The Children of Ludlow

Their Struggle is Our Struggle

by

Timothy McGettigan, PhD Professor of Sociology Colorado State University - Pueblo

Please send all correspondence to Prof. Tim McGettigan, Department of Sociology, Colorado State University, Pueblo, CO 81001-4901. Office Phone: 719.549.2416. Email: [email protected]

1 The Children of Ludlow

Their Struggle is Our Struggle

On Ludlow Field Written and recited by Frank J. Hayes President, United Mine Workers of America, on Occasion of Dedication of Ludlow Monument.

How can words our grief repay, Come we now with solemn tread, Deep the thoughts we cannot say, Come we now to mourn our dead, Deep the love that weeps today, Come we now with bowed head, Here on Ludlow Field. Here on Ludlow Field. Ah, we knew them every one, Oh! the mem’ry of it all! Father, Mother, Daughter, Son, Oh! the blackness of the pall! Ere their course of life was run, And the souls beyond recall, Here on Ludlow Field. Here on Ludlow Field.

Here a tented city rose, Here today we dedicate, White as yonder mountain snows, Here today we consecrate, Tents of free men, rows on rows, A monument to their estate, Here on Ludlow Field. Here on Ludlow Field. Free at at last from greed and wrong, Lo, the goal of Justice nears, Time to think and time of song, And we vision through our tears, Oh, the day was never long, Freedom’s martyred volunteers, Here on Ludlow Field. Here on Ludlow Field.

But alas! there came a day, Greed demanded: “Stalk your prey, Fire the tents and shoot to slay!” Here on Ludlow Field. In the embers grey and red, Here we found them where they bled, Here we found them stark and dead, Here on Ludlow Field.

2 Introduction

Inequality is as old as civilization itself. In every society where people have managed to produce economic surplus, leisure classes have spring up to seize that surplus and institutionalize inequality. For millennia, aristocrats sporting one pretentious title or another absconded with their subjects’ earnings without so much as a by your leave. That all changed when American colonists tossed a shipload of British tea into

Boston Harbor. The American Revolution destroyed King George III’s divine right to steal. Never again would a British monarch tax Americans either with or without representation.

Though American rebels cunningly coordinated their revolution around the drumbeat of democratic ideals, their post-revolutionary polity was more hypocrisy than democracy. Essentially, there were two kinds of people in post-Revolutionary America,

Real Men and Others. America’s founding patriarchs, aka Real Men, extended full citizenship rights to people who looked, talked and acted like themselves (i.e., white,

European, male, heterosexual, educated, English-speaking, propertied, masculine, etc.) and uniformly denied the perks of citizenship to Others: women, Indigenous Peoples,

African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, etc. So, despite the inclusivity that the term seems to imply, in its early days US democracy conferred stratospheric advantages on

Real Men and suffocating disadvantages on Others.

As the US economy shifted from a predominance on rural farming to urban industrialism (~1880-1920), the US labor movement launched a determined struggle to democratize America’s profoundly undemocratic opportunity structure. Sensing that the

3 1913-1914 coal miners strike in Ludlow, Colorado posed an intolerable threat to his social and economic preeminence, John Rockefeller, Jr., attacked the striking miners much like modern-day exterminators attack residential verim. In the end, Rockefeller broke the Ludlow coalminers strike by literally scorching the earth. On April 20, 1914, amidst countless other felonies, Rockefeller’s hired guns set the Ludlow tent camp ablaze. The fire killed eleven children and two women who suffocated in the crawlspace beneath their tent.

Ever since that dark day, April 20, 1914, what has since been known as the

Ludlow Massacre galvanized the US labor movement. Once properly unified, trade unions became strong enough to leverage significant economic concessions from the

Captains of Industry. Those economic concessions proved sufficient to buoy the aspirations of America’s middle class throughout much of the 20th century.

More than a century after the Ludlow Massacre, post-industrialist fat cats continue their relentless efforts to undermine the working class. If America’s middle class is going to survive this neverending onslaught, then hard-pressed 21st century workers will need to rekindle the spirit of the Ludlow strikers whose sacrifices gave working stiffs a shot at the American Dream.

