Ludlow: Playing Hardball in 1913

...At a ball game on Sunday between two teams of strikers the militia interfered, preventing the game; the miners resented, and the militia—with a sneer and a laugh—fired the machine guns directly into the tents, knowing at the time that the strikers' wives and children were in them...
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I just happened to looking through my bookshelf the other night and happened to pull out a book titled "Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's MOTHER EARTH (1906-1918." Thumbing through the book I ran across a piece titled "Remember Ludlow!" by Julia May Courtney. By coincidence the evening was April 20 and the story told about the Ludlow, Colorado massacre on April 20, 1913. Fifty-five women and children died in the attack by federal militia.

Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it titled "Ludlow Massacre." It is a haunting song that will melt the hardest heart with lyrics like...

It was early springtime when the strike was on,
They drove us miners out of doors,
Out from the houses that the Company owned,
We moved into tents up at old Ludlow.
...
You struck a match and in the blaze that started,
You pulled the triggers of your Gatling guns,
I made a run for the children but the fire wall stopped me.
Thirteen children died from your guns.
...
We took some cement and walled that cave up,
Where you killed these thirteen children inside,
I said, "God bless the Mine Workers' Union,"
And then I hung my head and cried.
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Below are some excerpts from Remember Ludlow...

"...And the climax came when the first spring winds blew over the hills and the snows melted from the mountain sides. On the 20th of April the cry was heard "Remember Ludlow!"—the battle cry that every workingman in Colorado and in America will not forget. For on that day the men of the tent colony were shot in the back by soft-nosed bullets, and their women and children were offered in burning sacrifice on the field of Ludlow.

The militia had trained the machine guns on the miners' tent colony. At a ball game on Sunday between two teams of strikers the militia interfered, preventing the game; the miners resented, and the militia—with a sneer and a laugh—fired the machine guns directly into the tents, knowing at the time that the strikers' wives and children were in them. Charging the camp, they fired the two largest buildings—the strikers' stores— and going from tent to tent, poured oil on the flimsy structures, setting fire to them.

From the blazing tents rushed the women and children, only to be beaten back into the fire by the rain of bullets from the militia. The men rushed to the assistance of their families; and as they did so, they were dropped as the whirring messengers of death sped surely to the mark. Louis Tikas, leader of the Greek colony, fell a victim to the mine guards' fiendishness, being first clubbed, then shot in the back while he was their prisoner. Fifty-two bullets riddled his body.

Into the cellars—the pits of hell under the blazing tents—crept the women and children, less fearful of the smoke and flames than of the nameless horror of spitting bullets. One man counted the bodies of nine children, taken from one ashy pit, their tiny fingers burned away as they held to the edge in their struggle to escape. As the smoke ruins disclosed the charred and suffocated bodies of the victims of the holocaust, thugs in State uniform hacked at the lifeless forms, in some instances nearly cutting off heads and limbs to show their contempt for the strikers.

Fifty-five women and children perished in the fire of the Ludlow tent colony. Relief parties carrying the Red Cross flag were driven back by the gunmen, and for twenty-four hours the bodies lay crisping in the ashes, while rescuers vainly tried to cross the firing line. And the Militiamen and gunmen when the miners petitioned "Czar Chase" and Governor Ammons for the right to erect their homes and live in them..."


I don't know what made me pull that book of the shelf and I don't know what made my eyes fall on the words "Remember Ludlow" on the 96th anniversary of this tragic event. That's just how life is sometimes...

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