On Feb. 7, 1894, the Western Federation of Miners declared a strike in the boomtown of Cripple Creek, Colorado, in protest of increased working hours. For the next five months, thousands of miners upheld the strike while fending off violent attacks from mercenaries hired by their bosses. The resulting victory became the first in a long chain of contentious and often violent labor struggles known as the Colorado Labor Wars. Independent historian Kyle Steven Kern joins The Real News for an overview of the Battle of Cripple Creek and its significance to US labor history.
Studio Production: Adam Coley
Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
Mel Buer: Welcome back, my friends, to The Real News Network Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Buer. Before we get started on today’s episode, I wanted to take a moment to thank you once again for listening to us week after week. Look, we know you’ve got limited hours in your day; Whether you’re listening to us in traffic, have us on your regular work pod rotation, or winding down the day with us, The Real News Network is committed to bringing you ad-free, independent journalism that you can count on. We care a lot about what we do, and it’s through donations from dedicated listeners like you that we can keep on doing it. Please consider becoming a monthly sustainer of The Real News Network by heading over to therealnews.com/donate. If you want to stay in touch with us and get updates about our work, then sign up for our free newsletter at therealnews.com/sign-up. As always, we appreciate your support in whatever form it takes.
As I’ve mentioned in previous episodes and conversations about my plans for the podcast, it’s my goal to introduce and discuss important dates in American labor history for our listeners. I come from a background of organizing with the IWW, which has a long and storied legacy in the labor movement in this country. I believe, as most organizers will agree, that knowing where we come from is a huge piece of knowing where we can go next. The struggle we are engaged in is not in a vacuum. We are a product of those who came before us and we are charting a path that those who come after us will be able to follow. To that end, this season, there will be a number of episodes released on or near the anniversary dates of important labor struggles.
American labor history is rich, varied, and downright incredible. I hope by doing these episodes we can open a few doors for you and get you thinking about some ways in which we belong to this legacy. To start this ongoing series, I want to take us back to early February of 1894, 130 years ago this year, to the mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado, the largest of a number of mining towns in the area organized by the nascent Western Federation of Miners.
We’ll get into the meat of the history here in a moment, but before we do, I would love to introduce my guest for today’s episode: My good friend and friend of the pod, Kyle Steven Kern. Kyle is a writer, independent historian, and the co-host of Profane Illuminations, an online show from Zer0 Books. His examinations of working-class life and labor history have been featured in publications like The Bias Magazine, The Activist History Review, and Protean Magazine. He is currently working on his debut monograph for Repeater Books, exploring the connection between philosophy and labor history. Welcome to the show, Kyle. So nice to have you with us.
Kyle Kern: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Mel Buer: It’s been a long time since we’ve been on a show together. I’m excited for this conversation today.
Kyle Kern: I know.
Mel Buer: I know. The last time we talked was what, 2020, I think?
Kyle Kern: Oh, something like that. Yeah.
Mel Buer: It’s been a while.
Kyle Kern: Yeah. Nothing interesting has happened since then though, so we can just pick right back up.
Mel Buer: Life goes on. Yeah. Okay, so we’re talking about the Cripple Creek miners’ strike of 1894. This is a piece of labor history that is important for us to dive into. February 7 was the start of the strike in 1894, that’s 130 years ago. When this episode gets released on February 8, we will be right around that anniversary. So this is a great time for us to have this conversation. I think to start, a great way to dig in is to take a look at some of the economic factors that played into the start of this strike. There’s a lot going on in 1893-94 in the US. Do you want to give us a little bit of a sense of what the economic conditions looked like at that time?
Kyle Kern: Sure. Thanks again for having me. By the way, the economics of the second half of the 19th century in the US is about as chaotic as the rest of the history in the second half of that century. You have not just the period leading up to a civil war and then the period of the Civil War itself, but everything in the back half of the 19th century is pointing the US toward the direction of industrialization. So the lives of everyday working people are changing rapidly; They’re surrounded by changes in the industry, changes in politics including representation in political parties, as well as the overall construction of the US moving away from an established agrarian economy and into a more internationally-focused, globally-focused, industrialized economy.