More is Less: The Paradox of Surplus

Civilization emerged as a consequence of an unprecedented achievement: production of agricultural surplus (Diamond, 1999). Prior to the dawn of civilization, environmental carrying capacities (Costanza, 1995) rigidly constrained human populations. This means that sustenance in natural habitats was in short supply. Those foolish enough to exhaust their local food supply rarely lived to tell the tale. The vast

4 majority of pre-civilized people had no choice but to live in small migratory groups that maintained a tenuous balance between nature’s scant resources and the thin edge of starvation (Snooks, 1996). Then, suddenly, everything changed. About fourteen- thousand years ago, farmers began blowing the lid off of nature’s carrying capacity.

Civilization emerged in conjunction with paradigm-shifting agricultural technologies, such as plows, irrigation, fertilizer, beasts of burden, etc (Maisels, 1993). For the first time in history, agriculture helped farmers produce more food than they needed to satisfy their society’s immediate needs.

In short order, farming nullified the formerly inviolable limits of nature’s carrying capacity. Liberated from the stringencies of nature-dictated food supplies, people congregated in ancient capital cities in heretofore unimaginable numbers (Holdren and

Ehrlich, 1974). Not only did bumper crops enable unprecedented hordes of people to congregate in close urban quarters, but as populations increased, so did the sophistication of the social spaces that they created. Neither the Egyptians nor the

Maya could have built their great pyramids without the liberating power of agricultural surpluses (Pimental and Pimental, 2008).

In every part of the world where it emerged, civilization was built on unparalleled agricultural production. Yet, in spite of such epochal surplus--or, as we shall soon see, because of it--civilization was also the first type of society to institutionalize inequality

(Adams, 2000). It seems counterintuitive that abundance should always precipitate inequality. All things being equal, one might expect economic surplus to inspire altruistic social systems as often as it inspires greed, but that isn’t how it works. Everywhere that

5 people have found a way to generate surplus, self-serving leisure classes have sprung up to claim ownership of that surplus (Diamond, 2005). Democracy would have to wait.

Members of the leisure class, who typically annoint themselves with self- aggrandizing titles (Duke, Duchess, Baron, Baroness, etc.), often behave as though they are members of a different species than the people who make up the working class

(Crăiuț u and Isaac, 2009). The most extravagant display of class-based pretensions comes in the form of an aristocracy. Broadly speaking, an aristocracy is a type of social class inequality which ennobles the leisure class (Salzman, 2002). This means that aristocrats literally perceive themselves as being made of finer stuff than the ruffians who comprise the working class. Indeed, when they are all done up in their finery aristocrats do tend to appear more majestic than the unwashed. However, such distinctions are entirely a product of props and staging. The only real distinction between snobs and commoners is that aristocrats are in a better position to exploit the advantages of social class dominance hierarchies (Bourdieu, 1984).

A dominance hierarchy is a means that one group uses to exert power over another group (McGettigan and Smith, forthcoming). Dominance hierarchies can be understood as beliefs that people use to distinguish and rank social groups. Dominance hierarchies often emanate from arbitrary subjective biases (e.g. white is “better” than brown) which assert that one group is more deserving of privilege than another. People have constructed dominance hierarchies out of practically every means that humans have ever invented to distinguish social groups, such as ethnicity, class, gender, age, sexuality, nationality, etc. Generally speaking, aristocracies coalesce when privileged groups find a way to leverage the social advantages of surplus agricultural resources.

6 Wherever there is an imbalance in the distribution of valued resources, those who control surplus can use that leverage to elevate their status over the disadvantaged. In spite of whatever claims they may make to the contrary, aristocrats are not qualitatively better than the commoners they deplore. Aristocrats are merely the beneficiaries of the social advantages that accrue to avaricious surplus-controllers.

Inequality has always been a centerpiece of complex societies in which valued resources--such as food, real estate, precious minerals, human traffic, spices, petroleum, information, etc.--have created opportunities for the fortunate to reap the advantages of dominance hierarchies. During the age of discovery, Europeans convinced themselves that they were socially and biologically superior to the colonial subjects that they tortured, robbed, and exploited (Wade, 2014). People who enjoy the advantages of dominance hierarchies often develop self-congratulatory theodicies to rationalize their presumptive superiority and the concomitant degeneracy of those that they exploit (Armour, 2000; Kipling, et al., 1956).

