Armed strikers at the Ludlow tent colony during the Colorado Coalfield War.
Creator: Mace, Stuart, Date: 1913-1914
Tragedy sparked national outrage
By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com
Striking miners and their families lived in a tent colony to protest low pay and dangerous conditions at the John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. The Colorado National Guard attacked the camp with machine guns and set it on fire, killing 21 people, including 11 children, who suffocated in an underground pit.
The tragedy sparked national outrage and a subsequent Congressional investigation, which led to landmark progressive reforms, including the enforcement of the eight-hour workday and improved child labor laws. Today, the site is a National Historic Landmark managed by the United Mine Workers of America.On 20 April 1914, after months of sporadic violence and the withdrawal of a larger contingent of troops a few days before, Colorado National Guardsmen and local militia fired on strikers participating in the United Mine Workers of America strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron company. Roughly 20 occupants of the colony, including at least 12 women and children, were killed — mostly by smoke inhalation in the ensuing conflagration. Also among the dead was Greek labor-organizer Louis Tikas.
A single Guardsman is known to have been killed by gunfire from the strikers. The violence at Ludlow sparked the most intense period of violence of the Colorado Coalfield War, which lasted until President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops into Colorado to end the fighting on 29 April.
Militiamen near the Colorado & Southern railway station in Ludlow, Colorado in 1913 during the early stages of the Colorado Coalfield War.
Ludlow Massacre Words and Music by Woody Guthrie
It was early springtime when the strike was on, They drove us miners out of doors, Out from the houses that the Company owned, We moved into tents up at old Ludlow.
I was worried bad about my children, Soldiers guarding the railroad bridge, Every once in a while a bullet would fly, Kick up gravel under my feet.
We were so afraid you would kill our children, We dug us a cave that was seven foot deep, Carried our young ones and pregnant women Down inside the cave to sleep.
That very night your soldiers waited, Until all us miners were asleep, You snuck around our little tent town, Soaked our tents with your kerosene.
You struck a match and in the blaze that started, You pulled the triggers of your gatling guns, I made a run for the children but the fire wall stopped me. Thirteen children died from your guns.
I carried my blanket to a wire fence corner, Watched the fire till the blaze died down, I helped some people drag their belongings, While your bullets killed us all around.
I never will forget the look on the faces Of the men and women that awful day, When we stood around to preach their funerals, And lay the corpses of the dead away.
We told the Colorado Governor to call the President, Tell him to call off his National Guard, But the National Guard belonged to the Governor, So he didn't try so very hard.
Our women from Trinidad they hauled some potatoes, Up to Walsenburg in a little cart, They sold their potatoes and brought some guns back, And they put a gun in every hand.
The state soldiers jumped us in a wire fence corners, They did not know we had these guns, And the Red-neck Miners mowed down these troopers, You should have seen those poor boys run.
We took some cement and walled that cave up, Where you killed these thirteen children inside, I said, "God bless the Mine Workers' Union," And then I hung my head and cried.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDrUduIU-Z8
Creator: Mace, Stuart, Date: 1913-1914
Howard Zinn was a young shipyard worker in Brooklyn when he heard a Woody Guthrie song about the Ludlow Massacre.
The lyrics haunted him.
“That led me to look in the library about this event which nobody had ever mentioned in any of my history courses (and) no textbook had ever mentioned,” the iconic historian once said.
Zinn wasn’t the first to write about southern Colorado’s 1913-14 coal strike as an historical event.
John Reed, the journalist and communist who was the subject of the movie “Reds,” sent gritty dispatches from the area where the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron and other companies sank shafts deep into the hillsides.
Upton Sinclair wrote about immigrants there on their knees hacking at coal seams.
And George McGovern published a history of the strike while running for president.
Still, Zinn’s many writings about Ludlow brought broader awareness. In several essays since the 1970s, he made it known how deep the corruption of wealth and power ran.
“The mining camps were feudal kingdoms run by the coal corporations, which made the laws; curfews were imposed, suspicious strangers were not allowed to visit the homes, the company store must be patronized, the company doctor used. The laws were enforced by company-appointed marshals. The teachers and preachers were picked by the company. By 1914, Colorado Fuel and Iron owned twenty-seven mining camps, and all the land, the houses, the saloons, the schools, the churches, the stores,” he wrote.
