Reading about the current RTD strike made me remember my eighth-grade history teacher talking about the Denver Tramway strike of 1920, how he’d just stepped off a train and walked uptown to find himself caught up in a brick-throwing mob that stormed The Denver Post.
It was one of the most violent intervals in Denver’s history. Back then, the private Denver Tramway Corp., with its extensive streetcar network, controlled almost all mass transit in the city. There wasn’t much other urban transit. Few people owned automobiles or horses, and many streets were unpaved, and thus not amenable to bicycling.
The company was controlled by powerful Colorado families, like Boettcher and Evans. Employees belonged to Local 746 of the Amalgamated Association of Street and Railway Employees.
Tensions had been building for several years. Workers wanted a raise to 75 cents an hour, since prices had gone up. Tramway wanted to raise fares from 5 to 6 or 7 cents, but its 20-year franchise, granted by the city in 1906, set the fare at a nickel, and the commuting public naturally opposed an increase.
To quote from the best source I could find (“Robert Speer’s Denver: 1904-1920” by Phil Goodstein), “By late July, an explosion was imminent. Tramway wanted to get rid of the union. The streetcar operator scorned all public efforts at accommodation. In the face of this, members of Local 746 knew they had to fight back. After assembling around 2 a.m. on Sunday, August 1, they voted at 5 a.m., 887-11 to strike against Tramway as of 5:30 that morning. Nine hundred and six workers walked out.”
The company responded by hiring strikebreakers – initially, a corps of 600 scabs led by a professional union-buster, John “Black Jack” Jerome of San Francisco.
Denver turned violent that week. The strike-breakers tried to operate the streetcars, and labor supporters responded by heaving bricks at the streetcars. The scabs sometimes responded with gunfire. Labor crowds fought back by tipping and burning streetcars.
The Denver Post, like the Rocky Mountain News and even the generally pro-labor Denver Express, condemned the walkout and urged the strikers to go back to work. On Aug. 5, after the burning of some streetcars in front of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception near the state Capitol, someone in the crowd shouted, “Let’s get The Post.”
In Bill Hosokawa’s fine history of this newspaper, “Thunder in the Rockies,” he tells what happened next. “[A] crowd estimated at a thousand persons, many of them curious spectators, started toward downtown Denver” and arrived at 1544 Champa St., where “Someone threw a rock through the glass of the locked front door. … More rocks were thrown … members of the mob poured into the building. They overturned desks in the business office on the first floor, smashed typewriters, dumped out the contents of file cabinets … the press equipment [was] attacked with rocks, pipes, and lumber. … A roll of newsprint was trundled into the street and unwound down Champa. The street was so jammed with spectators that police and firemen were helpless.”
No one was killed there, though, and The Post published on schedule the next day with headlines like “MOBS SWEEP DENVER” and “Authorities are helpless in orgy of terror.”
When not operating streetcars, strikebreakers stayed in Tramway’s carhouses, and fired their guns at crowds. Two teenagers were thus killed by scab bullets on Aug. 5 at a carhouse on South Broadway. The next night, a volley from the carhouse at 35th and Franklin killed five and wounded 13 – none of the victims were strikers or brick-throwers. Goodstein writes that Denver police “made no effort to arrest any of Jerome’s toughs. The district attorney’s office similarly ignored the shootings. No one ever stood trial for them.”
Federal troops were summoned on Aug. 7. They disarmed the scabs while protecting the streetcars – and the strike and union were broken. As Goodstein notes, “The walkout had cost it [Tramway] $500,000 – more than enough to have paid for the workers’ wage hike.”
I can’t remember whether Mr. Howard, my eighth-grade history teacher, was on the side of labor or management when he told us about the 1920 strike. The main lesson I remember is to avoid getting caught up in a mob. And now, to feel relieved that this transit strike might be settled without warfare on the streets.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com. ) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