Democracy: The Great Experiment

This was certainly the case when Europeans colonized the Western Hemisphere.

Europeans viewed the indigenous occupants of the New World as an under-evolved blight on the land (Zinn, 2005). For Europeans, Native Peoples had value only to the extent that they served as a source of cheap labor or, as in the cases of Pocahontas, La

Malinche, Sacagawea, Squanto and Tonto, helped bungling Europeans conquer their

New World adversaries (Patai and Corral, 2005).

After establishing stable, profitable colonies in North America, European colonists began to chafe under the domination of European aristocrats. It was one thing

7 to treat Indigenous Peoples and African Americans as sub-humans, but Europeans could not abide being treated like second class commoners (Shaara, 2001). American colonists repeatedly petitioned King George III to grant them the rights and privileges to which European commoners had grown accustomed. At minimum, the colonists demanded some sort of pre-tax political representation.

King George III catastrophically misjudged the displeasure that his tax policies evoked among his American subjects (O'Shaughnessy, 2013). Rather than languishing under the yoke of age-old aristocratic exploitation, America’s ascendant merchant class asserted its recently-conceived right to live as free men. America’s original tea partiers drew inspiration from Thomas Hobbes (1991), John Locke (1988) and Jean Jacques

Rousseau (1983). These were radical thinkers who asserted that ruling mandates derived from the consent of the governed rather than from God on high.

Of course, it was treason to suggest that snobs like King George III should have to ask anyone, much less their lowly subjects for anything. Kings (by God!) were put on earth to rule. At least, that’s what King George and his cronies insisted. Rebels understood that by challenging George’s divine right to rule they could well invite their own ruin. Benjamin Franklin captured this fearful prospect with the pithy observation:

“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." Benjamin Franklin speaking to the Continental Congress just before signing the Declaration of Independence, 1776 (Huang, 1994).

Why would well-educated, well-to-do men expose themselves to such a terrifying risk? If one reads history books, especially the piffle that clogs the pages of public school textbooks (Loewen, 1995), the answer is simple. Americans love to tell themselves that

8 Ben Franklin and his collaborators risked their hides out of a tear-jerking commitment to the principles of democracy: freedom, equality and justice for all things human.

There may be a grain of truth to that. The principles of democracy are indeed wondrous. And, sure, there may have been a few idealistic kranks, like Patrick Henry and John Hancock, who earnestly believed that the American Revolution was a historic deathmatch over political ideals. Aristocracy vs. democracy in a winner-take-all fight to the finish.

The majority of revolutionaries, however, took a more pragmatic view of the conflict between the colonists and King George III (Goetzmann, 2009). By the end of the

18th century, middle class Americans had wearied of financing the neverending champagne parties that King George III loved to throw for his homies. Kings and queens love to spend money. Other people’s money. Like all leisure-crats, aristocrats are experts at absconding with their subjects’ earnings, but they have a congenital allergy to earning their own keep.

Commoners and colonists alike had plenty of reasons to despise aristocratic leeches. However, habits ingrained over thousands of years are hard to break. Annoyed as they were, American rebels were still trepidatious about rebuking the monarchy.

Sure, King George III was an asshole (James, 2012), but so was every other monarch.

Commoners had tolerated the indignities of aristocratic domination for thousands of years. There had to be a more compelling reason to sever ties with King George III than the fact that he was the latest in a long parade of aristocratic assholes. And that’s where

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau came to the rebels’ rescue.

9 Aristocratic ideologies generally assert that God confers ruling mandates from above (Bendix, 1978). If that’s what people believe then, no matter how deplorable a monarch might be, the faithful tend to bite their tongues rather than badmouth their monarch. Finding fault with a divinely-enthroned monarch is ideologically equivalent to casting aspersions on God himself. And that’s about the worst sin a true believer can commit. As thinkers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau were true revolutionaries because, together, they overturned thousands of years of blind obedience to status quo- reproducing ideologies.

Instead of affirming the divine right of kings, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau dragged the high and mighty down to earth. For the first time in history, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau characterized kings as fallible human beings (Hayashi, 2014). In the

Enlightened Age, so long as monarchs held up their end of the social contract, they could keep their jobs. However, if monarchs reneged on their end of the bargain, then

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau provided commoners with the requisite philosophical rationale to kick the bums out.

