Review by Allen Best
Ludlow – October 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West
by Scott Martelle
Published in 2007 by Rutgers University Press
ISBN 978-0-8135-4062-7
IF KNOWN AT ALL, Colorado’s violent struggles between laborers and capitalists of a century ago are likely to be remembered simplistically. There was the bloodshed at Cripple Creek in 1903 and, about the same time, at Telluride, where a mine superintendent was shot and also where strike-breaking miners, commonly called scabs, were forced at gunpoint by strikers to march over 13,114-foot Imogene Pass on a cold October night.
Then, in April 1914, there was the Ludlow Massacre in the southern coalfields in the Walsenburg-Trinidad area. There, 13 women, children, and a baby who were huddled in a pit below a tent died of smoke inhalation resulting from a fire set by militia from the Colorado National Guard.
You may know that John D. Rockefeller owned the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co., which operated many of these coal mines, and that many of the striking miners were immigrants, particularly from Greece and Italy. But if you know the story at all, it’s probably as a ardently rendered morality tale.
In Blood Passion, journalist Scott Martelle has reexamined the strike called by the United Mine Workers of America in 1913 and 1914. His stated goal in peeling back time to look at Ludlow and the southern Colorado coalfields was to “come up with something close to an objective rendering of events, as well as to draw fresh attention to a forgotten moment in American history that sharply defines some of the conflicting perceptions of what it means to be an American.”
MARTELLE LARGELY SUCCEEDS with his mission. While there’s no doubt that his sympathies lie with the miners, his review of the facts dismisses the “romantic myth of the resilience of the union men and women in the face of oppression” that has pervaded previous accounts. Simple, coldly-calculated arithmetic tells why. Of the 75 deaths that he could confirm during the 18 months of skirmishes, 33 were of strikers or their families, 5 were essentially innocent bystanders, and 37 were strikebreakers, mine guards, National Guard soldiers or others targeted by the miners. The striking miners were effective guerrillas. “They might have been victims of an oppressive political and economic system,” says Martelle, “but they did not suffer their grievances meekly, and proved to be quite deadly.”
He even rejects the use of “massacre” as a product of the spin in which both sides engaged. There was no evidence of intentionality, only criminal negligence. And Union propagandists ignored the execution of three strikers , which Martelle implies was because the death of men did not resonate so disturbingly as that of women and children.
The bulk of Martelle’s book is a carefully researched recounting of the eighteen months of clashes that happened before President Woodrow Wilson was finally persuaded to dispatch federal troops to restore order. The locations of these murders ranged afield to Cañon City, and even Oak Creek, located near Steamboat Springs, with lesser violence reported in Crested Butte and in coal-mining towns in what are now the suburbs of Boulder.
Blow-by-blow accounts have value -and danger. At times, Martelle’s narrative borders on the tedious. It’s like being at an airport, and trying to keep track of all the passing faces. This story was not relentlessly simplified by Martelle, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, but some may wish the author had been less conscientious. On the other hand, this busy canvas allows readers to choose their own conclusions.
Salient is the violence of working people committed against working people, with ethnicity seeming to play no discernible role. Ugliness is always pervasive in times of war, but what caused this degree of ugliness to flourish is difficult to ascertain. Here, Martelle offers facts but -aside from his strongly argued introduction and epilogue -generally leaves the conclusion to readers.
SOME EVIDENCE POINTS toward the failure of local institutions. Several local newspapers were in cahoots with the mine owners, and even the Denver papers could be persuaded to pull punches. Also in criminal cahoots was the sheriff of Huerfano County, where Walsenburg is located. That sheriff, Jefferson B. Farr, had long been lining his own pockets in a classic case of elections rigged in complicity with the mine operators.
A congressional subcommittee who came to Colorado amid the strike came down hard on Rockefeller and the other mine operators. “The statement that a man or company of men who put their money in a business have a right to operate it as they see fit, without regard to the public interest, belongs to days long since passed away,” concluded the congressmen.
The strike was inspired by disputes over whether the mine owners would acknowledge the legitimacy of the union, and secondarily, over benefits, such as an eight-hour workday. Martelle also suggests that mine safety was an underlying issue, because union mines had far fewer injuries and deaths than non-union mines.
That the mine owners refused any legitimacy to the union infuriated the miners. This ultimately arrogant position was enabled by an indecisive governor, Elias Ammons, and actively abetted by a national guard, which Martelle makes clear was a tool for the mine operators. The guard was also without discipline; so at Ludlow, the soldiers became a mob.
IN MANY CASES, more background information would have been valuable. Consider the case of John Chase, an ophthalmologist from Denver who was adjunct general of the national guard. His anti-union bias was abundantly clear in Martelle’s account, but I think Martelle could have sketched the picture more fully. After all, this is the same individual who, after snowslides killed scores of miners in the San Juans in 1903, declared that the snowslides were God’s retribution for how the Telluride miners had treated strike-breakers.
The book also falls short in delivering on its ambitious subtitle about “class war.” In his introduction, Martelle speaks to the point with wonderful prose: “The striking coal miners, whatever crimes they might have committed, were fighting for their lives and livelihoods in a tableau established by the mine operators, and against an overwhelming system of corporate feudalisms in which the U.S. Constitution was trumped by greed and prejudice.”
The author also succeeds in documenting how the supposedly impartial Colorado National Guard ignored Constitutional liberties at every turn, creating a de facto state of martial law. But he delivers no clear picture of how the coal-miners lived and only passingly presents evidence of their subjugation. Perhaps all this has been done adequately elsewhere, but this book needed a chapter or three, or at least some strong passages, to justify this tantalizing title.
Martelle is more satisfying, and intriguing, when he distills the story of 1913 and 1914 to a “battle between two conflicting ideals of America: as a place where the ambitious could build an empire, and as a place where an individual could control his own destiny.” He suggests that understanding that past is of value now: as immigrants once again flood the country, and the gap between rich and poor widens, and we continue to debate what constitutes economic justice and the American dream.
