Remembering Bloody Ludlow – One Hundred Years On

[Sherman A1]

On the morning of April 20, 1914, agents of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency along with Colorado national guardsmen massed on a ridge overlooking a tent city of hundreds of coal miners and their families that occupied the plain below – roughly a half mile from the village of Ludlow, Colorado. They came armed, with some men on horseback but with others setting up machine gun positions able to sweep over the encampment. Inside the thin cotton tents some 1200 men, women and children stirred and began their day as they had throughout the preceding months. during one of the coldest Colorado winters in recent memory.

The miners and their families had been living in the tents since John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Coal and Fuel company along with 2 other coal operators had thrown them out of company houses in September of the previous fall. The companies had refused the demands of the miners and a strike/lockout had begun. The coal companies had hoped the brutal cold and isolation of the winter would break the striker’s resolve and end the confrontation.

Throughout the cold months, there had been skirmishes, with the Baldwin-Felts agents firing shots into the camp, wounding and on occasion killing strikers. With the arrival of spring, it became apparent that the miners and their families would be able to hold out for much longer, perhaps indefinitely.

The morning had begun with the strike’s organizer, Louis Tikas, being lured out of the camp to a meeting with the militia’s leader on the pretext of negotiating the release of two men who were supposedly wanted by authorities Tikas, who had dealt with the captain many times before, sensed something amiss during the meeting and cut it short, rushing back to his people in the tent city. As he returned, the Baldwin-Felts agents opened fire, sending a terrifying hail of soft-point bullets ripping through the fabric of the tents. So began the bloodiest and deadliest labor battle America has ever seen.

http://my.firedoglake.com/rfshunt/2014/04/20/remembering-bloody-ludlow-one-hundred-years-on/

[Sweeney]

1. Let us

sing a hymn to the defense of law and property. If people would not die for it, it would have no meaning what ever. Sing dear Droogies of the death that lets property live. Lives longed for not songed for distilled into vapors and ethers profound in their power to give mere matter- life. For this Automaton we die. For this Automaton we surrender all life, and do not cry as we die, for we whisper: It's alive. Look to these monsters and machines for they hold our souls in their well being.
Sweeney

[thucythucy]

2. I first heard about this as a kid

listening to a Woody Guthrie song: "The 1913 Ludlow Massacre." It's been a while, but I believe the last words are, "I said 'God bless the mine workers' union/and then I hung my head and cried."