Scott Martelle

journalist/author

"We must welcome this carefully-researched study of one of the most dramatic, violent, and important episodes in the history of labor struggles in this country."
- Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

"Blood Passion is the definitive account of a major landmark in the American struggle for social justice. And the way Scott Martelle tells the story is splendid proof that history can both be written as vividly as a novel and also be documented with scrupulous care."

- Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

A few years back I was reading a now-forgotten American history book and stumbled across a footnote reference to 100 men, women and children killed in a months-long war between striking coal miners and the Colorado National Guard. My first thought: Why didn’t I know about that? I knew about the April 1914 Ludlow Massacre, when two mothers and 11 children died after marauding Guardsmen torched a strikers' tent colony. But the broader war came as a revelation. And it was telling that such a protracted showdown between capital and labor had been reduced to a literal footnote. History is written by the victors, and labor has not been victorious very often.

Curiosity drove me deeper into the history, with loose plans to write a magazine article on the Colorado Coal Field War Project, an archaeological exploration of the Ludlow colony and the nearby Berwind mining camp. Led by Dean Saitta of the University of Denver, Philip Duke of Fort Lewis College in Durango, and Randall McGuire of the State University of New York at Binghamton, the 1999-2000 project was the first to treat the site as a place of archaeological inquiry, trying to determine what life was like for the miners both before and during the strike. But it quickly became apparent to me that there was more material here than I could shoe-horn into a magazine piece. Blood Passion is the result.

Although Blood Passion explores the violent trajectory of a labor strike, it is not a work of labor history. Rather, it is a journalist's look back at a story of oppression and rebellion, of ordinary people revolting under a corrupt local political system, and of immigrants who discovered that if they wanted a piece of the American Dream they had better be ready to fight for it. A union helped them in that battle, and is an integral part of that history, but this book is about the combatants and the battles themselves.

From this country's earliest days, we have wrestled with the conflicting concepts of respecting our government and rebelling against it. Blood Passion is an attempt to knock some of the dust off this long-forgotten yet hugely emblematic moment in American history.

-- Scott Martelle