In the spring of 1914, members of the Colorado National Guard machine-gunned and set fire to tents in Ludlow, Colorado, where striking miners were living with their families. Five miners, two miners’ wives, and twelve children died, most of them by suffocation while hiding in a cellar under a burning tent. The miners fought back, and, all told, more than seventy-five people were killed in the course of the dispute, roughly as many on the mine owners’ side as on the strikers’. In his new book, “Killing for Coal” (Harvard; $29.95), Thomas G. Andrews calls it the deadliest labor struggle in American history.
The earliest histories of the massacre were sponsored by unions, and historians since have followed their lead in seeing it as an episode in the long conflict between capital and labor. “The Bloodstained Lesson” was the title of the final chapter of George S. McGovern’s solid and thoughtful account, co-written with Leonard F. Guttridge and released in 1972, during McGovern’s Presidential campaign. In 1982, Zeese Papanikolas memorialized the story of Louis Tikas, a Greek-American union leader killed at Ludlow, in a rhapsodic telling intended as a corrective to the tendency of biographies to focus on public figures. In 2007, in a lively journalistic account, “Blood Passion” (Rutgers; $19.95), Scott Martelle called the strikers “freedom fighters” and said that they “helped crumble an egregious system of political corruption.”
Andrews’s innovation is to wonder whether “energy systems” might provide a better explanation than ideology. He therefore takes a long view of the story—so long that he goes back to the Cretaceous to explain the formation of coal. Andrews’s account—less moral and more mineral than the standard one—runs something like this: Ancient sun-energy is stored beneath the earth. Because industrial capitalism wants it, the force exerted to draw it out of the ground is high, and, because there is an abundance of unskilled workers, the counterforce that miners are able to apply in their own defense is low. Or so the capitalists calculate from the laws of supply and demand. But it turns out that there is another force to reckon with: the miners’ go-for-broke willingness to fight. The capitalists expect a smooth hoovering up of hydrocarbons and workers’ rights, but instead violence explodes. People discover, to their dismay, that the desire to exploit an energy resource as cheaply as possible can lead to something like war.