At Dawn on a Chill and Misty Morning in May, a Navy Battleship, The

At dawn on a chill and misty morning in May, a Navy battleship, the U.S.S. Montana approached New York harbor steaming first past the Ambrose Light Ship and then the Statue of Liberty. Slowing as she sailed deeper into the harbor, the Montana stopped and loosed her anchor mid-stream in the Hudson River opposite the lower tip of Manhattan Island, a park called "The Battery." On her deck lay 17 coffins, each neatly draped with the national ensign. As a silent crowd watched, a tug slipped its moorings, moved to the anchored warship, and lay alongside. Crewmen carefully and tenderly trans ferred the coffins to her decks. The tug returned to the park and the coffins were placed on waiting caissons. Soon a solemn funeral procession began, and in it rode the President of the United States. He was somber, grim-visaged, and seemed to be almost in a state of shock. As the procession rolled on he stared straight ahead, as a man alone, which, saddened, at this turn of events resulting from one of his recent decisions, he was. The year was 1914, the President Woodrow Wilson, and the funeral that for the 17 Marines who died as they stormed ashore at Vera Cruz, Mexico, to avenge an insult to the American flag, and in the doing, give some teeth to Wilson’s displeasure at the undemocratic regime of General Victoriano Huerta ruling the turbulent nation. The Mexicans had resisted fiercely, and while losing Vera Cruz to the combined Marine assault and naval gunfire, had killed the 17 Americans. And yet that tragedy was not the only worry that troubled Woodrow Wilson that cheerless day in May of 1914. Consider his burdens. In the White House, his wife lay dying. In Europe the tense situation described by one of Wilson's aides as "militarism gone stark raving mad" threatened to erupt into world war. At the same time along the border with Mexico, the federal military commander and three state governors called for immediate reinforcement of regular troops to replace state militiamen, who it was feared, might soon clash with Mexicans living in the border states and a force of about 5,000 interned Mexican federal troops, as all factions reacted to the violence that had begun with the 1910 revolution. And to the north, 1,700 federal troops patrolled the Colorado coal fields that day in May, beginning their third week of occupation. In Colorado tragedy had compounded tragedy as bitter skirmishes followed the death of two women and eleven children at a burning tent colony of striking coal miners called Ludlow, just north of Trinidad, in an attack by the state militia. That all day battle, however, which came on April 20, 1914, was but the culmination of a bitter and prolonged labor dispute that since September of 1913 had seen dozens killed in clashes in Colorado's front range coal fields as each side used rifles, shotguns, machine guns, even armored cars. Early in the dispute Colorado's governor, Elias Ammons, ordered the state militia, with its decisive put-down of the 1903 coal strike one of its major battle laurels, into the fray to restore order as a neutral force. 2 But soon the governor changed his mind, announcing that in keeping out strike breakers, he had gone beyond the law. In the eyes of the miners, this meant that the governor and the guard had sided with management, and indeed, the militia quickly lost that sense of neu- trality so necessary to forces attempting to quell labor disputes and supported the mine owners, eventually even enlisting mine company employees into their ranks. Violence in the coal fields became fre- quent, fear of what might happen next almost constant. Reason and moderation seemed almost to desert both sides: each armed; each fearful of the other; each determined not to compromise; each carry ing a heritage of 20 years of labor violence in Colorado. Thus the United Mine Workers, fresh from a victory in the West Virginia coal fields and sporting a healthy strike fund to finance the action, found themselves fighting not only the companies--led by one of the largest, part of the John D. Rockerfeller industrial empire, but a state militia acting less as a neutral constabulary and more like an active enemy. News of the Ludlow Massacre flashed around the state and nation. Many Coloradoans, repelled by the actions of their state troops, called on the governor to ask for federal assistance, their reaction less pro- union than anti-violence. Mixed within it was dismay and anger that the state militia had acted as it had. The Colorado Springs Gazette enquired "And now what is Colorado going to do about it? We stand today disgraced in the eyes of all nations. Not even Mexico has wit- nessed more barbaric, warfare." Governor Ammons, a weak and vacillating 3 executive, vacillated, torn between