AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF LABOR:

RESEARCH ON LUDLOW AND THE 1913-14 COAL WAR

Mark Walker

The Archaeology of the Colorado Coalfield War Project

Department of Anthropology
University of Denver
Denver, CO 80208-2406
(303) 871-2406
(markwalk@du.edu)

ABSTRACT
In The Archaeology of the Colorado Coal War Project, we take a class-based approach to the archaeology
of mine workers. We are working on sites associated with the 1913-14 coal strike in Las Animas and
Huerfano Counties in Southern Colorado, including the Ludlow Massacre Site (5LA1829) and the nearby
coal company town of Berwind. In this paper I will present our overall research goals for the project, along
with some of our findings from the season’s work at the Ludlow Tent Colony. I will also discuss some of
the issues and potentials in using class as an entry-point for the archaeological study of labor and as a
concern in public archaeology interpretation.

Submitted for the 1999 Colorado Council for Professional Archaeologists

Symposium, Exploring Ethnicity, Gender, and Class through Historical Archaeology.
Glenwood Springs, Colorado, March 1999.
I. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE COAL WAR
The Colorado Coal Field War was a strike in the Southern Coal Fields of
Colorado led by the United Mine Workers Of America 1. It lasted 14 months, from
September 1913 until November 1914. 10,000-12,000 miners struck, and, as was
common practice at the time, were evicted from their company housing. They set up tent
colonies at about twelve locations the length of the strike zone. Within months the
Colorado National Guard was called out, theoretically to maintain order, but for a number
of reasons, it became hopelessly compromised and degenerated into a heavily armed
strikebreaking force. The situation climaxed on April 20th 1914, when shooting broke out
at the largest striker colony at Ludlow. The National Guard fired on the colony with
machine guns and rifle fire. The armed miners fought back for as long as possible, while
others sought shelter wherever they could, including pits dug beneath their tents.
Outnumbered and outgunned the strikers held the National Guard off for most of the day.
When most of the strikers had fled to relative safety, the Guard moved into the colony,
looted it, and burned the tents, not realizing that there were people hiding underneath.
Eleven women and children died in a pit beneath one of the tents. The Guard also
captured and killed three strikers, including one of the colony leaders Louis Tikas. A total
of about 25 people died in the massacre.
For 10 days after Ludlow, bands of strikers fought a series of pitched battles
against company mine guards and the National Guard, attacking and burning nearly every
mine and company town in the 40 miles from Trinidad to Walsenburg. President Wilson
sent Federal troops to the area to disarm both sides and restore peace. Seven months later
the strike finally ended in defeat of the mineworkers.
Although it ended in the defeat of the union, the Ludlow Massacre focused
national attention on the conditions in the Colorado coal camps, and on labor conditions
throughout the US. John D. Rockefeller Jr., the owner of Colorado Fuel & Iron, the
largest company involved in the strike, was singled out and excoriated in the press and in
a spectacular series of public hearings before the Commission on Industrial Relations.
These hearings did lead to some reforms and improvements in the coal camps and
throughout the US.

II. THE COAL WAR PROJECT

The Colorado Coal Field War Archaeology Project is a joint effort between Dean
Saitta (University of Denver), Philip Duke (Fort Lewis College), and Randall McGuire
(SUNY-Binghamton). We are investigating sites from the 1913-14 coal strike in order to
(a) understand how conditions in the coal camps led to the strike and how the strike
changed those conditions, (b) raise public awareness of the Coal War and the Ludlow
Massacre (Saitta, McGuire and Duke 1999; Walker 1999). This project is funded by the
Colorado Historical Society, State Historic Fund.

1
The following discussion of the Coal War draws primarily on Beshoar (1957) Foner (1980), Gitelman
(1988), Long (1985, 1989) McGovern and Guttridge (1972), Papanikolas (1982), Reed (1955), and
Scamehorn (1990).
 During the 1998 season we worked at two sites, the Ludlow Massacre Site and the
nearby Colorado Fuel & Iron Company town of Berwind. At Ludlow, we completely
exposed a tent platform that is part of a tent row. We also identified a pit, which was
possibly one of the ones excavated beneath the tents before the massacre for protection
from sporadic attacks by mine guards and private detectives. The pit was filled with
debris, primarily tin cans and bottles, either cleanup from the burned colony or trash from
the tent colony. At the top of the rubbish, and separated from it by a thin layer of
sediment was the wire frame for a wreath.
At Berwind, a team under the direction of Margaret Wood surveyed and mapped
the entire town. We discovered twenty-one geographically distinct residential/use areas,
including areas associated with different classes and ethnic groups, including African-
Americans, Italians, and Hispanics. Test excavations were conducted in four areas of the
town where we discovered intact deposits dating to the strike period. We completed oral
history interviews with four informants who were able to tell us a great deal about their
everyday lives growing up in Berwind (ACCFWP 1998).

