In the spring of 1914, members of the Colorado National Guard machine-gunned and set fire to tents in Ludlow, Colorado, where striking miners were living with their families. Five miners, two miners’ wives, and twelve children died, most of them by suffocation while hiding in a cellar under a burning tent. The miners fought back, and, all told, more than seventy-five people were killed in the course of the dispute, roughly as many on the mine owners’ side as on the strikers’. In his new book, “Killing for Coal” (Harvard; $29.95), Thomas G. Andrews calls it the deadliest labor struggle in American history.
The earliest histories of the massacre were sponsored by unions, and historians since have followed their lead in seeing it as an episode in the long conflict between capital and labor. “The Bloodstained Lesson” was the title of the final chapter of George S. McGovern’s solid and thoughtful account, co-written with Leonard F. Guttridge and released in 1972, during McGovern’s Presidential campaign. In 1982, Zeese Papanikolas memorialized the story of Louis Tikas, a Greek-American union leader killed at Ludlow, in a rhapsodic telling intended as a corrective to the tendency of biographies to focus on public figures. In 2007, in a lively journalistic account, “Blood Passion” (Rutgers; $19.95), Scott Martelle called the strikers “freedom fighters” and said that they “helped crumble an egregious system of political corruption.”
Andrews’s innovation is to wonder whether “energy systems” might provide a better explanation than ideology. He therefore takes a long view of the story—so long that he goes back to the Cretaceous to explain the formation of coal. Andrews’s account—less moral and more mineral than the standard one—runs something like this: Ancient sun-energy is stored beneath the earth. Because industrial capitalism wants it, the force exerted to draw it out of the ground is high, and, because there is an abundance of unskilled workers, the counterforce that miners are able to apply in their own defense is low. Or so the capitalists calculate from the laws of supply and demand. But it turns out that there is another force to reckon with: the miners’ go-for-broke willingness to fight. The capitalists expect a smooth hoovering up of hydrocarbons and workers’ rights, but instead violence explodes. People discover, to their dismay, that the desire to exploit an energy resource as cheaply as possible can lead to something like war.
About seventy million years ago, when the Rocky Mountains were still rising out of the sea, coastal swamps covered much of present-day southern Colorado. Ferns and cycads budded, died, and rotted, adding another inch of peat to the swamp floor every forty years or so, until, after a few eons, the peat in some places was hundreds of feet deep. The peat was buried under sediment, and then for millennia it was dried, squeezed, and cooked underground. At last it became coal, dark and flammable. Twists in the earth shoved some of it back to the surface, and, in 1867, these outcroppings attracted the attention of a survey team planning the route of the Kansas-Pacific Railroad, led by a man named William Jackson Palmer.
At the time, Andrews writes, the people of Colorado were “suffering through nothing short of an energy crisis.” Rivers in the plains were too placid for mill wheels; those in the mountains too violent. Dry, infertile soil limited agriculture, and timber was rare. Palmer saw a way for the state to grow, and for a company to accrue such wealth that “there never would be any strikes or hard feelings among the laborers towards the capitalists.” It didn’t quite work out that way, but Palmer did become the largest coal-mine operator in the region, and soon Colorado was living off coal. It was burned to fire bricks, refine sugar, and bake bread, and it powered engines that pumped water, drove tractors, and ground flour. Coal oil was burned in smudge pots to save peaches from spring frost; coal gas lit the street lamps of Denver, Leadville, Pueblo, and Colorado Springs; and coal-generated electricity lit more than thirteen thousand bulbs decorating the façade of the Denver Gas & Electric Company’s headquarters. “We cannot exist without it,” Denver’s Chamber of Commerce declared, in 1907. A Denver beekeeper complained of losing eight or nine colonies of bees within a month because flowers were “continually coated with a deposit from the smoke,” but in those days smoke was welcomed as a sign of prosperity, especially by those with the means to move to suburbs upwind. The supply of coal never failed for long in cities like Denver and Pueblo, which were built at railroad junctions, giving them purchasing options. Nonetheless, politicians were careful to keep mine operators happy, and let them get away with land fraud, pollution, unsafe work conditions, and price gouging.
