” in Helena Typographical Union, #95, Helena, Montana, MHSA, Box 1, File 36, 1, 5, 12, and 13. It is important to note that three different documents deal with this case. In the first of these, the defendant’s name is spelled Kilfeather. In “Reply of Respondent in the Case of Edward Killfeather versus Helena Typographical Union, No. 95” and a letter about the case from the International Typographical Union president, James M. Lynch, to the Montana local, the defendant’s name is spelled Killfeather. It stands to reason that because “Re-

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ply” included Killfeather’s response to “Charges Against” and Lynch read materials from the defendant, the correct spelling is with two l’s, not one. The testimony and vote are from “Charges Against Edward Kilfeather,” 6, 9, 15–16, 19. 36.  Pueblo Courier, 20 January 1899, 3. 37.  Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 147–200; and Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 327–28. 38.  Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 331–36. 39.  Reveille, 25 September 1900, 5. 40.  Michael P. Malone, The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier 1864–1906 (1981; Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1995), 141–53; and Frisch, “Gibraltar of Unionism,” 315–23. 41.  State Ex Rel. Robert Mitchell Furniture Co. v. Toole, Governor, Et. Al., no. 1,715, Supreme Court of Montana, 26 Mont. 22; 66 p. 496; (1901). 42.  For the courts’ attitude toward labor in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, see William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 37–58; Herbert Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 1836–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 207–38; and Daniel R. Ernst, Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 90–109. 43.  Eighth Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of the State of Montana For the Year Ending November 30, 1902 (Helena: Independent Publishing Company, 1903), 205. On liberty of contract, see Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 335–571; Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 207–38; Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, 25–58; Ernst, Lawyers Against Labor, 90–109; and Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97. 44.  Labor World, 19 September 1902, 1. 45.  Labor World, 10 October 1902, 4. 46.  Official Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the Colorado State Federation of Labor (Original handwritten copy, 1896), 22, Colorado State Federation of Labor Papers, University of Colorado at Boulder Archives. 47.  Carl Wilburn McGuire, “History of the Colorado State Federation of Labor, 1896–1905” (M.A. thesis, University of Colorado–Boulder, 1935), 149–65. 48.  Pueblo Courier, 9 May 1902, 7.

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49.  Ibid., 2 May 1902, 2; 30 May 1902, 3; 25 July 1902, 4; and 15 August 1902, 8. 50.  Ibid., 10 October 1902, 1. 51.  Official Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Convention of the Western Federation of Miners (Denver: Colorado Chronicle Press, 1902), 12–13; for the entire speech, see 8–20. 52.  Ibid., 8–9. 53.  Ibid., 140–41. 54.  Ibid., 16–18. It should be noted that the convention proceedings confused the location of Rossland, placing it in Washington as opposed to its actual location of British Columbia. 55.  Eighth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1901–1902 (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., State Printers, 1902), 165–73; for details of the battle, see 168. 56.  Official Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Convention of the Western Federation of Miners, 16–18. 57.  Ibid., 66–68. 58.  Ibid., 150–51; and Eighth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1901–1902 (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., State Printers, 1902), 165–73. 59.  It is difficult to determine how representative that number of 63 percent was. The vote totals were 129¹⁄6 to 70 ¹⁄³, with 5½ ballots not cast for supporting the SP. The strange vote totals resulted from the federation’s ballot system. Membership determined the number of ballots each local union received, but local unions decided the number of delegates they would send to the convention. As a result, some locals—Butte #1, for example—had twenty votes. Members of #1 sent ten delegates who each had two votes, and therefore produced no fractions. Others, such as Silverton #26, had seven votes and sent two delegates each possessing 3½ votes. Some delegates were instructed to vote the wishes of the majority of their union local, while others voted their own conscience. For the vote itself, see Tenth Annual Convention of the WFM, 4–5, 91–92, and 94–96. 60.  For a firsthand account of the coal miners’ experiences in the Rocky Mountain states, see the periodic letters in the Labor Enquirer from 1884–86. The Union Pacific Employes [sic] Magazine (UPEM) also printed monthly correspondence of coal miners; see vols. 1–8 for the years 1886–94. For UMWA correspondence, see Pueblo Courier, especially 1901–03. For the significance of the 1894 strike and a fresh understanding of company towns, see Thomas G. Andrews, “The Road to Ludlow: Work, Environment, and Industrialization, 1870–1915” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2003), 402–50. Also see Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). For other works

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on company towns, see George S. McGovern and Leonard F. Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 1–38; Allan Kent Powell, The Next Time We Strike: Labor in Utah’s Coal Fields, 1900–1933 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1985); and Rick J. Clyne, Coal People: Life in Southern Colorado’s Company Towns, 1890–1930 (Denver: Colorado Historical Society, 1999), 1–62. 61.  UPEM 8 (March 1893): 59. 62.  James Whiteside, Regulating Danger: The Struggle For Mine Safety in the Colorado Coal Industry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 55–96; James Brian Whiteside, “Protecting the Life and Limb of Our Workmen: Work, Death, and Regulation in the Rocky Mountain Coal Mining Industry,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1986), 17–18; Andrews, “The Road to Ludlow,” 402-450; McGovern and Guttridge, Great Coalfield War, 79–81. 63.  For just one example, which deals with Sunrise, Wyoming, see Camp and Plant 1 (15 February 1902): 145–47, in the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company Papers, Archives, University of Colorado–Boulder Libraries. For more on CFI’s control over communities, see Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on the Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 13–106. 64.  See Camp and Plant from 1901 to 1903. 65.  Pueblo Courier, 17 February 1902, 2. 66.  Ibid., 9 November 1900, 1. 67.  Powell, Next Time We Strike, 37–46 (quote on 46). 68.  Pueblo Courier, 3 May 1901, 1; and 6 December 1901, 2. Other states in District 15 failed to pass a similar measure during this organizing drive. See Bulletin of the Department of Labor, vols. 6 and 7 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901 and 1902). This annual report listed all labor laws passed in the year it was printed. 69.  Whiteside, “Protecting the Life and Limb,” 134–37. 70.  Camp and Plant 3 (7 March 1903): 109. 71.  Pueblo Courier, 19 September 1902, 2; 14 November 1902, 2; and 26 December 1902, 4. 72.  Ibid., 25 January 1901, 3; 3 April 1903, 7; and 10 April 1903, 7. 73.  George C. Suggs, Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism: James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972), 38–44, 80; Stephen J. Kneeshaw and John M. Lingren, “Republican Comeback, 1902,” Colorado Magazine 48 (1971): 15–29; and William L. Hewitt, “The Election of 1896: Two Factions Square Off,” Colorado Magazine 54 (1977): 44–57. 74.  James Edward Wright, The Politics of Populism: Dissent in Colorado (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 234–35.

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75.  Pueblo Courier, 10 October 1902, 1. 76.  Ibid., 31 October 1902, 1. 77.  Ibid. 78.  Suggs, Colorado’s War, 30–44. 79.  Telluride Journal, 16 October 1902, 6. 80.  Miners’ Magazine 3 (November 1902): 4–5. 81.  Miners’ Magazine 3 (November 1902): 6. 82.  Colorado Chronicle, 24 September 1902, 1. 83.  Telluride Journal, 22 January 1903, 6. 84.  David Lawrence Lonsdale, “The Movement for an Eight-Hour Law in Colorado, 1893–1913” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado–Boulder, 1963), 252–63. 85.  Ninth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1903–1904 (Denver: The Smith-Brooks Printing Co., 1904), 48. 86.  There are many accounts of the Cripple Creek strike of 1903–04. For the best primary accounts, see Emma Langdon, The Cripple Creek Strike: A History of Industrial Wars in Colorado (Denver: Great Western Publishing, 1904–05); and Carroll D. Wright, Report on the Disturbances in the State of Colorado, from 1880 to 1904, Inclusive, with Correspondence Relating Thereto (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905), 160–66, 170–93, 207–86, 293–329. For secondary sources, see Suggs, Colorado’s War, 65–117; Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), 49–56; and Elizabeth Jameson, All that Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 200–05. 87.  Pueblo Labor Advocate, 16 October 1903, 1; and 13 November 1903, 1. 88.  George G. Suggs, Jr., “The Colorado Coal Miners’ Strike, 1903–1904: A Prelude to Ludlow?” Journal of the West 12 ( January 1973): 39. 89.  Suggs, “Colorado Coal Miners’ Strike,” 43–50. 90.  Quoted in Powell, Next Time We Strike, 55. 91.  Gomer Thomas to Heber M. Wells, 21 November 1903, National Guard Carbon County (NGCC) Coal Strike Records, 1903–04; 1909, Utah State Archives; and Wells’s Proclamation to send National Guard, NGCC Coal Strike Records, 1903–04; 1909. 92.  Melvyn Dubofsky expressed this sentiment toward the ALU in his We Shall Be All. See pages 74–75 for these observations and 71–75 for his overall analysis, which suggested that the ALU served as a steppingstone to the IWW. Others have furthered this notion that the ALU served as a precursor to the IWW. See Brundage, Western Labor Radicalism, 151–59; and Philip Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917, vol. 4, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 23–24.

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93.  ALUJ, 29 January 1903, 3; 13 August 1903, 5; and Carlos A. Schwantes, Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in Washington and British Columbia, 1885–1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 142–45. 94.  The Canadian Pacific Strike near Vancouver was the first major battle UBRE workers fought. See ALUJ, 12 March 1903, 5; 28 May 1903, 1; and 25 June 1903, 1; and J. Hugh Tuck, “The United Brotherhood of Railway Employees in Western Canada, 1898–1905,” Labour/Le Travailleur 11 (Spring 1983): 63–88 95.  ALUJ, 19 March 1903, 1. 96.  Andrew Wender Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–11, 59–119; Gordon, “Lost City of Solidarity,” 561–65; John B. Jentz, “Unions, Cartels, and the Political Economy of American Cities: The Chicago Flat Janitors’ Union in the Progressive Era and 1920s,” Studies in American Political Development 14 (Spring 2000): 51–54; and Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–1897 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 248–55, 307–22. 97.  Lyle W. Dorsett, The Queen City: A History of Denver (Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing Company, 1977), 92; and Brundage, Western Labor Radicalism, 14. 98.  Mary Murphy, Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914–41 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 44. 99.  The Cooks’ and Waiters’ Union fight against the employers’ association was played out in the pages of the Salt Lake Tribune from the last week in January through the first week in February 1902. For the employers’ association quote, see 31 January 1902, 8. 100. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Judiciary, Anti-Injunction Bill: Hearings before the Committee on Judiciary, 58 Cong., 2nd sess., 26 February 1904, 258 and 264. ALUJ, 19 May 1903, 1; 28 May 1903, 1. 101.  James C. Craig, “How Colorado Had to Fight, and Fought and Won,” American Industries 2 (16 May 1904): 5. On the origins of the Citizens’ Alliance, see Greene, Pure and Simple Politics, 88–93. 102.  House Committee on Judiciary, Anti-Injunction Bill, 262. 103.  Ogden Standard Examiner, 15 May 1903, 1. 104.  Ogden Standard Examiner, 3 August 1903, 1. 105.  House Committee on Judiciary, Anti-Injunction Bill, 258 and 264. 106.  Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Convention of the Montana Federation of Labor (Helena: Independent Publishing Company, 1904), 7. 107.  Ibid., 16. 108.  Ibid., 17. For the terms of the agreement, see 31–32.