calling for federal help or using the discredited state forces again as new violence spread through the coal fields following Ludlow. Described by novelist Upton Sinclair, a vocal union supporter and hardly unbiased, as an "apparently kindly man, intellectual calibre fitted for the duties of a Sunday School teacher in a small village, " Ammons finally wired Woodrow Wilson for federal troops, admitting that the situation had passed beyond the state’s ability to control, but acted only after being besieged in his office by a delegation of angry and determined women demanding federal intervention. Wilson had been attempting to arbitrate the strike intermittently since it began, and after Ludlow tried again, sending Representative Martin Foster of Colorado to negotiate with the isolated and austere John D. Rockerfeller, owner of the more important Colorado mines. But Rockerfeller refused to even consider arbitration or union recognition. Yet while the doomed arbitration attempt was in progress, Wilson and his capable Secretary of War, Lindley Miller Garrison, discussed the possibilities of sending troops to Colorado, and Garrison checked to see what few units of the already widely committed Army might be available and how quickly they could reach Colorado. Planning for possible Colorado troop deployment. Secretary Garrison worked into the night in the War Department. One late April evening, reflecting the tension of the many crises of the moment, Garrison attached to an 4 updated military situation report a note to the President asking "Will you please communicate to me so soon as you have seen these and reached a conclusion. If I am not in the Department, I will be at the other end of the telephone where I can be immediately reached." The next evening he wrote again "I will be down at the Department this evening . I can be reached by telephone instantly in case you want to talk to me about this situation." And all the while the mining areas of Colorado seemed to be edging closer to civil war, as miners and militia clashed along the front range. And so that last week of April 1914, hardly passed pleasantly. In Colorado storms of protest would not abate over the Ludlow attack and the state’s ineffective response to it. As Governor Ammons equivocated and the tired and stra ined President pondered his potential two-front war with Mexico, his wife's deepening illness, and the demise of Europe’s fragile calm that daily appeared more imminent, Secretary of War Garrison began preparing his instructions in case the order should come to send troops to Colorado. Few troops remained available, since most units were part of the force of 8,000 soldiers and Marines ashore at Vera Cruz, or the larger group stretched along the border, or among those ready to reinforce Vera Cruz if necessary. And little remained of an experienced command structure at the War Department to help the New Jersey lawyer judiciously apply the very limited military resources of the United States. For 5 with an uncanny inability to sense the press of events and the probable sequence of their unfolding, Woodrow Wilson had ushered out the top leadership of the United States Army just as that leadership was sorely needed. On April 21 the Marines attacked Vera Cruz but the next day, just two days after Ludlow, with calls for federal intervention in Colorado already being raised, the Chief of Staff, one of America’s most competent and colorful soldiers, Major General Leonard Wood, outspoken and irascible soldier-physician, had left office as his term expired. No doubt Leonard Wood’s close ties to Theodore Roosevelt had much to do with Wilson's removal of Wood as soon as it could be arranged. Wood's Assistant Chief of Staff left with him. His temporary replacement, one Major General W. W. Wotherspoon, presided over the Army while retaining the Presidency of The Array War College. So as the Army's experienced commander departed, the Secretary of War was forced to prepare to enter that legal and political twilight zone of federal military enforcement of state laws, assumption of state police powers, and perhaps even local civil government. Yet he had to do this with an exhausted President at the White House, an inept gover- nor at Denver, a threat of European intervention at Vera Cruz beginning to grow very real, and as state governors along the southern border called for more troops. Meanwhile, as if to underscore the urgency of the situation, new fighting erupted in Colorado. And as the coded secret messages flashed 6 over the telegraph wires on late April 28, alerting those few cavalry units in the West not yet deployed along the border, strikers attacked the Forbes Mine, near Canon City, screaming "Remember Ludlow," to be met with rifle and machine gun fire.

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