Hey everybody, this is the Martyr Maid Podcast. I am Daryl Cooper, and you are listening to episode 21, the first episode of a new series. that i've been working on for a long time on the american labor wars called who's america that title who's america can be read as a possessive Who's America? As in, who does America belong to? Or it can be read as a conjunction. Who is America? Because both questions are the subject of this series. If you're listening to this on the main feed...
That's because a week or two has passed after I released this episode first on Substack for MartyrMade subscribers. I will be doing that from now on. My cat's got to eat somehow. So those of you who like to queue up a new Martyrmaid episode as soon as it drops, please consider heading on over to martyrmaid.substack.com. and subscribe for just five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year.
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Finally, if you're the kind of person who's interested in learning wilderness survival and leadership along with mindfulness and breath work and more, head on over to primal-u.live for... information about a three-day course that they've got coming up in June. People who run it are a friend of the show, and I encourage you to check it out. Oh, actually, finally, as many of you know, I have another podcast called The Unraveling with my friend Jocko Willink.
retired Navy SEAL commander and Iraq war veteran. In that podcast, Jocko and I discuss historical issues as well as current events and try to pull the threads that connect one to the other. If you're somehow not aware of Jocko's other podcast called Jocko Podcast, definitely check that out. Personally, my favorite episode is probably 115.
There's so many good ones, but that one just stuck with me. Episode number 115, which is an interview and a book reading with Marine Corps combat veteran and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Dakota Meyer. It's a great, great episode. Jocko has a range of products available at originmaine.com. O-R-I-G-I-N, originmaine, M-A-I-N-E as in the state, all one word, .com.
very very high quality handmade clothing and boots as well as the only protein powder krill oil and energy drinks i allow in my home Okay, that last one's a lie. I'm a caffeine freak, so I will pretty much drink whatever you put in front of me. But the other ones are true. This episode is just a prologue.
I didn't really plan on doing it at first. I've been working on the first actual episode of this series for the last couple months. But as I started to get closer to the release time, I just thought back and I used a prologue to set the stage for the Jonestown series. Kind of like that format. The next episode, the actual first episode, is on the largest insurrection in American history since the Civil War.
But I decided to put this first to kick things off and kind of set the tune. Good news is that means the next episode is already almost done, and so it'll be following not far behind this one. So with no further ado, let's get this thing started. This is the prologue of Who's America? The American Labor Wars. Here we go. I'm content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No.
God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell does exist. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. ourselves apart for this small question of religion. Colonies ought to be emunctaries, or sinks of states. to drain away the filth. John White, The Planter's Plea, 1630. Quote, We know what class is, or we think we do.
Economic stratification created by wealth and privilege. But popular American history is commonly told, dramatized, without much reference to the existence of social classes. It is as though in separating from Great Britain, the United States somehow magically escaped the bonds of class and derived a higher consciousness of enriched possibility. After all,
The U.S. Senate is not the House of Lords. School books teach the national narrative along the lines of how land and liberty were won, or how ordinary folks seized opportunity. The hallowed American dream is the gold standard by which politicians and voters alike are meant to measure the quality of life as each generation pursues its own definition of happiness, unfettered by the restraints of birth, who your parents are.
or station, the position you start out from in the class system. Our cherished myths are at once bolstering and debilitating. All manner created equal was successfully employed as a motto to define the promise of America's open spaces and a united people's moral self-regard in distinguishing themselves from a host of hopeless societies abroad. The idea of America was presented by its chief promoters with great panache.
A vision of how a modern republic might prove itself revolutionary in terms of social mobility in a world dominated by monarchy and fixed aristocracy. All that is bolstering. However... the reality on the ground was considerably different. In the most literal terms, as we shall see, British colonists promoted a dual agenda. One involved reducing poverty back in England.
and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive to the new world. After settlement, colonial outposts exploited their unfree laborers, indentured servants, slaves, and children. and saw such expendable classes as human waste. The poor, the waste, did not disappear, and by the early 18th century they were seen as a permanent breed.
This way of classifying the poor took hold in the United States. In grand fashion, promoters of colonization imagined America not as an Eden of opportunity, but as a giant rubbish heap that could be transformed into productive terrain. Expendable people, waste people, was a common term, would be unloaded from England. Their labor would germinate a distant wasteland. Harsh as it sounds, the idle poor, dregs of society.
were to be sent thither simply to throw down manure and die in a vacuous muck. Most settlers in the 17th century did not envision their forced exile as the start of a city upon a hill.
They did not express undying confidence in Penn's holy experiment. Dreamers dreamt, but few settlers came to America to fulfill any divine plan. During the 1600s, Far from being ranked as valued British subjects, the great majority of early colonists were classified as surplus population and expendable rubbish, a rude rather than robust population. The English subscribed to the idea that the poor dregs would be weeded out of English society in four ways.
Either nature would reduce the burden of the poor through food shortages, starvation, and disease, or, drawn into crime, they might end up on the gallows. Finally, Some would be impressed by force or lured by bounties to fight and die in foreign wars, or else be shipped off to the colonies. Such worthless drones as these could be removed to colonial outposts that were in short supply of able-bodied laborers.
The English were obsessed with waste, which was why America was first and foremost a wasteland in their eyes. Wasteland meant undeveloped land. Land that was outside the circulation of commercial exchange and apart from the understood rules of agricultural production. Wasteland was idle land. Arable tracts of desirable property could only be associated with furrowed fields, rows of crops and fruit trees, golden waves of grain and pasture for cattle and sheep. Waste was wealth as yet unrealized.
It was not just land that could be waste. People could be waste, too. Idle and unused, they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land to be better, albeit no more humanely, put to use. This view of poverty was widely shared. One persistent project, first promoted in 1580 but never realized, involved raising a fleet of hundred-ton fishing vessels comprising 10,000 men.
half of whom were to be impoverished vagrants forced into service. The galley labor scheme was designed to beat the famously industrious Dutch at the fishing trade. Leading mathematician and geographer John Dee was another who imagined a maritime solution to poverty. In 1577, as the British Navy expanded, he proposed converting the poor into sailors. Others wished for the indigent to be swept from the streets, one way or another.
whether gathered up as forced laborers building highways and fortifications, or else herded into prisons and workhouses. The most ardent early promoters of colonization envisioned the American colony as one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. As the waste firm of America was settled,
it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets. Seeing the indigent as wastrels, as the dregs of society, was certainly nothing new. The English had waged a war against the poor, especially vagrants and vagabonds, for generations. A series of laws in the 14th century led to a concerted campaign to root out this wretched mother-of-all-vice.
By the 16th century, harsh laws and punishments were fixed in place. Public stocks were built in towns for runaway servants, along with whipping posts and cages variously placed around London. Hot branding irons and ear boring identified this underclass and set them apart as a criminal contingent. An act of 1547 allowed for vagrants to be branded with a V on their breasts and enslaved.
Slums envelop London. As one observer remarked in 1608, the heavy concentrations of poor created a subterranean colony of dirty and disfigured monsters living in caves. They were accused of breeding rapidly and infecting the city with a plague of poverty. Distant American colonies were presented as the cure. The poor could be purged.
The famous poet and clergyman John Donne wrote of Virginia in this fashion, describing the new colony as the nation's spleen and liver, draining the ill humors of the body to breed good blood. Others used... less delicate imagery. American colonies were imunctories, excreting human waste from the body politic." That passage is from the book White Trash, the 400-year untold history of class in America by Nancy Eisenberg. Maybe the first thing to know about America...
is that it was born as a profit-making enterprise. Not only that it was a society geared toward business, but literally, many of the early colonies... were owned by corporations whose investors demanded to see an immediate return on their share the mythology of america is the new jerusalem the land of liberty and the city on the hill
was one invented by and circulated among that narrow cast of wealthy or upwardly mobile settlers who formed just a very small slice of the early American population. The vast majority of Americans.