Oddly, in a phenomenon that Andrews calls “the paradox of coal,” one of the few things unchanged by the fossil-fuel revolution was the way that fuel itself was mined. First, a worker undermined a chunk of coal by chipping away at the foot of it with his pick, creating a gap called a kerf. Then he drilled holes, filled them with explosives, and detonated. Finally, he loaded the coal loosened by the blast onto a car. Except for the explosives, the only energy deployed was the miner’s own. An attempt at mechanization, in 1881, failed; the machines kept breaking down and miners hated them so much that they deserted. For decades, companies simply hired more men. Coal made this easy to do, because it had boosted population and efficiency—so that everywhere there were more people and less work—and had also made travel cheaper than ever before. By the eighteen-nineties, three or four thousand tons of coal could push a steamer across the Atlantic in just six days, and a ticket aboard cost only thirty dollars. Between 1870 and 1910, the non-indigenous population of Colorado grew twentyfold. Unskilled workers from Italy, Greece, Japan, the doddering Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Spanish-speaking New Mexico were hired for their muscles and their willingness to risk their lives. As an individual, a miner was expendable, and, to prevent unionizing, mine operators kept their workforce polyglot. In some Colorado counties, democracy was nearly vestigial. Industrialization was gradually reproducing the conditions of feudalism.
In 1892, Palmer’s company merged with another to become the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (C.F. & I.), which was run by a former bookkeeper, John C. Osgood. Osgood hated unions, glared at photographers, and spent two and a half million dollars on a Tudor manor complete with a game park. Teddy Roosevelt visited and shot game from the manor’s portico. Soon after taking over, Osgood noticed a revealing difference between so-called open camps, which had public roads and at least a modicum of town government, and closed ones, where miners lived on company property behind a fence that the boss could shut. During a strike in 1894, it became apparent that unions had more success recruiting at open camps. In response, Osgood built his workforce tidy concrete-and-wood houses (from which the disobedient could be evicted on short notice) and started a Sociological Department, which ran kindergartens, a hospital, and night schools, hosted minstrel shows, screened films, and published a weekly magazine. Miners lodged in cottages with pseudo-Swiss façades and shared a clubhouse, with a library. At many company stores, prices were competitive, and meat was kept cheap, for the sake of miners’ strength.
But the miners weren’t grateful. Some persisted in living in open camps, in houses improvised out of adobe or recycled packing crates. They called the company store a “pluck me,” because they went into debt there spending scrip, the paper advances against future earnings that the company issued between monthly paydays. A song of the time ran:
Monop’ly keeps grasping
For more and still more;
They will soon own the earth,
Through the company store.
Miners feared the company’s power. Those who criticized the company were often sent “down the canyon” (blacklisted) or “kangarooed” (beaten up). On Election Day, the company supervised voting, and when the Republican Party needed a victory one sheriff obliged by counting as voters the heads of passing sheep. “I am king of this county,” he once boasted. Whenever a miner died in an accident, the undersheriff asked the mine superintendent whom to put on the coroner’s jury. In the decade leading up to the Ludlow massacre, just one mining fatality in Huerfano County was blamed on management, leaving payments to widows and orphans in the other eighty-nine cases to the company’s discretion.
It was only in the mine itself that miners found a measure of autonomy. Underground, a mine was laid out in a grid, like a Western town, and, along the side streets, miners were given “rooms.” Paid by the ton, miners rarely saw their bosses underground. They owned their tools and chose their hours. As they picked, drilled, and blasted, they saw in the coal around them imprints of shells and seaweed and fossils of palms and breadfruit trees. “The miners’ craft,” Andrews writes, “thus bound its practitioners to a past when the dark seams in which they toiled had been teeming swamplands.” The work was dangerous. Explosions made headlines, but falling rocks killed more miners, who could also be poisoned by underground gases, which they variously named stinkdamp, blackdamp, firedamp, and afterdamp. For their protection, Colorado miners sometimes made pets of mice, who were sensitive to vibrations and fumes before humans were able to notice them. Still, mining deaths in Colorado were twice the national average. The cause was partly political—the state mine inspector’s office was understaffed—and partly geological: the Rockies, in their chaotic rising, had left fractures in rock strata, which increased the chance of a roof collapse underground. Furthermore, at Colorado’s high elevation, the air was drier and therefore more conducive to spontaneous coal-dust explosions.