A big part of this change in production was the Westward expansion in the US, including the incorporation of the territory of Colorado in, I believe, 1861, which is incredible timing – Obviously, not accidental timing – Considering it’s around the same time that Southern states were seceding. And the backdrop of all of this is the mining industry. The mining industry was something that initially started from the imagination of frontier culture; This idea that in 1848 and 1849, when hard metal ore deposits were discovered in places like California, and eventually Nevada, Idaho, and Montana, the US economy made a decided shift toward the grading of silver and gold as a way of measuring its national currency. All of this meant that in the beginning, moving out to the western part of the US meant – No, that’s not the direction I want to go in. Apologies. Sorry, I’m a little nervous. I know I shouldn’t be.
A good place to start would probably be 1873; 1873 was the year that the US was, by default, put on a gold standard, it passed the Coinage Act in 1873, and now the price of US currency was wrapped much more closely to the price of rare metals that were being extracted from western states like Montana, Colorado, Idaho, and California. The problem with this period in American history is the various booms, busts, and crises in American capitalism in its early industrial years. Meaning that for the last three decades of the 19th century, the American economy, and as a result, because of our focus today, working-class people were experiencing an incredible change.
And if you jump forward to 1893 – Which is the lead-up and set the stage for Cripple Creek and everything that happened in 1894, though not exclusively – There’s a banking crisis that historians refer to now as the Panic of 1893 which is when the reserves of gold in the US were short. This led to some pretty significant bank failures and a stock market crash as people rushed to withdraw their money from banks. The result of this was hundreds of miles of railroad going into receivership. Hundreds of banks over a three-month period, a lot of them centered on the newly settled Midwest and Western states, completely closed. After this three-month crash in the middle of 1893, the US entered into its worst financial depression since the beginning of industrialization.
In that same year, there was a collapse in silver prices, and it brought a lot of strain on the newly established Western territories that were relying heavily on mining – Especially mining for silver, copper, and eventually, gold – And started us on this path toward the conflict because miners in this time period were already struggling under very poor working conditions and the strain of all of the other financial panics that they’d experienced for decades before. So unemployment was skyrocketing and hundreds of thousands of people were put into either part-time employment or out on the road to try and find work.
The joint stock corporations that owned these mines were based in places like San Francisco and New York, and a drop like in Butte, Montana – They experienced this, their work, as they say, copper was king – A slight dip in the prices or the speculation of the price of copper in New York City or San Francisco could result in hundreds or thousands of people losing their job in the blink of an eye. So financial speculation, a lack of regulation, and a series of rushes to extract as many rare minerals from the earth as quickly and as efficiently as possible created an environment that was a powder keg. It was a powder keg that was waiting to explode at any moment. And it did, in a series of conflicts – Particularly in that decade – Set the stage for not just the mine wars of this period, but the ones in places like Colorado as well as back east in coal mines. It set the US on this path toward the industrial conflicts that it would experience in the early parts of the 20th century.
Mel Buer: There’s a good piece of context that we want to bring in here is that in the 1880s, the Knights of Labor were ascendant and consolidating themselves into what ultimately became the American Federation of Labor, which is the first half of the AFL-CIO Federation that we know today. That kind of organizing was happening in the mid-1880s at the tail end of what I would call the first major chapter of what is now successive Gilded Ages in this country. And there’s a lot of organizing these new laborers, particularly in these mines, as they’re being consolidated by these mining magnets. In Colorado and the surrounding area, there is what ultimately became the Western Federation of Miners, which is only about a year old, roughly. They organized in 1892-1893, I believe. They were originally called the Free Coinage Union Local 19, and that was quite a few of the miners that were working at something close to 150 mines in the Colorado area, and it became the Western Federation of Miners, not long after that.
