a lot of people have forgotten this strike, including the Wobblies, and it was probably the most successful strike they waged While historians have written prolifically about the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, there's been a lack of attention to the Columbine Massacre in which police shot and killed six striking coal miners and wounded 60 more protesters during the 1927 1928 Colorado Coal Strike. Even though its aftermath exerted far more influence on subsequent national labor policies.
In her 2023 book, Remembering Ludlow, but Forgetting the Columbine, the 1927 1928 Colorado Coal Strike, Lee Campbell Hale reorients understandings of labor history from the 1920s through the 1960s and the construction of public memory, and forgetting, Surrounding those events, our colleague, Robert Lindgren, who hosts the labor exchange radio show on KGNU Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins recently released a three part interview with Campbell Hale on today's show.
Part one of that series, You'll find the rest on the labor exchange podcast. We've got a link in the show notes and on labor history in two. the year was 1909. That was the day the United States Supreme Court decided the case Moyers v. Peabody. The case grew out of the Colorado Labor Wars, a series of back to back strikes in 1903 and 1904 in the precious metals mines and ore mills. I'm Chris Garlock, and this is Labor History Today.
This is the Labor Exchange on KGNU, Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins. I'm your host Robert Lindgren with the Denver Newspaper Guild and Colorado AFL CIO. You can find us online on KGNU's website and your favorite podcast app by searching for KGNU Labor Exchange. our guest today is Lee Campbell Hale, author of Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine, the 1927 to 1928, Colorado Coal Strike. Hi Lee, thanks for being on the show. Hi, thanks for having me.
Okay. So we always like to start by getting to know our guests. So if you don't mind, start out telling us a bit about yourself. Okay, that's easy. I'm fairly recently retired. I've spent almost all my life teaching. My first teaching jobs were in middle school in Arkansas. I've taught in Arkansas, California, mostly in Colorado. I've taught every grade, I like to say, between 6th grade and seniors in college.
so my longest gig was at Fairview High School in Boulder and the way our contract works is that. The more you get paid more for your years of service and your years of education, but my husband and I were always so broke. I could never go back to school, especially trying to have 3 kids at home, you know, and after going 8 years with no raise, I decided I better buckle up and go back to school and I went down and talked to the history department and they were wonderful and they worked with me.
So I got in to the history department where I got my master's. And then I got my PhD there, as I was teaching and having 3 kids at home. So, you know, I'm not very sympathetic to people who tell me they don't have time for things. I'm like, yeah, you can figure this out. obviously, you I needed a topic for my dissertation and my dad was a coal miner and my grandparents were coal miners. And so we come from this long history of coal mining.
So I'd heard all these coal mining stories growing up and I live in Lafayette, which is a coal mining town. and so at first, everybody else, I started looking into the long strike, that had Ludlow in it. But then I figured. What in the world can I add to that hasn't already been written about? And so I was looking for a strike, maybe that didn't have as much written about it. And that's how I came across that 1927 1928 Colorado Coal Strike, which is the main subject of my book.
And so as I started doing research, of course, it expanded and expanded and expanded and turned into a whole different thing. and so, you know, got my Dissertation got my big pay raise. Yay. I went on to, teach at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma. And then I taught for 4 years at University of Colorado in Denver. And, a couple of years ago, I decided that was about the end of it. So I hung up, but during the lockdown, I turned my dissertation into a manuscript for a book.
that's when that happened and it got published in February of 2013. And here I am. Yeah. Yeah. And reading your book, there were a lot of lessons to someone who reads a lot of labor history that I didn't know. And I thought it was interesting because you do go into, why Ludlow is so well remembered and, The Columbine mine strike, the 1927 28 strike is so forgotten.
so the book covers that 1927 1928 coal strike in serene Colorado, a former company town near Erie, as well as topics such as the challenges of oral history collection, and their analysis and this collective amnesia on this strike versus Ludlow. But can you give us some basic background on this strike and perhaps, more broadly the labor strike.
fields of colorado more Sure, the thing that attracted me to this track besides the fact that it hadn't been written about very much is that I first started off with an interest in women's history and Josephine Roach, owned the Rocky Mountain fuel company and so she had this reputation as this pro labor reformer and I was interested in finding out more about that. That and I was also interested in finding out about the roles of the women in the strike.
my original plan was to contrast Josephine Roach, this, progressive mine owner with Elizabeth, the mother of 17, who had this apparently key role in the Columbine massacre, that happened on, just briefly talk about the Columbine massacre. the strike broke out, in October and, it escalated, obviously, and people, strikers were coalescing on the very few, minds that were staying open.
