Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century - Hardcover

Zinn, Howard; Frank, Dana; Kelley, Robin D. G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807050121 ISBN 13: 9780807050125

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 2001

Synopsis

Three renowned historians present stirring tales of labor: Howard Zinn tells the grim tale of the Ludlow Massacre, a drama of beleaguered immigrant workers, Mother Jones, and the politics of corporate power in the age of the robber barons. Dana Frank brings to light the little-known story of a successful sit-in conducted by the "counter girls" at the Detroit Woolworth's during the Great Depression. Robin D. G. Kelley's story of a movie theater musicians' strike in New York asks what defines work in times of changing technology.
"Three Strikes brings to life the heroic men and women who put their jobs, bodies, and lives on the line to win a better life for all working Americans. Zinn, Frank, and Kelley show us that while the country and the union movement have changed greatly in the last hundred years, our struggle to close the divide between rich and poor remains the same."
—John Sweeney, president, AFL-CIO

"Provocative analysis of still relevant issues, as the passionate, sometimes violent demonstrations at international meetings of the global economy demonstrate."
—Mary Carroll, Booklist

"Highly readable, well-researched narratives of dramatic action"
—Leon Fink, Chicago Tribune

About this title

About the Author:

Howard Zinn is a teacher, historian, and social activist, and the author of many books, including the best-selling A People's History of the United States and You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon / 7127-7 / $13.00 pb). He lives near Boston. Dana Frank, professor of American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is author of the awardwinning Buy American (Beacon / 4711-2 / $17.50 pb). Robin D. G. Kelley, professor of history at New York University, is author of Race Rebels, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! (Beacon / 0941-5 / $14.00 pb), and Freedom Dreams (Beacon / 0976-8 / $24.00 cl).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

ON APRIL 21, 1914, in the quiet afternoon, a telephone linesman was making his way through the charred ruins of a miners' tent colony in southern Colorado. He lifted an iron cot covering a pit under one of the tents, and there he found the blackened, swollen bodies of eleven children and two women. The news was flashed swiftly to the world. The tragedy was given a name: the Ludlow Massacre.

Some Americans know about the Ludlow Massacre, though it does not appear in most of the history texts used in our schools and colleges. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it, a dark, brooding song. But few know that the Ludlow Massacre was the central event in a fourteen-month strike of coal miners that took a toll of at least sixty-six lives—a strike which is one of the most dramatic and violent events in the history of this country.

Two governmental committees subsequently recorded over five thousand pages of firsthand testimony by participants in the Colorado coal strike. Thousands of newspaper stories and hundreds of magazine articles dealt with the conflict. Some of the most fascinating figures in American history were involved in some way in that event: Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilson, John D. Rockefeller and Ivy Lee, Upton Sinclair and John Reed.

Yet that story has been buried, in the way that labor struggles in general have been omitted or given brief mention in most mainstream accounts of the history of the United States. It deserves to be recalled, because embedded in the events of the Colorado strike are issues still alive today: the class struggle between owners of large enterprises and their workers, the special treatment of immigrant workers, the relationship between economic power and political power, the role of the press, and the way in which the culture censors out certain historical events.
The Colorado strike took place in a physical setting of vast proportions and staggering beauty. Down the center of the rectangle that is Colorado, from north to south, march an array of huge, breathtaking mountains—the Rockies—whose naked cliffs merge, on their eastern edge, with low hills covered with cedar and yellow pine. To the east of that is the plain—really a mile-high plateau—a tawny expanse of pasture grass sprinkled with prairie flowers in the spring and summer, and gleaming here and there with yellow- blossomed cactus.

Beneath the tremendous weight of the Rockies, in the course of countless centuries, decaying vegetation gradually mineralized into the black rock known as coal. The constantly increasing proportion of carbon in this rock transformed it from vegetable matter to peat, then to lignite and bituminous coal, and finally to anthracite.

Three great coalfields, consisting chiefly of bituminous coal, were formed in Colorado. One of them was contained within two counties in southern Colorado, Las Animas and Huerfano counties, just east of the mountains. This field was made up of about forty discontinuous seams, ranging from a few inches to fourteen feet thick. These seams were from two hundred and fifty to about five hundred feet deep.

The mining of these fields became possible on a large scale only in the 1870s, when the railroads moving west from Kansas City, south from Denver, and north from New Mexico, converged on the region. At about this time, settlers moving down the old Santa Fe trail built a town on the banks of the Purgatory River (el Rio de las Animas Perdidas Purgatorio—the river of lost souls), just east of the Sangre de Cristo (blood of Christ) mountains and about fifteen miles north of the New Mexican border.

