Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)

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I think when you see these injustices that are being worked on us

down there will not be any doubt in your minds.

Mr. Gaines: Who did this man represent?

Mr. Fort: The Regie Company.

Mr. Gaines: Have they any competitors down there?

Mr. fort: No, sir; and I want to state also that this man who was representing

the Regie contractor was a personal friend of mine, and he told me:

“There is a whole world of tobacco in Robinson County that we can

not use.” The result is that there is no competition and no chance to

sell that, and there is no chance for this class of laborers and negroes,

who are dependent on this crop for a living, and I do not know what

we are going to do.

Mr. Stanley: Now, you say a man will raise 3 acres of tobacco?

Mr. Fort: Yes, sir.

Mr. Stanley: And Robinson County is the best tobacco county that you have?

Mr. Fort: Yes, sir.

Source: Hearings on the Relief of Tobacco Growers: Before a Subcommittee on Internal Revenue of the

Committee on Ways and Means; House of Representatives, 58th Congress, 2nd Session, February 4

and 25, 1904 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908).

706 Black Patch War (1909)

Ludlow Massacre (1914)

Located in the arid foothills of southern Colorado, the Ludlow Tent Colony

emerged over th e fall of 1913 afte r almost 14,000 coal miners went on str i ke on

September 16, 1913. Coal mine operators, chief among them John D. Rockefel-

ler’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), had relied on company-owned

towns to attract and manage their workers in the sparsely populated Rocky Moun-

tain region. When miners went on strike, operators evicted strikers to make room

for their replacements. The United Mine Workers of Amer ica (UMWA ) union

responded by providing temporary housing in 14 tent colonies established at stra-

tegic locations outside mines and at railroad stops to sustain the miners and their

strike activities. Miners constructed the largest of these tent camps 18 miles north

of Trinidad, Colorado, at the Ludlow Rail Depot. Operators set up their own camps

of private guards who were later joined by Colorado National Guardsmen to

oppose the UMWA. On A pril 20, 1914, ongoing tensions exploded in violence,

and by day’s end, 12 children, two women and 10 men, among them one of the

most effective Greek organizers Louis Tikas, had been killed, and the Ludlow Tent

Colony had been burned to the ground. The Ludlow Massacre in turn touched off

two weeks of armed rebellion that raged across the southern Colorado coalﬁelds

and ended only when the U.S. Army arrived to restore order.

By 1900, Colorado’s southern coalﬁelds represented the greatest concentration

of bituminous coal production west of the Mississippi and the region attracted a

large number of foreign-born workers. In 1888, four-ﬁfths of Colorado’s coal min-

ers were English-speaking, but a decade later, Colorado’s coal miners hailed from

the four corners of the world and comprised one of the most polyglot workforces

in the United States: Ludlow’s 1,200 inhabitants spoke 27 different languages.

While most of the coal miners and their families were from Central, Southern,

and Eastern Europe, signiﬁcant numbers also had arrived from Mexico, Texas,

and the American South. A wide variety of both push and pull factors brought this

heterogeneous group immigrants to Colorado—wars, economic hardshi p, family

ties, prejudice, and restlessness among them—and employers like the CF&I

presu med that they could turn the ethnic, cultural, racial, and linguistic divisions

to their advantage when it came to managing labor. Once in Colorado, however,

miners and their fami lies shared an array of challenges and hardships that tended

707

to unite them and that set the stage for the bitter 1913–1914 strike that led

to the Ludlow Massacre.

Conditions in the s outh ern Colorado c oal mines were universally deplorable,

especially for foreign-born workers. The New Immigrant miners experienced

racial prejudice in an increasingly nativist nation. Native-born mine managers

freely insul ted the Italians, Serbs, Greeks, Mexicans, and Japanese miners that

toiled in the mines. Making barely $2.00 per day, miners were treated little better

than slaves. They were forced to live in company housing, buy equipment and sup-

plies from company-owned shops with company-printed scrip, and bury their dead

in company-owned cemeteries. In 1913, 46 4 miners died or suffered severe inju-

ries while working in unsafe environments. The miners were paid by the ton of

coal they brought to the surface, and were not com pensated for what they called

“deadwork,” including timbering the mines to shore them up against collapse,

and laying track for the coal cars. These conditions encouraged a militant reaction

in miners, who saw their struggle in terms of a class revolution.