And 1 of those was the Columbine, which, as you said, was in this company town of serene and so locals would go there in groups of anywhere from a couple of 100 to 1 was estimated up to 1000 to March on this. company town before the miners would go to work, essentially trying to get them to not go to work.
And so all the main account that I read, that all the accounts I'd read, linked this woman, Elizabeth Brannick to the protests and to the morning, the Columbine massacre that happened on November 21st, 1927, where 20 strike police Open fire on strikers killed, six and maybe wounded as many as 60 people. and, she was always listed in these accounts. So my original idea was to contrast these two women. But boy, I couldn't find much information on Ms. Brannick, you know.
Uh, Roach was all over the place, but Brannick, was an immigrant who barely spoke English and didn't write it. And didn't leave records. So over the course of this research, the, focus of the research changed. Another thing that brought me into the interest of this strike was that it was led by the industrial workers of the world, which as somebody who taught US history and knew these textbooks back and forward, almost all textbooks said that the, IWW or the Wobblies were dead.
by the end of World War One. And so my question was, well, gee whiz, if they were dead, how did they lead? Most historians would agree is the most successful strike in Colorado history and it's called the most successful because Every all the coal miners in the state walked out and because when the strike was over, they actually won most of their demands. Um, so, in contrast to the earlier strike that the United mine workers wage between 1910 and 1914, the, um, w lost that strike.
and so that was, even though it's more famous, it was ultimately an unsuccessful strike. Yeah, and that's what really hit me when I first started hearing about the press around your book was, you know, I'm a union organizer. So you get into labor history through maybe the I. W. W. hearing about the music or those sorts of things. And that was my understanding was, yeah, the, the I. W. W. was basically, you know, destroyed by World War one . I mean, they're still around today.
There's still things happening. Ahmed White, who we had on, gently, brought me back from when I was mentioning this earlier, but, when I saw your book, I was like, wait a minute. This doesn't make sense because one it's so late and one it's in Colorado. I mean, I'd even say for Colorado history. You kind of think like the break in 05 when the IWW is formed and you have the Western Federation of miners.
It's actually like, we're still, you know, the Western Federation of miners, which became the mind mill. Like, that's kind of like pretty. Yeah. Yeah. jarring to me as someone who thinks they know some of Colorado's labor history, to see that wasn't really the, the case, last night, I decided to go on the IWW's, Wikipedia page, which is where, a lot of folks would get their first taste of history. If they're looking on the web, doesn't mention the strike on, and that's their own history.
And that I thought was really interesting too, which is something I address in the book, is a lot of people have forgotten this strike, including the Wobblies, and it was probably the most successful strike they waged, except for maybe, like on the East Coast. I think they had a couple of pretty successful strikes there. but yeah, it's interesting. and I address that in the book, why that's the case. And of course, I point the finger at, Thompson, Yeah.
briefly, if you want to just mention who Fred Thompson, was just, for the listeners. sure. So, Fred Thompson, was a wobbly, and he was funny, and smart, organized, and an activist, and he probably had more to do. With his historical revival of the Wobblies starting in the mid to mid 1950s through the 1960s than anybody else. And so he kept a lot of records that had been destroyed during the World War 1, Red scare type, raids.
and he wrote probably the 1st official history of the wobblies in 1955 and he worked with Joyce corn blue and she wrote this fabulous book on the Wobblies? there was a collection of, Wobbly, art and songs and lore and oral histories and stuff like that. But he worked with her and the archivist, of course, at William State University. in the Walter Ruther library to put together an incredible, archival collection of the wobblies. So he worked really hard to put this archives together.
But if you read any histories of the wobblies in the 60s, almost all of them refer to Fred, Fred Thompson, because they interviewed him and he would look over all their, research and say, no, this is right or no, this is wrong and whatever, you know, like everybody else, one of the first accounts I ever read of the strike was in his 1955 book, but then when I went to the archives, this is, this is sort of the, uh, serendipity of archival research. Right?
So I had a two week grant from CU Boulder. Yay. And, uh, I'd been through everything I could find on the strike and I still had like Three or four days left, because and so I thought, what the hell? I'll just look at Thompson's papers. And those, of course, turned out to be the most important papers of all, because I realized that his fingerprints weren't.
