Finding Ludlow

By Ken Colvin

After I got off work at 6:30 in the morning, the sun was still not up. While I was walking in the parking lot, I decided to take a drive down Ludlow. As I started my truck, I thought to myself: “I have half a tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, and a paper to write.” So I hit it.

With the speedometer pegged at 95 mph on the Interstate, the drive went pretty quickly.I nearly missed the turn, seeing as how it was my first drive down to the memorial site. Now I was traveling down a half-dirt road, with the other side being paved. I almost missed the second turn, too. I slammed on the brakes, and jerked the steering wheel, nearly sliding sideways on the dirt and gravel in the process. I parked, and got out.

Labor history in the United States has been extremely bloody and gruesome, especially in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Workers toiled away with long hours, low pay, and in most cases in very unsafe working conditions. When these workers protested their conditions and tried forming a union, most times the company responded with violence, and many times this violence was supported by governments, both state and federal. One of the most infamous examples is what is now known as the Ludlow Massacre. The Ludlow Massacre is an extremely important event in labor history, both for the state of Colorado and the United States. The memorial for this event is located just a few miles outside of Trinidad.

My initial reaction was, “Is this it?” The memorial is a giant statue, caged off and surrounded by picnic tables, an empty building, and a port-a-potty. “This is all the dead people get? Some picnic tables and foul smelling plastic toilets?”

I learned almost nothing of what I already knew. On the drive down, I imagined something a little more than what was there. Maybe pamphlets with details of the event, maybe even books on the subject for sale. One of the ‘highlights’ of the memorial is the information stand. The information stand is a three-sided display with information about different subjects on each side. Miners vs. Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, two women and eleven children dead, etc. Very basic information.

The Ludlow Massacre was born out of a strike of mine workers in Southern Colorado, most of who worked for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, owned by John D. Rockefeller. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) called for the strike in September 1913. The demands of the workers were reasonable enough. They called for the right to organize unions, better wages, enforcement of eight-hour work day laws, payment for "dead work," the right to elect their own check-weigh men without company interference, the right to trade at any store, and choose their own boarding places and doctors, and enforcement of the state mining laws and abolition of the company guard system.

At the time of the strike, coal miners were only paid for the coal they mined, and were paid by the weight instead of by the hour. Miners were not paid for dead work, which included such tasks as laying track. Check-weighmen were company workers who measured how much coal the miners brought out of the mine. Many times, weighmen cheated the workers, cutting the weight down so as not to pay the workers as much. But the company refused, especially to the right to organize. As soon as the workers went on strike, about 11,000 in all, they were evicted from the company towns.

Company towns were literally towns owned by the company. Workers were often forced to live in these towns as a condition of employment. The miners and their families were forced to live in company houses, shop at company stores, and send their kids to company schools. This was another demand during the strike. Company stores often inflated prices of common items. The workers had no choice but to pay, with company issued money called company scrip, because that is the only place they could shop. Company stores were just another way to take back money from the workers, who had too little to begin with.

A song pops into my head as I am reading about their evictions. It’s an old ditty by a guy named Tennessee Ernie Ford. I couldn’t recall off hand the lyrics, but I knew the chorus for sure. I could hear it being sung by the coal miners, even though Ford didn’t first sing it until 1955.

After my disappointment in the memorial itself, I looked out over the hills and fields. With the sun barely peeking over the hills and between the clouds, I squinted my eyes. “Out there,” I told myself. “That’s just one example of how greedy, inhumane, and corrupt business and government can be.” In those fields, innocent people were forced to live in tents because businesses wanted to make as much money as possible, not caring who got hurt along the way. In those fields, innocent people died because a state government chose to support big business rather than human rights.

As expected, striking miners did not make the company or the state happy. The company enlisted the services of the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, located in West Virginia, to act as strikebreakers. As if that wasn’t enough, Governor Ammons called in the state militia, because of heavy pressure from the company.

Battles between striking miners, strikebreakers and militiamen occurred sporadically throughout the winter of 1913. Even under heavy fire and insurmountable odds, the strikers were not giving up. They kept striking and holding to their convictions like true heroes, never letting up on the dream that their demands would be met.

On April 20, 1914, while many of the miners were celebrating Greek Easter, tensions came to a head. According to Godfrey Irwin, who was hiking through the hills at Ludlow, and ended up becoming an eyewitness to the massacre,

Then came the killing of Louis Tikas, the Greek leader of the strikers. We saw the militiamen parley outside the tent city, and, a few minutes later, Tikas came out to meet them. We watched them talking. Suddenly an officer raised his rifle, gripping the barrel, and felled Tikas with the butt. Tikas fell face downward. As he lay there we saw the militiamen fall back. Then they aimed their rifles and deliberately fired them into the unconscious man’s body. It was the first murder I had ever seen, for it was a murder and nothing less. Then the miners ran about in the tent colony and women and children scuttled for safety in the pits which afterward trapped them.

