October 16, 2024 • 60 mins
Unions and governments have always had a complicated, at-times antagonistic and violent relationship. In the first evening of this week's special two-part series, Ben, Matt and Noel explore a terrifying tale of corruption, crime and conspiracy: What was the Ludlow Massacre?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noman.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly,
you are you. You are here. That makes this the
stuff they don't want you to know. We are putting
on our our ridiculous history garb in a way, and
(00:48):
you know, roguesous robes are occulted, illumination, Global unlimited, ridiculous history,
branded robes, a lot of brand names there. And tonight
we are exploring something that maybe apropos to the current
situation here in the United States and abroad. Unions and
(01:10):
governments they've always had a complicated, at times antagonistic, violent
series of interactions. And you know, we live in different
parts of the Atlanta metro area. We all know different
people and get into different situations. So I'd like to
begin tonight by asking you guys, do you see any
(01:30):
like what's your vibe check in your neck of the
Woods on unions. What's the public opinion feeling like.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I can't speak for public opinion, but I would just
say that juxtaposition of unions and governments is really interesting
because the middleman between those two powers is always private industry, right,
So it's how much does yeah capital, how much does
the government support, defend or go against an organization that's
(01:59):
made quite a lot of money, which reads tax dollars
for a government.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
And it's also an interesting double edged story because historically
unions have sometimes gotten a bad rap because of the
potential for corruption and you know, things like Jimmy Hoffa
an organized crime and the Teamstress Union and all that stuff,
And I think it gives a bad rap to an
otherwise very very positive institution. So I think some people
have maybe a skewed perspective on what unions even are
(02:26):
and what they're meant to accomplish because of some of
these big, flashy stories and movies and things.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Especially because your public history textbooks don't go too far
out of their way to talk about the troubled history
of labor in the United States.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Oh yeah, yeah, and we're faced, and we have humanity
has been faced for a long time, especially in capitalist
societies with this problem of you need everybody to be
consumers to the extent that they possibly can, right, have
enough money to buy all this stuff that's being produced.
So how much do you actually pay the human beings
(03:04):
that produce the stuff to keep those goods cheap. It's
a formula that everybody can buy, and it's this weird
little game that's played, and unions generally stand there to say, hey,
you need to pay the people who make the stuff
enough money to afford the stuff.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Well, and the fact of the matter is too like oftentimes,
if you don't have somebody standing up for you, or
you aren't the one that's standing up for yourself or
your industry, the people in charge of the industry are
going to pay you as little as humanly possible to
maximize those profits.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah, and let's let's be clear on this aspect of
it right now. Like the public opinion waxes and wanes,
especially over recent decades, but most people can agree that
workers should have certain basic rights. You know, it's sad
that it's sad that it's distressingly common here in the
(03:58):
United States or people to kind of assume that labor
Day is about maybe people giving birth instead of workers' rights.
And I'm calling myself to account there. For many years,
a younger version, I was under that misapprehension. And many
of the rights held by workers in the United States
(04:20):
today come directly from the actions of unions, and no kidding,
from those organizations fighting against very real conspiracies and more
than a few times dying in pursuit of those ideas.
And before we introduce this, Matt, I think they're you
(04:41):
cited here in the doc a statement that I think
we all found moving, which is a great introduction to
our specific topic this evening.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Oh yeah, it's almost a poem written by Frank J. Hayes,
who from nineteen seventeen until nineteen nineteen was the United
Workers of America president. That is a union which.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
We'll get to, yeah, in depth.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yeah, we're going to talk about him a little later. Well,
I don't know how much we'll talk about him, because
he comes right after the events that we're going to
be discussing today. But he had this to say about
the subject that we're going to be discussing. In the embers,
gray and red. Here we found them where they bled, here,
(05:24):
we found them stark and dead. Here on Ludlow Field.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
And this is one reason I really like this is
because this also is a clear homage or an arguable
homage to the famous war poem in flanders Field, Yes
by John McCrae, written in nineteen fifteen, and believe Hayes
said this just a few years after, so it was
very much in the zeitgeist exactly. Yeah, and this brings
(05:53):
us what an excellent introduction to this entire oft forgetting
forgotten Keep it in Dylan, sorry, history of union activism
and corruption in crime. Tonight's exploration hinges on one of
the most infamous examples, what happens when this fraud relationship
goes wrong. This is our episode on the Ludlow Massacre.
(06:23):
Here are the facts, Okay, all right, to understand the
Ludlow massacre from the beginning, given that a lot of
us don't learn this when we're in grade school. Really
to the point about textbooks again, I think it's fair
to say that we need to understand just how crazy
(06:45):
the age of rail.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Was, and how much iron and coal and raw materials
you need to both create a giant railway and then maintain.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
It, and just the absolute cutthroat competition of it all,
the space race of it all kind of right.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah, well, and it's crazy to think that a lot
of this was private industry. It wasn't the United States
of America coming through and saying we're going to build
all these specific railways. It was individuals with like corporations,
companies that they created themselves, who are attempting to make
these smaller systems of rail that then all end up
getting connected at some point Niah.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
And to be clear, the US government was at every
step subsidizing oh yes, corporations in ways that because they
wanted it to happen too. So they're what they're doing
is while they're not creating Uncle Sam's Transcontinental definitely only
government workers railway system, what they are doing is giving
(07:50):
a lot of largesse from taxpayers. They are modifying immigration
policy specifically in their benefit for what we would call
slavelylabor or conscripted labor today. And they're on the same
team there, just by hook or by crook, going to
get this stuff done. And so they liked a lot
(08:11):
of the hand is hidden here. But to be clear,
the US is completely on board with this stuff, up
to and including exercising their military might in support of
these privates, because this is the last part I want
to make on this. There is separation of church and
state in the United States, but this is an excellent
(08:31):
example of why the Constitution has always conveniently ignored the
danger of not separating business in state.
Speaker 5 (08:40):
Yes, I guess it's occurred to me before.
Speaker 4 (08:42):
But you know, America has this history of being this
like welcoming immigrants with open arms and all of that
stuff in this melting pot kind of country. But there's
part of me that's always thought that that was really
only to the benefit of industry when it was convenient,
you know, to allow all of these folks to come
into the country so that they could kind of be exploited.
(09:03):
Is that too cynical an outlook?
Speaker 6 (09:06):
No.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I mean, obviously I'm biased towards cynicism as well, but
I would say with your point there, Noel. It's kind
of as though someone makes it across one of these
two vast oceans at the time and they get to
the United States and they say, oh, this is a
land of opportunity. I'm so glad I could be here.
I'm here to pursue my fortune and my dreams. And
(09:28):
then someone says that's great, man, as long as your
fortune that you're pursuing is backbreaking work in a mine
or on a railroad. And don't worry about complaining because
we'll just kill you.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, oh dude. And this is the point I want
to make. I think the buffer of a private organization
like that is so important when it comes to a
massive government attempt to build a transcontinental railway kind of thing, right,
where you've got a buffer of a private company. Where
nowadays it's the same kind of deal if you've got
(10:03):
a separate company that is, let's say, hiring the specific
people who are doing the work. If those workers get hurt,
if something goes wrong there, it's the company that then
is beholden to that thing. It is not the government's fault.
It is not even perhaps the parent company's fault. It
is the contracting organization.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
And when you've got a mass influx of say Chinese
laborers who are literally giving their lives to both the
rail or Greek workers who come in who are giving
their lives to the coal mine, it becomes a whole
different thing that isn't looked at us, at the government.
It is whoever the I was gonna say oligarch, but
that's not the right term. Whoever, the heads of these
(10:46):
giant capital systems.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Are the tycoons. And then it becomes a war for
public opinion. Right, Yes, Congress gets touched pretty easily. Then
as of now, no offense to members of Congress listening tonight.
But you know what, you know what we mean.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
A little offense perhaps, No, you know what you did, an.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Observation, you know what you're about to do.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
You know what you're doing right now. But we can
all So the story, one of the pivotal moments is
in our origin story is in the mid to late
eighteen hundreds, there are a bunch of survey teams who
are trying to figure out the roots for these ostensibly
private railways. One of these survey teams is led by
(11:34):
a guy named William Jackson Palmer, and in eighteen sixty seven,
they're mapping out potential routes for a thing called the
Kansas Pacific Railway. You get it, it's in the name
Kansas Pacific. That's where they're headed.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Like, are we going to go around these mountains or
through them?
Speaker 5 (11:53):
Mountains?
Speaker 3 (11:53):
The only way out is through, And so Willie and
his buddies are you know snoop adoop been around and
I like that.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
I'm sorry that made me chuck with some dynamite every
once in a while.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah, just just as a treat. Everything long, Yeah, yeah,
cu the Ineo and they realize that the Rocky Mountains
in this area in Colorado and specifically, there's this agglomeration
of veins of coal that are quite close to the surface,
(12:28):
to the point where you don't need at this juncture
a ton of infrastructure. You can actually just.
Speaker 5 (12:35):
Pull out of the ground with your hands.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
I mean maybe a shovel, but yeah, it's that close.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
You're right, like dig a short a small amount down
to really get access to a ton, Like we're talking
game changing amounts of coal.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah, this could. It's so it proliferates at such a
high rate in this area of the mountains that you
could be a mom and pop operation. And this is
this is a dream find the vague wording aside. This
is a gold mine. If you're building a railroad, your
(13:11):
fuel source is right there, you know what I mean.
You don't have to ship it from the other mines
out on the east coast. You can just build a
depot here, get the coal you need from, you know,
leaving them from the east coast and then stop over
here wherever you want to build it, and then just
have someone throw coal in the back of the the
back of the machine and boom, boom boom.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
Are you guys ever like mystified by the fact that
there is still coal to be mined, you know, it
being a finite resource and just like how long we've
been pulling that stuff out of the ground and there's
still coal to be had. I just I find that
incredibly mystifying.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
I don't think our brains are meant to comprehend some
of that stuff. Kind of like how many chickens are
born and produced and grown into factory leaf led chicken
and then kill old and then eaten that, you know,
chicken restaurants.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
It's like mind boggling.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
You can't. You can kind of think about it, but
the numbers just don't make sense when you even hear them,
or you looked at a picture, you'd just be like, no,
there's no way that's real.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
The human mind isn't isn't there for the scale? Yeah,
I mean, like one of the easiest ways to maybe
not sense the scale itself, but to sense the discrepancy
of that to you. Really, point NOL is to imagine
how many years is one billion seconds? If you counted
to one billion every second, how long would it take
(14:38):
you to get to a billion. The answer is almost
thirty two years.
Speaker 5 (14:43):
Yeah, my brain was already hurting just even that thought.
I could have done that easy by now counting.
Speaker 7 (14:52):
Okay, to not stop counting exactly ever, I always go
back to video game references, you guys, but I'm thinking
about this, this coal discovery there in that specific place
where they're trying to build the rail, as in StarCraft,
when you find like the resources exactly where.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
You need them to be to make a second base
to attack your enemy. I don't know why I'm thinking
about that, but you're just like, oh man, there's so
many resources right here. This is the perfect spot.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
I think is sid Meier's Civilization series.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
And I think great, and I think of No Man's Sky,
which is a mega resource extraction.
Speaker 5 (15:26):
Is that kind of like the point of the whole game.