Every paper because he was the one who had been collecting all this stuff and, this guy, Bob Rossi had written him a letter and said, Hey, what's up with the 2728 strike? How come there's not much there and, and, Thompson replied. Oh, that's been well written about and he gave him all these sources. And then I started looking at and I thought, wait a minute. this doesn't add up. this ain't right. Something's going on here.
And the more I dug, the more I realized that one of the, that Thompson had been brought in March of 1928. and he's one of the reasons that the successes of the strike were, quashed, You were listening to labor history today. On today's show Lee Campbell Hale talks about her 2023 book, remembering Ludlow. But forgetting the Columbine, the 19 27 28. Colorado coal strike. We'll be back with the rest of our interview in a moment right after Rick Smith tells us about another moment.
In the Colorado labor wars. I'm Rick Smith and this is Labor History in Two. On this day in labor history, the year was 1909. That was the day the United States Supreme Court decided the case Moyers v. Peabody. The case grew out of the Colorado Labor Wars, a series of back to back strikes in 1903 and 1904 in the precious metals mines and ore mills.
The Colorado National Guard meted out violent assaults, arrests, and deportations against strikers, often on orders from Colorado Governor James Peabody. The state militia routinely rounded up strikers and union leaders, detained them for weeks in bullpens, and ignored their habeas corpus petitions. Western Federation of Miners President Charles Moyer arrived in Telluride during a strike to find these repressive conditions. He signed a poster that read, Is Colorado in America?
The poster included an image listing the many violations of basic democratic rights on the American flag. Moyer was arrested in March of 1904 for desecration of the American flag on the poster. He was detained on the grounds of military necessity, even after the courts ordered his release. His case traveled through the state and federal courts until the Supreme Court ruled.
They held that the governor and officers of a state national guard, acting in good faith and under authority of law, may imprison, without probable cause, a citizen of the United States in times of insurrection and deny that citizen the right of habeas corpus. The ruling radicalized the labor movement. Many concluded there could be no justice through the court system. A later case successfully challenged the ruling on the basis that the claims of insurrection were subject to judicial review.
The ruling, however controversial, still stands today and was invoked after 9 11 in the 2004 ruling Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. For more information, go to laborhistoryin2. com, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter at laborhistoryin2. Back now to our interview with Lee Campbell hail about her 2023 book. Remembering Ludlow, but for getting the Columbine, The 19 27, 19 28.
Colorado coal strike. Here's Robert Lindgren who hosts the labor exchange, your radio show on kg and you Boulder, Denver and Fort Collins, where this interview originally appeared. Yeah. And it's funny, my notes preparing for this, I didn't actually include, talking about Fred Thompson because, obviously in the book, the more. Pertinent labor leader is a s Embry, who in some ways had that conflict with Thompson.
So if you wanna maybe, talk about a s Embry, who he was, what his importance was to the strike, in Colorado. Sure. So the, what I structured this book, and some people have said, this is really hard to follow. I'm like, I'm sorry, . I doesn't mean for it to be hard to follow. It was easy enough to follow. It's hard to make a radio show outta . Oh, okay. I wanted to cover this strike using multiple perspectives, and I tried to figure out a way to do that.
And for me, the best way to do that was to cover it from the point of view of A. S. Embry, who was the, IWFS strike leader.
The wobbly strike leader, Josephine Roach, who was the principal owner of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, where the Columbine Massacre took place, and then this guy, Powers Hapgood, who I described as like the Forrest Gump of the labor movement, and luckily for historians, he's great because he was a Harvard guy, and he wrote about 10 letters a day, and they're all archived and at, and then in Indiana University, thank God.
and Josephine broach brought him in after she had, settled the strike and, several months later, brought in the United mine workers, with an exclusive contract. And of course, another question there was if the wobblies wage the strike, why did the United mine workers get. The contract, even though they had nothing to do with the strike. So those were my three research questions about Josephine Roach's role. If the IWW was really dead, how did it wage the strike?
And then if it waged the strike, why did the United Mine Workers get the contract? So I started off the book with these, many histories of these three different people. Kind of explaining how they ended up in Colorado in 1927 at the same, in 28 at the same time, at the same place and what had brought them there and why they had been brought there. I think is fascinating figure. He was, born in Blackhead, Newfoundland, which is the eastern most point.
of the of the Western Hemisphere, it's closer to England than it is to, any other place. And so he was raised in this, fishing village and his dad was the preacher there. So everybody else was.
