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  • From Redstone to Ludlow: John Cleveland Osgood’s Struggle Against the United Mine Workers of America by F. Darrell Munsell
  • Anthony B. Newkirk
F. Darrell Munsell, From Redstone to Ludlow: John Cleveland Osgood’s Struggle Against the United Mine Workers of America (Boulder: University Press of Colorado 2009)

Acentury ago, southern Colorado’s coal mines were dangerous places. Given the few – and rarely enforced – official regulations, employers acted with impunity. We are now approaching the centennial of a fourteen-month long strike that involved up to 20,000 coal miners protesting these conditions. The most notorious event of this strike occurred on 20 April 1914 at Ludlow, a town controlled by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Since morning, armed strikers had been exchanging gunfire with the Colorado National Guard. In the late afternoon after most guardsmen were recalled from the field, a detachment of “independent militiamen,” as a high-ranking cf&i executive called them, attacked the strikers’ encampment. (234) In the subsequent inferno, eleven children and two adults hiding in a trench under a tent perished. The camp’s leader was executed soon after his capture. Red Cross doctors and journalists were denied entry for two days. The hastily-recruited militiamen were later acquitted of wrongdoing in courts martial and there were legal proceedings against captured strikers, union officers, and two Denver newspapers. (Today, working conditions in the area’s mines owned by a UK-based multinational are, of course, less than ideal; a recent strike at the old cf&i Pueblo site lasted several years).

F. Darrell Munsell examines how the events at Ludlow came to pass. He does this by telling the story of John Cleveland Osgood, the leading figure in Colorado’s coal-extraction industry between the 1880s and the early 1920s. Besides having a pervasive influence over Colorado politics, Osgood played a central role in the struggle against the United Mine Workers of America (umwa). From Redstone to Ludlow is divided into four sections: Osgood’s background, labour relations policies, and business dealings (chapters 1–3), Colorado company towns and camps (chapter 5 and 6), colliers’ strikes (chapters 4 and 7–14), and official investigations and reforms in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre (chapters 15 and 16).

Osgood founded cf&i in 1892 and, after he surrendered its control to the Rockefeller interests, established the Victor-American Fuel Company in 1909. In his company towns and camps, Osgood used various degrees of coercion, and hired strikebreakers. In his flagship town of Redstone, Osgood oversaw a program of “industrial betterment” that complemented company-owned stores, for-rent accommodations, company scrip, and “ethnic diversification.” (7) Osgood was the first western coal operator to develop welfare capitalism and a company-town system. But, as Munsell argues, although cf&i became a leader in industrial sociology, this form of welfare capitalism would [End Page 373] only feed miners’ desires for “industrial democracy.” (104) Osgood’s “open-shop philosophy” provoked the 1903–1904 and 1913–1914 strikes. (149) In both strikes, Osgood and fellow coal operators made use of use martial law, counterinsurgency tactics, journalists embedded with militia units, aggressive public relations, and their close relations with Colorado’s sitting governors. Munsell observes that since Osgood was instrumental in shaping Colorado’s harsh anti-union climate, he shares a large part of the blame for the Ludlow Massacre with his commercial rival John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Osgood’s experiment with welfare capitalism would prove to be short-lived. Victor-American’s saloon functioned as a tool of social control, although the coal operators subsequently sought to spruce up their image in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre by backing a temperance candidate for governor. In fact, Rockefeller is associated with one of the most memorable instances of welfare capitalism in the Progressive Era. Drafted in 1914 by W.L. Mackenzie King, the Industrial Representation Plan balanced union recognition with the open-shop by assigning unions a secondary position in labour-management relations. The Canadian reformer and future prime minister considered Osgood to be the main obstruction to this becoming a reality in Colorado. Munsell’s analysis is influenced by earlier work on welfare capitalism, such...

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