It's pretty fun. I enjoyed that stuff.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
In Civilization, one of the one of the settings. And
this is for hopefully not just you know, twelve people
in the audience, but in Civilization, one of the settings
determines your resources in your opening, your opening moves of
the game, and a huge part of it is to
that point positioning structures near valuable resources. And sid Meyer
(15:57):
didn't make up Civilization as a concept a game about
civil It's been around. Yeah, yeah, it's sorry said it's
been done now, I'm kidding. It's a great game. But
the great game, the great game. Yeah. But like we're saying,
this is an absolute windfall. This is a watershed moment
for the expansion of rail because now we have this
(16:21):
new yet untapped to them resource. And so over the
next few decades, from what we say, the late eighteen
sixties to the early nineteen hundreds, coal mining explodes in Colorado,
sometimes literally unfortunately. But by nineteen ten, the coal mining
(16:44):
industry alone is employing ten percent of the people in Colorado.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
That's huge.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Hey, it was a smaller population at the time.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
But it really is, as you said, akin to the
gold rush kind of thing where so many people flocked
out there because there's opportunity.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
M h. And yeah, and imagine you know, you're let's see,
imagine you've emigrated from Greece or Italy, right, or maybe
somewhere over in the Pacific, and you're going to find
yourself in a coastal city that's often very crowded, it's
often very competitive, and your opportunities may be limited depending
on your connections.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Because it came by ship, right, that's just important, Like
you're stuck there, kind of Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
No one flew there at this time that we know of, right, yeah,
And there were people crossing land borders, right, Canada and
Mexico in particular, obviously, But for a lot of folks
who land in the United States, given that promise of opportunity,
they find that it's incredibly difficult to make it in
(17:48):
New York, for instance. Right, So there's this clarion call.
Things like the romanticism of the wild West is still
very much in place. So a lot of times people
are going to see maybe a flyer or they'll hear
from a friend of a friend about an amazing opportunity
several states, hundreds of miles away. And so it's no
(18:10):
surprise that people came from all around the US and
the world to Colorado to work in these mines, you know,
to maybe to the point about the gold rush, maybe
even stake acclaim if possible. Unfortunately, a lot of folks
were late to the game, and by the time they
got there to Colorado and specific there weren't mom and
(18:32):
pop outfits. There were families living in company towns, scared
to death of angering huge corporate leviathans.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Oh yeah, just to get that, just to get the
scale of that trip that we're talking about, let's say
New York, right, if they came in through New York,
you're going seventeen hundred, eighteen hundred miles to get to
your opportunity. The stuff we've learned over the past I
don't even know how many episodes where we've been talking
about these schemes where we'll pay for your travel to
(19:04):
get to that opportunity kind of thing, and then not
necessarily put you in indentured servitude, but you will owe us.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
Well, it's also this notion that like the companies are
out to provide opportunity, Like that's the sort of you know,
pr line that is sold to these folks making this
trek on their own steam, only to arrive and realize
that the ground floor has been occupied for a long
time and they are now beholden to something much bigger
(19:35):
than they could have ever imagined.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Shout out to Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
Actually that's the book that really hipped me to this
whole struggle and this whole structure, you know. And we
were talking a little bit about Woody Guthrie off air,
which we'll get to a little later.
Speaker 5 (19:52):
Matt, you found a great quote.
Speaker 4 (19:54):
But there's a film called Bound for Glory that is
about Woody Guthrie story the folk singer, and his involvement
in labor, and it shows this exact kind of Grapes
of Wrath type situation where there are these just they're
these almost like camps of folks that are waiting for
for work.
Speaker 5 (20:12):
And it's just not coming.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
And now they're all there and they've abandoned their homes
and they've got furniture straps to their jaloppies, and now
there are no work for them, or if there is,
it is absolutely indentured servitude.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
I would say, though, to be completely objective, Uh, those
big companies are looking for opportunity.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
That's right, it's in the dirt, it's in the rocks.
We got to build, shareholder, Yeah, but but just to
really just keep ourselves in the minds of let's say
ahead of household who's brought their entire family out there
for this opportunity. Once you're there, what are you going
to and what that opportunity? Well, what if it dries up?
Are you going to take your entire family back that
(20:54):
eighteen hundred miles to try and go somewhere else? Are
you going to just move two hundred miles somewhere homeless?
Speaker 5 (21:00):
At this point, you're basically nomads.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
It's not possible. Also, a lot of people who had
their own means of transport at this time ended up
selling that means of transport upon arrival because they needed
the capital just to exist. This is where we introduce
an outfit called Colorado Fuel and Iron, biggest company in
the area, also one of the most sith Lordie known
(21:26):
for being the harshest by far, and.
Speaker 5 (21:30):
They were not as friendly as the name implies.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Ben No, no no. Unfortunately, they've got nothing on Denver
hugs and kisses. But add to this, they're sold Rockefeller
Senior John Dee buys a controlling steak in Colorado Fuel
and Iron and then he runs the company with an
(21:53):
iron fist haha. And he eventually gives control of the
company to his son, Rockefeller Junior in a burst of creativity.
And these are New York patricians. They don't go to Colorado.
They just expect the checks to come in on time,
the same way kings of European empires would expect the
(22:14):
peasants to give their tribute, even if you know they
don't speak the same language.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yeah, man, we should name some buildings after this guy,
maybe like a plaza.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:28):
Or maybe there should be ice skating. There should be
ice skating, yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
In a big ass tree. Not all the time, but sometimes.
Speaker 5 (22:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
And then maybe we could shoot a show that goes
out live on Saturday evenings. We could shoot it in
the building.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Sorry, there's a guy I like for this. There's a
guy I like. We'll have to text him.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Oh yeah, I bet he knows a lot of people,
though they probably live in his building.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
We'll pause here for a word from our sponsors, and
we'll be back with more on the Ludlow massacre.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
It's the Rockefeller like fortune has a This is a
big part in that fortune, right, Yes, companies like this,
not just this company, but then also in Jay Gould.
I didn't know much about Jay Gould until I started
just going down this rabbit hole. The Gould family fortune
also arises from this company because he was his family
(23:24):
was one of the other major shareholders in this company.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
If you want to trace oligarchical history, I think one
of the best places to look is mining interest because
extracting precious resources from the ground, be they liquid or
gaseous or you know, concrete I guess, or solids, I
should say, you will find that mining is a huge,
(23:51):
huge part of this. And there's a reason that mining
fortunes don't often get talked about in the modern day.
There's just so much power and indeed pr behind them. Yep,
shout out to Australia.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
And farming families like big industrial farming families.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Anyway, anyway, we're fun at parties. The thing is mining
and we have people in the audience tonight who have
mining backgrounds or are associated with the industry. Folks, you
know well more than most that mining then and now,
in the eighteen hundreds, in the turn of the twentieth
(24:30):
century and in the modern day, it was very dangerous work.
We learned. Our word of the evening is call yours.
That's the technical term for coal miners.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
It's a new one to me, and I'm glad to
have learned it. But like you said, ben Off, Mike,
pretty common last name. You know, it's like one of
those nominative determinism kind of situations.
Speaker 5 (24:51):
Maybe I just didn't realize that was a profession.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Yeah, maybe that's how they get the surname.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
No, that's the thing though, right, Like I'm I mean,
like some surtnames did arise because of a legacy involvement
in certain industries by those families Goldman Sacks.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
It made uh, it made me think about that magazine.
I always hear about Colliers magazine, but this Collier's magazine
has an apostrophe before the This is just without the apostrophe.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
You're just a collier. If you're a coal miner and
these look, let's be honest, this work sucked.
Speaker 7 (25:29):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
It was you were under constant immediate threat from explosions,
mind collapses, suffocation, right, and suffocation can be very difficult
to clock, would it when you still have time to
save yourself because you suffocate due to invisible gases. That's
where we get the canary and the coal mine concept.
(25:52):
Because of the lower lung capacity of the bird, it
would die first, That's where that comes from.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
And then get the hell out of there.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Right, and then if the bird's not twitter painting or whatever,
then it's time for us to go. Additionally, and a
lot of people weren't super aware of this or the
authorities were being wilfully ignorant. These colliers were at long
term risk of invisible insidious things because of the constant
exposure to dust and chemicals, the so called black lung. Right,
(26:26):
and this is the time before X rays, so there's
not a doctor who can look at your lungs and say, hey,
maybe you can work on the surface for a while.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
Yeah, it is a canary in. It's fine, the canary
is back. He's okay.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Well, I mean you kind of mentioned it. But just
the work that would go into some of these giant
mining facilities, because we're not talking about one entrance that
goes in and everybody gets the call from that one entrance.
You're talking about teams entering a mountain essentially from various points,
and often there are gloss used to make those initial
(27:02):
I don't know, cave hole kind of the the shafts
ye cable like the cable, you know them cables, But
there are explosions happening that are a part of this
interconnected system of you know, punched holes into this mountain,
and just the collapse thing is so scary and all
that other stuff. And it's not like you got walkie
(27:24):
talkies in the early nineteen hundreds talking to each other
about what's happening.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
Yeah, And as things become increasingly honeycombed in the subterranean sphere,
then then one change in a thing that could be
fine for the system you know about can be disastrous
for the other interconnected things, because you know, you're under
the rock and there's a lot of there's a lot
of heavy, heavy stuff above you. In addition to working
(27:52):
in these cartoonishly unsafe conditions, the miners were working twelve
hour days, six to seven days a week, like you
get a Sunday off maybe, and they're not paid by
the hour, so they're not paid, you know, X amount
of dollars per those twelve hours. They're paid like piece work.
You know, they're paid upon the amount of coal delivered.
(28:15):
And in the case of the Colorado the big companies,
we give you eighty cents per ton of coal that
you made. However, they didn't count a ton as two
thousand pounds. They counted it as two thousand, two hundred pounds.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Oh yeah, just you know, just becuz.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Just a little vigorous.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
And they're also not giving you eighty cents us. They're
giving you eighty cents worth of the store that you
can buy from the coal company.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Load sixteen tons. What do you get, dude? And another part,
and this is the part, oh man, this is going
to be familiar to anybody who's worked in the service industry.
They had other work they had to do, like their
equivalent of side work. You know, you don't get paid
to roll that silverware right to refill those ketchup bottles
(29:08):
or those condiment bottles, but you have to do it
because it's part of your job. The miners had to
do a bunch of stuff that they were not paid for.
Laying track, clearing those escape routes in case somebody else's
tunnel explodes, maintaining the tunnels, keeping the dust down. All
of this stuff day in and day out, they had
to do, and none of it was paid because it
(29:31):
only helped them survive. To get their you know, two
hundred pounds of coal and their eighty cents of Script,
and so they called all this other stuff they had
to do dead work. I can't verify this, but I
think they called it partially dead work because they weren't
getting paid, and then partially they called it dead work
because if they didn't do it, people would.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Die, right, including themselves. So you're just like, well, I
might as well do it so I can continue.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Just a quick backcheck on something Benja said to Script,
being like proprietary currency that can only be used like
it's like ben Bucks.
Speaker 5 (30:08):
Right, well, okay, sorry not to malign ben Bucks.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
That's it's got. It's an economy of scale into itself.
