Ludlow Massacre - National Guard Attacks Striking Miners, Kills 21 Including Women and Children

Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colony of approximately 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914, killing approximately 21 people, primarily miners’ wives and children. The massacre was the seminal event of the 1913-1914 Colorado Coalfield War, which began with a United Mine Workers of America general strike against poor labor conditions in CF&I’s southern Colorado coal mines. As a result of the strike, coal miners and their families were evicted from company housing and forced to establish a tent colony. Colorado Governor Elias M. Ammons called in the National Guard on October 28, 1913. Initially the Guard’s appearance calmed the situation, but Guard leaders’ sympathies lay with company management, and Adjutant-General John Chase imposed a harsh regime.

On Sunday, April 19, 1914, the National Guard encircled the Ludlow camp and deployed a machine gun on a bluff overlooking the strikers. The face-off raged for 14 hours, during which the miners’ tent colony was pelted with machine gun fire and ultimately torched by the state militia. Among the dead were two women and 11 children who suffocated in a pit they had dug under their tent. Bands of armed miners retaliated by attacking dozens of anti-union establishments over ten days, destroying property and engaging in skirmishes with the Guard along a 225-mile front. The fighting ended only after President Woodrow Wilson sent in federal troops who disarmed both sides. The United Mine Workers finally ran out of money and called off the strike on December 10, 1914, without achieving recognition or meeting strikers’ demands.

Historian Thomas G. Andrews declared it the “deadliest strike in the history of the United States,” while Howard Zinn described it as “the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history.” John D. Rockefeller Jr., a part-owner of CF&I who had recently appeared before Congress on the strikes, was widely blamed for orchestrating the massacre. The Ludlow Massacre exemplifies the brutal lengths to which corporate interests and state power would go to crush labor organizing—a pattern of violent repression that characterized the Progressive Era and would continue throughout the twentieth century as corporations refined their union-busting techniques.