The Ludlow Massacre: A Classic Case of Class Warfare

[Adele Edisen]

Ludlow, Colorado, a small coal mining town among other similar surrounding towns, became the site of a horrendously violent action by the Rockefeller family, owners of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, along with other mine companies, employing 11,000 workers in the southern region of Colorado. These workers in a labor union, the United Mine Workers, wanted to be able to bargain collectively for better wages, against dangerous working conditions and feudal domination by having to live in towns completely dominated by the mining companies, being paid in company script and over-charged in company stores. When one of their union organizers was killed, they went on strike. Mother Jones, for whom a current magazine is named, came to help and to organize more workers. She was arrested and kept in a dungeon-like cell, and then expelled from the state of Colorado.

This strike began in September 1913, and ended in April of 1914 in the massacre in Ludlow, Colorado. When the strike began, the miners and their families were evicted from their shacks in town, but with the aid of the United Mine Workers Union, they built tent colonies and continued with their strike. The Rockefellers hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to try to break the strike. These strikebreakers drove through the tent colonies and raided the miners' tents with Gatling (machine) guns and rifles. Despite the killing of a number of miners, the others battled on, even stopping and driving back an armoured train carrying in more strikebreakers. The Colorado governor called out his National Guard to put down the resistance by the miners. The wages of the National Guard members were paid by the Rockefeller family.

The Guardsmen brought in strikebreakers under cover of night; they beat the miners; and rode horses through parades in towns by women who supported the miners' cause. Still the strike went on through the cold winter of 1913-1914. In April, two National Guard companies surrounded the largest tent colony which consisted of 1000 men, women, and children, outside of the town of Ludlow, and began firing upon the tents on April 20. The leader of he strikers, Lou Tikas, was lured to the hills to make a truce with the National Guard and was shot and killed by them. Women had dug beneath the floor boards of their tents to avoid the gunfire, but the National Gyardsmen came from the hills at night with torches and set fire to the tents. Thirteen people had been killed by gunfire. The next day the charred bodies of 11 children and two women were found under floor boards of one tent. This became known as the Ludlow Massacre.

The news spread quickly. Several hundred armed miners massed from outlying districts, cut telegraph and telephone wires, shot mine guards, destroyed mines. Soldiers refused commands to go to Ludlow; railroads refused to carry soldiers there and in general, there was chaos in the region. Five thousand people demonstrated in front of the State Capitol in Denver, demanding that the militiamen of the National Guard be indicted for the murder of the Ludlow victims. Pickets paraded in protest in front of the Rockefdeller office at 26 Broadway in New York City. The entire nation and foreign countries were enraged. The governor of Ciolorado called for federal troops to restore order, and President Woodrow Wilson complied, and things quieted down. However, the Unitesd Mine Workers Union did not win recognition. All told, sixty-six adults and children had died. Not one militiaman or mine guard was indicted for murder.

In March, a month before the Massacre in April, and after Woodrow Wilson's offer of federal mediation which was refused by the mine operators and owners, a congressional hearing on the matter was held. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was called to testify. Under questioning he repeated his father's principle of business that workers were privileged to work and they could not determine the conditions of that work, and hence, no arbitration was necessary.

A poem from that time captures the sentiments of many.

"As long as he has the cash to spend, it is easy the people to fool,
As long as he builds a cottage or two and teaches Sunday School,
The toadies fawn, and the lickspittles kneel,
He's worshipped by all the freaks,
While bodies of little children are burned 'neath Colorado peaks.
And this skulking, sanctimonious ass, this breeder of crime and hate,
With the greed of a jackal and a heart of brass,
Whines, "Nothing to arbitrate."

A large monument was created in the vicinity to commemorate the Ludlow Massacre.

Sources:

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn, 2003, Harper Collins
THE ROCKEFELLERS, An American Dynasty by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, 1976, Holt, Rinehart, Winston
Wikipedia, Google

[Peter Lemkin]

Thanks for this important piece of history never in US textbooks on US 'History' even at University level.... It is something I have known about and how mean Daddy Rockefeller was; how mean the whole system was to worker and union rights. They always wanted slaves and they all but have them again from the entire population. I used to live in Colorado and every now and then pass near the site of the massacre. Zinn's book is essential reading if you want to know what really happened in the USA....because all you've been told by TPTB are lies!