So we have a lot of new organizing that is happening in the area as these industries are being consolidated under these monopolies, particularly in Cripple Creek. It’s one of the largest mines, it’s the largest mining town in the area at the time. Cripple Creek mine employs something like one-third of the miners in that area in the 1890s. So they have a monopoly over the labor force as well. And because of the Panic of 1893 and the collapse of the value of silver, gold becomes even more valuable. So the gold-mining industry becomes, in today’s money, a multi-billion-dollar industry because it’s keeping the economy afloat during the Panic. So what you’re seeing is on the one hand, you have these capitalists who are consolidating profits and are taking advantage of what ultimately becomes a labor surplus, because silver miners need to find jobs elsewhere and they end up finding jobs in the gold mines in the area.
And on the other hand, you also have militant labor organizing that’s happening in these mines. And for folks who have been organizing for a long time or are particularly interested in labor history, you know who the Western Federation of Miners is, and we’re going to talk a little bit more about the legacy of that union a little bit later on. But what they’re doing is they are attempting to stabilize an unstable profession in the area and this is what sets the scene for what ultimately becomes the Cripple Creek miners’ strike. Because of this labor surplus, because these bosses know that there are a lot of people looking for work, they start to squeeze the labor force by attempting to mandate a 10-hour workday. Now, prior to this mandate, the miners in the area worked eight-hour days and they got paid $3 a day, which is roughly about $100 a day in today’s money. So this was a standard that they had set.
The owners decided that they wanted to add two extra hours to the workday, which is a lot, and they didn’t want to pay more for the additional work. So it was going to be an additional two hours of work per day still for $3, which the union said, no, we don’t want this. So the owners said okay, you guys can work for eight hours a day, but you’re going to take a pay cut and only get paid $2.50, which is a significant pay cut for no change to the work that they were doing prior. And this is the bosses trying to capitalize on the fact that there are a lot of people who need work and someone will take that job for that amount of money, and understandably, it pissed the workers off. There’s no reason why these folks should have taken the pay cut to work the same amount of hours. So this is what sets the stage for the miners’ strike.
Kyle Kern: You bring up a couple of really good points. The first one is the effects of Gilded Age policies. The crises of this period that emerged, emerged directly from the policies and conditions of the Gilded Age and are what provoked the responses and the organizing efforts from miners in the Western territories and the establishment of the Western Federation of Miners. It’s a really useful context for understanding the way that these labor conflicts change history. Because there was a lot happening in the 1890s, in terms of conflict between miners and employers, but in the same way that the gold rush was a rush, so too was the precipitous increase in conflict between miners and owners that led to the establishment of the Federation in Butte in 1893, and then the incorporation of the Coinage Union as Local 19 in December of that same year.
This was all one year before everything happened, and the establishment of the WFM was catalyzed through incidents like another really important labor conflict at the Coeur d’Alene in Idaho, which was just the year before that. So we’re talking about a banking crisis in 1893, a labor conflict that resulted in violence in the Western territories the year before that, and in that same year as the establishment of the WFM in Colorado, all of a sudden there was this new interpretation, this new way of looking at work that was not as prevalent before. And we’ll talk about it later when we talk about the changes in organizing. But the Western Federation of Miners became an important element of the reformist movement that was popping up in multiple parts of the country, but especially out west, and it came to a head in Cripple Creek, just as you said, through the differences in working conditions and a lack of uniformity.
Industrial production is about taking workers and giving them individual, single, small skills as part of a larger operation. It was no longer just a guy panning for surface gold or surface mining on his own or as part of a small crew but was now a series of workers who were all performing single tasks. Everything from pit mining to surface mining, the role of individual people was fundamentally changing, and that’s the way that they lived their lives. They were in these mining towns, some of them far away from their families, some of them with their families with them, but not often.
The thing that’s unique about Cripple Creek is how it was established; It was part of the boom town boom, if you will, where these boom towns would all of a sudden pop up because of all of this capital investment. People were discovering gold and the prospectors who were discovering the gold were then in financial need of selling that property to owners – In this case Colorado Springs – And then the guy who found gold in Colorado, died poor, his name was Bob Womack, and he was at the meeting with the capitalists in Colorado Springs to first enter Cripple Creek. He met with the Raven Gold Mining company as well as a couple of other representatives but then he died poor. It’s really taxing work, mining, but as mines got deeper and as they went underground – It’s already dangerous work.
