66 ChaPter 2
members from returning to work and conducting any union organizing or
activity. U.S. troops arrested and imprisoned hundreds of miners and the army
even helped Idaho officials intervene in county and town politics to remove
elected officials who were considered too supportive of workers. Even though
liberals sought “cooperation” between capital and labor to avoid confronta-
tions and radicalism, the ruling class still had the ability to use force to stop
workers from seeking greater economic and political rights. For labor, there
was a bright side to repression. Along with the incredible growth the work-
ing class due to the rapid expansion of industry, political action by workers
and repression by the government motivated more and more people to join
unions and between 1897-1903, the AFL’s membership grew from 400,000 to
3 million. But those big numbers did not deter the government and corpora-
tions from harming labor and attacking workers. From 1903 to 1905,
Colorado’s Governor suspended access to the courts for labor, declared mar-
tial law, and sent in the militia to destroy the biggest union in the state, the
Western Federation of Miners [WFM]. In 1905, in Chicago, Teamsters had
violent battles in the streets against scabs and local police. In Westmoreland
County, Pennsylvania, 261 miners died in 1907 in the Darr Mine Disaster due
to lack of inspections and poor ventilation, which led to an explosion. In
December of that year, in the unregulated and uninspected mines of
Monongah, West Virginia, another 361 miners died in an explosion, the
bloodiest mining tragedy in American history, which forced the government
to create the Bureau of Mines [which did not effectively make mines safer or
give miners better wages or work conditions]. Across the country, union lead-
ers in Los Angeles, in 1910, were arrested for bombing the Los Angeles Times
building, and violence was prevalent in many other industries, such as coal
mining, meatpacking, oil, rubber, and textiles.
The years 1911-1913 were particularly harsh, with major labor battles and
tragedies taking place in New York, Massachusetts, and Michigan. At the
Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a clothing business in Manhattan, well over a hun-
dred girls made about six dollars a week working on the upper floors of a
tenement building. As they were finishing their work one day in March 1911
a fire broke out, trapping them in the workshop. Many jumped to their deaths
out of the windows, while others were stuck in elevators or crushed by girls
trying to get out of the few exits in their work place, some of which were