[Adele Edisen]

Thanks, Peter. I figured you would be one of those who would have known about this. Isn't it interesting that so many historic events in history, US and elsewhere, have been denied to the American people? No wonder that history is so badly understood because only ad hoc and coincidental explanations are provided, along with dates to be memorized, without much in the way of developing the significant causal mechanisms, for young students in most of American classrooms.

By the way, I first learned of this, and of the 1933-34 plot against FDR, from my father years ago. My school textbooks never mentioned either of these events. Howard Zinn's book is marvelous; everyone should read it.

Adele

[Peter Lemkin]

Thanks, Peter. I figured you would be one of those who would have known about this. Isn't it interesting that so many historic events in history, US and elsewhere, have been denied to the American people? No wonder that history is so badly understood because only ad hoc and coincidental explanations are provided, along with dates to be memorized, without much in the way of developing the significant causal mechanisms, for young students in most of American classrooms.

By the way, I first learned of this, and of the 1933-34 plot against FDR, from my father years ago. My school textbooks never mentioned either of these events. Howard Zinn's book is marvelous; everyone should read it.

Adele

Interesting Adele. It too was from my parents [I mentioned my mother was also named Adele] that I learned my real history. They were also political activists and regularly had democratic socialists and even some communists and political radicals and international rights people over to our house in Hempstead, Long Island, NY, outside of NYC. My uncle, who coined the word genocide and wrote the Genocide Convention at the UN was often over, as were UN delegates from many smaller nations. Our house was alive with international politics and people of all political views - from my Stalinist uncle [not the Genocide one] to right-winger neighbors. My mother went to the USSR with a women's peace delegation when Nixon was President - which got the FBI to question the neighborhood drunken lady next door as to why. My father was a Marshal on MLK's March on Washington and I went along. In their later years they both retired into activism - Iran-Contra, Haiti [where they volunteered at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital], Brazil for two years, and many other US 'battles' [of course they had FBI files when they died, I was able to obtain]. Growing up in that environment, there was no way not to learn both the true history of America and the World, as well as to 'grow up strange' - compared to many. Even the name Joe Hill was not a strange one in our home. Mother Jones. Sacco and Venzetti. The Shirtwaist Fire. You name it! They loved Zinn, as do you and I.

All of my grandparents had come to America in the late 1880-1890s to Ellis Island from Europe and Russia, Austrio-Hungary as refugees and we were very aware that the land had once held 20.000.000 Native Peoples who were mostly slaughtered for their land and the riches upon them - and that all the Europeans and others were not Native, but invaders, slaves of invaders or refugees of one kind or another.

Yes, Our True History has been whitewashed and snake oil history sold in its place. This is why I gravitated to the JFK case long ago. I felt even the 'thickest' of politically uninformed would easily see that the few who held the 'special election' on 11/22/63 were not acting in a democratic fashion - but as hidden tyrants; and that they tyranny ran deep before and after, but that the JFK case could be used to pry open the all-too-often closed minds of Americans who had been propagandized, brainwashed or just so comsumerized they couldn't think past the products, the lawn and the TV. Perhaps I was naive to think that the JFK case could unlock the genie of Truth for Americans. Perhaps not. We shall see. 911 could perhaps offer a more recent and further example to use as a 'lever'. I am a cynic, but I don't loose all hope and I don't stop trying! Personally, I have suffered for the 'work' on this. We all here know how it touched your life, Adele. It touched us all in some way. My family was glued to the TV that weekend when our 'World' changed by the 'secret election' and the deep political machinations of a few. We cried and grieved at JFKs death and when we watched Oswald murdered I remember the chill that filled our glances at one another - for we all sensed at that moment that the Truth was being buried deep - and that something was 'rotten in Denmark'.

Zinn is one of the best ways I know into the hidden and People's History of the USA. He has several books and there is a Voices of the People's History that is very good and there are movies and ebooks of it all available on the internet or in bookstores. He is, of course, not the only one who speaks well about the true hidden history, but is perhaps the best first stop for those who want an overview. I was saddened when he died not long ago. He was many times interviewed on Democracy Now and other documentaries.

I've blathered on long enough here. I'd just end with the mention that in my family and in my own mind class-warfare has been a constant theme. the Uber-rich have long thought they were ersatz kings and emperors and acted accordingly. They still do and they need to be knocked down to size and imprisoned for their crimes, IMHO.

