Killing for Coal

Thomas G. Andrews

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780674736689
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

1

A Dream of Coal-Fired Benevolence

William Jackson Palmer, a wiry man five feet ten inches tall with wavy, reddish brown hair, a neatly trimmed moustache, and an aristocratic bearing that seemed at odds with his twin creeds of Quakerism and republicanism, had honed a daunting array of talents during his thirty years of life. Engineer, executive, soldier, romantic—each role played a part in leading him to traverse southern Colorado and northern New Mexico in the summer of 1867. Yet what mattered most during these weeks of intensive exploration was Palmer’s oracular way of finding meaning in coal outcrops.1

To most people, rocks were just rocks: solid, unyielding facts that sat unnoticed and insignificant. To Palmer, the study of rocks opened windows onto an ever-changing past. A self-taught geologist who supplemented gleanings from the most current scientific treatises and lectures with practical knowledge gained on journeys through Britain, France, and the eastern states, Palmer saw rocks as repositories of history that not only recorded the past, but held clues to the future. He prided himself on his ability to discern these clues from outcrops of sandstone and shale, basalt and limestone and coal. And on this rugged southern Colorado frontier in the tumultuous wake of the Civil War, the prospects Palmer read seemed to tell of boundless power that could overcome the limitations of a stubborn land and create an industrial utopia.

William Palmer had been born in the Delaware countryside and had come of age in midcentury Philadelphia. An exemplary student, he nonetheless left Central High School before graduating, swooped up like many of his classmates at the elite public institution by an appeal to his ambition from one of the city’s counting houses. Clerking failed to excite young Palmer, though, so he left the city. It was most likely while he was working as a surveyor for the Hempfield Railroad in the Alleghenies that the three guiding passions of his life—railroads, coal, and wilderness—first coalesced. More than any other career, engineering promised to unite these obsessions.2

A common thread ran through the biographies of many of America’s small but growing pantheon of great engineers. Like many of the nation’s painters and patricians, they had embarked on the pilgrimage to Europe. Inspired by their example, William Palmer set sail in 1855 for a grand tour of the engineering marvels of Britain and France.3

The eighteen-year-old tottered down the gangway of the Tuscarora and onto a Merseyside quay on a summer’s day. In the nine months that followed, Palmer traced a snaking path through Britain’s main industrial districts, as well as Paris and its hinterlands. Occasionally he rode the train; more often he walked, carrying only what he could fit into a knapsack and bearing letters of introduction from such distinguished figures as Lucretia Mott, who described Palmer’s family as “warmly interested in our anti-slavery movement.”4

Palmer’s favorite uncle had loaned him money to pay for his passage. He met most of his other expenses by writing twenty-one long travel letters for the Pottsville Miner’s Journal, the most influential newspaper in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region. Published a decade after Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class of England and a year after Charles Dickens’s Hard Times first appeared in serialized form, each letter printed above the initials W. J. P. or the pseudonym Carbon earned the traveler four dollars. More valuable by far, however, were the contributions each made to Palmer’s burgeoning reputation as a keen observer of British industrialism. J. Edgar Thomson, the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the preeminent entrepreneur of the day, found them so impressive that he arranged to meet their author on his next business trip to Britain.5

After disembarking in the “double-distilled Pittsburgh” that was Liverpool, the eager young Palmer rode a packet ship to Manchester, griping along the way that “the pretty Irwell which had flowed through green fields and scented meadows grew black and thick with the refuse from factory gutters until” the once pastoral river “resembled more a sewer than the winding watercourse” of its upper stretches. After this introduction to the environmental damage inflicted by Britain’s industrial revolutions, Palmer approached one of the factories responsible for polluting northern England’s air and water.6

1.1. William Jackson Palmer, ca. 1870. Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, F-20207.

The Wigan cotton mills filled Palmer with awe. In a lengthy letter to his uncle, Palmer wrote that the gargantuan factory had given him “a more exalted opinion of the power of machinery and of the genius of the great inventors . . . than all the panegyrics I could have read.” Inside Palmer found “1,100 men, women and children” busily “guiding the almost automatic machines that perform with so much ease the manual labour. A thousand horsepower endlessly at work at as many different trades, varying in importance from the carrying of men and cotton up and down stairs to the setting in motion 800 looms, weaving the fabric so fast that you can hardly follow it with your eye.” Wherever Palmer looked, he saw machines “conducting with perfect system the entire duties of the manufacture with slight superintendence from the pigmy race who brought them into life.” The self-acting mule that spun cotton into thread struck the young American as “the most astonishing machine I ever saw,” while the sight of the weaving room “looms doing their master’s work with a regularity and speed that nothing but steam power could produce,” he said, would “remain in my memory as one of the few things worthy of being remembered though everything else fail.” As for the engines driving these machines, Palmer proclaimed them “undoubtedly the finest pieces of mechanism I have yet seen. Feeding their own coals[,] turning their own valves, pumping their own water into the boilers, registering their own force by guages [sic] . . . , providing themselves for the safety of their attendants in case of accidents, and giving motion besides to all the innumerable machinery and contrivances within the rooms of the factories, one could get a better idea of omnipotence . . . than the strongest imagination could otherwise furnish him with.”7

