There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Blood was first spilled on August 16, 1913, when Gerald Lippiatt was slain by Baldwin-Felts detectives in a shoot-out in the town of Trinidad. Enraged miners retaliated by assassinating George Belcher, a Baldwin-Felts man suspected in the Lippiatt murder, and Bob Lee, an arrogant mine guard who claimed to have ridden with the outlaws Frank and Jesse James.

  The miners had set a September 23 deadline to receive the companies’ response to their demands, and when no word from CFI was forthcoming, they gathered in the Trinidad Opera House for a prestrike rally. Mother Jones, “The Miners’ Angel,” was there, her tiny gray head adorned as ever by a small bonnet with a flower attached. “For God’s sake, strike—strike until you win,”130 she told the assembly. “Don’t be afraid, boys; fear is the greatest curse we have. I was never anywhere yet that I feared anybody. I would rather be shot fighting for you than live in any palace in America.”131 Eleven thousand miners soon walked off the job, but as they and their families resided in company housing, they were immediately evicted and took up residence in a dozen tent colonies provided by the UMW on land the union had purchased, the colonies situated so that the strikers could keep an eye on the roads by which scabs might be brought in. The largest was near the village of Ludlow and held about thirteen hundred men, women, and children in rows of white canvas tents, which residents dubbed “The White City,” an allusion to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.132 Harassment from the mine guards and Baldwin-Felts agents began almost at once, the guards scanning the tent colonies at night with powerful searchlights and occasionally shooting machine-gun bursts into the air.

  Governor Ammons initially ignored the coal companies’ request for the Colorado National Guard; it was expensive for the state to maintain the Guard in the field, and Ammons owed his election in part to the backing of organized labor. But by late October he bowed to the wishes of the mine owners.133 At first the twelve hundred arriving militiamen were greeted warmly by the strikers, who assumed the militia would offer protection from the hated mine guards. The strikers challenged the soldiers to a game of baseball, and later organized a dance for the visitors. But the mine owners grew impatient with such camaraderie; they wanted the troops’ presence to discomfort the strikers and nudge them back to work. Because they had begun subsidizing the upkeep of the militia, the owners were in a position to urge Ammons to order the soldiers to assist the company guards in protecting scabs, a move certain to alienate the miners.134

  The soldiers’ actions on behalf of the scabs did prove infuriating, and as Reed reported, “the attitude of the militia [toward the tent colonists] suddenly changed.” Militia incursions into the colonies began on the pretext of finding guns; in some instances soldiers beat or arrested uncooperative strikers; one old miner was so roughly handled he was unable to walk back to his tent and instead had to crawl on his hands and knees. The only encouraging sign was that some of the scabs rebelled, claiming to have been lured to Colorado under false pretenses. These mutineers quietly took leave of their compound at night to seek refuge in the miners’ tent colonies.135

  Mother Jones, meanwhile, was beginning to grate on the nerves of Governor Ammons. In an age when reformers were commonly maligned as “agitators,” the octogenarian Jones wore the title proudly. In a West Virginia strike the year before, she had mobilized miners’ wives to join her with “mops, brooms, and dishpans” to chase after scabs, and had driven mine owners to distraction with her small army of “wild women.” She firmly believed the rightful place for strikers’ wives was at the barricades. Greedy capitalists created “ladies,” Jones liked to say, “but God Almighty made women.”136 During a streetcar strike in New York City, she’d once so thoroughly roused a female audience that the women, upon exiting the hall, attacked the first “scab” streetcar to come by, smashing its windows, assaulting the crew, and fighting with arresting police.