But you would be issued instead of pay that is
universally you know, accepted. It would be something that you
literally have to spend only back with the company. That's
that's what I owe my soul to the company.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Store is referred to and not and not accepted in
other company towns. Right, And this is the maybe a
good modern example just for a weird dystopian comp We're
big fans of Dave and Busters. But what if you
worked for a D and B and you had to
live in, you know, an apartment complex run by D
and B and they only paid you in D and
(30:45):
B power points.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
It's like with DMB two and like you know certain arcades,
it's almost like sky miles, where there's no real metric
that is visible to you as to how much it's
even worth. It's completely up to the discretion of the company.
So they're paying you in a thing that they control.
Speaker 5 (31:02):
The value of that you can only use to buy
that they sell you.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Well, you just touch on something really important because in
the company's mind, you're not getting just paid in how
much coal you produce. You're getting paid in not having
to pay rent in the same way, because you do
live on the company's dime, on the company's property, in
one of their housing units that they've built thousands and
(31:27):
thousands of for their workers. Right, So they're the company
is building that into what you are getting compensated.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Labor camp package. Yeah, no, it is a labor camp.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
You're You're not wrong. But at the same time you
have to imagine in the minds of those tycoons like
John D. Rockefeller at the top, who's thinking, oh, well,
I'm treating them fairly. I look at I'm giving them
places to live and raise their families.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
What a guy, We built a church and they have
every other Sunday off, so it's basically gone. And then me,
do you.
Speaker 4 (32:01):
Guys think people at that level have to get to
a place where they really truly believe in their benevolence
like that they have this almost god complex. They're like,
I am helping the little guy the right thing.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
You can imagine it as in well the thought I
think that happens, and you can see it reflected in
some of the reporting and interviews that some of the
rock Fellers did after what we're going to talk about here.
But just this idea of I'm gonna I'm gonna use
this because I really think this is how they thought,
and I may be wrong, correct me if I am.
What else would they have if I weren't providing this
(32:37):
for them?
Speaker 3 (32:38):
And imph is on. I Yes, that's the issue too,
with the kind of I don't want to necessarily call
it malignant narcissism, but the the wilful ignorance again as
well as the tremendous cognitive parkour of rationalization. Right, this
is a time when social Darwinism is still very very big. Right,
(33:00):
people do believe in the American aristocracy that some people
by the lottery of birth are fundamentally in some way
superior the Also, I do think it's important here to
raise the specter of the controversial Dunbar's number, which argues
that after a certain amount of people, to our idea
(33:21):
of scale, the human brain no longer thinks of folks
as human beings with all the depth and beauty of
a human soul. Instead, they think of them as functions.
So to Rockefeller, these are mining things that take X
amount of resources and produce why amount of coal?
Speaker 4 (33:41):
He is owning a horse and paying to feed and
water said horse, or maintaining machinery.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Well, imagine a Rockefeller going down like traveling at some
point down to the mining operation and seeing all of
the people standing before him. Those are not individual people.
Those are his army of folks who bring him more capital.
Speaker 5 (34:05):
I bought you.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Sorry, Oh wow, God, how did I not get fired
for that one? Anyway, So for Grizzly snapshot there, and
I think we've laid out the context very well. For
Grizzly snapshot of what was happening, you could say this
army was increasingly endangered. There was a very high rate
of attrition. Indeed, it depended for time, upon a continual
(34:30):
influx of other folks to replace the people who died.
The national death rate in nineteen twelve. We're getting this
from an amazing book called Killing for Coal by Thomas
g Andrews. The national death rate in the US in
nineteen twelve was about three people per one thousand across
the United States, three point one five in the coal
(34:52):
mines of Colorado alone. At the very same time, the
rate of death is seven points zero six per one
thousand people. This means that if you work in Colorado
coal mines in nineteen twelve, you have more than double
the chance of dying than anyone else in the nation,
including really, you know, mean cities like Boston.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
It's like being cannon fodder in like an army.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Yeah, yeah, Colorado cannon fodder.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
You should have named their sports team the Colorado Cannon Far.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Are you guys in Colorado? No, we're in Atlanta, but
we are saving up for a cannon. Yeah, that'll work.
Take that. Savannah Bananas, they're delightful. Apparently they seem like
such a fun time.
Speaker 5 (35:39):
They're like the Harlem globe trotters.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
Like I didn't realize that for a long time they're
like a jokey kind of trick Baseball League.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Y'all are making this up right.
Speaker 5 (35:48):
No, you don't know about the Savanna bananas.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
No, oh, it's a real thing.
Speaker 5 (35:51):
They do like goofy pratts. Yeah, I've never seen it,
but I've heard it. It's a lot.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
It's like what the Harlem Globe Trotters would do, where
they do trick shots and you know, different kind of displays.
I mean, they certainly do play, but within the games
they do all kinds of wacky shenanigans.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Well, now I've got a new thing for the old
bucket list.
Speaker 5 (36:09):
Yes, yeah, i'd let's go with you guyslet's do it together.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
Yeah, let's take a trip. I have some ghost to
have to follow up with in Savannah anyway, and let's.
Speaker 5 (36:16):
Get there to go to Savannah.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, let's get there before that buried nuclear device off
the coast finally has a bad day.
Speaker 5 (36:23):
Well, good call.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
We'll walk up to it and just tap it on
the nose with a hammer like in the Looney Tunes cartoon.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Oh gosh, great. And look, with all these factors Savannah
bananas aside, you don't have to look far to see
that there is trouble brewing on the horizon, both in
Colorado and in other mining communities, and really in any
labor community. At this point, between eighteen eighty four and
nineteen twelve, where we got you those recent stats, mining
(36:50):
accidents killed more than seventeen hundred people in Colorado. The
next year, nineteen thirteen, one hundred and ten guys die
and mind related accidents. This makes it to Congress because
at this time, unions begin to become part of the conversation.
Before we introduce the union here, let's introduce the fact
(37:13):
that even the patricians in Congress, many of whom are
working hand in hand with corporate interests at this time,
or who are compromised and may as well be employees
of big corporations, they have an investigation and they conclude
the following, And keep in mind they're speaking against their
own literal bosses when they say this.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Guys, just note here as we're going into this quote,
I just try to click on that link, Ben, and
I'm getting a message from archive dot org that the
Internet archives are temporarily offline.
Speaker 5 (37:47):
Oh, someone who's reached out and told me that the
other day.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Yeah, that happened a little while back. Unfortunately I was
writing this before they went offline. But we hope archive
dot org comes back soon. It's a huge deal right now.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Yeah, it was working for me. Just wow, okay, uh weird, Okay.
Speaker 4 (38:05):
I'm sure they're in the process of dealing with it.
Maybe it's like up and down like you know.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Yeah, they've been in trouble recently because they also had
some protections regarding they had a lot of books full
that were common use. Oh there's something there's about.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Okay, well, let's get to this quote from the State
House Committee on Mines and Mining.
Speaker 5 (38:29):
This is the conclusion.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
I believe Colorado has good mining laws and such that
ought to afford protection to the miners as to safety
in the mind if they were enforced. Yet in this
state the percentage of fatalities is larger than any other,
showing there is undoubtedly something wrong in reference to the
management of its coal mines.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Boom, we took your campaign money and we appreciate it. Also,
the public tide has turned. And also, while we're at it,
I'm pretty sure Internet Archive was taken down by DDoS attacks.
Oh wow, okay, yeah, and that happened about forty eight
hours ago. Okay, well, hopefully it gets back up there.
(39:13):
And this happened after there was a previous breach of
the site that resulted in massive theft of millions of
user records. Anyway, trouble ahead. Like we said the coal miners,
at this point, you would say, okay, guys, we get it.
It stinks. It's very unfair situation. It's very rough. These
(39:34):
company towns are by the way, designed to deny them
from attaining a certain amount of economic success, Like the
cost of things are calculated against the usual or the
typical wage, such that you won't ever make You might
pay off your debts, but you won't ever make enough
money for you to move away. They want you to
(39:55):
stay there and powerless.
Speaker 4 (39:57):
Well, and given that calculation in the favor of the company,
doesn't that also mean that all the script that they're
paying out and stuff, it basically is a zero sum game,
like they're essentially getting free labor because they're hiding behind
the guise of this we're subsidizing your life by giving
you a place to live and feeding you, and you're
paying us for the privilege. But they control all of
(40:18):
those calculations, and they're doing it to make it where
it's almost like they're.
Speaker 5 (40:21):
Not paying anything.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
Yeah, and in some cases it would be possible, just
like with any other sort of dictatorial regime, it would
be possible in the perimeters and the adjacent areas, in
the liminal spaces, to trade your script for actual US currency,
but it would be at an egregious rate of you
know what I mean, You've got Zimbabwe dollars.
Speaker 4 (40:44):
It's like trading your foreign currency at the little terminal
at the airport.
Speaker 5 (40:50):
It's a bad idea. Did it once? Not good? Don't
ever do that pro travel tip, y'all.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
Yeah, just you know, unless you're definitely never going back
to a place, I would say, just hold on to
the foreign script and you know, roll the dice. See
how it's going to work the next time you go.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Dude, dude, Should we get so we're talking about them,
most of the workers living on company property. Should we
just get at least a bit of information about what
does the police force look like in one of these
company towns, because my understanding is that they would essentially
gather militias, like almost company militias that would function as
(41:33):
the local police to keep order as everybody is just
going around town and everything.
Speaker 8 (41:38):
Yeah, goon squads, right, well, goon squads, but also that
would be deputized in times of trouble such that they
were not technically goon squads.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
We're going to get to a very interesting private detective
agency in a little bit. But the militia like the
idea that we could rule by first by infrastructure, by
rigging the game, and then second by intimidation. The third
is ruling by force by physical force. Harassment, intimidation, assault,
(42:09):
and murder. These are all oh and sabotage, these are
all part of it. As a result of these factors,
the coal miners in Colorado and abroad had no real
way to air their grievances. They couldn't push for better conditions.
They didn't even have the paper thin theoretical protection that
exists for labor today. Technically, under the US law, it
(42:32):
is in most cases not against the law to attempt
to organize a union. Some groups cannot strike, like we
recently found the Post office is not allowed to strike
at all. But in this case they didn't have any
of that. Your corporate boss is your local government and
(42:53):
your local law enforcement, and so they start in secret
conspiring looking to unions for help. This is a counter
conspiracy to the conspiracy the corporations. These are obviously very
smart people. They say, look, if a mine is associated
with a union at this point in time in the
(43:13):
United States in the early nineteen hundreds, they have forty
percent fewer fatalities because the rules are enforced. So from
their perspective, it's a no brainer to have some kind
of organized labor. That's where they get with the United
mind Workers of America UMW, and in secret, again a conspiracy,
(43:36):
they begin to organize, and this leads to nineteen thirteen,
the unionization movement goes public. I'm sure the corporation already
knew there was something in the wind, but they have
a list of just seven demands, and if you read them,
they're pretty reasonable. You know. They're like, hey, can you
(43:58):
just count a ton as a ton?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, let's do. Let's go through these, ben because that's
that's the first one on the list, right.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
That's the second one. The first one is recognizing the
union as a bargaining agent.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Oh sure, yes, recognize us first. But the second one
is probably the most important, and we've talked about it
the early part of the show. Count a ton as
a ton, just what you said, Ben, And the other
one is just how about eight hour work days because
that that's kind of a law. So let's do that.
