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History (Education)

Education

Have you ever heard of the Ludlow Massacre? You might be shocked when you see what happened.

It's important to know your history.

via Colorado Coal Field War Project/University of Denver Library.

Strikers, Ludlow Tent Colony, 1914.


The early 1900s were a time of great social upheaval in our country. During the years leading up to the Ludlow Massacre, miners all around the country looking to make a better life for themselves and their families set up picket lines, organized massive parades and rallies, and even took up arms. Some died.

It's always worth considering why history like this was never taught in school before. Could it be that the powers that be would rather keep this kind of thing under wraps?

Here is Woody Guthrie's tribute to the good people who fought in the battles of Ludlow to help make a better tomorrow for everyone — you can just start the video and then start reading, if you wish:

Coal Country, Colorado

100 years ago, the Rocky Mountains were the source of a vast supply of coal. At its peak, it employed 16,000 people and accounted for 10% of all employed workers in the state of Colorado. It was dangerous work; in just 1913 alone, the mines claimed the lives of over 100 people. There were laws in place that were supposed to protect workers, but largely, management ignored those, which led to Colorado having double the on-the-job fatality rate of any other mining state.

It was a time of company towns, when all real estate, housing, doctors, and grocery stores were owned by the coal companies themselves, which led to the suppression of dissent as well as overinflated prices and an extreme dependence on the coal companies for everything that made life livable. In some of these, workers couldn't even leave town, and armed guards made sure they didn't. Also, if any miner or his family began to air grievances, they might find themselves evicted and run out of town.

strike, economy, money works, Union parade

Strikers, Ludlow Tent Colony, 1914.

Union Parade, Trinidad, Colorado, 1913. Images via Colorado Coal Field War Project/University of Denver Library.

The Union

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) had been organizing for many years in the area, and this particular company, Colorado Fuel and Iron, was one of the biggest in the West — and was owned by the Rockefeller family, notoriously anti-union.

Put all this together, and it was a powder keg.

The Ludlow colony, 1914 massacre, Colorado Coal Field War

The Ludlow Colony before the massacre, 1914.

Photo from Youtube video.

tent colony, mining, miners

Strikers, Ludlow Tent Colony, 1914.

Photo from Youtube video.

families, National Guard, unions

Strikers, Ludlow Tent Colony, 1914.

Photo from Youtube video.

Strike!

When a strike was called in 1913, the coal company evicted all the miners from their company homes, and they moved to tent villages on leased land set up by the UMWA. Company-hired guards (aka “goons") and members of the Colorado National Guard would drive by the tent villages and randomly shoot into the tents, leading the strikers to dig holes under their tents and the wooden beams that supported them.

Why did the union call for a strike? The workers wanted:

  1. (equivalent to a 10% wage increase),
  2. Enforcement of the eight-hour work day,
  3. Payment for "dead work" that usually wasn't compensated, such as laying coal car tracks,
  4. The job known as “Weight-checkmen" to be elected by workers. This was to keep company weightmen honest so the workers got paid for their true work,
  5. The right to use any store rather than just the company store, and choose their own houses and doctors,
  6. Strict enforcement of Colorado's laws, especially mine safety laws.
calvary, Trinidad, striking women

Cavalry charge on striker women in nearby Trinidad.

Photo from Youtube video.

UMWA, Rocky Mountains, President Woodrow Wilson

Militia and private detectives or mine guards, Ludlow.

Photo from Youtube video.

The Powder Keg Explodes

The attacks from the goons continued, as did the battles between scabs (strikebreakers) and the miners. It culminated in an attack on April 20, 1914, by company goons and Colorado National Guard soldiers who kidnapped and later killed the main camp leader and some of his fellow miners, and then set the tents in the main camp ablaze with kerosene. As they were engulfed, people inside the tents tried to flee the inferno; many were shot down as they tried to escape. Some also died in the dugouts below the burning tents. In the first photograph below, two women and 11 children died in the fire directly above them. A day that started off with Orthodox Easter celebrations for the families became known as the Ludlow Massacre.

