Labor History: Sacco and Vanzetti, Coal Miners, A Strike, And You

 

The Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and BartolomeoVanzetti were executed in Massachusetts on August 23, 1927 for a hold up and theft and for killing a guard and a paymaster, crimes that they most likely did not commit. The two men were arrested shortly after the hold up and murders and were first sentenced in July of 1921. Appeals and international protests and interventions by prominent politicians, public figures, and legal scholars followed. The defense had an answer for every argument made by the prosecution, and it was clear that the international protests supporting the two men had an effect on the judges and the prosecution and those they consulted with. Still, Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death in April of 1927 and an advisory committee charged with reviewing aspects of the case by Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller let the verdict stand.

We tend to think of the 1920s as a time of social excesses, mass consumption or consumerism, jazz, flappers, and people flaunting Prohibition. What we do not learn, or what we overlook, is that the 1920s were also times of increasing exploitation of workers, racist and mean-spirited restrictions on immigration, violent outrages against people of color, political repression, and strike-breaking by employers and losses for many unions. Coal mining and steel-producing regions were living in depression conditions well before the stock market crash of 1929. The labor movement and the Left were both deeply divided, although there were moments during the 1920s when both movements showed remarkable creativity and sometimes united around common objectives. By the standards of today the international labor and Left movements were large and deeply rooted in working-class communities, but by the standards of the 1920s these movements were in crisis and were trying to find their bearings after the devastation of the First World War and the failed strike waves and repression that followed the war. Moreover, the generation that had founded the modern labor and Left movements in many countries---including the United States---was passing on and the new leaders of these movements had only known the conditions of intense class war, repression, a world war, and bitter anti-colonial and often failing democratic struggles. It was in this atmosphere that Italian and German fascism formed and that industrial production and consumerism in the United States were reconfigured in the United States. And it was in this environment that Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, tried, and convicted. Innocent or guilty, the laws that prevail today would likely not have allowed either their convictions or their death sentences.

The cases of Sacco and Vanzetti might not be of great interest to working-class people in the United States today. What lessons could they hold for us after 97 years?

On August 8, 1927, the revolutionary Industrial Workersof the World (IWW) called a strike in Colorado’s southern coalfields to protest the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. Those coalfields employed thousands of mine workers, most of them employed by the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. Memories of the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 that had taken place in those same southern Colorado coalfields were still fresh in the minds of people there. The IWW had seen better days and was suffering from internal divisions and isolation. Depression conditions were prevalent in the coalfields at the time. Employment in some mines was sporadic and the state had four or eight or more distinct coalfields that produced for different markets and worked under different conditions. Immigrants and immigrant communities were facing special attacks. The Ku Klux Klan was on the march as a mass organization and had infiltrated state and local law enforcement. A bloody regional conflict between rival gangs over bootlegging and car thefts was underway. CF&I seemed all-powerful. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) officially opposed the strike. 

And still the mine workers of southern Colorado struck.

Thousands of mine workers, most of them with roots in Italy or Mexico or Eastern Europe, walked out and stayed out for three days with the hope that their actions would help prevent the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists being held on death row 2000 miles away, and lead to improvments in their working and living conditions as well.

There was no strike fund or strike pay.
There were no lawyers ready to help.
Most of the strikers were not affiliated with any union.
Many of the strikers could have been deported for having joined the strike.
All the strikers knew that they could be blacklisted.
One of the leading strike activists was a young woman named Milka Sablich, or "Flaming Milka," who was known for her red hair and wearing red to the picket lines on the prairies and for being especially tough.

The "Sacco and Vanzetti strike," as it was called, shut down all of the major mines in the southern Colorado coalfields.

Can you imagine this?

Milka Sablich

The mine workers returned after three days, reorganized, and struck again in September and October for a long list of union demands. The strike spread, and for the first time mine workers in all of Colorado’s coalfields struck together for a common set of demands.

The strike faced repression. A mineworker and a boy who was watching an IWW demonstration were killed in Walsenburg. Six striking mineworkers were killed at the Columbine Mine in northern Colorado. Union halls were raided and destroyed by the police and company thugs and vigilantes kidnapped strikers and transported them over state lines and left them in the middle of nowhere. The Governor of New Mexico ordered troops to the New Mexico-Colorado state line. The Catholic Bishop in Denver was said to have decreed that no member of the IWW could receive a Church funeral, although local clergy seem to have disregarded this. Strikers and strike supporters were held without charges and were moved from jail to jail. Homes were raided. Martial law conditions were imposed, although martial law was never declared, and these conditions were enforced by the Colorado National Guard and a state police unit that was reassigned from enforcing Prohibtion laws to strike-breaking. This special unit often acted with violence and was perhaps infiltrated by the Ku Klux Klan. Strikers and their supporters were blacklisted.

The IWW could not hold the strike together and state and company repression took a toll. The union was forced to the margins. The UMWA intervened and got a contract at the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company that shut the IWW out and gave the UMWA a base for future organizing. That contract and the UMWA’s later organizing helped bring some stability to the northern Colorado coal fields and helped steelworkers employed at the C&I-owned steel mill in Pueblo, Colorado to get a union contract years later. It also helped Josepine Roche, the progressive owner of Rocky Mountain Fuel, and her liberal cohort gain national attention and secured a place for her and some of those around her in President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. She became a major force behind the New Deal coal codes and she later served as an administrator of the UMWA’s Welfare and Pension Fund.

The Columbine Mine was owned by Rocky Mountain Fuel. Roche and her closest advisors denied being responsible for the deaths of the six who died there and the sixty or so people who were wounded there on November 21, 1927. She managed to survive charges that she and the management team under her were responsible for the violence and other charges that she interfered and prevented the families of those killed from receiving settlements for the deaths of their loved ones. Roche was forced from her position as a Welfare and Pension Fund administrator in 1971 as militant mine workers and their families and allies fought for democratic control of the UMWA. To this day, I believe, there is no accurate account of Roche's relationship to the violence that occured at Columbine and its aftermath and her role as a Welfare and Pension Fund administrator and her removal from that position.  

 

The IWW’s great organizer Sam Embree was hounded out of the union in the aftermath of the strike. He later became an organizer for the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. But before the strike was over the IWW opened an organizing campaign among western agricultural workers that had limited success. The mine workers’ strike and the campaign among the agricultural workers became foundational to Colorado’s Chicano movement of the 1960s.

The strike ran, more or less, from September or October of 1927 to February or March of 1928. For a brief time after the strike, Colorado mine workers were the highest paid mine workers in the world. Mine owners forced the workers to surrender their wage gains once the IWW was gone and the UMWA was tied up with trying to make the contract at Rocky Mountain Fuel work. 

Many of the strike's leaders and participants went on to make lasting contributions in politics, the labor movement, the Chicano movement, and Depression-era social movement organizing. They passed on what they learned in 1927-1928 to others who carried these lessons well into the 1960s. And so it is, I think, that Sacco and Vanzetti have given us lasting legacies, however indirect or difficult to trace these are.

I have been documenting the 1927-1928 Colorado mine workers’ strike and the legacies left by the strike’s participants and organizers since 1982. In the meantime, Leigh Campbell-Hale has come out with a worthyintroduction to the strike and Michael Robert Gonzalez has written his dissertation on the strike and has offered us a special look into the radical and ethic-communal origins of the strike. The book Slaughter in Serene gives an account of the violence that occured at the Columbine mine.

My hope is that we will read working-class history to place ourselves in our own history as collective owners of our destinies.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti had in his possession a draft of a leaflet when he was arrested that may still resonate with many of us today. It read:

Workers, you have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the bosses. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruit of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being?