Speaker 5 (44:28):
Payment for dead work, laying track, timbering, handling, impurities, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
That's all the stuff they had to do anyway, Right,
they're just saying, maybe compensate us for that stuff too.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
And then they're saying, hey, also, we think the people
in charge of weighing the stuff we get paid for
should be elected by us, the folks doing the work.
Because there was a known problem with in addition to
you know that crooked thing about twenty two hundred pounds
instead of two thousand. The company would hire these waightcheckers
(45:04):
and give them a kind of a quote of how
much could be paid at the time, so the company
encouraged corruption or even more frequent to be honest, the
weightcheckmen would skim a little vigorous off.
Speaker 5 (45:18):
Of course, of course they would. Yep.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
They also wanted the right to use their script at
any store. Yeah, or you know, just to be able
to buy things from any store and to choose guess
what where they lived and who their doctors were.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
So okay, this is another thing we'll get to this
at the end. This is one that really it bothers
me personally and should bother everybody listening unless you're already
a billionaire right now. What they're asking for here in
nineteen thirteen is freedom from a situation that you encounter
today in the world of private healthcare. You have a
(45:55):
doctor you like, but they're not in network. So imagine
trying to go to a grocery store and they say
you can't buy these potatoes. You're not in the grocery network.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Oh oh, that's fine, I'll just take my company bucks
somewhere else.
Speaker 6 (46:13):
Oh wait, oh crap, you take public This is crazy, dude,
And let's get look, let's get I think this one
is unfortunately really important.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
With a bullet or let's say, a whole magazine of bullets.
They wanted strict enforcement of Colorado's laws, which are the
mind safety stuff. They're on the books in Colorado already.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
They're just not enforced exactly.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
And they want to get rid of script they want entirely.
They want us dollars. Why not? And here is the
big one, I think, guys, an end to the company
guard system, which is the internally enforced internally hired system
of law enforcement by company employees.
Speaker 5 (46:57):
I mean, oh, sorry, so, but not like miners.
Speaker 4 (47:00):
They were just like literally a militia hired by the
company to maintain order, right, so over the companies.
Speaker 5 (47:06):
But it's over.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
Yes, yes, that's exactly what it was. And as had
already there was other stuff in the wind here. People
already knew that if if things got past a certain threshold,
it was well within the ability of the powers in
Congress to call in actual US military, which they would
(47:28):
do with very little hesitation. So we'd love to tell
you that this is the end of the show, and
that these Colorado mine companies accepted these seven pretty reasonable demands.
No sorry, they rejected all of them. And in September
of that year of nineteen thirteen, the UMW United Mine
(47:49):
Workers said, all right, our next step is a strike.
And this leads to one of the bloodiest labor conflicts
in US history. The corporations provably conspired to, by hook
or by crook, break the backs of these strikers in
a literal way, in.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
A literal way, and very much in breaking the spirit
right of anybody else who would even think about wanting
to join.
Speaker 3 (48:17):
Up and when they participated in this conspiracy. When they
orchestrated this conspiracy, you could argue it also they experienced
Mission creep. It got further out of hand than they
would ever imagine and led to a really weird era
of pr What are we talking about. We'll tell you
after this adbreak. Here's where it gets crazy, all right,
(48:47):
This strike is huge, at least sounds huge here we're
talking about these other militias that are anti union or
strike breakers, right, defenders of the so called scabs, the UMW.
Their strike is comprised of ten thousand miners. That's a
small army, and that's also not counting their families. So
(49:08):
the number of people are pro union is much bigger.
And they immediately focus on our earlier antagonists, Colorado Fuel
and Iron Company. The practices are the worst from this company,
and also the optics are the best as an enemy.
If you're Davidian Force looking for a goliath, then you
(49:29):
want Colorado Fuel and Iron because their bosses also don't
seem to care about the workers. They're out there literally
living on Broadway.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Yes, eighteen hundred miles away, and so just think about
the communication that has to happen there I guess telegram
is exist in existence at this time, right.
Speaker 3 (49:49):
Sure, yeah, not the app but the yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
Yeah, but they but they can be sent information back
and forth from whatever company offices exist out there, so
there can be communication to that extent. But it is
literally a couple of typed pages then end up in
the hands of the controllers of the company eighteen hundred
miles away, and then another typed page of how to
(50:12):
handle said whatever situation.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
Yeah, and so there to them again, are these actual
people or these simply functions that, when working correctly in
an equation, produce profit. What is the human element? The
strikers meet repercussions immediately. They are evicted from these company
talents once they are identified as union members or god
(50:38):
forbid leaders. The leaders are actually detained pretty often, and
so the striking miners again they don't have anywhere to go.
They start building a series of tent colonies. Ludlow Quality
is by far the largest of this encampment. It's quite diverse.
There are people from all kinds of parts of the world,
you know, and they have different ethnic background on different
(51:00):
spiritual beliefs, but they are united in the idea of
not letting this corporate power continue to oppress them. Also,
Colorado winter nineteen thirteen to nineteen fourteen terrible, terrible, and
that you're in a tent. You're in a canvas tent, Dude,
you will get in trouble if you steal cold from
(51:21):
the mine to stay warm, because that's how they operate.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
That's so crazy to me. And I don't think any
of us in the modern era unless you're an extreme
campophile or you know, I don't know the right word
that is, but you know, you go out there and
you spend winter nights camping, or you know, an extremely
cold climate on purpose.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Shout out Alex Linny's oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Well, and there are many of us who enjoy that
kind of thing. It's just we have technology now that
keeps us super warm and we don't even need a
fire anymore. We've got materials that can keep us good
to go through those winters. But if you imagine nineteen
thirteen to fourteen in Colorado in that cold, I am
(52:08):
so flabbergasted that that many people in an encampment like
that survived long enough for this to even occur.
Speaker 4 (52:16):
What we're both start, yeah and Matt, can I just
applaud you on your use of flabbergas that I don't
think it's used nearly enough these days.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
Yeay, And with this in mind, I do think it's
also incredibly important to note even now there are people
who are living in similar circumstances. Yes, so you have
to realize it is not then as now is not
a conscious choice, and people know it's unsustainable, but they're
(52:47):
able to get by because they're supporting each other.
Speaker 4 (52:50):
And shout out to the podcast Big Sugar by Celeste Headley.
We had Celeste on the show a while back, and
it's a total company town situation with a lot of
those massive sugar companies with these you know, workers that
live at the behest of the company on company property
in these bunks.
Speaker 5 (53:07):
It's the more things change, the more they stay the same.
To be glow.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Cliche, and again we have to remember that for decades,
in the case of Ludlow, Colorado, in this colony, people
have been flocking to this area in search for that
that opportunity, right, that American dream that has sold so
hard to you. And despite their demographic differences, you know,
the inevitable bouts of infighting, they were unanimous in their
(53:35):
mission and they said, if we stick together, we can
make a difference. There are more of us than there
are of them, them being the patricians, but they weren't
really counting the militias that would arrive shout out a
bug's life.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
Well, isn't it quite tragic, you guys, that ultimately all
these human beings are out here fighting just to keep
a job so that they can support the families that
they're growing. Like that is one of the primary things
that's happening here.
Speaker 3 (54:03):
Yes, like with the okey example from Grapes of Wrath
and the Great Depression, which is just on the horizon here. Historically,
Colorado Fuel and Iron sadly was also internally united in opposition,
and they were able to buy every politician and every
member of law enforcement in the area. There's not a
single story of a sheriff who didn't take the money
(54:27):
and stood up for the people, or more importantly, you
would argue for the American project, stood up for the
rule of law. That didn't happen. In fact, Colorado Fuel
and Iron hired a detective agency. Baldwin feltz, you've heard
of pinkertons. This is sort of the Pepsi to the
coca Cola, the Pinkertons. At first, they were just supposed
to run security for the new workers who were coming
(54:50):
in who made a vow to not joined the union,
just keep the coal mine running for the shareholder, to.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Basically just get them in out of the complex right
the mind.
Speaker 3 (55:02):
Right without being attacked by union protesters, which would have occurred.
They were to also break the strike by any means necessary.
And you know, I feel like Baldwin Felts would be
a fascinating episode of ridiculous history. Maybe stuff then once,
you know, because they originally were doing good guy work
(55:23):
in the age of great expansion of rail in the
early days, they were focusing on railroad crime, finding fugitives.
They were bounty hunters, you know. And this was the
era of like red dead, redemption two railroad bandits, you know,
with the bandana and they like the horses going I
hope dling. You seemed to do it like a little
(55:44):
jump riding a horse thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, doing that.
That didn't last very long. Railroad banditry became less and
less of a thing as the Americans became more settled,
as they further encroached into this two territory, and so
Baldwin Felts had to pivot and become private security, often
(56:06):
for mining interests, and they got a reputation for being
the fixers if anybody had the temerity to begin a union.
Speaker 2 (56:15):
Yeah. Well, and let's not forget Iman's a patient proclamations
only eighteen sixties. So if you just think about some
of the work that was done on fugitive.
Speaker 3 (56:26):
Hunting, let's save catchers. Yeah yeah, So.
Speaker 2 (56:30):
Who knows where those lines are? We don't, at least
when I'm speaking right now. I don't know the full
history of the Baldwin Felts, you know, detective agency, but
you can just imagine that some of that stuff's in play.
Speaker 3 (56:41):
Yet. We know that they were best known for again
railroad banditry. But still that's why I think they were
best known for stopping railroad banditry. But there were also
there were clearly cases in the previous eras are prior
to the Emancipation Proclamation, was a huge industry to hunt
(57:05):
enslaved people or trying to escape. But this agency is
founded in the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
Okay, okay, sorry, I'm getting my timeline wrong there. I
guess what I'm just trying to what I'm trying to say,
is any company that is a private agency like that
that does essentially law enforcement work. You are taking money
from somebody who probably has quite a bit of money
for whatever purpose you're doing. And you can see why
you would if you were expanding, let's say the company
(57:32):
like this, you would move to something like mining interests
because there's going to be a more frequent cash flow
and you can actually grow.
Speaker 3 (57:39):
Like private prisons moved to immigrant entertainment, right, and they
were grease in the right pockets the entire time. Look,
the bullwood Feltz folks got up to some pretty nasty stuff,
especially in the tent colonies, including Ludlow, but including other
ten colonies. Is because there were multiple and we are
(58:00):
going to pause here in media arrest, fellow conspiracy realist.
This is a rare two parter for us, But we
all very much invest in this story and we hope
you are finding it as fascinating and disturbing as we are.
So tune in in just a few days when we'll
be back with part two of what was the Ludlow Massacre.
(58:22):
In the meantime, we try to be easy to find online.
