Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War

     Thomas Andrews has written a book that is very hard to describe. Indeed, the most obvious explanation doesn’t make sense at first blush: an environmental history of the Ludlow Massacre. One might better describe it as a book about the relationship between coal miners, their employers, and the environment in which they worked.

     The parts of Killing for Coal are stronger than the book as a whole. Nevertheless, any potential reader should understand that these are very strong parts. The book begins and ends with Ludlow. Other subjects include a chapter on William Jackson Palmer that ably merges his activities in Colorado with the rest of his life, a discussion of how coal changed Colorado’s environment both indoors and out, and absolutely the best examination I have ever seen of exactly what coal miners did day in and day out underground. In this last section, Andrews describes the employers’ and employees’ conflicting visions of time and effort that are at the heart of any labor conflict. Andrews also contributes to a recent renaissance of Ludlow Massacre scholarship with an analysis of the 1913-1914 Colorado coal strike that takes into account the entire conflict rather than just one tragic day. His research on the miners’ angry and violent reaction to the massacre is particularly good.

     When Andrews describes the coal miners’ environment he does not just mean the coal and the rock. He examines their relationship with mules, rats, and even the air they breathed. Andrews’s discussion of more traditional topics like company stores and company towns are marked by a subtlety that cannot be found in the traditional one-sided labor histories that cover these topics. Most importantly, since his analysis of the Coalfield War is based on the conflicting visions of the environment possessed by each side, it is both fresh and provocative.

     This perspective, however, also explains why Andrews cannot convincingly tie all of these fascinating pieces together. Instead of moving forward with his analysis of the struggle for control of the workplace, Andrews falls back on an almost exclusively environmental explanation of the Coalfield War and subsequent massacre. While he correctly links unsafe conditions to the struggle for a union, Colorado coal mines were unsafe long after miners had more control of their environment.

     Unionization, which both sides agreed was the ultimate reason for the strike, does not get its due in Killing for Coal. The coal miners and the family members who died at Ludlow risked their lives and their livelihoods in order to join the United Mine Workers of America, not to better control their natural environment. To explain the culminating event of a strike for unionization apart from class struggle does not do justice to that conflict. Workers struggle to form unions in order to win a bigger piece of the pie from their employers, and while Andrews’s environmental perspective is extremely interesting, his analysis suffers from his failure to properly acknowledge this fact.

     For those interested in a more conventional history of the Colorado Coal War and Ludlow Massacre, there is another recent book that discusses the union in a comprehensive and balanced manner. Scott Martelle’s Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West (Rutgers University Press, 2007) is a compact, well-researched history of this tragedy that brings the miners’ aims and activities into sharp focus. What it lacks is Andrews’s extraordinary grasp of the strike’s context. For a complete picture of this seminal event in Colorado history, I would read these two works together as they complement each other beautifully.