1927–1928 Colorado Coal Strike
The 1927–1928 Colorado Coal Strike was a spreading strike, spearheaded by the Industrial Workers of the World. The exact number of workers involved is unclear due to the nature of the strike. However, it shutdown nearly all of Colorado's coal mines. Strike The strike has its immediate beginnings in 1927 when the IWW called for a three-day nationwide walkout to protest the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. While the United Mine Workers predicted the IWW's walkout would fail in Colorado, Sheriff Harry Capps of Huerfano County commented that "fully two-thirds of the miners in the [Walsenburg] district [are] members of the I.W.W." When the walkout occurred on August 8, 1927, out of a total 1,167 miners, 1,132 stayed off the job, and only 35 went to work. Under threat of injunction, the IWW leaders felt they'd demonstrated success, and they persuaded the miners to return to work one day early. Conlin wrote, "The tactical decision of the Wobblies was to give ground on this occasion to intensify organizing efforts for a statewide strike." Organizing proceeded apace. In one mine, the Supervisor went to work one morning and discovered "Wobbly stickers pasted on every timber and cross beam in the place." IWW leader Kristin Svanum met in a mass meeting with 187 delegates from 43 of the state's 125 mines to work out the miners' demands. Industrial Solidarity declared, "These mass meetings [are] to be the legislative bodies of the strikers." The rank and file miners were given full veto power over every aspect of the pending strike. The miners elected a General Strike Committee, which had the power to appoint all other committees, with only miners eligible for committee membership. While Wobbly organizers conducted the meetings, they had no vote in the miners' decisions. The Wobblies were careful that the strike demands reflected only the immediate needs of the workers, rather than long range goals of the IWW. The perceptions expressed in the IWW Preamble coincided with the Colorado miners' personal experiences with capitalism, and also with their feelings about the United Mine Workers union which since 1914 had seemed to ignore their needs. All national groupings were represented on the General Strike Committee—"Mexican, Slav, Spanish, Greek, Anglo, Italian, and Negro." There were so many different nationalities in the coal towns of Colorado due to corporate recruitment policy. After the coal strike of 1903–04, the companies intentionally recruited replacement miners who would have social, cultural, and language barriers to overcome before they could unite with other miners to form unions. But the IWW, always the champion of the immigrant and the ethnic worker, had readily overcome such challenges as early as the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike. 'Docile' immigrant workers may have been a boon to industry, but invariably, such workers were ruthlessly exploited. In the mines, yesterday's perplexed new arrival often became today's militant unionist. Immigrants aroused by injustice became targets. The Colorado newspapers railed against foreign workers and, alternately, an alleged foreign, or a lower class philosophy. For example,