THE MASSACRE AT LUDLOW
By Dick Meister
It began at 10 o’clock on that April morning in 1914, in the southern
Colorado town of Ludlow. National guardsmen, professional gunmen and others
high on a hillside unleashed a deadly stream of machine-gun and rifle fire
into a tent colony below that housed some 1000 striking coal miners and
their families.
Strikers grabbed their hunting rifles and fired back. Two men and a boy on
their side were killed. One Guardsman died.
The battle raged throughout that day of April 20. Finally, as night fell,
Guardsmen wielding torches dashed down the hill, doused the tents with coal
oil and set them aflame. They shot to death 10 of those who fled -- men,
women and children alike – as well as three strike leaders they had
captured. Thirteen others, two women and 11 infants and children, were
burned alive or suffocated as they huddled in a pit under a tent where they
had sought refuge.
The events of that day have been known ever since as the Ludlow Massacre,
one of the most horrific episodes in U.S. labor history, but one that
ultimately led to important and lasting improvements in how American workers
are treated.
None were in greater need of improvements than the 11,000 striking miners,
most of them wretchedly paid immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.
Virtually their entire lives were controlled by three highly profitable
mining companies, the most prominent of them owned by the enormously wealthy
family of John D. Rockefeller.
But though Rockefeller was the world’s richest man, his company’s employees
and the other miners were among the nation’s poorest men. Take-home pay was
less than $2 a day for their onerous and extremely dangerous work.
And out of that they had to pay the rent for company-owned shacks where they
were required to live and pay for the food, clothing and explosives and
other materials used on the job that were sold at company-owned stores where
they were required to shop. The miners had to perform for no pay so-called
“dead work” that did not involve digging coal, such as laying the tracks for
the carts that carried the coal out of the mines.
The miners had no voice in determining their working conditions, and the
mine owners vowed to keep it that way. To allow miners to take the
collective action essential to gaining a voice, Rockefeller declared,
would be to turn over control of the coal companies to “disreputable
agitators, socialists and anarchists.”
Miners were virtually voiceless off the job, too. Their employers controlled
the towns where they lived, appointing and paying law enforcement officers,
doctors, nurses, school teachers, librarians, even clergymen. The company
decided which books and other material should be stocked in the town
libraries and stores, which films should be shown in the towns’ movie
houses.
It’s no wonder the miners finally struck. As a federal investigator found,
they were “prohibited from having any thought, voice or care in anything in
life but work, and to be assisted in this by gunmen whose function it was,
principally, to see that you did not talk labor conditions with another
man."
Strikers demanded recognition of their union, the United Mine Workers, the
right to trade at any store, live wherever they wished, choose their own
doctors and be paid for “dead work. “ They wanted to elect the “weighmen”
who often cheated them in reporting how much coal they had dug and wanted
their pay per ton of coal dug raised so as to net them a modest 10 percent
pay increase.
The struck companies responded swiftly. They evicted the miners from their
company shacks, then hired a detective agency that dispatched armed gunman
to join company guards in raiding the tent colonies with the support of
local law enforcement officials who deputized them. But though outgunned,
strikers held them off, prompting Colorado’s governor to send in two
National Guard units at Rockefeller’s request.
Rockefeller paid the Guardsmen’s wages. They repaid him by escorting
strikebreakers to the struck mines and beating and arresting miners who
protested. Strikers held off the Guardsmen as they had held off the private
gunmen, through four cold winter months. In desperation, the Guardsmen
launched the attack that led to the massacre of 26 men, women and children.
As word of the massacre spread, armed miners and other workers marched on
Ludlow from throughout the area to clash with Guardsmen and other employer
forces. That battle raged for 10 days, until President Woodrow Wilson sent
in federal troops to stop it.
Strikers soon returned to work. They had lost much and won nothing. But the
violent response to their struggle for basic rights was a major factor in
enactment of the laws which legalized unions and their right to strike,
banned child labor and established the eight-hour workday as a national
standard.
Copyright © Dick Meister