Overview

A definitive study of the Ludlow massacre and events leading up to it. This story has much drama and struggle, and it holds some crucial lessons about industrial strife and about how viciously brutal AmericaAs capitalists were a couple of generations ago. -- Los Angeles Times -- The effect of this work is simply enraging, for the reality that the documentation evokes, both of wickedness and of the suffering that that wickedness caused, is intolerable. -- The New Yorker -- In the early 20th century, Colorado yielded more than a million tons of coal annually -- hacked and blasted out by immigrants from Eastern Europe living in crudely built towns owned by powerful mine operators. The companies owned the stores, ran the schools, churches, hospitals, and saloons, and bribed the region's lawmen to keep union organizers out. Mine safety was all but unheard-of when in 1913 mine explosions killed more than four hundred workers in just two of the mines. The United Mineworkers' Union infiltrated the towns, and thirteen thousand miners and their families made one mass exodus to establish a tent colony near the rail outpost at Ludlow. Months of fighting between the miners and company gunmen assisted by the Colorado State National Guard culminated in the Ludlow Massacre where tents were set afire, suffocating women and children who had sought shelter in storage pits beneath tent floorboards. The resultant public scandal compelled Washington to intervene, but it would take years before Colorado's coal miners gained union protection. The Great Coalfield War is a part of western history and an especially important part in view of today's declining union enrollments and the national movement to deregulate workplace safety laws and the federal agencies that enforce them. --Midwest Book Review

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9780870813818

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Reviews

A definitive study of the Ludlow massacre and events leading up to it. This story has much drama and struggle, and it holds some crucial lessons about industrial strife and about how viciously brutal America's capitalists were a couple of generations ago... -- Los Angeles Times. The effect of this work is simply enraging, for the reality that the documentation evokes, both of wickedness and of the suffering that that wickedness caused, is intolerable... -- The New Yorker. An authoritative account of one of the most classic and brutal struggles between American labor and its adversary... -- Kirkus Reviews.

A definitive study of the Ludlow massacre and events leading up to it. This story has much drama and struggle, and it holds some crucial lessons about industrial strife and about how viciously brutal America's capitalists were a couple of generations ago... -- Los Angeles Times. The effect of this work is simply enraging, for the reality that the documentation evokes, both of wickedness and of the suffering that that wickedness caused, is intolerable... -- The New Yorker. An authoritative account of one of the most classic and brutal struggles between American labor and its adversary... -- Kirkus Reviews.

Senator McGovern's Ph.D. thesis, touched up for general readability by Guttridge, is the most extensive and fair-minded treatment yet published on the savage confrontation between the Colorado coal miners and owner-barons in 1913-14 which culminated in the strike-breaking murders at Lud-low of 13 women and children during the grimmest week in the history of American labor. Not only does McGovern limn the historical conditions which prefigured the conflict but he graphically describes the specific discontents which fomented the miners' bitterness and eventual violence against the Colorado Fuel Company and its absentee-owner, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Obviously McGovern's sympathies are with the wretched miners (largely a polyglot of immigrants recruited as cheap labor from Europe) and their attempt to achieve bargaining power (the crux of the dispute), but his goal is getting at the historical truth and not the production of a labor manifesto; for example, he refutes the calumny that Rockefeller personally masterminded the strike from his New York office and therefore was directly responsible for the bloodshed - This is unsupportable, says McGovern. There is good reason to believe (see Anson's McGovern, p. 163) that George McGovern's research into the Colorado Coalfield War had an enormous impact on the development of his political sensibilities and for this reason his dissertation takes on added interest. But in the main it will be read by labor historians as an authoritative account of one of the most classic and most brutal struggles between American labor and its adversary. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

George S McGovern, former US senator from South Dakota, was the Democratic party candidate in the 1972 presidential election. Leonard F Guttridge is a writer whose most recent work has specialised in US naval history.

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