Regulating Danger

Regulating Danger
Author: James Whiteside
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780803247529

From the 1880s to the 1980s more than eight thousand workers died in the coal mines of the Rocky Mountain states. Sometimes they died by the dozens in fiery explosions, but more often they died alone, crushed by collapsing roofs or runaway mine cars. Many old-timers in coal-mining communities and even some historians haveøblamed the high fatality rate on ruthless coal barons exploiting miners in the single-minded pursuit of profit. The coal industry preferred to blame careless miners. James Whiteside looks beyond those charges in seeking to explain why the western coal mines were (and, to some degree, still are) dangerous and why territorial, state, and federal laws failed for so long to make them safer. Regulating Danger is the first extended study of the coal-mining industry in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. It exceeds the scope of traditional labor history in focusing on working conditions and the problems of workers instead of unions and strikes. After examining the inherent physical dangers of the work, Whiteside shows how the interplay of economic, social, and technological forces created an envi-ronment of death in the western coal mines. He goes on to discuss evolving industrial and political attitudes toward issues of responsibility for mine safety and government regulation and the fundamental changes in the industry that brought about safer working conditions.

Mining Towns of Southern Colorado

Mining Towns of Southern Colorado
Author: Staci Comden
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 0738599530

Images from the archives of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I).

Making an American Workforce

Making an American Workforce
Author: Fawn-Amber Montoya
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2014-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1492012580

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the policies of the early years of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, Making an American Workforce explores John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s welfare capitalist programs and their effects on the company's diverse workforce. Focusing on the workers themselves—men, women, and children representative of a variety of immigrant and ethnic groups—contributors trace the emergence of the Employee Representation Plan, the work of the company's Sociology Department, and CF&I's interactions with the YMCA in the early twentieth century. They examine CF&I's early commitment to Americanize its immigrant employees and shape worker behavior, the development of policies that constructed the workforce it envisioned while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the strike that eventually led to the Ludlow Massacre, and the impact of the massacre on the employees, the company, and beyond. Making an American Workforce provides greater insight into the repercussions of the Industrial Representation Plan and the Ludlow Massacre, revealing the long-term consequences of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company policies on the American worker, the state of Colorado, and the creation of corporate culture. Making an American Workforce will be of interest to Western, labor, and business historians.

From Redstone to Ludlow

From Redstone to Ludlow
Author: F. Darrell Munsell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2009-03-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

This book covers events from 1892, when John Cleveland Osgood and his associates organised the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, to 1917, when Osgood signed a contract with the United Mine Workers of America, marking the end of his long history of battling the union. Called the Fuel King of the West, Osgood was the leading coal baron in the western mountain region and the most prominent spokesperson for the coal industry for over three decades. During this time, his anti-union policies made him the UMWA's most formidable foe in its effort to organise the Colorado coal fields. The book depicts the bipolarity of his approach to the threat of unionism. The "Redstone experiment," a model industrial village designed to improve the lives of workers through social programs, showed Osgood's efforts to attain his anti-union goals through compassion. Conversely, the Ludlow tent colony and the events that transpired there, marked by armed gunmen and machine guns paid for by Osgood, illustrate his willingness to resort to violence and intimidation for the same purpose. A leading participant in the transformation of the West, Osgood helped to shape the character of the Gilded Age.

Killing for Coal

Killing for Coal
Author: Thomas G. Andrews
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2010-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674736680

On a spring morning in 1914, in the stark foothills of southern Colorado, members of the United Mine Workers of America clashed with guards employed by the Rockefeller family, and a state militia beholden to Colorado’s industrial barons. When the dust settled, nineteen men, women, and children among the miners’ families lay dead. The strikers had killed at least thirty men, destroyed six mines, and laid waste to two company towns. Killing for Coal offers a bold and original perspective on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the “Great Coalfield War.” In a sweeping story of transformation that begins in the coal beds and culminates with the deadliest strike in American history, Thomas Andrews illuminates the causes and consequences of the militancy that erupted in colliers’ strikes over the course of nearly half a century. He reveals a complex world shaped by the connected forces of land, labor, corporate industrialization, and workers’ resistance. Brilliantly conceived and written, this book takes the organic world as its starting point. The resulting elucidation of the coalfield wars goes far beyond traditional labor history. Considering issues of social and environmental justice in the context of an economy dependent on fossil fuel, Andrews makes a powerful case for rethinking the relationships that unite and divide workers, consumers, capitalists, and the natural world.

