Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine: the 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike

Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine: The 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike By Leigh Campbell-Hale B.A., University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 1977 M.A., University of Colorado, Boulder, 2005 A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado and Committee Members: Phoebe S.K. Young Thomas G. Andrews Mark Pittenger Lee Chambers Ahmed White In partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History 2013 This thesis entitled: Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine: The 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike written by Leigh Campbell-Hale has been approved for the Department of History Phoebe S.K. Young Thomas Andrews Date The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. ii Campbell-Hale, Leigh (Ph.D, History) Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine: The 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike Dissertation directed by Associate Professor Phoebe S.K. Young This dissertation examines the causes, context, and legacies of the 1927-1928 Colorado coal strike in relationship to the history of labor organizing and coalmining in both Colorado and the United States. While historians have written prolifically about the Ludlow Massacre, which took place during the 1913- 1914 Colorado coal strike led by the United Mine Workers of America, there has been a curious lack of attention to the Columbine Massacre that occurred not far away within the 1927-1928 Colorado coal strike, led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). This dissertation brings to light an understudied set of significant events and the processes of memory that allowed 1920s era strikes to be forgotten in historical narratives. It thus reveals meaningful and important strands of labor activism in an era often understood to be quiescent. A comparative biography of three key participants before, during, and after the 1927-1928 strike—A.S. Embree, the IWW strike leader; Josephine Roche, the owner of the coalmine property where the Columbine Massacre took place; and Powers Hapgood, who came to work for Roche after she signed the 1928 United Mine Workers’ contract—demonstrates the significance of these events to national debates about labor during the period as well as changes and continuities in labor history from the Progressive era to 1930s New Deal labor policies and even through the 1980s. Reasons why the 1914 Ludlow Massacre has been remembered but the 1927 Columbine Massacre has been forgotten are complex but key to understanding the relationship of these events. Strategic and personal factors helped to shape a narrative that prioritized the well-documented labor militancy and resistance to it during the Progressive era, when Ludlow occurred, over the 1920s and early 1930s, which came to be portrayed as a quiescent era for labor, which, as the biographies show, it was not. Both individuals (such as Roche, Hapgood, and others) and institutions (such as the United Mine Workers and the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers’ Union) needed to put the tumultuous twenties behind them and reinvent themselves in the thirties. In the decades that followed, multiple contexts led both historians and even the original participants to reinforce the forgetting. The history of the Columbine thus reorients scholarly understanding of both labor organizing in the 1920s and the construction of public memory and labor history in Colorado and the United States throughout the 20th century. iii Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine: The 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike Table of Contents Introduction:…………………………………………………………........................................1-29 Chapter 1: A.S. Embree: Becoming Radical, 1877-1926…………………...…………………………….30-78 Chapter 2: A.S. Embree: IWW Leader of the 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike…………………….….79-136 Chapter 3: Josephine Roche: Maternalist Reformer, 1878-1927…………………………………..…..137-190 Chapter 4: Josephine Roche: Coal Mine Operator, 1927-1930…………………………………….…..191-231 Chapter 5: Powers Hapgood: Trying to Democratize the UMW from Within, 1899-1927…………………..…….….......232-276 Chapter 6: Powers Hapgood: The Trouble with Industrial Democracy, 1929-1935……………………….……….….….277-334 Chapter 7: Triumphalist Labor Narratives: The New Deal to the End of World War………….….......335-378 Chapter 8: The Fight, the Film, and the Fund: The Legacies of Militance in the CIO, Mine Mill, and the UMW in the Post-World War II Era…………………………………………...…..379-428 Chapter 9: New Labor History and the New Left: The Rediscovery of the IWW the Rediscovery of the IWW…………………….................429-464 Chapter 10: Colorado Coalfield Memories: Out of the Depths and Oral Histories, 1970s-1980s………………………………..…...….465-501 Epilogue: The Second Columbine Massacre and Lessons Learned, 1999-201…………..………...…502-512 Bibliography:…………………………………………………………………………...…..513-530 iv Introduction At dawn on November 21, 1927, twenty Colorado state policemen opened fire on what Denver newspapers reported were at least five hundred protestors near the Columbine coalmine fifteen miles north of Denver. One died immediately, four more died later that day, and by week’s end, a sixth man lay dead from his wounds. All were striking coal miners. At least twenty and perhaps as many as sixty more men and women were also injured that day, but we can never know for sure. After word spread that those seeking medical treatment got arrested instead, people stayed home. Over the previous two weeks, daily “parades”—a festive and highly effective form of picketing to try to keep strikebreakers from going to work—had marched through the mining town surrounding the Columbine coal mine. Paraders targeted the mine since it was the largest one still working in the northern Colorado coalfields. The rest had shut down, along with most of the mines throughout the state, since the official Industrial Workers of the World strike call had gone out in mid-October. Until that morning there had been scores of arrests, isolated violence, but no deaths. The shootings changed that, and two more deaths would follow in January. The Columbine Massacre, as it came to be called, was the turning point of the 1927-1928 Colorado coal strike. While this sequence of events might sound somewhat familiar, given the history of labor violence in the region, the strike presents several conundrums. First, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) led the strike even though most historians claim the IWW’s influence had faded in the wake of World War I. What are we to make of the IWW leading a statewide coal strike in Colorado nearly a decade later? Second, while the IWW led the strike, the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMFC), which owned the 1 Columbine, signed a contract with the United Mine Workers (UMW) six months after the strike ended. Ironically, this victory came from a strike in which it had played no role, except to denounce. This agreement appears to be one of only a handful of new contracts (as opposed to renewals), the UMW secured between its organizing peak during World War I until the beginning of the New Deal in 1933. What do the surprising actions of these unions in the Columbine case imply for our understandings of labor history in this era, typically viewed as one of relative quiescence? Third, Josephine Roche, the majority stockowner in the RMFC, initiated the UMW contract. A female mine operator was novelty enough, but an owner who invited the United Mine Workers to represent coalminers in the 1920s was unheard of. Moreover, this strike initiated Roche’s lifelong association with John L. Lewis, president of the UMW and a key labor figure of the twentieth century. How did this unlikely alliance between Roche, Lewis, and the UMW form and why did it last? We know that coalmining, Lewis, and the UMW played key roles in the dominant labor narratives from World War I through the 1960s – but this story doesn’t easily conform to our expectations of this era. In deciphering these developments, this dissertation not only aims to unravel a mystery, but also argues that the confluence of events that created Columbine shifts our understanding of labor in the 1920s and early 1930s and the origins of the New Deal. Curiously, the 1927-1928 strike has received little historical attention from labor historians, an omission even more confounding considering the substantial quantity and quality of historical scholarship that the 1910-1914 Colorado coal strike (which Colorado 2 coalminers called the long strike) has generated. 1 Many fine (and some, not so fine) historians, past and present, have written about the especially violent 1913-1914 phase of the long strike, which led to the April 20, 1914, Ludlow Massacre, when eleven children and two women suffocated in a makeshift basement dug beneath a tent that a rag-tag collection of Colorado National Guardsmen set on fire above them. Most of these 1913-1914 strike historians trace the same narrative arc. After laying out the causes and escalation of the strike, the shocking brutality of the Ludlow Massacre serves as crucial turning point. Some, especially the recent ones, cover the Ten- Day War that immediately followed Ludlow, when an enraged army of striking coalminers armed with Winchester 30-30s took to the nearby hills and waged open warfare upon their equally armed-to-the-teeth opponents. That war only stopped after President Woodrow Wilson dispatched

Load more