White, black, any color, the vast majority who arrived before the American Revolution came to this country in chains. The recent 1619 project of the New York Times suggested that the narrative of American history ought to be pushed back to begin in 1619 the year that the first African slaves arrived in the colonies but actually that initial shipment of Africans were not
technically slaves they were indentured servants and most of them had been granted their freedom within the decade which is to say that 1619 is probably not a good year to begin the story even if we accept their framing since indentured servitude existed before that year and in fact formed the basis on which colonial america was being built i don't say that to compare the plight of european indentured servants to african slaves
Because the stories that I'm going to be telling in this series are not about white people or black or brown or any other color of people. These stories are about America, about American people. A country born as it was out of the rigid class system of England and about those people who fought and very often died. So that you and I and everyone else listening today don't work 14 to 16 hour days in terrible and dangerous conditions for starvation wages. That outcome was not avoided by chance.
It was not avoided due to some natural process of historical development. No, no, no. That outcome was avoided because working men and women faced down police and mercenaries. assassins, even the National Guard and the U.S. Army to ensure that their children, and we, their great-great-great-grandchildren, grew up in a country that they might be able to call their own.
The point of this next piece is not to make a racial point, but to illustrate that capital respects no color, no creed, no distinction of gender, even age in its relationship to its human.
resources. This article is from the African American publication, Ebony Magazine. It's from November 1969. Quote, When someone removes the cataracts of whiteness from our eyes, and when we look with unclouded vision on the bloody shadows of the American past, we will recognize for the first time that the Afro-American
who was so often second in freedom, was also second in slavery. Indeed, it will be revealed that the Afro-American was third in slavery, for he inherited his chains in a manner of speaking from the pioneer bondsmen who were red... and white the story of this succession of how the red bondsman and the white bondsman passed on the torch of forced labor to the black bondsman and of how white men created a system of white servitude
which lasted in America for more than 200 years. The story of how this system was created and why. of how white men and white women and white children were bought and sold like cattle and transported across the seas in foul slave ships. The story of how all this happened.
of how the white planter reduced white people to temporary and lifetime servitude before stretching out his hands to Ethiopia has never been told before in all its dimensions. As a matter of fact, The traditional embalmers of American experience seem to find white servitude enormously embarrassing and prefer to dwell at length on black bondage in America.
But this maneuver distorts both black bondage and the American experience. For white bondage and red bondage are the missing legs of the triangle of American servitude. and this triangle defines the initial American experience as an experiment in compulsion. Both red and white bondage were integral parts of this experiment.
but white bondage was particularly important. In the first place, white bondage lasted for more than two centuries and involved a majority of the white immigrants to the American colonies. It has been estimated that at least two out of every three white colonists worked for a term of years in the fields or kitchens as semi-slaves.
A second point of immense importance in this whole equation is the fact that white servitude was the historic foundation upon which the system of black slavery was constructed. In other words, white servitude was the historic proving ground for the mechanisms of control and subordination used in Afro-American slavery. The plantation past system, the fugitive slave law.
The use of the overseer and the house servant and the Uncle Tom, the forced separation of parents and children on the auction block and the sexual exploitation of servant women, the whipping post, the slave chains, and the branding iron. All these mechanisms were tried out and perfected first on white men and white women.
Masters also developed a theory of internal white racism and used the traditional sambo and minstrel stereotypes to characterize white servants who were said to be good-natured and faithful. but biologically inferior and subject to laziness, immorality, and crime.
And all of this would seem to suggest that nothing substantial can be said about the mechanisms of black bondage in America except against the background and within the perspective of the system of white bondage in America. How did the system develop? And why? It developed primarily because of a desperate need for labor.
It has been suggested that the white man's sense of humanity kept him from enslaving white people, but as Eric Williams has said, there is no evidence of this sense of humanity in the record. The white founding fathers needed labor. They were willing to do anything to get labor. They did not care what color that labor was or what religion it professed or what country it came from. They first enslaved the Indians, and when that supply became uncertain,
They drafted the poor whites of Europe. But the supply of poor whites was limited, and so only then did they turn their eyes to Africa. It should be noted that both white and black bondage grew out of and reflected internal tensions and contradictions in Europe. These tensions and contradictions revolved around certain ideas relating to the proper subordination and social segregation of white people.
Mercantilist ideas about national power and Lebensraum for the masses in a new milieu of competitive egoism growing out of the Renaissance and the commercial revolution. And flowing with and out of all this... was a new spirit of adventure and ruthlessness, which included a certain contempt for human beings of any color if they were seen to be poor or unproductive.
These mental attitudes reflected, in turn, certain material contradictions in Europe which was a confused and afflicted place on the eve of colonial expansion. Nothing indicates this more clearly than the social chaos of England. where the upper classes were engaged in the bloody process of driving the peasants from the land.
We are told that on the eve of the founding of the plantations of Virginia and Massachusetts, the roads and fields of England swarmed with beggars, vagabonds and thieves. Unemployment was at an all-time high. and the relief rolls bulged with supplicants. Instead of dealing with the white poor on a basis of humanity, the rulers of English society drove them against the wall by enacting drastic vagrancy and poor laws.
It was in this setting of social nightmare that England embarked on its career of colonialism. As so many scholars have suggested, one of the major causes of this movement was the idea that England needed a dumping ground for its undesirables. Velasco, the Spanish minister to England, said as much in a 1611 letter to his monarch. In quoting Velasco, their principal reason for colonizing these parts is to give an outlet for so many idle, wretched people as they have in England.
thus prevent the dangers that might be feared of them. However that might be, the fact remains that the idle wretched people became the first fodder of colonialism. And they played this role under a system of forced labor with deep roots in European experience. By this time, of course, the institution of slavery had virtually died out in Europe.
a casualty of agrarian feudalism in which peasants who might otherwise have been vulnerable to enslavement served a lord of the aristocracy who wasn't going to allow his tax base and labor force to be carried off. But other forms of forced labor... including the apprenticeship system, were common. And when the opening of the New World created a demand which free labor could not satisfy, the colonists created a system of forced labor based loosely on the old apprenticeship system.
Under the new system, called indentured servitude, a person sold himself or was sold for a stipulated number of years, usually from two to seven, although some were sold into lifetime slavery. to pay the cost of his transportation to America. The indentured servant, as the white bondsmen were called, signed a contract of indenture in England or in America.
The ranks of white servitude also included convicts, who were sentenced to terms of service, usually 7 to 14 years, in the colonies in lieu of prison sentences. Kidnapped men, women, and children. wives fleeing husbands, and children fleeing fathers and mothers. As the system developed in America, other forms and styles of servitude sprang up.
illegitimate children and the children of the poor were routinely bound out until they were 21. Colonial adults were also bound out to pay debts or satisfy legal requirements.
This system did not spring full-blown from the heads of the original settlers. It evolved piece by piece, act by act, within the context of the colonial syndrome. As Balaga has shown... the system deteriorated and tended to pass into a property relation which asserted a control over the bodies and liberties of their person during their service as if they were things
The system of white servitude evolved in America, but it evolved within a context of experience which came to America with the first white immigrants. In fact, a large proportion of the first English immigrants were bound to service or labor for an unspecified number of years. Most of the pioneer Virginia settlers, for example, were de facto slaves of the Virginia Company.
which banned private property and ruled by martial law. Molina and other inhabitants complained that they were being treated like slaves. According to surviving documents, the first white settlers in Virginia were driven to work in gangs and punished severely for minor infractions. Anyone who missed church on Sunday was to lie neck and heels that night and officially reduced to slavery for a week. For the third offense, the colonist was liable to official enslavement for over a year.