When you’re working with surface rock, in Colorado specifically, what they would do in order to penetrate the surface, is they take a pickaxe and poke patterns in the surface of the rock, and then insert blasting caps into that and then use that to blast out and dig in further. They were often in water and cold conditions. Oftentimes, these early miners as well as miners later on, would work specifically in the winter because they had to dig horizontally, and in order to protect themselves, they would have to dig while the water was frozen. This is all to say that not only were the working conditions poor and difficult, but when industrial capitalists came in and started dictating how the working day went, something had to give. There was something around like 150 mines in the Cripple Creek district.
Cripple Creek is a small creek but the whole surrounding area was named after the place where gold was first discovered. So you had all of these bosses who lived in Colorado Springs, who worked with one another, colluded with each other, and formed organizations like the Mine Owners Association in order to advocate for one another. But they were working under very variable working conditions, especially with hours being a big part of it. One mine would have eight hours, another mine would have nine hours, and another one would work 10 hours with almost always the same pay. And what the mine owners started doing, as capitalists and industrialists do very well, is they started organizing with one another.
That’s how this conflict around the working day combined with the soft labor market – Again, Mel, you hit the nail on the head – Is what resulted in a bunch of silver workers and silversmiths from places like Leadville close by in Colorado, which was very rich with silver, to go out looking for more work. So when hundreds or thousands of workers were losing employment, immediately at the whims of someone in New York or someone in San Francisco washing the market, they started to recognize the difference in their working conditions. But those differences were brought to the surface by the mine owners themselves who decided that they wanted to increase working hours because of the soft labor market.
Incidents like Coeur d’Alene peering over the shoulders of everyone who’s in this situation was a big galvanizing moment that pushed organizing and also gave mine owners something to fear. They wanted to adjust the variable hours to a… Sorry, I’m going to rewind that a little bit. It all started with the owner of a particular mine called Isabella, I believe, who planned to lengthen the working day from eight to 10 hours, and then that’s when the miners voted amongst themselves to authorize a strike. It was the first big moment that pushed additional organizing in Cripple Creek on both sides; On the side of the mine owners who established a chapter of the Mine Owners Association in Colorado Springs, and on the side of workers as well, who used this move – Specifically around hours – To organize the mines in the Cripple Creek district, call it the Free Coinage Union, and affiliate with the Western Federation of Miners more solidly.
That was in December. And when stuff picks up that next year, the real takeaway from all of that is it’s so remarkable to think about how quickly these things pop up when necessity is at the forefront of people, whether or not people can eat or their families can eat. A lot of the problems that they had too, was with working conditions because you can’t breathe that stuff in for that long, for that much time. Surface mining is dangerous because of what you’re breathing in.
The front-tier fantasy probably gave away pretty quickly to the reality of changing an industrial production, which in the case of mining means disaster, because the history of mining is a history of workplace disasters. On the one hand, the immediate ones like accidents in transportation, explosions, roof-ins, and fires. When a fire starts and you’re underground, you die by suffocating because the fire sucks all of the oxygen out. There’s a story that I read for my book – It’s about a coal miner but it’s a story that sticks in my mind – About a large coal pile that someone was doing work on, standing on top of. The problem is that it was an unstable pile of coal and what happened was a pocket of air opened up close to the bottom of it, and then the shift in that coal pile took the worker and sucked him into the bottom of it. And the thing is that he didn’t die from the pressure or die from that injury. He died by suffocating because he didn’t have any air. There are the effects of mining that are a full-scale invasion of the body. Mining for rare minerals in open-cast context, in surface mining, and underground mining – Because we can study this now, we know more about it – They all introduce elements of black lung disease.
