Colorado Coal Mine Workers' Strike of 1927-1928

COLORADO COAL MINE WORKERS’ STRIKE OF 1927-1928. The coal industry in the United States was in crisis through most of the 1920s. Mine workers were engaged in a nationwide fight to maintain a United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)-negotiated wage Jacksonville scale that provided for an eight-hour day and a $7.50 daily wage to miners. The operators represented in the Central Competitive Field (CCF) agreed to this but then broke their agreement, threatening wages in other coal fields. The UMWA was weakened by operator resistance, losses in the courts, internal splits, and efforts by UMWA President John L. Lewis to centralize union operations. Militant local and district mine worker movements and the national Save the Union Committee were challenging the union leadership’s direction.

Colorado’s coal mine workers lost UMWA representation in the early 1920s, and the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron company (CF&I) had never signed a UMWA contract, although the company’s steel mill in Pueblo did have some union contracts. CF&I and the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMF) were the two dominant coal mining companies in Colorado by 1927.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) called a strike in southern Colorado on August 8, 1927 to protest the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. The brief strike was successful in pulling out as many as 3000 mine workers and testing the water for further strike action. Colorado mine worker conferences backed the demand for the Jacksonville scale and issued other demands as well. Statewide strike action was postponed until the IWW completed a legally required petitioning effort and built strike leadership committees. A statewide mine strike movement opened in late September. This was the only time that mine workers in all of Colorado’s coal mining districts struck together for common demands, and it was the IWW’s last mass strike.

The statewide strike committee was organized on the basis of race and nationality. Decisions were made in assemblies of striking workers, but formal leadership committees existed. The statewide strike committee adopted a strategy of seeking to negotiate with the companies through the Governor of Colorado and seeking to use the state’s Industrial Commission to win wage increases. Car caravans carried picketers all over the state. Leadership came from IWW organizer A.S. (Sam) Embree, a Lithuanian socialist named Karl Clemens, a Croatian laundry worker named Milka Sablich who was popularly known as “Flaming Milka,” and others. Embree and Sablich went on a national tour and their report on New York’s WEVD radio station was probably the station’s first labor report.

Strikers were given a white card that signified their participation in the strike and that enabled them to get supplies through the IWW. On the ground the strike was run as a united front effort between IWW members, members of the UMWA and the Communist-led National Miners Union, and mine workers who were not affiliated with any union. The strike drew support from working-class lodges, dissident-led UMWA locals, Left organizations, the International Labor Defense, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the IWW. Joe Ortega, a boxer known as “Kid Mex,” who was a mine section boss in Lafayette, supported strikers with exhibition matches. Some students from University of Colorado scabbed, but the Methodist minister A.A. Heist and students from the Iliff School of Theology supported the strike.

The strike came at a difficult moment. The Ku Klux Klan had taken over many state offices and agencies and Klansmen were on both sides of the strike. A war between rival bootlegging organizations was disrupting life in the southern Colorado coal fields. The large Colorado coal operators were using mine mechanization and scientific management to raise mine production. CF&I had an industrial representation plan and a spy system in place that blocked unionization and gave the company insight into coal field communities.

The Colorado National Guard and the state law enforcement bureau that had been charged with enforcing Prohibition were used to harass and arrest strikers and strike leaders. Union and lodge offices were raided, files were seized, and these records were turned over to the companies and anti-union and anti-immigrant spokespeople. Denver’s Roman Catholic Bishop claimed that IWW members could not receive Church funerals, but at least two local priests disregarded this. UMWA leadership and liberal sympathizers took the position that the strike was justified, but that progress could only be made through the UMWA. Some UMWA officials sought behind-the-scenes cooperation with coal companies and state and local officials.

At least six people were killed and dozens wounded at Rocky Mountain Fuel’s Columbine mine on November of 1927, when 2 or 3 machine guns may have been turned on strikers. A Mexican mine worker, Clemente Chavez, and a teenage bystander were killed in an attack on the Walsenburg union hall in January of 1928 as workers were providing testimony to the Industrial Commission. The union had a weak base in Colorado’s central and western coal fields and had no base at the Pueblo steel mill, relief supplies were running low by January of 1928, violence was increasing, and strike leaders and activists were facing legal and extra-legal repression. The strike ended in February of 1928. Colorado’s Industrial Commission granted wage increases that made the state’s mine workers the highest paid in the United State for a time. The Depression and wage concessions reversed this victory.