Things were not much better further north, where the Puritans began their crusade for democracy by reducing to servitude a relatively large number of white men. It was in 1628 that white bondage began in the Puritan Commonwealth. In that year, 180 servants landed at Salem to prepare the food and homes for the pioneers of the history books who came over a year later. In addition to the men and women held to service or labor,
Many white pioneers were condemned to slavery within a few years after their first landing. In 1609, Henry Spellman, a Virginian colonist, was apparently sold to the Indians by Captain John Smith. Spellman... who was rescued a year later, said, I was carried by Captain John Smith, our president, to Ye Fales and Ye Little Powhatan, where, unknown to me, he sold me to him.
This was apparently a fairly common occurrence in the early days, for we are also told that in 1609, Admiral Newport gave Powhatan a boy named Thomas Salvage in exchange for an Indian servant. A few years later, the colony of Massachusetts was openly sentencing white men to slavery for penal offenses. In 1641, for example, William Andrews was condemned to slavery by the general court for assaulting his master.
John Hazelwood and Giles Player were also sentenced to slavery for theft and housebreaking. Although some Indians were reduced to slavery and servitude in the first decade of the 17th century, the colonial masters continued to rely on the poor whites of Europe. From the very beginning, poor white children were picked up on the streets and in the almshouses of London and Bristol and Amsterdam and shipped off to the colonies.
The first step on this road was taken at the first meeting of a representative political body in white America, its very first meeting in Jamestown. The Virginia legislature provided for the recording and enforcing of contracts of indenture, forbade servants from marrying without consent, and authorized masters to whip their servants.
When, towards the end of this interesting year, the first blacks landed at Jamestown, they found the system of servitude firmly established and most of the white population living in the shadow of chains. In that same year, a ship from London brought 100 white women and they were bought up immediately at a price of 120 pounds of tobacco each. Another memorable event of the year was the arrival of 100 poor children from the streets of England.
Eight years later, about 1,500 kidnapped children were sent to Virginia while the authorities pleaded for another shipment of the friendless boys and girls. The number of servants crossing the Atlantic increased year by year, and by the middle of the century, the trade in white men was an international business which commanded the attention of politicians, merchants, captains, and bankers.
The servants came from all over Christian Europe, from Germany and Holland and Sweden and Scotland. Most, however, came from England and Ireland. They came, these Christian demi-slaves. the same way most black slaves came, crammed shoulder to shoulder, toe to toe, the living and the dead side by side in the unventilated holds of crowded ships. In this respect, and others,
There were striking similarities between the white slave trade and the black slave trade. In fact, many of the same ports and the same merchants were involved in both trades. Some of the big African slave traders acquired their experience and capital in the white servant trade. There were also common mechanisms in the systems of capture and delivery.
It was not for nothing that the trade in Irish servants was called the Irish slave trade. As a side note, the 1611 King James Bible used the term servant where Most other versions use slave or bondsman. So that's a context worth keeping in mind when that word servant is used in secular documents of the same age. Back to the article. Whether white men or black men or red men was big business, and the men who profited from that business used the accepted merchandising and marketing skills.
Most of the big traders and captains relied on hired agents who scoured the countryside, distributing propaganda leaflets and trumpeting the virtues of life as a bonded servant in Virginia or Maryland or Pennsylvania. But when these methods failed, other forms of persuasion were used, including kidnapping and coercion, usually with the explicit or implicit cooperation of the authorities.
Ruthless agents called spirits openly kidnapped men, women, and children on the streets of Bristol and other cities and held them in depots until the day of departure. These spirits were good at their trade. One man said that he had spirited away 500 persons a year for 12 years. In 1617, an affidavit was sworn out against one William Thine, who spirited away 840 persons in a single year.
As can be imagined, this was not a particularly good period for people who liked to walk the streets alone. In fact, things got so bad in London that one could precipitate a riot by shouting the word, Spirit. There were other stratagems equally successful. Some ship captains made a practice of visiting the Clerkenwell House of Correction and plying the women prisoners with drinks. When the women were sufficiently drunk,
The captains, with the connivance of the warden, would carry them off to America. On November 17, 1692, one Narcissus Luttrell noted in his diary that a ship lay in Leith going for Virginia. on board which the magistrates had ordered 50 immoral women out of the houses of correction and 30 others who walked the streets after 10 at night. From time to time, the colonial authorities scheduled special projects.
For example, there was the famous and controversial project for sending some 1000 young Irish girls to Jamaica for breeding purposes. No one seems to know what happened to this plan, but there is a letter of one Henry Cromwell, which throws a curious light on the age. It is not in the least doubted that you may have such number of them as you shall think fit to make use upon this account. Another source of unwilling colonists was the penitentiary.
The best estimates suggest that at least 50,000 convicts were shipped to America in this period, and that most of them went to Virginia and Maryland, which were known in some circles as penal colonies. Marcus W. Jernigan author of Laboring Independent Classes in Colonial America, has written, In this connection, it has been suggested that American genealogists in search of missing data to complete their family tree
would find a rich mine of unexplored material in the archives of the prisons of Newgate and Old Bailey, the latter filling 110 manuscript volumes. Some of the convicts, incidentally, were openly identified as slaves and bound for life. Political prisoners, defeated soldiers, Irish priests, Quakers, and other dissenters
completed the cast of characters for the white servant trade drama. The political prisoners served for varying lengths of time, but some were slaves condemned in the language of the day to serve in our colonies in America during the term of their natural lives. The survivors of the first stage of the process of selection were assembled at ports and packed like fish into the holds of ships for the 8-12 week trip to America. Under the best circumstances, this trip was a harrowing experience.
Under the conditions imposed on the servants, it was almost insupportable. There was little or no room for movement between decks. The food was poor and scant, and mortality was high. Sometimes more than half of the servants died before the ship reached America.
Settlers who did have some means that were coming to America would receive larger land grants if they came with servants, and this held whether the servants lived or died en route. Henry Lorenz The South Carolinian, who bought and sold white and black flesh, said he never saw an instance of cruelty in 10 or 12 years' experience in that branch, the African slave trade, equal to the cruelty exercised upon these poor Irish.
Self-interest prompted the baptized heathens, the captains, to take some care of their wretched slaves for the market But no other care was taken of those poor Protestant Christians from Ireland but to deliver as many as possible alive on shore upon the cheapest terms. When the ships arrived at American ports, the dead were thrown overboard and the survivors were spruced up for on-deck sails. In some cases, both men and women were stripped naked and examined by the prospective buyers.
Abbott Emerson Smith wrote, conversed with them to discover their degrees of intelligence and docility and finally if satisfied brought them and carried them off home the whole scene bore resemblance to a cattle market Among the leading buyers and sellers of servants were the most distinguished men in the colonies. Some, like William Carter and Robert Beverly of Virginia, had a hand in the Indian, white, and black trades.
Carter, for example, bought and sold blacks and whites and engaged in the Indian fur trade. Among the well-known Americans who bought white servants was George Washington. During the sale, husbands and wives were separated. and children under five were sold or given away until their 21st birthday. G. Middleberger, who came to America in 1750, said, Many parents must sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle.
Some enterprising and insensitive merchants called soul drivers bought servants in lots of 50 or more and drove them through the country, selling them by ones and twos to local planters.
White servants were also sold individually on auction blocks. In some cases, whites, blacks, and reds were sold from the same stand. The consummation of the sale changed the servant's relationship with himself, and with his fellow men for he now became subject to the will interest and whim of another human being in practice as almost every student of white servitude is pointed out he was a de facto slave J.B. McMaster wrote,
were dressed in the cast-off clothes of their owners, and might be flogged as the master and mistress might think necessary. Father, mother, and children could be sold to different buyers. John Fisk said, Their lives were in theory protected by law, but where an indentured servant came to his death from prolonged ill usage or from excessive punishment or even from sudden violence, it was not easy to get a verdict against a master.