In Colorado, if a boss put a miner in a spot encumbered with rock, the miner had to cart it away at his own expense. If a ceiling looked unstable, he had to timber it, and his only payment was his own improved safety. “All such work was called ‘dead-work,’ ” Upton Sinclair explained in his 1917 novel, “King Coal,” “and it was the cause of unceasing war.” Another point of contention was the weighing of a miner’s car. The scales were widely believed to be rigged, but operators often refused to allow checkweighmen, so a miner had to depend on the company’s good faith. Nonetheless, the miner’s independence, however notional, was precious to him. “Each day I worked I learned something,” an old-timer recalled in an early-twentieth-century interview. “I learned to tell the boss to kiss it.”
A spell of incautious spending at the turn of the century left C.F. & I. unable to pay bills and vulnerable to takeover. In 1902, the New York investor John D. Rockefeller, Sr., bought six million dollars’ worth of its stocks and bonds. In 1903, he bought a little more and accepted Osgood’s resignation.
In 1907, to stanch C.F. & I.’s losses, Rockefeller assigned it a minder. LaMont M. Bowers was old school; he scorned “muckrakers, labor disturbers and the milk and water preachers and professors.” Upon arrival in Colorado, he shortened lunch breaks in the office, pruned the Sociological Department until miners’ living standards fell, and even reduced bribes to politicians. The company turned profitable. In 1910, when an explosion killed seventy-nine miners and the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics accused C.F. & I. of “cold-blooded barbarism” in its neglect of safety measures, Bowers assured his superiors in New York that the miners would soon “get over the excitement.” In reply, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to whom his aging father was ceding control, merely asked why C.F. & I. wasn’t growing faster. The younger Rockefeller had recently resigned from the board of Standard Oil to devote his energy to philanthropy. He was particularly concerned about fallen women.
In 1913, the United Mine Workers, a national union, decided to organize in southern Colorado. They expected a fight, and recruited surreptitiously. To undercut the union’s appeal, C.F. & I. raised pay ten per cent, started making payments twice a month, abolished scrip, limited the workday to eight hours, agreed to allow checkweighmen, and promised never again to force anyone to shop at the company store. “This keeps them in line and reasonably happy,” Bowers wrote to New York, in justification of his generosity. Rockefeller was later to claim that these concessions proved how humane his company had been, but most were requirements under Colorado state law. With less publicity, C.F. & I. hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, a firm whose agents had recently turned a machine gun on striking miners in West Virginia. More than three hundred Baldwin-Felts agents were quickly named sheriff ’s deputies. The union responded by having its organizers commissioned as game wardens, so that they, too, would be armed if the government suspended the right of ordinary citizens to carry guns.
In September, the prominent campaigner Mother Jones warned miners, “If you are too cowardly to fight there are enough women in this country to come in and beat the hell out of you.” Adapting the Civil War song “Battle Cry of Freedom,” the union members sang “We’re Coming, Colorado”—
The union forever, hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Down with the Baldwins, up with the law;
For we’re coming, Colorado, we’re coming all the way,
Shouting the battle cry of union
—and voted to strike. A week later, in near-freezing rain, miners collected their tools and left the closed camps for land rented by the union, which had promised to provide tents, many of which had not yet arrived. Sanitation trenches were dug, and wooden floors were laid down. The largest colony, near a railroad depot in Ludlow, housed about twelve hundred miners and family members. It was nicknamed White City, for the color of its tents and in homage to the white buildings at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and it even had a baseball diamond. To supplement the groceries they were able to buy on their modest union benefit, strikers fished, hunted rabbits, and kept chickens. A former boxer named John R. Lawson led the strike, and the Ludlow camp’s unofficial mayor was Louis Tikas, who had run a coffeehouse in Denver and as a boy in Crete had trained cats and birds to play together peacefully.
Even before the strike, union men and detectives had begun shooting at each other. Local hardware stores sold out of guns, ammunition, and dynamite. A union organizer ordered rifles wholesale. The detectives imported machine guns from West Virginia and mounted one on a car armored with plates of steel, which strikers dubbed the Death Special. The coal companies called for the National Guard to intervene, no doubt expecting the guardsmen to break the strike, but the governor, a former rancher, had been elected with labor support, and he hesitated, not least because the state was out of money. At the end of October, a few miners and a few mine guards died in a burst of skirmishing, much of it led, on the mine operators’ side, by Karl Linderfelt, a sometime National Guardsman who already considered himself mobilized. After the strikers forced him to retreat, Linderfelt telegraphed to Denver, “The only solution is troops.” The governor gave in.
