August 23, 2007 12:34 PM

Scott Martelle on his book "Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West"

Mark_Wolf(Q) Welcome Scott Martelle, author of Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. What's the genesis of the book?
Scott_Martelle(A) It has a long genesis, actually. I've been interested in that era of time, and labor/progressive history, since reading Dos Passos' USA trilogy. In 1995 I was working at the Detroit News when a strike broke out, and spent the next 18 months on the picket line. So I was attuned to labor issues. About 4-5 years ago I was reading a book I don't recall, and saw a footnote that mentioned 100 or so people killed in the strike, and it floored me. How did I not know that? That started me on the quest to find out what happened. The actual death toll, btw, was 75...

Mark_Wolf(Q) You write that the deaths of the women and childen at Ludlow did NOT constitute a massacre. Why not?
Scott_Martelle(A) It has to do with definition. We think of a massacre as involving acts of willful violence -- shootings, hackings, that sort of thing -- against a large group of people. The 11 kids and two mothers who died were hiding in a maternity chamber dug below ground, hoping to avoid the daylong gunbattle. When the National Guard torched the tents at dusk, there's no indication they knew the people were there. The fire sucked the oxygen out of the chamber and they suffocated (two mothers survived, of the 14 people who were hiding there). So in reality it was more an act of criminally negligent homicide -- they died as a consequence of the arson. But they were not not intentionally killed, which is a key element of a massacre. And in the horror of what happened, people lost sight of the true "massacre" -- the execution of Louis Tikas and two other strikers at the tent colony, by the National Guard.

Mark_Wolf(Q) As you tell it, the attack on the tents where the miners and their families lived as a result of being displaced from their company houses seems to result from a series of misjudgments by both sides.
Scott_Martelle(A) Yes, that's true. On April 20, 1914, the National Guard had been largely pulled from the strike district. Tensions were high with rumors that the strikers had received a shipment of new weapons, and that the militia was planning an attack. A woman had sent a letter to the militia complaining that her husband was being held hostage at the tent colony; Hamrock, in charge of the troops left at Ludlow, called the colony and asked Louis Tikas, a usually accommodating man, to meet him to discuss it. Tikas refused -- his belief was that he had no reason to answer to Hamrock, since the militia was being withdrawn. Hamrock read that, though, as a sign of trouble, ordered Lt. Karl Linderfelt to move to a nearby Water Tank Hill with a machine gun. That was interpreted as an offensive act by the strikers. They began leaving the colony with their rifles to take up positions in the arroyo and along a rail cut, which the militia interpreted as preparations for an attack. No one can say with certainty what the final spark was, but it seems the militia fired three dynamite blasts as a signal to others in the canyons that trouble was brewing, and the strikers misstook that as the start of an attack. The bullets began flying, and it kept up all day, culminating in the storming and burning of the colony by the militia.

Mark_Wolf(Q) Why was the National Guard involved in the strike?
Scott_Martelle(A) After the strike began in September 1913, tit-for-tat violence occurred up and down the coal district in Las Animas and Huerfano counties. It was to the coal companies' advantage to have the violence, which they thought would persaude the governor to send in the National Guard to keep the peace, as they had done -- with considerable effect and violence -- in the 1903 strike. And keeping the peace meant keeping the mines operating, effectively using government to end the strike on the companies' terms. But things turned ugly as the initial deployment began rotating out and the soldiers were replaced by mine guards. Strikers began recognizing faces they hated, and the deterioration escalated. There was a lot of nuance involved -- you'll have to read the book to get it all ;-) -- but that's the general overview.

Mark_Wolf(Q) How much power did Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. wield in Colorado?
Scott_Martelle(A) Enormous, depending on the part of the state. It owned massive amounts of land, was the state's largest employer, and in many ways was the engine that drove industrialization here. They bought politicians and, sad to say, journalists, and in Huerfano County -- around Walsenburg -- they wielded fief-like power through Sheriff Jefferson Farr, as big a rogue as you could hope to encounter. He ran bars, bordellos, liquor supply companies and the like, and was in and of himself the local law. He controlled elections, too. Each closed mine camp was its own election precinct. Farr would order those votes held back from counting until the "open" precincts reporte din. Then he would have the "closed" precincts file whatever votes were necessary to give the win to his candidates. He even counted sheep in the pasture. His fraud eventually cost him his job after the strike ended, when a state Supreme Court rukong through him out of office and awarded it to a guy who used to run guns for the strikers. ... Oh, and one of his business partners was a regional manager for ... CF&I.

