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

Preface and Acknowledgments

xiii Anybody who read about the Ludlow Massacre, anybody who heard about it was bound to be affected by it. (Zinn 2004) On the morning of April 20, 1914, Colorado National Guard troops opened fire on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado. Armed miners returned the militia’s fire while their families hid in cellars under their tents or scurried across the plains for safety. The Guard continued firing machine guns and rifles into the colony until late afternoon and then overran the camp, looting tents and setting them aflame. When the smoke cleared, all that remained of the colony were burned wooden frames, charred iron bedsteads, and great iron stoves standing starkly on the plains. Sunrise the next day found eighteen of the camp’s inhabitants dead, including two women and ten children who suffocated in a pit below a burning tent, and a twelveyear -old boy shot through the head. The Ludlow Massacre is the most violent and best-known event of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield Strike, but its significance goes far beyond this struggle. The death of innocents shocked the American public, and popular opinion soon turned against violent confrontations with strikers. After Ludlow, labor Preface and Acknowledgments P r e f A c e A n d A c k n o W l e d g M e n t s xi relations in the United States started to move away from class conflict to corporate and government policies of negotiation, co-option, and regulated strikes. The press used the massacre to demonize John D. Rockefeller Jr. In response, he initiated the first important U.S. company union at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and he launched the first large-scale corporate public relations campaign in U.S. history. Mary “Mother” Jones, Upton Sinclair, John Reed, and other important personages in labor history participated in the strike. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) holds the massacre site as hallowed ground, maintains a monument there, and each June holds services to sanctify the ultimate sacrifice of union men, women, and children. Such shrines to the struggles of labor in this country are sorely needed because memories of class struggle have essentially been lost from popular consciousness. Strikes and labor struggle rarely leave evidence in the earth for archaeologists to dig up. The massacre at Ludlow and the subsequent burning of the colony, however, left a record of the strike in the ground. Dean Saitta of the University of Denver, Phillip Duke of Fort Lewis College (Durango, Colorado), and Randall McGuire of Binghamton University began the Colorado Coalfield War ArchaeologyProjectin1996tounearththestoryof classstruggleinU.S.history.Graduate students from the University of Denver, Fort Lewis College, Binghamton University, Syracuse University, and the University of Colorado joined them to form the Ludlow Collective and investigate the Colorado Coalfield War. The collective has worked in cooperation with UMWA. The Colorado Historical Society funded the research with grants from the State Historical Fund, and the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities helped fund the educational programs. The Colorado Coalfield War is a well-documented event. The archival record of the strike includes thousands of pages, and hundreds of photographs exist of people and events that were part of it. The historians who have analyzed these records talk principally about the strike leaders and UMWA’s organizational work. They emphasize the common experience of workers in the mines and how it built the solidarity necessary for the strike. They contrast this to the home as the hearth of ethnicity that divided the miners. In these histories, the strike is a tale of striking male miners. Union workers, however, told a different story. They said that husbands and wives made the decision to strike at the kitchen table before workers ratified that decision in the union hall. They emphasized the hardship of a strike on mothers, sons, and daughters and the fact that solidarity had to spring from within the family or a strike would fail. Our research demonstrates that early–twentieth-century Colorado mining families shared a day-to-day experience of life that unified them and that the adversity of this experience forced families to strike. Archaeology provides a way to study the day-to-day experience of mining families in early–twentieth-century Colorado. The excavations of the Ludlow Preface and Acknowledgments x Tent Colony offer a unique and...