Tag Archives: Mother Jones

Colo. Springs police disperse March 26 anti-imperialism rally because it was easier than listening to socialists

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Colorado Springs Socialists
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO- Local socialists assembled at City Hall on Sunday to “March Against Imperialism”. After a brief march and an half-hour rally while encircled by CSPD, the socialists were informed they were “free to carry on with their assembly” but whoever lingered would be issued a citation for having been in the street. Making no distinction for who had and who hadn’t, the police began handcuffing participants and the couple dozen others quickly dispersed. Five socialists were issued citations for “pedestrian in the highway” and “failure to disperse” while another was arrested and detained for failing to show an ID while filming the police. That person was taken to the downtown police station and held until officers finally informed her of the charges for which she was being cited, after which she identified herself. Throughout her detainment, multiple officers kept up a harassment of questions, refusing her requests that she contact her lawyer. CSPD never issued an order to disperse, a fact that is borne out by witness video. But in effect that is what the officers accomplished. They threatened the legal assembly with citations, for failure to disperse!

CSPD cruiser gunboat diplomacy

It made a funny scene. Around thirty self-declared socialists, blockaded by eight sometimes more CSPD cruisers, in a standoff that lasted until the police lost their patience. Socialists spoke against imperialism, the police officers being their main audience that quiet Sunday downtown. Immediately as the march had ended the police had announced that anyone stepping back into the street would be arrested, and so no one did. But a half-hour of speeches proved too much for the officers to bear and so they interjected again, this time to discuss the problem they had with what had happened earlier. We told those officers they were of course free to discuss such matters individually with whoever they considered a person of interest, BUT AFTERWARD, because they were otherwise interrupting our legal assembly. But the officers persisted in their interruption, deciding after the fact what charges to bring, regardless that they’d forgotten to provide the evidence to back them up. “See you in court” they laughed! We’ve heard that before.

On a serious note. What happened Sunday could have a chilling effect on the nascent kick-ass Colorado Springs Socialists. Unwarranted police attention is an unhappy tradition for socialist organizers, from anarchists to trade unions. Sunday’s denouement confirms all their parents’ worst worries, the folly of declaring yourself to be a socialist in a regressive backwater like Colorado Springs. People were arrested? Handcuffed?! Now you’re on a police watch list! I remember my father’s alarm when he learned his college sophmore had a subscription to Mother Jones Magazine.

Fun as it was, Sunday’s event was essentially uneventful: no altercations, no property damage, not even rhetoric to threaten infrastructure. Minus any media attention, or much of an audience at all on a sleepy Sunday evening, these socialists were determined to parade their dissent where and how those around could see, and reaped more law enforcement than the circumstances required.

While you might say the outcome was predictable, it needn’t have been. Students from the wealthier Colorado College have free range on downtown streets, protesting racism or election outcomes on the street without arrests or citations. Every full moon CC students ride the length of downtown’s main street on bike, skate or skateboard, without even police escort. Sunday’s fledgeling socialist organization is a student club of the UCCS campus. UCCS is more working class, for many a commuter campus, and obviously isn’t shown any deference by city administrators.

Compared to the liberal arts curriculum of Colorado College. UCCS is considered more conservative. UCCS hosts business and military related classes. It even has a Brazil-esque Department of Homeland Security -um- Department. So I think it’s all the more admirable that UCCS has spawned a bonafide socialist group that dwarfs even their school’s Young Republican franchise. I’ve no doubt those socialists I met on Sunday will not be cowed by CSPD’s preemptive aggressions. Hopefully their more timid members will take heart.

Public protests are regularly given use of the streets, which like parks are considered traditional free speech zones. The Tea Party and Occupy took to the streets of Colorado Springs without incurring arrests. More recently people have marched for Black Lives Matter and for solidarity with Native Americans fighting oil pipelines. These have produced zero arrests.

In the meantime it will be important to debrief on what happened and unify the legal strategies. All defendants face the traffic offense of being a pedestrian on the highway [sic] and the misdemeanor of failure to disperse, no doubt tacked on to be a droppable charge as fodder for plea bargains. The recalcitrant videographer faces an added charge of misdemeanor interference for failing to produce her ID. They give her no extra credit for providing a pretext for interrogation because she wouldn’t say zilch without a lawyer present, except to explain where and when they were violating her rights. It used to be that cops had to read us our rights.

Police can issue all the tickets they want when there’s probable cause. They can’t threaten to issue tickets for the solitary purpose of disbanding a legal assembly. In the end, the only socialists who got citations were punished not for being in the street but for standing their ground in front of City Hall.

Pueblo museum excises Mine Workers Union from Ludlow Massacre exhibit!

