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Title: Remember Ludlow!
Author: Julia May Courtney
Date: 1914
Language: en
Topics: Ludlow Massacre
Source: Retrieved on March 20, 2012 from http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Remember_Ludlow!
Notes: Originally published in Mother Earth magazine in May of 1914 (Vol. IX, no. 3), in response to the Ludlow massacre.

Julia May Courtney

Remember Ludlow!

“REMEMBER LUDLOW” the battle cry of the crushed, downtrodden, despised

miners stifled at Calumet, in West Virginia, in Cripple Creek, has

echoed from coal camp to coal camp in southern Colorado, and has served

again to notify the world that Labor will not down.

Peaceful Colorado, slumbering in her eternal sunshine, has been rudely

awakened. And her comfortable citizens, tremendously busy with their

infinitely important little affairs, have been shocked into a mental

state wavering between terror and hysteria. And the terrified and

hysterical community, like the individual, has grabbed for safety at the

nearest straw. The federal troops are called to the strike zone in the

vain hope that their presence would intimidate the striking miners into

submission, and the first spasm of the acute attack has subsided. But

the end is not yet.

In September the coal miners in the southern Colorado district went out

on strike. Immediately the word went forth from No. 26 Broadway, the

Rockefeller headquarters in New York City, and the thugs and the gunmen

of the Felts-Baldwin agency were shipped from the Virginia and Texas

fields and sent by the hundreds, into the coal camps. With their wives

and children the miners were evicted from their huts on the company’s

ground, and just as the heavy winter of the mountains settled down, the

strikers put up their tents and prepare for the long siege. It was then

that the puerile, weak kneed Governor Ammons, fawning on the

representatives of the coal companies, at the request of the Colorado

Fuel and Iron Co., called out the militia to “keep order.”

And the climax came when the first spring winds blew over the hills and

the snows melted from the mountain sides. On the 20^(th) of April the

cry was heard “Remember Ludlow!”—the battle cry that every workingman in

Colorado and in America will not forget. For on that day the men of the

tent colony were shot in the back by soft-nosed bullets, and their women

and children were offered in burning sacrifice on the field of Ludlow.

The militia had trained the machine guns on the miners’ tent colony. At

a ball game on Sunday between two teams of strikers the militia

interfered, preventing the game; the miners resented, and the

militia—with a sneer and a laugh—fired the machine guns directly into

the tents, knowing at the time that the strikers’ wives and children

were in them. Charging the camp, they fired the two largest

buildings—the strikers’ stores— and going from tent to tent, poured oil

on the flimsy structures, setting fire to them.

From the blazing tents rushed the women and children, only to be beaten

back into the fire by the rain of bullets from the militia. The men

rushed to the assistance of their families; and as they did so, they

were dropped as the whirring messengers of death sped surely to the

mark. Louis Tikas, leader of the Greek colony, fell a victim to the mine

guards’ fiendishness, being first clubbed, then shot in the back while

he was their prisoner. Fifty-two bullets riddled his body.

Into the cellars—the pits of hell under the blazing tents—crept the

women and children, less fearful of the smoke and flames than of the

nameless horror of spitting bullets. One man counted the bodies of nine

children, taken from one ashy pit, their tiny fingers burned away as

they held to the edge in their struggle to escape. As the smoke ruins

disclosed the charred and suffocated bodies of the victims of the

holocaust, thugs in State uniform hacked at the lifeless forms, in some

instances nearly cutting off heads and limbs to show their contempt for

the strikers.

Fifty-five women and children perished in the fire of the Ludlow tent

colony. Relief parties carrying the Red Cross flag were driven back by

the gunmen, and for twenty-four hours the bodies lay crisping in the

ashes, while rescuers vainly tried to cross the firing line. And the

Militiamen and gunmen when the miners petitioned “Czar Chase” and

Governor Ammons for the right to erect their homes and live in them. [1]

[...] for the first time in the history of the labor war in America the

people are with the strikers—they glory in their success. The trainmen

have refused to carry the militia—entire companies of the National Guard

have mutinied—nearly every union in the State has offered funds and

support of men and arms to the strikers—and the governor has asked for

federal troops.

The federal troops are here—the women who forced the governor to ask for

them believe they have secured Peace—but it is a dead hope. For Peace

can never be built on the foundation of Greed and Oppression. And the

federal troops cannot change the system—only the strikers can do that.

And though they may lay down their arms for a time—they will “Remember

Ludlow!”

[1] Part of the text missing here