III. WHAT IS CLASS?

We are doing this project for a lot of reasons, not the least of which, as academic
marxists, it gives us a chance to put some of our money where our mouths are. Probably
the defining concept of marxist approaches is class, class as defined by class struggle. At
Ludlow we can actually dig up a strike and engage in an archaeological study of labor
struggle. Ludlow gives us an opportunity to study class in the past, to realize this study
as action in the present, and it highlights the problematic relationship between past and
present-day interests (Duke and Saitta 1998; McGuire and Walker 1997).
First of all I think it is important to say what we do and do not mean by class.
Someone once wrote of Marx that he used “words like bats”; sometimes they look like
mice and sometimes like birds (Sayer 1987). “Class” is one of these words. One
difficulty is that classes are not categories. Classes are relations; historically specific
relations between people, something that happens. Class has been said to occur at the
juncture of structure and agency. Structurally, it is the position of people within the
relations of production, relations in capitalism that are based in the exploitation of labor.
Subjectively, it is the experience and understanding of these relations, and the action
taken based upon these understandings and experiences (Thompson 1963).
It might be useful to conceive of class as having different levels of abstraction,
being stratified if you will. For example, Katznelson (1986) conceives of class having
four levels, moving from abstract conceptions to concrete historical situations:

1) Class as structure Abstract

2) Class as social organization
3) Class as disposition
4) Class as action Concrete

At the most abstract level we might talk about class in a structural sense as the
position in the relations of production, or of the famous two great classes of bourgeoisie
and proletariat. As we move from abstraction to concrete reality, we need to address
more and more specific issues, as well as the interaction of class processes with other
social processes. In considering class in Southern Colorado during the strike, we would,
at the lower levels of abstraction, consider issues such as the nature of capitalism in the
US in the early 20th century, immigrant flows, and the organization of labor. Then, more
specifically, we would need to consider cultural factors, the cognitive mapping and
historically rooted interpretations of the class structures in which the immigrants and
native-born miners found themselves. Finally we need to consider how these structures
and understandings are expressed in action. As we move from abstraction to concrete
reality, what class is becomes more historically contingent and more complex.
One difficulty in discussing class is that the discussants are often using different
or inappropriate levels of abstraction. For example we might learn something by
describing the Trinidad shopkeepers who took up arms with the miners as “petit
bourgeois” or “middle class”, and the mine guards who fought the miners as “working
class”, but we obviously have not learned enough.
Historical archaeologists don’t often use a relational view of class, for any
number of reasons. I think one major one is simply a discomfort with the idea of classes
in the US. It is very much ingrained into us that the US is a classless society. We are
uncomfortable talking about classes other than the middle class. Even just the term
“working class” smacks to us of condescension or an old-timey romanticism. I won’t
dwell on this point, but I do believe that our attitudes towards class are influenced by our
class attitudes.
Generally when archaeologists have addressed class, it has been as a category—a
status or ranking. Class has been treated in terms of income or occupation. Class has also
treated in terms of residence, where working class people are the people who live in
working class neighborhoods--not rigorous, but is probably all the better because of it.
A relational approach means that classes do not exist as separate or independent
entities, a working class culture over here and a middle class culture over there. Classes
exist in relation with and in struggle with each other. “Culture” and everyday life is one
of the arenas of struggle. The material objects that archaeologists find are part of the
relations between classes, rather than indices or descriptors of separate class cultures.
For example, the presence of teacups and white matched dining sets in working
class settings, does not necessarily indicate acculturation into middle class ideals or
emulation of the middle class, at least not in any direct sense. But this does not mean we
should be torturing the teacups in a desperate search for resistance, again, not in any
direct sense. As Elizabeth Jameson (1998) points out in her study of Cripple Creek the
acquisition of supposedly “middle class” artifacts and housing may not be emulative, but
proud or defiant statements of equality and the strength of union. Middle class ideologies
as well as artifacts may also be given new meanings or used in unexpected ways by
working class people. In the same study, Jameson (1977,1998) also notes, as does
Hardesty (1994), that, for better or for worse, the ideology of separate spheres and
domesticity was used by organized labor to justify wage demands—the “family wage”
and the moral obligation of the male breadwinner to earn enough to support his family.
Another example is Lizbeth Cohen's (1986) well-known study of working class
household furnishings. Cohen suggests that such objects may indicate alternative ideas
of what constitutes “Americanism;” working class or immigrant ideas rather than middle
class ones.

