{"id":2163,"date":"2012-10-23T09:20:27","date_gmt":"2012-10-23T15:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=2163"},"modified":"2014-07-04T09:36:28","modified_gmt":"2014-07-04T15:36:28","slug":"george-mcgovern-and-colorados-tent-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=2163","title":{"rendered":"George McGovern and Colorado’s “Tent City” on the Prairie"},"content":{"rendered":"

The many obituaries of the American politician\u00a0George McGovern<\/a>\u00a0published in the aftermath of his death last Sunday mention that he earned a PhD in History from Northwestern University. But other than that they offer precious few details about George McGovern’s life as a historian and scholar.\u00a0 My colleague Jonathan Rees at Colorado State University-Pueblo fills the gap with an appreciation of McGovern\u2019s historical work (\u201cGeorge McGovern: Historian<\/a>\u201d) posted yesterday to the Historical Society Blog.\u00a0 McGovern\u2019s 1972 book The Great Coalfield War<\/em><\/a> (co-authored with Leonard Guttridge and published in the year of McGovern’s candidacy for president of the United States) is a seminal text for understanding the 1913-14 southern Colorado coal miner\u2019s strike. This 15 month-long strike culminated in perhaps the most dramatic example of open class warfare in American history, the infamous Ludlow Massacre<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Ludlow Tent Colony, View from Railroad Tower Looking East<\/p><\/div>\n

Between 1997-2007 I researched the Colorado coalfield strike as Co-Director (with my fellow anthropologists Phil Duke and Randy McGuire) of\u00a0The Colorado Coal Field War Project<\/a>. This project was generously supported by grants from the\u00a0Colorado State Historical Fund<\/a>. \u00a0It included the first-ever archaeological investigation of the most important of the miner’s strike camps, the Ludlow Tent Colony<\/a> or, as it’s described by some locals in southeastern Colorado, the Ludlow \u201cTent City.\u201d Ludlow was the largest of a dozen such strikers’ camps. \u00a0It was strategically located on windswept prairie at the mouth of a canyon that led up to the coal mines. Ludlow consisted of about 200 tents and housed around 1200 people.\u00a0 Our archaeological work produced several key insights about striker life at the colony: how the occupants organized their built environment, how they provisioned themselves, and how they survived one of the worst winters in Colorado history.<\/p>\n

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Ludlow Tent Colony, Street Level View<\/p><\/div>\n

Several of our research findings are relevant to the concerns of this blog. In keeping with the commitments of an \u201cIntercultural City\u201d there was no apparent ethnic segregation of families within the colony (24 different languages\u2014mostly eastern and southern European\u2014were spoken in the southern Colorado coal camps and mine shafts). Based on the stratigraphic positioning of artifacts within cellars dug beneath the tents it appears that colony residents attempted to forge solidarity through the everyday use of certain shared items of material culture. For example, use of plainware ceramics seems to have been preferred over finely decorated Victorian teawares, as the latter would have signaled different social statuses and\/or social-climbing ambitions. \u00a0In other words, strikers sought in their daily practices to emphasize a shared working<\/em>\u00a0class<\/em> identity. The tents were arranged\u00a0 to maximize security and impede surveillance of the interior by passers-by, especially coal company officials and professional strikebreakers.\u00a0 A concerted effort was made to present a \u201ccivilized\u201d face to the outside world as a way to combat early 20th century racist stereotypes about immigrants as unclean, ignorant, and naturally violent. \u00a0The tent city as portrayed in historical documents and photographs evince concerns for health, cleanliness, family, community, and civic order.\u00a0 Our archaeological excavations also suggest that contemporary state militia reports may have purposely over-estimated the amount of weapons and ammo–the number of WMDs<\/a>, if you will–possessed by the strikers as a way to exaggerate the threat that they posed to public safety and, by extension, justify the militia’s assault on the colony on April 20, 1914. \u00a0In short, our archaeological work supplements, enriches, and even corrects the established historical record of the strike.<\/p>\n

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Family at Ludlow<\/p><\/div>\n

Like Jonathan, I had a personal encounter with George McGovern at the April 2004 fundraiser for the Bessemer Historical Society<\/a>. After the event Phil Duke and I ferried the Senator back to his hotel along with our significant others. The five of us had drinks in the lobby lounge.\u00a0 We talked a bit about Ludlow. But mostly we talked about the 1972 presidential campaign. As Jonathan notes, it was hard to stay away from that topic and, like Jonathan, we were treated to some of the Senator\u2019s favorite reflections about his opponent (\u201cI would rather be me right now than Richard Nixon<\/em>“; and “Nixon was incredibly intelligent, but completely amoral<\/em>\u201d). The Senator was accommodating and gracious throughout the evening.<\/p>\n

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George McGovern at Ludlow Memorial Service, June 29, 2008 (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

In 2008 I again met up with Senator McGovern when he visited the Ludlow Tent Colony site to speak at the United Mine Workers of America<\/a> (UMWA) annual June memorial service<\/a>\u00a0remembering victims of the Ludlow Massacre. That day I had the honor of batting lead-off for a line-up of speakers that included Senator McGovern and the fiery United Mine Workers of America president Cecil Roberts<\/a>. \u00a0The June memorial service is never for the faint of heart, and it was especially energized with McGovern and Roberts in the house. \u00a0Cecil can wave the union flag and excite a crowd like no one else. \u00a0But McGovern was no slouch. \u00a0I recall the Senator giving us a taste of what Jonathan, in his Historical Society Blog post, describes as the \u201cbarely concealed anger and pro-union language\u201d of McGovern\u2019s original dissertation about the southern Colorado coalfield troubles. \u00a0The dissertation served as the basis for The Great Coalfield War<\/em>, but was sanitized in 1972 for a polite election year readership.<\/p>\n

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Me and the UMWA’s Bob Butero at the Ludlow Memorial Service, June 28, 2009<\/p><\/div>\n

Senator McGovern\u2019s historical scholarship is significant because it paved the way for more recent Ludlow histories (e.g., the books by Scott Martelle<\/a> and Thomas Andrews<\/a>) and historical archaeologies (e.g., my book<\/a> and a collection of essays<\/a>\u00a0edited by Karin Larkin and Randy McGuire).\u00a0 The 2009 listing of the Ludlow Tent Colony as a\u00a0National Historic Landmark<\/a> testifies to the quality of this accumulated scholarship and McGovern\u2019s original pathbreaking text. Many plays, films, poems, and novels about the Colorado Coal Field Strike have been similarly inspired by McGovern’s scholarship. \u00a0This creative work is just as important as traditional scholarship for communicating the lessons of history, sensitizing us to human difference, expanding the scope of who counts<\/em> as part of “us”, and furthering moral progress.<\/p>\n

While driving home yesterday I heard a National Public Radio piece<\/a> about Senator McGovern’s death that included a clip in which he said that \u201cI’ll go to my grave believing America would be better off had I been elected<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 I suspect that\u2019s true, but we\u2019ll never really know for sure. Certainly, we can be much more confident that the practices of social history<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0public history<\/a> are far better off\u2014more inclusive, more democratic, more humane\u2014because of the work of George McGovern: politician, historian, scholar, gentleman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The many obituaries of the American politician\u00a0George McGovern\u00a0published in the aftermath of his death last Sunday mention that he earned a PhD in History from Northwestern University. But other than that they offer precious few details about George McGovern’s life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[22,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archaeology","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-yT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2163"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3336,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions\/3336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}