The town was called Trinidad, and it became the center of the southern mining area. By 1913 it had about ten thousand people—miners, ranchers, farmers, and businessmen. From the main highways and railroad lines leading north out of Trinidad, branch railways and old wagon roads cut sharply west into the foothills of the mountains, into the steep-walled canyons where the mining camps lay. Scattered in these narrow canyons, on the flat bands of earth running along the canyon bottoms, were the huts of the miners, the mine buildings, and the mine entries.

It was a shocking contrast: the wild beauty of the Colorado countryside against the unspeakable squalor of these mining camps. The miners' huts, usually shared by several families, were made of clapboard walls and thin- planked floors, with leaking roofs, sagging doors, broken windows, and layers of old newspapers nailed to the walls to keep out the cold. Some families, particularly Negro families, were forced to live in tiny squares not much bigger than chicken cooops.

Within sight of the huts were the coke ovens and the mine tipple, where coal was emptied from the cars that carried it to the surface. Thick cloudsssss of soot clogged the air and settled on the ground, strangling any shoots of grass or flowers that tried to grow there. Wriggling along the canyon wall, behind the huts, was a now sluggish creek, dirty yellow and laden with the slag of the mine and the refuse of the camp. Alongside the creek the children played, barefoot, ragged, and often hungry.

Each mining camp was a feudal dominion, with the company acting as lord and master. Every camp had a marshal, a law enforcement officer paid by the company. The "laws" were the company's rules. Curfews were imposed, "suspicious" strangers were not allowed to visit the homes, the company store had a monopoly on goods sold in the camp. The doctor was a company doctor, the schoolteachers hired by the company.

In the early dawn, cages carried the men down into the blackness of the mine. There was usually a main tunnel, with dozens of branch tunnels leading into the "rooms," held up by timbers, where the miners hacked away at the face of the coal seam with hand picks and their helpers shoveled the coal into waiting railroad cars. The loaded cars were drawn along their tracks by mules to the main shaft, where they were lifted to the surface, and then to the top of the tipple, and then the coal showered down through the sorting screens into flatcars.

Since the average coal seam was about three feet high, the miners would often work on their knees or on their sides, never able to straighten up. The ventilation system was a crude affair that depended on the manipulation of tunnel doors by "trapper boys"—often thirteen or fourteen years old—who were being initiated into the work.
The first to labor in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company's mines were Welshmen and Englishmen who had gained their experience in their mother countries. But with the great waves of immigration from southern Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, these were joined by Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Montenegrins, and Serbs. There was also a large proportion of Mexicans and Negroes.

It was a man in charge of the "Sociological Department" of Colorado Fuel & Iron who described the mine bosses and camp officials this way: "At the bottom of the pit with pick and shovel the miner frequently found a grafting pit boss on his back. The camp superintendents as a whole impress me as most uncouth, ignorant, immoral, and in many instances the most brutal set of men that we have ever met. Blasphemous bullies."

Political power in Colorado rested in the hands of those who held economic power. This meant that the authority of Colorado Fuel & Iron and the other mine operators was virtually supreme. A letter from company manager L. M. Bowers to the secretary of John D. Rockefeller Jr., written in May of 1913, describes the situation:
The Colorado Fuel & Iron Company for many years was accused of being the political dictator of southern Colorado, and in fact was a mighty power in the whole state. When I came here it was said that the C. F. & I. voted every man and woman in their employ without any regard to their being naturalized or not; and even their mules, it used to be remarked, were registered, if they were fortunate enough to possess names.... The company became notorious in many sections for their support of the liquor interests. They established saloons everywhere they possibly could.... A sheriff, elected by the votes of the C. F. & I. Co. employees ... established himself or became a partner in sixteen liquor stores in our coal mines.
The Colorado attorney general who conducted an investigation in Huerfano County in the fall of 1913, on the eve of the strike, said, "I found a very perfect political machine, just as much a machine as Tammany in New York." Another letter, from Superintendent Bowers to Rockefeller shortly after the strike began, describes the cooperation of the bankers and the governor against the strike, and refers to Governor Ammons (a Democrat and a supporter of President Woodrow Wilson) as "our little cowboy governor."

Colorado's deputy labor commissioner, Edwin Brake, later testified before the House Mines and Mining subcommittee that investigated the strike, "It's very seldom you can convict anyone in Huerfano County if he's got any friends. Jeff Farr, the sheriff, selects the jury and they're picked to convict or acquit as the case may be."

A Reverend Atkinson, who interviewed Governor Ammons during the strike, asked the governor if there was constitutional law and government in Colorado, to which Ammons replied, "Not a bit in those counties where the coal mines are located."

Company officials were appointed as election judges. Company-dominated coroners and judges prevented injured employees from collecting damages. Polling places were often on company property. J. C. Baldwin, gambler and bartender, was jury foreman in 80 percent of the cases tried in his county.

Much of the land on which these camps stood had been acquired under dubious...

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0807050121
• ISBN 13: 9780807050125
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 174