Deadliest Strike US History, Ludlow Massacre April 20 1914, 1200 Miners: Rockefeller Jr Armed Thugs
- The Ludlow Massacre: Bitter and Prejudiced In the Extreme,' Common Dreams, April 23, 2023. Ed. (Repost).
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, Colorado, 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...- Read More (Repost), https://www.democraticunderground.com/111712826
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