So even before we had a name for a lot of these types of things, even before we had an archive that I was able to go and dig around in, or World Health Organization studies talking about the effects of mercury on contemporary mining. Mercury attracts these heavy, rare metals. So what they do is they use mercury to combine it with the heavier metals that are present in an ore, then they extract it, and then later on they separate the mercury from the gold, or the mercury from the silver, or whatever they’re trying to refine. And exposure to mercury, if you can believe it, causes organ failure and causes neurological problems.
Mining has always been physically dangerous, but it’s always worse than you think it is. And the people who understood this the best were the people who were sitting there and breathing the stuff in. All of this combined together – I mentioned a powder keg earlier. Not to be cliche, but that’s what it is – Something was waiting to happen because of the conditions of industrial production in that industry. You see how quickly things popped off in Cripple Creek, and yet somehow you still manage to think, how did this not happen sooner?
Mel Buer: There’s an important piece to be looked at, and maybe this is a good segue into the strike itself. The workers walked off, and they struck on February 7, because of the organizing that they had been doing in the region. Workers struck multiple mines at the same time. It wasn’t just the Cripple Creek mine but it was solidarity strikes and secondary strikes at other mines as well in the area. And as a result of that… According to my research, there were certain mines where mine owners had previously pushed for a 10-hour workday. They immediately, upon seeing other mines getting struck, reversed course and they guaranteed an eight-hour workday, and those mines remained open. There’s an interesting parallel. In labor history, as you do as well, we look for the parallels and the strategies that are still in use today. And I think of that particular strategy being most recently very useful for what the UAW was attempting to do with their contract campaign.
Kyle Kern: Absolutely.
Mel Buer: Right. This is a piece to give us a good 10 minutes or so to talk about what strategies were employed during the strike and what were some of the pieces that were unique to this particular strike, especially as it relates to the state response, and who was supportive of the strike and who was not. That’s a great place to move toward. What are your thoughts? What has your research told you?
Kyle Kern: Oh, man, where do you begin? In terms of strategy, the most important lesson from this and almost all labor history is the way that workers used the unique particularities of their environment, which includes the type of work that they were doing, its historical and political context, and the types of workers who were there. Cripple Creek was unique in some ways because it was more homogenized than other mining communities. It had a lot of, for example, European immigrants.
There was a big problem with the Italian question in other mining camps, especially up in Montana, which is a rabbit trail I’m not going to go on. But the thing about Cripple Creek was that it was, even for mining communities, primitive in a lot of ways. When you came out to the West to mine when you were a prospector, it’s not dissimilar. When you come out prospecting, you come out your first year, you’re in a tent, you bring your food and cans, and then eventually you move into something of a primitive log cabin in that Scandinavian style that was popular in the frontier west in the US in that time period.
In other instances, like in Butte, for example, there was enough time through the extraction of things like copper and silver to create more established mining communities. It’s not that this didn’t happen in Cripple Creek, it did, but it’s because the element of Cripple Creek being essentially the final gold rush in Colorado’s history meant that there was still lagging in this, not to call it the standard of living, but in the type of living that people were doing. So it was an environment where the elevation was extremely high, where it was difficult to get to, and where a mining community had just popped up a couple of years before that. So, out of necessity, as all workers do, they found themselves standing shoulder-to-shoulder by virtue of their condition, not by virtue of national origin or something. The types of people who were out in Colorado were of all different stripes too.
There were people who had come out earlier, buying into the myth-making of frontier culture as a way to potentially get rich, or find wealth, or stability for their family. There was the Trumpist element of work in that time period, something that I researched on as well, where workers who were maybe blacklisted from certain employers out East – Especially if they were union organizing or were generally transient in their day-to-day life – Would make their way out via rail technology. There was a railway that went into Cripple Creek that was very narrow, which proved to be an advantage for the union. That’s another good thing to add to the list, but that allowed access for people to make their way East and West. So it was difficult to do what they did, but it’s always difficult, and the way to overcome the particular context of your labor conflict is to lean into the skid, so to speak, and to capitalize on the actions of your employer.