The UMWA had attempted to organize the Colorado coal miners as early as

1892. Such a large group of nonunion coal miners not only offered a fertile ﬁeld

for organization, but it also undermined the union’s efforts to raise the standard

of living and improve the conditions for miners in the East. At ﬁrst, union leader-

ship viewed the multiethnic character of the workers as an impediment to success-

ful organization. English-speaking leaders simply could not converse with Italians,

Mexicans, and other nationalities. To overcome this obstacle, the UMWA imple-

mented what it called the “Group System,” encouraging the formation of separate

organizations for each nationality. Although the union was ineffective throughout

the remainder of the 1890s, it was successful in recognizing the value of various

immigrant gro ups. In 1903, a UMWA strike a gainst CF&I nearly achieved a sig-

niﬁcant victory for the union and the miners, and it was defeated only when Gov-

ernor Peabody declared martial law and ordered the state militia to occupy Las

Animas and Huerfano counties. By June 1904, the militia had deported many of

the stri ke leaders, including the ubi quitous and effective organizer Mother Jones.

Learning from this defeat, by 1913, the UMWA had also hired ethnic ﬁeld organ-

izers, able to speak with their countrymen in ways that could harness their antago-

nism toward the mine operators and maintain a grassroots organizing campaign in

the face of jailings and deportations. Louis Tikas, a Greek organizer, described the

miner’s struggle as being analogous to Greek wars against the Turks. UMWA dis-

trict leaders also published papers in many languages, ultimately adopting an Ital-

ian newspaper as the ofﬁcial organ of the union. These papers often employed a

nationalistic tone, linking historic and contemporary struggles.

Opposed to the UMWA were the coal companies, their armed guards, and the

state militia, led by the giant CF&I, controlled by John D. Rockefeller and his

708 Ludlow Massacre (1914)

son John D. Rockefeller Jr. and managed by J. F. Welborn. These manager s had

long abandoned the company’s efforts to gain the support of its workers through

the construction of club houses, reading rooms, and the like—the hallmark of the

previous owner Charles Osgood’s Sociological Department—and instead used

the tried-and-true methods of segmenting w ork along raci al and ethnic lines,

employing blacklists, a nd threatening violence. In 191 3, the coal companies

immediately employed armed guards hired to police the mines, intimidate work-

ers, and escort scabs to the mines. State militiamen, many of them CF&I employ-

ees, had been called out by Colorado governor Ammons ostensibly to keep the

peace but clearly tended to sympathize with the operators, setting up entrenched

positions overlooking the tent camps and bringing an impressive array of heavy

weapons with them. The strikers responded by arming themselves and intercepting

trains loaded with strikebreakers and additional guards. The potential for violence

quickly became an ever-present reality in the strike zone.

In 1913, the UMWA felt conﬁdent that the lessons it had learned in earlier

strikes might lead to eventual victory, and it called workers out on September 16,

1913, demanding union recognition, an increase in wages, an eight-hour workday,

pay for “deadwork” (safety work), and the right to purchase equipment wherever

they pleased. Local organizers included representatives such as Louis Tikas, a

Greek, as well as seasoned American organizers such as John Lawson. Almos t

40, Lawson was a veteran organizer from a union family and a former Pennsylva-

nia coal miner who had started work as break er boy at a ge eight. He had moved

west and taken a job with the CF&I to extend the inﬂuence of the UMWA. Mary

Harris Jones, better known as “Mother” Jones, or the “Angel of the Coal Camps,”

came to Colorado once again to embolden the workers with her ﬁery rhetoric, and

the miners displayed an amazing solidarity in 1913 and 1914, persisting in their

efforts and remaining in their tent camps over the challenging Colorado winter.