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109.  Eighth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1901–1902, 17–44. For Smith’s comments on the cost of living, see 23–24. 110.  Ibid., 47–48, 52. 111.  Ibid., 48, 55–56. 112.  ALUJ, 23 April 1903, 1. 113.  Pueblo Labor Advocate, 18 September 1903, 4. Chicago brick makers used cooperatives in this way in the 1880s; see Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, 153. 114.  Pueblo Labor Advocate, 25 September 1903, 1; and 2 October 1903, 1. 115.  Ibid., 22 January 1904, 1; and 29 January 1904, 1. 116.  ALUJ, 13 August 1903, 1. 117.  Ninth Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of the State of Montana For the Year Ending November 30, 1904 (Helena: Independent Publishing Company, 1904), 177. 118.  President’s Report, 1 April 1904, CSFL Papers.

Notes to Chapter 4 1.  Union Label League Bulletin (ULLB), 1 (April 1906): 23; ULLB 1 (August 1906): 19–21; “Report of the Officers of the Denver Trades and Labor Assembly, January 13, 1907,” in ULLB vol. #1, 5. For one of Rude’s advertisements, see Clarion Advocate, 21 October 1904, 3. For the union trademark laws, see Bulletin of the Department of Labor, 5 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), 231–32; 444–45; 1113–14. 2.  Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1899–1900 (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., State Printers, 1900), 119. 3.  Official Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Convention of the Western Federation of Miners (Denver: Colorado Chronicle Press, 1902), 100. 4.  Industrial Worker, 6 May 1909, 2. 5.  Melvyn Dubofsky, “The Origins of Western Working Class Radicalism, 1890–1905,” Labor History 7 (Spring 1966): 131–54; and Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969). 6.  Industrial Worker, 26 December, 1912, 7. It should be noted that Salvatore Salerno’s Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989) pointed out that immigrant radicalism played as important a role, if not more so, than western influences; see 45–67. 7.  American Labor Union Journal (ALUJ ), 13 August 1903, 3, 8. It must be remembered that the United Association of Hotel and Restaurant Employees

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and the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees also belonged to the ALU, and their locals were not listed. On IWW membership numbers, see Stewart Bird, Dan Georgakas, and Deborah Shaffer, Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW (Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1985), 1–18; and Jon Bekken, “Industrial Workers of the World,” in Historical Encyclopedia of American Labor, ed. Robert E. Weir and James P. Hanlan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 1: 245. On Colorado union membership totals, see Thirteenth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1911–1912 (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., State Printers, 1913), 110. 8.  William English Walling, “The New Unionism—The Problem of the Unskilled Worker,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 24 (September 1904): 12–13, 27. 9.  Miners’ Magazine 11 (3 March 1910): 8. A number of works discuss the new unionism that was emerging in the early twentieth century. For some examples, see Christopher T. Martin, “New Unionism at the Grassroots: The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in Rochester, New York, 1914–29,” Labor History 42, no. 3 (2001): 237–53; Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); and David Montgomery, “The ‘New Unionism’ and The Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 1909–22,” Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974): 509–29. Also, works on women, African Americans, and Mexican Americans, show that despite having reservations over the AFL’s conservatism, many of the workers whom Gompers did not welcome with open arms nonetheless found the AFL to be their best option for improving their living conditions. See Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); and Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993). 10.  For a list of ALU affiliates, see ALUJ, 13 August 1903, 3. 11.  Voice of Labor, 3 (March 1905): 4–5. This became the official periodical of the ALU in 1905, when the ALUJ and Railway Employees Journal merged. Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 76. 12.  The Conference of Industrial Unionists at Chicago, Manifesto (Cincinnati, OH: Conference of Industrial Unionists, 1905), 3. The Manifesto appeared often in the ALUJ and Miners’ Magazine between January 1905, when it was issued, and June 1905, when the IWW was formed. This copy comes from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Anaconda, Montana, Local #88, Papers, Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, Montana.

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13.  Manifesto, 2–3. 14.  Proceedings: The Founding Convention of the IWW (1905; New York: Merit Publishers, 1969), 117–18. 15.  Proceedings: IWW, 160. For a fuller account of Coates’s views, see 117–60. 16.  Ibid., 317–18. 17.  Ibid., 507. 18.  Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Convention of the Montana Federation of Labor (Helena: Independent Publishing Company, 1904), 9–15. 19.  Proceedings: IWW, 507. 20.  Ibid., 575–76. In the appendix of the IWW’s Proceedings is the account of the ratification meeting held in July 1905, which also served as an organizational drive. 21.  Ibid., 576. 22.  Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1899–1900 (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., State Printers, 1900), 162–63. 23.  San Juan District Union, Minutes, 10 April 1899, in the Clinton Jencks Papers, University of Colorado–Boulder Archives. 24.  Eric Rauchway, “The High Cost of Living in the Progressives’ Economy,” Journal of American History 88 (December 2001): 898–924. 25.  Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of the State of Montana For the Year Ending November 30, 1897 (Helena: State Publishing Company, 1898), ix. 26.  Eighth Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of the State of Montana For the Year Ending November 30, 1902 (Helena: Independent Publishing Company, 1903), 183–84. 27.  Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 4–5. 28.  Clarion Advocate, 18 November 1904, 1. 29.  Clarion Advocate, October 1904–May 1906. 30.  Ninth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado 1903–1904 (Denver: Smith Brooks Printing Co., 1904), 29. 31.  Rocky Mountain News article, 28 February 1891, in Stuart B. Kaufman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Unrest and Depression, 1891–94, vol. 3, The Samuel Gompers Papers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 36–37. See also Rosanne Currarino, “The Politics of ‘More’: The Labor Question and the Idea of Economic Liberty in Industrial America,” Journal of American History 93 ( June 2006): 17–36. 32.  Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 147.

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33.  The Official Colorado State Labor Directory and Manual (Denver: Colorado State Federation of Labor, 1906), 44–49. Colorado State Federation of Labor Papers, University of Colorado–Boulder Archives. 34.  ULLB 1 (September 1906): 15 and 19. 35.  ULLB 2 ( July 1907): 15–17. 36.  ULLB 2 (October 1907): 25. 37.  Nancy Woloch, Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), 10–32. 38.  Industrial Union Bulletin, 15 June 1907, 2. 39.  Ibid., 15 June, 1907, 2; and 20 April 1907, 4. 40.  Women’s Protective Union/Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union Butte (WPU), Minutes, 18 February 1904, WPU Collection, Montana Historical Society Archives. 41.  Women’s Protective Union, No. 148, A.L.U. to Butte City Council, in Butte City Council Minutes, 23 February 1904, Silver Bow County Archives. The Licensing Committee did not report on the matter over the next two years. 42.  WPU Minutes, 9 July 1903; 14 June 1904; 19 March 1905. 43.  WPU Minutes, September–December 1905. For the IWW’s critique of the closed shop, see Industrial Union Bulletin, 15 June 1907, 2; 20 April 1907, 4. On the WPU joining the AFL, see Cobble, Dishing it Out, 65. 44.  Industrial Worker, 1 April 1909, 2. 45.  Industrial Union Bulletin, 2 March 1907, 1. 46.  ULLB 1 (August 1906): 9. For the label as a symbol of conservatism, see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). Trachtenberg, like the Wobblies, claims that workers used the label as “the mark of legitimacy” that symbolized “labor’s willingness to accept the wage system in exchange for a secure place within the social order” (95). Dana Frank argues that label agitation was a mixed bag. On one hand, the label could promote classconscious awareness of consumption and bring husbands, the traditional wage earners, and wives, the traditional consumers for the family, together to support organizing drives. Yet the label movement could as easily divide men and women. Men saw promoting union activism as their primary goal, and women understood that frugality was essential to being a wise consumer. Furthermore, labels could help American capitalists by promoting economic nationalism. Frank makes these arguments in Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), see especially 212–46; and on the label’s role in economic nationalism, see Frank’s Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 131–59,

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187–213. Finally, Lawrence Glickman contends that the label symbolized a transformation in economic thinking on the part of the working class. Fighting for the living wage, or demanding the ability to provide for one’s family, Glickman argues, emerged as the basic argument against capitalist hegemony. See Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), especially 112–28. 47.  Frank, Purchasing Power, 193–99; Glickman, A Living Wage, 95–98; and John Graham Brooks, “The Trade-Union Label,” Bulletin of the Department of Labor 3 (March 1898): 197–219. 48.  Butte Carpenters Union Local 112, Minutes, 9 January 1902, Carpenters Union Hall, Butte, Montana. 49.  Salt Lake Typographical Union Local #115, Minutes, 7 October 1906, University of Utah Archives. 50.  Missoula County Trades and Labor Council, Minutes, 23 September, 1915, Silver Bow County Archives. 51.  Salt Lake Retail Clerks Union Local #558 Minutes 1 July 1902. 52.  ULLB 2 (October 1907): 17. 53.  Bulletin of the Department of Labor, 5 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), 231–32; 444–45; and 1113–14. 54.  ULLB 1 (April 1906): 13. It should be noted that the Union Label League originated in Denver and spread to Pueblo and Salt Lake City before moving east to Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and into Canada. For more on women and the union label, see Frank, Purchasing Power, 212–46; Maurine Weiner Greenwald, “Working-Class Feminism and the Family Wage Ideal: The Seattle Debate on Married Women’s Right to Work, 1914–1920,” Journal of American History 76 ( June 1989): 118–49; Kathryn J. Oberdeck, “ ‘Not Pink Teas’: The Seattle Working-Class Women’s Movement, 1905–1918,” Labor History 32 (Spring 1991): 193–230; and Glickman, A Living Wage, 112–24. 55.  Industrial Union Bulletin, 20 April 1907, 4. 56.  Ibid. 57.  Industrial Worker, 29 August 1909, 1. 58.  Ibid., 11 June 1910, 1. David Montgomery argued, in his essay on new unionism, that many union locals did not join the Wobblies because it forbade contracts. His point, however, was that the eastern unions he examined were sympathetic to the IWW’s aims. See chapter 4 in Montgomery’s Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); or his essay, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America.” 59.  James Weinstein, Detour: The History and Future of the American Left (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 52.

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60.  Official Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Convention: Western Federation of Miners (Denver: Reed Publishing, 1906), 196–98. For a larger breakdown of the ambivalence of WFM members toward the IWW at the 1906 convention, see John Ervin Brinley, Jr., “The Western Federation of Miners” (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1972), 149. 61.  Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 96–105; and J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 62.  Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual WFM Convention, 17–21. 63.  Brinley, “Western Federation of Miners,” 152. 64.  Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 110–13. Brinley, “Western Federation of Miners,” 154. 65.  Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual WFM Convention, 582–83. 66.  See Miners’ Magazine, October–November 1906. 67.  Official Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Convention: Western Federation of Miners (Denver: n.p., 1907), 525. 68.  Ibid., 572. 69.  Brinley, “Western Federation of Miners,” 161. 70.  WFM Executive Board Minutes, 14 December 1907, in the Clinton Jencks Papers. 71.  Brinley, “Western Federation of Miners,” 164. 72.  Official Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Convention: Western Federation of Miners (Denver: Western Newspaper Union, 1904), 13. For another discussion on the affiliation, see Brinley, “Western Federation of Miners,” 112–26. 73.  Allan Kent Powell, The Next Time We Strike: Labor in Utah’s Coal Fields, 1900–1933 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1985), 51–80. 74.  Miners’ Magazine 6 (9 February 1905): 4. 75.  Ibid., 5. 76.  Brinley, “Western Federation of Miners,” 113. 77.  Ibid., 113–15. 78.  Miners’ Magazine 6 (13 April 1905): 7. 79.  For a more detailed discussion on WFM affiliation with the AFL, see Brinley, “Western Federation of Miners,” 116–20. For the local vote, see Industrial Worker, 25 June 1910, 2. 80.  Industrial Worker, 9 April 1910, 3. 81.  Ibid., 6 April 1911, 1. 82.  WFM Executive Board Minutes, 6 December, 1906. 83.  Official Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Convention of the Western Federation of Miners of America (Denver: n.p., 1903), 177; WFM Executive Board Minutes, 11 December 1905.

