Ludlow Massacre, April 20, 1914, Colo.: 1,200 Miners In 'Deadliest Strike in the History of the US'

[appalachiablue]

- Coal miners armed themselves at Ludlow, Colorado, 1913-1914.
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- 'The Ludlow Massacre: Bitter and Prejudiced In the Extreme,' Common Dreams, April 21, 2022. Ed.

This week marks the 108th anniversary of what Wallace Stegner called "one of the bleakest and blackest episodes of American labor history," when armed thugs hired by John Rockefeller Jr. burned down a tent encampment and machine-gunned the families of striking coal miners in Ludlow, CO, killing at least 26 - including 15 women and children who suffocated in a pit - for the crime of seeking to be treated as human beings. The attack on April 20, 1914 against 1,200 striking mineworkers was the culmination of a long struggle in Colorado coal country, where the United Mine Workers had been organizing a diverse workforce of thousands of miners.

Many miners were Greek, Mexican and Italian. Most worked for the massive Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. owned by the Rockefellers, America's richest family, who despite growing public revulsion for the excesses of the Gilded Age still ran CFI like the Robber Barons they were. Miners died in the hundreds in cave-ins and from disease, working 12-hour days, 7 days a week, for 80 cents per ton of coal; they got no pay for the so-called "dead work" of prepping a mine to minimize its hazards; they had to live in company shacks in company towns, shopping at company stores using company scrip, guarded by company thugs who ruled towns like concentration camp kapos.

In September 1913, after the company rejected all their demands for better working conditions, over 13,000 coal miners in southern Colorado went on strike.



- Speakers at the Ludlow strike rally workers from an open- top car.

In swift response, CFI evicted the miners and their families from their company-owned shacks; expecting the move, the union had set up canvas tents in the nearby hills, where the miners, some armed, moved. Ludlow, north of the town of Trinidad, was the largest encampment, with about a thousand men, women and children; reflecting its majority ethnicity, it also had a Greek bakery and coffee shop. The miners continued their strike through the especially harsh 1913-1914 winter; as tensions mounted, the company hired private armed guards from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency who regularly raided and shot into the tent camp, often from an armored vehicle mounted with a machine gun they called the "Death Special." When the strike persisted, even as miners were felled, Colorado's governor at the behest of Rockefeller brought in the National Guard.

At first, miners thought the Guard had been sent to protect them. Instead, soldiers on horseback beat and arrested them, attacked their wives marching in solidarity in Trinidad, and brought in unknowing strikebreakers under cover of night to work their jobs. On the morning of April 20, with two National Guard companies stationed nearby, a scuffle broke out between guards and miners. The Guard began a machine gun attack, some miners fired back, and a full-blown battle erupted. As the Guard began torching tents, terrified women and children fled into the hills; as they ran, Guard snipers cut down at least 13. Other panicked families, engulfed by smoke and gunfire, tried to hide by hastily digging pits under the tent sites. The next day, searchers going through the burned rubble of the encampment uncovered a pit with the charred bodies of 4 women and 11 children - the atrocity that became the Ludlow Massacre. In Trinidad, miners attended funeral services for the 26 victims...
https://www.commondreams.org/further/2022/04/20/ludlow-massacre-bitter-and-prejudiced-extreme
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- Three women, wives of striking coal miners, and their children stand outside of a tent at the Ludlow colony.

- THE LUDLOW MASSACRE was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colony of roughly 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Approximately 21 people, including miners' wives and children, were killed. John D. Rockefeller Jr., a part-owner of CF&I who had recently appeared before a United States congressional hearing on the strikes, was widely blamed for having orchestrated the massacre.

The massacre was the seminal event of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War, which began with a general United Mine Workers of America strike against poor labor conditions in CF&I's southern Colorado coal mines. The strike was organized by miners working for the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and Victor-American Fuel Company. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident during the Colorado Coalfield War and spurred a 10-day period of heightened violence throughout Colorado. In retaliation for the massacre at Ludlow, bands of armed miners attacked dozens of anti-union establishments, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 225-mile front from Trinidad to Louisville.

From the strike's beginning in September 1913 to intervention by federal soldiers under President Woodrow Wilson's orders on April 29, 1914, an estimated 69 to 199 people were killed during the strike. Historian Thomas G. Andrews has called it the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States." 

The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Socialist historian Howard Zinn described it as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history." Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events. Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an 8-hour work day. The Ludlow townsite and the adjacent location of the tent colony, 18 miles northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, is now a ghost town...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
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- Coal company scrip, WVa. - COMPANY SCRIP is "tokens or paper with a monetary value issued to workers as an advance on wages by the coal company or its designated representative". As such, coal scrip could only be used at the specific locality or coal town of the company named. Because coal scrip was used in the context of a coal town, where there were usually no other retail establishments in that specific remote location, employees who used this could only redeem their value at that specific location. As there were no other retail establishments, this constituted a monopoly...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

[Sherman A1]

1. K&R

[niyad]

2. Thank you for the reminder.

I have been to that site. Knowing what happened there gives one chills.