Speaker 4 (58:25):
That's right, you can find us at the handle Conspiracy
Stuff where we exist on Facebook where we have our
Facebook group Here is where it gets crazy. On YouTube,
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Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noman.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly,
you are you. You are here. That makes this the
stuff they don't want you to know. We are putting
on our our ridiculous history garb in a way, and
(00:48):
you know, roguesous robes are occulted, illumination, Global unlimited, ridiculous history,
branded robes, a lot of brand names there. And tonight
we are exploring something that maybe apropos to the current
situation here in the United States and abroad. Unions and
(01:10):
governments they've always had a complicated, at times antagonistic, violent
series of interactions. And you know, we live in different
parts of the Atlanta metro area. We all know different
people and get into different situations. So I'd like to
begin tonight by asking you guys, do you see any
(01:30):
like what's your vibe check in your neck of the
Woods on unions. What's the public opinion feeling like.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I can't speak for public opinion, but I would just
say that juxtaposition of unions and governments is really interesting
because the middleman between those two powers is always private industry, right,
So it's how much does yeah capital, how much does
the government support, defend or go against an organization that's
(01:59):
made quite a lot of money, which reads tax dollars
for a government.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
And it's also an interesting double edged story because historically
unions have sometimes gotten a bad rap because of the
potential for corruption and you know, things like Jimmy Hoffa
an organized crime and the Teamstress Union and all that stuff,
And I think it gives a bad rap to an
otherwise very very positive institution. So I think some people
have maybe a skewed perspective on what unions even are
(02:26):
and what they're meant to accomplish because of some of
these big, flashy stories and movies and things.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Especially because your public history textbooks don't go too far
out of their way to talk about the troubled history
of labor in the United States.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Oh yeah, yeah, and we're faced, and we have humanity
has been faced for a long time, especially in capitalist
societies with this problem of you need everybody to be
consumers to the extent that they possibly can, right, have
enough money to buy all this stuff that's being produced.
So how much do you actually pay the human beings
(03:04):
that produce the stuff to keep those goods cheap. It's
a formula that everybody can buy, and it's this weird
little game that's played, and unions generally stand there to say, hey,
you need to pay the people who make the stuff
enough money to afford the stuff.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Well, and the fact of the matter is too like oftentimes,
if you don't have somebody standing up for you, or
you aren't the one that's standing up for yourself or
your industry, the people in charge of the industry are
going to pay you as little as humanly possible to
maximize those profits.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah, and let's let's be clear on this aspect of
it right now. Like the public opinion waxes and wanes,
especially over recent decades, but most people can agree that
workers should have certain basic rights. You know, it's sad
that it's sad that it's distressingly common here in the
(03:58):
United States or people to kind of assume that labor
Day is about maybe people giving birth instead of workers' rights.
And I'm calling myself to account there. For many years,
a younger version, I was under that misapprehension. And many
of the rights held by workers in the United States
(04:20):
today come directly from the actions of unions, and no kidding,
from those organizations fighting against very real conspiracies and more
than a few times dying in pursuit of those ideas.
And before we introduce this, Matt, I think they're you
(04:41):
cited here in the doc a statement that I think
we all found moving, which is a great introduction to
our specific topic this evening.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Oh yeah, it's almost a poem written by Frank J. Hayes,
who from nineteen seventeen until nineteen nineteen was the United
Workers of America president. That is a union which.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
We'll get to, yeah, in depth.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yeah, we're going to talk about him a little later. Well,
I don't know how much we'll talk about him, because
he comes right after the events that we're going to
be discussing today. But he had this to say about
the subject that we're going to be discussing. In the embers,
gray and red. Here we found them where they bled, here,
(05:24):
we found them stark and dead. Here on Ludlow Field.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
And this is one reason I really like this is
because this also is a clear homage or an arguable
homage to the famous war poem in flanders Field, Yes
by John McCrae, written in nineteen fifteen, and believe Hayes
said this just a few years after, so it was
very much in the zeitgeist exactly. Yeah, and this brings
(05:53):
us what an excellent introduction to this entire oft forgetting
forgotten Keep it in Dylan, sorry, history of union activism
and corruption in crime. Tonight's exploration hinges on one of
the most infamous examples, what happens when this fraud relationship
goes wrong. This is our episode on the Ludlow Massacre.
(06:23):
Here are the facts, Okay, all right, to understand the
Ludlow massacre from the beginning, given that a lot of
us don't learn this when we're in grade school. Really
to the point about textbooks again, I think it's fair
to say that we need to understand just how crazy
(06:45):
the age of rail.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Was, and how much iron and coal and raw materials
you need to both create a giant railway and then maintain.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
It, and just the absolute cutthroat competition of it all,
the space race of it all kind of right.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah, well, and it's crazy to think that a lot
of this was private industry. It wasn't the United States
of America coming through and saying we're going to build
all these specific railways. It was individuals with like corporations,
companies that they created themselves, who are attempting to make
these smaller systems of rail that then all end up
getting connected at some point Niah.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
And to be clear, the US government was at every
step subsidizing oh yes, corporations in ways that because they
wanted it to happen too. So they're what they're doing
is while they're not creating Uncle Sam's Transcontinental definitely only
government workers railway system, what they are doing is giving
(07:50):
a lot of largesse from taxpayers. They are modifying immigration
policy specifically in their benefit for what we would call
slavelylabor or conscripted labor today. And they're on the same
team there, just by hook or by crook, going to
get this stuff done. And so they liked a lot
(08:11):
of the hand is hidden here. But to be clear,
the US is completely on board with this stuff, up
to and including exercising their military might in support of
these privates, because this is the last part I want
to make on this. There is separation of church and
state in the United States, but this is an excellent
(08:31):
example of why the Constitution has always conveniently ignored the
danger of not separating business in state.
Speaker 5 (08:40):
Yes, I guess it's occurred to me before.
Speaker 4 (08:42):
But you know, America has this history of being this
like welcoming immigrants with open arms and all of that
stuff in this melting pot kind of country. But there's
part of me that's always thought that that was really
only to the benefit of industry when it was convenient,
you know, to allow all of these folks to come
into the country so that they could kind of be exploited.
(09:03):
Is that too cynical an outlook?
Speaker 6 (09:06):
No.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I mean, obviously I'm biased towards cynicism as well, but
I would say with your point there, Noel. It's kind
of as though someone makes it across one of these
two vast oceans at the time and they get to
the United States and they say, oh, this is a
land of opportunity. I'm so glad I could be here.
I'm here to pursue my fortune and my dreams. And
(09:28):
then someone says that's great, man, as long as your
fortune that you're pursuing is backbreaking work in a mine
or on a railroad. And don't worry about complaining because
we'll just kill you.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, oh dude. And this is the point I want
to make. I think the buffer of a private organization
like that is so important when it comes to a
massive government attempt to build a transcontinental railway kind of thing, right,
where you've got a buffer of a private company. Where
nowadays it's the same kind of deal if you've got
(10:03):
a separate company that is, let's say, hiring the specific
people who are doing the work. If those workers get hurt,
if something goes wrong there, it's the company that then
is beholden to that thing. It is not the government's fault.
It is not even perhaps the parent company's fault. It
is the contracting organization.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
And when you've got a mass influx of say Chinese
laborers who are literally giving their lives to both the
rail or Greek workers who come in who are giving
their lives to the coal mine, it becomes a whole
different thing that isn't looked at us, at the government.
It is whoever the I was gonna say oligarch, but
that's not the right term. Whoever, the heads of these
(10:46):
giant capital systems.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Are the tycoons. And then it becomes a war for
public opinion. Right, Yes, Congress gets touched pretty easily. Then
as of now, no offense to members of Congress listening tonight.
But you know what, you know what we mean.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
A little offense perhaps, No, you know what you did, an.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Observation, you know what you're about to do.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
You know what you're doing right now. But we can
all So the story, one of the pivotal moments is
in our origin story is in the mid to late
eighteen hundreds, there are a bunch of survey teams who
are trying to figure out the roots for these ostensibly
private railways. One of these survey teams is led by
(11:34):
a guy named William Jackson Palmer, and in eighteen sixty seven,
they're mapping out potential routes for a thing called the
Kansas Pacific Railway. You get it, it's in the name
Kansas Pacific. That's where they're headed.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Like, are we going to go around these mountains or
through them?
Speaker 5 (11:53):
Mountains?
Speaker 3 (11:53):
The only way out is through, And so Willie and
his buddies are you know snoop adoop been around and
I like that.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
I'm sorry that made me chuck with some dynamite every
once in a while.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah, just just as a treat. Everything long, Yeah, yeah,
cu the Ineo and they realize that the Rocky Mountains
in this area in Colorado and specifically, there's this agglomeration
of veins of coal that are quite close to the surface,
(12:28):
to the point where you don't need at this juncture
a ton of infrastructure. You can actually just.
Speaker 5 (12:35):
Pull out of the ground with your hands.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
I mean maybe a shovel, but yeah, it's that close.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
You're right, like dig a short a small amount down
to really get access to a ton, Like we're talking
game changing amounts of coal.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah, this could. It's so it proliferates at such a
high rate in this area of the mountains that you
could be a mom and pop operation. And this is
this is a dream find the vague wording aside. This
is a gold mine. If you're building a railroad, your
(13:11):
fuel source is right there, you know what I mean.
You don't have to ship it from the other mines
out on the east coast. You can just build a
depot here, get the coal you need from, you know,
leaving them from the east coast and then stop over
here wherever you want to build it, and then just
have someone throw coal in the back of the the
back of the machine and boom, boom boom.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
Are you guys ever like mystified by the fact that
there is still coal to be mined, you know, it
being a finite resource and just like how long we've
been pulling that stuff out of the ground and there's
still coal to be had. I just I find that
incredibly mystifying.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
I don't think our brains are meant to comprehend some
of that stuff. Kind of like how many chickens are
born and produced and grown into factory leaf led chicken
and then kill old and then eaten that, you know,
chicken restaurants.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
It's like mind boggling.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
You can't. You can kind of think about it, but
the numbers just don't make sense when you even hear them,
or you looked at a picture, you'd just be like, no,
there's no way that's real.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
The human mind isn't isn't there for the scale? Yeah,
I mean, like one of the easiest ways to maybe
not sense the scale itself, but to sense the discrepancy
of that to you. Really, point NOL is to imagine
how many years is one billion seconds? If you counted
to one billion every second, how long would it take
(14:38):
you to get to a billion. The answer is almost
thirty two years.
Speaker 5 (14:43):
Yeah, my brain was already hurting just even that thought.
I could have done that easy by now counting.
Speaker 7 (14:52):
Okay, to not stop counting exactly ever, I always go
back to video game references, you guys, but I'm thinking
about this, this coal discovery there in that specific place
where they're trying to build the rail, as in StarCraft,
when you find like the resources exactly where.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
You need them to be to make a second base
to attack your enemy. I don't know why I'm thinking
about that, but you're just like, oh man, there's so
many resources right here. This is the perfect spot.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
I think is sid Meier's Civilization series.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
And I think great, and I think of No Man's Sky,
which is a mega resource extraction.
Speaker 5 (15:26):
Is that kind of like the point of the whole game.
