One of the bloodiest labor conflicts that shook the early twentieth-century American West, the Ludlow Massacre marked the end of Colorado's "thirty years' war." While relations between coal miners and mining corporations in Colorado had been poor for more than a decade, the direct origins of this event were in the United Mine Workers' organizing efforts, begun in the fall of 1913. The refusal of John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and several smaller mine operators to recognize the budding union sparked a strike by more than eight thousand miners in September 1913. Evicted from company-owned housing, the striking miners, comprised mostly of Slavic, Greek, and Italian immigrants, formed their own tent colony. Workers demanded union recognition, a 10 percent wage increase, and rigorous enforcement of existing state laws, especially the eight-hour day. Over the next several months sporadic violence between miners and the state militia marred the coalfields. Despite federal mediation efforts, John D. Rockefeller Jr. refused to budge and followed the unfolding conflict from his New York office some two thousand miles way.
On 20 April 1914 a day-long gun battle broke out between the state militia and miners, culminating in an attack on the tent colony that took the lives of ten male strikers and a child. The militia and local deputies eventually overran the camp and torched it. When the smoke cleared two women and eleven children were found suffocated in a dugout beneath a burned tent. Over the next several days the miners retaliated by burning mining operation buildings and confronting company guards. By the end of April, President Woodrow Wilson ordered federal troops to Ludlow and began more than six months of unsuccessful mediation before striking miners called off the strike. The Ludlow Massacre engendered a great deal of debate about the deteriorating relations between capital and labor on the eve of World War I.
Workers throughout the nation rallied to the cry of Ludlow, while the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations undertook an extensive investigation of the event. One long-term impact of the massacre was Rockefeller's decision to hire labor experts to devise an employee representation plan. By the early 1920s more than a million American workers belonged to such company unions.
Bibliography
Gitelman, H. M. Legacy of the Ludlow Massacre: A Chapter in American Industrial Relations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.
McGovern, George S., and Leonard F. Guttridge. The Great Coalfield War. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1996.
Encyclopedia of American History Copyright © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