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PUEBLO, COLORADO- 2014 marks one hundred years since the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. A variety of commemorations are planned before the formal anniversary on April 20. I attended one such event on Wednesday, a lecture by a CSU professor to footnote the “Children of Ludlow” exhibit at El Pueblo History Museum. I’m always excitied when attention is paid to Ludlow, a subject regularly left out of American schoolbooks, but I was disappointed to find key elements of labor history excised from the museum’s narrative. Literally. The United Mine Workers of America, the organization central to the strike, which supplied the tent city, and which even today maintains the memorial site, was mentioned only once, IN FINE PRINT! The Ludlow miners voted to strike because the mining companies refused to recognize the UMWA. Unmentioned. The horrors of the atrocity were not tempered, in their explicitness perhaps we think them enough, but there was also the apologist suggestion that some culpability belonged to the miners. I questioned one curator who admitted they were at pains to keep the story “balanced” and that the squeakiest wheel thus far has been the National Guard. Apparently the Guard is offended that its role will be misconstrued. What balance do they want, I wondered. Had they lost children in the “battlezone” too?

Children are at the heart of commemorating Ludlow and at the heart of this preversion of the massacre’s memory. Were they recklessly endangered by their parents and union organizers? Were they dragged into a battlezone? The museum seems to suggest as much, highlighting the beligerence of the miners, mischaracterizing the soldiers, and leaving the union actions largely unexplained.

First I’d like to declare how I tire of the objective irrelevance which results when academics seek the approval of government technocrats. I am also disturbed by educators who pretend blindness to subtle inferences which shape a political takeaway. To them, “remembering” Ludlow seems sufficient in itself. I can hardly see the point to remembering Ludlow unless we have discerned its lessons. Until we are remembering the LESSONS OF LUDLOW, our educators’ self-proclaimed raison d’etre will be self-fulfilling: “history will repeat itself.” This Pueblo exhibit suggests no lesson other than the exploitation of tragedy, and leaves me fearful about the Ludlow commemorations to follow. The anti-union, pro-military climate which prevails these hundred years since the massacre will make for a travesty of a remembrance unless someone with a worker’s perspective speaks up.

NOT BROUGHT TO YOU BY…
Let’s start with this exhibit, which alas has already escaped critique since September. Its full title, as evidenced in the photo above: “Black Hills Energy presents: Children of Ludlow, Life in a Battlezone, 1913-1914.”

I’ll bet curators thought it a measure of truth and reconciliation that the Ludlow presentation was sponsored by a local extraction industry business. Black Hills Energy trades not in coal but natural gas. In fact they’re among the frackers tearing up Southeastern Colorado. I think the irony more likely suggests how the UMWA’s starring role was left on the cutting room floor. There are generic mentions of “the union”, as at right, keeping a ledger of which families were assigned tents, but only in the fine print is the UMWA named as owning the ledger.

BATTLEZONES
More troubling is the skewed framing of the museum’s narrative. It begins with the subtitle, “life in a battlezone.” That’s taking a rather curious liberty don’t you think? The event we accept now as “Ludlow” became a battlezone on April 20, and the regional Coal Field War which followed was a battlezone to which both revenge-seekers and militia thronged, but the tent colonies in which 12,000 lived, 9,000 of whom were the children of the title role, were camps full of families. That they were straffed regularly by the guards makes them shooting galleries not battlegrounds.

Calling Ludlow a battlezone is like calling Sand Creek a “collision” or calling the Middle East a “conflict”. All of these mask the role of the aggressor.

I will credit the curators for offering a candid detail of horrific import. In a description of the day before the massacre, when the Greeks among the immigrants were celebrating Greek Easter, mention is made of the mounted National Guards offered this taunt: “You enjoy your roast today; we will have ours tomorrow.” No one should deny today that the events of April 20, which culminated in the torching of the tents and asphyxiation of women and children, was a premeditated act.

THE CHILDREN
Should the miners have put their children in harm’s way by defying the mining companies? How could they not? As immigrants they didn’t have nearby relatives to foster their children away from the random bullets. Also left unsaid by the display: many of the children had already been working in the mines and counted among those on strike. This was before child labor reforms.

Curiously, the exhibit did include a famous photograph of the notorious activist Mother Jones leading a childrens’ march through Trinidad. The caption explained that Jones “wasn’t above using real children to advance the cause of Colorado’s coal miners.” Emphasis mine. While technically true in a modern context, it’s probably disingenuous to imply someone is using the children when a key issue of the demonstration is CHILD LABOR.

No really. Mother Jones was leading a march of children, many of them workers of the mines, for the reform of labor practices which abused children. This and subsequent campaigns eventually led to child labor laws. Is saying “Mother Jones wasn’t above using children” in any way an accurate characterization?

Compounding the inference that the Children of Ludlow were jeopardized for the cause, was the implication that the miners were combatants who contributed to the battlezone. As the displays progressed in chronological order, the first weapon on display was a rifle used by the miners. Immediately behind it was an enlarged photograph vividly depicting miners posed with two identical specimens.

Moving along the exhibit chronologically, anticipating the rising violence, the museum goers is apparently supposed to register that the strikers were firing too, if not first. Recent historical accounts have deliberated about who fired first. I think the motive is suspiciously revisionist in view of today’s dogma of nonviolence absolutism: if your protest devolves into violence, you deserve every bit of the beating you get.

Whenever it was that the miners began firing, the single militia and three guard casualties were not recorded until after the massacre took place, belying the narrative that the miners invited the massacre. Witnesses conflict about when the three union leaders were executed. I’ll give the museum credit for defying the National Guard in summarizing that among the casualties, three of the miners were “executed”.

