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The following was excerpted from Howard Zinn's A PEOPLE'S
HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES (pgs 346-349).
"a telephone linesman going through the ruins of the
Ludlow tent colony ... found the charred, twisted bodies
of eleven children and two women. This became known as
the Ludlow Massacre."
The Ludlow Massacre
"... shortly after Woodrow Wilson took office there began in
Colorado one of the most bitter and violent struggles between
workers and corporate capital in the history of the country.
"This was the Colorado coal strike that began in September 1913
and culminated in the 'Ludlow Massacre' of April 1914. Eleven
thousand miners in southern Colorado ... worked for the
Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, which was owned by the
Rockefeller family. Aroused by the murder of one of their
organizers, they went on strike against low pay, dangerous
conditions, and feudal domination of their lives in towns
completely controlled by the mining companies. ...
"When the strike began, the miners were immediately evicted
>from their shacks in the mining towns. Aided by the United
Mine Workers Union, they set up tents in the nearby hills and
carried on the strike, the picketing, from these tent colonies.
The gunmen hired by the Rockefeller interests -- the Baldwin-
Felts Detective Agency -- using Gatling guns and rifles, raided
the tent colonies. The death list of miners grew, but they
hung on, drove back an armored train in a gun battle, fought to
keep out strikebreakers. With the miners resisting, refusing
to give in, the mines not able to operate, the Colorado
governor (referred to by a Rockefeller mine manager as 'our
little cowboy governor') called out the National Guard, with
the Rockefellers supplying the Guard's wages.
"The miners at first thought the Guard was sent to protect
them, and greeted its arrival with flags and cheers. They soon
found out the Guard was there to destroy the strike. The Guard
brought strikebreakers in under cover of night, not telling
them there was a strike. Guardsmen beat miners, arrested them
by the hundreds, rode down with their horses parades of women
int he streets of Trinidad, the central town in the area. And
still the miners refused to give in. When they lasted through
the cold winter of 1913-1914, it became clear that
extraordinary measures would be needed to break the strike.
"In April 1914, two National Guard companies were stationed in
the hills overlooking the largest tent colony of strikers, the
one at Ludlow, housing a thousand men, women, children. On the
morning of April 20, a machine gun attack began on the tents.
The miners fired back. Their leader, ..., was lured up into
the hills to discuss a truce, then shot to death by a company
of National Guardsmen. The women and children dug pits beneath
the tents to escape the gunfire. At dusk, the Guard moved down
>from the hills with torches, set fire to the tents, and the
families fled into the hills; thirteen people were killed by
gunfire.
"The following day, a telephone linesman going through the
ruins of the Ludlow tent colony lifted an iron cot covering a
pit in one of the tents and found the charred, twisted bodies
of eleven children and two women. This became known as the
Ludlow Massacre.
"The news spread quickly over the country. In Denver, the
United Mine Workers issued a 'Call to Arms' -- 'Gather together
for defensive purposes all arms and ammunition legally
available.' Three hundred armed strikers marched from other
tent colonies into the Ludlow area, cut telephone and telegraph
wires, and prepared for battle. Railroad workers refused to
take soldiers from Trinidad to Ludlow. At Colorado Springs,
three hundred union miners walked off their jobs and headed for
the Trinidad district, carrying revolvers, rifles, shotguns.
"In Trinidad itself, miners attended a funeral service for the
twenty-six dead at Ludlow, then walked from the funeral to a
nearby building, where arms were stacked for them. They picked
up rifles and moved into the hills, destroying mines, killing
mine guards, exploding mine shafts. The press reported that
'the hills in every direction seem suddenly to be alive with
men.'
"In Denver, eighty-two soldiers in a company on a troop train
headed for Trinidad refused to go. The press reported: 'The
men declared they would not engage in the shooting of women and
children. They hissed the 350 men who did start and shouted
imprecations at them.
"Five thousand people demonstrated in the rain on the lawn in
front of the state capital at Denver asking that the National
Guard officers at Ludlow be tried for murder, denouncing the
governor as an accessory. The Denver Cigar Makers Union voted
to send five hundred armed men to Ludlow and Trinidad. Women
in the United Garment Workers Union in Denver announced four
hundred of their members had volunteered as nurses to help the
strikers.
"All over the country there were meetings, demonstrations.
Pickets marched in front of the Rockefeller office at 26
Broadway, New York City. A minister protested in front of the
church where Rockefeller sometimes gave sermons, and was
clubbed by the police.
"The New York Times carried an editorial on the events in
Colorado, which were not attracting international attention.
The Times emphasis was not on the atrocity that had occurred,
but on the mistake in tactics that had been made. Its
editorial on the Ludlow Massacre began: 'Somebody blundered ...
' Two days later, with the miners armed and in the hills of
the mine district, the Times wrote: 'With the deadliest weapons
of civilization in the hands of savage-mined men, there can be
no telling to what lengths the war in Colorado will go unless
it is quelled by force ... The President should turn his
attention from Mexico long enough to take stern measures in
Colorado.'
"The governor of Colorado ask for federal troops to restore
order, and Woodrow Wilson complied. This accomplished, the
strike petered out. Congressional committees came in and took
thousands of pages of testimony. The union had not won
recognition. Sixty-six men, women, and children had been
killed. Not one militiaman or mine guard had been indicted for
crime.
[...]
"The Times had referred to Mexico. On the morning that the
bodies were discovered in the tent pit at Ludlow, American
warships were attacking Vera Cruz, a city on the coast of
Mexico--bombarding it, occupying it, leaving a hundred Mexicans
dead--because Mexico had arrested American sailors and refused
to apologize to the United States with a twenty-one gun salute.
Could patriotic fervor and the military spirit cover up class
struggle? Unemployment, hard times, were growing in 1914.
Could guns divert attention and create some national consensus
against an external enemy? It surely was a coincidence--the
bombardment of Vera Cruz, the attack on the Ludlow colony. Or
perhaps it was, as someone once described human history, 'the
natural selection of accidents.' Perhaps the affair in Mexico
was an instinctual response of the system for its own survival,
to create a unity of fighting purpose among a people torn by
internal conflict.
"The bombardment of Vera Cruz was a small incident. But in
four months the First World War would begin in Europe.
--oOo--