Democracy is a nice idea, it is sad we don't have one - but we could - if we fight for one!

[Adele Edisen]

Dear Peter,
Thank you for that illuminating and interesting personal history. I was very touched by it because I was the child of two immigrants from Finland (before World War I), and I could relate to much of what you said. In the rural upstate New York area where I grew up and where my parents moved from NYC during the Great Depression, we had neighbors who were Finns, Russians, French, Spanish, Italian, and African-American. And, even one family, not very close, who lived in a very old farmhouse where Major Andre, a spy for the Brittish Army during the American Revolutionary War had spent the night when he was on the way to meet with the British Army and captured later before he reached his destination. Anyway, apparently, the family who lived in that old house were descendants of Matthew Brady who was the photographer famous for his photographs of the US Civil War. One of my grammar school teachers also was a descendant of Matthew Brady. My father had a good friend at work from South America, an Inca Indian, and his family would visit us often. That rural community was like a little United Nations, or a history/geography textbook.

Many immigrants came to the United States to escape oppression, persecution, and to find a better life. My mother sought an operatic career, after singing for Jan Sibelius, the Finnish composer. He encouraged her to go to America because cultural life in Finland under the Russian czars had little to offer. My father came because he had fought against the forces of Baron Von Mannerhein, a former Czarist General in the Russian Army who overthrew the first Finnish independent democratic government. My injured father had been captured and sentenced to be shot by firing squad, but he and his cell mate, also so sentenced, escaped the night before their execution and went to Sweden by fishing boat. From there, my father came to the United States and eventually became a US citizen after he met and married my mother. Incidentally, Baron Von Mannerhein was named the first Fascist in Europe by Historian Samuel Harper, the son of William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago.

Speaking of fascists, I recently found this two-part article submitted to DPF last year by Magda, under the topic "Black Operations". In case you have not seen it, here is the link. I am mentioned in Part 2. (Thanks, Magda)


https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...Lie-Part-1

Hank Albarelli's book will be available in April, and is titled "A Secret Order."

Thank you for your life story. I loved it.

Adele

[Peter Lemkin]

Adele, fascinating partial history of your early life. Ah, yes the Albarelli book - I forgot. I'll look for it when it is out! By the way, did you get my email recently, or did it get hidden in the 'spam' box?

We absolutely seem to agree on both the history of fascism in America and its current reign supreme [almost]. I and my family have been fighting its rise all of our lives. The Occupy Movement and what it may spin off or become is, in my mind, a last hope. Do see the interviews in the video here. [A Conversation with Lawrence Lessig and Chris Hedges] Hedges especially would have made Zinn proud.

NB - almost the entire book by Gross Friendly Fascism is on Google Books. I re-read much of it and while a few parts don't apply as well today as they did when written, much of it still is insightful analysis and an 'early call' of the coming danger.

[Adele Edisen]

Peter.

I just received my copy of Friendly Fascism two days ago and will start reading it. It is easier to read a printed book than anything on internet screen. I see it was published in 1980, over 30 years ago.

No, I did not receive your email. If you sent it to my old address, I had to change it because I changed everything to the U-verse. I don't know how to reach you by e-mail because I lost my old addfress book. Is there any way you could contact me - by postal mail? I am hesitant about giving out my email address on the internet? I'll check private messages here, first. I can reach you that way?

Thanks for the Lessig-Hedges interview link. I'll go there right now.

Adele

[Adele Edisen]

One more thing, Peter. Have you ever read THE IRON HEEL by Jack London? A futuristic novel written just after the turn of the Century over 100 years ago! Looks like his prediction might be happening...
Adele

[Peter Lemkin]

One more thing, Peter. Have you ever read THE IRON HEEL by Jack London? A futuristic novel written just after the turn of the Century over 100 years ago! Looks like his prediction might be happening...
Adele

No, Haven't read that book. Will try to find it. Yes, I agree, that only a page or two is comfortable on a computer screen. I also still am in love with the feel of a physical book. I'd be a rich man if I didn't love books so much! No, don't put your new email on here, of course, but either I could send you mine via PM or you could send me yours - or have a trusted friend who knows my email email me. Had to change everything in your universe, eh?! Such are the times we live in! Best. Peter