Fish for cod and then he was the preacher's kid, but they were radical Methodist Which I did some research on very interesting didn't drink didn't smoke intensely democratic all this kind of Religious belief he goes off to college and instead of training for the ministry as everybody thought he would he gets bitten by the mining bug So he majors in metal essay essaying And he took off for, the Klondike gold rush, and we don't know what happened there,
although he did have leave some records behind the record seems to indicate that he got really sick and almost died. And probably during this time, he was radicalized by what he saw around him for the big mining companies. And soon after he joined the Western Federation of miners, which had just formed. I think 1893, I'm not quite sure, but in the late 1800s, and he joined them. And, as soon as it became a thing in 1905, he joined the wobblies and he was a dual member of both.
he was a big fan of dual membership. his whole life. and he, joined the labor movement and worked the whole rest of his life toward the labor movement. And most of his, apparently, he was a great organizer, he was a great speaker, but probably his most important contribution was he was a great writer and editor and he wrote and wrote and edited and edited and he moved around quite a bit. We know he was in Butte, Montana a long time. we know he was in the Pacific Northwest.
We, know he was in California. We know he was in Alaska. We know, of course, he was in Colorado. And he's mostly famous because he was the leader, in 1917 of the Copper Strike in Bisbee, Arizona, which led to, almost 1200 people getting herded onto trains and moved into New Mexico, and kept, And essentially in jail for a couple of months. So he was this wobbly leader and, he like a lot of the wobblies was jailed.
he got put in jail, in Idaho, in the early 20s, but when he got out in 1925, he went back to labor organizing and it was at that point that the wobbly sent him to Colorado. Which, why they sent him there is up for debate. Some people say it was because it was hopeless and he was, powerful and they wanted to get him out of headquarters in Chicago because he had his own following and this kind of stuff.
But he was a loyal guy and he went to Colorado and against all odds, he and several other organizers actually did a great job and organize these coal miners. So Josephine Roach, she plays a central role in the book, big and an important role in Colorado history. But if you want to talk maybe a little bit about her reputation in history before your book and the ways in which you tried to get a more truthful portrait of her, through your research.
Sure. it's funny because the very first thing that brought me to this research project, and I'm 69. Okay, I'm not, trying to hide my age or anything like that. my dad, as I mentioned, was a coal miner, but he left coal mining in the big strike in 1949. the year my sister was born, because I think he worked like three days that year. and he said, to hell with this, I'm gonna do something else. and, my grandma, I don't know.
who's, of course, since dead, was trying to get black lung payments back when that was, a big controversy. And my dad is, was very, detail oriented, to say the least. And so I watched him struggle to try to get my grandma these black lung payments. what originally drew me to this project was the whole black lung thing.
Program, which I did quite a bit of research on for various other classes and what I discovered, I discovered a lot, but I discovered that it was all tied into the, United Mine Workers Retirement and Pension Fund and that, Josephine Roche is the person who designed it and administered it for years. So she started off her life, with rich parents. She grew up in Nebraska. she went to Vassar for heaven's sake, after going to a private high school in Omaha, went to Vassar.
And then she went to Columbia and got a master's in like political science and economy in a 10 person cohort that also included Francis Perkins. and the people she met there were going to influence her and our federal government and our history for the forever, because that's where she first met, Franklin Roosevelt, Al Smith, all those people, who were involved with the New York, reform situation. her father bought into what. In 1911 would become the Rocky Mountain fuel company.
He was a co owner of it. And he did that. That was 1910 1911 at that point. That's when she had. She was just getting her, just finishing up her masters at Columbia. And instead of staying in New York, she came back to Colorado and started working in Colorado's reform. Community with, which I call 'em progressives, capital P progressives, the party, but also lowercase p Progressives, who were progressives but didn't join the progressive party.
And so she came to Colorado and this whole time she always lived with her parents when they were alive. So keep that in mind, you know, so, so that's kind of interesting, I think. and she came to Colorado and started working with Judge Ben Lindsey in the juvenile court, and, got caught up in that.
Drama and then she, the I love this period of time because this guy named George Creel comes in and he's running the Rocky Mountain news and they get to know each other as part of this progressive community. He leaves Denver, he's run out on a rail he's run out by people who don't want reformers. and he's a newspaper man, really a great newspaper man.