Woody Guthrie, child labor laws, worker rights

The "Death Pit."

Photo from Youtube video.

colony, coal country, University of Denver

Rear view of ruins of tent colony.

Photo from Youtube video.

funeral procession, Louis Tikas, Greek strikers

Funeral procession for Louis Tikas, leader of Greek strikers.

Photo from Youtube video.

The 10-Day War

The miners, fresh off the murders of their friends and family members, tried to get President Woodrow Wilson to put a stop to the madness, but he deferred to the governor, who was pretty much in the pocket of the mine companies.

So the miners and those at other tent colonies quickly armed themselves, knowing that many other confrontations were coming. And they went to the mines that were being operated by scabs and forced many of them to close, sometimes setting fire to the buildings. After 10 days of pitched battle and at least 50 dead, the president finally sent in the National Guard, which promptly disarmed both sides.

Union Victory

While close to 200 people died over the course of about 18 months before and after the battles at Ludlow and the union ultimately lost the election, the Ludlow Massacre brought a congressional investigation that led to the beginnings of child-labor laws and an eight-hour workday, among other things.

But it also brought national attention to the plight of these miners and their families, and it showed the resilience and strength that union people could display when they remained united, even in the face of extreme corporate and government violence. Historian Howard Zinn called it "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history." And the primary mine owner, John D. Rockefeller Jr., received a lot of negative attention and blame for what happened here.

monuments, April 20, 1914, coal miners, revolution

The UMWA is still a solid union today, and there is a monument in Colorado to those who died in the Ludlow Massacre.

Image by Mark Walker/Wikimedia Commons.

This article was written by Brandon Weber and originally appeared on 08.14.14


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Education

Voice recordings of people who were enslaved offer incredible first-person accounts of U.S. history

"The results of these digitally enhanced recordings are arresting, almost unbelievable. The idea of hearing the voices of actual slaves from the plantations of the Old South is as powerful—as startling, really—as if you could hear Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee speak." - Ted Koppel

Library of Congress

When we think about the era of American slavery, many of us tend to think of it as the far distant past. While slavery doesn't exist as a formal institution today, there are people living who knew formerly enslaved black Americans first-hand. In the wide arc of history, the legal enslavement of people on U.S. soil is a recent occurrence—so recent, in fact, that we have voice recordings of interviews with people who lived it.

Many of us have read written accounts of enslavement, from Frederick Douglass's autobiography to some of the 2,300 first-person accounts housed in the Library of Congress. But how many of us have heard the actual voices of people who were enslaved telling their own stories?

ABC News' Nightline with Ted Koppel aired a segment in 1999 in which we can hear the first-person accounts of people who had been enslaved taken from interviews conducted in the 1930s and 40s (also housed in the Library of Congress). They include the voice of a man named Fountain Hughes, who was born into slavery in 1848 and whose grandfather had "belonged to" Thomas Jefferson.

As Koppel says in the segment, "The results of these digitally enhanced recordings are arresting, almost unbelievable. The idea of hearing the voices of actual slaves from the plantations of the Old South is as powerful—as startling, really—as if you could hear Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee speak."

Indeed, hearing formerly enslaved people share their experiences of being bought and sold like cattle, sleeping on bare pallets, and witnessing whippings for insubordination is a heartbreaking reminder of how close we are to this ugly chapter of our history. The segment is well worth ten minutes to watch:

This article originally appeared on 03.09.20

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Education

An 8-yr-old Chinese American girl helped desegregate schools 70 years before Brown v. Board

Mamie Tape and her parents fought the school district all the way to the California Supreme Court in 1885 and won, but that wasn't the end of the battle.

Public Domain

The Tape family fought for their daughter, Mamie, to be enrolled at an all-white school in San Francisco.

In 2024, the idea of racially segregated schools sounds ridiculous, but it was the standard practice for most of American history. White Americans often refused to accept their children being educated alongside children of other races and ethnicities, and lawsuits over the matter ultimately rose all the way to the Supreme Court, culminating in the famous Brown vs. Board of Educationruling.

