Ludlow Massacre

LUDLOW MASSACRE. An attack on 20 April 1914 by troops of the Colorado National Guard on a tent village inhabited by striking coal miners and their families, mostly Italian, Greek, and eastern European immigrants, gave the Ludlow Massacre its name. Two women and eleven children were among those slain. Called a battle by the Guard, it was an incident of the Colorado Fuel and Iron strike (1913–1914), a coal strike centered in southern Colorado near Trinidad. Strikers led by the United Mine Workers of America demanded improved safety and living conditions, higher wages, and union recognition. The largest company involved was the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

In October 1913 Governor Elias Ammons ordered the Colorado National Guard into the strike region. The Guard, supposedly a neutral force, quickly allied itself with the coal companies. By early April the strike had bankrupted the state, and the governor ordered most troops out of the region. The remaining companies were increasingly joined by mine guards notoriously hostile to the strikers. On the morning of 20 April these troops began circling the Ludlow tent colony. Around nine o’clock the first shot was fired (each side accused the other of it). Troops began firing into the tents as many inhabitants were getting out of bed or getting dressed. Strikers returned fire from a trench dug to one side but were poorly armed and by 4:00 P.M. had run out of ammunition. At dusk the troops entered the tent village with war whoops and burned it to the ground. The dead women and children were found suffocated by smoke in one of the tent cellars dug for them to run into in case of attack. As the news electrified the nation, the miners began an armed rebellion that continued for ten days until President Woodrow Wilson ordered the US Army into the southern Colorado coal field.

In response to Ludlow, reformers, socialists, and others organized protest demonstrations and rallies across the United States. In New York the socialist novelist Upton Sinclair led a silent picket in front of the offices of John D. Rockefeller. The Socialist Party criticized his action on the grounds that the system was at fault, not individuals like Rockefeller. This objection did not prevent similar pickets from appearing in front of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil offices in Chicago and San Francisco.

Others prominent in the protests included the reformer Jane Addams, who presided over a large protest meeting in Chicago, and Max Eastman, the socialist editor of the Masses. Eastman took the train to Colorado to report on the debacle. Sinclair also went to Colorado and it was on his suggestion that a progressive Denver judge, Benjamin Barr Lindsey, accompanied a group of strikers’ wives across the country for the purpose of publicizing the plight of the strikers. Sinclair’s novel King Coal (1917) grew out of his involvement with these protests.

Back in Tarrytown, New York, members of the Industrial Workers of the World picketed the Rockefeller estate, while in New York City four of their comrades died in a Lexington Avenue tenement when a time-bomb exploded prematurely. It was generally believed that the bomb had been intended for the Rockefeller townhouse.

Such widespread negative publicity prompted the Rockefellers to launch a pioneering corporate public relations campaign, as well as to institute an important form of the company union in the Colorado coal mines. Although these were largely token efforts, they represented an important ideological shift toward liberalism on the part of some capitalists.

Long, Priscilla. “The Women of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Strike, 1913–1914.” In Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, edited by Ruth Milkman. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Long, Priscilla. Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry. New York: Paragon, 1989.

McGovern, George S., and Leonard F. Guttridge. The Great Coalfield War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.

Papanikolas, Zeese. Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982.