Photo courtesy United Mine Workers of America
100 years ago today, a gunfight broke out between members of the Colorado National Guard and striking coal miners employed by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company near Trinidad, Colorado. During the fighting in and around a tent encampment of striking miners, eleven children and two women were killed when the tent above a pit they were taking shelter from the fighting in was set on fire. This event became known as the Ludlow Massacre, and shocked the nation into a greater awareness of the poor working conditions and exploitative "company town" economic predation faced by coal miners.
This event is being widely commemorated on its 100th anniversary today, and we'll update with coverage.
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Ammons might not have been Colorado's worst governor, but J.D. Rockefeller was probably Colorado's worst business owner.
I suppose ordering the company goons to attack a camp full of unarmed civilian families is a bit too obvious and immediate to fit into modern conservative business practices. Your typical 1% CEO likes things a bit more sanitary and removed, with plausible deniability.
Included in this Huerfano County History page, by Louise Adams and Nancy Christofferson, are some contemporary news accounts of the "Ludlow Tragedy", by the local news outlets: the Pueblo Indicator, the Akron Weekly Pioneer Press, the Routt County Sentinel, and the Yuma Pioneer. Some Pueblo Chieftain reporting on Ludlow from 2007-2009 is interesting – apparently, Governor Ritter got disrespected by union folks when he visited Pueblo in 2009.
Oh there were plenty just as bad. The only thing that forced big business owners to make any concessions to simple human decency was organized labor. Reagan convincing Joe Six Pack that the Princes of Wall Street were their friends who were in their corner and poor people on welfare, though not receiving nearly as much welfare as the princes, were their enemies was a piece of flim flam that wouldn't have worked anywhere else in the modern industrial world.
Pendergast has a good piece in Westword now about Ludlow. One of several stains on CO history
Thanks for the reminder. Still need to read that article.