Mark_Wolf(Q) What did you discover about mining conditions in the area at the time of the strike?
Scott_Martelle(A) They were dreadful. Scores of miners died each year in rock falls. Miners were killed by the dozens in undergound explosions (Colorado was statistically the most dangerous terrain in the country for coal miners). Pay was based on the weight of coal mined -- and a ton was defined as 2,400 pounds, not the standard 2,000 pounds. Pay was in company scrip despite state law banning it. Housing in most of the mine camps was owned by the company, and miners had to shop in the company store -- to be caught buying goods in Trinidad, Walsenburg or elsewhere would get a miner fired, or "sent down the canyon," as they said then. And the companies valued mules more than men, because they were in essence renting the men's time. If one died, he could be replaced with no cash outlay. If a mule died, a new one had to be bought. And there was no avenue for recourse for the miners, which in large part led to the drive for unionization, and then the coal war itself.

Mark_Wolf(Q) How did the newspapers of the time report the Ludlow massacre and the aftermath and how do you think that coverage shaped public opinion?
Scott_Martelle(A) Coverage varied. Your Rocky Mountain News was one of the more objective voices, but it's coverage clearly favored the miners. The Post seemed sympathetic to the operators. The defunct Denver express was solidly for the miners. One of its reporters eventually joined the war and led a battalion at Walsenburg. Best I could figure out he died a year or two later fighting in Mexico. In the strike district, the biggest paper, the Trinidad Chronicle-News, was owned by a lawyer for the coal operators, and you can imagine the skew at play there. But there was a local union-owned paper to offer the opposite spin. Nationally, there was little coverage other than some editorial tut-tutting about the strikers -- until the news of the Ludlow Massacre spread. The national revulsion was massive, and intense.

Mark_Wolf(Q) With so many conflicting reports, how did you determine the truth?
Scott_Martelle(A) It was hard. I used something akin to triangulation. I would find as many versions of an event as I could, weigh the various sources, and then try to limit what I put in the book to the details I could comfortably defend. So I left a lot out. But many of the details I included clear up conflicting elements of previous works on the strike and coal war.

hellcat(Q) what role did the IWW play at Ludlow?
Scott_Martelle(A) None, to speak of. They had largely left Colorado after the 1903 strike, and the UMWA was organizing the state. Interestingly, the union lost the 1913-14 strike, though they won the guerrilla war -- it didn't end until President Wilson sent in the U.S. Army to replace the hated National Guard. But the Wobblies eventually returned and in 1927 led a strike that finally led to union reecognition in the mines, a campaign that has been captured admirably in a book co-written and co-edited by a Denver activist named Richard Myers. Unfortunately I don't have that book with me and don't remember the title, but it was published locally by the Bread and Roses press, I think it's called.
hellcat(Q) The IWW wasn't formed until 1905; perhaps you're conflating it with the Western Fed of Miners?
Scott_Martelle(A) You're right, I am conflating. The IWW was formed by a group -- meeting in Butte, MT, if I recall -- that included some key members of the defeated WFM. Still, the Wobblies weren't involved in the 1913-14 strike, though there were reports of some individual organizers floating into the district during the aftermath of the Ludlow Massacre.
Mark_Wolf(P) That book by Richard Myers is Slaughter in Serene: The Columbine Coal Strike Reader. God bless Google.
hellcat(C) Thanks for the cite. I'll take a look at the Myers book.

