The Archaeology of Class War: The Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1913-1914

8. “Thou Shalt Not Dose Thyself”: Proprietary Medicine Use at the Ludlow Tent Colony

251 8 8 Strikers’ Demand #6: “We demand the right to trade in any store we please, and the right to choose our own boarding place and our own doctor.” McGovern and GuttridGe 1972:102 In 1913 the coal miners of southern Colorado drew up a list of seven demands to be presented by their union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), to the mining companies. The sixth of the seven demands encompassed the frustration miners and their families felt over their employers’ intrusion into all aspects of home life—a lack of choice in where to live, where to shop, and where to obtain medical services. While early–twentieth-century mining companies had an interest in keeping workers relatively satisfied, the deskilling of the work and a ready force of new immigrants made workers fairly expendable. In isolated mining camps, the employer could, and often did, exert a high degree of control over workers’ lives, including their health care. The archaeology, documentary evidence, and oral histories associated with Ludlow and the nearby coal camp of Berwind provide an opportunity to examine the material remains of health care in the early twentieth century. During the Progressive era, middle-class reformers became interested in working-class health issues. Advances in the understanding of disease transmisProprietary Medicine Use at the Ludlow Tent Colony “thou Shalt not dose thyself” claire H. Horn c l a i r e H . H o r n 252 sion created a new imperative for civic sanitation, since epidemics that incubated in cities’ crowded tenements could spread to other neighborhoods. Through improved sanitation and medical treatments, the ravages of diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid fever could be greatly reduced. Much has been written about the efforts of Progressive reformers to change the health and hygiene habits of the working class (Duffy 1997; Engs 2001; Hoy 1995; Kraut 1994; Rosner and Markowitz 1997; Tomes 1998). During the first decades of the twentieth century, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) adopted many of the health-related programs initiated by reformers in urban areas. Often, CF&I’s programs relied heavily on proscriptive literature and lectures intended to educate workers on how to keep a clean home and thus avoid sickness. As Robert Fitts (1999:39) has noted, however, proscriptive literature can be a poor indicator of what a group’s actions actually were as opposed to what the authors hoped for or railed against. Historical archaeologists have used health-related artifacts to analyze different attitudes toward health according to race, ethnicity, class, and occupation (Bonasera and Raymer 2001; Cabak, Groover, and Wagers 1995; Franzen 1995; Hautaniemi 1994; Howson 1992). Eric Larsen (1994) used four proprietary medicine (or patent medicine) bottles recovered from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, as a stepping-stone to investigate the nineteenth-century ideal of motherhood. Excavations at isolated work camp sites have produced proprietary medicine vessels similar to those found at Ludlow, including liniments, painkillers, and laxatives at logging camps in northern Michigan (Franzen 1995), at a dam construction camp in California (Maniery 2002), and at a coal mining town in Iowa (Gradwohl and Osborn 1984). As the medical profession was strongly opposed to the use of proprietary medicines, these vessels provide an opportunity to examine how workers made their own choices about health care, even in a restrictive setting. Workers and their families made their own decisions about when to make use of professional physicians’ services and when to treat illnesses at home with proprietary medicines or home remedies. Despite doctors’ warnings against them, proprietary medicines remained in use at the Ludlow Tent Colony and in Berwind, both before and after the 1913–1914 strike. These products, often containing alcohol and narcotics, were popular throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. Archaeologists recovered a variety of proprietary medicine vessels from both the Ludlow and Berwind sites. The use of proprietary medicine at these sites provides a window into the materiality of health in the early–twentieth-century United States. HealtH RefoRm in tHe PRogRessive eRa Health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became tied to a number of other issues, ranging from fear of immigrants and overcrowded “Thou Shalt Not Dose Thyself” 253 slums to home decor. Despite increased medical knowledge about the causes of disease, holdovers from previous belief systems persisted. With the advent of indoor plumbing, the old concerns over miasmas translated into a new fear of sewer gases...