Remembering Ludlow

Remembering Ludlow

Colorado

Photographs: November 2022/Essay: November 2023

On the morning of April 20, 1914, a fierce gun battle erupted between a detachment Company B of the Colorado National Guard and members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) at the Ludlow tent colony in the eastern foothills of Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains.[1]

The combat zone would be the camp settlement where five hundred miners and their families had made their home through the brutal winter. These families had been evicted from company housing when a strike against the region's coal companies began that previous September.[2] In the ensuing battle, over ten people, strikers, their family members and militiamen would lose their lives in the gunfire, including eleven year old Frank Snyder who was fatally struck in the skull by a bullet while sitting in his tent and caught by his father before he hit the floor.[3,4]

Three of the union men killed had been taken captive by National Guard soldiers and executed; shot in the back while laying on the ground. One of these men, Louis Tikas, who was a UMWA leader and had attempted to mediate a ceasefire in the midst of the gunfire, had his skull cracked open by the commanding Lieutenant's rifle before being shot in the back three times.[5] Terrified refugees fleeing the violence and freezing weather arrived in nearby communities, including a mother and newborn who reached the town of Aguilar after birthing her child alone in the cactus brush.[6,7]

Still, the most horrific events of the day were yet to be realized. As the barrage of machine gun fire eventually allowed the soldiers to take control of the camp, they began to loot and set fire to the colony in an attempt to drive out any colony residents who remained.[8] But below many of these tents, families had dug out cellar pits for women and children to take shelter in the event of outbreaks of violence.[9] While tents were being torched, some women and children were still taking cover from the gunfire in the ground below.

Mary Petrucci and her three children fled from their cellar when the family’s tent above caught fire. They ran from militia gunfire into tent number 58, which covered the maternity chamber, and found it already crowded with other mothers and children. Soon after they joined the terrified group, the tent above was set ablaze and the smoke began to drift below into the dugout cave. They began to cough, but were afraid to leave and be shot. The burning tent then collapsed onto the chamber. The bigger children tried to push open the floor, burning their fingers as they fell back on the others. The fire soon drew all of the oxygen from below and one by one the women and children trapped, fell unconscious.[10]

The following morning two women and eleven children were found, piled lifeless in a cellar pit. This harrowing event would become known as the Ludlow Massacre.[11]

With a strike that had been marred with violence and murder from its beginning, the deaths of the women and children would escalate the conflict to new heights. The fury felt by the union miners would result in a “guerrilla war that stretched along more than two hundred miles of the eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies.”[12] Company mine property was torched and company guards, strikebreakers and militiamen were murdered throughout the region in vengeance.[13] The union miners would take “control of a swath of territory roughly fifty miles long and five miles wide, including the town of Trinidad.”[14] Federal troops would be ordered into the region by President Woodrow Wilson, bringing an end to what would be one of the largest armed rebellions in post-Civil War history.[15] Over seventy-five people lost their lives during the total course of the 1913-1914 Colorado coalfield strike.[16]

The underlying catalyst of all this violence were the union miners' seemingly simple demands: “an eight-hour workday, right to join a union, freedom to shop outside company-owned stores, a system of checks to ensure miners, who were paid according to how many tons of coal they dug out, received a fair weighing.”[17] But the strike represented much more.

In these company fiefdoms, where workers regularly had their civil liberties disregarded, where they were spied upon, threatened and intimidated, beat by company guards, their wives and daughters sexually preyed upon by company supervisors, paid in company scrip and compulsorily indebted to companies for all of their goods and unfit housing, where their families went without decent food, healthcare and schooling, where their own lives were treated as disposable as the looming possibility of death would leave their family destitute, voiceless in fixed elections and at the mercy of a corrupt local government, police force and court system all controlled by the mining companies, all designed to trap them in a perpetual state of poverty to further enrich some of the wealthiest people in the nation, the strike was just as much about claiming their basic rights as Americans to freedom and justice.[18]

This need to fight for their constitutional rights held especially true for the melting pot of workers who found themselves bound together in the Ludlow tent colony, whose ethnicity and race left them largely marginalized in the Anglo-American power structure. The mine owners had strategically recruited workers from various racial and ethnic backgrounds to their mines with intention of their culture and language divisions, as well as existing prejudice, to minimize potential unity among them.[19] Despite this, the striking workers of Ludlow represented “families speaking two dozen languages...black and whites, Mexicans and Anglos, Italians, Greeks and Slavs,” who worked together to stand against the coal companies, to logistically run a large tent colony and take up arms together in their pursuit of improving their bleak economic circumstance.[20]

On the opposing side of the strike came the hardline stance against unionism summed up in a reported statement by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., owner of the largest operating mine company in the area, who “...declared he would lose his entire fortune before recognizing organized labor.”[21,22]

The environment was a tinderbox for violence: a lawless, exploitative frontier, the desperation of the miners, the aggressive stance by mining companies to destroy the union at all cost, in an area flush with guns and explosives. But the horrors that unfolded went beyond what those on both sides could have anticipated. The tragedy at Ludlow is a scar that would take its place as one of the darkest moments in America's violent and repressive labor history.

