The United Mine Workers of America were an important force in the labor movement during the years prior to WWI. By 1910, a third of all mine workers were organized (compared with a tenth of the US workforce as a whole); mining, unlike most industries with strong union representation, employed many African American and immigrant workers, and the UMWA (like the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World) sought to organize across racial and ethnic lines.
John D. Rockefeller and other Colorado mine owners spearheaded an “open shop campaign” in 1913, hoping to ensure that workers could enter the mines without being members of the union. In late September 1913, 10-12,000 mostly foreign-born miners struck against Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) among others. Workers’ complaints were simple and predictable to anyone who had ever choked out a living in America’s mines. Miners were not being properly compensated for all the coal they were extracting and were being cheated out of pay on at least 400 pounds per ton; state laws allowing miners to elect their own checkweighmen were flagrantly ignored by the companies, who refused to concede any democratic terrain to their employees; workers were paid in company scrip worth 90 cents on the dollar, which they could only spend at company stores; they found themselves being forced by superintendents to cast votes for approved local and national candidates; they were beaten or fired for complaining and were overseen by private dectectives from the notorious Baldwin-Felts Agency. And so on and so forth, world without end.
Intended to keep the miners compliant and helpless, these and other indignities enraged them further, leading to one of the most protracted labor disputes of the early 20th century. When 90 percent of Southern Colorado’s coal miners struck in September 1913, Baldwin-Felts detectives roamed the strikers’ tent camps in an armor-plated sedan built in Pueblo by CF&I. The car, which was equipped with a machine gun, was nicknamed the “Death Special” by miners, who dug pits to shield their families and themselves from the spray of bullets that became routine in Ludlow, Forbes, Trinidad, and other tent colonies.
On 17 October 1913, Baldwin-Felts agents unleashed the “Death Special” on the encamptent at Forbes, killing one miner and hitting a young girl in the face. A young boy fleeing the attack was shot nine times in one leg; one of the tents was discovered to have between 85 and 150 holes (depending on the account) — the riddled tent was shipped east to publicize the conditions under which the miners were living.
The assault at Forbes was merely one opening skirmish in the Colorado Coalfield War, which lasted until early May 1914 and ultimately took the lives of scores of miners and their family members.
10 comments
October 17, 2008 at 5:44 pm
urbino
I never know quite how to think about this part of American history, and I don’t know why. Something about it grinds my mental apparatus to a halt. All that dust, maybe?
October 17, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Sir Charles
My reaction to this — and it has shaped my life pretty substantially — is always one of incredible outrage and a wish that the UMW had taken the likes of Rockefeller out and shot him like a dog. But that’s just me.
I still cherish my United Mine Workers “Soldiers of Solidarty” camoflauge T-shirt from the Pittston Coal strike in 1988.
October 17, 2008 at 6:09 pm
urbino
Such a sentiment seems incongruous with your peerage.
October 17, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Sir Charles
I contain multitudes.
Or are my pants just getting tight?
October 17, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Jonathan Rees
Dave:
It’s really cool that you blogged about the Death Special when the Ludlow Massacre tends to overshadow that attack so badly. You made one mistake here though that absolutely drives me batty. It’s John D. Rockefeller, Jr. who ran the anti-union campaign. The original John D. Rockefeller was mostly just playing golf and giving dimes to small children by 1913.
October 17, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Brad
Yea, labor history!
October 17, 2008 at 10:05 pm
davenoon
D’oh! Sorry, Jonathan….
October 17, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Vance
Urbino @5:44 — I’m a bit surprised to see you confess that sentiment, but I feel something like it too. Is it that the period has left little residue of popular culture or continuous historical memory (in particular, representing the strikers’ side)? It’s as though a crucial episode of the history of the American left and labor movement had been played by understudies on a temporary stage.
October 18, 2008 at 8:20 am
zunguzungu
It’s a similar sort of thing in WV, where very similar stuff happened a bit later (a railroad car with a gatling gun mounted on it, I believe, would go from coal camp to coal camp mowing people down). And aside from occasional stuff like Sayles’ Matewan or Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven, the popular memory of these events is just non-existent. West Virginian high school kids take a whole year to learn WV history, but at least when I was growing up, the mine wars were not part of that (certainly all the good stuff was gone, replaced by anodyne “struggels for unionization continued during this period”). And, seriously, what else is there to teach?
The peculiar thing to me is that, the way Vance and Urbino put it, there doesn’t really feel like an appropriate way to mobilize that historical memory in the present day, even when there are clear parallels. The way coal companies like Massey are mountaintop removal mining the southern part of the state ruins the watershed and destroys towns (and makes destructive flooding infinitely more likely) and as people have been more and more successful in using the courts to fight them, physical intimidation has become incredibly common. This is Maria Gunnoe talking about what it’s like to stand up against the coal companies:
“I’ve had sand put in my gas tank – cost $1,200 to keep my truck on the road. And you know, in this kind of area, if they ground your vehicle, you’re grounded! You’re stopped right there, dead in your tracks. I’m 25 miles from the nearest town, so that really slowed me down for quite a while. Teachers in the schools make comments to my kids. It’s not their place to tell my children that their water isn’t poisoned by coal, when my children know they can’t drink their water. I’ve had my tires cut, my dog shot. People spit on my truck all the time – big, gross tobacco juice spit. One of my dogs was shot and left in the parkin’ lot where my kids catch the school bus.”
Larry Gibson (who was sort of bizarrely profiled in People magazine a week ago) was actually driving around with some Washington Post reporters telling them about all the threats and intimidation he faces, and when they indicated some skepticism, he turned on his CB so the reporters could hear two coal truck drivers talking about how they were going to run Larry’s (very recognizable) truck off the road. The reporters, needless to say, were quite shaken (and I think they mentioned it in their article).
The point is not that this is the same thing as a “Death car,” since the difference in scale is pretty enormous, but if we had a better historical memory about these kinds of events, the parallels would be much more clear.
October 19, 2008 at 7:32 pm
tf smith
Pretty much a straight line between Lehigh, Ludlow, and Matewan.