In those days of frequent flogging, the lash was inflicted upon the indented servant with scarcely less compunction than upon the purchased slave. And in general, the condition of the former seems to have been nearly as miserable as that of the latter. save that the servitude of the Negro was perpetual, while the white man might look forward to an end. For him, Pandora's box had not quite spilled out the last of its contents.
If we judge by contemporary reports, almost all of the contents of Pandora's box engulfed the hapless white servant. The record bulges with cases of appalling cruelty, and many observers said that the lot of the white servant was worse than that of the black slave, for as long as it lasted. In a letter written in 1770, Edis said, Negroes being a property for life, the death of slaves in the prime of youth and strength is a material loss to the proprietor.
They are therefore under more comfortable circumstances than the miserable Europeans over whom the rigid planters exercise an inflexible severity. Generally speaking, the white servants groan beneath a worse-than-Egyptian bondage. The same kind of reports came from the English colony on Barbados, where Richard Ligon said he saw, In Barbados and on the mainland, Servant women were systematically exploited by their masters and overseers.
Many of this class of women, Philip A. Bruce said, were exposed to improper advances on their master's part as they were by their situation very much in the power of these masters, who, if inclined to licentiousness, would not be slow to use it. The laws defining the servants' rights and obligations varied from state to state, but there was a common core. As a rule, servants could not marry without consent, and they could not buy whiskey or engage in trade.
They could not leave the plantation area without a pass, nor could they vote or hold office. Like the slave, the servant could be bought, sold, borrowed, won or lost in a card game, given away as a prize. seized for a debt, pledged as a security on a loan, or transferred in a will. The master was obligated to feed and clothe the servant and to give him certain freedom dues.
corn, cloth, and in some cases land at the end of his service, but there's much evidence to show that masters very often failed to meet their obligations. Some, in fact, did everything they could to extend the service of their servants. As a result, Many servants who survived the first term of their service were tricked, forced, or penalized into second and third terms. It was also common for poor whites to sell themselves into servitude to pay debts and avoid prison.
including debts from medical expenses. In 1675, in Virginia, a white man named Lambert Groton sold himself into lifetime slavery in order to satisfy a debt. Most servants were field hands. and most worked the traditional slave hours from can see to can't see. In the field and house, the servant worked side by side with black and red servants and slaves.
Servants and slaves shared the same holidays and the same feasts. They lived together in primitive huts they were forced to build. F.I. McCormick said, and the tendency was for masters to treat them all alike. It was not unusual for a master to make a black or red man overseer of the white workers, nor was it unusual in the early part of the century for a black man to own white servants.
From the very beginning, white servants conspired and attempted to revolt. It is interesting to note that white historians use the same conceptual apparatus in their explanation of the number of white and black revolts. For example, Abbott Emerson Smith says, A disposition to general rebellion seems scarcely to have existed among servants on the continent, perhaps because the chance of success was negligible as compared with that on a relatively small island.
He had Barbados in mind. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the white planters lived in constant fear of a united rebellion by blacks, whites, and reds. To forestall that possibility... they systematically sowed the seeds of division the most common form of resistance was flight throughout the colonial period newspapers were filled with reports of absconding servants
Some of the reports indicated that whites and blacks ran away together. In the matter of runaways, there was absolutely no difference between the institutions of slavery and servitude. The same mechanisms were used to capture servants and slaves. And the advertisements indicated that the servants wore collar chains and were scarred and maimed by cruel treatment.
throughout the 17th century and part of the 18th century white servitude was the major economic prop of most of the colonies as the years wore on The limited supply of white servants and the changing economic needs of the English and colonial power structures shifted the spotlight to Africa. But by that time, white servants had left an indelible mark on the economic and social fabric of America.
To cite only one example, white servitude helped create the landed aristocracy of the South. The system of indentured service and its social effects, Philip Bruce said, differed but little. if at all, from the system of slavery. The indentured servants were as much a legalized lower class in Virginia as the noblemen were a legalized higher class in England.
American history and American historians have not been kind to the memory of the poor white founding fathers. For example, some historians say openly that it was fortunate that so many indentured servants fell by the wayside. T.J. Wurttenbaker wrote, even if he ultimately secured his freedom to leave descendants to perpetuate his lowly instincts. Abbott Emerson Smith wrote, Perhaps it was a fortunate thing that pioneer conditions were as difficult as they were.
if there is any truth in theories of heredity, for the unenterprising were not preserved. The strong and competent survived, and if this manner of separating sheep from goats puts too great a premium on sheer physical health, That, at least, was something well worth distinguishing and preserving. There was a speedy winnowing of the vast influx of riffraff which descended upon the settlements. The residue, such as it was, became the American people.
As they said, by the early 19th century, during that first generation after the American Revolution, direct... Enslavement, official enslavement as we think of it, was largely a condition now inflicted solely on Africans. But the lives of a majority of poor white southerners were, at least in a material sense, very often... little better than those of slaves. Most of them scratched out a living on subsistence farms.
always at risk of debt peonage in the event of a drought or a locust attack and usually dependent to one degree or another on the patronage of a local elite. In the North,
The budding industrial revolution was changing the nature of work altogether and generating a massive demand for labor in these growing cities. Many of the surviving generations from these indentured laborers these laborers and artisans and craftsmen whose bloodlines and made it through the winnowing process into the 19th century, by this point had managed to...
create a mixed labor economy in many places that somewhat approximated the utopia envisioned by Karl Marx when he said that in a communist society, it becomes possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow. No. No. Of course, we don't like Karl Marx here on the Martyr Maid podcast, and the world he's describing obviously did not prevail in the details in early 19th century America. But those lines of his that I just read do in...
very vague terms describe a style of life that would have been familiar to many people here at that time. Take, for example, the shoemaking industry in Lynn, Massachusetts. The labor historian Norman Ware writes of this period from about 1830 to 1840, just before the transition to the fully industrialized urban factory system. Quote,
The transition to the factory system was not far advanced in the beginning of our period. Lynn, Massachusetts was the center of the women's shoe trade and was only emerging at this time from the domestic system. The domestic worker at Lynn had been part farmer, part artisan, part fisherman. If one of his three props failed him, he could fall back on another. He felt that he could work in the fields or in the shop as he chose.
and when disinclined for either, he could lock up his ten-footer and go fishing. When it was too cold for work indoors or out, he sat in his kitchen reading, both the men and women who worked on shoes in the earlier days, did so irregularly and at their own request. In 1830, nearly all the shoemakers of Lynn had owned their homes with some land about them.
Even those who rented had usually large gardens where they were able to raise sufficient vegetables for their winter supply. Almost every family kept a pig, and many had their own cow. Discipline in the little shop was slack. When an apprentice left his work at night, he might be expected back in the morning, but there was no special grounds for the expectation. He might drop in the next morning or the next week.
The panic of 1837 was less distressing in its results for the Lynn shoemakers than it would have been at a later period because of the still primitive nature of the industrial situation. With a garden, a pig, and some fishing tackle, the shoemaker... could bid defiance to financial tempests. In the winter, he could go clam and eel hunting, and if he had two or three cords of wood split and piled in the shed, he considered himself in easy circumstances. And now where is quoting,
David Newhall Johnson's 1880 book Sketches of Lynn. When the spring opened, the horizon of his hopes expanded. Less clothing and fuel were needed. The clam banks discounted more readily. Haddock could be got at Swampscot so cheap that the price wasn't worth quoting. The boys could dig dandelions. Then, if the poor man had his little spring pig that he had kept through the winter...