Tragically, after all the loss, violence and heartbreak, the strike failed to achieve its goals. The balance of power against them would prove too strong.[23] Miners in the area would not gain the protections of a union contract for decades to come. Like many other workers of the time, there were little to no laws protecting them, no enforcement of the laws that did exist, nor any effective means of government mediation in labor disputes, even if there was the political will to do so; military intervention and repression had been the only real historical precedent. The existence of many workers for a large part of American history resembled anything but a constitutional democracy, let alone the American Dream.

In its day, the event at Ludlow and its aftermath made national headlines. It invoked outrage throughout the country, federal hearings were conducted and John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose managerial repression and uncompromising stance would come to take much of the public blame for tragic loss of life at Ludlow, would essentially invent the modern corporate public relations campaign in attempts to rehabilitate his public image.[24,25]

Today, the events at Ludlow are largely absent in American collective memory, as are most struggles and sacrifices made by people to gain the rights we, as workers, take for granted today. But there are those who work to ensure that public memory of this important part of history is not forgotten. Local community members, organizations, historians, artists, museums, memorials and monuments ensure the lessons and legacy of the struggle and sacrifice of those involved in the 1913-14 Colorado Coalfield War lives on.

The above photo series is a document of the local remembrance of this dark chapter in labor history. It is also a document of sites where significant events in this struggle took place, but are without markers of public memory.

The most prominent point of remembrance in this conflict is the continued care and maintenance of the Ludlow Massacre Memorial, erected in 1918 through the collection of small donations. The memorial stands just feet away from the covered cellar where the women and children perished. The lone survivor, who crawled out from the burned rubble of the massacre site, was present at its unveiling: Mary Petrucci, on the spot where her children died four years earlier, pulled a string “collapsing the large silken American Flag...unveiling the...twenty-foot granite spire anchored by life-sized statues of a miner, a miner's wife, and a miner's child, symbolizing the lives that had been lost in the battle for dignity and freedom.”[26]

Standing in the cold wind of the solitary flats beneath the Ludlow memorial, where these striking miners and their families endured such horrors in their failed attempt to stand together and bring a sense of justice to their lives, it begs one to wonder—was their sacrifice in vain?

Speaking to Robert Butero, UMWA Regional Director, former coal miner and Board Member of the Coal Mining Museum in Trinidad, CO, visitors are reminded that Ludlow was not a loss. It, like many other awful events in labor history, would eventually culminate in the passing of the Wagner Act, which created the worker protections that would result in the proliferation of union contracts and lead to the creation of the American middle class. As with the Civil Rights Movement, Butero points out, it took decades of failed battles and tragic loss of life before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed. The labor movement endured a similar history. Many ordinary people made extraordinary sacrifices to achieve the rights that we as Americans have today.

As stated on the inscription plaque at the Ludlow Memorial Pavilion:

“These people, along with later generations of American miners and workers, took the first steps along the path to values and benefits working people across the country enjoy today. These benefits include the eight-hour work day and the 40-hour work week, paid holidays and vacations, paid sick days, overtime pay, pensions, health care benefits, workplace health and safety laws and anti-discrimination laws. They fought for and won social improvements like public schools, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and voting rights for women and minorities.”

The story, as sad as it is, is equally inspiring. The odds these miners faced seemed absolutely impossible to overcome. But the story of their courageous struggle against injustice and their solidarity across racial and ethnic lines would be one future organizing efforts would look back upon in hopes of realizing the goals that the brave men, women and children of the 1913-1914 Coalfield Strike could not bring to fruition. Miners with their militant heritage of unionism would, against all odds, become the most unionized industry in America only decades after the events at Ludlow.

The story of American miners and the UMWA is a shining example for those workers banding together at companies such as Amazon and Starbucks to demand economic justice from the anti-union Goliath's of today. Historical memory is important to this struggle and its presence or absence puts a finger on the scale of contemporary events.

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The name of the impressive mountain range that lies just West of the Ludlow colony is Spanish for the “Blood of Christ.” The day preceding the Ludlow Massacre, residents of the colony of all backgrounds celebrated together in an ad-hoc observance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ:

“...April 19, had been Easter Sunday for the Greek Orthodox Church, and the Ludlow tent colony, with its large Greek population, had held traditional and non-traditional celebrations, from a feast to a baseball game.”

Soldiers would often watch the colony baseball games for entertainment, but on that day, they carried rifles, walked onto the field, blocked the base runners and made ominous threats for the following day.[27]

The blood of the innocent spilled in the foothills of the “Blood of Christ” mountains following a jubilant Easter celebration adds a certain sacredness to the story of Ludlow. Those who work to remember the events honor the martyrs in such a way. Along with the stories of those who gave their lives for the cause of the the American Revolution, the Abolition of Slavery, Women's Suffrage or the Civil Rights Movement, the story of the men, women and children who died at Ludlow should remembered by all Americans as those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of freedom and liberty.