On April 20 of that year, the industry-controlled Colorado National Guard engaged striking miners in a gun battle and set their tents on fire.
“It was on the following day, April 21, that a telephone linesman going through the ruins, lifted a twisted iron cot that covered one of the pits dug beneath the tents for shelter. There he found the mangled, charred bodies of two women and eleven children, heaped together in what had been a desperate struggle to escape,” Zinn wrote, unforgettably.
At least 75 people died, including strikers, strike breakers, guardsmen and bystanders.
Thomas Andrews grew up in Boulder. He breezed past high school and college without having heard about the slaughter. It wasn’t until grad school that he learned the nation’s bloodiest strike went down in his state.
“It was taboo even to talk about. It was a suppressed memory,” says Andrews, now a historian at CU and author of “Killing For Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War.”
“Zinn felt that doing wart- and-all histories made us stronger,” adds Dean Saitta, a DU anthropologist who excavated the site and says local families still have hard feelings about what happened.
Zinn put Ludlow on the map. Not just as a place, in all its gruesome details, but as a concept. He popularized the struggle so that the name of the railroad town has become synonymous with corruption — “the firm connection between entrenched wealth and political power, manifested in the decisions of government, and in the machinery of law and justice.”
Ludlow’s uncomfortable history now is taught widely in college courses and K-12 classes. Textbooks cover it. Students take field trips to the shadowed ground that’s finally a national historic landmark.
Zinn died last week at age 87.
He’d hoped to be remembered “for getting more people to realize that the power which rests so far in the hands of people with wealth and guns . . . ultimately rests in people themselves.”
And, he added, “that they can use it.”
Members of the 11th U.S. Cavalry, that include Homer Lockett, stand near the railroad depot in Ludlow, Las Animas County, Colorado. The 11th Cavalry was called in at the request of Colorado Governor Ammons, to restore order in the coal fields after the Ludlow Massacre at the time of the United Mine Worker's strike against Colorado Fuel & Iron.
Gov. Bill Ritter, local dignitaries, miners, union representatives and others will gather today at Ludlow to dedicate the site.
Now a ghost town 13 miles north of Trinidad, Ludlow was the site of 14 months of strikes in 1913-14 by some 1,200 coal miners who were fed up with low wages, unsafe conditions and company towns that kept the miners deeply in debt. More than 100 people died in the strikes.
One particularly tragic confrontation occurred on April 20, 1914, when 20 people, including 11 children and two mothers, died when the Colorado National Guard stormed a tent encampment.
The United Mine Workers Association bought that site in 1917, then installed a granite monument to the strikers and the massacre victims.
The site remained contentious between unionists and others, some of whom either doubted the stories of the massacre or believed the miners got what they deserved.
On May 7, 2003, vandals broke off and stole the heads of the male and female statues, as well as the female’s left arm. The mine workers’ association was incensed, as were other national labor organizations. An intensive investigation by Las Animas County Sheriff James Casias, as well as the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, led nowhere.
The broken statues were removed from the monument and shipped to California. There, a specialist used similar granite from Vermont to repair the statues.
On May 5, 2005, they were replaced at a cost of more than $80,000. The money came mostly in small donations from individuals and union locals. Black Hawk, which has a strong mining tradition, donated $10,000, said the association’s Region 4 director, Bob Butero.
As word of the vandalism spread nationally, a group of labor historians — including James Green of Yale University; Julie Greene, formerly of CU-Boulder and now at the University of Maryland; and Betsy Jameson of the University of Calgary — took up the cause of honoring labor strife as part of our national heritage.
Greene wrote in The Denver Post that Ludlow was an important site because it represents “a crusade that cost many workers their lives, and reminds us of the central role immigrants played in building industrial America and of the shocking violence that accompanied that process.”
On Jan. 16, just before President George W. Bush left office, the Department of the Interior rushed through the designation of Ludlow as a National Historic Landmark.
Wives of the Ludlow coal strikers prepare food for their striking husbands, as the men stand behind them in a kitchen in Ludlow, Colorado in Las Animas County. Loaves of bread, milk, and jam are on the edge of the table. 1913-1914
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