Pork and dandelions were no small items in the bill of fare. Back to where? It is well no doubt to be skeptical of a golden age, either past or future, and well, too, to discount reminiscences. But the evidence is considerable. of the reality of the freedom and security of these people. End quote. Well, the Industrial Revolution put an end to all this.
The American children used to grow up, maybe they still do, I did when I was a kid, hearing folk tales about the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan and John Henry the steel-driving man. These were stories that made superheroes out of working men, but they had a tragic edge to them.
John Henry is supposed to have been this giant black freedman who did the hard work of hammering steel drills into rock to bore holes for dynamite to blast a path for the railroad. Very hard work that took a very strong man to do it. Not just any average man could do steel driving at all, and among the strong men who did it, none were better and more efficient than John Henry.
But the Industrial Revolution, on whose behalf he had been working, eventually came for him too. The adoption of the steam-driven rock drill, basically an early jackhammer. It would enable just any old average man to drill rock just as well as John Henry. Henry had his partisans among the men who resisted the new technology, but its spread was inexorable, and soon giant John Henry found himself working side by side with the steam-driven equipment. And so one day a challenge is set up.
John Henry would line up against the most efficient powered rock drill and would settle once and for all whether man would be replaced by machine on the rail line. Henry and the jackhammer operator raced to drill their holes as other men dropped their tools to cheer on one side or the other, most of them naturally on the side of John Henry, and their faith was well-placed. John Henry won the contest.
But as the crowd celebrated his victory, the effort caused his heart to give out, and he died there on the railroad. If the great John Henry could not keep up with the powered machine and survive, nobody could, and so the days of the steel-driving man came to an end. A man like John Henry...
could still get a job operating a jackhammer, but now he was competing with the great mass of average men that his great strength had previously placed him beyond. The heroic quality of the labor had been lost. Even today, we still hear a persistent myth of a future, that Jetson's future, where more and more human work is done by machines and every individual becomes a miniature aristocrat living a life of ease.
and benefiting from the labor of thousands of electronic and mechanical servants. But this is an old myth that's been reshaped to fit each stage of our industrial development. The tech theorists of the early 1800s predicted it.
But the myth, then and now, ignores the fact that men and women are more than just economic units and, as long as they're not starving, have deeper concerns than making their next meal easier to come by. Ware writes, quote, It is commonly supposed that the dissatisfaction in the 1840s with the character and results of the Industrial Revolution was the result of purely temporary maladjustments.
It is admitted that a temporary maladjustment lasting over one's working lifetime is sufficiently permanent for the one concerned, but it is claimed that, from the standpoint of history,
The degradation suffered by the industrial worker in the early years of the Industrial Revolution can be discounted by his later prosperity. And this might be true from the calm standpoint of history if the losses and gains were of the same sort but they were not the losses of the industrial worker in the first half of the century were not comfort losses solely but losses as he conceived it
Men generally were questioning the trend of their age. They were ill-attuned to the song of the machine, or... it was ill-attuned to them. They saw the powers of the air, steam, and water, performing work that would have required the labor of thousands, labor-saving devices, so-called, that had not lightened labor.
but had succeeded only in adding to the profits of the owners of the machine, while those who labor are not only required to toil longer than before, but, compared with their employers, are as a class sinking day by day into a still deeper degradation. The source of the dissatisfaction with the achievements of the Industrial Revolution lay in the fact that they were accompanied by the degradation of the industrial population. Orestes Brownson wrote in 1840, To men like Brownson, End quote.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in one of his books, remarks about the effect of radio and television on the vocation of the lounge singer. It used to be that every respectable watering hole or restaurant had to have a lounge singer to entertain the guests. And so thousands of lounge singers were employed in cities all over the country, and none of them were rich, but they were all making a living. The invention of the radio and TV, the jukebox.
That meant that you didn't need a singer in every lounge anymore. You just needed one singer. who probably lived in a far-off big city whose music could be piped in via the new technology. And so instead of thousands of lounge singers making a living, there were now a few recording artists making millions.
Industrial technology and the transition to the factory system of production had the same effect on thousands of trades. The semi-rural craftsman that we just described was put out of business as railroads...
brought factory-produced goods at cheaper prices than he could ever match and survive, and so he was left with no choice but to head into the city to go look for work in one of the factories that had just ruined him. The shop... had been run by a master craftsman, who took on apprentices and journeymen as opportunity and ambition allowed.
In other words, each shop in the old system was owned and managed by men and women who had done the work, mastered the work. Not so in the factory. The factory was managed by an overseer, hired by the company. to extract maximum productivity from the workers at whatever cost. Workers who were subjected to strict discipline and replaced without a thought if they failed to keep up. The formerly independent craftsman was now...
A precariously perched basic laborer whose existence was always haunted by the prospect of the next recession that would leave his family without food or shelter. The American doctrine of independence.
and the self-made man animated businessmen and drove manifest destiny, even as individual workers in the 19th century were forced by circumstance and powerful interests into a more... and more servile position and a more dependent position by the year and so a gigantic new class of these interchangeable hand-to-mouth wage laborers that would later in the century be called the urban proletariat, festered and tried to survive in the alleys and cellars of the cities.
Compare, for example, the lives of those craftsmen shoemakers that I just described in 1830s Lynn, Massachusetts, who worked at a leisurely pace. and weathered depressions and smaller economic downturns by leaning on their gardens and livestock and fishing and hunting and barter in their tightly knit semi-rural social landscape.
compared to the lives of shoemakers in New York just a few years later. This is Norman Ware again, quote. There is no outlet back and, of course, no yard privileges of any kind. The miserable room is lighted only by a shallow sash, partly projecting above the surface of the ground and by the little light that struggles down the steep and rotting stairs. In this often lived the man with his workbench.
his wife and five or six children of all ages, and perhaps a palsied grandfather or grandmother, and often both. In one corner is a squalid bed, and the room elsewhere is occupied by the workbench. a cradle made from dry goods box, two or three broken seatless chairs, a stew pan, a kettle, and that is all. Here's an account of...
workers' quarters in Boston by that city's Committee on Internal Health in 1849. Quote, a dungeon six feet square on the semen height with no aperture for the admission of air save the narrow door which was closed at night served to accommodate borders the landlord said the tide came through the floor of his rooms
One cellar was reported by the police to be occupied nightly as a sleeping apartment for 39 persons. In another, the tide had risen so high that it was necessary to approach the bedside of a patient by means of a plank. That same report in Boston spoke of another place, entered by... two alleyways and a stair that the residents called Jacob's Ladder. To the right of Jacob's Ladder is a cluster of six privies, that's an outhouse, situated nearly in the center of the place.
At the time of the cholera epidemic, these were greatly out of repair and the ground about them was covered with their overflowing contents, removed only by evaporation. At the foot of the drain are two more clusters of privies, six in number. The open space likewise presents three cesspools intended to carry off dirty water, but they were all choked by all sorts of vegetable matter.
As these accumulated, they were scooped up and thrown upon the ground, which was thus plentifully bestrewed with putrefying vegetable matter. With these were mingled no small proportion of substances still more loathsome.
the rear of the house was separated from the stone wall which supported the side of the hill by a space of a few feet and here the contents of drains from above found their receptacle creating a perpetual humidity As a result of these living conditions, which were becoming general among the urban proletariat in American cities by the middle to late 18th century, 19th century rather.
is a result of these conditions, as well as the extreme long hours and the high pace of industrial work. The committee's report, this Boston committee's report, stated that the average lifespan of an Irish immigrant to Boston at the time was 14 years. Not that they died at only 14 years old. not life expectancy but that the average irishman who arrived in boston at 20 years old would be dead by 34. this was
the expendable human material that was ground up and poured into the American foundation. So working conditions were deplorable because workers were replaceable. Industrial workers had little to no leverage to demand any improvements. Very often the conditions were deadly. In 1900... 200 men died in a Utah coal mine when 24 kegs of black powder exploded. In 1902, in Brocktown, Massachusetts, 58 workers died. Another 150 were injured.
when the four-story shoe factory in which they were working collapsed in flames on top of them, trapping and burning dozens of them to death. In New York in 1911... The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was destroyed in a fire. Jocko turned me on to an eyewitness account of this event by one William Shepard. Quote,
I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye. I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound, a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk. Thud dead.