That landmark 1954 case marked the end of legal school segregation, as the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregating students by race was unconstitutional, a violation of the 14th amendment.

But another segregation case reached the California Supreme Court 70 years prior, and it revolved around an 8-year-old Chinese American student named Mamie Tape.

According to History.com, Mamie's parents, Joseph and Mary Tape, had each come to the U.S. as children and had fully integrated into American life and culture. They took English names, wore Westernized clothing and lived by standard American customs. They were married in a Christian ceremony and named their three children Mamie, Emily and Frank. Joseph operated a delivery service and was a successful, well-respected businessman among both Chinese and white communities in San Francisco.

However, despite their extreme assimilation, when they tried to enroll their 8-year-old daughter in the all-white Spring Valley Primary School in 1884, Principal Jennie Hurley flat out refused to admit her.

Unsurprisingly, the school-board had a policy against admitting Chinese children. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which placed a 10-year ban on Chinese workers immigrating to the U.S., had just been passed in 1882 and anti-Chinese prejudice was commonplace. But that did not deter the Tapes from their mission to get the best education for their child.

California had passed a law in 1880 that entitled all children in the state to partake in public education. However, school boards ignored the ruling and social custom kept the schools segregated. Chinese children attended the mission-run schools in Chinatown, while white children attended their local neighborhood schools.

The Tapes wanted Mamie to attend her neighborhood school. So they fought the administration's refusal to admit their daughter by filing a lawsuit on her behalf against Hurley and the San Francisco Board of Education. The Tapes' lawyer, William Gibson, argued that not only did Hurley barring Mamie from the school violate California's existing law, but it also violated the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution—the basic argument that would eventually ban segregation nationwide in the Brown v. Board verdict.

Joseph and Mary Tate and their three children

The Tape Family

Public Domain

Tape vs. Hurley never went to the highest federal court, however, because both the Superior Court and the California Supreme Court agreed with Gibson's interpretation of the Constitution. On January 9, 1885, Superior Court Judge McGuire wrote in the court's decision, “To deny a child, born of Chinese parents in this State, entrance to the public schools would be a violation of the law of the State and the Constitution of the United States.”

Despite their success in court, that unfortunately wasn't the end of the Tapes' struggles to get Mamie into the Spring Valley school. The court's ruling did not address the "separate but equal" doctrine, which was not yet legally binding (that would come with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896) but was the prevailing justification for segregation. The "separate but equal" idea held that segregation was okay as long as it affected all races equally. For instance, white people and non-white people could have separate drinking fountains, as long as everyone had access to a drinking fountain.

What that meant in the Tapes' case was that the San Francisco school board quickly and successfully pushed to pass a new state law authorizing the creation of separate public schools for “children of Chinese and Mongolian descent.” The new Chinese school wasn't ready yet, so the Tape still tried to enroll Mamie into the white school, but Hurley still denied her, citing there being too many students already and claiming that Mamie didn't have the required vaccinations.

Having already exhausted legal avenues, Mary Tape published a scathing letter in the Daily Alta California newspaper.

“Dear sirs,” she wrote. “Will you please to tell me! Is it a disgrace to be born a Chinese? Didn’t God make us all!!!” She railed against her daughter's treatment, saying she was more American than many people reading it. No matter how Chinese people live and dress, they are hated simply for being Chinese, she pointed out. "There is not any right or justice for them," she wrote.”

Indeed, Mamie and the Tapes didn't see justice in their case, despite winning their legal case in court. But Tape vs. Hurley has gone down in history as a landmark case in the fight for ending segregation, one stepping stone toward true equality under the law.

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History (Education)

The truth about America's first female tycoon who was so frugal she set a world record

Hetty Green supposedly never even spent money on new underpants.

Hollinger and Rocky|Wikicommons

America's first female tycoon so frugal she's in record book

There is nothing wrong with pinching a few pennies here and there. Most people on a budget or fixed income become really good at learning where they can save money but frugality isn't something you consider when thinking of millionaires.