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84.  For discussions of the BMU’s contract, see Official Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Convention of the Western Federation of Miners, 308–52. 85.  Industrial Union Bulletin, 20 April 1907, 4; Miners’ Magazine 17 (3 February 1916): 3; and Brinley, “Western Federation of Miners,” 352, 107. 86.  WFM Executive Board Minutes, 17 December, 1906. 87.  Robert Todd Laugen, “The Promise and Defeat of the Progressive Public: Reform Politics in Colorado, 1902–1929” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 2005), 39–63. For more on Denver’s middle-class reformers, see Thomas A. Krainz, Delivering Aid: Implementing Progressive Era Welfare in the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 67–101. 88.  ULLB 1 ( June 1906): 23. 89.  Salt Lake Federation of Labor, Minutes, 24 September 1909, University of Utah Archives; Sheelwant Bapurao Pawar, “An Environmental Study of the Development of the Utah Labor Movement: 1860–1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1968), 228–37; and Brinley, “Western Federation of Miners,” 149. 90.  Salt Lake Tribune, 1 October 1906, 2. 91.  John R. Sillito, “‘A Party For All Toilers’: The Labor Party Movement in Utah, 1890–1910,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession, n.d., 10–17. 92.  Salt Lake Typographical Union Local 115 Minutes, 7 June 1908, Minute book 2, Box 19, University of Utah Archives. 93.  John S. McCormick and John R. Sillito, “Respectable Reformers: Utah Socialists in Power, 1900–1925,” in A World We Thought We Knew: Readings in Utah History, ed. McCormick and Sillito (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995),119–20. 94.  John T. Walker, “Socialism in Dayton, Ohio, 1912 to 1925: Its Membership, Organization, and Demise,” Labor History 26 (Summer 1985): 385; Richard Judd, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Errol Wayne Stevens, “Labor and Socialism in an Indiana Mill Town, 1905– 1921,” Labor History 26 (Summer 1985): 353–83; and Douglas E. Booth, “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform: The Milwaukee Experience, 1910–1940,” Journal of Urban History (November 1985): 51–74. 95.  John S. McCormick and John R. Sillito, “Socialism and Utah Labor: 1900–1920,” Southwest Economy and Society 6 (Fall 1983): 19–23; and McCormick and Sillito, “Respectable Reformers,” 115–29. 96.  Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 242; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 286–90; and McCormick and Sillito, “Respectable Reformers,” 116. 97.  Colorado Socialist Bulletin, August 1910, 2, in the William Penn Collins Papers, University of Colorado–Boulder Archives; and James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism 1912–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 116–17. 98.  Paul Andrew Frisch, “The ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’: the Working Class at Butte, Montana, 1878–1906” (Ph.D. diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1992): 331–36; Jerry W. Calvert, The Gibraltar: Socialism and Labor in Butte, Montana, 1895–1920 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1988), 17–35; and International Socialist Review 11 ( June 1911): 731–33; International Socialist Review 12 ( July 1911): 5–6; International Socialist Review 12 ( July 1911): 104–06; International Socialist Review 12 (November 1911): 287–92; and International Socialist Review 13 (September 1912): 263–64. 99.  Montana Socialist Party flyer, 1911, Socialist Party Papers, Microfilm Edition, Reel 99. 100.  Calvert, The Gibraltar, 39. For more on the importance of health issues to Western workers during this period, see Alan Derickson, Workers’ Health, Workers’ Democracy: The Western Miners’ Struggle, 1891–1925 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 101.  Butte Teamsters to the Honorable Mayor and City Council of Butte, 2 March 1901, Butte City Council Records. 102.  Eighth Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of Montana, 197–98. 103.  Butte Teamsters to Butte Mayor and City Council, in Butte City Council Minutes, 2 March 1901; and 6 February 1907. 104.  Butte Teamsters Union to Butte Mayor and City Council, in Butte City Council Minutes, 3 November 1913. 105.  Lewis J. Duncan to the Butte Teamsters Union, 17 November 1913. Silver Bow County Archives, Labor History Collection Box 010. 106.  Pueblo Courier, 15 July 1898, 1; Labor News, 5 July 1897, 1; Carl Wilburn McGuire, “History of the Colorado State Federation of Labor, 1896–1905” (M.A. thesis, University of Colorado–Boulder, 1935), 131; and Clarion-Advocate, 29 July 1904, 1. 107.  H. B. Waters, “Initiative and Referendum,” The Official Colorado State Labor Directory and Manual (Denver: Colorado State Federation of Labor, 1906), 32–37. 108.  Session Laws State of Colorado: Eighteenth General Assembly (Denver: The Smith-Brooks Printing Company, 1911), chapter 150. 109.  Senate Journal of the Fifth Session of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Utah, 1903 (Salt Lake: The Deseret News, 1903); and House Journal:

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­ leventh Session of the Legislature of the State of Utah (Salt Lake: Century PrintE ing Company, 1915), 57. 110.  Miners’ Magazine 3 (February 1903): 29. 111. Eighth Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of the State of Montana, 151. 112.  Montana News, 18 October 1906, 1; 25 October 1906, 1; and 10 January 1907, 1. 113.  Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 232–58; Ryken Grattet, “Sociological Perspectives on Legal Change: The Role of the Legal Field in the Transformation of the Common-law of Industrial Accidents,” Social Science History 21 (Fall 1997): 359–97. Lawrence M. Friedman and Jack Ladinsky, “Social Change and the Law of Industrial Accidents,” in American Law and the Constitutional Order: Historical Perspectives, ed. Friedman and Harry N. Scheiber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978): 269–71. 114. On the states that passed stricter laws, see Friedman and Ladinsky, “Social Change,” 383–92. On Colorado’s 1893 measure, see Mills’ Annotated Statutes of Colorado, 1891–1896, vol. 3 (Denver: Mills Publishing Company, 1904), 422–25. 115.  Pueblo Courier, 1 February 1901, 1. 116.  Ibid., 226–27. 117.  Friedman and Ladinsky, “Social Change,” 272–78. 118.  John Edward P. Williams-Searle, “Broken Brothers and Soldiers of Capital: Disability, Manliness, and Safety on the Rails, 1863–1908” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2004), 470–514. 119.  Eleventh Report of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry of the State of Montana For the Year Ending November 30, 1908 (Helena: Independent Publishing Company, 1908), 169. 120.  Friedman and Ladinsky, “Social Change,” 278–79. 121.  The Sixteenth Convention of the Montana Federation of Labor (n.p., 1909), 15–32. 122.  Convention Proceedings of the Montana State Federation of Labor (n.p., 1913), 16–17. 123.  Montana Socialist, 14 September 1913, 1–3; 25 January 1914, 1. For the law, see Laws, Resolutions and Memorials of the State of Montana Passed by the 14th Regular Session of the Legislative Assembly (Helena: State Publishing Company, 1914), 168–218. 124.  First Report of the Industrial Commission of Colorado (Denver: Eames Brothers, 1917), 6; for a full discussion of the law, see 6–68. 125.  Senate Journal of the Tenth Session of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Utah, 1913 (Salt Lake City: Century Printing Company, 1913), 219, 564, 647–48, 666–67, 786.

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126.  Senate Journal of the Eleventh Session of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Utah, 1915 (Salt Lake City: Century Printing Company, 1915), see 42, 122, 130–31, and 835 for the first measure; for the proposed railroad compensation measure, see 48, 145; for the compensation schedule, see 54, 428, 488, 533–34, 599. 127.  Senate Journal of the Twelfth Session of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Utah, 1917 (Salt Lake City: Century Printing Company, 1917). 128.  Ibid., 103, 612, 720. 129.  Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life, 1906–1926, new, rev. ed. (1955; New York: International Publishers, 1973), 103–05; and Industrial Worker, 16 September 1909, 1. 130.  Industrial Worker, 20 October 1909, 2. 131.  Salt Lake Tribune, 13 August 1913, 1–2; and 18 August 1913, 12. McCormick and Sillito, “We are not Seeking Trouble,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession, 2006). 132.  Philip S. Foner, The AFL in the Progressive Era, 1910–1915, vol. 5, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1980), 9–31. 133.  Weinstein, Decline of Socialism; 1–30; Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs, 255–56; and Foner, AFL in the Progressive Era, 9–31. 134.  Miners’ Magazine 12 (29 August 1912): 6. 135.  Morris Hillquit, Socialism Summed Up (New York: H. K. Fly Company, 1913), 43. See also Hillquit, Socialism in Theory and Practice (New York: Macmillan Company, 1909); Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910–1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973); and Irving Howe, Socialism and America (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 3–48. 136.  International Socialist Review 12 (February 1912): 462–63, 466. 137.  Ibid., 481–86. 138.  Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 307–09; and Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs, 255–56. 139.  For socialists in the AFL, see Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 222–23; for Hillquit on “boring within,” see Socialist Party Proceedings of the First National Congress, 1910 (Chicago: n.p., 1910), 65. 140.  Philip S. Foner, The Case of Joe Hill (New York: International Publishers, 1965); Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 307–13; and Pawar, “Utah Labor Movement,” 312–13. 141.  Foner, Case of Joe Hill, 52–66. 142.  Salt Lake Tribune, 17 November 1915, 14.

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143.  Pawar hints that the USFL was conservative, while Foner and Dubofsky do not mention the state federation’s refusal to support Hill. 144.  Proceedings of the Twelfth Convention of the Utah State Federation of Labor (Salt Lake City: Allied Printing, 1916), 14–22. 145.  Wall Street Journal, 7 May 1903, 1–2. 146.  Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). In his recent and sympathetic study of the Wobblies, Cole examines IWW Local 8, which was comprised of Philadelphia dockworkers. Local 8 was one of the most successful IWW unions in terms of longevity. Cole writes that many IWW “branches often emerged and disappeared in the course of a single job action” (4). He wondered what made this organization different. Central among his conclusions is that these workers championed revolution but also battled for immediate gains. At times, they came under attack from national leaders for their attention to bread-and-butter issues, but such a dual focus allowed for the growth of this local. One of the questions that Cole’s study asks is why other Wobbly locals did not follow this path? This chapter helps answer that question. Some workers not only tried, but as members of the ALU and then AFL, they proved that joining pragmatic political actions with views of a better world could lead to significant changes in power relations. Instead of romanticizing the IWW, as I would argue too many scholars do, we should do more to understand the disparate groups of workers scattered across the country who sought an organization somewhere in between the AFL and the IWW. Also, instead of offering praise to the IWW for attempting to create an alternative to the AFL, we should, as this chapter does, treat them more like the SLP; that is, we should point out that workers interested in socializing markets and searching for ways to accomplish socialist ends were forced out of the IWW because of the Wobblies’ commitment to a socialist—really anarchist—purity that many of the organizations’ leaders insisted members embrace.

