Apr. 29, 2005 - 18:42 MDT

THOUGHTS ON FOLKS

The old somewhat renewed is featured in an article in today's Rocky Mountian News. An article by Joe Garner of that paper, giving good news. In part:

Ludlow restoration nearly done

"The headless man has a new head."

"The granite woman, who stood by him for nearly 90 years at the Ludlow Massacre Memorial, will be fitted with a new head of her own sometime in the next three weeks."

"With restoration nearly complete, the sculptures are to be returned to the Southern Colorado monument at the end of May, about two years after vandals took a sledgehammer to them."

"The memorial is to be rededicated at a ceremony June 5."

"They sat out there for all these years without anyone laying a finger on them," said Robert Butero, regional director of the United Mine Workers of America. "You have to hope the damage done to them was just a passing situation."

"The $80,000 restoration has attracted donations from miners around the world because of the massacre's bloody significance to the American labor movement."

"The nation was horrified April 20, 1914, when at least 18 people, 11 of them children, were killed at Ludlow, a tent city 12 miles north of Trinidad."

"The miners, mostly Hispanics and recent immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, had been forced out of their company-owned homes after they went on strike over pay and working conditions."

State militia and hired guards fired on the miners' families and torched the tent city."

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A few words in the morning paper, a picture too. Cant expect too much to be said about a thing of the past.

From what I have read, my understanding is this, Colorado Fuel and Iron owned by the Rockefellers also owned the coal mines in the hills near Pueblo where CF&I had their steel mills. The wheels that spun in Colorado were allowed to do as they saw fit and did so.

The miners were a polyglot bunch, Hispanics, emigres from Europe's different countries. Communication was poor of course. Of which circumstances led the big dogs in the company to keep wages low, working conditions bad and human rights disregarded -- more so I think than the ordinary citizens of this country suffered.

The days of the company store and company houses were there then. You bought from the company store -- or else. Same with housing, and if you didn't like that it was, "Down the canyon to somewhere else."

Quoting from a book by Howard Gitelman, "Legacy Of The Ludlow Massacre" is the following,

"In an effort to expand and ensure the stability of its organization in the coal fields of Northern Colorado, the United Mine Workers, in the summer of 1913, began to organize the miners in the state's southern camps. Despite intense employer opposition and the constant harassment of law officers, union organizers made considerable progress. Among their new recruits were numbers of men who had taken the places of other miners during a strike ten years earlier, now they were the aggrieved."

"Late in August 1913, the union invited the coal operators to confer about the grievances of the men. The operators ignored the letter. A second request for a conference also was ignored. So, on September 15, when the delegates from the various mines assembled in the city of Trinidad, it was clear that they had a struggle on their hands. They agreed to strike for a seven point program:

1. - Recognition of the union.

2. - A ten percent increase in wages.

3. - The eight hour day.

4. - Payment for deadwork. (Miners were paid on the basis of the wieght of the coal they mined. Deadwork was work necessary to mining that did not directly or immediately result in mined coal.

5. - The right to elect checkweighmen (i.e. miners who could verify the weight of the coal mined).

6. - The right to trade in any store, board anywhere, and hire the services of any doctor.

7. - Enforcement of Colorado mining laws and the abolition of armed mine guards."

"Items 3, 5, 7, and elements of item 6 were due the miners under existing state laws. They were bargainable only in the sense that these laws HAD BEEN IGNORED. The purely economic demands, items 2 and 4, were important, but not critical. Everyone understood that the central issue was union recognition. The fate of the other demands hinged upon whether the U.M.W. would be present to compel concessions and compliance."

"Eight thousand miners struck on September 23 and, with their families and possessions, moved out of the company camps and into tent colonies provided by the union."

"Any knowledgeable observer could have predicted tragedy, for armed conflict was almost certain to occur. Coal mining imposed a degree of vassalage so inconsonant with the American ideal of freedom, that the resort to arms practically was inevitable. The mining camps were situated in isolated canyons. Everything therein, the roads, streets, land, houses, churches, stores, bars, jails, schools and governments belonged to the company. The people in the camps were company property, too, in a very real sense. Anyone who would not do the company's bidding at work, at home, or in public was compelled to leave. Discipline was maintained by intimidation and, if need by, by physical assault."

"As will be shown, the coal companies openly flouted state mining laws, rigged elections, and suborned local public officials. Local law officers served them as a private army, enforcing the law selectively in the interest of both the companies and their own perquisites. Even in peaceful times, the civil rights of the miners had been routinely ignored. Once the strike began and miners were openly case as enemies, all restraints were dropped. The companies imported several hundred additional deputies and mine guards among them Texas desperadoes and thugs provided by the Baldwin-Felts DEtective Agency. As the closest contemporary observer put it: "the operators hired an army for the purpose of making war upon, and if necessary, killing their employees."

"The miners also armed themselves. In many ways, it became impossible to distinguish the stike from a war. "Troops and armed workers aand armies of company goons marched, bivouacked, deployed, and exchanged fire in open warfare. Murder, arson, and dynamiting took its toll." Mackenzie King would later estimate that two hundred lives were lost in the strike."

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Howard M. Gitelman's book is ISBN 0-8122-8099-7 Copyright by the University of Pennsylvania Press. I suppose I am in trouble for quoting from the book due to the copyright. My apologies, I feel that things like this must be brought out to be seen. Mackenzie King of Canadian fame was one of the folks pushing the forming of "company unions," which were total failures -- Oxy-Moronic one might say.

This happened seven years before I was born, there were civil war veterans still living in our town, cowboys were still running the range, but I think the reservations were where the Indians were then. Even as I grew up and the NLRB came into being, my Mother and Dad were active in organizing a local union at the place they worked, working in fear of company goons or job loss even then. Those were the days that a boss could fire an emplyee just because, because for no reason other than his whim. It is a different world now.

But I wonder, will it stay different ? Seems that inroads are being made on our civil rights, pensions dying on the vines, overtime and who is qualified under attack as well as many other things.

Looking back and trying to imagine the lives direly affected by corporate practices over the years, living in fear of job loss, working for whatever the boss offers for however many hours and days he wants you to work. Are we coming to that again ? I have friends and acquaintances and even relative or two who have no love for unions and who refuse to believe that the eight hour day, five day week are because many people strived mightily to achieve that. Vacations ? Unions again, decent and safe working conditions also unions.

Then we have the S&L scandals of a few years back, Enron in our day and age. Just thinking about the common folks at Enron, losing their retirement, their jobs vanishing into thin air. Some of those folks worked long and faithfully and were thinking they were building up their retirement funds. Some who fell for the sales pitch and bought company stock and held on to it.

THe working stiff has always had it hard. Read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," some of Dicken's stories which were fiction based on real life back then. There were many Bob Cratchit's then, just with different last names.

I was taught that wages received were for, a job well done, on time, cheerfully. And that is the way I tried. Yet my wages were begrudged in some places I worked.

So, tonight the conditions are a bit changed from back then, but not as much as I would like to see. My sympathies and my heart is in my entry tonight of THOUGHTS ON FOLKS . . . . . . . . .

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