IV. THE PROJECT: CLASS IN THE PAST

A. The Causality of Class Struggle

One of the central concerns in our research at Ludlow and the surrounding coal
camps is labor struggle as a causal factor in social and material change. The 1913-14
strike was an expensive and bloody defeat for the union, but it was also an expensive and
bloody victory for the coal operators. To avoid more such victories, companies instituted
limited reforms in labor-management relations, shifting from a policy of confrontation to
one of co-optation. Rockefeller, with the introduction of the Colorado Industrial Plan,
instituted one of the first company unions. Company unions were exactly that--unions
owned and operated by the company. These were intended to give workers a voice
without actually permitting them to organize. It is also common historical wisdom that
the strike sparked nation-wide reforms in company town conditions.
A class-based approach demands an awareness of the global or national context of
the sites we study, as do many approaches. If we looked at Berwind or other company
towns in Southern Colorado in isolation or as individual sites explainable on their own
terms, we are then thrown back on idealist or top-down explanations. Changes in
conditions in the camps are explained in terms of paternalism or free-market ideology,
such as the need to attract and keep labor.
Sometimes these explanations may be true. But we obviously need to look at the
context. For example, the Coal War was only one event in an explosive period of labor
unrest. The period from 1910-1915 has been called the "Age of Industrial Violence"
(Adams 1966). Changes in labor conditions during or immediately after this period of
labor unrest need to be considered in light of this.
Archaeology is very well positioned to make a contribution to our understanding
of the impact of labor struggle on everyday life. The documentary record on this issue is
often far from rich. Historians are thrown back on company and union records. It is, for
example, generally accepted wisdom that company town conditions improved throughout
the US as a result of the Coal War (Crawford 1995; Roth 1992). But the sources for this
are the companies themselves or the architectural firms they hired. The discussion
revolves around a few well-known model company towns or architectural firms who
specialized in such towns. Archaeologists can identify what changed and how in the less
well-documented towns where the majority of workers lived.
In the Coal War Project our approach is actually quite straightforward, at least in
principle. We get at the causality of labor struggle by periodizing the archaeological
deposits on the basis of the strike; searching for deposits that date to before and
immediately after the strike. By examining variations at the community and household
scales we can start to talk about exactly what conditions changed after the strike and how
they changed.
At the community scale we will be considering changes in spatial organization,
refuse disposal, drainage, and street paving. Other community-wide improvements
would also be churches, medical care, and, certainly high on the corporate list of
improvements, YMCAs and bandstands.
At the household level, we will also be considering architectural changes, and
specific amenities such as the addition of electricity, plumbing, and individual outhouses.
Domestic refuse—faunal remains, bottles, ceramics, and cans—will inform on changes in
household consumption patterns and expenditures. It is also possible that, through
changes in assemblage diversity and analysis of labeling and embossing, we may be able
to assess dependence on the company store
Beyond the depth of these improvements, we must consider their breadth. Were
all neighborhoods of the coal camps treated equally? For example, a stone terrace with a
number of substantial houses distinguished the main part of Berwind. These prominent
houses were referred to by one of our informants as the “atonement houses” for the
Ludlow Massacre. Yet we have also encountered less-visible neighborhoods up side
canyons where the architecture is considerably more rough-and-ready.
Superficially, this is straightforward, but it should not be reduced to a simple
cataloging exercise. Any one of these changes can be seen from multiple perspectives.
Changes limited to public architecture such as YMCAs and churches would suggest fairly
limited input from the miners. For example, a good example of disconnected corporate
liberalism is that a proliferation of bandstands in the coal camps was an immediate
consequence of the strike. Obviously someone thought that lack of musical
entertainment was a factor in the strike. Less publicly visible improvements may have
been more important. Plumbing, for example, would have real consequences for
domestic labor. We should also think about the trade-off between increased material
comfort and increased company interest in the housing and the surveillance that would
bring.