Notes to Chapter 5 1.  Jerry W. Calvert, The Gibraltar: Socialism and Labor in Butte, Montana, 1895–1920 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1988), 34; and James R. Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 102–17. 2.  David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 7, 330–464; Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–12, 87–107; and Melvyn Dubofsky,

Notes to Chapter 5

305

The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 61–105. 3.  For company unionism, welfare capitalism, and the general tumult of the era, see the works in note 2 as well as David Brody, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Brody, “The Rise and Decline of Welfare Capitalism,” in Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle, ed. David Brody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 48–81; and Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 73–95. 4.  Important works suggest that defeat did in fact happen, arguing that workers had to rediscover mutualism and invent a new political culture; see, for example, Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Robert H. Zieger’s The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997). Cohen argues that workers created a “culture of unity” where, regardless of skill level or race, laborers found common ground in their shared experiences of working in new mass-production industries, as consumers in chain stores, and as devotees of various forms of popular culture, particularly radio programs and movies. As this new sense of solidarity developed, a friendly federal government worried about purchasing power, and Democratic Party leaders concerned with votes paved the way for the union movement, first through the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and then the Wagner Act (1935). These measures forced employers to recognize unions as workers’ legal bargaining agents, which in turn allowed organizers to bring unskilled and semi-skilled factory workers into the labor movement to improve their living standards. The workers who forged this culture of unity used their new federally supported industrial unions to manufacture a “moral capitalism,” or a system in which they received their “fair share” of wealth and leisure time. The roots of this moral capitalism, according to Cohen, grew out of the promises employers made to their employees in the 1920s. They vowed that company unions and corporate welfare programs would provide higher wages and better conditions. When owners’ practices diverged from their rhetoric, these laborers proved ready to embrace the CIO (324, 285–86). Denning takes a slightly different view of 1930s unionism than Cohen. He argues that a culture of unity did develop, but insists that its adherents wanted social democracy, not moral capitalism. He stresses that the CIO’s political culture had no connection to its Progressive Era counterpart,

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­ riting that “the earlier collapse of the Debsian Socialist Party meant that w U.S. social democracy was the product not of a Second International labor or Socialist party but of the alliance of the New Deal and the Communist Party” (11). I, as is evident by this point, see social democracy as the result of workers in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era updating socialism to match their lived experiences. 5.  As new unionism grew, laborers started fighting for industrial democracy. Industrial democracy meant that workers, with the aid of legislation, would have a say in their workplace conditions. Scholars writing on this topic have helped us understand how the efforts of Progressive Era labor reformers were tied to CIO activists. For some examples, see Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 146–323; Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 1–9, 41–163. 6.  Butte Bulletin, 15 July 1921, 2. 7.  Butte Bulletin, 29 July 1921, 2. 8.  Pueblo Courier, 28 February 1902, 2. 9.  Pueblo Courier, 31 January 1902, 2. 10. On workers’ view of Chinese workers as contract laborers, see Eighth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1901–1902 (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., State Printers, 1902), 297–304; and for continuity compare it to the Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1907–1908 (Denver: Smith-Brooks Printing Co., State Printers, 1908), 79–81. On the contract labor system, see Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 82–114; and Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 24. 11.  Ellen Schoening Aiken, “The United Mine Workers of America Moves West: Race, Working Class Formation, and the Discourse on Cultural Diversity in the Union Pacific Coal Towns of Southern Wyoming, 1870–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 2002), 70–134, see especially 121–25. 12.  Building Laborers’ Protective Union, Salt Lake City, Minutes, 27 April 1903, and 22 April 1906, Labor History Collection, University of Utah Archives.

Notes to Chapter 5

307

13.  BLPU, Minute Book/Journal, 1 May 1906. As recording secretary, Trujillo included drafts of letters and minutes as well as the actual minutes and official correspondence. 14.  BLPU, Minutes, 22 May 1906. In his notes, Trujillo wrote “ass” and crossed it out. A blank line is substituted for the word in the official copy of the minutes. 15.  The Wobblies’ promotion of racial harmony, once thought to be ubiquitous, has been called into question. See Phil Mellinger, “How the IWW Lost Its Western Heartland: Western Labor History Revisited,” Western Historical Quarterly 27 (Autumn 1996): 303–24. 16.  The BLPU’s minutes end in 1906 and start again in 1909, at which point the union is no longer an IWW local; in 1911 it affiliated with the AFL as a local of the International Hod Carriers’ Union. 17.  For one example, see WFM Executive Board Minutes, 10 December 1907, Clinton Jencks Papers, University of Colorado–Boulder ­A rchives. 18.  WFM Executive Board Minutes, 11 December 1907. For more on Bingham, which proved especially nativistic, see Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, 210–23, and Philip J. Mellinger, Race and Labor in Western Copper: The Fight for Equality, 1896–1918 (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1995), 91–105. 19.  Quoted in David Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 270. 20.  Auvo Kostiainen, “For or Against Americanization?: The Case of the Finnish Immigrant Radicals,” in American Labor and Immigration History, 1877–1920s: Recent European Research, ed. Dirk Hoerder (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 259–75. 21.  Paul F. Brissenden, “The Butte Miners and the Rustling Card,” American Economic Review 10 (December 1920): 755–75; and Emmons, Butte Irish, 272–73. 22.  Emmons, Butte Irish, 278; Calvert, The Gibraltar, 82. 23.  For the rising tensions and the conflicts they produced, see Butte Miner, May–June 1914. 24.  Calvert, The Gibraltar, 83–85; and Brissenden, “The Butte Miners,” 756–60. 25.  Butte Miner, 22 June 1914, 1. 26.  William D. Haywood, “The Battle of Butte,” International Socialist Review 15 (October 1914): 223. 27.  Calvert, The Gibraltar, 86–89.

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28.  Communication from the National Office of the Socialist Party to All Locals, taken from the January 1913 issue of National Municipal Review, Socialist Party Papers. 29.  Calvert, The Gibraltar, 42. 30.  Thomas G. Andrews, “The Road to Ludlow: Work, Environment, and Industrialization, 1870–1915” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2003); George S. McGovern and Leonard F. Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972); Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 272–331; Philip S. Foner, The AFL in the Progressive Era, 1910–1915, vol. 5, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1980), 196–213; H. M. Gitelman, Legacy of Ludlow Massacre: A Chapter in American Industrial Relations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); and Rick J. Clyne, Coal People: Life in Southern Colorado’s Company Towns, 1890–1930 (Denver: Colorado Historical Society, 1999). 31.  Wyoming Labor Journal, 20 November 1914, 6. 32.  For an analysis of this strike wave, see David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), ch. 4; or his “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America,” Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974): 509–29. For more on the significance of labor militancy in this period, see Shelton Stromquist, “Class Wars: Frank Walsh, the Reformers, and the Crisis of Progressivism,” in Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience, ed. Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce Laurie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 99–101; Dubofsky, State and Labor, 62; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Politics, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). 33.  Shelton Stromquist, Re-Inventing “the People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 165–90; McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 12–37. 34.  McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 28–29. 35. United States Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Reports and Testimony, 64th Cong., 1st sess., Senate Documents, 26 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 1:30, 38–61. 36.  Miners’ Magazine 15 (5 August 1915): 2. 37.  James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 311, 381–415; Stephen Skowronek, Building A New

Notes to Chapter 5

309

American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3–18; Edward A. Stettner, Shaping Modern Liberalism: Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); and Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 38.  Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 347–56; Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 305–13; Gitelman, Legacy of Ludlow Massacre, 191–203. 39.  This article is reprinted in John D. Rockefeller, Jr., The Colorado Industrial Plan (n.p., 1916), 9, 11, 21. 40.  American Federation of Labor, Involuntary Servitude in Colorado (Washington, DC: American Federation of Labor, 1917), 1. 41.  Ibid., 1–3. 42.  Denver Commission of Religious Forces, Denver Tramway Strike, 1920 (Denver: The Denver Commission of Religious Forces, 1921), 38–58; McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 89–104; and Robert Todd Laugen, “The Promise and Defeat of the Progressive Public: Reform Politics in Colorado, 1902–1929” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 2005), ch. 3. 43.  Denver Post, 2 August 1920, 9; 4 August 1920, 1; and Religious Forces, Tramway Strike, 24–27. 44.  Religious Forces, Tramway Strike, 30–35. For a slightly different interpretation of the politics of the Tramway strike, see Laugen, “Promise and Defeat,” ch. 3. 45.  Religious Forces, Tramway Strike, 38–39. 46.  Laugen, “Promise and Defeat,” 104–16, and 142–43. 47.  Colorado Labor Advocate, 2 November 1922, 7. 48.  Ibid., 8. 49.  National Non Partisan League, War Program and Statement of Principles: Origin, Purpose and Method of Operation (n.p., n.d.), in William Penn Collins Papers, University of Colorado–Boulder Archives. Also, Montana Nonpartisan, 7 September 1918–20 December 1919. This was the official paper of the Montana Non Partisan League and was also called the Inverness News and the Montana Leader during this period. 50.  Colorado Labor Advocate, 11 January 1923, 2. 51.  Robert A. Goldberg, “Denver: Queen City of the Colorado Realm,” in The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, ed. Shawn Lay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 47–48. 52.  Ibid., and Robert A. Goldberg, “Beneath the Hood and Robe: A Socio­economic Analysis of Ku Klux Klan Membership in Denver, Colorado, 1921–1925,” Western Historical Quarterly 11 (April 1980): 181–98. 53.  Goldberg, “Denver: Queen City,” 39–51.

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54.  Laugen, “Promise and Defeat,” 299–305. 55.  Salt Lake Tribune, 4 October 1919, 8. For more detail, see Sheelwant Bapurao Pawar, “An Environmental Study of the Development of the Utah Labor Movement: 1860–1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1968), 351–54. 56.  Deseret News, 13 March 1920, 1. 57.  Pawar, “Utah Labor Movement,” 356–57. 58.  Official Proceedings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Conventions of the Utah State Federation of Labor (n.p., 1922). 59.  Examples from Colorado and Utah could support these points. For instance, one could examine the local affiliates of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union, which replaced the WFM, in these states to illustrate the implementation of a more inclusive unionism. Reform politicians, such as Colorado’s Edward P. Costigan, who depended on the labor vote when they ran for local and state office and then continued to count on and reward workers’ support in the 1930s demonstrate this resurgence of progressive unionism. Costigan became a key player in advancing workers’ rights during the New Deal. For more on the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, see Vernon H. Jensen, Heritage of Conflict: Labor Relations in the Nonferrous Metals Industry up to 1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950). On Costigan, see Edward P. Costigan, Public Owner­ ship of Government: Collected Papers of Edward P. Costigan (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1940), especially chs. 4–8; and Fred Greenbaum, Fighting Progressive: A Biography of Edward P. Costigan (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1971). 60.  The demands were circulated in a strike notice. This notice is included in a letter to Jeannette Rankin from the Metal Mine Workers’ Union, Box 1, Jeannette Rankin Papers, 1917–1963, Montana Historical Society. 61.  Mrs. H. N. Kennedy to Jeannette Rankin, 23 June 1917, Box 1, Rankin Papers. 62.  MMWU Press Committee to Jeannette Rankin, 20 June 1917; and Mary O’Neill to Jeannette Rankin, 28 July 1917, Box 1, Rankin Papers. 63.  New York Times, 2 August 1917, 20. Also see Los Angeles Times, 2 August 1917, 11; and Washington Post, 2 August 1917, 5 for examples of national coverage. 64.  Montana Leader, 28 September 1918, 1. 65.  Calvert, The Gibraltar, 128–34. 66.  Butte Bulletin, 22 December 1921, 3. 67.  Butte Bulletin, 19 August 1921, 4. 68.  Butte Bulletin, 29 July 1921, 1.

Notes to Conclusion

311

69.  Butte Bulletin, 31 August 1923, 6. 70.  Butte Bulletin, 18 August 1922, 4. 71.  Butte Bulletin, 25 August 1922, 1, 6. 72.  Butte Bulletin, 10 November 1922, 1. 73.  Laurie Mercier, Anaconda: Labor, Community, and Culture in Montana’s Smelter City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 45–113. 74.  Butte Bulletin, 6 April 1923, 1.