PARITY OF WEAPONS
Students of the Ludlow accounts know that many of the miners were better riflemen than the soldiers. Many were immigrants who’d served in Bulkan wars and outmatched Colorado’s green guardsmen. That is not to suggest that the miners and their harrassers were equally armed, yet…

The only other weapon on display is a rifle of vintage used by the national guard. It shares a case with a uniform and sabre, lending it official authority. Also, the rifle is not presented as having been used at Ludlow, so it doesn’t project an aura of culpability. Missing is the machine gun depicted in the photograph of the machine gun nest which fired down upon the camp. It’s depicted with a caption about the Guard being a welcome presence. Missing too is the armored car dubbed the “Death Special”. Obviously the armor protected its operators from being hit by striking-miner bullets as it drove through the canvas encampment, straffing the tents with its mounted machine gun.

HUMANIZING THE PERP
Right after the photo of armed miners was the display at right, with a very contrived bit of spin catering to today’s military families. Although the photo shows soldiers actively aiming their gun at the camp, the caption assures us that the “Ludlow families feel relief with the arrival of National Guard”. This supposition is based on the fact that when the soldiers first arrived they were serenaded with the “Battle Cry of Freedom” and greeted with American flags. Most of the miners being immigrants, they were eager to show their patriotism, but the conclusion drawn here is a terrible mendacity. The miners and union organizers knew full well the purpose of the National Guard. They knew the strikebreaking role it played in famous strikes of the past. The miners feted the soldiers hoping to sway them from their eventual task. Protesters of all eras hold out this hope every time they face riot police.

A following paragraph suggested that by the time the massacre was committed, most of the soldiers had been mustered out and replaced with militia members and company guards. This is slight of hand. After the official inquiry, which was prompted by the public outcry, twenty National Guard soldiers were court martialed. All were acquitted. Is the Guard wanting us to believe they were acquitted because they weren’t there?

This attempt to put a friendly face on the National Guard, coupled with an abdication of effort to give the union its due, seems engineered to appeal to the average Pueblan of today, many probably related to an active-duty soldier and long since indoctrinated against evil unions. When I asked the lecturer about the omission of the UMWA, she prefaced her answer for the audience, explaining that unions of old were not like those despised today. I told her I thought failing to describe the hows and whys of the strike was a real teaching opportunity missed.

HISTORY COLORADO
It’s probably important to point out that the Ludlow presentation at the History Museum was developed with the assistance of History Colorado, which finally shuttered a contested display: a Sand Creek Massacre exhibit with a similar flavor of whitewash. Like labeling Ludlow a battlezone, History Colorado tried to typify Sand Creek as a “collision.”

Also typical of History Colorado is the propensity to address their exhibits to children. Programming for school bus visits invariably dumbs down what can be presented and I hardly think the compromise is worth it. If children ran the world, maybe Disney versions of history would suffice.

I’d like to have seen it highlighted that the Ludlow miners were mainly immigrants who were looked down upon by the residents of Colorado. If the museum audience were the “Children of Ludlow” in the extended sense, as a few descendants probably were, more of us were the children of the soldiers of Ludlow, or the citizens who cheered them on, or joined the militia or built the armored car at Rockefeller’s Pueblo factory. If we’re going to remember Ludlow, we ought to remember our role in it so we don’t do that again. It’s easy to pretend we were the martyrs. In all probability that’s who we will be if the lessons of Ludlow are discarded.

Mother Jones was not a Democrat!

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Mother Jones Magazine sent me an email the other morning, subject: “BREAKING”, first line: “URGENT” so I opened it wondering if it was possibly about more than asking for money, how silly of me. Apparently, Stephen Colbert’s sister stands a chance to beat Republican Sanford in a senate race somewhere, as if that mattered to Mother Jones! Has a Democrat yet delivered anything to cheer about? Like President Obama, they are worse than Republicans because we pretend they are kinder gentler rapists and they’re not even that, they’re doublespeaking rapists whispering sweet nothings, this latest has the last name “Busch.”

Sin las mujeres, no hay revolución

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Without women there is no revolution
Camila Vallejo, Cindy Sheehan, Medea Benjamin, Ann Wright, Cynthia McKinney, Kathy Kelly, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, Bernardine Dorhn …an exhaustive list of the dominance of women among activist leaders would go on and on, back to earlier waves of influential organizers, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, Hellen Keller, Emma Goldman, Harriet Tubman, Louise Michel.

