On Killing for Coal

This book doesn’t really know what it wants to be, and that’s a shame. Starting the introduction, I thought that it would be a book about the Ludlow Massacre and debates about it. Then Andrews says, as interested in it as he is, he wants to look at the larger context. Great, I’m interested in that, but he winds again towards a discussion of environmental history, so I thought, “neat, an environmental history of the Colorado coalfields, that sounds cool.” Turns out that this book wasn’t that either.

This book is different things at different times. One chapter, Andrews is following a science-environmental perspective, the next a social perspective, after that a perspective that highlights race and immigration, and of course the role of labor history cannot be understated. At the end of the day, this book is about the context that led up to the 1913-14 coal war between the United Mining Workers and the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. While the events of the Ludlow Massacre and the Ten Days’ War are discussed in the introduction, the text is effectively about the decades before. That being said, the different directions in which Andrews takes the book makes it into something disjointed and unable to maintain itself as a cohesive whole.

I feel that this book had a great deal of potential, but missed the mark by a long shot. I can’t, in all honesty, recommend this. I’m sure there are better texts elsewhere.