Notes to Conclusion 1.  Wall Street Journal, 12 June 1914, 7; and 19 September 1914, 1.

index

Note: Figures and tables are indicated by f or t, respectively, following a page number. Adams, Charles Francis, Jr., 40–43, 64 Adams, Henry Carter, 79 AFL. See American Federation of Labor African Americans: and AFL, 222, 295n9; unions and, 61–62, 222, 275n95 Age, 87 ALU. See American Labor Union ALUJ. See American Labor Union Journal Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America, 234 American Federation of Labor (AFL): and arbitration, 233; boring within, 174, 193–94, 212, 213, 217, 223, 245; changes within, 173–74; Communists purged by, 245; formation of, 10, 67; growth of, 10; historians on, 23; IWW criticisms of, 186–87; and length of work day, 184; and new unionism, 173; and politics, 17–18, 182; pure-and-simple unionism of, 10, 17, 20, 121, 122, 172, 182; and race/ethnicity, 10, 124, 222–23, 295n9; Rocky Mountain unionists and, 5, 17–18, 20–21, 121,

123–27, 144, 167, 172–74, 177–78, 182–83, 196, 198, 223, 249; Socialist Party and, 212; UBRE and, 157; WFM and, 123–24, 193–94, 196, 245 American Labor Union (ALU): demise of, 182; formation of, 6, 20, 121, 128; and IWW, 20–21, 172, 175, 182, 292n92; membership of, 173, 261n44, 294n7; and progressive unionism, 157–58, 160, 163–66, 174; Rocky Mountain unionists and, 198; WFM and, 190 American Labor Union Journal (ALUJ), 157–58, 164, 261n44 American Land League, 58 American Legion, 235, 242, 244 American Party, 199 American Protective Association, 86 American Railway Union (ARU), 16, 17, 97, 101, 129, 157, 259n33 Ames, Ella, 110 Anaconda Company, 219, 226–28, 240–42, 244, 249 Anaconda Copper Company, 131 Anaconda mine, 39 Anaconda Mining Company, 225 Anarchist International, 9 Anderson, Gus, 222–23 Antimonopolism, 6–7, 10, 92, 94–95 Arbitration, 195, 233 Arnesen, Eric, 273n92

313

314 Asian immigrants, 220. See also Chinese immigrants Assumption-of-risk rule, 205–7 Atlantic Monthly, 231 Australian ballot, 87 A. W. Waters and Company, 83 Bailey, Dewey, 235–38 Bales, M. P., 239 Bamberger, Simon, 208 Barker, James, 140 Bartenders Union, 159 Barthella, John, 140 Bellamy, Edward, 6, 118; Looking Backward, 7 Bensel, Richard Franklin, 262n47 Berger, Victor, 5, 133, 211 Bernstein, Eduard, 4–5, 120 Bimetallism, 6–7, 10, 105–6 Bloc voting, 25, 28, 50, 73, 76, 87–88, 90, 93, 96, 102, 112, 153–54 BLPU. See Building Laborers’ Protective Union BMU. See Butte Miners’ Union BMWU. See Butte Mine Workers’ Union Boland, Patrick, 89 Boring within, 174, 193–94, 210, 212, 213, 217, 223, 245 Boyce, Edward, 123, 139–44, 161, 167 Boycotts. See Consumer activism Bradley, Joe, 226 Brandeis, Louis, 184 Branigan, John, 136 Breen, Peter, 88, 93–95, 106, 115, 132, 217, 249 Brewery Workers Union, 159 Brissenden, Paul, 261n43 Brooks, John Graham, 19 Brough, Charles M., 101, 102, 248 Brown, Arthur, 45–46 Brown, Henry B., 104 Brundage, David, 58, 261n42 Buchanan, Joseph, 11, 16, 25–28, 41–44, 47–53, 56–59, 61–63, 65–66, 68–70, 72, 75–77, 79–81, 84, 132, 175, 217, 249, 274n92 Buchanan, Lucy, 80 Building Laborers’ Protective Union (BLPU), 61–62, 222, 307n16 Burlingame Treaty (1868), 57

Index Butte, Montana, 16, 34, 38–39, 58, 73, 86–92, 95–96, 98, 133–34, 166, 186, 201–3, 218–19, 225–28, 240–45 Butte Bulletin, 218, 242, 244 Butte Bystander, 15, 90–92, 94, 98 Butte Carpenters’ Union Local 112, 129 Butte Inter Mountain, 39 Butte Laborers’ Union, 90 Butte Miners’ Union (BMU), 15, 44, 60, 89–90, 125, 190, 195–96, 209, 218–19, 225–26, 228 Butte Mine Workers’ Union (BMWU), 226–28, 240 Butte Mining Journal, 86, 88–89 Butte Teamsters Union, 202–3 Butte Workingmen’s Union (BWU), 90 Button, Herbert, 102–4, 115 Bystander. See Butte Bystander Cache Valley, Utah, 1 Calderhead, J. H., 180 Calderwood, John, 108, 112, 115 Camp and Plant, 145, 147 Campbell, Alexander, The True American System of Finance, 6 Campbell, John, 114 Capital accumulation, 35 Capitalism: and accumulation, 35; as historically conditioned, 266n9; and liberty, 30; Marxist predictions for, 4–5; opposition to, 7, 19, 95; and value, 30–31; welfare, 219, 232; and Western economic development, 31–39. See also Corporate capitalism Carbon County, Utah, 155–56 Carpenter, M. B., 75–76 Carter, Sam, 179 Carter, Thomas H., 85–86 Casson, Herbert M., 133 CBLS. See Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics Central Labor Union, 76 Central Laundry, 183–84 Cheesewright, Belle, 80 Chicago, Illinois, 9, 13 Chicago Tribune, 9 Child labor, 181, 184 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 62, 64, 88, 221 Chinese immigrants, 57, 60, 62–65, 131, 221

Index Christian, Phil, 226 Cigar makers, 187 Cigar Makers International Union, 68 CIO. See Congress of Industrial Organizations Cities, unions in, 158–61, 203 Citizens’ Alliance, 149, 151, 154, 159–62, 165, 169, 173, 177, 197–98, 215, 236, 237, 249 Clarion Advocate, 169, 181 Clark, D. O., 64 Clark, John Bates, 30, 51 Clark, William Andrews, 38–39, 85–86, 134, 137 Class: liberalism and, 263n48; race/ ethnicity in relation to, 57–59, 273n92; and revolution, 4–5, 171; Rocky Mountain unionists and, 122. See also Middle class; Workers Cleveland, Grover, 16–17, 96 Cleveland, Ohio, 13 Closed shops, 121, 158, 160, 185–88 Coates, David, 18, 108, 112–15, 132–33, 142, 146, 151–53, 161, 167–68, 172, 175–78, 217, 249 Cohen, Lizbeth, 305n4 Cole, Peter, 304n146 Collective bargaining, 196, 231–33 Colorado: economic development in, 37–38; politics in, 14, 75–82, 105–6, 108–14, 111f, 149–54, 204, 207–8, 236–38; Socialist Party in, 137–39, 142–43, 201; union membership in, 173; women’s suffrage in, 17 Colorado and Southern Railway (C&S), 158 Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics (CBLS), 2–3, 15, 50, 53–54, 65, 82–83, 118, 154, 181 Colorado Chronicle, 152–53 Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CFI), 145, 155, 219, 229–32 Colorado Industrial Commission (CIC), 234–35, 238 Colorado Industrial Plan, 231 Colorado Miner, 44 Colorado National Guard, 219, 229 Colorado Socialist Bulletin, 201 Colorado State Federation of Labor (CSFL), 112–15, 137, 146, 150, 183, 204, 206–7, 229, 233

315 Colorado Supreme Court, 114, 118, 198 Colorado Towel Company, 183 Colorado Union Labor Party, 78 Coming Nation, 133 Common laborers. See Unskilled workers Communism, 218, 244–45 Communist Party (CP), 217–18, 244 Company stores, 147–48 Company towns, 144–49 Comstock Lode, 33–34, 44 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 219, 245, 246, 305n4 Connelly, John, 198 Connor, Patrick E., 34 Consumer activism, 54–55, 129, 162–63, 165–66, 186–88, 297n46 Consumption, value determined by, 30, 51, 180–81 Contracts, 188–89, 195–96, 221. See also Credit-ticket system Cooks’ and Waiters’ Union, 159 Coolies, 57, 62 Cooperatives, 7–8, 35–36, 165–66, 183–84 Corbin, Julius N., 55, 71, 82–83, 106–7, 217 Corporate capitalism: challenges to, 7, 94; and free-labor ideal, 41; government as check on, 6, 22, 40; political power of, 19, 49, 67, 73, 139, 148; and value, 30–31 Corruption, 225 Costigan, Edward P., 310n59 Cost of living, 180–82, 235–36 Courier. See Pueblo Courier Coxey, Jacob, 96, 110 Coxeyite movement, 96–97, 101 CP. See Communist Party Craft unions, 10, 66, 68, 86, 173, 175, 177–78, 192 Craig, James C., 149, 160–61, 168; The History of the Citizens’ Alliance in Denver, 161 Credit-ticket system, 57 Cripple Creek strike, 1894–94, 109; 1903–04, 154, 170, 197 CSFL. See Colorado State Federation of Labor Curran, Frank, 226 Curtin, John C., 97 Cutts, William, 242

316 Daily Worker, 218 Daly, Marcus, 38–39, 85–86 Davidson, William, 141 Davidson (mine superintendent), 179 Davis, Andrew J., 38 Davitt, Michael, 58 Dawley, Alan, 263n48 Deaths, job-related: of miners, 147, 240; of railroad workers, 2. See also Violence Debs, Eugene Victor, 16, 18, 123, 128, 133, 137, 174, 201, 212, 218, 246 De Leon, Daniel, 81, 174, 176, 191 Democratic Party, 96, 98, 197–98 Denning, Michael, 305n4 Denver, Colorado, 25–26, 34, 37–38, 58, 63, 74, 108, 197–98, 234–37 Denver and Rio Grande (D&RG) Railroad, 144 Denver Barbers Union, 198 Denver Bricklayers, 52 Denver Cigar Makers’ Union, 61 Denver Commission of Religious Forces, 235 Denver Garment Workers Union, 169, 172 Denver Post, 235 Denver Republican, 60, 78, 80–83 Denver Teamsters Union, 160 Denver Trades Assembly (DTA), 27, 48–50, 53–54, 56, 68, 75, 78, 81, 108, 124, 127, 169, 172, 174, 181–85, 197–98, 203 Denver Tramway Company, 234–35 Denver Typographical Union (DTU), 1, 53–55, 112 Deseret News, 45 Deseret Typographical Association, 39 Deskilling, 173, 175, 192, 194 Devoy, John, 58 Direct actions, 19, 171, 179–80, 189, 209–12 Direct legislation, 204–5, 207. See also Initiatives; Referendums District Assembly 49, New York City, 10, 67–68 District Assembly 82, 15, 41, 52–53, 55, 61, 64, 68, 102, 106, 125, 157 District Assembly 98, 88 District 15, 146, 148, 155, 220–21 Donovan, James, 135–36