  Ammons moved to ban Jones from the southeast part of the state, although she made several attempts to defy his edict and was eventually jailed—first in the convent-run San Rafael Hospital outside Trinidad, later in a courthouse cellar. “The soldiers have the bayonets,” Jones complained, “and I have nothing but the Constitution.”137 On January 22, 1914, Brigadier General John Chase of the Colorado militia was the antagonist in the so-called Mother Jones Riot, which broke out in the town when Chase’s mounted troops confronted two hundred miners’ wives who were marching to support the imprisoned Jones. At one point Chase lost his grip on his horse’s pommel and fell to the ground; believing the women were laughing at him, he quickly remounted and in a rage ordered, “Ride them down! Ride them down!” The troops surged their horses forward and, amid screams of protest, attacked the fleeing women, prodding them with their sabers and bringing numerous complaints of injury, including a victim who claimed a part of her ear had been severed.138

  BY SPRING 1914 THE STRIKE WAS more than half a year old, and the ranks of the National Guard, due to state budget constraints, were drawn down to two hundred men. Meanwhile the militia’s leaders heard rumors that more guns were coming into the miners’ possession, and became newly vigilant. On the morning of April 20 a woman informed the troops that her husband was being held in the Ludlow tent colony against his will. The task of confronting the strikers over the woman’s husband—and possibly the secret stockpiling of guns—fell to two National Guard officers, Major Patrick C. Hamrock, a Denver saloon keeper and former Indian fighter; and Lieutenant Karl E. Linderfelt, who called the miners “wops” and had a reputation as a petty tyrant even among his own troops. Linderfelt had once struck a miner’s young son who had failed to respond to an order, screeching, “I am Jesus Christ, and all these men on horses are Jesus Christ, and we have got to be obeyed.”139

  Linderfelt and Hamrock sent word to the Ludlow colony that the missing man would have to be turned over, but when soldiers entered the colony Louis Tikas assured them he was not there. They warned Tikas that if the miners didn’t produce him soon, they would return in greater numbers and search more thoroughly. A short time later Major Hamrock contacted Tikas by telephone and ordered him to appear at the militia’s camp. Tikas suggested they meet halfway, at a small rail depot, which was agreeable to Hamrock. There Tikas spoke with Hamrock and Linderfelt. It was a few minutes before ten o’clock.

  As the group was talking, gunfire was heard from the direction of the colony, followed by a loud explosion. It has never been entirely clear what happened; either some of the miners were positioning themselves in anticipation of an attack, and the soldiers perceived their movements as aggressive, or the soldiers simply opened fire. Tikas immediately raced back to the colony, waving a white handkerchief as he urged men to return to their tents, while Hamrock telephoned his headquarters, saying, “Put the baby in the buggy and bring it along,” an order to move a machine gun onto the firing line.140 The shooting, once commenced, proved difficult to halt. The Guard, holding the high ground at a place called Water Tank Hill, forced the miners to retreat; the troops then descended among the tents, looting their contents and setting many afire. The miners had dug pits beneath some as hiding places, and in one, eleven women and children were discovered, dead from smoke inhalation. A total of twenty-two people died in the assault.

  Tikas, taken captive, was brought again before Lieutenant Linderfelt. They argued over whose actions had triggered the day’s bloodshed and Linderfelt, in a rage, struck Tikas over the head with the stock of his rifle, opening a vicious wound. Linderfelt later testified that Tikas “called me a name any man with red blood in his veins will not stand.”141 The lieutenant then left him in the custody of a militia sergeant and several soldiers. According to the militiamen, Tikas and another prisoner named James Fyler tried to escape, prompting them to open fire, killing both. The soldiers bent over Tikas’s corpse and shook its hand, mockingly “wishing him well in the next world.” An autopsy revealed that Tikas’s “scalp had been laid open by a blunt instrument” (the blow from Linderfelt) and that he’d been shot three times in
the back.142

  News of a massacre—the multiple deaths of innocent women and children in the Ludlow tent colony as well as the assassination of Louis Tikas—rippled through the nation’s headlines. UMW president John P. White was livid. “The State of Colorado,” he said, “has spent nearly a million dollars to aid the coal companies to drive the miners back to the mines and a vacillating governor has directed the use of the militia in such a manner and way as to bring discredit and disgrace upon the state. Scores of men, women and children have been murdered.”143 Even the conservative press was stunned, the Denver Express mourning the “mothers and babies crucified on the cross of human liberty” as “a burnt offering laid on the altar of Rockefeller’s Great God Greed.”144

