Tuesday, March 04,
Italians
in "The
The ANNOTICO Report
In one of thousands of
examples, Italians, as the protagonists are easily identified
as the miners who lived in a modern feudalist state.most of them
fresh off the boats, were lured to the coal fields of southern
When the immigrants, many of which spoke little or no English, arrived to claim
the "good jobs" they had been promised, they
found themselves working for a company that owned or controlled every aspect
of life in the mining camps, including medical care, law enforcement, and the
only consistent supply of food - the company-owned store. Mine workers were
paid not in cash, but in "company script" that was only
redeemable at the company store. Because the mine operators controlled
everything, they could inflate rent and food prices, and deflate wages so
that the miners couldn't make ends meet, and incurred debt just keeping food on
the table and a roof over their heads. Such a system was meant to control
and subjugate the workforce, which it did, but it also created incendiary
resentment and quite appropriate opprobrium for the mine operators.
"The Ludlow Massacre" aka
The Colorado Coal War, the miners suffered mightly.
They won the battle and the war, But, The industrial giants, led by the
Rockefeller oil mob, absorbed the loss on the backs of its former workers,
and trudged forward, continuing to trample the civil rights of the workers
and their families. And it would be decades before the United Mine Workers of
America would be fully recognized, and the system of feudal servitude known
as "the company town" lasted until the 1950's in southern
Blood Passion: The
Natural News.com
By Luke J.Terry
March 3, 2008
In history classrooms the world over, schoolchildren
learn about the important American wars, going back to the American Revolution.
It seems that one important war, that occurred on
American soil, has been largely left out of the history books. This
war took place in southern
Through concise writing and compilation of many accounts of the events of the
war, Martelle documents the deaths of how 75 men, women,
and children were killed, and dozens of buildings burn ed
or dynamited. This war, a series of intense gun battles, bombings, beatings,
assassinations, and outright murder, pitched the early labor unions against the
powerful industrial elite, or more accurately, their henchmen, the mine
operators and corrupt local law enforcement, and eventually a corrupted
Colorado National Guard.
Is the omission of this war from our history, until this book, an unfortunate
oversight of a minor historical event, or perhaps a more purposeful excision
by the ruling class of business elite? After all, history is written by
the conquerors.
Martelle, a veteran LA Times journalist, spends little ink editorializing the reasons for the omission of this war from
the annals of American history. Rather, he has poured his prodigious
storytelling ability into creating a concise and historically accurate
chronology of this fight. Using a wide array of research sources, he has
painstakingly reconstructed the events of late 1913 and early 1914, attempting
to be as unbiased and objective as his journalistic training will allow.
This war could be called the Colorado Coal War. The conflict
sprung from a potent brew of suffering, oppression, greed, and the human
need for freedom and fair treatment. It began in the abject poverty and
stark living conditions of the "mining camps" or corporate-operated
hovels owned by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, a holding of the Rockefeller
family.
Though Martelle strained to eliminate any reference to
the classical good-guy/bad-guy dic hotomy, the protagonists are easily
identified as the miners who lived in a modern feudalist state.
Thousands of mostly Italian, Greek and Mexican immigrants, with a
smattering of eastern European and Japanese, most of them fresh off the
boats, were lured to the coal fields of southern
When the immigrants, many of which spoke little or no English, arrived to claim
the "good jobs" they had been promised, they
found themselves working for a company that owned or controlled every aspect
of life in the mining camps, including medical care, law enforcement, and the
only consistent supply of food - the company-owned store. Mine workers were
paid not in cash, but in "company script" that was only
redeemable at the company store. Because the mine operators controlled
everything, they could inflate rent and food prices, and deflate wages so
that the miners couldn't make ends meet, and incurred debt just keeping food on
the table and a roof over their heads. Such a system was meant to control
and subjugate the workforce, which it did, but it also created incendiary
resentment and quite appropriate opprobrium for the mine operators.
The whole operation was industrial-strength indentured servitude -- a
term that may not m ean much to modern Americans, but
one that refers to an illegal and shameful form of slavery, banned by
our constitution, and inhumane by any standard.
