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Notes on the Ludlow massacre

From Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War

Ruins of Ludlow restored image

"The massacre story assumed a key place in the martyrology of the American labor movement and a striking centrality in the interpretation of the nation’s history developed by several of the most important left-leaning thinkers of the twentieth century." (6)

6-8: Figures whom the massacre influenced.

7: Aftermath for JDR, Jr.

9: Left sees Ludlow as a harbinger of progress in labor conditions.

17: "a new company town system, expressly designed to contain the opposition that underground work tended to generate."

244: Coal company executives "stepped up assaults against union organizers, in the process killing at least one man; planted moles within the United Mine Workers; and expelled hundreds, even thousands, of suspected union miners from the camps (many of whom turned out to be anti unionists targeted by the 'inside-outside' system)...The companies also proceeded to enlist sympathetic newspapers willing to portray the strikers by using the same rhetoric perfected a decade earlier, as well as to lay the groundwork for National Guard intervention."

245-246: JDR Jr. ignored warnings of strike, only acknowledged it two weeks in.

246: "To the denizens of boardrooms and clubhouses in New York and Denver alike, the causes of the strike remained all too clear: outside agitators had invaded Colorado, then alternately intimidated and misled the state’s previously contented and well-paid miners. Having inflamed these gullible foreigners to the point of savage rage, the union stood poised to unleash a reign of anarchy that threatened both the rights of cap ital and the workers’ true self-interest."

246: Near-freezing temp. day of the strike.

247: Preparation of the strikers for the strike.

247: "Leaving work even before the Trinidad Convention had authorized the strike, the miners of Delagua and Valdez drew their tools fi rst. Next to come out were the Huerfano County colliers, perhaps 70 percent of whom had left the mines by Saturday, September 21. Two days later, virtually every mineworker in Fremont County—and an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the mine labor force in Las Animas and Huerfano counties—had joined the struggle, as had most of Crested Butte’s workforce, a few hundred colliers from the outskirts of Colorado Springs, four hundred miners from the newly opened Routt County collieries near Steamboat Springs, and over a thousand nonunion miners in northern Colorado, where hundreds of union miners had been on strike since 1910."

247 onwards: details of the migratory patterns of the strikers. Some sought employment elsewhere; many others moved to union tent colonies. Some stayed put.

250: "Union tent colonies, despite considerable differences in their population and layout, had in common the arrangement of tents around a central communal space. Ludlow, the largest of the camps, featured a large parade ground on which strikers assembled almost every day to listen to speeches." The adjacent “Big Tent” served as the local union headquarters as well as a workplace, where women (and some children and men) together did the work required to sustain the colony."

252: Ludlow was multi-ethnic and utopic. Harsh conditions (see 251) but plenty of solidarity.

252: "Tent colonies functioned as military encampments as well as refugee camps and incubators of group identity. From the start, Ludlow was undoubtedly the most martial of the camps. Strategically located, like many of the other colonies, the camp was protected by rifle pits and guarded by sentries. On the central parade ground strikers held rallies and planned picket lines against incoming trains carrying scabs."

254: “There is probably no camp in the district affected by the strike,” the Walsenburg Independent claimed, “where stronger animosity is displayed between the company employees and the miners.”

255: A federal investigator concurred, reporting: “The strikers at the Ludlow tents are in a highly nervous condition.” The miners, he alleged on October 9, “expect trouble and are apparently ready to create a very grave situation on slight provocation.” Mine guards proved even more eager to fight. After numerous gun battles erupted around the colony in late October, Ammons made the fateful decision to bring state troops back into Colorado’s labor wars for the first time since Peabody’s ignominious tenure."

255-257: Governor's orders to send in the National Guard; strikers originally enthusiastic; National Guard turns partisan, supporting the companies; companies begin paying the guards' salaries; composition of the guardsmen becomes increasingly dominated by former company men, which makes the strikers grow mistrustful, and eventually hostile.

257: Petty violence resumes in November.

258: Joint conference between company and union reps breaks down in November; twas the last and best shot at ending things peacefully. Talks collapse over the issue of recognition of the UMW (United Mine Workers).

263: The striking colliers criticized company misrule, but they also offered a program of reform. Replace corporate hierarchy, they urged, with workers’ democracy. To Ammons’s chagrin, the three miners proved incapable of discussing strike demands, the workscape environment, or work relations underground without constantly returning to the subject of unionization."

264: "the miners equated workscape safety and workers’ control, self-governance and craft autonomy, thus predicating their cause on the same dynamics that had underpinned coalfield conflict since the inception of the industry"

265: "[Governor] Ammons ... seemed to have ignored or misunderstood practically every point the miners had tried to make."

266: The operators were negotiating cynically, with the ulterior aim of convincing the governor that the miners' demands were frivolous.

