The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West, by Mark A. Lause (2017) London and Brooklyn: Verso, 283 pages. ISBN: 978-1-78663-196-1

On 27 June 1967, in the midst of the counter revolution against the Civil Rights Struggle in America, H. Rap Brown said: “Violence is as American as cherry pie”. America conducted a revolution to free itself from rule across the Atlantic at the end of the Eighteenth Century. Its Declaration of Independence stated that: “All men are created equal”, seemingly oblivious to its use of persons seized from Africa as slaves. The American Civil War resulted in the killing of 750,000 Americans. During the Nineteenth Century, there was what Mark Lause describes as the “ethnic cleansing” of indigenous peoples (p. x). To this, we can add the lynchings of African Americans after the ending of slavery, the Civil Rights Struggle and the killings associated with the more recent Black Lives Matter, the violence of labour struggles, and the never-ending killings, now mass killings including school children, linked to America’s gun culture. Hollywood has glorified cowboys and the West as simple morality stories between “good” and “evil”, in abstracting from what, in fact, happened during this era of bloodshed and murder. The point of Mark A. Lause’s The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West is to put an end to such abstractions and investigate the struggles for power and domination which occurred on the prairie. He demonstrates that violence was used by the rich and powerful to enhance their position and tame dissent against those who resisted their domination. Private armies were employed against small farmers and ranchers as well as cowboys who utilised strikes to seek improvements in their economic position. The title of the book suggests a focus on strikes by cowboys. While Lause clearly explains the background to and events associated with a wave of strikes which occurred in the years 1883 to 1886, his work is really an account of radical politics, or the ferment of ideas, movements and political parties, in short what he refers to as Third Parties during the decades after the Civil War. His book reflects extensive research on events on the prairies and in the meeting places of those pursuing a radical agenda and those hell-bent on ensuring that this did not occur, and those “charged” with the responsibility of killing off those who got in the way of “progress.” One of the major points made by Lause is that these events in the West have been generally ignored by American historians. He rejects the supposition that radical ideas emerged in the East with baggage brought to America by immigrants in the latter decades of the Nineteenth Century. He maintains that they were “homegrown,” a response to the repression experienced by those who found themselves dominated by ruling elites from the East or in England. Cowboys were invariably successful in their strike endeavours in either resisting cuts to or obtaining increases in their pay. The bosses were unable to find an alternative workforce to perform the arduous tasks associated with four of fifth month, sixteen hour a day cattle runs. But those cowboys who were involved with strikes were not offered jobs after the run, were blacklisted and, if they sought to establish their own cattle herds, were accused of being ‘rustlers’ and became targets for hired killers. Lause devotes a number of chapters to how violence was employed against political opponents or those who challenged the powerful. He examines how a bombing was used by Republicans to frame an opponent prior to an election in Coffeyville, Kansas. He also documents how a judge in Woodsdale had his bodyguard kill a political opponent on the doorsteps …