Index Doran, John, 240 Douglass, Frederick, 25 Downtain, O. D., 142 Dreiser, Theodore, 6 Driscoll, Tim, 227 DTA. See Denver Trades Assembly Dubofsky, Melvyn, 260n42, 267n14, 292n92 Duggan (sheriff ), 244–45 Duncan, Lewis, 201–3, 219, 226–28 Dunne, William Francis, 217–20, 240–46, 249 Economic development: Mormons and, 32–37; in Rocky Mountain West, 31–39, 31t, 32t Economy: consumption as key to, 30, 51, 180–81; marginalism and, 30, 51, 180; natural law and, 39–40, 91; Panic of 1893, 95–96, 100 Eight-hour work day. See Work day, length of Elton, Daniel, 199 Ely, Richard T., 22, 79, 254n9 Emmons, David, 261n42 Employment agents, 209 Enquirer. See Labor Enquirer Espionage Act (1917), 241 Estes, George, 157, 174 Ethnicity: class in relation to, 57–59, 273n92; cross-ethnic unity, 60; organizations based on, 58; and politics, 85–86; tensions involving, 59–60, 218–19; unions and, 10, 17–18, 56–57, 60–61, 220–28, 244, 295n9. See also Immigrants; Race Ethnocentrism. See Racism European immigrants, 57–59 Evolutionary socialism, 4–5 Factionalism, 10, 18–19, 66, 82, 84, 127–29, 133, 152, 190–91, 199, 212, 226–28 Fairgrieve, Alex, 21, 162, 176–77, 218, 249 Farlin, William L., 38 Farmers, 281n60 Farmers’ Alliance, 88, 109–10 Farwell v. Boston and Worcester Railroad Company (1842), 205–6 Federal Employers’ Liability Act, 206–7

Index Federated Trades. See Utah Federated Trades and Labor Council Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), 9, 67 Fellow-servant doctrine, 205–7 Ferguson, J. A., 180 Ferrell, Frank, 61, 275n95 Field, William T., 88 Fields, Barbara, 273n92 Finnish immigrants, 225 First Amendment, 209–10 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 208–9 Foran Act (1885), 221 Foster, Frank, 68 Foster, William Z., 217, 244 Fourteenth Amendment, 274n92 Fox, Harry W., 221 Frank, Dana, 297n46 Freeman, Legh, 86 Free speech, 208–10 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 59 Garman, Harvey, 127 George, Henry, 6–7, 13, 27, 59, 76–77, 88, 118; Progress and Poverty, 6–7, 76 Gerner, Adolph, 193 Gerstle, Gary, 22 Glickman, Lawrence, 298n46 Goldmark, Josephine, 184 Gompers, Samuel, 9, 10, 17–18, 20–21, 23, 67, 122–28, 144, 157, 167, 173–74, 178, 182–83, 193–94, 213, 230, 249, 295n9 Gould, Jay, 270n53 Government: economic role of, 42–43, 118–19, 247; and strikes, 17, 109–10, 142–43, 154–56, 233. See also Militia; National Guard Great Falls, Montana, 16 Great Upheaval, 51–52 Greenback Party, 6–7, 59 Greene, Julie, 17 Guggenheim, Simon, 114 Gunter, Julius, 236 Gunton, George, 50–51, 270n60 Hall, Willis, 123 Hallett, Moses, 16–17 Hammerick, S., 129–30 Hardy, Harvey, 104 Harper’s Weekly, 74

317 Harriman, Job, 210 Harrison, Benjamin, 107 Haskell, Burnett, 77 Hauser, Samuel T., 38 Havre, Montana, 16 Hawkins, Albert, 130–31 Hayes, Max, 193 Haymarket Square demonstration, 9, 11, 66–67 Hays, George M., 135–36 Haywood, William “Big Bill,” 174, 177–78, 189–91, 196, 211–12, 227 Hazlett, Ida Crouch, 209 Health, of workers, 104, 184 Hearst, George, 33 Heinze, F. Augustus, 134, 136–37 Helena, Montana, 16, 38, 97–98 Helena Light and Traction Company, 162–63 Helena Trades and Labor Assembly, 88, 162–63 Helena Typographical Union #95, 130–32 Hewett, Abram Stevens, 76 Hill, Joe, 212–14 Hill, Nathaniel P., 37 Hillquit, Morris, 211, 230 Hindry, J. B., 108 Historiography, 20–23 Hogan, William, 96–97 Holden, Albert F., 104 Holden decision, 184 Holtz, Samuel, 150 Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, 186 Howbert, Irving, 109 Immigrants: Chinese, 57, 60, 62–65, 131, 221; European, 57–59; Finnish, 225; Irish, 58–59; Italian, 59–60; Japanese, 221; unions and, 10, 17–18, 56–57; and whiteness, 274n92. See also Ethnicity; Race Indentured servants, 57, 62 Independent Labor Party, 88 Independent Workingmen’s Party, 99 Industrial Advocate, 123 Industrial Commission Law, 233–36 Industrial democracy, 306n5 Industrialization, 13–14, 29–30, 39–41 Industrial peace, 231–34, 238–39

318 Industrial Union Bulletin, 185, 187 Industrial unionism, 157, 173, 177, 192–95 Industrial Union Movement, 175 Industrial Worker, 186, 188–89, 194, 209 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): alienating actions of, 177– 78, 185, 189–90, 215–16; and ALU, 172, 182, 292n92; and BMWU, 226–28; and closed shops, 185–86; and contracts, 188–89, 195–96; and direct actions, 19, 171, 179–80, 189, 209–12, 261n43; factionalism in, 190–92; founding convention of, 21, 172–73, 175–77; and free speech, 208–10; ideological rigidity of, 21, 177, 195, 215–16, 304n146; and industrial unionism, 175; Local 8, 304n146; membership of, 172–73, 261n43; and politics, 19, 194, 197, 199–200, 208, 210; progressive unionism and, 18–20, 214–15; and race/ethnicity, 222–23; Rocky Mountain unionists and, 19–21, 171–73, 176, 203, 208, 218, 249; as scapegoat, 235; Socialist Party and, 210; and union labels, 186–88; USFL and, 198; and violence, 19, 175, 178; WFM and, 20, 190–96 Initiatives, 118–19, 131, 203–5 Insurance, workingmen’s, 207–8 Inter-Mountain Freeman, 86 Intermountain Worker, 214 International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, 210 International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, 217 International Metal Workers’ Union, 176 International Socialist Review, 128, 201 International Union of Mine Mill and Smelter Workers, 245, 310n59 International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), 79–80 Involuntary Servitude in Colorado (AFL), 233 Irish immigrants, 58–59 Irish Land League, 58–59, 66 Iron law of wages, 42 Israel, Joseph, 17

Index Italian immigrants, 59–60 IWA. See International Workingmen’s Association IWW. See Industrial Workers of the World James, William F., 103 Jameson, Elizabeth, 257n25, 261n42 Japanese immigrants, 221 Jaurès, Jean, 120 Jerome, John “Black Jack,” 235 Joint Strike Bulletin, 240 Jones, Jack, 208 Jones, Samuel “Golden Rule,” 13 Jung, Moon-Ho, 62 Justice: attainment of, 42–43; conceptions of, 53; contexts of, 2; mutualism and, 129; Rocky Mountain unionists and, 103; signs of, 51, 103; socialism and, 117–18; wages and, 50–54; as worker objective, 4, 25, 26, 29, 51–53 Kalispell, Montana, 166 Kazin, Michael, 258n31 Kearney, Dennis, 63 Kelley, Charles T., 101 Kennedy, Will, 87–88, 91, 94, 115 Killfeather, Edward, 131–32, 288n35 King, W. L. Mackenzie, 231 Kirwan, James, 191 Kloppenberg, James T., 22, 254n9, 286n6 Knerr, William M., 210 Knights of Labor (KOL), 15, 25, 27, 43, 52–53, 56, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 76, 80, 82, 83, 86, 87, 90, 97, 102, 107, 122, 125, 173, 206, 275n95; as case study, 7–11; decline of, 66–69 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 237–38, 242, 244, 246 Labels. See Union labels Labor. See Rocky Mountain unionists; Unions; Workers Labor Advocate, 238 Labor Enquirer, 11, 25–27, 50, 53, 56, 58, 63, 68, 76–79, 81, 274n92 Labor parties, 76–82, 86–88, 93, 98–99, 134–36, 199, 205 Labor Party, 134–36, 199, 205

Index Labor theory of value, 30, 36, 41–42, 50–51, 120 Labor wars, 260n42 Labor World, 136 La Follette, Robert, 209 Land League, 58–59, 66 Laundrymen’s Club, 183 Laundry workers, 166, 181, 183–85 Laundry Workers’ Union, 166 Law: corporate power and, 73; enforcement of, 73, 147–48, 170, 229–30; and health of workers, 104; markets affected by, 26, 55; and strikes, 75–76; workers and, 1–2, 26, 48, 78, 88, 100, 104, 107, 109, 147–48; workplace safety and, 2–3. See also Natural law Leadville, Colorado, 43–44 Lee, Fitzhugh, 275n95 Lee, Ivy, 231 Lee, W. Scott, 77 Legislation. See Law Lemert, Rae, 130–32, 217, 249 Lennon, John, 47–49, 77, 123 Letwin, Daniel, 273n92 Liability, of employers, 205–7 Liberalism, 4–5, 22, 263n48 Liberal Party, 98 Liberty: labor and, 29–30, 41–42; strikes and, 46 Lincoln, Abraham, 30 Lindsay, B. M., 141 Lindsey, Ben, 198 Lithographers Union, 192 Little, Frank, 208, 241 Livingston, Montana, 16 Living wages, 50–54, 90–91, 100, 170, 180–82, 234–36 Locke, John Galen, 237 Londoner, Wolfe, 74 Los Angeles Times, 210 Ludlow, Colorado, 219, 229–31 Lum, Dyer D., 36–37, 42; Social Problems of To-Day, 36; Utah and Its People, 36 Mahoney, C. E., 191–92 Manifesto, 175, 295n12 Margarine, 83 Marginalism, 30, 51, 180 Markets: constructed nature of, 182, 194; laws’ role in, 26, 55; socialized,

319 164–66, 197, 205, 237; workers’ role in, 18 Martial law, 44, 154, 219, 227. See also Militia Marx, Karl, 4, 79 Marxism, 4–5, 19, 121 Maternalists, 184–85 McClelland, T. A., 198 McDermott, William, 96 McDonald, Daniel, 72, 124, 128, 134–36, 138, 144, 161, 164, 167–68, 172, 174, 177–78, 217, 244, 249 McDonald, Duncan, 193 McDonald, Muckie, 226 McHugh, Frank, 213 McIntire, Albert W., 110 McMullen, John, 191 McNamara, James, 210 McNamara, John, 210 Mechanics’ lien laws, 277n11 Mellinger, Phil, 261n43 Metal Mine Workers’ Union (MMWU), 240 Metal Trades Council of Butte, 218 Metropolitan unions. See Urban unions Mexican Americans, and AFL, 295n9 MFL. See Montana Federation of Labor Middle class, reform efforts of, 21–22, 263n48 Migratory workers, 208 Militia, 17, 44, 58, 101, 109, 142–43, 154–55, 229. See also National Guard Miller, Guy, 173, 231 Mine Owners’ Association (MOA), 152 Miners: dangers faced by, 147; and labor issues, 43–47, 146, 148; strikes of, 107, 109, 123, 140–43, 154–56, 179, 193, 229–30, 240–41; and unions, 107–8; work-related deaths of, 147, 240. See also Western Federation of Miners (WFM) Miners’ Cooperative Union, 43 Miners’ Magazine, 128, 152, 191, 193, 194, 205, 210 Miners’ Protective Union, 44 Miners’ Union Day, 60 Mining, 33–34, 37–39, 41–42 Missoula, Montana, 208–9 Missoula County Trades and Labor Council, 187 Mitchell, John, 193