266-267: Ammons, vexed by the miners’ rejection of his proposed settlement, issued new orders to the National Guard. At the governor’s behest, General Chase stepped up arrests of strike leaders and held most without formal civil charges until special military tribunals could interrogate and try them. He also issued a new directive, General Order 17, that made it easier for coal companies to import strikebreakers... Ammons’s new orders to the militia brought an in flux of strikebreakers into the mines. In a portent of things to come, National Guardsmen at Ludlow enacted the new policy by dispersing “a crowd of more than 100 women and children, armed with clubs and stones gathered at the station” to attack a trainload of scabs. As state troops helped coal companies escape the labor shortage—and hence the fuel blockade—on which the strikers’ cause turned, the operators gained the upper hand.

268: The joint conference escalated tensions, rather than settling them.

268: As winter descended, "hostility ... governed virtually any encounter between guardsmen and strikers. Especially outrageous in the eyes of miners and their many sympathizers around the nation was Chase’s order in early January that Mother Jones, now in her eighties, be escorted past the state line. The militia also arrested dozens of other strikers and union leaders and held them without trial or even formal charges until a special military commission could hear their cases. No pretense of neutrality remained. Colorado Fuel and Iron automobiles were frequently seen parked outside the adjutant general’s headquarters at the Columbian Hotel in Trinidad. Company officials openly participated in the militia’s interrogations of strikers, while elsewhere in the strike zone regular militiamen, who were more interested in returning home than in serving as the mailed fist of corporate power, elected to muster out of the National Guard, only to be replaced by company gunmen."

269: Many heated exchanges between militiamen and strikers in December and January. At one point, Chase and his men attacked a women's march in Trinidad.

269: Now that the state and capital were operating in collusion around them, the miners sought to enlist support from beyond Colorado. Their efforts led to an investigation by the House Subcommittee on Mines and Mining, which culminated in four weeks of hearings in February and March of 1914, and garnered substantial publicity nationwide. However, "The complexity and violence of the conflict, combined with the subcommittee’s lack of real power, stymied the union’s efforts to enlist federal authority to intervene on the strikers’ behalf."

269-270: Oddly, in February, things seemed to have quiet down. Ammons withdrew all but two hundred of the militiamen, and soon after "the state would soon pull out of the coalfields altogether and return authority to civil officials."

270: "The first sign of renewed trouble occurred at the union tent colony erected outside Forbes. Chase reported to Woodrow Wilson that on March 8, “a non- union miner was atrociously murdered near” there. Two days later, Chase’s men rode through the colony, rounding up and imprisoning all sixteen men in the camp and destroying every tent, “to forestall further outlawry.” Emma Zanetell, whose home had been dynamited by anti union men in 1894 after her father joined the men marching from Sopris to Rouse, was turned out of her tent-home into the sleet and snow, where her newborn twin babies sickened and died. In response to such outrages, the president of the Globe Detective Agency informed the governor, union men were assembling revolvers, rifles, and ammunition, while many “Baldwin-Felts men [had] been recruited into the [militia] service.” He reckoned, “Unless all signs fail, a reign of terror can be expected.” By early April, a militia officer reported from the strike zone, “Things are in an awful mess here.” As Kenehan blocked funds and the coal companies scrambled to pay the militia’s tab, soldiers were left “ragged, dirty an[d] with only a few nickels left after paying their bills, or as much of them as they could. It is a terrible disgrace to the state of Colorado.”"

270: Despite these ominous developments, Ammons withdrew more militiamen from the strike zone. By April 17, only two companies remained, both heavily manned by mine workers. (Details in page.)

271: Tensions mount further. The militiamen are worried about an attack by the strikers, who outnumbered them, and many of whom were combat veterans. The strikers, in turn, interpreted the withdrawal of militiamen in favor of companies manned by mine workers as a sign that the intention was to wipe them out.

271: "It was a formula for disaster: two armies preparing for a battle that both had come to perceive as inevitable. In this context of pervasive paranoia, threat and counterthreat, any enemy movement seemed to presage a fullblown assault. Both sides had carried out beatings and murders over the previous seven months and exchanged tit for tat in the frequent skirmishing around Ludlow, Forbes, and other colonies. By mid-April the death toll for the strike had edged toward thirty. As the spring sun dawned at Ludlow on April 20, the actions of the Colorado National Guard and the strikers’ armies alike triggered mutual suspicion. The day of reckoning was at hand, virtually every one concluded. All it took was one gunshot to ignite the powder keg.

The details of what happened next are in dispute. The confusion that characterizes any battle, the irregular makeup of both fighting contingents, the weak chain of command in each, the absence of neutral witnesses, the partisan worldviews of two sides staring past each other, the yawning gulf of hatred and misunderstanding that separated them—these and other complications make it foolish to think that we can know with any certainty what actually occurred on April 20.

This admission does not imply, however, that all stories about Ludlow deserve equal credence. Few major events in American history seem so shrouded in misconceptions, harbored not only by the general public but even by esteemed scholars."

272 There is little doubt, though, about the culpability of Karl Linderfelt and other militiamen in the death of Louis Tikas: they shot him in the back after Linderfelt smashed a rifle butt over his head.

References

Martelle, Scott (2008). Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-4419-X.

Andrews, Thomas Franklin (2008). Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-03101-6.

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