On this day April 20th, 1914, the National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company guards carry out the Ludlow massacre.
It happened after months of
intermittent violence between the striking miners and the mine
detectives employed by the J.D. Rockefeller owned Colorado Fuel &
Iron Company.
Miners were generally paid according to tonnage of coal produced,
while so-called "dead work", such as shoring up unstable roofs, was
often unpaid. Between 1884 and 1912, mining accidents claimed the lives of more than 1,700 Coloradans
In 1913 alone, 104 men would die in Colorado’s mines, and 6 in the
mine workings on the surface, in accidents that widowed 51 and left 108
children fatherless.
Colliers had little opportunity to air their grievances. Many colliers resided in company towns,
in which all land, real estate, and amenities were owned by the mine
operator, and which were expressly designed to inculcate loyalty and
squelch dissent.
Frustrated by working conditions which they felt were unsafe and unjust,
colliers increasingly turned to unionism. Nationwide, organized mines
boasted 40 percent fewer fatalities than nonunion mines. Colorado miners had repeatedly attempted to unionize since the state's first strike in 1883. The Western Federation of Miners organized primarily hard rock miners in the gold and silver camps during the 1890s. Beginning in 1900, the UMWA began organizing coal miners in the western states,
including southern Colorado. The UMWA decided to focus on the CF&I
because of the company's harsh management tactics under the conservative
and distant Rockefellers and other investorsors. To break or prevent
strikes, the coal companies hired strike breakers,
mainly from Mexico and southern and eastern Europe. CF&I's
management mixed immigrants of different nationalities in the mines, a
practice which discouraged communication that might lead to
organization.
Despite attempts to suppress union activity, secret organizing by the
UMWA continued in the years leading up to 1913. Eventually, the union
presented a list of seven demands on behalf of the miners:
- Recognition of the union as bargaining agent
- An increase in tonnage rates (equivalent to a 10% wage increase)
- Enforcement of the eight-hour work day law
- Payment for "dead work" (laying track, timbering, handling impurities, etc.)
- Weight-checkmen elected by the workers (to keep company weightmen honest)
- The right to use any store, and choose their boarding houses and doctors
- Strict enforcement of Colorado's laws (such as mine safety rules, abolition of scrip), and an end to the company guard system
The major coal companies rejected the demands and in September 1913,
the UMWA called a strike. Those who went on strike were promptly evicted
from their company homes, and they moved to tent villages prepared by
the UMWA. The tents were built on wood platforms and furnished with
cast iron stoves on land leased by the union in preparation for a
strike.
When leasing the sites, the union had strategically selected
locations near the mouths of canyons that led to the coal camps, for the
purpose of monitoring traffic and harassing replacement workers.
Confrontations between striking miners and working miners, referred to as "scabs" by the union, sometimes resulted in deaths. The company hired the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency to protect the new workers and harass the strikers.
Baldwin–Felts had a reputation for aggressive strike breaking.
Agents shone searchlights on the tent villages at night and fired
bullets into the tents at random, occasionally killing and maiming
people. They used an improvised armoured car, mounted with a machine gun the union called the "Death Special"
to patrol the camp's perimeters. The steel-covered car was built in the
CF&I plant in Pueblo, Colorado from the chassis of a large touring sedan. Frequent sniperr
attacks on the tent colonies drove the miners to dig pits beneath the
tents where they and their families could be better protected.
As strike-related violence mounted, Colorado governor Elias M. Ammons
called in the Colorado National Guard on October 28. At first, the
Guard's appearance calmed the situation, but the sympathies of Guard
leaders lay with company management. Guard Adjutant-General John Chase, who had served during the violent Cripple Creek
strike 10 years earlier, imposed a harsh regime. On March 10, 1914, the
body of a replacement worker was found on the railroad tracks near Forbes, Colorado.
The National Guard said that the man had been murdered by the strikers.
In retaliation, Chase ordered the Forbes tent colony destroyed. The
attack was launched while the inhabitants were attending a funeral of
infants who had died a few days earlier. The attack was witnessed by
photographer Lou Dold, whose images of the destruction appear often in accounts of the strike.
The strikers persevered until the spring of 1914. By then, the
state had run out of money to maintain the Guard, and was forced to
recall them. The governor and the mining companies, fearing a breakdown
in order, left two Guard units in southern Colorado and allowed the
coal companies to finance a residual militia consisting largely of
CF&I camp guards in National Guard uniforms.
On the morning of April 20, the day after Easter was celebrated by
the many Greek immigrants at Ludlow, three Guardsmen appeared at the
camp ordering the release of a man they claimed was being held against
his will. This request prompted the camp leader, Louis Tikas,
to meet with a local militia commander at the train station in Ludlow
village, a half mile (0.8 km) from the colony. While this meeting was
progressing, two companies of militia installed a machine gun on a ridge
near the camp and took a position along a rail route about half a mile
south of Ludlow. Anticipating trouble, Tikas ran back to the camp. The
miners, fearing for the safety of their families, set out to flank the
militia positions. A gunfight soon broke out.
The fighting raged for the entire day. The militia was reinforced
by non-uniformed mine guards later in the afternoon. At dusk, a passing
freight train stopped on the tracks in front of the Guards' machine gun
placements, allowing many of the miners and their families to escape to
an outcrop of hills to the east called the "Black Hills." By 7:00 p.m.,
the camp was in flames, and the militia descended on it and began to
search and loot the camp. Louis Tikas had remained in the camp the
entire day and was still there when the fire started. Tikas and two
other men were captured by the militia. Tikas and Lt.Karl Linderfelt,
commander of one of two Guard companies, had confronted each other
several times in the previous months. While two militiamen held Tikas,
Linderfelt broke a rifle butt over his head. Tikas and the other two
captured miners were later found shot dead. Tikas had been shot in the
back. Their bodies lay along the Colorado and Southern Railway
tracks for three days in full view of passing trains. The militia
officers refused to allow them to be moved until a local of a railway
union demanded the bodies be taken away for burial.
During the battle, four women and eleven children had been hiding
in a pit beneath one tent, where they were trapped when the tent above
them was set on fire. Two of the women and all of the children
suffocated. These deaths became a rallying cry for the UMWA, who called
the incident the "Ludlow Massacre."
In addition to the fire victims, Louis Tikas and the other men
who were shot to death, three company guards and one militiaman were
killed in the day's fighting.
The Ludlow Massacre became a rallying cry for union organizers and
labor activists for years afterwards. It would be decades before the
rights the Ludlow strikers fought for, such as the right to join an
independent union, an eight-hour workday, and child labor laws — were
enshrined in law with the passing of the National Labour Relations and Wagner acts as part of FDR’s New Deal.
These strong protections for unions paved the way for the longest
period of prosperity in American history, the Long Boom of the post-WWII
economy.
Though it has been mostly forgotten by the history books, the Ludlow Massacre inspired historians like Howard Zinn and Georg McGovern to write about it. Zinn described the Ludlow Massacre as "the culminating act of perhaps the
most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in
American history". Musicians like Woody Guthrie among other wrote songs about Ludlow.
Today
the Ludlow Monument, stands at the site
of what was the Ludlow colony. It is now officially a national historic
landmark, commemorating “a pivotal event in American history,” when
workers and their families fought and died so that they did not have
to surrender their rights and freedom at the job site. May they rest in power.
Lest we forget. Unions learnt from Ludlow, fought back strong, and were able to forge and implement new forms of welfare support and working class power. Over the years with stricter labour laws and increased enforcement of them curtailed the right of employees and gave strength to those in unions. So that business leaders are denied repeating the abuses of old. Long may this be so.