Thud dead, thud dead, thud dead. 62 thud deads. I call them that because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was 80 feet. The first 10 thud deads shocked me. I looked up, saw that there were scores of girls at the windows.
The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they too must come down. And something within me, something that I didn't know was there, steeled me.
I even watched one girl falling, waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud. Then a silent... unmoving pile of clothing and twisted broken limbs as i reached the scene of the fire a cloud of smoke hung over the building i looked up to the seventh floor there was a living picture in each window
Four screaming heads of girls waving their arms. Call the firemen, they screamed, scores of them. Get a ladder, cried others. They were all as alive and whole and sound as... were we who stood down below on the sidewalk i couldn't help thinking of that we cried to them not to jump we heard the siren of a fire engine in the distance the other siren sounded from several directions
Here they come, we yelled. Don't jump. Stay there. One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back, and then she dropped into space. I didn't notice whether those above watched her drop because I had turned away. Then came that first thud. I looked up. Another girl was climbing under the windowsill. Others were crowding behind her.
She dropped. I watched her fall, and again the dreadful sound. Two windows away, two girls were climbing onto the sill. They were fighting each other and crowding for air. Behind them I saw many screaming heads. They fell almost together, but I heard two distinct thuds. Then the flames burst out through the windows on the floor below them and curled up into their faces.
The firemen began to raise a ladder. Others took out a life net, and while they were rushing to the sidewalk with it, two more girls shot down. The firemen held it under them. The bodies broke it. The grotesque simile of a dog jumping through a hoop struck me. Before they could move the net, another girl's body flashed through it. The thuds were just as loud it seemed as if there had been no net there.
It seemed to me that the thuds were so loud that they might have been heard all over the city. I had counted ten. Then my dulled senses began to work automatically. I noticed things that... had not occurred to me before to notice little details that the first shock had blinded me to i looked up to see whether those above watched those who fell i noticed that they did
They watched them every inch of the way down and probably heard the roaring thuds that we heard. As I looked up, I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped the girl to the windowsill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building, and let her drop. He seemed cool and calculating. He held out a second girl the same way.
and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if he were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly, he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry. Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window.
Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash, he was on the windowsill himself. His coat fluttered upward, the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head. Thud dead, thud dead. Together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see that he was a real man. He had done his best.
In the room in which he stood, many girls were being burned to death by the flames and were screaming in an inferno of flame and heat. He chose the easiest way and was brave enough even to help the girl he loved to a quicker death after she had given him a goodbye kiss. He leaped with an energy as if to arrive first in that mysterious land of eternity.
But her thud dead came first. The fireman raised the longest ladder. It reached only to the sixth floor. I saw the last girl jump at it and miss. And then the faces disappeared from the window. But now the crowd was enormous, though all this had occurred in less than seven minutes, the start of the fire and the thuds and the deaths. I heard screams around the corner and hurried there.
What I had seen before was not so terrible as what had followed. Up in the ninth floor, girls were burning to death before our very eyes. They were jammed in the windows. No one was lucky enough to have been able to jump, it seemed. But, one by one, the jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking, flaming bodies with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire.
The whole, sound, unharmed girls who had jumped on the other side of the building had tried to fall feet down.
But these fire torches, suffering ones, fell inertly, only intent that death should come to them on the sidewalk instead of in the furnace behind them. On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman... later went about with tags which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls numbering each with a lead pencil and i saw him fasten tag number fifty-four to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring
A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least 50 bodies in the big room on the seventh floor. Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there. into the narrow court and saw a heap of dead girls the floods of water from the fireman's hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood i looked upon the heap of dead bodies
And I remembered these girls were shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year, in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer. End quote. Now things like this used to happen every year or two. industrial America, but they don't happen so often anymore. But that change did not come as the result of some natural process.
the historical dialectic notwithstanding. In fact, all the historical, economic, and technological forces conspired in the other direction. These things changed because people... Fought to change them. Working men and women who rotted in jails and were beaten and killed by police and mercenaries to secure rights that we all, you, me, even the most thoughtful of us.
generally take for granted today. As the Industrial Revolution proceeded, The structure of the American economy raised the status of owners and distributors and financiers to gigantic proportions while degrading the lifestyle and the basic dignity of the common worker. whose only leverage in negotiation were their numbers and their solidarity.
The victory of big business over agrarianism in the Civil War brought down the last remaining dissenting force to the total rule of capital over American affairs. At the end of that war, labor was almost totally unorganized, both by habit and by design. And that was a circumstance that was going to have to be rectified if the common people were going to stake their claim to a place in American society.
There was little hope for any support from elected government whose representatives typically shared the interests and the prejudices of big business. In slums, in factories... In the mines and on the railroads, workers slowly at first and then more quickly began to come together and push back. The ownership class considered this uprising of the waste people.
to be a violation of their property rights, and more often than not with state support availed themselves of extreme force in brutality to put the uppity workers back in their place. One example of this is from 1914 in Colorado. Not long after the war between the states, soft coal had been discovered in the southern part of Colorado.
And so industry moved in by rail from Denver and New Mexico, and people came down the Santa Fe Trail and built the town of Trinidad just east of the Rockies and down by the New Mexico border on what's now the 25 Freeway. Small coal operators began to set up shop, and soon the mines in southern Colorado were consolidated into this large and powerful conglomerate called the Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation. Now it may be...
A cliché to say so, but digging coal was back-breaking work. The left-wing historian Howard Zinn wrote, quote, In black mist so complete it seemed alive, grotesque, men hacked away at the face of the coal seam with hand picks. Their helpers shoveled the coal into waiting railroad cars.
which were drawn through tunnels by mules to the main shaft and lifted to the surface to the top of the tipple, the coal then showering down through the sorting screens onto flat cars. The average coal seam was about three feet high. so the miner worked on his knees or on his side. The ventilation system depended on the manipulation of tunnel doors by trapper boys, often 13 or 14-year-old children being initiated into mining.
At the edge of the mountains, in steep-walled canyons, were the camps where the miners lived, in sagging wooden huts with old newspapers nailed to the walls to keep out of the cold. Nearby were the mine buildings and the coke ovens. with clouds of soot clogging the air. Behind the huts was a sluggish creek, dirty yellow, laden with mine slag and camp refuse, alongside which the children played.
The mining camps were feudal kingdoms run by the coal corporation, which made the laws. Curfews were imposed. Strangers were not allowed to visit the homes. The company store must be patronized. The company doctor used. The teachers and preachers were picked by the company. By 1914, Colorado Fuel and Iron owned 27 mining camps and all the land, the houses, the saloons, the schools, the churches, and the stores. End quote.
In 1902, the corporation had come into the possession of the Rockefeller family, who ran the company from New York City. The early coal in southern Colorado had been dug by poor Englishmen and Welshmen. Many of them were miners back in Britain who were imported to Colorado for the purpose. By the time Rockefeller bought CFNI, the Englishmen and Welshmen had been joined by an eclectic mix of Italians and Greeks and Poles and Hungarians as well.
as Mexicans and black Americans. Under Rockefeller control, the corporation became a dominant political power in the state of Colorado, with unchecked power over the portion of the state in which the company operated. CF and I bought politicians and voted on behalf of its employees whether they were naturalized citizens or not. If anyone complained, they had to make their case to company officials who had been appointed as election judges.