Josephine Roche had taken control of Rocky Mountain Fuel and recruited a group of fellow Progressives to help her run the company, including one-time UMWA strike leader and dissident John Lawson. Roche had a record as a liberal reformer, and her management cohort negotiated contracts with the UMWA and other American Federation of Labor-affiliated unions. The UMWA contract excluded IWW members from employment at the company. The UMWA and the workers covered under the RMF contract made wage and benefit concessions in order to keep the company competitive. Many prominent liberals also assisted. Roche ran for Governor of Colorado, served in the Roosevelt administration, and served as an administrator of the UMWA’s Health and Retirement Fund. She was forced out of that position in 1971.

The IWW promised to “take the strike to the job” and focused on using a legal loophole and attempting to win elections for checkweighmen positions at many mines, including a few owned by CF&I. Checkweighmen were elected and paid by mine workers to ensure that miners were correctly paid for mined coal. A conscientious checkweighman could serve as a union organizer. The operators challenged the IWW’s right to hold these positions. The IWW eventually won its point, but by then the IWW had been shut out. The IWW opened a western states’ agricultural workers’ organizing campaign from the mine workers. This campaign had some success, but it was eclipsed by Communist and AFL-led organizing campaigns and could not overcome divisions among western agricultural workers or find full support within the IWW. Jose Villa, a Spanish-born IWW mine worker and agricultural worker organizer, died unexpectedly in Wyoming in 1929, and IWW publicist Byron Kitto died in 1931. Their deaths were particular setbacks for the IWW.

The IWW won some important legal battles during the strike, including a reversal of a habeas corpus decision that had been issued when “Big Bill” Haywood had been arrested in 1908 for the murder of Frank Steunenberg. The IWW and the ACLU cooperated in legal efforts to hold Roche, RMF, and the State of Colorado liable for the deaths at the Columbine mine but lost that case.

Francisca DeLattore, the wife of Clemente Chavez, died shortly after the killings in Walsenburg, and she was remembered in public demonstrations of grief by women in there for several years. Sam Embree was accused of financial improprieties, acting against the IWW’s interest, and working covertly for the Communists by IWW activist Fred Thompson after the strike. Embree was cleared of the charges and later denied having been a communist. He had many years of IWW activism and imprisonment on behalf of the IWW and the Western Federation of Miners behind him to demonstrate his support for the IWW. He had been encouraged to organize in Colorado by Communist leaders, but he worked independently. Embree later became an organizer with the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Sablich was sent by the IWW to the Work People’s College in Duluth, Minnesota, where she became a school leader. She faced opposition from the Croatian community in Trinidad and stepped back from known public activism. Attorney R.W. Henderson, who had helped manage the IWW’s legal work during the strike and had been in the Walsenburg union hall when Chavez was killed, later helped found the National Federation of the Blind, and did civil rights and farmworker union legal work in California, including fighting a ban on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Strike activist Jim Allendar became a Communist and carried the “Duclos Letter” from Europe to the United States. Clint Jencks’ first political act was soliciting support for the strike in the Colorado Springs area. CF&I intervened to stop a Slovenian lodge funeral for a popular lodge member and striker in Crested Butte. His funeral was the last time lodges in Crested Butte organized a mass funeral on a workday.

Glenny, Hazel Alice. A history of labor disputes in the Northern Colorado coal mining fields with emphasis on the 1927-1928 strike (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Colorado, Boulder. 1938.

McMahan, Ronald. “Rang-U-Tang”: The I.W.W. and the 1927 Colorado Coal Strike,” in Joseph R. Conlin, ed. At the Point of Production: A Local History of the I.W.W. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981).

May, Lowell and Richard Myers, eds. Slaughter in Serene: the Columbine Coal Strike Reader. (Denver: Bread and Roses Workers' Cultural Center & Industrial Workers of the World, 2005).