Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

9. A Generation of Industrial Warfare

143 9 From midnight until dawn on the cold night of September 30, 1903, Emma Langdon worked to get out the Victor Record. While state militiamen hammered on the door of the Record office, demanding entrance in the name of the governor of Colorado, she composed the morning edition on the cumbersome linotype machine. When householders in the mining town stepped out into the crisp morning air for their daily paper, they saw a headline that read “Somewhat Disfigured, but Still in the Ring!” The story on page 1 reported that at 11:05 the previous evening, a squad of armed soldiers led by Major Thomas McClelland had arrested Langdon’s husband and other members of the newspaper staff as “prisoners of war.” The alleged offense that precipitated the raid and kept the Record staff in the military lockup for more than twenty-four hours was an article detailing the criminal records of several guardsmen on duty in the Cripple Creek Mining District. In the guard officers’ minds, the real misdeed was the Record’s consistent support of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in its strike against Cripple Creek mine owners. Since February, the WFM had been battling to obtain an eight-hour workday for smelter workers in Colorado City, an industrial suburb of Colorado Springs. Unable to force the largest smelter companies to recognize their union, the federation leaders had Is Colorado in America? Martial Law Declared in Colorado Habeas Corpus Suspended in Colorado Free Press Throttled in Colorado Bull-pens for Union Men in Colorado Free Speech Denied in Colorado1 —William D. HayWooD, ca. 1903 a Generation of industrial Warfare DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c09 chapter nine 144 resorted to a sympathy strike by Cripple Creek miners. On August 8 they had walked out on the mines that shipped ore to nonunion mills and smelters in Colorado City. After a mine fire and several beatings marred the peacefulness of the strike, Colorado governor James H. Peabody had answered the petition of local businesspeople with units of the Colorado National Guard. His order of September 4, 1903, sent nearly a thousand troops into Teller County “to protect all persons and property . . . from unlawful interference” and to see that “public peace and good order be preserved upon all occasions, to the end that the authority and dignity of this state be maintained and her power to suppress lawlessness within her borders be asserted.”2 A similar order on March 3 had dispatched 300 soldiers to protect the smelters in Colorado City. November 20 brought a third proclamation and two troops of cavalry—400 men in all—to help the sheriff of strike-torn San Miguel County enforce the laws in the town of Telluride in the San Juans. On March 23, 1904, Governor Peabody called out the militia yet again, sending 300 soldiers into Las Animas County to suppress an alleged state of rebellion among coal miners. Colorado City, Cripple Creek, Telluride, and Idaho Springs were only a few of the towns in which labor disturbances divided Coloradans in 1903 and 1904. During 1903 coal miners in the northern fields conducted a successful strike for an eight-hour workday. The Idaho Springs Miners’ Union, WFM, shut down several companies in Clear Creek County from May through July, and the Denver Mill and Smeltermen’s Union, WFM, struck the Globe and Grant mills of the American Smelting and Refining Company on July 3, 1903. Both unions demanded shorter hours. In Denver, strikebreakers protected by city police kept the plants in operation. At Idaho Springs, a dynamite blast at the Sun and Moon Mine on July 28 provided the excuse for the owners and businessmen of the Citizens’ Protective League to run twenty-two union leaders out of town and to end the strike through systematic harassment. At the root of each strike was the defiance of state law by Colorado’s corporate community. As early as 1899, the Colorado General Assembly had passed an eight-hour workday law for mine, mill, and smelter workers. Colorado Fuel and Iron and the Smelter Trust had responded by cutting wages in proportion to the reduction in hours. A month after the assembly’s law went into effect, the Colorado Supreme Court declared that it violated workers’ rights to sell their labor as they saw fit. Three years later Coloradans countered the court’s objec- a generation of industrial warfare 145 tions...