Remembering Labor on Labor Day

Labor Day comes on Monday. It inspires thoughts of picnics and mountain outings, but it also brings to mind a conversation I had years ago with my state representative -- the rare Republican who carried a union card.

Several mines had closed. Our area had lost a lot of well-paid steady jobs with excellent benefits. We talked about how seasonal tourist jobs -- work that paid poorly and offered no benefits -- were not much of a replacement.

"But you have to remember," he said, "that mining jobs didn't become good jobs because mining companies are run by philanthropists. It took about forty years of bloody industrial warfare."

Much of that warfare was in the West, with armed rebellions stretching from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, to Globe, Arizona. Colorado's most famous labor battle came in the coal camp of Ludlow in 1914 -- one good book about it is The Great Coalfield War by George S. McGovern (yes, it's the former senator) and Leonard F. Guttridge.

Ludlow participants included John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Mother Jones and John L. Lewis, so it's a big story. But it's not the only one. The silver mines of Leadville and the gold producers at Cripple Creek also saw guns and dynamite. The union struggle was especially fierce in Telluride, as explained by MaryJoy Martin in The Corpse on Boomerang Road: Telluride's War on Labor, 1899-1908.

The most militant of the miners' unions was the Western Federation of Miners. One of its officers, Big Bill Haywood, argued that the mine owners "did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy, all the gold belonged to them."

Haywood had the most American of backgrounds -- he was born in Salt Lake City and his father was a Pony Express rider -- but he ended up buried in the Kremlin wall.

Wikipedia offers a fair account of the rise and fall of the WFM. The mine owners and the state governments were so eager to squash the union that they kidnapped the WFM's leaders from Denver to put them on trial in Idaho for the dynamite killing of a former governor by terrorist Harry Orchard. They were defended by Clarence Darrow, and the story is exhaustively told in Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas.

This part of our history doesn't get much local attention. I've visited many old mining towns and their museums, and found only one that gives the WFM more than a passing mention. The museum with a WFM wall is in Victor, Colo., six miles from the casinos of Cripple Creek. It's fitting, since Victor was the district's labor town where the state militia tried to shut down its newspaper.

So that's an appropriate destination for a Labor Day road trip, and a way to remember that mining corporations are not run by philanthropists.