Now MoJo throws Apple critic Mike Daisey under the bus in their exposé of Walmart Chinese shadow factories

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Ft Carson Sustainability Enforcement Officer, private contractor, witness protection programMother Jones is next to discredit Playwright Mike Daisey for his dramatization of Apple’s supply line abuses in China, right in the byline of Andy Kroll’s piece on Walmart’s shadow factory system in China, which they call their, haha, “fiction-free investigation”. THEN THEY FALL FOR A GREEN INDUSTRY-STRENGTH CLEANER! MoJo asks: Are Walmart’s Chinese Factories as Bad as Apple’s? and never really answers. Instead it’s a behind the greenwash exposé, and what else is new. AND Kroll falls for a Walmart PR contractor who adversaries of sustainability hacks recognize as the archetypal intelligence fiend, the federal witness protection program hair club for men, biker, treehugger alias. This time in the persona of “Terry Foecke (pronounced FAKE-ee), a consultant spearheading Walmart’s factory energy efficiency program in China. In a lobby full of Westerners, Foecke cut an unmistakable figure—thickly bearded, 6-foot-3, with a broad belly and hip square-framed glasses. He was an unlikely Walmart ally: a soft-spoken, almost professorial progressive who quoted George Bernard Shaw and told me he spoke out against runaway consumerism at his Unitarian church back home in Minnesota.” Um, yeah Andy. Fake-ee.

Cindy, Lockerbie, recruiters, organ theft

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Four great reads: AntiWar.com’s John Walsh describes Cindy Sheehan’s reception at Martha’s Vineyard: Barack Obama to Cindy Sheehan: get lost. John Pilger decodes the indignation about Scotland’s release of a terrorist: Lockerbie: Megrahi was framed. Mother Jones’ David Goodman details the military recruitment of American school kids: A Few Good Kids. An interesting inquiry into Professor Yehuda Hiss and Palestinian organ theft: The autopsy surgeon Aftonbladet forgot.

Mother Jones at Denver Capitol steps

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Mary Harris Jones in Denver
In this photograph from her autobiography, Mother Jones leads a labor protest march in the heavy snow of the winter of 1914, past the courthouse, across Civic Center Park, around the Civil War Memorial, and unto the steps of the state capitol.

2008 rally at Democratic National Convention
August 2008: the press assembles for the first rally to protest the Democratic National Convention.

Mother Jones and the children of Ludlow

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Mary Harris Jones and the children of miners 1914
APRIL 20 MARKS THE 95TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LUDLOW MASSACRE.
From her 1925 autobiography, Mother Jones wrote about the UMWA strike in Ludlow Colorado, over the harsh winter of 1914.

From Chapter 21:

No one listened. No one cared. The tickers in the offices of 26 Broadway sounded louder than the sobs of women and children. Men in the steam heated luxury of Broadway offices could not feel the stinging cold of Colorado hill-sides where families lived in tents.

Then came Ludlow and the nation heard. Little children roasted alive make a front page story. Dying by inches of starvation and exposure does not.

On the 19th of April, 1914, machine guns, used on the strikers in the Paint Creek strike, were placed in position above the tent colony of Ludlow. Major Pat Hamrock and Lieutenant K. E. Linderfelt were in charge of the militia, the majority of whom were, company gun-men sworn in as soldiers.

Early in the morning soldiers approached the colony with a demand from headquarters that Louis Tikas, leader of the Greeks, surrender two Italians. Tikas demanded a warrant for their arrest. They had none. Tikas refused to surrender them. The soldiers returned to quarters. A signal bomb was fired. Then another. Immediately the machine guns began spraying the flimsy tent colony, the only home the wretched families of the miners had, riddling it with bullets. Like iron rain, bullets’ upon men, women and children.

The women and children fled to the hills. Others tarried. The men defended their home with their guns. All day long the firing continued. Men fell dead, their faces to the ground. Women dropped. The little Snyder boy was shot through the head, trying to save his kitten. A child carrying water to his dying mother was killed.

By five o’clock in the afternoon, the miners had no more food, nor water, nor ammunition. They had to retreat with their wives and little ones into the hills. Louis Tikas was riddled with shots while he tried to lead women and children to safety. They perished with him.

Night came. A raw wind blew down the canyons where men, women and children shivered and wept. Then a blaze lighted the sky. The soldiers, drunk with blood and with the liquor they had looted from the saloon, set fire to the tents of Ludlow with oil-soaked torches. The tents, all the poor furnishings, the clothes and bedding of the miners’ families burned. Coils of barbed wire were stuffed into the well, the miners’ only water supply.

After it was over, the wretched people crept back to bury their dead. In a dugout under a burned tent, the charred bodies of eleven little children and two women were found-unrecognizable. Everything lay in ruins. The wires of bed springs writhed on the ground as if they, too, had tried to flee the horror. Oil and fire and guns had robbed men and women and children of their homes and slaughtered tiny babies and defenseless women. Done by order of Lieutenant Linderfelt, a savage, brutal executor of the will of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The strikers issued a general call to arms: Every able bodied man must shoulder a gun to protect himself and his family from assassins, from arson and plunder. From jungle days to our own so-named civilization, this is a man’s inherent right. To a man they armed, through-out the whole strike district. Ludlow went on burning in their hearts.

Everybody got busy. A delegation from Ludlow went to see President Wilson. Among them was Mrs. Petrucci whose three tiny babies were crisped to death in the black hole of Ludlow. She had something to say to her President.

Immediately he sent the United States cavalry to quell the gunmen. He studied the situation, and drew up proposals for a three-year truce, binding miner and operator. The operators scornfully refused.

