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