The company chose and owned the coroners and the judges who ensured that CF&I never had to pay out for employees injured or killed on the job. A Colorado state official told a committee looking into this incident that it's very seldom that you can convict anyone in Werfano County if he's got any friends. Jeff Farr, the sheriff, selects the jury and they're picked to convict or acquit as the case may be.
A local gambler and bartender who worked as a fixer and a hatchet man for CF&I was appointed to serve as jury form in 80% of all county court cases over a period of years. The governor of the state himself Governor Ammons told an interviewer that there was no constitutional law whatsoever, absolutely none, he said, in the counties that were run by the coal operators, and that it was a circumstance that even he, as the governor of Colorado, did not have the power to affect.
In 1903, the year after Rockefeller took over, the United Mine Workers tried an organizing drive in the southern Colorado fields and led a strike when their efforts were resisted by the company, but it all came to nothing. In 1913, a decade later, fresh off a bloody confrontation with the mine operators in southern West Virginia, the UMW took another shot at Colorado. The company refused to consider the establishment of a union among the miners. The UMW asked them to negotiate.
Instead, they hired mercenaries from the Baldwin-Feltz Detective Agency. Detectives is really a euphemism in this context. Baldwin-Feltz was one of the private police and paramilitary organizations responsible for... countless assassinations and massacres of workers in the 19th century a job they did with gusto until the fbi took over the role of union buster in the first half of the 20th
The company-owned sheriffs of the various counties swore in hundreds of deputies, including many of the Baldwin-Feltz mercenaries, giving their violence the imprimatur of law, and the camps were put under an effective state of martial law. In August of 1913, a UMW organizer arrived in Trinidad by train and was immediately gunned down by Baldwin Feltz detectives before he even reached his lodging.
The first man to reach the body said that the detectives had drawn and fired. The organizer went down, managed to get off a shot of his own wounding one of his killers in the thigh and then he died. The man who came to his body said that when he looked up
The men's guns were trained on him. The coroner's jury consisted of a handful of local business owners who were friends of CF and I, and the company's regular fixer was appointed as its jury foreman. I don't need to tell you that the shooters got off. Instead of deterring the organizers, it hardened them and they redoubled their efforts. The company anticipated a strike and so responded by importing hundreds of gunmen, convicts.
gunfighters and adventurers from the saloons of Denver and from outside the state as well. Within two weeks of that murder, over 300 men had been deputized, armed and paid by the coal company. The miners... held an open convention in trinidad attended by delegates who'd been elected at hundreds of secret meetings that now took place nightly in churches and in abandoned mines anywhere that they might elude the detectives for a short time at the convention
The miners codified their complaints. They said that out of every ton of coal that they dug, the company took 20-40% of it without compensation. When they were paid, it was... In company script that was worth 90 cents on the dollar that can only be spent in company stores, where prices were 25-40% higher. Anyone who complained about the conditions was immediately fired and thrown out of his company lodging with his family.
and that's if he was lucky many were beaten several were killed as for the actual working conditions I mean coal mining is hazardous duty everywhere, but casualty rates in Colorado were double what they were in other mining states at the time. The convention's guest of honor was an 80-year-old woman named Mary Jones.
better known as Mother Jones, and she'll be a recurring character in this series. She'd been a labor firebrand ever since she lost her entire family, husband and four children, to yellow fever in 1867. and then her home and her business to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The UMW was overall pretty moderate. They supported the current governor, Ammons, and...
They helped the Democratic Party fight off challenges from the left, like from the socialist and progressive parties. Mother Jones was not a moderate, and she showed up to the convention and delivered a blistering speech that fired up the minors of southern Colorado. The delegates made one final request for the company to negotiate. When the company refused, a strike was called for September 23, 1913. And when that day came, it was quite a sight. 11,000 miners.
About 90% of all the workers in the Southern Colorado mines put down their tools and marched off the job. The mining camps were owned by the company and closed to striking workers. And so these miners packed up their families and their meager belongings and left their homes to go dwell in tent cities. For the first two days, it rained unrelentingly, but the miners were very determined.
They came in on roads deep with mud, mothers carrying babies and trying to shield them from the rain, families sleeping on soaked mattresses and water-dripping tents. One tent colony outside a railroad depot called Ludlow had 400 tents and over 1,000 people, including 271 children. During the course of the strike, 21 babies would be born there.
The Baldwin-Feltz mercenaries got a car and reinforced it with steel armor and mounted a Gatling gun up on top to patrol and intimidate the mining camps. The miners called it the Death Special. On October 17th, it opened fire on a tent city, riddling a 10-year-old boy's leg with nine bullets and killing one minor.
When several dozen miners who were declared to be unlawful agitators were captured and marched by armed guards to Trinidad, the death special car trailed behind them with its Gatling gun pointed at the miners' backs. When a man tried to photograph the car, one of the Baldwin Feltz men beat him nearly to death with the butt of his pistol and then had the photographer arrested for disturbing the peace.
When an armored train brought in 190 more mercenaries armed with machine guns and rifles, it was intercepted by a group of armed miners. Gunfire was exchanged, and one of the mercenaries was killed. This was at least the fourth... such engagement and so far nine men had been killed all but two of the miners on the ridges high above the tent colonies were placed high-powered searchlights to light up the tents at night
and machine gun nests that stayed trained on the men, women, and children in the colony below. At the end of the month, October, the governor declared real martial law, official martial law. He forbade the company from importing any more strike breakers from out of state, and he ordered the Colorado National Guard into the striking areas to restore order.
This was intended to placate both sides a bit in order to settle things down and bring about a settlement, but in practice, the governor only had the power to keep up his end to the company. namely by reinforcing their mercenaries with government soldiers, and he had no power at all to keep the company from bringing in out-of-state scabs or more gun thugs.
Rockefeller's man in Colorado wrote back to New York to assure the boss that he'd rallied the unanimous support of all the bankers in the area who met with the governor and agreed to fund the National Guard operation. He'd also ensured that the Chambers of Commerce The real estate brokers and all the other important businessmen, as well as all the editors of all the major papers in the state of Colorado, were busy pressuring the governor to support the company and end the strike.
Well, the miners welcomed the arrival of the National Guard. They'd suffered, at this point, five weeks of terror under the company's gun thugs. That's what they called them back then. And they expected relief. or at least fairness from the government troops who were ordered into action by a governor that the UMW had actually supported in 1912.
At Ludlow, the tent colony at Ludlow, hats were passed around to collect any spare change, pennies and nickels that might be used to purchase a big American flag and a thousand men and their families, half starved and exhausted. but dressed in the very best clothes they had, lined the road to greet the guardsmen as they came in. Several of them held up the big American flag that they'd purchased, and the children...
all dressed in white, with smaller American flags. They even managed to cobble together a band from among their number, and they played the Union forever as the troops marched by. The people sang and sang until the last of the troops were out of sight. But their hopes were misplaced. A National Guard officer... Soon after their arrival caught a teenager on the road outside Ludlow and beat him unconscious. A parade of wives and mothers in Trinidad was dispersed by guard cavalry.
and a 16-year-old girl was kicked in the chest while trying to run away by the guard commander himself, General Chase. The Ludlow Colony's leader, a Greek man named Lou Tikus, was beaten down and taken to jail multiple times. That winter, that cold and hungry winter, 172 people were arrested. One was a mother of two named Mary Thomas. and she was put in a vermin-infested cell for several weeks. One striker was made to sleep bare on a freezing concrete floor and died from it after nearly a month.
