Ludlow Massacre

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Coordinates: 37°20'21"N 104°35'02"W


Ruins of the Ludlow Colony in the aftermath of the massacre

Date: April 20, 1914
Location: Ludlow, Colorado, U.S.
37°20'21"N 104°35'02"W
Methods: Machine guns, fire
Resulted in: Tent colony burned, Tikas and roughly 20 other residents killed. Ten days of increased fighting followed by federal military intervention.
Parties:
United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)
Colorado Fuel and Iron Company;
Colorado National Guard
Hired Strikebreakers

The Ludlow Massacre was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colony of roughly 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Approximately 21 people, including miners' wives and children, were killed. John D. Rockefeller Jr., a part-owner of CF&I who had recently appeared before a United States congressional hearing on the strikes, was widely blamed for having orchestrated the massacre.

The massacre was the seminal event of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War, which began with a general United Mine Workers of America strike against poor labor conditions in CF&I's southern Colorado coal mines. The strike was organized by miners working for the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and Victor-American Fuel Company. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident during the Colorado Coalfield War and spurred a ten-day period of heightened violence throughout Colorado. In retaliation for the massacre at Ludlow, bands of armed miners attacked dozens of anti-union establishments, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 225-mile (362 km) front from Trinidad to Louisville. From the strike's beginning in September 1913 to intervention by federal soldiers under President Woodrow Wilson's orders on April 29, 1914, an estimated 69 to 199 people were killed during the strike. Historian Thomas G. Andrews declared it the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States."

The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Socialist historian Howard Zinn described it as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history". Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events. Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day. The Ludlow townsite and the adjacent location of the tent colony, 18 miles (29 km) northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, is now a ghost town. The massacre site is owned by the United Mine Workers of America, which erected a granite monument in memory of those who died that day. The Ludlow tent colony site was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009, and dedicated on June 28, 2009. Subsequent investigations immediately following the massacre and modern archeological efforts largely support some of the strikers' accounts of the event.

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