Palmer found the scale, scope, and “perfect system” of the mills nothing short of sublime. Nowhere in the United States could he have witnessed anything like it. Yet even as the romantic in Palmer trembled in the presence of this modern wonder, the realist in him resolved to trace back to its earthly source the seemingly supernatural power that vitalized the mills’ “inert matter.” The next day, Palmer “occupied the hours of daylight in descending and ascending deep coal mine shafts in the neighborhood of Wigan and in crawling about with back and legs at an angle quite as acute as the pain thereby caused through underground passages that were apparently constructed for some lilliputian race yet to be discovered.” Though he derided “colliers and collieries” as “decidedly the most unpleasing things,” the traveler nonetheless focused most of his subsequent tour on the frequently unpleasant subject of coal. Palmer even published most of his letters under the wry title of “Underground Walks in England.”8

The dawning realization that the sublime and the infernal aspects of British industrialism were intimately interrelated troubled the young American’s Quaker morals, romantic love of nature, and republican distaste for fixed class distinctions. Tramping south from Lancashire to the Midlands, Palmer found farming and grazing “entirely sacrificed, for the fields beneath are more valuable than those at the surface.” The sky in what Britons called the Black Country—“no name,” sniffed Palmer, “could be more appropriate”—remained “always obscure and dusty” no matter how “bright the sky or sunny the day a few miles remote.” Beneath the smoke and haze stretched a buckling, heaving landscape scarred by “abundant records of the work that has been going on below.” Here in the Black Country, it seemed to Palmer, “no other business [was] thought of . . . than that of mining the Coal and Iron ore which underlie it and converting them to purposes of utility.”9

The young American noted how coal and the industries it powered put not only the land, but also workers’ lives and health in jeopardy. The sickly appearance of Sheffield’s coke handlers appalled him; they looked “as though their lungs had become too familiar with sulphuretted hydrogen and . . . too ignorant of the pure, fresh air from which they are daily excluded.” Worse still were conditions in the collieries which powered the British economy. Palmer expressed amazement at the policies and technologies that operators used to guard their employees against the hazards of mining; at the “fiery” Incehall colliery, for instance, he marveled at “the strict surveillance” carried out by mine officials called “firemen, who sit as if in judgment on benches near the foot of the pits” and at the steam engines responsible for “draining a mass of water which is never exhausted, in order that men may work and live in what would otherwise be only a vast pond.” Yet despite such measures, acute and chronic dangers nonetheless lurked wherever Palmer ventured on his “underground walks.” He decried such “fearful sources of danger and disease to the workman” as the explosive methane emitted from the coal seams into a Sheffield colliery with a “loud singing sound very much like that of a tea-kettle, close to the boiling point.” He also recoiled at the complaints of colliers secreted away from “wholesome sunshine and the light of Heaven,” who spoke to him “of the crouching, confined position which their labor necessitated.”10

Most shocking of all to the young American, however, was the use of female and child labor in and around the mines. Depicting mining women as “a stout, muscular race, equipped with heavy boots,” Palmer huffed that he had to take “a second look to assure” himself “that they [were] not in reality what they seem[ed] to be, men.” Palmer was more sympathetic to the trapper boys who had to remain “sitting the whole livelong day without any light but such as would flash by them in the hands of the passing colliers,” by no means “a pleasant substitute for the race over the green fields, the playground sports and attendant sunlight, in the midst of which an English lad is usually inducted into his teens.” Mine work seemed to turn boys into drones, women into men, and manly laborers into “an inferior class of beings.”11

Appalling as Palmer found the travails of British laborers, though, he was equally concerned about the tactics workers were using to improve their lot. After attending the meeting of a colliers’ pit committee, Palmer grumbled that “these ‘Unions’ never stop with the redress of those wrongs which first caused them to be established.” Palmer ardently believed that colliers deserved relief from poor ventilation and other occupational hazards. And yet his sympathies extended only so far. “The question of wages,” he ominously warned, “will surely be entertained by those who have found that in ‘Union is strength.’” Once miners began to feel their oats, strikes “with all their attendant evils” would inevitably “come to afflict” the industry, an eventuality that would deny workmen their wages, capitalists their profits, and consumers their fuel.12