It's pretty fun. I enjoyed that stuff.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
In Civilization, one of the one of the settings. And
this is for hopefully not just you know, twelve people
in the audience, but in Civilization, one of the settings
determines your resources in your opening, your opening moves of
the game, and a huge part of it is to
that point positioning structures near valuable resources. And sid Meyer
(15:57):
didn't make up Civilization as a concept a game about
civil It's been around. Yeah, yeah, it's sorry said it's
been done now, I'm kidding. It's a great game. But
the great game, the great game. Yeah. But like we're saying,
this is an absolute windfall. This is a watershed moment
for the expansion of rail because now we have this
(16:21):
new yet untapped to them resource. And so over the
next few decades, from what we say, the late eighteen
sixties to the early nineteen hundreds, coal mining explodes in Colorado,
sometimes literally unfortunately. But by nineteen ten, the coal mining
(16:44):
industry alone is employing ten percent of the people in Colorado.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
That's huge.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Hey, it was a smaller population at the time.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
But it really is, as you said, akin to the
gold rush kind of thing where so many people flocked
out there because there's opportunity.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
M h. And yeah, and imagine you know, you're let's see,
imagine you've emigrated from Greece or Italy, right, or maybe
somewhere over in the Pacific, and you're going to find
yourself in a coastal city that's often very crowded, it's
often very competitive, and your opportunities may be limited depending
on your connections.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Because it came by ship, right, that's just important, Like
you're stuck there, kind of Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
No one flew there at this time that we know of, right, yeah,
And there were people crossing land borders, right, Canada and
Mexico in particular, obviously, But for a lot of folks
who land in the United States, given that promise of opportunity,
they find that it's incredibly difficult to make it in
(17:48):
New York, for instance. Right, So there's this clarion call.
Things like the romanticism of the wild West is still
very much in place. So a lot of times people
are going to see maybe a flyer or they'll hear
from a friend of a friend about an amazing opportunity
several states, hundreds of miles away. And so it's no
(18:10):
surprise that people came from all around the US and
the world to Colorado to work in these mines, you know,
to maybe to the point about the gold rush, maybe
even stake acclaim if possible. Unfortunately, a lot of folks
were late to the game, and by the time they
got there to Colorado and specific there weren't mom and
(18:32):
pop outfits. There were families living in company towns, scared
to death of angering huge corporate leviathans.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Oh yeah, just to get that, just to get the
scale of that trip that we're talking about, let's say
New York, right, if they came in through New York,
you're going seventeen hundred, eighteen hundred miles to get to
your opportunity. The stuff we've learned over the past I
don't even know how many episodes where we've been talking
about these schemes where we'll pay for your travel to
(19:04):
get to that opportunity kind of thing, and then not
necessarily put you in indentured servitude, but you will owe us.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
Well, it's also this notion that like the companies are
out to provide opportunity, Like that's the sort of you know,
pr line that is sold to these folks making this
trek on their own steam, only to arrive and realize
that the ground floor has been occupied for a long
time and they are now beholden to something much bigger
(19:35):
than they could have ever imagined.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Shout out to Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
Actually that's the book that really hipped me to this
whole struggle and this whole structure, you know. And we
were talking a little bit about Woody Guthrie off air,
which we'll get to a little later.
Speaker 5 (19:52):
Matt, you found a great quote.
Speaker 4 (19:54):
But there's a film called Bound for Glory that is
about Woody Guthrie story the folk singer, and his involvement
in labor, and it shows this exact kind of Grapes
of Wrath type situation where there are these just they're
these almost like camps of folks that are waiting for
for work.
Speaker 5 (20:12):
And it's just not coming.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
And now they're all there and they've abandoned their homes
and they've got furniture straps to their jaloppies, and now
there are no work for them, or if there is,
it is absolutely indentured servitude.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
I would say, though, to be completely objective, Uh, those
big companies are looking for opportunity.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
That's right, it's in the dirt, it's in the rocks.
We got to build, shareholder, Yeah, but but just to
really just keep ourselves in the minds of let's say
ahead of household who's brought their entire family out there
for this opportunity. Once you're there, what are you going
to and what that opportunity? Well, what if it dries up?
Are you going to take your entire family back that
(20:54):
eighteen hundred miles to try and go somewhere else? Are
you going to just move two hundred miles somewhere homeless?
Speaker 5 (21:00):
At this point, you're basically nomads.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
It's not possible. Also, a lot of people who had
their own means of transport at this time ended up
selling that means of transport upon arrival because they needed
the capital just to exist. This is where we introduce
an outfit called Colorado Fuel and Iron, biggest company in
the area, also one of the most sith Lordie known
(21:26):
for being the harshest by far, and.
Speaker 5 (21:30):
They were not as friendly as the name implies.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Ben No, no no. Unfortunately, they've got nothing on Denver
hugs and kisses. But add to this, they're sold Rockefeller
Senior John Dee buys a controlling steak in Colorado Fuel
and Iron and then he runs the company with an
(21:53):
iron fist haha. And he eventually gives control of the
company to his son, Rockefeller Junior in a burst of creativity.
And these are New York patricians. They don't go to Colorado.
They just expect the checks to come in on time,
the same way kings of European empires would expect the
(22:14):
peasants to give their tribute, even if you know they
don't speak the same language.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yeah, man, we should name some buildings after this guy,
maybe like a plaza.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:28):
Or maybe there should be ice skating. There should be
ice skating, yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
In a big ass tree. Not all the time, but sometimes.
Speaker 5 (22:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
And then maybe we could shoot a show that goes
out live on Saturday evenings. We could shoot it in
the building.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Sorry, there's a guy I like for this. There's a
guy I like. We'll have to text him.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Oh yeah, I bet he knows a lot of people,
though they probably live in his building.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
We'll pause here for a word from our sponsors, and
we'll be back with more on the Ludlow massacre.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
It's the Rockefeller like fortune has a This is a
big part in that fortune, right, Yes, companies like this,
not just this company, but then also in Jay Gould.
I didn't know much about Jay Gould until I started
just going down this rabbit hole. The Gould family fortune
also arises from this company because he was his family
(23:24):
was one of the other major shareholders in this company.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
If you want to trace oligarchical history, I think one
of the best places to look is mining interest because
extracting precious resources from the ground, be they liquid or
gaseous or you know, concrete I guess, or solids, I
should say, you will find that mining is a huge,
(23:51):
huge part of this. And there's a reason that mining
fortunes don't often get talked about in the modern day.
There's just so much power and indeed pr behind them. Yep,
shout out to Australia.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
And farming families like big industrial farming families.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Anyway, anyway, we're fun at parties. The thing is mining
and we have people in the audience tonight who have
mining backgrounds or are associated with the industry. Folks, you
know well more than most that mining then and now,
in the eighteen hundreds, in the turn of the twentieth
(24:30):
century and in the modern day, it was very dangerous work.
We learned. Our word of the evening is call yours.
That's the technical term for coal miners.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
It's a new one to me, and I'm glad to
have learned it. But like you said, ben Off, Mike,
pretty common last name. You know, it's like one of
those nominative determinism kind of situations.
Speaker 5 (24:51):
Maybe I just didn't realize that was a profession.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Yeah, maybe that's how they get the surname.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
No, that's the thing though, right, Like I'm I mean,
like some surtnames did arise because of a legacy involvement
in certain industries by those families Goldman Sacks.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
It made uh, it made me think about that magazine.
I always hear about Colliers magazine, but this Collier's magazine
has an apostrophe before the This is just without the apostrophe.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
You're just a collier. If you're a coal miner and
these look, let's be honest, this work sucked.
Speaker 7 (25:29):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
It was you were under constant immediate threat from explosions,
mind collapses, suffocation, right, and suffocation can be very difficult
to clock, would it when you still have time to
save yourself because you suffocate due to invisible gases. That's
where we get the canary and the coal mine concept.
(25:52):
Because of the lower lung capacity of the bird, it
would die first, That's where that comes from.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
And then get the hell out of there.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Right, and then if the bird's not twitter painting or whatever,
then it's time for us to go. Additionally, and a
lot of people weren't super aware of this or the
authorities were being wilfully ignorant. These colliers were at long
term risk of invisible insidious things because of the constant
exposure to dust and chemicals, the so called black lung. Right,
(26:26):
and this is the time before X rays, so there's
not a doctor who can look at your lungs and say, hey,
maybe you can work on the surface for a while.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
Yeah, it is a canary in. It's fine, the canary
is back. He's okay.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Well, I mean you kind of mentioned it. But just
the work that would go into some of these giant
mining facilities, because we're not talking about one entrance that
goes in and everybody gets the call from that one entrance.
You're talking about teams entering a mountain essentially from various points,
and often there are gloss used to make those initial
(27:02):
I don't know, cave hole kind of the the shafts
ye cable like the cable, you know them cables, But
there are explosions happening that are a part of this
interconnected system of you know, punched holes into this mountain,
and just the collapse thing is so scary and all
that other stuff. And it's not like you got walkie
(27:24):
talkies in the early nineteen hundreds talking to each other
about what's happening.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
Yeah, And as things become increasingly honeycombed in the subterranean sphere,
then then one change in a thing that could be
fine for the system you know about can be disastrous
for the other interconnected things, because you know, you're under
the rock and there's a lot of there's a lot
of heavy, heavy stuff above you. In addition to working
(27:52):
in these cartoonishly unsafe conditions, the miners were working twelve
hour days, six to seven days a week, like you
get a Sunday off maybe, and they're not paid by
the hour, so they're not paid, you know, X amount
of dollars per those twelve hours. They're paid like piece work.
You know, they're paid upon the amount of coal delivered.
(28:15):
And in the case of the Colorado the big companies,
we give you eighty cents per ton of coal that
you made. However, they didn't count a ton as two
thousand pounds. They counted it as two thousand, two hundred pounds.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Oh yeah, just you know, just becuz.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Just a little vigorous.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
And they're also not giving you eighty cents us. They're
giving you eighty cents worth of the store that you
can buy from the coal company.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Load sixteen tons. What do you get, dude? And another part,
and this is the part, oh man, this is going
to be familiar to anybody who's worked in the service industry.
They had other work they had to do, like their
equivalent of side work. You know, you don't get paid
to roll that silverware right to refill those ketchup bottles
(29:08):
or those condiment bottles, but you have to do it
because it's part of your job. The miners had to
do a bunch of stuff that they were not paid for.
Laying track, clearing those escape routes in case somebody else's
tunnel explodes, maintaining the tunnels, keeping the dust down. All
of this stuff day in and day out, they had
to do, and none of it was paid because it
(29:31):
only helped them survive. To get their you know, two
hundred pounds of coal and their eighty cents of Script,
and so they called all this other stuff they had
to do dead work. I can't verify this, but I
think they called it partially dead work because they weren't
getting paid, and then partially they called it dead work
because if they didn't do it, people would.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Die, right, including themselves. So you're just like, well, I
might as well do it so I can continue.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Just a quick backcheck on something Benja said to Script,
being like proprietary currency that can only be used like
it's like ben Bucks.
Speaker 5 (30:08):
Right, well, okay, sorry not to malign ben Bucks.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
That's it's got. It's an economy of scale into itself.
But you would be issued instead of pay that is
universally you know, accepted. It would be something that you
literally have to spend only back with the company. That's
that's what I owe my soul to the company.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Store is referred to and not and not accepted in
other company towns. Right, And this is the maybe a
good modern example just for a weird dystopian comp We're
big fans of Dave and Busters. But what if you
worked for a D and B and you had to
live in, you know, an apartment complex run by D
and B and they only paid you in D and
(30:45):
B power points.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
It's like with DMB two and like you know certain arcades,
it's almost like sky miles, where there's no real metric
that is visible to you as to how much it's
even worth. It's completely up to the discretion of the company.
So they're paying you in a thing that they control.