  The Colorado Senate also reeled over the affair, its Progressive members blaming the coal operators who had waved away possible arbitration, the governor for taking money from the coal corporations for support of the militia, and the militia itself for being trigger-happy. State Senator W. C. Robinson offered a resolution finding Governor Ammons “incompetent to run the state government” and urging his immediate resignation. In a speech supporting his resolution he referred to Ammons as “The Great Squaw Catcher” for detaining Mother Jones, and suggested he take the name as his formal title upon leaving office.145 The Colorado Women’s Peace League, a group of Denver society women who sent a committee to view the carnage at Ludlow, insisted to Ammons that “Rockefeller gunmen and thugs” be “purged” at once from the militia and demanded the state take over the operation of the mines until a labor agreement could be obtained.146 The Socialist Appeal to Reason lampooned Rockefeller and his famous family’s supposed devotion to Christian ideals and institutions:

  … as long as he has the cash to spend, it’s 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 the bodies of little children are burned ’neath Colorado’s 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.”147

  John Reed and Max Eastman traveled to Ludlow shortly after the massacre, toured the devastated tent colony, and moved on to observe the shooting war that had erupted between miners and militia. A published “call to arms” had gone out, a message of vengeance for the Ludlow deaths, urging striking miners “to protect the people of Colorado against the murder and cremation of men, women, and children by armed assassins employed by the coal corporations.”148 For days, gunfire echoed in the hills and canyons surrounding remote mining villages around Ludlow. Along a 250-mile front, three thousand miners were under arms. They were soon joined by others. Passions were so heated and the impact of the strike on local commerce so extensive that after the burning of the Ludlow colony all manner of men—teachers, bankers, drivers—sought weapons and took to the hills, creating “one of the nearest approaches to civil war and revolution ever known in this country in connection with an industrial conflict.”149 Several mines were destroyed and seventy-five people perished during ten days of fighting. No doubt the only thing that kept the actual dimensions of this bitter struggle largely from public view (and memory) is that it occurred in such an out-of-the-way place.

  Governor Ammons vowed that his militia would put down the insurrection; however, the Colorado Women’s Peace League had other ideas. Leading a march by a thousand Denver women on the state capitol, they took up positions inside the building and vowed not to move until the governor alerted the White House. President Woodrow Wilson had followed news of the strike since the previous fall, when he had judged that “the situation was unraveling because the operators [had] tried to force tenth-century despotism onto a twentieth-century industrial situation.” He had urged the owners to accept the involvement of outside mediators.150 Now he hesitated to send federal troops to Colorado, wanting the state to resolve the crisis on its own; but the descriptions of the deaths at Ludlow and the advocacy of the Women’s Peace League had combined to force his hand, and he ordered seventeen hundred soldiers into the state. Concerned that Ammons was not taking seriously the responsibility to restore order, the president warned that “my constitutional obligations with regard to the maintenance of order in Colorado are not to be indefinitely continued by the inaction of the state legislature.”151

  Despite a coroner’s inquiry, a National Guard commission hearing, and a court-martial concerning the tent killings of the miners’ families and the murder of Louis Tikas, no one was ever successfully prosecuted for any of the violence at Ludlow. That the inquiries produced this result may have partly had to do with the fact that not a single striker’s testimony was heard in the latter two venues, their representatives having refused to take part in the proceedings because they were not open to the public. The most damning evidence at the coroner’s hearing came from a Colorado & Southern Railroad train crew, which witnessed the militiamen torching the miners’ tents and firing at a group of women and children who were attempting to use the passing train as cover so they could escape the militia assault. At the court-martial, Guard officers who testified offered a number of reasons for the attack on the colony and the deadly conflagration, all difficult to prove or disprove—that they had been responding to shooting by miners; that a strong wind had caused the tents to catch fire; that some soldiers had acted excessively, but only after finding a fallen comrade whose body had been mutilated by the strikers. A Guard corporal named Mills, implicated in the killing of Louis Tikas, did not appear at the hearing because he was said to have fled to Mexico, fearful that Tikas’s friends were looking to even the score; Lieutenant Linderfelt also complained to the court that he was a hunted man. Although neither Major Hamrock, who was allowed to sit at the defendants’ table wearing his six-shooter, nor Linderfelt was punished, the tribunal concluded that Hamrock had erred in ordering a machine gun used against the strikers’ colony, that it had been soldiers who had set the tents on fire, and that Lieutenant Linderfelt had failed to keep them from doing so. The court also adjudged him guilty of striking Tikas over the head with a rifle, but elected to attach no criminal motive to it.152