Inspired by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, American rebels thumbed their noses at King George III. In their Declaration of Independence, the rebels incorporated the kind of trash talk that was certain to inflame a petulant king’s outrage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and

10 organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Kings like George III had zero interest in their subjects’ safety or happiness. From

George’s perspective, commoners did not exist to make themselves happy.

Commoners existed to make him happy. But far worse than all of the gibberish about commoners’ safety and happiness was the rebels’ opening salvo about equality. The rebels contended that they were made of the very same stuff as King George III, “...all men are created equal.”

From George’s perspective, the rebels could hardly have uttered a more treasonous insult. For their part, the rebellious colonists knew exactly what they were doing and why.

For decades King George III had remained deaf to colonists’ demands for representation in his government. George preferred to bilk his American colonists in peace. Without Parliamentary representatives, the only way to pry George’s greedy little fingers out of their purses was to terminate his reign over America.

Democracy provided the perfect cover for this political maneuver. With it, the rebels could cultivate the illusion that they were more interested in principles than profit.

By appealing to the universal rights of man, Americans shrewdly knocked King George

III off of his throne and invalidated his time-honored justification to tax his subjects into the poorhouse. As expected, upon learning of the rebels’ declaration of independence,

George pitched a hissy fit and dispatched British Regulars to teach his disloyal colonists a lesson. Fortunately for the rebels, America was a much lower priority for George than the wars he was waging on the Continent (O’Shaughnessy, 2013). Squaring off against

11 the Redcoats’ JV squad, the rebels ultimately won the American Revolution through protracted campaigns of guerrilla warfare and strategic retreat. All’s fair in love and war.

Being able to claim victory in the Revolutionary War meant that Americans had successfully employed democracy as a form of “reverse dominance hierarchy” (Boehm,

1993). A reverse dominance hierarchy can be understood as a socio-political mechanism that is designed to destroy one or more dominance hierarchies. Throughout the era of agriculture-based civilization, monarchs had maintained the illusion of aristocratic superiority by reaping the advantages of class-based dominance hierarchies

(Mann, 2012). In addition to claiming a disproportionate share of strategically-valuable resources, aristocrats used their position of dominance to craft an ideology that conveniently justified their claim to social dominance. Members of the leisure class asserted that they were not only wealthier the working class, but they were innately superior to the working stiffs they dominated (Kautsky, 1982).

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Having won their independence, Americans turned to the task of self- governance. One might think that Americans would be at pains to construct a polity that closely adhered to their transformative political ideals. However, no sooner had

Americans nullified King George’s mandate, than they turned around and constructed a new set of profoundly anti-democratic dominance hierarchies of their own (Wilson,

2011). Democracy was for Real Men, not Others.

The phrase, “all men are created equal,” is one of the most grandiose practical jokes that humans have ever played on one another. When Americans say, “all men are

12 created equal,” it sort of sounds like we are saying, “all humans are created equal.”

Indeed, that is the very hypocrisy that the USA’s founding patriarchs hoped to achieve.

When the Founding Fathers coined the phrase, “all men are created equal,” they didn’t really mean all men. Only some men--and definitely no ladies (Dye and Zeigler,

1981). We need only consider the 18th century definition of “men” to reveal how the founding patriarchs concocted this monumental deceit.

What’s in a Name?

Many have decried the transition to inclusive pronoun usage as an example of political correctness run amok (Friedman and Narveson, 1995). In fact, the words we use and the meanings we attach to them are the bricks and mortar of the social realities that we construct (Berger and Luckmann, 1984). Inherent biases in our language produce inherent biases in our society.

For the founding patriarchs, the term “men” only applied to those who were endowed with the necessary qualifying criteria, such as white skin, English-language skills, formal education, Protestant religious beliefs, masculinity, public displays of heterosexuality, self-serving avarice, etc. In the new America, Real Men owned property, while they treated the majority of Others like undervalued pieces of property

(Guillaumin, 1995). For example, in America’s early days, indentured servants and slaves did not qualify as Real Men because they were deemed the semi-human property of their owners. Also, anyone who disputes the idea that Real Men have treated women like pieces of property (Lerner, 1986) should consider traditional matrimonial ceremonies which essentially transfer ownership of brides from older to younger men.

