Three Strikes Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century

by Zinn, Howard; Kelley, Robin D.G.; Frank, Dana

• ISBN13: 9780807050132
• ISBN10: 080705013X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-16
• Publisher: Beacon Press

Summary

Three renowned historians present stirring tales of labor: Howard Zinn tells the grim tale of the Ludlow Massacre, a drama of beleaguered immigrant workers, Mother Jones, and the politics of corporate power in the age of the robber barons. Dana Frank brings to light the little-known story of a successful sit-in conducted by the "counter girls" at the Detroit Woolworth's during the Great Depression. Robin D. G. Kelley's story of a movie theater musicians' strike in New York asks what defines work in times of changing technology. "Three Strikes brings to life the heroic men and women who put their jobs, bodies, and lives on the line to win a better life for all working Americans. Zinn, Frank, and Kelley show us that while the country and the union movement have changed greatly in the last hundred years, our struggle to close the divide between rich and poor remains the same." -John Sweeney, president, AFL-CIO "Provocative analysis of still relevant issues, as the passionate, sometimes violent demonstrations at international meetings of the global economy demonstrate." -Mary Carroll, Booklist "Highly readable, well-researched narratives of dramatic action" -Leon Fink, Chicago Tribune Howard Zinn is a teacher, historian, and social activist, and the author of many books, including the best-selling A People's History of the United States and You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon / 7127-7 / $13.00 pb). He lives near Boston. Dana Frank, professor of American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is author of the awardwinning Buy American (Beacon / 4711-2 / $17.50 pb). Robin D. G. Kelley, professor of history at New York University, is author of Race Rebels, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! (Beacon / 0941-5 / $14.00 pb), and Freedom Dreams (Beacon / 0976-8 / $24.00 cl).

Author Biography

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a world-renowned historian, author, playwright, and social activist best known for the perennially best-selling classic A People's History of the United States. His many highly acclaimed books include You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train; Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century; and Three Plays—The Political Theater of Howard Zinn: Emma, Marx in Soho, Daughter of Venus.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of seven books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original and Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America.

Dana Frank, author of the award-winning Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929, is professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her other works include Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism and Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California's Kitsch Monuments. She lives in Santa Cruz.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(4)
The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913-14	5	(52)
Howard Zinn
Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big: The Detroit Woolworth's Strike of 1937	57	(62)
Dana Frank
Without a Song: New York Musicians Strike Out against Technology	119	(38)
Robin D. G. Kelley
Bibliography	157	(14)
Acknowledgments	171

Excerpts

Chapter One ON APRIL 21, 1914, in the quiet afternoon, a telephone linesman was making his way through the charred ruins of a miners' tent colony in southern Colorado. He lifted an iron cot covering a pit under one of the tents, and there he found the blackened, swollen bodies of eleven children and two women. The news was flashed swiftly to the world. The tragedy was given a name: the Ludlow Massacre. Some Americans know about the Ludlow Massacre, though it does not appear in most of the history texts used in our schools and colleges. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it, a dark, brooding song. But few know that the Ludlow Massacre was the central event in a fourteen-month strike of coal miners that took a toll of at least sixty-six lives-a strike which is one of the most dramatic and violent events in the history of this country. Two governmental committees subsequently recorded over five thousand pages of firsthand testimony by participants in the Colorado coal strike. Thousands of newspaper stories and hundreds of magazine articles dealt with the conflict. Some of the most fascinating figures in American history were involved in some way in that event: Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilson, John D. Rockefeller and Ivy Lee, Upton Sinclair and John Reed. Yet that story has been buried, in the way that labor struggles in general have been omitted or given brief mention in most mainstream accounts of the history of the United States. It deserves to be recalled, because embedded in the events of the Colorado strike are issues still alive today: the class struggle between owners of large enterprises and their workers, the special treatment of immigrant workers, the relationship between economic power and political power, the role of the press, and the way in which the culture censors out certain historical events. The Colorado strike took place in a physical setting of vast proportions and staggering beauty. Down the center of the rectangle that is Colorado, from north to south, march an array of huge, breathtaking mountains-the Rockies-whose naked cliffs merge, on their eastern edge, with low hills covered with cedar and yellow pine. To the east of that is the plain-really a mile-high plateau-a tawny expanse of pasture grass sprinkled with prairie flowers in the spring and summer, and gleaming here and there with yellow- blossomed cactus. Beneath the tremendous weight of the Rockies, in the course of countless centuries, decaying vegetation gradually mineralized into the black rock known as coal. The constantly increasing proportion of carbon in this rock transformed it from vegetable matter to peat, then to lignite and bituminous coal, and finally to anthracite. Three great coalfields, consisting chiefly of bituminous coal, were formed in Colorado. One of them was contained within two counties in southern Colorado, Las Animas and Huerfano counties, just east of the mountains. This field was made up of about forty discontinuous seams, ranging from a few inches to fourteen feet thick. These seams were from two hundred and fifty to about five hundred feet deep. The mining of these fields became possible on a large scale only in the 1870s, when the railroads moving west from Kansas City, south from Denver, and north from New Mexico, converged on the region. At about this time, settlers moving down the old Santa Fe trail built a town on the banks of the Purgatory River (el Rio de las Animas Perdidas Purgatorio-the river of lost souls), just east of the Sangre de Cristo (blood of Christ) mountains and about fifteen miles north of the New Mexican border. The town was called Trinidad, and it became the cente