Speaker 5 (31:02):
The value of that you can only use to buy
that they sell you.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Well, you just touch on something really important because in
the company's mind, you're not getting just paid in how
much coal you produce. You're getting paid in not having
to pay rent in the same way, because you do
live on the company's dime, on the company's property, in
one of their housing units that they've built thousands and
(31:27):
thousands of for their workers. Right, So they're the company
is building that into what you are getting compensated.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Labor camp package. Yeah, no, it is a labor camp.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
You're You're not wrong. But at the same time you
have to imagine in the minds of those tycoons like
John D. Rockefeller at the top, who's thinking, oh, well,
I'm treating them fairly. I look at I'm giving them
places to live and raise their families.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
What a guy, We built a church and they have
every other Sunday off, so it's basically gone. And then me,
do you.
Speaker 4 (32:01):
Guys think people at that level have to get to
a place where they really truly believe in their benevolence
like that they have this almost god complex. They're like,
I am helping the little guy the right thing.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
You can imagine it as in well the thought I
think that happens, and you can see it reflected in
some of the reporting and interviews that some of the
rock Fellers did after what we're going to talk about here.
But just this idea of I'm gonna I'm gonna use
this because I really think this is how they thought,
and I may be wrong, correct me if I am.
What else would they have if I weren't providing this
(32:37):
for them?
Speaker 3 (32:38):
And imph is on. I Yes, that's the issue too,
with the kind of I don't want to necessarily call
it malignant narcissism, but the the wilful ignorance again as
well as the tremendous cognitive parkour of rationalization. Right, this
is a time when social Darwinism is still very very big. Right,
(33:00):
people do believe in the American aristocracy that some people
by the lottery of birth are fundamentally in some way
superior the Also, I do think it's important here to
raise the specter of the controversial Dunbar's number, which argues
that after a certain amount of people, to our idea
(33:21):
of scale, the human brain no longer thinks of folks
as human beings with all the depth and beauty of
a human soul. Instead, they think of them as functions.
So to Rockefeller, these are mining things that take X
amount of resources and produce why amount of coal?
Speaker 4 (33:41):
He is owning a horse and paying to feed and
water said horse, or maintaining machinery.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Well, imagine a Rockefeller going down like traveling at some
point down to the mining operation and seeing all of
the people standing before him. Those are not individual people.
Those are his army of folks who bring him more capital.
Speaker 5 (34:05):
I bought you.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Sorry, Oh wow, God, how did I not get fired
for that one? Anyway, So for Grizzly snapshot there, and
I think we've laid out the context very well. For
Grizzly snapshot of what was happening, you could say this
army was increasingly endangered. There was a very high rate
of attrition. Indeed, it depended for time, upon a continual
(34:30):
influx of other folks to replace the people who died.
The national death rate in nineteen twelve. We're getting this
from an amazing book called Killing for Coal by Thomas
g Andrews. The national death rate in the US in
nineteen twelve was about three people per one thousand across
the United States, three point one five in the coal
(34:52):
mines of Colorado alone. At the very same time, the
rate of death is seven points zero six per one
thousand people. This means that if you work in Colorado
coal mines in nineteen twelve, you have more than double
the chance of dying than anyone else in the nation,
including really, you know, mean cities like Boston.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
It's like being cannon fodder in like an army.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Yeah, yeah, Colorado cannon fodder.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
You should have named their sports team the Colorado Cannon Far.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Are you guys in Colorado? No, we're in Atlanta, but
we are saving up for a cannon. Yeah, that'll work.
Take that. Savannah Bananas, they're delightful. Apparently they seem like
such a fun time.
Speaker 5 (35:39):
They're like the Harlem globe trotters.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
Like I didn't realize that for a long time they're
like a jokey kind of trick Baseball League.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Y'all are making this up right.
Speaker 5 (35:48):
No, you don't know about the Savanna bananas.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
No, oh, it's a real thing.
Speaker 5 (35:51):
They do like goofy pratts. Yeah, I've never seen it,
but I've heard it. It's a lot.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
It's like what the Harlem Globe Trotters would do, where
they do trick shots and you know, different kind of displays.
I mean, they certainly do play, but within the games
they do all kinds of wacky shenanigans.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Well, now I've got a new thing for the old
bucket list.
Speaker 5 (36:09):
Yes, yeah, i'd let's go with you guyslet's do it together.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
Yeah, let's take a trip. I have some ghost to
have to follow up with in Savannah anyway, and let's.
Speaker 5 (36:16):
Get there to go to Savannah.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, let's get there before that buried nuclear device off
the coast finally has a bad day.
Speaker 5 (36:23):
Well, good call.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
We'll walk up to it and just tap it on
the nose with a hammer like in the Looney Tunes cartoon.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Oh gosh, great. And look, with all these factors Savannah
bananas aside, you don't have to look far to see
that there is trouble brewing on the horizon, both in
Colorado and in other mining communities, and really in any
labor community. At this point, between eighteen eighty four and
nineteen twelve, where we got you those recent stats, mining
(36:50):
accidents killed more than seventeen hundred people in Colorado. The
next year, nineteen thirteen, one hundred and ten guys die
and mind related accidents. This makes it to Congress because
at this time, unions begin to become part of the conversation.
Before we introduce the union here, let's introduce the fact
(37:13):
that even the patricians in Congress, many of whom are
working hand in hand with corporate interests at this time,
or who are compromised and may as well be employees
of big corporations, they have an investigation and they conclude
the following, And keep in mind they're speaking against their
own literal bosses when they say this.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Guys, just note here as we're going into this quote,
I just try to click on that link, Ben, and
I'm getting a message from archive dot org that the
Internet archives are temporarily offline.
Speaker 5 (37:47):
Oh, someone who's reached out and told me that the
other day.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Yeah, that happened a little while back. Unfortunately I was
writing this before they went offline. But we hope archive
dot org comes back soon. It's a huge deal right now.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Yeah, it was working for me. Just wow, okay, uh weird, Okay.
Speaker 4 (38:05):
I'm sure they're in the process of dealing with it.
Maybe it's like up and down like you know.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Yeah, they've been in trouble recently because they also had
some protections regarding they had a lot of books full
that were common use. Oh there's something there's about.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Okay, well, let's get to this quote from the State
House Committee on Mines and Mining.
Speaker 5 (38:29):
This is the conclusion.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
I believe Colorado has good mining laws and such that
ought to afford protection to the miners as to safety
in the mind if they were enforced. Yet in this
state the percentage of fatalities is larger than any other,
showing there is undoubtedly something wrong in reference to the
management of its coal mines.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Boom, we took your campaign money and we appreciate it. Also,
the public tide has turned. And also, while we're at it,
I'm pretty sure Internet Archive was taken down by DDoS attacks.
Oh wow, okay, yeah, and that happened about forty eight
hours ago. Okay, well, hopefully it gets back up there.
(39:13):
And this happened after there was a previous breach of
the site that resulted in massive theft of millions of
user records. Anyway, trouble ahead. Like we said the coal miners,
at this point, you would say, okay, guys, we get it.
It stinks. It's very unfair situation. It's very rough. These
(39:34):
company towns are by the way, designed to deny them
from attaining a certain amount of economic success, Like the
cost of things are calculated against the usual or the
typical wage, such that you won't ever make You might
pay off your debts, but you won't ever make enough
money for you to move away. They want you to
(39:55):
stay there and powerless.
Speaker 4 (39:57):
Well, and given that calculation in the favor of the company,
doesn't that also mean that all the script that they're
paying out and stuff, it basically is a zero sum game,
like they're essentially getting free labor because they're hiding behind
the guise of this we're subsidizing your life by giving
you a place to live and feeding you, and you're
paying us for the privilege. But they control all of
(40:18):
those calculations, and they're doing it to make it where
it's almost like they're.
Speaker 5 (40:21):
Not paying anything.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
Yeah, and in some cases it would be possible, just
like with any other sort of dictatorial regime, it would
be possible in the perimeters and the adjacent areas, in
the liminal spaces, to trade your script for actual US currency,
but it would be at an egregious rate of you
know what I mean, You've got Zimbabwe dollars.
Speaker 4 (40:44):
It's like trading your foreign currency at the little terminal
at the airport.
Speaker 5 (40:50):
It's a bad idea. Did it once? Not good? Don't
ever do that pro travel tip, y'all.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
Yeah, just you know, unless you're definitely never going back
to a place, I would say, just hold on to
the foreign script and you know, roll the dice. See
how it's going to work the next time you go.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Dude, dude, Should we get so we're talking about them,
most of the workers living on company property. Should we
just get at least a bit of information about what
does the police force look like in one of these
company towns, because my understanding is that they would essentially
gather militias, like almost company militias that would function as
(41:33):
the local police to keep order as everybody is just
going around town and everything.
Speaker 8 (41:38):
Yeah, goon squads, right, well, goon squads, but also that
would be deputized in times of trouble such that they
were not technically goon squads.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
We're going to get to a very interesting private detective
agency in a little bit. But the militia like the
idea that we could rule by first by infrastructure, by
rigging the game, and then second by intimidation. The third
is ruling by force by physical force. Harassment, intimidation, assault,
(42:09):
and murder. These are all oh and sabotage, these are
all part of it. As a result of these factors,
the coal miners in Colorado and abroad had no real
way to air their grievances. They couldn't push for better conditions.
They didn't even have the paper thin theoretical protection that
exists for labor today. Technically, under the US law, it
(42:32):
is in most cases not against the law to attempt
to organize a union. Some groups cannot strike, like we
recently found the Post office is not allowed to strike
at all. But in this case they didn't have any
of that. Your corporate boss is your local government and
(42:53):
your local law enforcement, and so they start in secret
conspiring looking to unions for help. This is a counter
conspiracy to the conspiracy the corporations. These are obviously very
smart people. They say, look, if a mine is associated
with a union at this point in time in the
(43:13):
United States in the early nineteen hundreds, they have forty
percent fewer fatalities because the rules are enforced. So from
their perspective, it's a no brainer to have some kind
of organized labor. That's where they get with the United
mind Workers of America UMW, and in secret, again a conspiracy,
(43:36):
they begin to organize, and this leads to nineteen thirteen,
the unionization movement goes public. I'm sure the corporation already
knew there was something in the wind, but they have
a list of just seven demands, and if you read them,
they're pretty reasonable. You know. They're like, hey, can you
(43:58):
just count a ton as a ton?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, let's do. Let's go through these, ben because that's
that's the first one on the list, right.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
That's the second one. The first one is recognizing the
union as a bargaining agent.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Oh sure, yes, recognize us first. But the second one
is probably the most important, and we've talked about it
the early part of the show. Count a ton as
a ton, just what you said, Ben, And the other
one is just how about eight hour work days because
that that's kind of a law. So let's do that.
Speaker 5 (44:28):
Payment for dead work, laying track, timbering, handling, impurities, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
That's all the stuff they had to do anyway, Right,
they're just saying, maybe compensate us for that stuff too.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
And then they're saying, hey, also, we think the people
in charge of weighing the stuff we get paid for
should be elected by us, the folks doing the work.
Because there was a known problem with in addition to
you know that crooked thing about twenty two hundred pounds
instead of two thousand. The company would hire these waightcheckers
(45:04):
and give them a kind of a quote of how
much could be paid at the time, so the company
encouraged corruption or even more frequent to be honest, the
weightcheckmen would skim a little vigorous off.