13 Real Men conveniently solved the problem of Native American property rights by reducing America’s indigenous inhabitants to political non-entities. The Naturalization

Act of 1890 literally de-naturalized Indigenous Peoples by asserting that only “free whites” could enjoy the privilege of US citizenship. By disqualifying Indigenous Peoples from US citizenship, the US pitilessly transformed Native Americans into undocumented aliens in their own homeland and nullified their property claims over ancestral territories in North America. De-naturalizing Indigenous Peoples also paved the way to continent- wide genocide (Anderson and Anderson, 2013) because US laws only protect US citizens.

So, thanks to the founding patriarch’s warped definition of democracy, there were two kinds of people in the USA: Real Men and Others. Real Men enjoyed the fruits of unqualified citizenship, while US democracy treated Others like garbage. As one might expect, the founding patriarchs’ post-aristocratic elitism reproduced European feudalism in North America. The one minor difference being that the USA’s landed gentry did not sport aristocratic titles. Indeed, some have argued that during USA’s gilded age, social class disparities in America became even greater than those in the Old Country (Fraser,

2015).

Being dissatisfied with the USA’s anti-democratic elitism, the American labor movement was an attempt by workers who owned nothing but their strong arms to claim a fair share of the American dream (Rosenberg and Foner, 1982): life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Avaricious industrialists used all of the dirty tricks at their disposal--monopolization of capital, starvation wages, rate busting, miserable working conditions, threats and acts of violence, etc.--to prevent workers from obtaining any

14 meaningful economic bargaining power (Jones, 1969). As long as industrialists could keep their workers weak, isolated and demoralized, the Captains of Industry could accumulate wealth and power without impediment. If, however, workers could find some way to build strength and hope, then they just might be able to establish the kind of organizations, unions!, that might one day help their American dreams become a reality

(Storch, 2013).

The Fight in the Fields

To this day, the Ludlow Massacre numbers among the most alarming incidents in

US labor history (Montoya, 2007). Beginning in September, 1913, coal miners who worked for the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) company went on strike. The coal miners believed in the radical proposition that they should earn a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work. The strikers also protested the hazardous working conditions that prevailed in CF&I mines. An important reason for the deplorable state of

CF&I’s mines was that CF&I refused to remunerate its miners for the down time required to make unstable coal mines safe. As a result, the threats to health and safety in CF&I mines were appalling. Ultimately, the CF&I miners called a strike when it became obvious that--either as a result of CF&I’s starvation wages, or because of the constant threat of underground cave-ins--CF&I was more likely to make a killing than the miners were to make a living in CF&I’s coal mines (Papanikolas, 1982).

Still, it was not easy for the miners to call a strike. A strike meant that CF&I would evict the coal miners and their families from their Rockefeller-owned company housing

(Green, 2010). Living conditions in CF&I’s company towns may have been deplorable,

15 but any roof was better than none in what would come to be regarded as Colorado’s coldest winter on record.

Many of the striking coal miners had families, and were undoubtedly anguished to see their loved ones evicted by Rockefeller’s henchmen. Yet, dreadful as it was to see their loved ones booted from their homes, the miners called the strike because the consequences of failing to strike were even bleaker (Van Nuys, 2002). It was a dog-eat- dog world, and CF&I cared more about the mules than the men who slaved in its hellish subterranean tunnels.

If CF&I flatly refused to vouchsafe the welfare of its employees, then the miners had no choice but to look after themselves. The only effective bargaining chip that the miners had was their labor. Individually the miners were all replaceable. However, if the miners could somehow coordinate a general strike, then they could conceivably pull enough of their comrades out of the mines to cut painfully into CF&I’s profits (Rees,

2010).

Though CF&I was a formidable opponent, the miners were not entirely without resources. One stroke of fortune was that the United Mine Workers of America were able to supply canvas tents for the strikers (Zinn and Arnove, 2004). Blessed by this windfall, the strikers set up their tents on a patch of public land in Ludlow, Colroado. The heart of southern Colorado’s coalfields. Though canvas may have been meager protection during the frostbitten winter of 2014, the snow and cold were the least of the campers’ worries. It was the bullets that ripped through their tents on a daily basis that really scared the strikers (Andrews, 2008).

