The fire took hold in the camp around 7 P.M., set by the anti-union militias working alongside the National Guard to crush the mine strike. As women and children attempted to flee, gunfire from the troops surrounding the camp forced them back into the flames. By the time the chaos subsided, 19 civilians were dead: 12 children, two women, and five of the striking miners. More would die in the coming days, in a conflict which the U.S. Congress’ Commission on Industrial Relations said sparked “danger of a national revolution.”
Over the last few weeks, I’ve written about an ongoing, coordinated attempt by the wealthiest Coloradans to exert undue influence on the state’s systems of democracy and governance. While our investigation was able to reveal new details about how that influence has been exerted in Colorado, the fact of billionaires warping the fabric of democracy to suit themselves is not groundbreaking.
This is a problem which plagues democracies. A kind of systemic bug- it’s been happening since Athens. Small groups of elite citizens have a tendency to use their wealth and influence to ensure that democratic governments are more responsive to their own needs, desires, and business interests than to the needs or desires of average citizens. In the recent past, including here in Colorado, those efforts often included bombs, guns, and the full weight of the federal government being brought to bear against workers; against average citizens who realized that they were entitled to more than they had been given.
I was thinking over this Labor Day weekend about how organized workers are one of the only forces which has ever successfully held back that tide of special interests seeking to pervert democracy; and I spent time thinking about Colorado’s unique role in that history.
Like other fascinating parts of American history, parts which might prove inconvenient to the same elites we are discussing, the Colorado Coalfield War has not been remembered as widely as it deserves. It has not benefited from frequent repetition, or ubiquitous inclusion in school curricula. And it’s not hard to understand why: it is a story of hardworking citizens demanding fair compensation for the back-breaking labor of coal mining, and, in return, having John D. Rockefeller and the federal government rain hellfire down upon them with no compunction. It is the most American of stories – the kind we don’t tell too often because we would rather not look in that mirror.
It started in 1913 as a strike at Colorado Fuel & Iron, a major steel and mining interest which was a predecessor of the steel plant which still looms over Pueblo, and which until its sale last month was owned by a Russian corporation named the EVRAZ Group. At the time of the 1913 strike, it was owned by John D. Rockefeller. Colorado was a major center of coal production in the early 20th century, and the state’s miners paid the price. According to the book Killing for Coal by University of Colorado professor Thomas G. Andrews, fatalities among Colorado coal miners were more than double the national average in the decades before the strike. Danger was not limited to the mines: typhoid and other diseases swept through the cramped company towns miners and their families were corralled into.
If the dangers of the job were not enough, miners working for CF&I also lived under something of an authoritarian corporate regime. The company prohibited the presence of any “socialist” texts and other books deemed undesirable. Workers were constantly surveilled, both on and off the clock, by paid infiltrators from the Pinkerton or Baldwin-Felts detective agencies, inserted into company towns by corporate bosses paranoid about any union activity by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). According to a 1915 report on the strike, CF&I’s “economic domination” of the state also gave them “the active aid of…state, county, and town officials, who placed the entire machinery of the law at the disposal of the companies in their persecution of organizers and union members.”
While miners were being censored, surveilled, unjustly prosecuted, and dying at rates two-to-three times the national average, the company itself was untouchable: coroners and county officials were eager to declare that there was no negligence or wrongdoing on the company’s part in any sort of fatal mine incident.
For these reasons and more, CF&I workers with the backing of UMWA declared a strike in the summer of 1913, with some forming a de facto tent village of strikers and their families at Ludlow in Las Animas County. The strikers were asking for an eight-hour workday, payment for all of their work (instead of just how much coal they mined in a given day), and enforcement of the ignored mine safety laws which were already on the books in Colorado. Instead of ceding to these reasonable demands, or even bargaining, the company chose to flex its muscle and settle the strike with state-sanctioned violence.