A 19-year-old pregnant woman was assaulted by guard troops until she went unconscious. When four soldiers busted into a miner's home looking for the striking father and husband, They found only his wife and his four children, and so they tossed the place up, harassed his wife, took all their money and valuables, and then broke his little girl's nose by kicking her in the face. The soldiers
fired over the miners' tents at night to terrify them and keep them awake. They abused their women and children. The harassment and intimidation. And low-level violence hung like a cloud at all times with the miners, who knew that there was nowhere for them to turn now that even the authority of the government was being brought to bear on behalf of the company.
When Mother Jones tried to return in January, she was arrested and deported out of the state by the National Guard. She might have been 80 years old, but she was spunky and so she managed to escape from the three guardsmen who were assigned to her and she made her way back. Over a hundred militiamen then stormed the hotel where she was lodging, took her prisoner for 20 days. Women...
assembled to march in protest of Mother Jones' captivity, but their protest was put down and 18 of them were thrown in jail. Well, when the money for the National Guard operation began to run out in the spring, The company took over their payroll, and the guard and the company mercenaries were essentially merged into a single organization.
The bulk of them were stationed up on a ridge overlooking the large tent colony down near Ludlow in preparation for an operation that was meant to put an end to this strike once and for all. On April 20th, a Monday morning, a signal was given, and the machine guns opened up indiscriminately on the Ludlow tent city.
Women and children who had been cleaning up after breakfast and preparing for the day were running about wildly, screaming and looking for shelter. One eyewitness remembered, quote, the firing of the machine guns was awful. They fired thousands and thousands of shots.
There were very few guns in the tent colony, not over 50, including shotguns. Women and children were afraid to crawl out of the shallow pits dug under the tents. Several men were killed trying to get to them. The soldiers and mine guards tried to kill everybody. Some miners grabbed the few guns that they did have and made themselves conspicuous with them to try to draw fire away from the women and children. The camp's leader...
Lou Tikus was in the big main tent, the center of camp, trying to set up barriers to protect women and children when the telephone rang. It was one of the commanders up on the ridge, and he demanded that Tikus come up to see him. At first, Ticus refused, but the phone kept ringing and the bullets kept raining down, and so he agreed to go up. Ticus carried a white flag, and he met the lieutenant, who was surrounded by armed gunmen.
A young engineer happened to witness this scene from a nearby cliff. The two men, Tikus and the lieutenant, were... close together with one another talking when out of nowhere the soldier swung his rifle and brought the stock down with full force on Tikus' skull. The rifle was smashed apart by the impact and Tikus fell to the ground bleeding.
The witness recounted, As he lay there, we saw the militiamen fall back. Then they aimed their rifles and fired into the unconscious man's body. It was the first murder I had ever seen. Two other miners were captured and executed in a similar manner, and the machine guns kept firing, killing another five people, including a 10-year-old whose father remembered that incident.
Frank was sitting on the floor, and he was in the act of stooping to kiss or caress his sister. I was standing near the front door of my tent, and I heard the impact of the bullet striking the boy's head, and the crack. as it exploded inside of his brain." The engineer described what happened next. When the sun dropped beneath the mountains, the machine gunners were called off.
and soldiers crept down toward the camp where the survivors were trying to recover their wits. The soldiers drenched the canvas tents with coal oil and set them on fire. The engineer described it, quote, We watched from our rock shelter while the militia dragged up their machine guns and poured a murderous fire into the arroyos from a height by Water Tank Hill above the Ludlow Depot. Then came the firing of the tents. I'm positive...
that by no possible chance could they have been set ablaze accidentally. The militiamen were thick about the northern corner of the colony where the fire started, and we could see distinctly from our lofty observation place what looked like a blazing torch. waved in the midst of the militia a few seconds before the general conflagration swept through the place." People who tried to flee the burning tents
were opened up on with rifles, pistols, and machine guns, which had been dragged down to the tent colony for the purpose. A report from a journalist back to the New York Times read, quote, A seven-year-old girl dashed from under a blazing tent and heard the scream of bullets about her ears. Insane from fright, she ran into a tent again and fell into the hole with the remainder of her family to die with them.
The child is said to have been a daughter of Charles Costa, a union leader at Aguilar, who perished with his wife and another child. James Feiler, financial secretary of the Trinidad Local, died with a bullet in his forehead as he was attempting to rescue his wife from the flames. Mrs. Marcelina Pedragon, her skirt ablaze, carried her youngest child from the flames, leaving two others behind.
The tents became crackling torches, and for hours the countryside shone in a ghastly light while men, women, and children roamed the hills, looking for others in their families. At 8.30 p.m., the militia... captured the Ludlow tent colony, now a smoldering pile of ashes. It was on the following day, April 21st, that a telephone linesman going through the ruins
lifted a twisted cot that covered one of the pits dug beneath the tents for shelter. There he found the mangled, charred bodies of two women and eleven children. heaped together in what had been a desperate struggle to escape. According to the Trinidad Red Cross, 26 bodies of miners and their families had been found at Ludlow. End quote. Well, this podcast series will tell what I believe, for my money, is the greatest part of the American story. The battle of common people.
of working men and women for a dignified life against the arrayed forces of technology, economics, and class prejudice. There was no labor movement to speak of in the U.S. before the Civil War, and what little there was dissipated in the late 1840s as dissatisfied workers began to leave for California to go look for gold.
The remainder of the reformist energy was absorbed by the sectional conflict of the 1850s in the lead-up to the Civil War. Millions of American men fought in that war. They had suffered. They had been maimed and traumatized and seen their friends and relatives killed for their country. But more than that, they had been blooded on the battlefield and instructed in the power of collective violence to force social change.
The men who left the battlefield to go back into those city slums and mining camps and railroad lines were not the same men who had left those places for the battlefield. And they were soon reinforced by waves. and waves of European immigrants who were much more experienced not only in the tactics of strike and negotiation, but in insurrection and revolution, and whose anarchist...
Socialist and communist ideologies helped awaken the American worker to the reality that respect would never just be given to him, but had to be taken. The majority of America's early settlers, as we said early in this prologue, came here in chains. Whether you are white or black, if your family came here,
before the American Revolution, there's a two-thirds to three-quarters chance they came here in chains. They worked as servants for an English upper crust who carried their class sentiments with them to the New World. And each new wave of immigrants, the English who came after the initial batches, the Irish, the Scots, the Scots-Irish.
the Quakers and Shakers and other religious minorities, the militants of Central Europe and the Balkans, the Chinese and Japanese, the Jews, Italians and Greeks, the Mexicans and Central Americans. Each new wave faced resistance when they arrived on American shores, and they had to fight for their place. And it was in that fight, joined in solidarity with other working men and women, That they became Americans. And that America became what it is. The face you have seen. April has come.
The month we were waiting for through the dark winter began. The old man with the face you have seen, tough and kind. and none too bright but lasting. The face you have seen getting on the streetcar at the Mill Gate stop for the Gusty Corner. Now... Under the blood-soaked handkerchief looks out at you with blood oozing down the forehead from under the handkerchief and blood on the collar of the old overcoat.
We'll be in it by April, they said. Sure enough, the fighting has started. And this old man with the face you have seen is the first to get hurt. Who's America, somebody asked. And is this the answer? Another old man with a face you also have seen. A face you have seen getting out of limousines at the bank entrance for the war department. asks us to remember 94. That was a time to forget, I thought, and I think.
Right now is the worst of all possible times to ask us to remember. It is April now, the month we were waiting for. But was it for this that we waited? The berserk copped with the brandished club, the armored bus spraying gas on the pickets, the mobbing howl of the press.
and the rabies in congress to the electric chair with the strikers who's america anyhow now in this april we need to find out yes all of us need to know who's america Because if it really isn't the America of the old man with the face which is our face, tough and kind and none too bright but lasting, then... Well, we are going to have to do some thinking. Some mighty hard thinking. This is the April we were waiting for. This is the April. This April. Now! Now! Now! Now! Now! Now!