16 CF&I was determined to break the strike by any means necessary. Taking full advantage of the strike’s remote staging area, Rockefeller hired the Baldwin Felts

Detective Agency to do much of his dirty work (Martelle, 2007). Though it beggars belief, the Baldwin Felts Detectives used a particularly horrifying weapon, referred to as the “Death Special” (Hunter, 1915), to help them break the strike. The “Death Special” was an armored car that CF&I mounted with a machine gun. Treating the strikers as if they were enemy combatants in a war zone, the Baldwin Felts Detectives daily peppered strike camp with machine gun fire.

Because of the frequency with which bullets ripped through the Ludlow tent colony, the strikers took the precaution of digging trenches beneath their tents. Since the strikers could not hope for assistance from law enforcement--apparently the powers- that-be did not deem firing live rounds at Ludlow strikers a crime--their only recourse was to scuttle into their dark, comfortless cellars at the first crack of gunfire

(Tchorzynski, 2007).

As the strike dragged on, Rockefeller’s thugs intensified their violence. When the terror inflicted by Baldwin Felts Detectives’ reached a crescendo, the Governor of

Colorado dispatched a detachment of National Guard troops to Ludlow (Johnson,

2009). Initially, the strikers hoped that the Guard’s arrival might signal an end to the

Baldwin Felts’ terror campaign, but those hopes were soon dashed. Far from coming to the strikers’ rescue, the National Guard troops fell in with the Baldwin Felts Detectives and amplified the hellstorm of violence directed against the strikers (Duwe, 2007).

The Massacre

17 Despite Rockefeller’s best efforts to terrorize the Ludlow strikers into submission, the strikers and their families endured. Bullies usually only have one tool in their chest: violence. When violence fails, bullies can either admit defeat or they can intensify their violence. Rockefeller chose the latter.

On April 20, 2014, gun fighting broke out in the vicinity of the Ludlow camp. The

Colorado National Guard surrounded the strikers’ camp and raked it with gunfire throughout the day. During the fighting, National Guardsmen poured kerosene on some of the strikers’ canvas tents and, as one would expect, the tents soon went up in flames.

The day-long gunfight had driven many of the strikers and their families out of the tent colony. Unfortunately, eighteen people, including four women and eleven children who suffocated in the crawl spaces beneath their tents, were killed by the fire. On the morning of April 21, 2014, nothing remained of the tent colony save a charred waste.

The Makings of a Massacre?

In an unparalleled act of academic insensitivity, Scott Martelle attended the 2014

Ludlow Massacre Centennial events held in Pueblo, Colorado, and disparaged the decision to characterize the Ludlow Massacre as a ‘real massacre.’ Martelle went so far as to dispute the historical memory of direct descendants of Ludlow Massacre victims concerning the scope and intensity of the violence (DeStefanis and Feurer, 2014).

One must wonder, from Scott Martelle’s perspective, precisely how many dead women and children are required in order to designate a mass murder “a massacre?”

Two? Ten? Twenty?

Most historians consider the events at Ludlow to have been a massacre because most are of the mind that, in the land of the brave and the home of the free, protest is

18 not a capital crime. Those who would from the comfort of their armchairs dismiss the innumerable horrors inflicted upon Ludlow strikers and their families as so much historical “overstatement” are, I regret to say, being just as heartless as the murderers who set the Ludlow camp ablaze in 1914.

Finally, I find myself in agreement with Cecil Roberts, the charismatic President of the United Mine Workers of America, who proposed that it might be instructive to invite Ludlow-doubters to participate in a repeat performance of the Ludlow Massacre.

Just as the strikers did long ago, Ludlow-doubters could pitch tents at the original site of the Ludlow Massacre. Once the doubters are ensconced in their tents, event organizers could invite National Guard troops to begin riddling the camp with gunfire. Under the cover of ongoing gunfire, a small detachment of National Guard troops could douse the tents with kerosene and set them alight. Roberts suspects, and I agree that after undergoing such an enlightening experience, Ludlow-doubters would be more inclined to characterize the events at Ludlow as a massacre thereafter.

Just Desserts

By massacring innocent women and children in the Ludlow strike camp,

Rockefeller won a battle, but he lost the war. With the help of brutal strike-breaking tactics, Rockefeller broke the 1913-14 coalminers’ strike. Shell-shocked into submission, the Ludlow strikers called off their strike and returned to the mines without negotiating a new and improved labor deal with their hated employer, Rockefeller

(Rees, 2010). The Ludlow strikers must have felt utterly demoralized to admit defeat.