So the start of the massacre came with a cheap shot from the militiamen. They had called Tikas, the leader, out to negotiate, and brutally murdered him in front of his followers. The battle that followed lasted for fourteen hours, with gunfire being exchanged between both sides. Both sides had casualties.

Where I was looking, a fight once raged. A fight that was not supposed to be read about in history books, but rather to decide what was more important in this still-growing state: human rights or big business’ profits. This fight personified the fight throughout America, for it was not just confined to these fields in Southern Colorado. And with all fights, there are winners and losers. So who won and lost this fight on this day?

Obviously the company and government won this first day. By evening, the tent colony was in flames while the militia was looting the tents. Irwin said about the fires,

I am positive that by no possible chance could they have been set ablaze accidentally. The militiamen were thick about the northwest corner of the colony where the fire started and we could see distinctly from our lofty observation place what looked like a blazing torch waved in the midst of militia a few seconds before the general conflagration swept through the place.

The strikers were looking for basic rights and instead were met with fiery, brutal deaths. Even though the colony was burned to the ground and looted, the worst was yet to come.

After uncovering some of the burned tents, pits were discovered. To guard themselves from gunfire, the strikers dug pits beneath the tents for their families. In one pit, which came to be known as the Death Pit, the bodies of two women and eleven children were pulled out. All had most likely died of suffocation. The youngest child was three months old. Of the eleven children killed, ten were under the age of eight. The oldest child was barely 11 years old.

The immediate effect of the Ludlow Massacre was ten days of civil war in the southern part of the state. More than one thousand armed miners swarmed over the hills to fight pitched battles with company guards and state troops.The miners burned mine property and laid siege to the better-protected mines in a twenty mile stretch between Trinidad and Walsenburg. Not until President Woodrow Wilson assigned 1600 federal troops to southern Colorado with orders to disarm everyone in the state – militia, company guards, and strikers – did the warfare cease.

The official end of the strike came in December 1914, with the company prevailing. After the strike ended, 408 miners were arrested and 332 were indicted for murder.On the other hand, ten officers and twelve enlisted men were court-martialed by the state militia and all were exonerated.

The company had won a victory. They didn’t have to recognize the union, they could keep paying the workers demeaning wages, working them long hours wouldn’t get them in trouble with the law, and they could still make lots of money. On top of all that, the miners ended up being arrested while none of the perpetrators of the real crimes were prosecuted. The company won all the way around.

But the longer lasting effects of the Massacre were more important than the measly victories the company won. News of Ludlow sparked outrage throughout the public. National attention was focused on the conditions of the coal camps, and also on labor relations throughout the country. Rockefeller, Jr. was singled out and criticized both by the press and by a series of public hearings before the Commission on Industrial Relations.

In the immediate aftermath, the nation was shocked when the story hit the newspapers. They couldn’t believe that the lives of two women and eleven children were taken. They demanded answers, and John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the owner of CF&I, knew that the company had to tell them what they wanted to hear. In comes Ivy Lee, one of the founding members of public relations, to the rescue. He put out bulletins that claimed the women and children died because of a stove that had overturned.Adding to its influential role in labor history, Rockefeller’s campaign to rehabilitate his image led to Ludlow having a special place in history as one of the founding places of professional public relations.

But the public demanded more than just relations after all the violence. The public wanted action. So Ludlow, because of public outcry, was also the birthplace of “company” unions. These were unions controlled by the company, and gave the workers very little rights besides the recognition of this company union. This was yet another way for the companies to put the workers in their place. After the workers had fought so hard, so long, and suffered so much, the company again found a way to outsmart them. Company unions were finally outlawed in 1935 when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act.

Before I left, I took another look out at the foothills. By now, the sun came fully through the clouds and shone brightly. I took it as irony. When I came to the memorial, I was more or less in a good mood, and the sun was covered up by a few clouds, making the foothills a little dark. And now when I was in a dejected mood, the sun comes through and shines brightly on my day. But after staring for awhile, I came to a different conclusion. I should be happy. Right out there in those fields, men, women and children had died fighting for a cause they believed was just.And even though they lost their lives that day, they gave back something even greater to their cause. They gave an image.

Historians cannot just look at a subject or event and take it for what it’s worth. What we look for is its significance, its effects, and its truth, elusive as that concept might be. And that’s the point that is being stressed here. This event cannot simply be looked at as a skirmish between the miners' union and the CF&I. It cannot be looked at as a couple casualties of business.

These workers gave an image that the public could focus on and point to when needed. This was an image of human struggle, company greed, and corrupt government. It was an image of innocence and guilt. It was in 1914 truly a modern-day David and Goliath. And once again, David had prevailed. The Ludlow Massacre encouraged state and federal lawmakers to pass legislation that in the long run would allow working men and women their deserved dignity and respect. It let people like my ancestors to work at the same steel mill that was responsible for the massacre, CF&I, without receiving company scrip to use only at company stores. It let ancestors of countless Puebloans work at the same mill with protection from a union along with decent wages and benefits. And even though the war between labor and business is still going on today, and probably will still be going on many years from now, Ludlow is a battle that will stand out in labor history as a turning point.