LUDLOW — A granite monument on a dusty plain in southern Colorado stands as a reminder of the Ludlow Massacre, in which, 100 years ago Sunday, 11 children and two women died amid a coal-miners strike.
But historians and labor leaders say Ludlow’s actual legacy can be seen in the changes in workers’ rights, workplace safety and fair pay, as well as limits on the powers of corporations.
“It’s a shame that we have to have places like this to make people remember,” said Brian Johnson, a tourist from Coarsegold, Calif., as he and his girlfriend, Triston Calhoon, walked around the site on a recent Monday morning.
The site explains how strikebreakers hired by John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. and deputized into the state militia opened fire with machine guns on about 1,200 striking miners on April 20, 1914, then rushed in to set fire to their tent colony to try to break their will. The women and children who died smothered in a pit beneath a tent.
By the end of the Colorado Coalfield War, 10 days later, at least 66 people were dead and scores were wounded. The brutality drew the gasp of a nation. In the aftermath, there was change.
“The strikers paid the ultimate price in blood for rights we take for granted today,” said Dean Saitta, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Denver. “Safe workplaces, overtime, the 40-hour week — all were gains that followed Ludlow. We owe our weekends (off) to those strikers.”
When the strike began, seven months before the massacre, the miners asked for things strikers still seek today: workplace safety, fairness in pay, paid time off and collective bargaining.
Historians characterize the Ludlow tragedy as a bold engagement of class warfare — the poor and powerless miners against the rich and powerful Rockefeller empire.
Activists stoked those fires of dissent then, just as participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement three years ago declared themselves part of the 99 percent against America’s richest 1 percent.
Economic injustice is invoked today in debates over anti-union laws, raising the minimum wage and last week’s demise of the Equal Pay Act for women, said Bob Butero, the regional director for the United Mine Workers of America.
“The issues haven’t gone away,” he said.
A story of families
Events marking the centennial began nearly a month ago with Su Teatro’s “Ludlow: El Grito de las Minas,” or “Cry of the Miners,” in Denver, concluding on March 30.
Written by Anthony J. Garcia, senior artistic director for the theater company, the play illustrates the hardships of immigrant workers.
Nearly all the 1,200 people in the tent colony were immigrants lured to the coalfields with the promise of prosperity.
Instead, the work was dirty and dangerous, and immigrants were paid a pittance, while enduring racism and xenophobia. They had no legal protections, and no one was ever charged with the deaths at Ludlow.
Mexican immigrants today still cross the border hoping for a better future, but many are still exploited without legal recourse, Garcia noted.
“When we did the show, we had so many people come up after (each performance) and say, ‘That’s my family’s history,’ ” he said.
But despite 24 languages spoken at the camp, the strike held for seven months, and strikers set up a school, hospital, playground, grid of streets and system to distribute firewood.
“That’s a lesson we could still learn today,” Saitta said. “As Denver grows more diverse, we often see immigrant communities that have conflicts with each other, rather than working together toward a common cause.”
Before Ludlow, the Rockefellers were characterized as American royalty for their wealth and power. But that image was tainted by the violence in Las Animas County.
Two months after the massacre, Rockefeller inflamed public outrage even more by weakly justifying it.
“While this loss of life is profoundly to be regretted, it is unjust in the extreme to lay it at the door of the defenders of law and property, who were in no slightest way responsible for it,” he said.
Birth of PR
As he became the most derided man in America, Rockefeller pushed back to improve his image, personally visiting the massacre site and constantly displaying his family’s philanthropy.
That effort is recognized as the birth of corporate public relations, similar to the TV commercials today extolling BP in the aftermath of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010.
For the tough task, Rockefeller hired a former reporter, Ivy Lee, who would become known as the “father of public relations.”
To appease demands for labor rights, Rockefeller created a “company union” that for the first time allowed workers to air their grievances to the company.
And with the help of technology and tougher laws, mine safety has dramatically improved, although lapses still occur.
The year before the Ludlow Massacre, 108 men died at Colorado coal mines, twice the national average.
In the first three months of this year, four coal miners have been killed — none in Colorado — according to the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.
A hundred years ago, there were dozens of southern Colorado coal mines. Today, there are six in the entire state, none on the Front Range. Most of the roughly 2,200 miners are not unionized, compared with an estimated 12,000 striking miners in 1914, when Colorado was the eighth-leading coal-producing state. Today it’s ninth, according to the Colorado Mining Association.
Butero’s grandfather began working in the coal mines near Trinidad in the 1920s, earning 45 cents a ton. Miners’ annual pay and benefits in 2012 averaged $115,759, according to the state mining association.
“When I went to work in the mines in 1976, all these things were in place because of the sacrifices they made,” Butero said of the Ludlow strikers. “Today, the fight is to just hang on to what they helped us get.
“We owe them a lot. We owe them everything.”