B. Class and Ethnicity

A second emphasis of our research on the Coal War is the relationship between
class and ethnicity. One notable aspect of the Ludlow colony, and the strike as a whole,
was the solidarity of the different ethnic groups who made up the strikers. The diversity
of ethnic groups in the mines and mine camps was a continual source of comment by
historical observers. It was a source of concern, for example, for the union, who
suspected that the companies were importing a variety of different ethnic groups to
hinder communication and increase divisiveness among the miners.
Many archaeologists seem to feel that, in a bizarre sort of zero-sum game, the
study of class implies neglecting issues such as race, ethnicity, or gender. I stress that
class processes never exist in a pure "laboratory" form. A relational view of class means
that class is "worked out" in the actual world through kinship networks, community,
ethnicity, race, gender relations, culture. Class is always historically situated and interacts
with other social and natural processes and contexts, such as ethnicity, in complex ways.
Once we start addressing concrete historical situations, we need to address these other
processes, and the way class processes work themselves out in the actual world.
Otherwise we are merely illustrating dogma.
Traditionally ethnicity is seen as a divisive element opposed to class-
consciousness, which is unifying. Class-consciousness, in traditional labor studies, is
formed at the “point of production,” in the workplace and on the shop floor. This
relegates ethnicity to the home and the community. Ethnicity is primordial, it pre-exists
class, derives from separate processes from class and is to be overcome by the class-
consciousness of the workplace. I don’t think I need to stress the gendered implications
of such a perspective.
More recently, labor historians have stressed the rootedness of class in contexts
such as community networks and informal organizations. This approach, situating class
formation in the material conditions of everyday life, intersects with the interests of many
archaeologists and anthropologists. Using archaeology we ultimately hope to be able to
root the remarkable solidarity of the miners in everyday life in the coal camps.
I think it is important to stress the extent to which ethnicity and class can in fact
arise simultaneously out of the same processes. We see this not just in the coal camps of
Southern Colorado, but in numerous other industrial settings in the US during this period.
Many of the immigrants in the Colorado coal camps were Greek and Italian. Greece
during this period was in the throes of nation formation. Italy had recently completed it.
While people from these areas may have thought of themselves in some abstract sense as
belonging to a larger nation, they lived their lives as being from certain villages or
regions. When these Piedmontese, Sicilians, Tuscans, and Tyroleans emigrated, they
found themselves being organized in workgroups and neighborhoods, working and living
as “Italians.” The same for the Cretans, Macedonians, or Bulgarians, who were now
“Greek.” These abstract national identities were realized in concrete ways in the work
gangs, tenements, and coal camps of industrial America. So paradoxically it was in the
US that these diverse ethnic groups became, not only “Americans” and “workers,” but
also “Greeks” and “Italians.” The formation of these new ethnic identities was part and
parcel of the formation of class-consciousness. Tweaking class and ethnicity apart and
treating them as independent variables, or in more postmodern terms, as separate
identities, may not be possible or even desirable.
One issue we want to address is whether the companies used ethnicity as a
divisive element by favoring some ethnic groups over others. This is something we
should be able to identify archaeologically, and may have been a factor in determining
which areas got improvements and which did not.
A second issue for us is how the local union organizers at Ludlow treated ethnic
diversity. Was it in fact something that to be suppressed as inimical to class solidarity, or
was it something that they worked with and may even have drawn upon? The histories
we have suggest that at Ludlow the leadership was divided up among the different ethnic
groups, Louis Tikas being often referred to as the leader of the Greeks at Ludlow. We
don't have much more specific historical information than this.
A key step is identifying whether the tent colony was ethnically differentiated or
whether such differentiation was discouraged. In getting at this we have to rely almost
exclusively on archaeological evidence. We have fully exposed one tent location at
Ludlow, and possibly parts of surrounding tents. I feel pretty confident in saying that we
are in a Catholic area here, one that is most probably Italian. But whether it is just the
individual tent household or whether the neighborhood was Italian will require further
work. Once we start excavations in other areas of the colony, we will form a better idea
of its spatial ethnic organization.
V. PUBLIC INTERPRETATION: CLASS IN THE PRESENT
In conclusion, I want to point out that a relational view of class forces us to
consider class interests in the present. Understanding class in the past entails
understanding class in the present and our positioning in that class structure. The same
goes for the other parts of the Unholy Trinity--Race and Gender. Archaeologists and their
audiences are predominantly white and middle class. It doesn't take intricate or obscure
textual analyses to see this orientation in a lot of historical archaeology--for example the
celebrations of consumerism, the melting pot models of acculturation, or the discomfort
with the idea of class. Recently many archaeologists have been trying to expand the
audience for archaeology, trying to make it relevant to African-Americans or to Native
Americans. We ourselves have been confronted with the fact that many of the people
who have the greatest interest in the site, for whom the memory of Ludlow is most
important, are people who really don't have much use for archaeology, at least not
archaeology as usual.
In 1998, we were asked to prepare an exhibit on our work at Ludlow and Berwind
to show at the UMWA Ludlow Memorial Service. The memorial service confronted us
with the importance of the memory of Ludlow to working people in this area. Among the
attendees were striking steelworkers from Oregon Steel in Pueblo. 400 of them marched
to the service preceded by a banner with the names of all the people killed at Ludlow on
it. The point I want to make here is that the history of Ludlow and the coal camps is not
simply lying in the ground waiting for us to dig it up. There are histories that precede our
arrival on the scene, and that are rooted in different interests from ours. For our project
to be at all meaningful to the local community, we must understand and engage these
histories and interests. Our interpretations of the past are constructed in a complex set of
relationships between ourselves, the real past, and, what is often not discussed, our
audiences (Trouillot 1995; Shanks and McGuire 1996).
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