A mass meeting was called in Denver. Lindsay spoke. He demanded that the operators be made to respect the laws of Colorado. That something be done immediately. The Denver Real Estate Exchange appointed a committee to spit on Judge Lindsey for his espousal of the cause of the miners.

Rockefeller got busy. Writers were hired to write pamphlets which were sent broadcast to every editor in the country, bulletins. In these leaflets, it was shown how perfectly happy was the life of the miner until the agitators came; how joyous he was with the company’s saloon,. the company’s pigstys for homes, the cornpany’s teachers and preachers and coroners. How the miners hated the state law of an eight-hour working day, begging to be allowed to work ten, twelve. How they hated the state law that they should have their own check weigh-man to see that they were not cheated at the tipple.

And all the while the mothers of the children who died in Ludlow were mourning their dead.

A Colorado coal mining family

Mother Jones: You Don’t Need a Vote

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Mary Harris Jones portrait from her 1925 autobiographyAfter the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the later capitulation of the UMWA union, Mother Jones, by now 85 years old, toured the US to spread the word about what happened. She wrote in her autobiography, about a meeting in Kansas City: “I told the great audience that packed the hall that when their coal glowed red in their fires, it was the blood of the workers, of men who went down into black holes to dig it, of women who suffered and endured, of little children who had but a brief childhood. ‘You are being warmed and made comfortable with human blood’ I said. … ‘The miners lost,’ I told them, because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win.'”

From The Autobiography of Mother Jones, Chapter 22:
YOU DON’T NEED A VOTE TO RAISE HELL.

Five hundred women got up a dinner and asked me to speak. Most of the women were crazy about women suffrage. They thought that Kingdom-come would follow the enfranchisement of women.

“You must stand for free speech in the streets,” I told them.

“How can we,” piped a woman, “when we haven’t a vote?”

“I have never had a vote,” said I, “and I have raised hell all over this country! You don’t need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!”

Some one meowed, “You’re an anti!”

“I am not an anti to anything which will bring freedom to my class,” said I. “But I am going to be honest with you sincere women who are working for votes for women. The women of Colorado have had the vote for two generations and the working men and women are in slavery. The state is in slavery, vassal to the Colorado Iron and Fuel Company and its subsidiary interests. A man who was present at a meeting of mine owners told me that when the trouble started in the mines, one operator proposed that women be disfranchised because here and there some woman had raised her voice in behalf of the miners. Another operator jumped to his feet and shouted, ‘For God’s sake! What are you talking about! If it had not been for the women’s vote the miners would have beaten us long ago!'”

Some of the women gasped with horror. One or two left the room. I told the women I did not believe in women’s rights nor in men’s rights but in human rights. “No matter what your fight,” I said, “don’t be ladylike! God Almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies. I have just fought through sixteen months of bitter warfare in Colorado. I have been up against armed mercenaries but this old woman, without a vote, and with nothing but a hatpin has scared them.

“Organized labor should organize its women along industrial lines. Politics is only the servant of industry. The plutocrats have organized their women. They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity.”

Ludlow Massacre or unhappy incident?

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Ludlow Tent Colony 1914
COLORADO COLLEGE- CC is holding a symposium on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. Actually, it’s only called the Ludlow Symposium. True to Colorado Springs form, several among the audience want to call it an “incidence,” instead of a “massacre.” One of the participants, author Scott Martelle, is willing to oblige, explaining that if the militia hadn’t known that women and children were taking shelter beneath the tents which they were putting to the torch, then the soldiers were guilty only of criminally negligent homicide.

(*Note 4/12/09: this article has been revised in light of helpful comments offered by symposium participants. Also: Differences of opinion aside, I am remiss if I do not praise the scholars who were very generous with their time and encyclopedic memories to enrich this symposium.
1. CC’s own Professor David Mason authored an evocative narrative of lives caught up in the 1914 events, written in verse, entitled Ludlow.
2. Journalist Scott Thomas researched the most recent definitive account to date, the 2007 Blood Passion: the Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West.
3. Thomas Andrews, Associate Professor at CU Denver, enlarged the context in 2008 with his award winning Killing For Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War.
4. Zeese Papanikolas represented his authorative Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre, written in 1984.)

Does it matter what it’s called, or with what certainty? The symposium is filled with public school system educators looking for an angle with which to approach Ludlow with their kids. One of them expresses her doubt about teaching about Mother Jones, having just heard from the panelists a probably too-nuanced assessment of the labor hero’s tactics. The political climate of our age can’t find any purchase with moral nuance.

I’m stuck thinking that in recording social history, scholars cannot avoid writing the victor’s narrative. In particular as regards the history of labor, because neither academics nor even middle class hobbyists in the symposium’s audience can look at the events from the perspective of the working class.

Even the scholar’s objectivity is middle class. The opinion was expressed by the panel that the Ludlow aftermath was one of the few occasions when the story was spun to the benefit of labor interests. But this does not account for why authors and educators find themselves having to resurrect the tale of Ludlow these many years later. When it occurred, Americans may have swallowed the hyperbole, but since that time they’ve internalized its internment, effaced by a corporate culture so as to have disappeared from even our school textbooks.