It’s not surprising that wages, free time, working conditions, and health and safety concerns remain problems that people are experiencing. You’ve mentioned the UAW, which is absolutely 100% the best comparative example right now, maybe besides Warrior Met which we can also talk about. But the idea of the UAW strike, the contemporary most recent UAW strike, a lot of it was about the condition of work. There’s a really good article that’s in The Nation, I can’t remember who wrote it, unfortunately, that was dissecting the claims of injury and difficulty that UAW workers were experiencing. And it’s like I was talking about earlier with the hidden aspects of the difficulty of this work.
For UAW workers, it’s about the stress of repetition in a production line. Your job, say, on a production assembly line is to put seats into a car. The frame gets down to you and you do the same thing, however many hundreds of times per shift per week, which involves taking a seat, stepping over the frame of a car, leaning into a particular area with your hands, feet, and everything exposed, and doing the same repetitive moves over and over and over again. UAW workers report a lot of issues with their lower backs and it makes perfect sense. The condition your body is put in by doing the same repetitive action over and over and over again is not the result of you not being good at your job; It’s the result of the natural wear and tear that work has on the body and that injury is a condition of your employer’s profits. They don’t make profits without being able to induce as much injury as possible, without breaking the law, or without coming on the wrong side of their workers.
Mel Buer: There’s something you mentioned about political context here. One thing to remind our listeners is in the 1890s, we were in the midst of an intense populist movement in the US, which had a lot of benefits for union organizing at that time. Particularly in the area, you have a populist governor who is in support of the strike. You have judges and other justices who are also in support of the strike, which means that oftentimes the mine owners try to employ things like the courts or requests for the state militia – Which is the precursor to the National Guard to come and break the strike – Are sidestepped or outright denied. Ultimately, what you have during the strike as well, is you have a county sheriff who is willing to do the dirty work of the mine owners and deputize something like 1,300 ex-army folks, private mercenaries, the precursor to freelancers for the Pinkertons, to try and break the strike as it drags on over the course of nearly two years.
What we see is for the first time in Colorado history and maybe the last time in a long time, stepping on the side of the striking workers to push back against the militarization of these independent strikebreakers. And to ultimately drive them out of the region and force the mine owners to disband these private armies that they have put together to try and break this strike. So this is a very unique space in labor history where we can see what that looks like. And there aren’t very many moments in labor history since then where we can point to the results of a sympathetic government stepping in for workers. The best we can hope for is a sitting US president to walk a picket line.
That’s a good piece to remind folks about; The post-panic or the economic conditions led to some interesting political shifts that then worked in the favor of these mine workers during their strike and very quickly experienced a backlash within a couple of years after the strike ended where we did not see that state response again. In fact – And we’ll talk about this here in a minute, it’s a good piece for us to land on as a way to wrap up this conversation – We see a bunch of interventions by the state, by state militia, by the state governor, by mayors, and by court justices, all of whom belong to the camp where they are in support of this because no one likes what the bosses are trying to do.
The Western Federation of Miners did enjoy popular support for this strike. You had civilians and individuals who lived in the region who absolutely supported what they were doing. They did not think that the mine owners were in any way justified in their attempts to squeeze more blood from their workforce without adequately compensating them for it. And you’ve noted that the working conditions were abysmal, so they had a real sense of popular support and institutional support for what they were trying to do. After two years of intermittent violence by both sides, two years of incredible things were happening, including, at one point, strikers blew up a shaft house above one of the mines as these deputized mercenaries were trying to reach their position where they were holding their line and sent them running back down the hill. So you have these moments in the course of this strike that I wish we had more time to get into, but we have this dramatic story that’s unfolding, and ultimately, the miners were successful.
