On April 20, 1914, guards of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I) and the Colorado National Guard fired on the Ludlow tent colony of striking coal miners and their families. The massacre left two dozen dead, including two women and eleven children, generating widespread sympathy for the miners and contempt for the mine’s owner, John D. Rockefeller Jr. At the time, journalists, workers, and capitalists viewed Ludlow as a watershed event. Participants recognized that something was both gained and lost by this moment of worker militancy and corporate and state repression; in 1916 the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) purchased the tent colony site, and in 1918 the union erected a granite memorial to honor in perpetuity those who had died in the struggle.
Historians have helped others continue to consider the Colorado coalfield war’s significance. Ludlow marks a central place in American labor history alongside other violent...