Together, Palmer’s dispatches reflected the future business giant’s dawning recognition of coal’s centrality to the industrial revolution. Palmer knew that the “omnipotence” so evident at the Wigan mills was possible only because of the “unpleasing” collieries below, just as he called coal “the real creator of all the wealth and prosperity we now witness” at Birmingham, the driving force that had turned this small town into “the iron depot of Europe and lined her streets with the shops and dwellings of princely manufacturers.” Palmer had embarked on his tour of subterranean Britain largely because he needed material to fill his Miner’s Journal letters. The more he saw of the leading industrial economy in the world, however, the more he became convinced that the real story of Britain’s success was rooted as much in the collieries as in the engineering marvels they fueled. 13

Thus William Palmer began to teach himself the art and science of reading coal strata. Palmer returned to Pennsylvania in the spring of 1856 intent on leveraging the knowledge he had amassed on his tireless wanderings through British collieries and coal-consuming industries into a career at the frontlines of America’s nascent fossil-fuel-driven economy. He had already begun to court J. Edgar Thomson, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and one of the first American railroad executives to embrace the coal age. Thomson, described by one historian as having done “more than any one man who ever lived to establish, create, and perfect the railway system of the American continent,” had taken note of Palmer’s dispatches to the Miner’s Journal and had even found time on a busy trip to London to squeeze the young American into his schedule. For the remainder of his trip, Palmer had provided Thomson with detailed reports on how British railroads used coal and coke. Once back in the states, Palmer began conducting extensive surveys of American coal properties for Thomson. Two years later, he performed a series of experiments that helped convert Pennsylvania’s locomotives to coal from wood, which was fast becoming scarce and expensive in the Northeast. Even as these accomplishments earned Palmer membership in Philadelphia’s prestigious Franklin Institute, he was supplementing his geological skills with business acumen. In 1857 he became secretary of the Westmoreland Coal Company at the early age of nineteen. Shortly thereafter, Palmer began a job that would change the course of his life, a four-year tenure as Thomson’s private secretary, during which time Palmer worked closely with Thomas Scott and Andrew Carnegie.14

Lincoln’s election in 1860 and the South’s secession brought Palmer, raised like many of his fellow Quakers as an ardent opponent of slavery, to take up arms. He organized a “picked body of light cavalry” in the fall of 1861 and served as its commander for the duration of the war. Named the Anderson Troop, after Fort Sumter’s defender, and later mustered into service as the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry, Palmer’s special forces regiment swept down the Mississippi in 1862, then back to Pennsylvania for drilling and reorganization. As Robert E. Lee’s army withdrew following the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Palmer volunteered to spy behind enemy lines. Though captured in civilian clothes, Palmer managed to avoid summary execution by playing the role of W. J. Peters, a Baltimore-based mining engineer of Palmer’s invention. After several months in the Confederate prison in Richmond known as Castle Thunder, as he related after the war in a Harper’s article entitled “The General’s Story,” Palmer was freed in an exchange of prisoners. He went on to lead his men through two more years of fierce fighting in eastern Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. The soldier who “never expected to come back” from the fighting finished the war holding a brevet commission as brigadier general, making him the highest-ranking Quaker in either army.15

And though he laid down his arms at war’s end “without a scratch” on his body, Palmer would always be marked by the war. Soon after returning to his regiment from prison, Palmer detailed to his father the new philosophy of life he had adopted at Castle Thunder. “If we do what seems for the best at the time, I think nothing further is required of us. Let Providence attend to the rest.” This cast of mind, as Palmer would later admit, rendered him “too reckless to care for consequences, or the opinions of people.” Foremost among the people whose “opinions” he dismissed were his troops, many of whom grumbled at their commander’s merciless drilling and haughty demeanor. His republican and Quaker tenets now hardened by militarism, Palmer set out to make his mark in the world with the self-assurance of a man who had served his country and cheated death while many of his friends were serving themselves.16

Even before the war ended, J. Edgar Thomson had offered Palmer a position of considerable authority and responsibility, as secretary-treasurer for the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division, renamed the Kansas Pacific (K.P.) in 1868. Thomson and his associates at the Pennsylvania Railroad had invested both their hopes and their money in this now forgotten transcontinental pathway, destined to become one of history’s great losers when the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific linked up in May 1869. Soon after acceptin...