Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (review)

In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, in a place called Ludlow, a tent city populated by striking coal miners and their families was raked with gunfire and torched by Colorado state militiamen on April 20, 1914. Eleven children were among the dead in the infamous "Ludlow Massacre." So was the leader of the strikers' camp, a Greek immigrant named Louis Tikas, who was captured alive, beaten, and then murdered in cold blood by the militiamen. The events of that horrific day outraged the nation and focused attention of Progressives on the "labor question" like no other event of the time. But the sensational brutality of the Ludlow Massacre both in its time and afterward has tended to obscure the context that produced it: "Few major events in American history seem so shrouded in misconception, harbored not only by the general public but even by esteemed scholars" (271). In this book, Andrews seeks to dispel those misconceptions by restoring the Ludlow massacre to its proper context, which Andrews extends well beyond the smoldering ruins of the strikers' tent city.

Andrews' book is notable for the three ways in which it contextualizes bloody Ludlow. First, he places the events of 1914 within a protracted pattern of conflict in Colorado that dated back to the earliest coal camps established in the state. The 1914 conflagration had precursors, most notably in 1894, when thousands of colliers marched from one mine camp to another in a failed attempt to force mine operators to accept their union. What happened in Ludlow grew out of a long history of struggle.

Second, Andrews portrays the miners not merely as victims caught up in violent repression but as people who brought their own resources with them into this conflict. The colliers of southern Colorado were an extraordinarily diverse lot who were drawn there across great geographical and cultural distances—and not empty-handed. "Those who came brought a tradition of conflict, a volatile mix of trade unionism and rural resistance, radicalism and conservatism—and held fast to memories of ancient struggles against oppressive landlords and of recent strikes" (89).

Finally, Andrews relates the Ludlow struggle to the developing fossil-fuel economy that was transforming the American West, where the "calculus of energy proved inescapable" (108). This point is both the book's most interesting and its least satisfying contribution. Although Andrews illuminates the environmental history of coal mining, he has little to say about the vicissitudes of the coal market and thus about why mine operators were determined to keep their workers unorganized.

Yet the book on the whole succeeds in bringing the Ludlow story to life for a new generation of readers who will find the environmental history that it presents particularly interesting. Examining the Ludlow massacre from a fresh perspective, and recounting the miners' story in ways that connect with urgent contemporary concerns, is no mean feat. Indeed, the book should be widely read.