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by Howard Zinn. It was on my list of must-reads forever, but I just got to it lately. Give this book to every young person you know!
These people laid their lives on the line, over and over, the miners, the railroad workers, the garment workers, the farm laborers and on and on. They won the 40-hour week, worker's compensation, child labor laws, pensions and other small victories with their blood and sweat. It is clear that these things must be fought for anew with each generation. We should be telling their stories, not just on Labor Day but at every opportunity.
Here are two of the labor stories in A People's History of the United States: In 1900 there were 500,000 women office workers--in 1870 there had been 19,000. Women were switchboard operators, store workers, nurses. Half a million were teachers. the teachers fromed a Teachers League that fought against the automatic firing of women who became pregnant.
The following "Rules for Female Teachers" were posted by the school board of one town in Massachusetts:
1. Do not get married. 2. Do not leave town at any time without permission of the school board. 3. Do not keep company with men. 4. Be home between the hours of 8 PM and 6 AM 5. Do not loiter downtown in ice cream stores. 6. Do not smoke. 7. Do not get into a carriage with any many except your father or brother. 8. Do not dress in bright colors. 9. Do not dye your hair. 10. Do not wear any dress more than two inches above the ankle.
{and we think Afghanistan could not happen here?} *************
Shortly after Woodrow Wilson took office there began in Colorado one of the most bitter and violent struggles between workers and corporate capital in the history of the country. This was the Colorado coal strike that began in September 1913 and culminated in the "Ludlow Massacre" of April 1914. Eleven thousand miners in southern Colorado, mostly foreign-born--Greeks, Italians, Serbs--worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, which was owned by the Rockefeller family. Aroused by the murder of one of their organizers, they went on strike against low pay, dangerous conditions, and feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the mining companies. Mother Jones, at this time an organizer for the United Mine Workers, came into the area, fired up the miners with her oratory, and helped them in those critical first months of the strike, until she was arrested, kept in a dungeonlike cell, and then forcibly expelled from the state. When the strikes began, the miners were immediately evicted from their shacks in the mining towns. Aided by the United Mine Workers Union, they set up tents in the nearby hills and carried on the strike, the picketing, from these tent colonies. The gunmen hired by the Rockefeller interests--the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency--using Gatling guns and rifles, raided the tent colonies. The death list of miners grew, but they hung on, drove back an armored train in a gun battle, fought to keep out strikebreakers. With the miners resisting, refusing to give in, the mines not able to operate, the Colorado governor (referred to by a Rockefeller mine manager as "our little cowboy governor") called out the National Guard, with the Rockefellers supplying the Guard's wages. The miners at first thought the Guard was sent to protect them, and greeted its arrivals with flags and cheers. They soon found out the Guard was there to destroy the strike. The Guard brought strike-breakers in under cover of night, not telling them there was a strike. Guardsmen beat miners, arrested them by the hundreds, rode down with their horses parades of women in the streets of Trinidad, the central town in the area. And still the miners refused to give in. When they lasted through the cold winter of 1913-14, it became clear that extraordinary measures would be needed to break the strike. In April 1914, two National Guard companies were stationed in the hills overlooking the largest tent colony of strikers, the one at Ludlow, housing a thousand men, women, and children. On the morning of April 20, a machine gun attack began on the tents. The miners fired back. Their leader, a Greek named Lou Tikas, was lured up into the hills to discuss a truce, then shot to death by a company of National Guardsmen. The women and children dug pits beneath the tents to escape the gunfire. At dusk, the Guard moved down from the hills with torches, set fire to the tents, and the families fled into the hills: thirteen people were killed by gunfire. The following day, a telephone linesman going through the ruins of the Ludlow tent colony lifted an iron cot covering a pit in one of the tents and found the charred, twisted bodies of eleven children and two women. This became known as the Ludlow Massacre. *************
Let us honor their memory today.
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