Speaker 5 (45:18):
Of course, of course they would. Yep.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
They also wanted the right to use their script at
any store. Yeah, or you know, just to be able
to buy things from any store and to choose guess
what where they lived and who their doctors were.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
So okay, this is another thing we'll get to this
at the end. This is one that really it bothers
me personally and should bother everybody listening unless you're already
a billionaire right now. What they're asking for here in
nineteen thirteen is freedom from a situation that you encounter
today in the world of private healthcare. You have a
(45:55):
doctor you like, but they're not in network. So imagine
trying to go to a grocery store and they say
you can't buy these potatoes. You're not in the grocery network.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Oh oh, that's fine, I'll just take my company bucks
somewhere else.
Speaker 6 (46:13):
Oh wait, oh crap, you take public This is crazy, dude,
And let's get look, let's get I think this one
is unfortunately really important.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
With a bullet or let's say, a whole magazine of bullets.
They wanted strict enforcement of Colorado's laws, which are the
mind safety stuff. They're on the books in Colorado already.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
They're just not enforced exactly.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
And they want to get rid of script they want entirely.
They want us dollars. Why not? And here is the
big one, I think, guys, an end to the company
guard system, which is the internally enforced internally hired system
of law enforcement by company employees.
Speaker 5 (46:57):
I mean, oh, sorry, so, but not like miners.
Speaker 4 (47:00):
They were just like literally a militia hired by the
company to maintain order, right, so over the companies.
Speaker 5 (47:06):
But it's over.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
Yes, yes, that's exactly what it was. And as had
already there was other stuff in the wind here. People
already knew that if if things got past a certain threshold,
it was well within the ability of the powers in
Congress to call in actual US military, which they would
(47:28):
do with very little hesitation. So we'd love to tell
you that this is the end of the show, and
that these Colorado mine companies accepted these seven pretty reasonable demands.
No sorry, they rejected all of them. And in September
of that year of nineteen thirteen, the UMW United Mine
(47:49):
Workers said, all right, our next step is a strike.
And this leads to one of the bloodiest labor conflicts
in US history. The corporations provably conspired to, by hook
or by crook, break the backs of these strikers in
a literal way, in.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
A literal way, and very much in breaking the spirit
right of anybody else who would even think about wanting
to join.
Speaker 3 (48:17):
Up and when they participated in this conspiracy. When they
orchestrated this conspiracy, you could argue it also they experienced
Mission creep. It got further out of hand than they
would ever imagine and led to a really weird era
of pr What are we talking about. We'll tell you
after this adbreak. Here's where it gets crazy, all right,
(48:47):
This strike is huge, at least sounds huge here we're
talking about these other militias that are anti union or
strike breakers, right, defenders of the so called scabs, the UMW.
Their strike is comprised of ten thousand miners. That's a
small army, and that's also not counting their families. So
(49:08):
the number of people are pro union is much bigger.
And they immediately focus on our earlier antagonists, Colorado Fuel
and Iron Company. The practices are the worst from this company,
and also the optics are the best as an enemy.
If you're Davidian Force looking for a goliath, then you
(49:29):
want Colorado Fuel and Iron because their bosses also don't
seem to care about the workers. They're out there literally
living on Broadway.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Yes, eighteen hundred miles away, and so just think about
the communication that has to happen there I guess telegram
is exist in existence at this time, right.
Speaker 3 (49:49):
Sure, yeah, not the app but the yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
Yeah, but they but they can be sent information back
and forth from whatever company offices exist out there, so
there can be communication to that extent. But it is
literally a couple of typed pages then end up in
the hands of the controllers of the company eighteen hundred
miles away, and then another typed page of how to
(50:12):
handle said whatever situation.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
Yeah, and so there to them again, are these actual
people or these simply functions that, when working correctly in
an equation, produce profit. What is the human element? The
strikers meet repercussions immediately. They are evicted from these company
talents once they are identified as union members or god
(50:38):
forbid leaders. The leaders are actually detained pretty often, and
so the striking miners again they don't have anywhere to go.
They start building a series of tent colonies. Ludlow Quality
is by far the largest of this encampment. It's quite diverse.
There are people from all kinds of parts of the world,
you know, and they have different ethnic background on different
(51:00):
spiritual beliefs, but they are united in the idea of
not letting this corporate power continue to oppress them. Also,
Colorado winter nineteen thirteen to nineteen fourteen terrible, terrible, and
that you're in a tent. You're in a canvas tent, Dude,
you will get in trouble if you steal cold from
(51:21):
the mine to stay warm, because that's how they operate.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
That's so crazy to me. And I don't think any
of us in the modern era unless you're an extreme
campophile or you know, I don't know the right word
that is, but you know, you go out there and
you spend winter nights camping, or you know, an extremely
cold climate on purpose.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Shout out Alex Linny's oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Well, and there are many of us who enjoy that
kind of thing. It's just we have technology now that
keeps us super warm and we don't even need a
fire anymore. We've got materials that can keep us good
to go through those winters. But if you imagine nineteen
thirteen to fourteen in Colorado in that cold, I am
(52:08):
so flabbergasted that that many people in an encampment like
that survived long enough for this to even occur.
Speaker 4 (52:16):
What we're both start, yeah and Matt, can I just
applaud you on your use of flabbergas that I don't
think it's used nearly enough these days.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
Yeay, And with this in mind, I do think it's
also incredibly important to note even now there are people
who are living in similar circumstances. Yes, so you have
to realize it is not then as now is not
a conscious choice, and people know it's unsustainable, but they're
(52:47):
able to get by because they're supporting each other.
Speaker 4 (52:50):
And shout out to the podcast Big Sugar by Celeste Headley.
We had Celeste on the show a while back, and
it's a total company town situation with a lot of
those massive sugar companies with these you know, workers that
live at the behest of the company on company property
in these bunks.
Speaker 5 (53:07):
It's the more things change, the more they stay the same.
To be glow.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Cliche, and again we have to remember that for decades,
in the case of Ludlow, Colorado, in this colony, people
have been flocking to this area in search for that
that opportunity, right, that American dream that has sold so
hard to you. And despite their demographic differences, you know,
the inevitable bouts of infighting, they were unanimous in their
(53:35):
mission and they said, if we stick together, we can
make a difference. There are more of us than there
are of them, them being the patricians, but they weren't
really counting the militias that would arrive shout out a
bug's life.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
Well, isn't it quite tragic, you guys, that ultimately all
these human beings are out here fighting just to keep
a job so that they can support the families that
they're growing. Like that is one of the primary things
that's happening here.
Speaker 3 (54:03):
Yes, like with the okey example from Grapes of Wrath
and the Great Depression, which is just on the horizon here. Historically,
Colorado Fuel and Iron sadly was also internally united in opposition,
and they were able to buy every politician and every
member of law enforcement in the area. There's not a
single story of a sheriff who didn't take the money
(54:27):
and stood up for the people, or more importantly, you
would argue for the American project, stood up for the
rule of law. That didn't happen. In fact, Colorado Fuel
and Iron hired a detective agency. Baldwin feltz, you've heard
of pinkertons. This is sort of the Pepsi to the
coca Cola, the Pinkertons. At first, they were just supposed
to run security for the new workers who were coming
(54:50):
in who made a vow to not joined the union,
just keep the coal mine running for the shareholder, to.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Basically just get them in out of the complex right
the mind.
Speaker 3 (55:02):
Right without being attacked by union protesters, which would have occurred.
They were to also break the strike by any means necessary.
And you know, I feel like Baldwin Felts would be
a fascinating episode of ridiculous history. Maybe stuff then once,
you know, because they originally were doing good guy work
(55:23):
in the age of great expansion of rail in the
early days, they were focusing on railroad crime, finding fugitives.
They were bounty hunters, you know. And this was the
era of like red dead, redemption two railroad bandits, you know,
with the bandana and they like the horses going I
hope dling. You seemed to do it like a little
(55:44):
jump riding a horse thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, doing that.
That didn't last very long. Railroad banditry became less and
less of a thing as the Americans became more settled,
as they further encroached into this two territory, and so
Baldwin Felts had to pivot and become private security, often
(56:06):
for mining interests, and they got a reputation for being
the fixers if anybody had the temerity to begin a union.
Speaker 2 (56:15):
Yeah. Well, and let's not forget Iman's a patient proclamations
only eighteen sixties. So if you just think about some
of the work that was done on fugitive.
Speaker 3 (56:26):
Hunting, let's save catchers. Yeah yeah, So.
Speaker 2 (56:30):
Who knows where those lines are? We don't, at least
when I'm speaking right now. I don't know the full
history of the Baldwin Felts, you know, detective agency, but
you can just imagine that some of that stuff's in play.
Speaker 3 (56:41):
Yet. We know that they were best known for again
railroad banditry. But still that's why I think they were
best known for stopping railroad banditry. But there were also
there were clearly cases in the previous eras are prior
to the Emancipation Proclamation, was a huge industry to hunt
(57:05):
enslaved people or trying to escape. But this agency is
founded in the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
Okay, okay, sorry, I'm getting my timeline wrong there. I
guess what I'm just trying to what I'm trying to say,
is any company that is a private agency like that
that does essentially law enforcement work. You are taking money
from somebody who probably has quite a bit of money
for whatever purpose you're doing. And you can see why
you would if you were expanding, let's say the company
(57:32):
like this, you would move to something like mining interests
because there's going to be a more frequent cash flow
and you can actually grow.
Speaker 3 (57:39):
Like private prisons moved to immigrant entertainment, right, and they
were grease in the right pockets the entire time. Look,
the bullwood Feltz folks got up to some pretty nasty stuff,
especially in the tent colonies, including Ludlow, but including other
ten colonies. Is because there were multiple and we are
(58:00):
going to pause here in media arrest, fellow conspiracy realist.
This is a rare two parter for us, But we
all very much invest in this story and we hope
you are finding it as fascinating and disturbing as we are.
So tune in in just a few days when we'll
be back with part two of what was the Ludlow Massacre.
(58:22):
In the meantime, we try to be easy to find online.
Speaker 4 (58:25):
That's right, you can find us at the handle Conspiracy
Stuff where we exist on Facebook where we have our
Facebook group Here is where it gets crazy. On YouTube,
where we have video content galore for your enjoyment, as
well as on xfka, Twitter, on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 5 (58:39):
We're Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (58:41):
If you want to call us, our number is one
eight three three std WYTK. Call in and tell us anything.
Give us a book recommendation, give us a movie we
need to see, and think about anything at all. Do
please give yourself a cool nickname and let us know
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we got more to say than could fit in a
three minute voicemail. Why not instead send us a good
(59:03):
old fashion email.
Speaker 3 (59:05):
We are the entities that read every piece of correspondence
we receive. Contacting us by email is one of the
best ways for us to be able to dive into links,
to dive into pictures, or we all see it when
it arrives. When we respond, we all hear it. We
can't wait to hear from you. We get so many
fantastic recommendations for episodes for future pieces of conversation. Shout
(59:28):
out to Brock who just let us know get this
evidence of negative time has been found in a quantum
physics experiment. No idea what that's about, but we're going
to find out because he, like hopefully you, fellow conspiracy realists,
has taken us to the edge of the rabbit hole.
Be well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back,
so join us here in the dark conspiracy at iHeartRadio
(59:50):
dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
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