I think this may have been something of the question posed by symposium organizer Jaime Stevensen to the panel, when she asked how the authors insulated themselves from the fictions woven into their own perspectives of history. She didn’t get any takers.

The very concept that history adds up to only so much trivial pursuit, is inherently a view from the ivory tower. BLOOD PASSION by Scott Martelle Do the Ludlow scholars not recognize that common people today face the same foes as did the miners of Ludlow? With the added impediment of a corporate PR system erasing its malevolent deeds. Have not American unions been maligned to the point of extinction? Yet at the same time, capitalists have thoroughly reprised their Machiavellian ways. History can be a tool, not only for statecraft, but for the common American to protect his hard-fought democratic gains.

The United Mine Workers of America having successfully spun the deaths of the striking miner families as a “massacre” may have made an unmerited impact on the public’s sympathies, but likewise, deciding to call Ludlow “not a massacre” will be falsely charged as well. Is there a valuable lesson in unlearning that unbridled corporate greed can be unthinkably inhumane?

OUT OF THE DEPTHS by Barron BeshoarHistorians can fancy themselves objective to ambivalence, but is that a luxury their readers and in particular the schoolchildren can afford? As we witness today the gloves coming off of the globalisation taskmasters?

How I prefer the emotional truth of earlier chroniclers like Barron Beshoar, author of OUT OF THE DEPTHS, a 1942 account of Ludlow, whose preface included this gem:

“If the mine guards and detectives, the mercenaries who served as the Gestapo and the coal districts appear to be scoundrels who sold themselves and their fellowmen for a few corporation dollars, the author will consider them adequately presented.”

KILLING FOR COAL by Thomas AndrewsAt Colorado College the consensus of contemporary historical synthesis, embodied by CU Denver’s Thomas Andrews‘ excellent book KILLING FOR COAL, seems to conclude about Ludlow, “we may never know exactly what happened.” This may reflect the Factual Truth, but it does so at the expense of unrecorded oral accounts, by depreciating their traditional path to us through of folklore.

Buried UnsungAnother author made pains to debunk the lyrics “Sixteen tons, and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt,” a cultural indictment of the “company store,” which was one of the grievances of the Ludlow strikers. He postulated that modern readers could be prone to let folklore color a predisposition against the company store. Perhaps a company store was in fact a convenience, derided because it was an arbitrary restriction against which human nature bucked. Trying to be helpful, another panelist suggested: “Imagine if the company store was 7-11, and you were told you could only shop there.” I believe both of these gentlemen are overlooking the much grosser complaint which the miners were protesting, that of insurmountable debt, systematically forced on them by their employers. That’s a phenomena on the rise today, if maybe not among college professors. Around the world, indentured servitude has never abated.

In our ivory tower we can debate which side, the union or the militia, fired the first shots on April 20. Who was at fault, seemed to be what that question would decide. At least panelist Anne Hyde had the presence of mind to lay some of the responsibility on the mine owners, who weren’t there of course, but whose stubborn greed played a not unsubstantial part in what the other panelists were attributing to “macho intransigence.”

That expression was in vogue to describe Cowboy presidencies. What an effete put down of militant activism. Are we to blame the striking miners for holding firm to their demands?

Thank goodness someone in the audience brought up recent efforts to deny the Sand Creek Massacre, which two panelists quickly weighed in to say “that was a real massacre,” discrediting Ludlow, obviously, and failing to grasp her point that indeed some Colorado Springs locals are rewriting Sand Creek as a battle, and not a massacre.

Another isolationist luxury has become to judge every action as it compares to a nonviolent ideal. It was noted that UMWA union leader John Lawson always recused himself from violent tactics. During the symposium’s opening reception, someone performed a song dedicated to the Ludlow martyr Louis Tikas, which lauded him for choosing to fight with words not guns, as if guns would discredit him.

I’ll play devil’s advocate and suggest that the miners fired the first shots. They saw Louis Tikas bludgeoned in the back of the head and then executed as he lay on the ground unconscious, they saw the National Guard move a machine gun into position above their tent city, and they probably began to fire at the soldiers lest a rain of bullets descend on miners’ wives and children before they had a chance to flee the camp.

The miners were asking that their union be recognized, that the Colorado eight hour work day be enforced, that the scales which determined their pay be verified, that their full hours be compensated, etc. The mine owners clung to their profits, and ordered the miners’ tent city, their only shelter and all their worldly possessions burned to the ground. Women and children were hiding in underground pits dug to escape the sniper fire which the mine guards sporadically aimed at the tents. The guards drove an armored car around the perimeter of the union camp, at all hours, for that purpose.

Ultimately this climate erupted into the violent clash on April 20, 1914, in which the miners battled with the far better equipped soldiers. The casualties were 25 to 1. I call that a massacre.

ADDENDUM: Photographs from visit to the Ludlow Memorial.
Site of Ludlow Massacre, photographed 2009
LUDLOW MEMORIAL, COLORADO- Day three of the Colorado College Ludlow Symposium featured a bus ride to the site of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, then on to Trinidad to the grave of Union leader Louis Tikas. A reporter for Colorado Public Radio interviewed the symposium panelists at the U.M.W.A. memorial grounds.

