María Montoya’s A Workplace of Their Own examines labor conflict in Colorado’s mining industry from the late 19th to the early 20th century, a period marked by acute violence that has long attracted study by a range of historians. Yet Montoya’s attention to new local, national, and even transnational elements of these conflicts recontextualizes existing accounts while reminding us of the all-too-often forgotten violence at the heart of American labor history.
Montoya frames her engagement around two dyads: the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the 1927 Columbine Mine Massacre; and the visions of labor relations advanced by the two inheritors of Colorado’s then-largest mining companies, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Josephine Roche. The book excavates these massacres not as discrete episodes but as outgrowths of broader contests over the agency of labor in the workplace and the relative influence of local and national coalitions seeking to manage labor conflict. This reorientation is then powerfully illustrated by Rockefeller and Roche’s competing, if not openly hostile, attempts to rehabilitate their families’ reputations by using Colorado as a testing ground for models of industrial peace that later influenced national debates and legislation.
One powerful dividend of this approach is showing how Rockefeller and Roche’s visions of labor relations were derived from different arenas of Progressive politics and Social Gospel influences, but concurrently tied to both industrialists’ high-society upbringings in New York City. Rockefeller embraced notions of scientific management and foundation-based philanthropy, which informed his intra-corporate “Industrial Relations Plan.” This plan involved a program of scientistic inquiry into the entire life cycle of laborers, which could be adjusted through the intentional planning of corporate housing communities. Roche embraced a more procedurally grounded understanding of class and racial reconciliation, seeking to focus workers on their family lives as private consumers, buoyed by better wages and working conditions. Neither engaged with the more radical democratic visions of worker ownership or intra-corporate agency that often grounded the aspirations of Colorado miners.
A Workplace of Their Own thoroughly explores this contest in great detail while centering the driving force of local conditions in Colorado. One standout dimension is Montoya’s textured sense for how physical geography shaped labor conflict and the quite different experiences miners faced under Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CFI) and Roche’s Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMFC). Montoya’s previous work on Western land dispossession clearly sensitizes her demonstration of the truism that land and labor, both inside and outside of the workplace, can never be separated. Rockefeller’s general hostility to unions was enabled by the relative isolation of the CFI mines and a resulting domination through corporate housing. In contrast, Roche’s more conciliatory stance was almost a necessity given the more socially diverse and sprawling community in which RMFC miners lived. These differences fundamentally shaped patterns of socialization and the nature of miners’ relationships with local merchants and governmental interests. Even the nature of the mining in each location interacted with how new technologies and patterns of racial migration impacted labor relations.
Montoya’s attention to physical geography also contributes to her effective detailing of the tensions between local and national associations of labor and capital, often just as suffused with distrust as were relations between labor and capital locally. It quickly becomes clear how wide the ideological gap remained between even union-friendly Progressives like Roche and local miners, who were inspired by masculinist ideas of what Montoya calls “local producerism”—tied to notions of labor republicanism fundamentally uncomfortable with wage labor and managerial authority. Roche’s large-scale procedural vision of “summit arbitration” was repeatedly frustrated by local unions’ sense of independence, especially in regard to striking. Even within Colorado, urban Progressives who saw better labor conditions as supportive of family coherence advanced moral visions that miners largely rejected; in turn, these reformers were averse to any acts of violent resistance by miners.
A Workplace of Their Own highlights a variety of key dynamics beyond labor ideology that led to the recurrent failure of both Rockefeller’s and Roche’s approaches to industrial peace. The Progressive fixation on alcohol prohibition to “improve” working-class, especially immigrant, families, fractured labor alliances, even as “the family” was used to justify state declarations of martial law to suppress strikers. Ideas of patriotism were used both for and against labor activism over time, intertwined with shifts in foreign policy, which also fractured local and national labor coordination along racial and religious lines. The Colorado chapters of the Ku Klux Klan further undermined labor coalitions, although in unpredictable ways, as they “prioritized their hatred of immigrants, Jews, Catholics, bootleggers, saloon owners, and those who trafficked in prostitution (‘white slavery’) over their hatred of Black Americans.” (P. 119.) Even moments of relative labor peace, or seeming victory for Roche’s model, were, in retrospect, as contingent on the price of coal as they were on ideological resonance.