And he goes off and he heads up, during World War I, the Committee on Public Information, which we know now is a big propaganda arm that whipped people up and got them into an anti immigrant radical frenzy and stuff. Well, he hires Josephine Roach, and she is the only woman to head up one of those committees. And she's the only woman to head up one of those committees.
and then after that, she goes on to, be editor of the Children's Bureau, which is one of those progressive women's, called maternalist agencies that works on issues that have to do with women's health, immigration, this kind of stuff. So she was absolutely 100 percent pedigreed, educated, smart, great manager, all this kind of stuff. But then. Her parents get sick, old and sick, and she comes back and starts taking care of them. And her father dies in January of 1927. Her mother dies in June.
And suddenly she's holding half of the ownings of this Rocky Mountain fuel company. And. The evidence, there are a couple of interpretations of Josephine Roach. The first one was she was an idiot, because it all had to do with people bashing John L. Lewis during its darkest times in the 60s, and that she had just been Lewis's right hand woman who went along entirely with what he did, and she was this idiot, and she should have known better, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But then she very astutely remade her own image. Partially by donating her papers to the, University of Colorado, but I argue that it was women's history that really resuscitated her and turned her into this hero, which is great because she has many heroic qualities, but they kind of glossed over all that other extraordinarily really dark stuff in the meantime. what I tried to do in this book was restore some kind of balance, and make her into a human being.
who had both good and bad characteristics for heaven's sake, and, yes, she helped labor, but yeah, maybe she wasn't the angel of the coal mines that people had portrayed her as, well, and part of that, Part of what comes out in the book John L. Lewis was the sort of, very strong, leader of the United Mine Workers of America. some would say dictatorial, most, almost all would say dictatorial.
I think, I think you should say dictatorial, but like this friend of mine who's also, this one from the labor, history, group, I was telling her about my research and she says, yeah, he was a dictator, but he was our dictator, and I'm like, yeah. Okay. Sure. and, there's a lot to unpack there because, the black lung thing, what, one of the parts that wasn't said was, with Josephine Roche being the, administrator of it, there was a lot of denial of black lung through that fund.
it's like I said, there's a lot going on in this book, but, Roach and Lewis both had a very similar vision of what they wanted coal mining to look like, they wanted it to be efficient. They both believed in, scientific management, they both thought that coal miners should be unionized and paid well, that the job should be safe, that it should be as heavily mechanized as you could afford it to be, and and they grew to distrust the government.
government's role and for good reason, not for no reason at all. So they were part of the, modernization, program for the United Mine Workers was as mines became increasingly mechanized, especially in the 50s, increased mechanization, increase the coal dust.
That led to increased levels of black lung and as this disease got worse Both of them denied it even existed, you know which is kind of a problem when you got these guys who are totally suffering from black lung and The people who are head of the retirement and pension fund and who run the hospitals which were wildly inventive to come up with these, minors hospitals, but if you're denying that black lung exists, that's a problem.
So in the 1960s, a really strange group of people come together to form this black lung movement, which includes Ralph Nader. And there's Raiders, people from a bunch of law students and law professors and at West Virginia and, and dissatisfied coal miners who are finding that they can't get their pension because they're sick and their own unions telling them they're not sick. So they formed this, 3 part alliance that formed this black lung movement that ultimately got the.
Federal government to pay black lung pensions to anybody who had mined coal during a certain time period, whether they could prove they had the disease or not, which is really interesting, but yeah, a whole different topic there. Lee Campbell Hale talking about her a 20, 23 book, remembering Ludlow. But forgetting the Columbine, the 19 27, 19 28, Colorado cold, straight. With Robert Lindgren who hosts the labor exchange radio show on K G N U Boulder, Denver and Fort Collins.
Where this interview originally appeared. This is part one of a three-part interview you can find parts two and three on the labor exchange on your favorite podcast platform. And we've got links in the show notes. That's it for this week's edition of labor history today, you can subscribe to LHT on your favorite podcast app, even better. If you like what you hear. Sure. Hope you do like it in your podcast app. Pass it along and leave a review that really helps folks to find the show.
Labor history into is a partnership between the Illinois labor history society and the Rick Smith show or labor theme to radio show out of Pennsylvania. Our music today was dark black, coal by Logan Halstead. Labor history today was produced by the labor heritage foundation and the Kalmanovitz initiative for labor in the working poor at Georgetown university. You can keep up with all the latest labor arts news. So scribe to the labor heritage foundations, weekly newsletter. Labor heritage.org.
For labor history today, this has been Chris Garlock. Thanks for listening. K making history. And we'll see you next time.