Yacht trips in the Mediterranean, swanky dinners on plates that cost more than people's rent payments and extravagant shopping sprees are all things that come to mind when thinking of the uber-rich. Very seldomly would anyone equate frugality to extreme wealth, but that's likely because they didn't know about Hetty Green.

Henrietta ("Hetty") Howland Robinson was born in 1834 to a wealthy Quaker family in New Bedford, Massachusetts where she was raised mostly by her grandparents. Her grandfather and father amassed their wealth through whaling, and according to the Forgotten Newsmakers, she was an expert on stocks and bonds by age 15.

Green's expertise didn't come by through her genuine interest at first. Due to her grandfather's poor eyesight, he had the young girl read the financial news to him daily. Recently the heiress has come to modern public consciousness after her story was shared on different social media platforms highlighting her extreme money saving techniques.

The Quaker woman never knew poverty as she was born into millionaire status in the 1800s, but you wouldn't know that from her spending habits. In the social media post it mentions that she never purchased a new pair of underwear after learning to mend them at the age of 16. Until her death, Green was wearing the same pairs underwear she had worn since her teen years.

In another truly mystifying supposed factoid the wealthy woman shopped around for the best price to have her son's broken leg set. Her delay in medical treatment for her son resulted in him having to get his leg amputated. Though, this part of the story has been disputed by Roberta Sawyer who spent her childhood on the Green's estate tells South Coast Today, "Hetty's own daughter, Sylvia Wilkes, told a completely different story. The truth is that Hetty Green went around with her son for three days trying to find a doctor who felt he could save Ned's leg instead of amputating it."

Hetty Green Blazing Trailswww.nps.gov

According to Wilkes much of the information on Green seems to be sourced from the book "The Day They Shook the Plum Tree," which she calls "mistruths" in 2011. But the bulk of the claims about her frugal nature seem to be true according to books, multiple articles, and a 1905 character study written about the woman. Green learned to rely on left overs while in boarding school, wore the same black dress for years and dressed her children in secondhand clothes.

The woman's spending habits are what landed her in the Guinness Book for being the "world's greatest miser." Looking outside of her tight fisted nature, she was actually a powerhouse of an individual. She not only had her own bank account before women were legally allowed to open their own accounts, she was respected in the financial world by giants on Wall Street.

Green was a woman in a man's world who not only inherited wealth but amassed her own wealth through her strict budgeting and her ability to navigate stocks. Maybe should be remembered as a financial pioneer ahead of her time instead of her ability to hold on to a dollar. "Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon" is attempting to do just that, highlighting the woman's business sense not just her eccentric nature.

File:Hetty Green and Terrier.jpg - Wikimedia Commonscommons.wikimedia.org

Green was so savvy with her investments that the millionaire had to bail out investors on Wall Street. She foresaw the "Knickerbocker crisis" of 1907 and when John Pierpont Morgan (yeah, that J.P. Morgan) called the greatest minds in finance to help him figure out how to save the economy, Green was the only woman at the table.

She bailed out The New York Central Railroad with a loan according to Yahoo Finance, which cited quotes from the 1916 Literary Digest. Green explains in one of the quotes that she knew the chaos was coming and did her part to help others without taking advantage of the situation. So much for the stingy miser label.

“When the crash came I had money, and I was one of the very few who really had it. The others had their ‘securities’ and their ‘values.’ I had the cash and they had to come to me,” she said.

Yahoo Finance highlights that she loaned the New York City government $1.1 million at the height of the 1907 panic and just months before she loaned them $4.5 million.

“Those to whom I loaned money got it at 6%. I might just as easily have secured 40%,” she explained. “Never in my life—no matter what has been said against me—have I practiced usury, and no one knows it better than the wealthy men who have had business dealings with me.”

There you have it, Hetty Green, The World's Greatest Miser, investment tycoon, business woman and multimillionaire who turns out to not be as stingy as people made her out to be.

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