On the night before the attack on the Ludlow tent camp, the sounds of banjos, ﬁd-

dles, accordions, and ta mburitzes could be heard as well as songs sung in Slavic,

Italian, Spanish, and English. The camp had just celebrated Greek Easter with

dancing, baseball games, and a special feast of Greek dishes, and the strikers still

looked forward to eventual victory.

The Ludlow Massacre instantly changed the stakes, and many warned of class

war in the mountain region that might spread to the rest of the nation. A Rocky

Mountain News editorial of April 22, 1914, intoned that the “machine guns which

played in the darkness upon the homes of humble men and women, whose only

crime was an effort to earn an honest living, were bought and paid for by age nts

of the mine owners. Explosive bullets have been used on children. Does the

bloodiest page in the French revoluti on approach this in hideousness?” After the

strikers had buried those killed at Ludlow, ﬁghting resumed, and revolution

Ludlow Massacre (1914) 709

seemed for many to have become a reality. Competing with America’s invasion of

Mexico for national a ttention, the “Ten Day War” verged on a full-scale c lass

uprising. As strikers and their supporters took control of the towns and mines from

Walsenburg and Trinidad, one congressional report stated that there was a positive

danger of a national revolution growing out of the Colorado strike. Finally, on

April 28, President Wilson called out the National Guard to quell the ﬁghting.

Over 1,600 troops were required.

In spite of the courage and tenacity shown by the strikers, the UMWA did not win a

victory in 1913–1914, despite a great public outcry and the general belief that the

owners, led by Rockefeller, precipitated violence. Instead, it led to a compromise.

Once order had b een restored, the Ludlow Tent Colony was rebuilt and the strike

dragged on until the UMWA ﬁnally called it off in December 1914. Some of the strik-

ing miners remained on strike relief until the following year, others drifted out of the

state, and still others went back to work for the mine operators. Mass arrests of miners

followed, and several hundred, including John Lawson, were indicted for murder,

though these charges were eventually quashed and it took a decision of the Colorado

Supreme Court to overturn Lawson’s conviction for murder. The state of Colorado

court-martialed over 20 of its Guardsmen, though all of them were found innocent

of wrongdoing save for one who had been witnessed striking a miner, Louis Tikas,

in the head with the butt of his riﬂe. The strike caused the federal government to ini-

tiate a two-year study of industrial violence, the U.S. Commission on Industrial Rela-

tions, and its 1,200-page ﬁnal report condemned many of the practices of employers,

especially those used by mine operators in Colorado.

Advised of the precariousness of the situation, John D. Rockefeller visited the

strike zone and followed this up with an astonishingly expensive and comprehen-

sive public relations offensive meant to gather sympathy from as much of the pub-

lic as possible. H e brought in Canadian labor expert William Mackenzie King to

devise a new employee representation plan, late r dubbed the Rockefeller plan by

less-than-enthusiastic employees in the la ter 1910s and 1920s, to rec oncile the

interests of labor and management—opening up a new era of welfare capitalism

in the process. Over UMWA objections, workers accepted the Colorado Industrial

Plan of 1915 and participated in company unionism. Company unionism gave

workers limited collective bargaining powers within the company without legiti-

mizing independent employee advocacy through organized labor union s like the

UMWA. A lso, limited reforms improved working conditions. Payment in com-

pany scrip and questionable payroll deductions were eliminated. Ind eed, t he

CF&I maintained the company union plan until 1933, when New Deal legislation

shifted bargaining power to independent unions.

—Gerald Ronning

710 Ludlow Massacre (1914)

See also all entries under Molly Maguires (1870s); Great Railroa d S trikes (1877);

Haymarket Riot (1886); Seattle Riot (1886); Homestead Strike (1892–1893); Pullman

Strike (1894); Lattimer Massacre (1897); Black Patch War (1909); Boston Police Strike

(1919); Battle of Blair Mountain (1921); Bonus Army (19 32); Toledo Auto-Lite S trike

(1934); World Trade Organization Protests (1999).