They ultimately were able to call these mine owners into a room in Colorado Springs and get them to agree to an eight-hour workday with no change in pay, and to get that on paper. And these mine leaders survived attempts to lynch them outside the meeting house. They had to sneak out the back door in order to find safety. They had pretty much an uphill battle to try and win this, and ultimately, they were successful. As far as casualties go, I think there were two deaths, one on either side of the strike, and a bunch of miners that were arrested, only six maybe were convicted of crimes as a result of the strike. So ultimately, a resounding victory for this very young miners’ union. But as you and I both know, there is a backlash to this. The backlash at the end of this conflict was pretty swift, and the Western Federation of Miners was forever labeled violent, militant, and ultimately socialist.
Kyle Kern: Yeah. The advantage that the Western Federation of Miners had in this case, it illustrates the complexity of wielding power in defensive workers. The governor of Colorado at the time was a guy named Davis Waite, who reportedly came from an abolitionist family. He was born in New York, and he moved across the Midwest during the Civil War, partially because of those abolitionist views. Waite was radical in some ways; In the same ways that the Populist party – Which formed in 1891 as a coalition of Midwestern and Southern agrarian reformers who cared about stuff like reform of the federal government in the form of nationalization of industry, an eight-hour workday, free silver, anti-monopoly, anti-robber baron policies – Was popular, and Colorado at the time elected a delegation to Congress entirely from the Populist party, including their governor.
So, Davis Waite, the thing about what he did is that he didn’t just intervene in some ways. He didn’t maintain a pure lily-white neutrality or whatever but inserted himself into the conflict in a way that put him on the side of the workers. In the first round of negotiation, he negotiated on their behalf, and then he did something remarkable; On the second day of negotiation, he stepped back and showed up in support, but stopped driving the car, right? His goal was to get them, his goal was peace, and his goal was stability, but his goal was stability at the bargaining table and fair consideration in the midst of this intense physical conflict, that you saw after the miners overtook Bull Hill, which was the biggest overlook over Altman: The highest point in that district.
They took power by setting up commissaries and boarding houses and prepared for a long haul under the leadership of John Calderwood. They militarized themselves and began performing daily drills, and they started rehearsing for these conflicts. So when things escalated, it became clear that, and as you’re saying, in the events surrounding this where state power was wielded in the way that we’re most familiar with, which is to break the strike, put people back to work, and to maim and kill workers in favor of capitalists and industrial capitalists. The necessity of allies, including the community, is now and shall always be incredibly important. Workers and other hard rock miners from around Colorado showed up to Cripple Creek when they heard of everything that was happening, especially after the union moved to seize some of the mines and raided the general store. And as word got out, it was clear that people were on their side.
Mel Buer: A great way to close out this conversation, is that there is a legacy to the strike, as I mentioned. The Western Federation of Miners’ involvement, saw a boom in their membership and more organizing drives in the years after the strike. But they also had some backlash because they were seen as the instigators of some pretty intense violence. In the late 1890s, what ultimately ended up happening was that they were forever more seen by mine owners as being these beastly instigators of extreme violence against the machine of capital.
As we know, capitalists are good at personifying those mechanisms and creating an emotional attachment to them in the eyes of the citizens that they propagandize. So the Western Federation of Miners was seen as this too-militant, too-violent workers organization, and they were often blamed for violence breaking out in subsequent labor fights in the area. Ultimately, what that led to is the WFM severed ties with the AFL in the 1890s, and they went on to become a major defining group of organizers in the creation of the industrial workers of the world in 1905 and played a huge part in many of the mining organizations and strikes that happened in the first 15 years of the 20th century.
Very important figures coming out of that movement are folks like Big Bill Haywood and Frank Little, who are IWW organizers and are affiliated with the WFM within the IWW. So in terms of the legacy, in terms of seeing this timeline stretched a little bit beyond the last decade of the 19th century, what we’re seeing is a through-line of these strikes radicalizing a new generation of organizers and workers who are already fed up with the ways in which industrial capitalism has made their material conditions worse. And it leads to some of the most exciting, in my opinion, organizing in the new decades of the 20th century. We wouldn’t be where we are without the hard-fought wins of places like Cripple Creek. What do you think? Do you agree?