Representation and Rebellion

Representation and Rebellion
Author: Jonathan H. Rees
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2010-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1607320401

In response to the tragedy of the Ludlow Massacre, John D. Rockefeller Jr. introduced one of the nation’s first employee representation plans (ERPs) to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1915. With the advice of William Mackenzie King, who would go on to become prime minister of Canada, the plan—which came to be known as the Rockefeller Plan—was in use until 1942 and became the model for ERPs all over the world.In Representation and Rebellion Jonathan Rees uses a variety of primary sources—including records recently discovered at the company’s former headquarters in Pueblo, Colorado—to tell the story of the Rockefeller Plan and those who lived under it, as well as to detail its various successes and failures. Taken as a whole, the history of the Rockefeller Plan is not the story of ceaseless oppression and stifled militancy that its critics might imagine, but it is also not the story of the creation of a paternalist panacea for labor unrest that Rockefeller hoped it would be.Addressing key issues of how this early twentieth-century experiment fared from 1915 to 1942, Rees argues that the Rockefeller Plan was a limited but temporarily effective alternative to independent unionism in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre. The book will appeal to business and labor historians, political scientists, and sociologists, as well as those studying labor and industrial relations.

The Great Coalfield War

The Great Coalfield War
Author: George Stanley McGovern
Publisher:
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1996
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

"A definitive study of the Ludlow massacre and events leading up to it. This story has much drama and struggle, and it holds some crucial lessons about industrial strife and about how viciously brutal AmericaÂs capitalists were a couple of generations ago." -- Los Angeles Times -- "The effect of this work is simply enraging, for the reality that the documentation evokes, both of wickedness and of the suffering that that wickedness caused, is intolerable." -- The New Yorker -- In the early 20th century, Colorado yielded more than a million tons of coal annually -- hacked and blasted out by immigrants from Eastern Europe living in crudely built towns owned by powerful mine operators. The companies owned the stores, ran the schools, churches, hospitals, and saloons, and bribed the region's lawmen to keep union organizers out. Mine safety was all but unheard-of when in 1913 mine explosions killed more than four hundred workers in just two of the mines. The United Mineworkers' Union infiltrated the towns, and thirteen thousand miners and their families made one mass exodus to establish a tent colony near the rail outpost at Ludlow. Months of fighting between the miners and company gunmen assisted by the Colorado State National Guard culminated in the Ludlow Massacre where tents were set afire, suffocating women and children who had sought shelter in storage pits beneath tent floorboards. The resultant public scandal compelled Washington to intervene, but it would take years before Colorado's coal miners gained union protection. The Great Coalfield War is a part of western history and an especially important part in view of today's declining union enrollments and the national movement to deregulate workplace safety laws and the federal agencies that enforce them. --Midwest Book Review

My Heart Lies Here

My Heart Lies Here
Author: Laurie Marr Wasmund
Publisher:
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2012-08-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780985967505

In 1913, the United Mine Workers of America led a daring strike against John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel & Iron Company that would end in war. In this novel of the Ludlow Massacre, a young woman learns the true meaning of love, sacrifice, and what it means to be an American. Newly arrived in Colorado, Christian Scott is caught in a web of divided loyalties. Torn between her dedication to her brother, Alex, who clings to his proud Scottish heritage, and her love of Pearl, a spirited orphan whose flight from abuse and poverty lands her on the Scotts' doorstep, Christian experiences heartbreak when the two become enemies. At the same time, she secretly joins with a passionate Greek miner on a dangerous course of resistance against the coal company and the brutal Colorado National Guard that threatens to destroy everything--and everyone--she loves.

Blood Passion

Blood Passion
Author: Scott Martelle
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 081354419X

"On April 20, 1914, in the small railroad town of Ludlow, Colorado, striking coalminers and state National Guardsmen waged a day-long battle that ended with the burning of a strikers' tent colony. The "Ludlow Massacre," as it is known, was only part of a seven-month war in which at least seventy-five people were killed. In Blood Passion, journalist Scott Martelle explores this largely forgotten American saga of coalminers rising against political and economic corruption, a fight that embraced some of the most volatile social movements of the early twentieth century."--Cover.