320 Mixed local unions, 67, 173 Montana: economic development in, 38; politics in, 14, 84–98, 205–7, 240–45; Socialist Party in, 134–36, 201–3, 205, 207, 227–28; statehood for, 84–85; women’s suffrage in, 17 Montana Bureau of Agriculture, Labor and Industry (MBALI), 206–7 Montana Daily Record, 130–31 Montana Federation of Labor (MFL), 125, 131, 162–63, 176, 186, 205, 207, 218 Montana National Guard, 227 Montana News, 205 Montana Nonpartisan, 309n49 Montana Power Company, 240 Montana Smelting Company, 38 Montana State Federation of Labor, 218 Montana State Trades and Labor Council, 125, 131, 135 Montana State Trades Assembly, 134 Montana Supreme Court, 227 Montgomery, David, 298n58 Montgomery, W. H., 127 Mooney, Michael, 43 Mormons: and economic development, 32–37; and politics, 98–100, 199 Morrison, Arling, 212 Morrison, Frank, 127–28 Morrison, John G., 212 Morrison, Merlin, 212 Mowry, George, 22 Moyer, Charles, 139, 174, 190 Muller v. Ogden (1908), 184 Municipal socialism, 200 Murphy, Dennis, 207 Murphy, John H., 142 Murray, Joseph, 59 Mutualism, 129–32, 160–62, 165. See also Workers: solidarity of National Civic Federation, 193 National Consumers’ League, 184 National Erectors’ Association, 210 National Guard, 156, 219, 227, 229. See also Militia National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), 305n4 Nationalism, 59 National Municipal Review, 227

Index National War Labor Board (NWLB), 234–35 Naturalization Act (1790), 274n92 Natural law: economics and, 39–40, 91; wealth distribution and, 19 Neasham, Thomas, 64, 68 New Freedom, 247–48 New unionism, 173, 194 New York City, 13 Nineteenth Amendment, 15 Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. See Knights of Labor Non Partisan League (NPL), 217, 237, 241–42 Nonpartisanship, 12–14, 17, 26–27, 48–49, 81, 84, 100, 105–6, 110. See also Non Partisan League Northern Pacific Railroad, 94, 97 NPL. See Non Partisan League Ogden, Utah, 16, 100–102, 199 Ogden Standard, 101, 102 Ogden Sun, 102 Ogilvie, G. B., 34 Olney, Richard, 16 Omaha Platform, 94, 106 O’Neill, John M., 152, 174 O’Neill, Mary, 241 Open shops, 149, 161, 210, 219, 228 Orman, James B., 142–43, 151 Owen, Robert, 7 Owers, Frank W., 153 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 218, 244 Parades, 28, 44–48, 53, 60, 96 Parks, William J., 38 Patterson, Thomas, 110 Peabody, James, 149–55, 168, 170, 197, 203, 236 Penrose, William J., 86, 88–90, 93–94, 115 People’s Party (Mormons), 98, 100 People’s Party (Populists). See Populist Party Pettibone, George, 190 Pfeiffer, Emil, 109 Pierce, J. D., 127 Pigott, William Trigg, 135–36 Pinkerton, William John, 3 Pitkin, Frederick, 44 Pitkin, Fredrick, 58, 63

Index Plank 10, 123 Political machines, 12–13, 23, 74, 197, 203 Politics: AFL and, 17–18, 182; aversion to (see pure-and-simple unionism; syndicalism); in Colorado, 14, 75–82, 105–6, 108–14, 111f, 149–54, 204, 207–8, 236–38; corruption in, 49, 71, 270n53; economics and, 11, 69, 182; ethnicity and, 85–86; IWW and, 19, 194, 197, 199–200, 208, 210; labor parties in, 76–82, 86–88, 93, 98–99, 134–36, 199, 205; in Montana, 14, 84–98, 205–7, 240–45; nonpartisanship in, 12–14, 17, 26–27, 48–49, 81, 84, 100, 105–6, 110 (see also Non Partisan League); Rocky Mountain unionists and, 12–20, 23, 47–50, 72–116, 121–23, 126, 171–72, 196–99, 203–8, 234–46, 248–50; in Rocky Mountain West, 12, 73–74; in San Francisco, 258n31; state-level, 203–8; unions and, 12–13, 71–73, 76–77, 92, 117–68; in Utah, 14, 98–104, 204, 208, 238–39; workers and, 5, 11–12, 23, 25–28, 43, 45, 47–50, 56, 71, 78, 92, 262n47 Polygamy, 36, 99–100 Population in Rocky Mountain West, 14t, 15t Populist Party, 94–96, 98, 104–10, 115, 133, 151 Powderly, Terence, 7–10, 66–69, 175, 275n95 Pragmatism, of Rocky Mountain unionists, 8, 11, 27, 70, 105, 142, 153–54, 205, 207, 218 Progressive Party, 236 Progressive unionism: activism of, 176–77; and AFL, 21; and ALU, 157; characteristics of, 124; and IWW, 18–20, 214–15; as mainstream, 215; and politics, 19–21, 122, 142, 144, 195; and race/ethnicity, 220–28; Rocky Mountain unionists and, 18– 21, 23, 122; and socialism, 23, 117, 128; syndicalism vs., 177; and union labels, 186; and WFM, 192–93; and WLU, 128 Progressivism, 22, 263n48 Prohibition, 238

321 Provost, John C., 152–53 Public: attitudes of, toward railroad workers, 207; and direct legislation, 204–5, 207; and workers’ concerns, 6, 18, 27, 28, 47, 97, 156, 162, 178, 187, 214–15, 230, 232–33, 246 Pueblo, Colorado, 165–66 Pueblo Central Trades and Labor Union (PCTLU), 113 Pueblo Clerks’ Union, 165 Pueblo Co-operative Mercantile Company, 165–66 Pueblo Courier, 72, 112–13, 133, 137–38, 146–48, 150–51, 155 Pueblo Labor Advocate, 155 Pueblo Typographical Union, 112 Pullman, George, 16 Pullman strike, 16–17, 107, 123, 129 Pure-and-simple unionism, 10, 17, 20, 121, 122, 172, 182 Race: class in relation to, 57–59, 273n92; conceptions of, 273n92; immigrants and, 274n92; and KKK, 237–38; law and, 274n92; unions and, 10, 17–18, 56–57, 60–65, 220–28, 244, 275n95, 295n9. See also Ethnicity; Immigrants; Racism; White supremacy Racism, 60–65, 221–25, 228, 244 Radicalism: decline of, 10; sources of, 260n42, 261n43 Railroad, 34–35, 37–38, 40–41 Railroad Gazette, 101 Railroad workers: dangers faced by, 2–3, 207; occupations of, 280n59; public opinion of, 207; strikes of, 52, 157–58 Railway Times, 101 Randall, Robert, 193 Rankin, Jeannette, 240–41 Raton, New Mexico, 16 Rawlins, Wyoming, 16 Red baiting, 80, 161 Redistribution policies, 43, 78–79, 88, 181, 214 Referendums, 118–19, 131, 203–5 Rent strike, 81 Republican Party: KKK and, 238; and labor, 78, 80, 82–83, 96; probusiness interests and, 149–51, 153, 197, 236

322 Retail Clerks Union, 187 Reveille, 134 Revisionism, 4 Revolution, 4–5, 19, 21, 79, 81, 171, 176, 191, 212 Ricardo, David, 42 Richards, E. L., 247–48 Richardson, F. H., 126, 138, 144, 150–51, 153–54, 161, 167–68, 217 Richmond Whig, 61 Rideout, D. O., 208 Right to strike, 233, 238–39 Riley, Bert, 225 Riots: race-related, 63; strike-related, 235; union-related, 225–26 Rizer, J. Edward, 138 RMSL. See Rocky Mountain Social League Robber barons, 6 Robert Mitchell Furniture Company, 135 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 219, 229–34, 249 Rockefeller family, 134, 136–37 Rocky Mountain Bell Telephone Company, 164 Rocky Mountain Celt, 58 Rocky Mountain News, 1, 44, 53–55, 63, 110, 111 Rocky Mountain Social League (RMSL), 79–81, 137 Rocky Mountain unionists: and AFL, 17–18, 20–21, 121, 123–27, 144, 167, 172–74, 177–78, 182–83, 196, 198, 223, 249; and ALU, 20–21, 198; characteristics of, 128; class identity of, 122; in Colorado, 173; dissension among, 18–19; and IWW, 19–20, 171–73, 176–78, 189, 203, 208, 249; objectives of, 170; organization of, 5–6, 15–16; overview of, 5–12; and politics, 12–20, 23, 47–50, 72–116, 121–23, 126, 171–72, 196–99, 203–8, 234–46, 248–50; pragmatism of, 8, 11, 27, 70, 105, 142, 153–54, 205, 207, 218; and Pullman strike, 16–17; and race/ethnicity, 17–18, 56–57, 121–22, 124, 132, 220–28; regional focus of, 122–29; and social democracy, 122; and socialism, 11, 79–81, 94–95, 105, 117, 128,

Index 134–44, 150–53; and social restructuring, 171, 178, 182, 184–85, 189, 205, 215, 228, 248–49; in urban areas, 158–61, 203; wages of, 55–56. See also Progressive unionism; unions; Workers Rodgers, Daniel T., 263n48 Rogers, Platt, 74 Roney, Frank, 41–42 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 245 Roosevelt, Theodore, 76, 236 Rosenthal, Arnold, 165 Rossland strike, 140 Rude, I., 169–70, 188 Rustling cards, 225 Ryan, Albert, 191 Sabotage, 19, 171, 189, 210–12 Sacco, Nicola, 218 Safety. See Workplace safety Salerno, Salvatore, 261n43 Salt Lake Building Trades Congress (SLBTC), 103, 200 Salt Lake City, Utah, 33–36, 39–40, 100, 199 Salt Lake Federation of Labor, 200 Salt Lake Herald, 99 Salt Lake Tribune, 1, 16, 36, 39–40, 42, 46–47, 146 Salt Lake Typographical Union, 39, 187 Sanders, Elizabeth, 281n60 San Francisco, California, 258n31 San Francisco Mining Press, 44 Santa Fe Railroad, 157 Scabs, 52–53, 64, 102, 129, 135, 140–41, 156, 158, 169, 179, 198 Schloss, Helen, 229–30 Schneirov, Richard, 13 Scientific American, 64 Scrip, 145, 146, 148 Second Great Awakening, 33 Secret ballot, 87 Seippe, Harriet, 183–84 Seligman, Edwin R. A., 79, 81 Sherman, Charles, 176, 191 Shop-floor codes, 130 Shove, Gilbert, 77, 81 Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly (SBTLA), 55, 125, 134, 135, 186, 218, 244