Further Reading

Scamehorn, H. Lee. Mill and Mine: The CF&I in the Twentieth Century. Lincoln: Univer-

sity of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Scamehorn, H. Lee. Pioneer Steelmaker in the West: The Colorado Fuel and Iron Com-

pany, 1872–1903. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Industrial Violence

As the United States industrialized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, violent

confrontations between workers and management became an increasingly common

phenomenon. The causes of this perennial violence were manifold. Of course, the

workplace itself was the scene of e v eryday violence as machines, mines, and danger-

ous materials killed, maimed, and injured tens of thousands of workers. Workers in

hazardous occupations valorized a rough masculinity that often intoned the threat

of violence. Accustomed to the perquisites of class and power, employers perceived

workers as mere obstacles to their industrial dreams. A national sense of crisis over

the racial, religious, and ideological threat posed by millions of New Immigrants

tended to dehumanize workers and legitimize authoritarian and violent measures to

control the workplace. Finally, until the 1930s at least, industrial capitalism remained

relativ ely unregulated, and state and federal gov ernments, generally inclined to favor

capital over labor, tended to foster an environment in which employers and workers

felt that violence was a rational choice to defend or advance their interests.

Within a decade of the end of the Civil War, U.S. industry had made tremen-

dous strides, and a rising group of powerful capitalists who had horizontally and

714 Ludlow Massacre (1914)

vertically integrated industriesengagedincutthroatcompetitiontoextendtheir

mastery. Industrial violence followed close on their heels. Most costs of doing

business were relatively ﬁxed, and when boom and bust cycles compelled ambi-

tious employers to cut costs to the bone to survive or expand, wages, and the

unions that defended them, often became targets. This occurred in Pennsylvania’s

anthracite region in 1875, when Franklin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia

and Reading Railroad, cut the wages of coal miners. The largely Irish workforce

went on strike. The strike lasted ﬁve months and was marked by violence on

both sides. Miners, mi ne bosses, a nd strikebreakers beat and killed each other

and miners derailed trains, sabotaged machinery, and burned down mine build-

ings. According to Gowen, a terrorist orga nization cal led the Molly Maguires,

a secret organization of Irish Catholic coal miners, engage d in arson, beatings,

and murder. Gowen effectively shifted the blame for violence onto his work-

force by invoking the specter of terror, and over the next two years, 30 accused

Mollies were hanged.

In the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, wave upon wave of industrial violence followed,

typically cresting during one of the periodic economic busts brought on by the ruin-

ous Gilded Age business cycle. In 1877, the Great Uprising, the closest the United

States has come to experiencing a national s trike, brought railroads across the

nation to a ha lt, literally destroyed the industrial heart of Pittsburgh, resulted in

dozens of deaths and injuries, and brought o ut the armed force of the federal

government on the side of business. In the 1880s, led by the Knights of Labor and

an insurgent a narchist movement, hundreds of thousands of workers fought for

the eight-hour day, among other things, only to have their hopes dashed by the par-

oxysms of violence leading up to the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. In the

1892 Homestead Strike, hundreds of hired Pinkerton guards and miners fought a

pitched battle, and in the American West, antagonized by mine guards, Pinkerton

and Baldwin Felts agents, and state militias, the president of the radical union the

Western Federation of M iners advocated armed self-defens e and encouraged the

thousands of members of the union to purchase modern riﬂes.

Violent confrontation continued into the 20th century—Lawrence, Ludlow, the

West Virginia Mine Wars, Columbine, and the Teamsters, seamen’s, and streetcar

strikes of the Great Depression—and has yet to have disappeared completely from

the industrial landscape. Nevertheless, though with signiﬁcant exceptions, the fre-

quency, gravity, and intensity of industri al violence signiﬁcantly diminished after

the 1930s. With the legislatio n of the New Deal Era—section 7a of the National

Industrial Recovery Act and later the Wagner Labor Relations Act—the formation

of powerful new labor organizations like the Committee on Industrial Organiza-

tions, and the evolution of the post–World War II labor-management accord, the

rules of industrial capitalism, fair or not, were increasingly recognized by b oth

Ludlow Massacre (1914) 715