Montoya shows how this contingency makes it difficult to characterize any single perspective during this period as either “radical” or a more universally effective strategy for industrial peace. As is endemic to labor history, valorizing even workers’ own perspectives does not necessarily reveal some ideal perspective, especially in eras where racial, religious, and gendered chauvinism drove local strategies as much as did nationally paternalistic notions of “American” family life.
Still, A Workplace of Their Own does display some sympathy for Roche in her union-friendly quest to improve working conditions and in her many unsuccessful attempts to persuade other industrial leaders to recognize the shared virtues of improved working conditions. Though both Rockefeller and Roche eventually shifted their attention elsewhere, Roche was far more active in addressing labor issues through the emerging New Deal politics driven by the Roosevelt administration, while Rockefeller turned most of his industrial and philanthropic energy elsewhere. Roche’s experiences in Colorado clearly impacted her work promoting the procedurally oriented bargaining regime of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which sidelined any notion of collective ownership or direct worker participation in workplace governance.
What ultimately emerges from A Workplace of Their Own is not just a history of competing ideologies and shifting coalitions, but a history, especially for workers, of violence. Montoya addresses the gap between “lofty rhetorical debates” and “violent battles that often included machine guns and dynamite.” (P. 1.) She opens the book with a vignette about displaced workers who had been expelled from company housing for striking, and whose tent colony was then burned down following a private militia’s invasion. Frantic mothers searched for their children, ultimately to discover that they had died in a cellar in which several families had succumbed to asphyxiation.
Such violence was intimately tied up with the law, which was both recurrent and impotent throughout Montoya’s miners’ lives. Her granular attention to local conditions always includes issues of legality, present beginning with the leases that initially structured miners’ control over their workplaces. The patchwork of state laws governing labor relations during this era can be used to determine whether various actions by labor and capital alike were “illegal” at any given time. Later, the very issues that were decisive in leading up to the Ludlow and Columbine massacres, from miners’ claim to a “right to property” in their jobs to the use of replacement workers, all faced judicial refutation under the NLRA regime.
But, as is endemic to labor history, the force of law recurrently yielded to facts on the ground. The private militia that stormed the tent colony with which Montoya opens the book was just one instance where such violence was deployed against not only workers, but also pro-union governmental officials and journalists. Moreover, such militias acted “in the face of court orders declaring their actions to be illegal, they detained strikers and their sympathizers in bullpens, beat them in the streets and in their homes, and deported them out of the jurisdiction, sometimes even out of the state.” (P. 60.) While miners did deploy violence of their own, the treatment of this violence by courts was a far cry from the near total insulation of employer and state-inflicted death from legal accountability.
While such visceral violence may seem absent in modern American life to some, this perception is rooted in the same issue of social distance shared by Rockefeller and Roche, despite their differences. Indeed, in the present moment, the dynamic Montoya describes may appear less remote to many readers than it did just a few years ago. This reality speaks to the fact that labor conflict always raises the most fundamental questions about whether democratic values have a role in American economic life, and about the unsettling consequences when their absence becomes systemic—often replaced by dehumanizing chauvinism.
Montoya keeps her historiographical work largely separate from broad normative generalizations but cannot resist noting that issues of dignified work and economic inequality remain unresolved. Today, the future of work is often discussed as an issue of technocratic adaptation. And even though empirical sociology has demonstrated with increasing force the many enduring and compounding traumas of precarious work, attempts to breathe this reality into the flattened metrics of most labor market models still rarely inform such debates. Whether this disconnect will again lead to conditions more like those experienced by Montoya’s miners is ultimately a political, not legal or technical, question, as it has always been throughout American labor history.