Kyle Kern: Yeah, I completely agree. The WFM formed initially with the intent of confederating with the AFL and then left the AFL really quickly. And the reason why is because the AFL didn’t offer them support when they needed it in Colorado. So it pushed the WFM in a more radical direction, in a direction that would ebb a little bit in terms of their establishment of the IWW, and shortly thereafter, their break with the IWW. There’s a difference in strategy and the determining factor was what’s the best way to approach this? It’s a time period where people are establishing new political parties and seeing them as a vehicle for change. They’re doing all kinds of things in order to address the rapidly changing world around them. But the thing that cuts to the core of everything that we’ve been talking about is it raised a new element of working-class spirit in the US that had never existed before.
And that’s the takeaway from every event in labor history; Is that while work changes, while economies change, the process of addressing these issues that we talking about largely remains the same. And I don’t mean in strategy, because there’s no precise strategy. I don’t mean in blueprint because there is no blueprint, there’s no manual, and there’s no skeleton key for worker struggle. The answers to your problems at work are always born in that struggle, and they’re articulated by those who are willing to stand up for themselves and the people around them, which is something that I believe that everyone has within them. We have it within us to make the determination to struggle based off of our daily lives. I’ve been talking about blasting caps and dynamite. Well, it’s all dynamite. The dynamite is the working-class spirit in you because it’s a gift, it’s free, and it’s because the price has already been paid by people who came before you and by you.
It’s too biblical, but I think about the section of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus said, “For the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are a few who’d find it.” He’s talking about this reflection on a way of living that, on the one hand, there’s a way of living that’s wide and easy and requires being told what to do and how to live your life in a particular way that’s very external, that’s through the influence of others sometimes who are taking advantage of you. And then there’s always an alternative path that is inside of you, and that’s to do the difficult thing and make the determination to struggle.
It’s not like the Coolies and the Rockies and the valleys and the curves of the mountains brought gold to the US. It all seems like this big accident. A gold rush leads to statehood, which leads to industrial investment, leads to workers moving to the area, leads to exploitation, leads to conflict, leads to the results of that conflict, and so on and so forth, and keeps moving. In all of this, there was never a guidebook outside of the particular conditions of where they were living. There’s no blueprint telling them what to do. There’s just the magnitude of their life, the necessity of doing something about it, purely for a lack of other options, and the discovery that we make every time we organize. The discovery we make is that yes, there is power in standing with one another and in using all means necessary in order to forward a struggle into new decades.
The WFM and the IWW have done this and set the stage for history as we see it happen throughout the 20th century. But as you were talking about with the UAW specifically now, Shawn Fain, the newly elected leadership, and Unite All Workers for Democracy, have done something really special. Not just through their direct action, their fights with The Big Three, and the new organizing that they’re doing right now, but they did so by using history in a certain way that recognizes that history is never closed off. It’s not this thing in a book or a place; It’s your life. And when they declared their strike the stand-up strike, people were able to recognize the weight of what that meant, but history tells us just how heavy that weight is. It’s incredible work to be able to take the past and re-articulate it in the present. It’s difficult, and the path is very narrow, but for those who are willing to do it, it’s incredibly rewarding. And as I said earlier, in a way, it leads to life, if that makes sense.
Mel Buer: It does. That’s a great way to end it. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Kyle. Please come back anytime to talk about labor history. I would love to have you on again. Can you let our listeners know where we can find you and your work?
Kyle Kern: Oh, sure. You can find me on Twitter @LaborKyle and pretty much everything. I have a YouTube channel and you can also find me on the Zer0 Books YouTube channel semi-frequently, talking about all kinds of stuff. But just keep listening to this show, that’s my takeaway.
Mel Buer: Thank you. All right. That’s it for us here at The Real News Network Podcast. Once again, I’m your host, Mel Buer. If you loved today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get notified when the next one drops. They usually come out on Thursdays. You can find us on most platforms, including Spotify and YouTube. If you are checking us out on YouTube, leave a comment below. Don’t forget to subscribe.
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