Joshua Zaffos

The following review of Killing for Coal, America’s Deadliest Labor War by Thomas G. Andrews, was published in the July 2009 issue of Earth Magazine.

Books: Killing for Coal: A Class, Environmental and Labor War

Many more men died in shadowy mines than during gunfights in the days of the Wild West, a point that darkly underscores the true threats of the Rocky Mountain frontier. But miners’ safety and gunplay collided in April 1914 in the southern Colorado coalfields. At the tiny tent colony of Ludlow, a seven-month-long miners’ strike ignited into a fire fight with state National Guardsmen, resulting in the death of five miners, two women and 12 children. The Ludlow Massacre marked the beginning of a season-long armed struggle that transformed the Colorado coalfields “into an epicenter of class war,” according to Thomas G. Andrews’ new book, “Killing for Coal.”

In “Killing for Coal,” Andrews dives into the global and local forces that pitted desperate laborers against industry bosses, culminating in the massacre and a month of violence when more than 60 individuals were killed, including striking miners and their families, strikebreakers and hired mine guards. Ludlow and the Rocky Mountain coal wars have largely been remembered as a labor battle, earning folkloric retellings and academic history treatments from the likes of Upton Sinclair, Woody Guthrie and George McGovern. But Andrews, a history professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, reframes the story with an emphasis on the environmental conditions that influenced the miners’ behavior and actions.

In late 19th century America, coal and other fossil fuels powered impressive growth. Where the high and dry plains had promised little chance of prosperity, mineral exploration enabled factories and brick homes to rise in cities illuminated by streetlights. Mechanized tractors and chemical fertilizers changed the scale of farms. Railroads stretched across the continent without consuming forests for fuel. Andrews calls this “mineral-intensive industrialization,” and Colorado’s bountiful coal deposits fueled the unheralded development of the frontier and the entire nation.

For William Jackson Palmer, the railroad engineer who discovered Colorado’s coal outcroppings in 1867, the question was whether an industrial era for the Rockies could avoid the unscrupulous and immoral business relations that seemed to follow mineral wealth. He sketched out a utopian vision of Colorado’s future coal industry, where miners would receive fair wages and stock options, and “there would never be any strikes or hard feelings among the labourers toward the capitalists.”

Reality never approached Palmer’s daydream. A glut of workers, migrating from all over the United States and three dozen countries, guaranteed cheap wages and a dispensable view of labor. Coal might have built Denver as a modern city, but underground, it remained a primitive “workscape” that hardly benefited from industrial advances. Coal dust caused “miners’ asthma,” better known as black-lung disease. The release of stinkdamp (hydrogen sulfide), blackdamp (nitrogen and oxygen) and firedamp (methane and carbon monoxide) posed a range of dangers from suffocation to combustion. Fallen roofs, explosions and fires also terrorized some individuals. By 1900, Colorado mines had twice the average death rate of other American coal mines.

Ludlow Tent Colony, before the massacre, 1914 (image from Denver Public Library)

Mining had enabled technological progress for society, but the workers received few of the advantages of industrial life in the coal mines — or at home. Strikes broke out from time to time over better pay, improved ventilation or an eight-hour workday. But things didn’t get violent until the oppressive work environment moved to the surface. The construction and administration of regimented “company towns” in the 1900s gave mine owners control over stores, schools, governments and courts. When the Strike of 1913 began, miners were either exiled from these communities as union agitators or left on their own, leading to the formation of union tent camps like Ludlow.

Mining officials, including John D. Rockefeller Jr., portrayed labor unrest as the inflated whims of union leaders, not a grassroots uprising. But the “underground commonwealth” that had formed in the coal mines fed a solidarity aboveground that superseded ethnic divisions among miners and overwhelmed their bosses, who, the miners said, had no idea what was really going on. The Ludlow Massacre and the coalfield wars of 1914 are still the country’s deadliest labor rebellion since the Civil War.

Andrews dwells on the connections between geological, economic, environmental and social forces, illustrating how they combined to inflame the labor woes leading to the coal strikes and conflicts. Today, most of Colorado’s former coal towns and tent camps are ghost villages in the shadows of the Rockies. But the communities that have sprung into resort ski towns still depend on fossil fuels — and migrant labor — for their existence.

Amnesia or denial of the complex relations between our exploitation of mineral resources and management of labor probably won’t initiate a new era of violence, Andrews writes. But until we better understand and acknowledge the connection between class conflict and environmental degradation, we won’t really know what’s going on either.

– Joshua Zaffos