Howard Zinn

Among the many recorded moments of American history impacted by Howard Zinn, who died at age 87 in late January, one of the most significant is the Ludlow Massacre, a 1914 labor skirmish between Colorado’s militia and the families of striking coal miners.

Calling Ludlow a skirmish is putting it gently: In April 1914, the Colorado National Guard, called in by the mining companies, opened fire on women and children at the Ludlow tent camp, killing fourteen, and then set fire to the settlement. The incident ignited seven months of gunfights and bombings around southern Colorado’s coal fields, but the history of Ludlow remained in the shadows, partly because neither embittered families nor mining executives much wanted to remember the massacre, albeit for different reasons.

Zinn first heard about Ludlow through a Woody Guthrie song, which inspired him to learn more about the labor wars in Colorado. Here is Zinn, in his own words, talking about Guthrie’s influence and Ludlow:

Zinn later included his own telling of Ludlow in his seminal work, A People’s History of the United States (Disclosure: I’ve never read the complete tome, but have read his section on the coal labor struggle).

Before Zinn’s scholarship, the labor struggles surrounding Ludlow were “taboo,” according to Thomas G. Andrews, a history professor at University of Colorado, Denver. Andrews wrote an environmental history of the Colorado coalfield wars, Killing for Coal, America’s Deadliest Labor War, which I reviewed for Earth Magazine in July 2009.

Andrews spoke to Denver Post columnist Susan Greene for her January 31 column, remembering Zinn and Ludlow. In the column, Greene offers her take on Zinn and the positive consequences for history students in Colorado and everywhere:

…Zinn’s many writings about Ludlow brought broader awareness. In several essays since the 1970s, he made it known how deep the corruption of wealth and power ran.

“The mining camps were feudal kingdoms run by the coal corporations, which made the laws; curfews were imposed, suspicious strangers were not allowed to visit the homes, the company store must be patronized, the company doctor used. The laws were enforced by company-appointed marshals. The teachers and preachers were picked by the company. By 1914, Colorado Fuel and Iron owned twenty-seven mining camps, and all the land, the houses, the saloons, the schools, the churches, the stores,” he wrote.

…

Zinn put Ludlow on the map. Not just as a place, in all its gruesome details, but as a concept. He popularized the struggle so that the name of the railroad town has become synonymous with corruption — “the firm connection between entrenched wealth and political power, manifested in the decisions of government, and in the machinery of law and justice.”

Ludlow’s uncomfortable history now is taught widely in college courses and K-12 classes. Textbooks cover it. Students take field trips to the shadowed ground that’s finally a national historic landmark.

To hear more from Andrews about his research and background with the Colorado coal wars and Ludlow, check out this video:

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