Mark_Wolf(Q) You don't portray the strikers as totally innocent victims of the mine owners - more guards and strikebreakers died than miners - but you ultimately cast them as freedom fighters.
Scott_Martelle(A) That's true. They were definitely victims of an oppressive political and economic system, were living under a form of feudalism, and they rose up against it in true American tradition. Earlier books about the coal war tend to paint them as virtuous victims, but these were hard, determined men. Many of the "riff-raff" that the operators thought they had hired were veterans of Balkan wars, and they knew how to take to the hills and fight. I don't think there were any angels involved on either side in this thing, but the miners were clearly fighting for better lives for themselves and their families in circumstances in which the Constitution and local laws had been trumped by the interests of the coal operators. To me, this is what makes this past so intriguiong, and part of the broad sweep of American history. It involves labor and unions but it is not a labor history -- it is as much as part of what made the country what it is was other uprisings, from the Hays rebellion on.

Mark_Wolf(Q) How did the killings at Ludlow change/shape the national labor movement?
Scott_Martelle(A) It galvanized it, and became a rallying cry. I didn't study the aftermath in much detail, but "remember Ludlow" became for union supporters what "Remember the Maine" became for pro-war activists in the lead-up to the Spanish-American War. And I suspect it went a long way toward elevating the profile of unions across the country. Eleven children and two mothers dying at the hands of National Guardsmen paints a very sympathetic portrait. And the unions used that, sending some of the survivors on the road on speaking tours, including audiences in Washington, D.C. Testimony at federal inquisitions also raised public awareness of just what the coal miners were fighting against.

Mark_Wolf(Q) Your book contains a number of fascinating characters. Was there anyone whose story you found particularly compelling?
Scott_Martelle(A) Several, but probably most compelling to me for some obvious reasons was Don MacGregor, the Denver Express reporter who put down his pen, picked up a gun and joined the uprising. If anyone ever makes a movie of this -- and offers will be entertained .;-) -- he would be the best figure to focus on. Mother Jones is a classic and this was just one episode in her life. And Louis Tikas is a compelling figure too, a Greek immigrant who came here to make his fortune and died fighting for a better life for others (Zeese Papanikolas has written a book about him).

Mark_Wolf(Q) Your book casts the events surrounding Ludlow as being emblematic of the social change occuring in the country. What does Ludlow tell us about how the nation was evolving in the early days of the 20th century?
Scott_Martelle(A) It drew all sorts of activists, from the socialists to the anarchists, and in many ways presaged the turmoil surrounding World War I. The era of the Robber Barons had faded, class awareness was high. Remember, Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 split the Republican vote with his Bull Moose Party because he thought Taft, his essentially hand-picked successor in The White House, had turned his back on the reforms he had begun. Wilson won in a field of four candidates -- Eugene V. Debs, a Socialist, was other main candidate. But our historic sense of all this has been eclipsed by WWI, the russian Revolution and the Red Scare/Palmer Raids of the early 1920s. Unionism was on the rise as a counter to the increased power of corporations. And, more broadly, we were well on our way to becoming a consumer-driven society

Mark_Wolf(Q) Ultimately, what do you want people to take away from the book?
Scott_Martelle(A) Awareness. I go back to my intial revelation -- how did so many people die in such a convulsion of violence on American soil within the last 100 years, and it NOT be a part of commonly recognized history? And also a better sense of the blood sacrifices that have been made for working conditions that most of us take for granted. Sacrifices that ring loudly with the recent tragedy in Utah.

Mark_Wolf(Q) Did writing this book affect the way you view the coal mine disaster in Utah?
Scott_Martelle(A) I don't know enough about what happened there to draw distinct parallels, but there was a sense of deja vu when I saw the reports. As I was writing the book several coal miners died in incidents in West Virginia. As we type, Chinese officials are trying to figure out whether there will be any survivors of a mine disaster there. Most of us live comfortable lives, or lives that at least don't endanger us when we show up for work. I think we tend to forget that many people, though, still toil in dangerous circumstances.

Mark_Wolf(Q) Thanks to Scott Martelle, author of the new book Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. Scott will be at Tattered Cover LoDo at 7:30 p.m. tonight to discuss and sign his book.
Scott_Martelle(A) Thanks for the interest, Mark, and the insightful questions. I'm happy to continue the conversation with readers by email through my website, www.scottmartelle.com.

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