At the time of these events in American history, rights that we take for
granted today, like OSHA regulations and an 8-hour workday were still a far-off
dream. The foreign-born laborers toiled for 12 to 16 hours a day, 6 days
a week in subterranean mine shafts, engulfed in carcinogenic and highly
flammable coal dust riddled with pockets of methane gas that could suffocate
miners or explode without warning. Many miners of the day were killed in massive
explosions and the resulting cave-ins. The miner's arduous and
inherently risky labors were paid not hourly but by the ton of coal each
miner extracted, a system easily cheated by mine bosses. The miners
lived in squalor, while the mines generated massive profit, creating
a pipeline of cash from the bowels of the Roc kies to
the concrete canyons of
The early labor movement was just starting to get organized to fight for safe,
humane working conditions. It would be more than 30 years before the labor
movement would be recognized. In 1913, labor organizers were underground,
literally and figuratively, because if found out, the mine operators would
eject them from the coalfields. In some cases, labor activists were taken at
gunpoint by train deep into the deserts of the southwest, or far out on the
Such conditions brewed deep unrest and resentment amongst the miners. Miners
organized and formed picket lines to protest their inhumane treatment. The
mine operators, who owned the local politicians and law enforcement, ruled with
an iron fist. The situation was a powder keg, and early in the strike, when a
local union activist was assassinated in a brawl in the streets of
The homeless miners set up in encampments of canvas tents, paid for by
the unions, in meadows and fields near the mines, where they could set up
picket lines. The miners and their families continued to suffe
r beatings and attacks at the hands of the mine guards and Baldwin-Felts
thugs.
The Italian & Greek miners, some of whom were veterans of the Balkan
wars of the late 1800's, armed themselves and struck back. The union bought
guns, lots of them, and ammunition, and imported more miners and ruffians from
other strike zones and other unions. With so many armed, angry men in southern
The war went on and on, from the fall of 1913 well into 1914 in the classic
style of mob violence caricatured in mafia movies: "You send one of our
guys to the hospital, we send one of your guys to the
morgue." The violence escalated, tit for tat, throughout the winter,
until the miners were dynamiting mines, railroad stations, and mine buildings,
while the mine operators, who had by this time co-opted the Colorado
National Guard, ha d begun strafing the miner's tent colonies with machine guns
mounted on armored cars. The war pitched back and forth until April 20,
1914, the
The murders created martyrs, and the miners struck back with vengeance.
Fueled by rage, "Remember Ludlow" became a rallying cry for the
miners, who rose up and rained down a punishing fusillade of bullets, dynamite
and violence on the mine operators and mines all across Colorado, in a zone of
destruction 225 miles long, from Longmont and Boulder, near Denver in the
Northern Rockies, all the way to Trinidad, on the southern border, and deep
into the mountains, as far west as Crested Butte.
The inspired fighting went on for 10 days, during which many mines and their
adjacent processing centers and rail access points were destroyed, causing
millions of dollars of destruction, at a time when a rifle could be purchased
for a couple of dollars, and a cup of coffee was a nickel.
The inflamed miners were pushing back hard against the Colorado National Guard.
The CNG had their hats handed to them, and were in the process of being
routed and expelled from the strike zone, when the federal government
finally stepped in. The situation was grave enough for President Woodrow Wilson
to call in the regular Army, and call back the part-timers and corrupt weekend
warriors of the CNG out of the strike zone. The
Martelle weaves the narrative with pr ecision and accuracy, gleaning details from historical
archives of local and national news, personal diaries, court proceedings and
the Congressional hearings that would follow in the months after the war.
The miners won the battle, even won the war, by any body-count method of war
calculus, because fewer miners died than their persecutors. Yet in the most
important analysis, the industrial political machine quashed the miners.
The miners were left bereft, without homes or jobs, and the unions went
unrecognized.
Yet the dead and wounded did not go down in vain, though this book doesn't
cover the long-lasting reverberations of the war, instead offering a
play-by-play recounting of the war itself. The industrial giants, led by the
Rockefeller oil mob, absorbed the loss on the backs of its former workers,
and trudged forward, continuing to trample the civil rights of the workers and
their families. It would be decades before the United Mine Workers o f
The story is a compelling look at class warfare, one that has great
importance for readers today.
Reading between the lines, we
can see this tale as an allegory, an epic that follows the money trail,
indicting the industrialists who enslaved the people with a corporate system of
industrial capitalist feudalism. It is far more than a cautionary tale. Willful
readers with their eyes wide open, recalling Halliburton and the evils of
corporate industrialism will see this book as a call to arms.
Martelle's tale of the immigrant miners who
had the spine to stand up to the industrial tycoons should be an inspiration to
us all. The miners had the backbone to go toe-to-toe with an exploitive and
inhumane industrial system. They didn't break the industrial feudalist system,
but we aren't working 16 hours and sucking down coal fumes, either, thanks
in part to them. Readers who are interested in the politics of class war will
find his book fascinating and compelling, as will readers who desire a modern
story of an uprising against capitalistic greed and inhumanity.
It's also a great local interest story for those who have connections to, or
have visited the magnificently beautiful vistas of southern Colorado, and are
interested in the landscape that is still today dotted with historic buildings
and hundreds, if not thousands of abandoned mines and the relics of the mining
era.
http://www.
naturalnews.com/z022756.html
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ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:
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