But to conclude that Ludlow strike was a failure would be to miss the resonating historical importance of the Ludlow strike.

19 In the aftermath of the Ludlow Massacre, news of the calamity spread far and wide. Rather than crushing the American labor movement, Rockefeller’s barbaric tactics generated a firestorm of outrage. Rockefeller’s methods were so repugnant that he and his cronies could no longer claim the moral high ground. The Ludlow Massacre laid bare the the conflicting motivations between the strikers and that fat cats, and the Massacre also made plain who were the good guys, and who were the bad guys.

The Children of Ludlow

Subsequent to the Ludlow Massacre, the American labor movement mounted one successful campaign after another to demand concessions from fat cat industrialists. As the 20th century progressed, the strength and bargaining power of unions steadily grew. By the 1950s, blue collar workers shared the surreal landscapes of suburbia with white collar workers with whom they merged to create one big

American middle class (Norton, 2012). And though the Captains of Industry might have griped about profits being skimmed by money-hungry laborers, the truth was that all

Americans thrived as a result of the mutually-beneficial partnerships between labor and industrialists. Entire social classes were ascendant in post-War America (Lipset and

Bendix, 1959). What was good for GM was, indeed, good for the entire USA.

Those were happy days, but they were fleeting. As the 20th century wore on,

Industrialists demonstrated that they, when it came to augmenting class-wide social mobility, nobody could outgain the fat cats.

Record profits and shares all around of the American Dream was a mid-century panacea that was simply too good to last. Beginning in the 1970s, deindustrialization

(Cowie and Heathcott, 2003) undermined much of the progress that labor unions had

20 fought hard to achieve. Industrialists did an end run around labor unions by shipping jobs and, ultimately, entire industries overseas (Milberg and Winkler, 2013). By employing overseas workers for pennies on the dollar, industrialists reaped profits unlike anything they had seen since the gilded age.

The 1990s and new millennium ushered in a new era in which industrial downsizing and wage stagnation became the new normal for American labor (Coates,

2001). In the 21st century, most of the good jobs are long gone. Whereas in the 1950s a single wage earner, whether blue or white collar, could earn enough to maintain a footing in the middle class, in the McJobs era (Weissmann, 2013), even households with multiple full-time earners find their economic footing slip sliding away. Rather than forging alliances with the working class, fat cat executives pride themselves on the number of jobs that they have eliminated. With each passing day, wealth and income become ever more polarized (McCarty, et al., 2006).

Where will it end? Will fat cats ever arrive at a point where enough is enough?

Will the Captains of Industry ever willingly share a few spare clams with their working class compadres? Suffice it to say that altruism and market economics are not kissing cousins.

It appears that the road ahead will not be easy for the working class. The most enduring lesson that the Ludlow Massacre teaches is that the powerful never willingly concede power. The only way to break the leisure class’ death grip on power is leverage. In the wake of the Ludlow Massacre, labor unions used their newfound strength to break age-old economic dominance hierarchies. Unions leveraged

21 unprecedented concessions from fat cat industrialists and, for a while, everyone benefited.

Democracy is at its best when common folk fight for the common good. More often than not, democracy is a cheat. Too often common folk are crushed under the wheels of progress. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The hardy souls who stood up against the fat cats in Ludlow remain an inspiration. Even the poorest and most desperate people can strike a blow for democracy. It doesn’t matter that the founders of American democracy were a bunch of self-interested hypocrites. The principles of democracy--freedom, fairness, justice and equality--are beautiful and they are a beacon to anyone who dreams of making the world a better place. The Ludlow Massacre is a reminder to all that democracy does not come cheap. Those who are willing to pay the ultimate price may yet purchase a taste of democracy. If not for themselves, then perhaps for their children.

The children of Ludlow are the beneficiaries of a priceless inheritance. They-- we--would all do well to remember to whom we are indebted and, for the sake of our own children, make our own enduring investment in democracy.

22 References

Anderson, E. N., and Barbara A. Anderson. Warning Signs of Genocide: An Anthropological Perspective. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013.

Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

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