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For once, our President spoke sensibly. Asked if our
country could win the war on terror, he replied I don't
think you can win it.
George W. Bush was right. The United States can eliminate terrorists, but the tactic of terrorism will always be with us.
That said, Labor Day weekend in Colorado is an appropriate time to ponder terrorism, which was an issue here long before Sept. 11, 2001. A century ago, Colorado was an industrial battleground, and terrorism was practiced by both sides.
As mining developed in Colorado after the 1859 gold rush, the mine owner evolved from a lucky prospector into a faceless Eastern corporation with stockholders and directors who wanted the maximum return.
That meant reducing labor costs. One common method was to change the pay scale from $3 for an eight-hour day to $3 for a 10-hour day. The miners responded by organizing unions -- the biggest was the Western Federation of Miners -- and going on strike.
These strikes usually involved another conflict, between local and state government. The county sheriff, being elected by the local residents, often supported the strikers -- after all, they elected him, and in any camp there were going to be a lot more miners than mine owners. If a striker was arrested and tried, the local judge and jury could be quite sympathetic.
In the Cripple Creek district, for instance,
high-grading
was common. Miners would pocket
valuable chunks of gold ore, rather than muck the broken
rock into the company's tram car. At one trial, the judge
ruled that this was not a crime because mineral is real
estate, and real estate cannot be stolen.
The mine owners were not defenseless. The stolen ore was sold at crooked assayers' offices, and eight such offices were dynamited in the Cripple Creek district. Rather than practice overt terrorism, though, the mine-owners usually worked through the system where they controlled it -- at the statehouse.
When a strike came, the Federation might work to keep it
peaceful. But there were always some hotheads, and after
they acted, the governor had an excuse to dispatch the
state militia to preserve order.
The militia boasted new recruits, mostly thugs, and it was heavy-handed -- closing union stores, smashing newspaper offices, rounding up and imprisoning men without trials, then hauling them to remote spots in Kansas and New Mexico before dumping them off the train.
Mostly, though, the militia protected scabs imported by the mine owners. The Federation responded by terrorizing the strikebreakers, as with the June 6, 1904 explosion at the Independence railroad station which killed 13 non-union miners and maimed many others.
The man who set that dynamite blast, Harry Orchard,
specialized in such mayhem. Another victim was former Idaho
Gov. Frank Steunenberg, who was blown to pieces in front of
his house on Dec. 30, 1905. After his arrest, Orchard
testified against three Federation officers who were
kidnapped from Denver and tried in Idaho. Among their
defense attorneys was Clarence Darrow, who won acquittals
or dismissals, as detailed in the 1998 book Big
Trouble
by J. Anthony Lukas.
Meanwhile in Telluride, the mine-owners tried another
tactic, according to a wonderful new book (The Corpse on
Boomerang Road: Telluride's War on Labor 1899-1908
by
Maryjoy Martin). They accused the Federation of murdering
men who were later seen alive; a gullible press was eager
to ignore the truth and spread the lies.
That's just a start on an oft-neglected aspect of our
history, when terrorism was a tactic employed by both
sides. Even at this remove, it's often difficult to
penetrate the maze of spies, informers and provocateurs. As
Orchard biographer Stewart Holbrook put it in The Rocky
Mountain Revolution,
that was an era when the
classic enemy camps of Labor and Capital both harbored
barbarians beyond number.
Eventually some degree of labor peace settled upon Colorado. But it did not mean that terrorism would vanish from this earth. It was refreshing that President Bush admitted as much, even though he changed his tune the next day.
That leaves us with the concept of terrorism, though. Colorado's labor history shows that both sides employed it as a tactic. So the question arises: Who gets to define terrorism?
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