Linderfelt, one of the catalysts of the Ludlow tragedy, is a mysterious figure. Martelle reports that he grew up in Milwaukee, where his father taught classics, wrote a book on the Esperanto-like universal language Volapük, and was caught embezzling from the city library. After his father fled to Paris, Linderfelt dropped out of prep school, turned gold miner, and fought in the Philippine-American War, where he and others in the militia may have acquired a taste for torture and mutilation. (The war, in McGovern’s judgment, “may have been Vietnam’s closest parallel in U.S. military history.”) Such a taste might explain some of the offenses Linderfelt and his men committed in Colorado. On one occasion, they lined a group of strikers up against a wall and told them they were going to face a firing squad. Another time, when an officer’s horse tripped on a piece of barbed wire, Linderfelt struck a boy who happened to be nearby and shouted, “I am Jesus Christ, and all these men on horses are Jesus Christ and we have got to be obeyed.” Other militiamen ordered strikers to dig what they told them were their own graves and invited them to write farewell letters to their families. A sick man was kept in a cold cell for three weeks—he died soon afterward—and a wounded one was so deprived of sleep that he told his guard, “I feel lots better take me out and shoot me.”
Once the National Guard was deployed, its general claimed the power of martial law, holding prisoners incommunicado, setting up a military commission to review detentions, and threatening to jail a local district attorney if he interfered. According to Papanikolas, one union organizer took advantage of his indefinite incarceration to read “The Pickwick Papers,” “The Three Musketeers,” and “Les Misérables.” Mother Jones took advantage of hers to win publicity, and, when a thousand women protested her detention by marching through the city of Trinidad, the general, who in peacetime served Denver as an ophthalmologist, panicked. On horseback, he kicked a sixteen-year-old girl; then he fell off his mount and in revenge cried out, “Ride down the women!”—an order that led his cavalry to slash with sabres at a square full of women. One was cut on the face, another on her hands, and a third had an ear partly severed.
The militiamen, meanwhile, weren’t being paid, because the state auditor sympathized with the union and was holding up funds. As a result, citizen volunteers began to be replaced in the militia by guards and detectives salaried by the mine operators. Though the Colorado National Guard had at first been welcomed by the strikers and even played baseball with them, the militiamen gradually sided more and more openly with the mine operators. A final break came in March, 1914. The corpse of a strikebreaker—either a victim of bludgeoning or a drunk who fell on the railroad tracks, depending on who was asked—was found near the tent colony of Forbes, and guardsmen arrested the Forbes men and tore the tents down. Despite the mounting violence, mine operators refused even to meet with union representatives, and Congress summoned the younger Rockefeller to Washington to explain the impasse. Rockefeller testified that the miners were striking against their will, coerced by outside agitators, and that his company was fighting for the workers’ freedom. “And you would do that if that costs all your property and kills all your employees?” a congressman asked. “It is a great principle,” Rockefeller replied.
While Congress was asking questions, southern Colorado grew deceptively peaceful, and by mid-April the governor had withdrawn all but two National Guard companies, one of which was Linderfelt’s.
On the morning of April 20th, the day after Orthodox Easter, four guardsmen interrupted Louis Tikas as he was looking at photo postcards in the tent of Pearl Jolly, a married woman he may have been romancing. The soldiers had heard that a man was being held in the Ludlow colony against his will. Tikas irritably denied the charge but agreed to walk to the depot to talk it over. Put on guard by Tikas’s prickliness, the officer in command there ordered a machine gun to the top of a hill that overlooked the tents. Some men from the camp saw the gun and saw horsemen galloping between the hill and the depot, took their rifles, and slipped into a sand cut along railroad tracks just south of the colony. As Tikas left the depot, he heard three explosions—Linderfelt said later that he detonated them as a signal, to call for reinforcements—and shooting broke out between the strikers and the militia. Some women ran with their children to a dry arroyo to the north, others to a pump station near the railroad tracks. But a number of women and children descended into pits that had been dug beneath their tents months before, soon after they moved to the colony. They were, after all, mining people; they felt secure underground.
