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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War John Barnhill (bio) Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. By Thomas G. Andrews. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. x+386. $29.95. At Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914, coal miners went on strike. The mine owners and the state came down hard against the strikers, and the protest erupted into violence, a mini-war of the sort common to coal mining communities. Pitched battles cost lives, and eventually the superior power of the state and the mine owners prevailed, setting back the cause of organized labor yet again. That is the traditional version of the Ludlow "massacre," familiar to any reader of labor history. Thomas Andrews approaches the confrontation from a new angle. He does not ignore the traditional focus on the conflict between union workers and the mine owners, but he takes Ludlow beyond a simple story of good working men against evil owners, thugs, and conspiratorial government forces. Andrews's broader view begins with the creation of coal in Colorado some 50 million years ago. From there he ventures into the geology of the region before shifting to a more human scale to tell of the early [End Page 257] settlement and the influence of technology on agriculture and mining in what would otherwise be an arid and marginally habitable region. He explains how the railroads not only brought coal to the nearby towns and to distant industries but also used coal as their fuel, creating the initial market. Having established a geographic and economic structure, Andrews introduces the men and women of the coal industry. They are human beings rather than types, from a wide variety of ethnicities and working the wide range of jobs involved in coal mining. He spends time with General William Jackson Palmer, the Quaker railroad entrepreneur who developed the region, and emphasizes that Palmer sought utopia and only by misfortune created the industrial environment that degraded human beings in pursuit of profit. The people who came to the mines had diverse backgrounds, some with a long tradition in mining, others with no experience at all. The work they came to was dirty and dangerous but imbued with dignity and autonomy. The workforce changed over time with shifting ethnicities encouraged by a changing business structure and a technology that downgraded mining from a craft to a mechanized inhuman industry. The owners' seeming generosity in developing company towns was in fact a method of imprisoning the miners, taking away their autonomy and locking them into dependency aboveground as the machines and unskilled labor below took the autonomy of the master miners. Andrews argues strongly that what happened at Ludlow was not a simple case of unionist dissatisfaction but rather a matter of people being tired of decades of abuse and paternalism and wanting the self-respect and autonomy they had enjoyed in the early days of the mining industry, and as they had enjoyed before they entered the mines. Killing for Coal breaks new ground in its application of environmental history to an episode that has traditionally been dealt with as labor history. Andrews also notes that he is the first to use the transcripts of the final meeting between management and miners before the dust up, a transcript in which the miners lay out their complaints, their philosophy of life as it were, and their demands to have their humanity acknowledged and respected. All this sailed unrecognized over the heads of the managers. Ludlow is Andrews's hook. His purpose is to show how human beings dealt with an evolving industry and society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When he finally addresses the violence of 1914, his treatment is more nuanced, firmly placed into a context that ties the short-term events solidly to long-term developments. Killing for Coal is a history of the impact of technology on the workscape and landscape and on the people who inhabit both. The research is solid and the writing is crisp. It is the rare work of scholarship that actually lives up to its advance billing. [End Page 258] John Barnhill John Barnhill received his Ph.D. in American...