The Great Coalfield War by George S. McGovern; Leonard F. GuttridgeReview by: William GraebnerThe American Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Feb., 1973), p. 180Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1854072 .

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180 Reviews of Books

farmer has fretted over the possibility of crimi- nal conviction. It is true, as Daniel notes, that judicial decrees against peonage have hardly impeded peonage farming. But Daniel's own evidence suggests that the perpetual threat of criminal conviction has induced many peonage farmers to deny-even to themselves-that they have held bondsmen. This sharply distin- guishes them from their antebellum predeces- sors who openly and often proudly acknowl- edged the master-slave relationship.

The book falls short on another count. Dan- iel concentrates upon publicized events. Chap- ters focus upon newsworthy incidents in the history of peonage like the Alonzo Bailey case and the Jasper tragedy. Yet the newsworthy is necessarily the exceptional. The plight of most black peons provoked neither litigation nor publicity. Unheralded conditions typified life upon the peonage farm and much more needs to be known about such conditions.

These qualifications aside, The Shadow of Slavery merits very serious consideration. Its message is important for historians and indis- pensable for the wider reading public.

LAWRENCE J. FRIEDMAN

Bowling Green University

GEORGE S. MCGOVERN and LEONARD F. GUTTRIDGE.

The Great Coalfield War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1972. Pp. xii, 383. $8.95.

The Great Coalfield War began in September 1913 as a routine walkout of Colorado miners designed to achieve recognition of the United Mine Workers of America. Sporadic violence and brutality on both sides culminated seven months later in the pitched battle between stri- kers and state militia labeled (with some justi- fication) the Ludlow Massacre by the union publicity director. A virtuoso performance by federal troops brought order to the coal fields but no reprieve for the strikers. Defeated in every way they gave up the struggle in Decem- ber 1914 without having obtained a single con- cession from the operators.

This is history in the narrative and bio- graphical vein, and on both accounts it suc- ceeds admirably. Particularly impressive are the portraits of figures identified with the opera- tors: John D. Rockefeller, Jr., absentee director

of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, a philanthropist whose philanthropy ignored the workers in his own mines and who, pursuing a policy of noninvolvement, became the national focus of the drama; Elias Ammons, Colorado's irresolute governor, incapable of leadership in a crisis; and Brigadier General John Chase of the state National Guard, who fell off his horse while trying to stop a parade of women seeking freedom for the imprisoned Mother Jones. Chase met laughter with the command, "Ride down the women!"

What emerges clearly from this work is the extraordinary power of corporate America in a rural-industrial setting. Among the most reac- tionary of businessmen, the Colorado coal op- erators dominated municipal, county, and-to some extent-state politics. Although the au- thors belatedly claim difficulty in separating the heroes from the villains, the operators qual- ify nicely as the latter. Not only did these "an- archists for profit" distort and mutilate the law enforcement and judicial systems, but their total rejection of negotiations, even when the union had waived the key demand for recogni- tion, appears indefensible. The authors hy- pothesize that the antidemocratic climate was in part a product of frontier isolation, Freder- ick Jackson Turner notwithstanding. Southern Colorado, at any rate, was a far cry from Her- bert Gutman's Paterson, New Jersey.

There is, unfortunately, no systematic at- tempt to explain why the coal operators acted as they did or why they differed from other businessmen, an omission perhaps related to the absence of an adequate survey of competi- tive conditions in the Western coal industry. And the strikers, although adequately treated, remain somewhat mysterious. On the whole, however, this is a remarkably good book, well written and well researched, suffering little from its origin as McGovern's 1953 doctoral thesis. The only serious error was made by the publisher, for there are no footnotes.

WILLIAM GRAEBNER

State University of New York, College at Fredonia

ROBERT G. MCCLOSKEY. The Modern Supreme Court. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1972. Pp. x, 376. $12.95.

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