The gunfire lasted all day. The militia shot dogs and chickens. One militiaman, one bystander, and several strikers fell. An eleven-year-old boy was picked off when he and his parents emerged from their cellar during an apparent lull. When a private car was commandeered to transport a machine gun, one of the civilians in it overheard an order “to drive everyone out and burn the colony.” And, just after seven o’clock, the brakeman of a southbound train passing the colony saw a man in uniform setting fire to a tent. Andrews considers the arson “a matter of speculation,” but most historians fault the guards for the fire, and all witnesses agreed that the camp was soon ablaze. Around the time that the fire started, Linderfelt led a charge into the camp. (His men were seen plundering an accordion, a sewing machine, a suitcase, an umbrella, and a bicycle.) Only once they had penetrated the camp, Linderfelt later claimed, did he realize that people were hiding in the pits beneath their tents. He also claimed that his men tried bravely to rescue them, but, if so, they never looked in the cellar of tent No. 58, where four women and eleven children had taken refuge. “The tent over us caught fire and blazed up big and the smoke commenced to come down on top of us,” a survivor later recalled. “The bigger children tried to climb up out of the cellar, and they took hold of the burning floor, and their little fingers were burned and they fell back on top of us.” The women and children lapsed into unconsciousness. One woman came to and escaped the pit later that night; another got out the next morning, when soldiers were again seen setting fire to the tents. Smoke suffocated the rest.
Shortly after Linderfelt entered the camp, Tikas and two other strikers were brought before him as captives. Linderfelt cracked his rifle over Tikas’s head so hard that he exposed bone in his skull and snapped the rifle’s stock. A sergeant later told a military investigator under oath that Linderfelt then ordered Tikas’s execution, though the charge was never proved. Several historians believe that militiamen told Tikas and his friends to run and then shot them in the back. The bodies lay exposed for three days.
For a week and a half, strikers took revenge. Crying “Remember Ludlow!” they dynamited, looted, burned, and otherwise destroyed at least half a dozen mines. By the time federal troops arrived, they had more or less evened the kill.
In the month following the massacre, Upton Sinclair sent the Ludlow women and children on a tour that reached Woodrow Wilson’s White House, but the union gave up the strike in December, financially exhausted. Rockefeller, whom the violence had at last embarrassed, hired a publicist to spin the disaster and a labor-relations specialist to fix it. Bowers was quietly retired. “My hope is that I am progressing,” Rockefeller told a federal commission in January, 1915. He intended to let workers elect representatives within C.F. & I. to raise grievances with management. The federal commission condemned the plan for a company union as “an instance of that handing down of favors in which autocrats have always delighted,” but that fall Rockefeller danced with coal miners’ wives in a schoolroom in southern Colorado, and he seemed to have prevailed.
The legacy of Ludlow is not easy to discern. Andrews notes that, in the aftermath, neither side cared to remember the workers’ armed rebellion. The union seems to have preferred to imagine its martyrs pure, and the mine owners may have been reluctant to spread the news that workers had fought back with bullets and torches and got away with it. But one can perhaps still see traces of the conflict in today’s political rhetoric. One of the few whom Rockefeller failed to charm was the union leader John Lawson, who caricatured the philanthropist as offering “health for China, a refuge for birds, food for the Belgians, pensions for New York widows, university training for the elect, and never a thought of a dollar for the thousands of men, women, and children who starved in Colorado.” Here, perhaps, is the real-life antecedent of the phony-hearted liberal élitist who stalks the prose of right-wing pundits today. And Ludlow may also be the source of this figure’s complement, the worker whose only political instinct is to distrust government. At Ludlow, after all, strikers tied red bandannas around their throats for a uniform and were called rednecks. For good reason, they were wary of the state—it was shooting at them.
In the end, though, government was the redneck’s ally and even his salvation. Without the intervention of federal troops, trusted by both sides to behave neutrally, the coal war would almost certainly have lasted longer and taken even more lives. It was a federal bureaucrat who praised the miners’ effort as “a strike of the twentieth century against the tenth-century mental attitude.” After a journalist was murdered for trying to expose the Ludlow sheriff ’s political corruptions, a federal district attorney called it “a political killing,” and the Colorado Supreme Court deposed the sheriff, writing of his vote rigging that “no more fraudulent and infamous prostitution of the ballot is conceivable.”
In other words, the lesson of Ludlow may be that, in the pursuit of energy and in combats between capital and labor, there is one more force to reckon with. When a representative democracy wins people’s trust, it is capable of moderating disputes among corporations, the market, and the individual. Time suggests that nothing else can take its place, though from time to time corporations have offered to do so. According to Andrews, most of the open camps of southern Colorado still survive and have grown into towns, though some are struggling. But you can’t even find the ruins of most of the company-owned closed camps without a good map. ♦