  THE SUFFERING OF THE Ludlow families resonated that spring in distant New York City, where there was labor agitation of a different kind. An estimated three hundred thousand jobless men had taken to roaming the streets, standing for hours on breadlines or besieging relief agencies and church missions. Labor reformers had embraced the crisis, waging a kind of low-scale guerrilla war on behalf of those out of work. When city and charitable efforts proved inadequate, this Revolt of the Unemployed, as it was named, invaded the sanctuary of churches and synagogues while services were under way, desperately seeking to make their plight known. “I asked for permission to go into the church with the boys and the priest would not give me that permission,” Frank Tannenbaum, a youthful leader of the revolt, later testified. “I then asked for food which was refused, and then for money which was also refused. Then I said to the priest, ‘So this is your Christian gospel?’ And he said, ‘Never mind about that. I will not allow you to talk to me in that way.’ ”153

  The city’s newspapers uniformly denounced those who would interrupt a place of worship, but Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman’s magazine Mother Earth roundly applauded such activism; what could be more fitting than that the “well-fed, pharisaical clergymen and their smug, self-righteous congregations [be] rudely awakened from their fatuous dreams of seventeenth century theology by hordes of angry men demanding food and shelter.” When the churches hired guards to keep the masses away, the “ragged, starving men” bearing “the Black Flag of Hunger” invaded the city’s better neighborhoods, reported Mother Earth, home to “the world’s industrial potentates.”154

  The police grew frustrated by their inability to defeat the roving bands
and, when they did manage to corner the wanderers, fell on them with vicious glee, clubbing and sometimes arresting the vagrants. A visit by Lincoln Steffens to police headquarters helped end the worst forms of brutality, although the authorities threw the book at Tannenbaum, the young idealist, a court convicting him of inciting to riot and sending him to Blackwell’s Island for a year, as well as fining him $500. “There is no instance in the world’s history where the efforts of the slave class to free themselves have been considered legal,” Tannenbaum assured the judge in a final statement. “I belong to the slave class.”155 Goldman and Berkman tried to carry on in Tannenbaum’s absence, on March 21 leading protestors from Union Square in a march uptown that produced the headlines “Emma Goldman Tells Mob to Storm Churches and Shops,” “Reds Go up Fifth Avenue Cursing the Rich,” and “Marchers Drive All Well-Dressed Persons to Seek Refuge in Doorways.”156

  Soon local resentment came to fix on the news of the Ludlow Massacre and the apparent indifference of the man responsible, New York’s own John D. Rockefeller Jr. In protests coordinated by muckraker Upton Sinclair, Rockefeller’s offices at 26 Broadway were picketed by demonstrators wearing black armbands in memory of the tent colony victims. The irrepressible Sinclair also helped engineer a cross-country fund-raising and consciousness-raising tour led by a prominent Denver Progressive, Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey, featuring women and children survivors of the Ludlow disaster. Judge Lindsey was no friend to the Colorado coal operators—he had recently published data showing that between 1910 and 1913, 622 children had been left fatherless by coal mining accidents in the state—nor did the hometown Denver press look approvingly on his national mission to publicize the horrors of Ludlow. In retaliation it began trafficking in rumors that his eastbound delegation was in fact an avant garde sexual caravan in which the lecherous judge took advantage of the now-husbandless Ludlow widows.157 Of course the reality could not have been more different; one of the women, Mary Petrucci, who had lost three of her children in the blaze, had been turned mute by the tragedy and, utterly inconsolable, seemed to scarcely know where she was.158 The Lindsey group reached Washington and was welcomed at the White House by President Wilson, who held one of the surviving Ludlow babies in his arms as he listened to the victims’ accounts.