In spring of 1914, the strike camp at Ludlow – full of the miners and their families – was surrounded by militias of strikebreakers and troops from the Colorado National Guard, called in at the behest of the governor. The fires were started on the night of April 20, 1914. Between fire and gatling guns operated by the militia and guardsmen, 19 innocents lost their lives that night in what is today remembered as the Ludlow Massacre, when it’s remembered at all.
But the massacre at Ludlow was the beginning of the story, not the end.
When word of what had happened at Ludlow reached another camp of striking miners in Walsenburg, the decision was made to fight back. Enterprising local businessmen in Pueblo and Walsenburg were more than happy to sell large quantities of arms to both sides of the conflict. Suddenly, thousands of striking miners were no longer complacently asking for an eight-hour workday; they were armed with dynamite and rifles.
Less than a week after the massacre, on April 26, a force of more than 1,000 armed strikers descended on the company town of Chandler, outside of Cañon City. They exchanged fire with mine guards from the hills around the town, cut the telegraph wires connecting the facility to the rest of the state, then dynamited CF&I buildings, according to contemporaneous reporting by the New York Times. Similar skirmishes happened at other mines in Las Animas and Huerfano Counties, and the northernmost battle of the conflict occurred all the way up in Boulder County, at the Hecla mine in Louisville.
The fighting raged across Colorado for ten days, with conflicts between workers and either the National Guard or the strikebreaking militias erupting in Walsenburg, Trinidad, and several now-defunct company towns. Prominent Colorado women including Helen Ring Robinson and Alma Lafferty – the first women to serve in the state Senate and House, respectively – organized a sit-in at the state Capitol in Denver to push the governor for peace.
After more than a week, President Woodrow Wilson offered to mediate, but Rockefeller rejected the offer because it was predicated on giving collective bargaining rights to the striking workers. So, instead of mediation, Wilson deployed 1,651 federal troops to Colorado to stand-down the militias and disarm the miners, ending the conflict.
The story of the Colorado Coalfield War is a deeply American story, exemplifying a pattern which has emerged again and again in our history: when the government has a choice between average citizens and wealthy business interests, it makes the same choice every time, and will continue to until elites’ influence on politics is whittled back down to one person, one vote like the rest of us. But the story of the Coalfield War is deeply American in another way, too, exemplifying not just the worst of our body politic, but some of the best. Just as it is a story of robber barons and politicians crushing the little guy, it is a story of average citizens banding together and creating a force potent enough that it took federal troops to put it down – and winning even after defeat.
Congress’s investigation into the Ludlow Massacre and the subsequent Coalfield War resulted in a 1915 report which is still deemed a driving force in building political support for child labor laws and the eight-hour workday.
In the decades after the Coalfield War – and other uprisings like the Battle of Blair Mountain – labor unionization took off in the United States. The workers who stood their ground in the early days of what historian Howard Zinn called “the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history” paved the way for an era of unionization that created the five-day work week, the very concept of a weekend, and the mid-century economic boom which anti-union conservatives still fetishize.
Then unionization fell off again, beginning a steady slide in the 60s which accelerated sharply in the 80s. Today, fewer than 10% of the workers in the United States are unionized. Meanwhile, wealth inequality in the United States now surpasses what it was during the Gilded Age, and the exact same Pinkerton agency has been paid to suppress union activity for Amazon, Starbucks, and other corporate giants.
Special interests have successfully rolled-back workers’ rights in the United States in recent decades, and those efforts are accelerating under the second Trump administration. But what was true at Ludlow is still true now: that organized workers can create power to rival Rockefellers, militias, and federal troops, that taking a stand can matter even if it seems futile at the time; that principle and sacrifice in the darkest times have a way of preceding the dawn.
Those lessons feel worth remembering today. Something else worth remembering? That sometimes, just sometimes, justice is served. In 1997, unionized workers at the Colorado Fuel & Iron facility in Pueblo went on strike again. It took seven years, but that time, they won. In fact, they won decisively enough that they were granted a record-breaking amount of back pay for wages lost during the strike. Under the strain of the payout, CF&I was forced to sell the plant, ultimately going out of business in 2007 – killed, at long last, by striking workers.