April 2009 Visit to Ludlow site
David Mason is interviewed by a freelance reporter for Colorado Public Radio.

April 2009 Visit to Ludlow site
Scott Martelle and Thomas Andrews are interviewed above the fatal cellar.

April 2009 Visit to Ludlow site

April 2009 Visit to Ludlow site

TRINIDAD, COLORADO- Masonic Cemetary.
April 2009 Visit to Louis Tikas grave site

April 2009 Visit to Louis Tikas grave site
Zeese Papanikolas spoke about his protagonist’s gravestone and its reference to Tikas as a “Patriot.”

April 2009 Visit to Louis Tikas grave site

April 2009 Visit to Louis Tikas grave site

Will the Biden-Obama plan to ethnically divide Iraq into 3 parts lead to peace?

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obama-bidenJoseph Biden is a long time proponent of creating 3 separate ethnic enclaves in Iraq so that the Pentagon can better dictate Iraq’s future. Essentially, Joe Biden is the actual architect of current Bush Administration strategy in Iraq, which is based on ethnic cleansing and separation. See the report US Senate votes to divide Iraq for a peek into the background information about this.

The Democratic Party controlled US Antiwar Movement has been in a long hibernation away from doing any sort of mass protests against the US-Iraq War and Occupation by Pentagon troops, simply because the Democratic Party has been directing the strategy of the US troops for some time now and there is no plan by their Big Shots to basically change anything that was previously worked out with the Republican Party in this strategy currently being used. The strategy has bipartisan accord going for it and the Iraqi people themselves working against it. In short, it’s doomed to failure.

The problem facing US antiwar activists today is how to break the grip the Democratic Party has on this movement? The American public itself does not see the connection between their own bleak economic fate from the pending economic collapse, and the continued US occupation of Iraq, and has opted out to do just about basically nothing as it puts its faith almost entirely into accepting the empty sloganeering that the Obama Campaign used to get the Democratic Party Establishment back into the White House. It has not registered on most American’s minds that military deficit spending is the foundation of corruption that the entire US economy is structured on.

The long term prognosis for the Biden strategy of maintaining US government control over the fates of the people of Iraq is bound to produce a horrible collapse into total chaos and disintegration for the entire region, not that either the Democratic Party Big Shots nor their more local ‘PEACE’ underlings really care much at all about any of this. They will merely wring their hands and absolve themselves of all responsibility for the final meltdown when it eventually occurs, even as they will cast blame onto the supposed ‘violence’ of the Iraqi people themselves.

One can already begin to imagine the recriminations of the US religious Left, pacifist DP voters as they will lament about the lack of Gandhian methodology used by ‘the others’, the Iraqi people. They will pray on the matter and then will continue to go on about their business of getting more Democrats into office. The Iraqis will be left inside a totally decimated country left in shambles. Those of us outside this mind frame owe the people of the world to do the best we can in opposing the complicity of our own US liberals in the destruction of Planet Earth, the US economy, and the Middle East. We will have to work against these people even as we will try to find ways to work alongside them, if they will do anything very constructive at all? One thing is for sure, right now they have entirely dropped the ball on concretely opposing the bipartisan US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, they have helped put Joseph Biden into a higher office within the US government.

For more information about the Biden Plan for continued US control over Iraq see Mother Jones in its August, 2008 issue
Partition in Iraq: A Serious Problem With Biden as VP?

Mary McFate Sapone aka non-profit spy

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Aka Mary Sapone McFateWhile Dennis Kucinich begins to shed light on the intelligence infiltration of civic and community groups, Mother Jones has tracked down a non-profit for-profit snoop. She’s volunteer over-achiever Mary McFate to her gun control do-gooder colleagues, and Mary Jo Sapone to her do-much-badder private security firm and its client the NRA. Here’s a prophetic snapshot of a running SolutionGal from her blogspot site.

Before gun control advocates, Sapone infiltrated animal rights groups, once urging a reluctant activist to plant a bomb. An co-worker infiltrator/provocateur drove the would-be bomber to the site.

The whole Sapone family was in on the spying business, her daughter-in-law Montgomery advertised these skills: “Collect and analyze intelligence on European activities of major international environmental organization for a company specializing in domestic and internal opposition research, special investigations, issues management and threat assessment. Write weekly intelligence update on European animal rights and eco-terrorist activity. Assist in confidential litigation support research.”

While her son Sean takes credit for organizing “the first major legal arms shipment to Liberia in 15 years.” Daughter Shelley helped to develop political strategies against the social reform groups. All of the Sapones were pro-war. I’d have thought that would be a giveaway.

Now Montgomery and Sean Sapone have adopted the last name McFate, and advise DC think tanks and the Pentagon on “Mercenary Anthropology.”

Undocumented immigrant as superhero

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The latest issue of Mother Jones features four photographs from Dulce Pinzon’s SUPERHERO project. These portray Mexican immigrant workers costumed as might befit the superhero responsibility they carry. Favorite unsung heroes? The Thing, Human Torch and Superman below.
Superman
NOE REYES from the State of Puebla works as a delivery boy in Brooklyn New York. He sends home 500 dollars a week.

