American History Made Me Cry: New Yorker book Review: There Was Blood

[Omaha Steve]

Marta handed me the review right after I got home from work this afternoon. TWO DU members that I know of had relatives that were a part of this page in US history.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/01/19/090119crbo_books_crain

The Ludlow massacre revisited.
by Caleb Crain

January 19, 2009


Armed miners at the military headquarters of the United Mine Workers, in Trinidad, Colorado, the month of the Ludlow massacre.

In the spring of 1914, members of the Colorado National Guard machine-gunned and set fire to tents in Ludlow, Colorado, where striking miners were living with their families. Five miners, two miners’ wives, and twelve children died, most of them by suffocation while hiding in a cellar under a burning tent. The miners fought back, and, all told, more than seventy-five people were killed in the course of the dispute, roughly as many on the mine owners’ side as on the strikers’. In his new book, “Killing for Coal” (Harvard; $29.95), Thomas G. Andrews calls it the deadliest labor struggle in American history.

The earliest histories of the massacre were sponsored by unions, and historians since have followed their lead in seeing it as an episode in the long conflict between capital and labor. “The Bloodstained Lesson” was the title of the final chapter of George S. McGovern’s solid and thoughtful account, co-written with Leonard F. Guttridge and released in 1972, during McGovern’s Presidential campaign. In 1982, Zeese Papanikolas memorialized the story of Louis Tikas, a Greek-American union leader killed at Ludlow, in a rhapsodic telling intended as a corrective to the tendency of biographies to focus on public figures. In 2007, in a lively journalistic account, “Blood Passion” (Rutgers; $19.95), Scott Martelle called the strikers “freedom fighters” and said that they “helped crumble an egregious system of political corruption.”

Andrews’s innovation is to wonder whether “energy systems” might provide a better explanation than ideology. He therefore takes a long view of the story—so long that he goes back to the Cretaceous to explain the formation of coal. Andrews’s account—less moral and more mineral than the standard one—runs something like this: Ancient sun-energy is stored beneath the earth. Because industrial capitalism wants it, the force exerted to draw it out of the ground is high, and, because there is an abundance of unskilled workers, the counterforce that miners are able to apply in their own defense is low. Or so the capitalists calculate from the laws of supply and demand. But it turns out that there is another force to reckon with: the miners’ go-for-broke willingness to fight. The capitalists expect a smooth hoovering up of hydrocarbons and workers’ rights, but instead violence explodes. People discover, to their dismay, that the desire to exploit an energy resource as cheaply as possible can lead to something like war.

About seventy million years ago, when the Rocky Mountains were still rising out of the sea, coastal swamps covered much of present-day southern Colorado. Ferns and cycads budded, died, and rotted, adding another inch of peat to the swamp floor every forty years or so, until, after a few eons, the peat in some places was hundreds of feet deep. The peat was buried under sediment, and then for millennia it was dried, squeezed, and cooked underground. At last it became coal, dark and flammable. Twists in the earth shoved some of it back to the surface, and, in 1867, these outcroppings attracted the attention of a survey team planning the route of the Kansas-Pacific Railroad, led by a man named William Jackson Palmer.

FULL 5 page review at link. THANK YOU New Yorker for the things you print!

[leftstreet]

1. K&R

[anonymous171]

2. K&R. nt

[Mike 03]

3. OMG. Thank you. I never heard of this, but everyone should know about it.

I'm going to see if I can get this book, "Killing for Coal," on Amazon, or some of these other accounts.

My God. The older I get, the more shocked I am at how little I know about our history.

Thanks for posting this.

[Omaha Steve]

4. America's ONLY unionized online bookstore Powells has it

http://www.powells.com/biblio/71-9780674031012-0

[Mike 03]

7. Thanks, I didn't know Powells was unionized! I love that bookstore!

Thanks!!!!!!!!!

I will start ordering from them from now on.

[Mike 03]

8. Omaha, can I post this information? I bet most book lovers here had no clue

that Powells was our only unionized bookstore. This is important!

[Omaha Steve]

9. Sure

Please go telling the secret.

[dalaigh lllama]

5. I first heard about this two years ago

when I saw a documentary on Mother Jones -- I hadn't even known she was a real person. Never heard about any of it in history classes. Lot of our history never makes it into the history books.

[lumberjack_jeff]

6. No, it *was* a chapter in the conflict between capital and labor.

"Energy systems" is the techie lens through which we see the world today. Take it from a grandson of a Molly McGuire who today lives in the neighborhood of the Centralia massacre. It's about the big struggle toward which we are now completely tone-deaf.

[Chulanowa]

10. I just learned of this yesterday, reading Howard Zinn

I remember some years ago, I was working at "the smoker" - Tillamook Country Beef Jerky's factory in Bay City, OR. It was easily the most dangerous place I've worked - pressure washers in the hands of idiots, caustic chemicals flying around, and malfunctioning equipment, and the floor manager was prone to screaming in fits of rage.

There was no union. I asked a few people about this. The general response was "We don't need a fucking union!" People were promised benefits - and to be honest, it was a nice benefit package... And people were prone to getting fired just before their benefits came to fruit. It's the main source of local employment, so, invariably most people would seek a rehire... and have to start over again. The only thing missing was paying us in scrip for the company store (which did happen to be the most conveniant place to buy stuff in Bay City)

"We don't need a fucking union!" - It's a sentiment I've heard an awful lot. And what it always reminds me of is when I was in school, and the black kids would make fun of Rosa Parks, or laugh at videos of the dogs tearing up the marchers in Selma. Men and women fought and died for labor rights. They were fucking MURDERED for the right to have a safe wage and not be ruled like serfs in tzarist Russia. You can go to their graves, and there they are, people who bled and were buried so we can have what we have.... And people are willing to just blow it off, laugh it away, forget all about it, treat it as a joke.

[Hannah Bell]

11. "Andrews’s innovation is to wonder whether energy systems might provide a better explanation than

ideology"

"Andrews’s innovation" is the same old same old" - anything but class conflict.

I suppose "energy systems" explain the global slave trade too.

I'm surprised so many people never heard of the Ludlow massacre.

When I was in HS, a short overview of labor history with the highlights (or lowlights?) - Haymarket, etc. - was part of the Wa state curriculum.