Index Silver Bow Trades and Labor Council, 243 Silver Bow Trades Council, 245 Silver Reef Miners’ Union, 45–47 Simpson, John, 145–46, 148 Sinclair, Upton, 6 Single tax, 7, 10, 88, 91 Skilled workers, 177–78 Sklar, Kathryn Kish, 263n48 Sklar, Martin J., 22 Sleater, R. G., 98–99, 217, 249 SLP. See Socialist Labor Party Smith, Clarence, 158 Smith, Howard, 162 Smith, James T., 163, 181 Smith, Joseph, 32–33 Smith, Robert B., 98 Social democracy: characteristics of, 4, 22–23, 120; Christian socialists and, 286n6; as culture, 120; historians on, 20–23, 263n48; as mainstream, 232; origins of, 3–5, 11, 254n9, 305n4; Rocky Mountain unionists and, 5, 122; worker identification with, 120 Social Democracy party, 133–34, 137 Socialism: conceptions of, 79, 81, 212; in Europe, 120; evolutionary, 4–5; gradualist wing of, 211–12; and justice, 117–18; liberalism as surrogate for, 22; municipal, 200; mutualism and, 161; opposition to, 247–48; policy ideas of, 11, 79; and revolution, 79, 81, 171, 212; Rocky Mountain unionists and, 11, 79–81, 94–95, 105, 117, 128; unions and, 133–44; in United States, 120; varieties of, 23, 119, 121; and violence, 161; worker identification with, 118–20 Socialist Labor Party (SLP), 81, 134, 137, 191 Socialist Party (SP): and AFL, 212; ALU and, 128; in Colorado, 137–39, 142–43, 201; conception of socialism held by, 121; and free speech, 210; historians on, 23; and IWW, 210; membership in, 200–201, 212; in Montana, 134–36, 201–3, 205, 207, 227–28; Rocky Mountain unionists and, 134–44, 150–53, 197; and sabotage, 211; syndicalism

323 and, 171; and unions, 174, 201–3; in United States, 200–201; in Utah, 199–200, 213–14; and working-class representation, 133, 136 Soldiers. See Militia; National Guard Soldier-Worker, 242 Sons of St. George, 89 Southern Pacific Railroad, 101, 157 SP. See Socialist Party Speer, Robert, 197–98, 203, 236 Spry, William, 213 Standard of living, 180–82, 214 Stapleton, Benjamin Franklin, 237–38 State constitutions: Colorado, 114, 118, 150, 197; Oklahoma, 277n9; Utah, 14, 74, 102–4, 114 State-level politics, 203–8 State Metal Trades Council, 218 Steffens, Lincoln, 6 Steunenberg, Frank, 190 Stevens, Theron, 142–43 Steward, Ira, 50–51, 270n60 Stewardship, 33 Stewart, Jack, 244 Stewart, Samuel, 227 Stimson, Edward C., 151–53 St. John, Vincent, 19, 142–44, 167, 191–92, 194, 196, 230 Strikebreakers, 44, 52–53, 109, 154–56, 235, 241. See also Scabs Strikes: causes of, 230–31, 235–36; Cripple Creek strike, 109, 154, 170, 197; Denver Tramway, 235; electrical workers’, 240–41; government and, 17, 109–10, 142–43, 154–56, 233; in Great Upheaval, 51–52; incidence of, 9, 230; laws against, 75–76; Ludlow strike, 229–31; miners’, 43–47, 107, 109, 123, 140–43, 154–56, 179, 193, 229–30, 240–41; owners’ power and, 154–55; Pullman strike, 16–17, 107, 123, 129; railroad workers’, 52, 157–58; rent, 81; rights concerning, 233, 238–39; Rossland strike, 140; sympathy, 176; telephone operators’, 164; Telluride strike, 140–43; over wages, 90 Stromquist, Shelton, 13, 259n33, 263n48 Stuart, Granville, 38 Stuart, James, 38 Sullivan, James, 97

324 Sullivan, John C., 166 Sweet, William E., 236–37 Sympathy strikes, 176 Syndicalism, 19–20, 170–72, 177, 194, 212, 214, 224, 241 Taft, William Howard, 230 Tarbell, Ida, 6 Taxation, 79. See also Single tax Teamsters Union, 160, 202–3 Telephone operators’ strike, 164 Telluride strike, 140–43 Thirteenth Amendment, 233 Thomas, Charles, 113–14 Thomas, Gomer, 156 Thum, Otto, 112, 133, 152–53 Tikas, Louis, 229 Tilford, Frank, 49 Toole, Joseph K., 135–36 Townley, Arthur C., 237 Trachtenberg, Alan, 297n46 Trautmann, William, 175, 191 Trials, for union infractions, 129–30 Trujillo, L. J., 222–23 Typographical Union, 87 UBRE. See United Brotherhood of Railway Employees UFL. See Utah Federation of Labor ULP. See Union Labor Party UMWA. See United Mine Workers of America Unemployment, 95–96, 100, 108 Union Co-operative Mercantile Company, 165–66 Union Label League, 298n54 Union Label League Bulletin, 183, 188 Union labels, 129, 165–66, 169–70, 186–88, 297n46, 298n54 Union Labor Club, 77 Union Labor Party (ULP), 13, 76–82, 84, 258n31, 278n23 Union organization: approaches to, 27; Buchanan and, 47–48, 50; in company towns, 145; on craft lines, 67; rationale for, 1; in Rocky Mountains, 5–6, 15–16, 39 Union Pacific Employes’ Magazine (UPEM), 55, 61, 64, 71, 76, 83, 106 Union Pacific (UP) Railroad, 37–38, 52, 64, 101–2, 144, 221

Index Unions: attitudes toward, 40; boring within, 174, 193–94, 210, 212, 213, 217, 223, 245; decline of, 219–20; Knights of Labor as case study in, 7–11; laws affecting, 76, 305n4; lawsuits against, 55; miners’, 107–8; mixed local, 67, 173; in 1930s, 305n4; objectives of, 48; opposition to, 149, 218, 232–40, 246; and politics, 12–13, 71–73, 76–77, 92, 117–68; and pure-and-simple unionism, 10, 17, 20, 121, 122, 172, 182; and race/ethnicity, 10, 17–18, 56–57, 60–65, 220–28, 244, 275n95, 295n9; and socialism, 133–44; Socialist Party and, 174, 201–3; and unskilled workers, 17, 20, 72, 125, 157, 174, 185; urban, 158–61, 203; and wages, 52, 55–56, 90, 272n79. See also Rocky Mountain unionists; specific unions; Union organization United Brewery Workers, 192 United Brotherhood of Railway Employees (UBRE), 157 United Labor Party, 76, 199 United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), 129, 146, 148, 155, 156, 192–94, 220–21, 232 United States Commission on Industrial Relations (USCIR), 230–31 Unskilled workers: attitudes of, 93, 163–64; deskilling and, 173, 175, 192, 194; female, 163–66; IWW and, 177–78; in new economy, 173; unions and, 17, 20, 72, 125, 157, 174, 185; wages of, 56, 159 UP. See Union Pacific (UP) Railroad UPEM. See Union Pacific Employes’ Magazine Urban unions, 158–61, 203 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 235 USFL. See Utah State Federation of Labor U.S. Industrial Commission, 114 U.S. Supreme Court, 73, 184, 205, 274n92 Utah: Mormons in, 33–37; politics in, 14, 98–104, 204, 208, 238–39; Socialist Party in, 199–200, 213–14; statehood for, 74, 99–100, 103; women’s suffrage in, 17

Index Utah Associated Industries, 238–39 Utah Federated Trades and Labor Council (UFTLC), 74, 98–100, 102–4, 124 Utah Federation of Labor (UFL), 125, 159 Utah Fuel Company, 146, 156 Utah Labor Political League, 214 Utah National Guard, 156 Utah State Federation of Labor (USFL), 198, 213–14, 223–24, 239 Value, labor and, 30–31, 36, 39–40, 46–47, 50–52, 120, 180–81 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 218 Veterans, of World War I, 242–44, 243f Victor Fuel Company, 146, 155 Violence: IWW and, 19, 175, 178; owners’ use of, 156, 161, 179, 219, 229–30, 235, 241–42; race-related, 63–64; Rocky Mountain unionists and, 178–79; unions and, 141; workers and, 210. See also Militia; Strikebreakers Voting. See Bloc voting Vulcan Mine, 179 Wages: fair, 46–47, 50–54; living, 50–54, 90–91, 100, 170, 180– 82, 234–36; marginalism and determination of, 51, 180; of Rocky Mountain unionists, 55–56; unions’ effect on, 52, 55–56, 90, 272n79 Wage slavery, 29, 41, 51, 163 Wagner Act (1935), 305n4 Waite, Davis, 16–17, 105–6, 109–12, 115, 211, 284n114 Walling, William English, 173 Wall Street Journal, 215, 247–48 Walsh, Frank, 230–31 Walsh, J. H., 188 Walsh Report, 230–31, 234 Washington Day parade, 25–26, 28, 48 Waters, H. B., 204 Waugh, William, 179 Wealth distribution, natural law and, 19. See also Redistribution policies Webb, Beatrice, 120 Webb, Sidney, 120 Weed, E. D., 97 Welfare capitalism, 219, 232

325 Wells, Heber M., 156 West, Caleb, 101 Western Federation of Miners (WFM): and AFL, 123–24, 193–94, 196, 245; and ALU, 172; and arbitration, 195; and contracts, 195–96; and IWW, 20, 172–73, 178, 190–96; and Populism, 107–9; and progressive unionism, 192–93; and race/ ethnicity, 220, 224; role of, 190; and Socialist Party, 139; and strikes, 140–42, 151–52, 161, 171, 179; and UFL, 125; and WLU, 124, 126–28 Western Labor Union (WLU), 6, 20, 72, 121, 124–28, 135, 172, 182, 190 Western Montana Trades and Labor Council, 135 WFM. See Western Federation of Miners Wheeler, Burton K., 241, 244–45 Whitely, Charles, 141, 244 Whiteness model, 273n92 White supremacy, 60, 62, 273n92 Wilcox, Hyrum, 156 Wilcox, Lute, 110 Williams, Ben, 19 Williams, Owen, 55 Wilson, James, 171 Wilson, Woodrow, 213, 230, 234, 241, 247 Wiseman, F., 222–23 WLU. See Western Labor Union Wobblies. See Industrial Workers of the World Wolcott, Henry R., 112–14 Women: and AFL, 295n9; attitudes of, 163–64; equality for, 54; and social-welfare activism, 263n48; and strikes, 53, 229; and suffrage, 17, 74–75, 284n114; working, 53–54, 163–66, 169, 181, 183–86 Women’s Protective Union (WPU), 159, 186, 245 Work day, length of, 2, 5, 9, 73, 88–89, 113–14, 124, 134, 136, 149–51, 153–54, 181, 184–85, 198 Workers: attitudes of, 83, 92–93, 99, 118–19, 141; backlash against, 218– 19, 234–40, 246; as collective voting bloc, 25, 28, 50, 73, 76, 87–88, 90, 93, 96, 102, 112, 132–33, 153–54;

Index

326 Workers: attitudes (continued) demonstrations by, 25–26, 28, 43–48, 96; hardships of, 2; and law, 1–2; legislative demands of, 26, 48, 78, 88, 100, 104, 107, 109, 147; liberty of, 29–30, 41–42; market role of, 18; and politics, 5, 11–12, 23, 25–28, 43, 45, 47–50, 56, 71, 92, 262n47; public response to concerns of, 6, 18, 27, 28, 47, 97, 156, 162, 178, 187, 214–15, 230, 232–33, 246; solidarity of, 16, 26, 28, 40, 53, 58–59, 73, 87, 93, 129–32, 160–62, 165, 228, 242–46, 305n4; and value of labor, 30–31, 36, 39–40, 46–47, 50–52, 120, 180–81. See also Rocky Mountain unionists; Unskilled workers Workers Party of America, 244 Working conditions, 230. See also Workplace safety

Workingmen’s Association, 100 Workingmen’s compensation, 207–8 Workingmen’s County Ticket, 50 Workingmen’s Party, 63, 86–87, 89 Workingmen’s Political Committee, 49–50 Workingmen’s tickets, 72, 76, 84 Workplace safety, 2–3, 147, 205–7 World War Veterans, 242–44 Wright, Carroll D., 180–81 Wright, John, 114 Wyoming Labor Journal, 221–22, 229 Young, Brigham, 33, 35–36 Yup, Ah, 274n92 Zion Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI), 35