From Marine to Al Jazeera Journalist

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Marines are crazy as a rule. Or so, that’s been my experience with them. But crazy can sometimes be good,too. Al Jazeera online is one of my favorite sources of information, so it’s particularly interesting to see this particular ex-marine go to becoming a journalist working for Al Jazeera. If you get a chance, see the documentary mentioned in this article from Mother Jones. It’s all about how the Pentagon keeps assassinating reporters, from the Yugoslav television stations they bombed, to the hotel in Baghdad they blew away at. Remember when they bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade? So many ‘accidents’. Go get The Education

Some Colorado labor history

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Labor day. It commemorates the likes of Samuel Gompers, Big Bob Haywood and Mother Jones and their efforts to unite working class peoples. They met great resistance from gullible populations of consumers and business owners who weren’t going to give anything unless they were forced.

Child labor laws, five day work weeks, eight hour days, overtime pay, work breaks, retirement, benefits, sick days, vacation days, we owe all these to the might of collective bargaining.

Today’s labor organizers are seen more as standing in the way of productivity. We think of union workers as lazy and greedy, corrupt and undeserving. How is it the labor unions have fallen so low in our sentiments? Probably because businesses have public relations budgets which advance the corporate view, and labor unions, well, do not.

Was this always so? Actually, yes.

The Gold Miner’s Strike, 1894
Colorado Springs citizens themselves figured prominently in an early and notorious labor conflict: the Cripple Creek Miner’s Strike of 1894. Miners united by the Western Federation of Miners were fighting for the three dollar, eight hour day. This was a high wage at the time, but the gold mining business was a veritable bonanza and mine owners were building huge homes on Wood Avenue, “Millionaire’s row.”

Up on the mountain the miners seized and shut down the mines. From their exclusive hang out, the El Paso Club, the mine owners complained about the evils of socialism and the populist leanings of the governor.

When underhanded attempts to dislodge the strikers failed, the mine owners, with the assistance of the Gazette, convinced the population of Colorado Springs to rise up in arms against the miners, lest the miners descend from the mountain and attack them. Twelve hundred men were deputized and led on a march to defeat the seven hundred miners. Luckily the 1,200-strong Colorado Springs volunteer posse was outwitted and the miners achieved their demands.

The struggle was long and bitter and makes an amusing story now. We can be happy that the miners prevailed but let us not today be mistaken about which side most of Colorado Springs was on.

Breaking the union, 1904
By 1904, miners had lost the eight hour day. The Mine Owner’s Association issued work permits only to miners who would renounce their union memberships. As the owners shipped in scab labor to substitute for the union holdouts, the conflict grew bloody. The state militia was called in to close the Victor Record, a newspaper sympathetic to the W. F. M. The union was silenced.

On June 6, 1904, a lunatic fighting on the side of the miners, but for motives of his own, blew up a train platform, killing 21 nonunion workers. Though it was not then established who had done it, the W. F. M. was immediately blamed and routed. 225 union miners, a number of whom had families in Cripple Creek, were boarded unto trains and deported from Teller County.

One group was sent to the Kansas border, marched across, and abandoned. The other was dropped off in a desolate part of New Mexico. All were threatened with dire consequences should they return. The mine owners responsible have names which any Colorado Springs resident can recognize today: Carlton, MacNeill, Penrose, and Tutt.

The Ludlow Massacre, 1914
Who hasn’t heard of the “Ludlow Massacre?” The Ludlow Massacre put Colorado on the map. Do you know what for?

In 1913, the coal miners of Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation in Trinidad were protesting against poor wages, unsafe conditions, and struggling with debt in towns owned entirely by their employer. Naturally when the workers went on strike they were immediately evicted from their shacks.

With help from the United Mine Workers Union the striking workers were able to set up tents in the nearby hills and continue their protest. The Rockefellers hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to snipe at them and fire into their camps with Gatling guns. The National Guard was brought in to further harass the striking workers, the justification given to the public being the interrupted supply of coal.

When the miners were able to keep up their strike through the harsh winter that year, the Rockefellers had the Governor of Colorado order an all out attack. The National Guard encircled the largest of the tent settlements at Ludlow, inhabited by approximately one thousand men, women and children, and commenced firing.

Thirteen people were killed in the shoot out before the soldiers set fire to the tents and forced the families to flee. After the fire, someone discovered eleven burned corpses, most of them children. They’d been hiding in a shelter dug to escape the incessant gunfire.

News of the “Ludlow Massacre” spread fast. Working class people came from the surrounding areas to avenge the massacre. Mine shafts were exploded, mine guards were shot, anarchy reigned in the hills, and this time President Wilson sent in the Federal troops.

In the end, 66 people were killed. Not a single mine operator or soldier was indicted of a crime. The press announced the attack on the union stronghold and the burning of the sheltered children to have been “a tactical blunder.”

Should such accounts be taught in our schools? The next time we’re told that a union’s demands are unreasonable, let’s remember to look who’s doing the telling.

(This article is reprinted from CRANK MAGAZINE, vol I, number 7)