In the late afternoon of May 8 this year John Fatur, a Colorado rancher, steered his pick up truck through the dry lands that were once the vast Trinidad mine field, the main source of coking coal west of the Mississippi. The sun hung low just above the Spanish Peaks of the Sangre de Christo Mountains as Fatur drove south along a road that paralleled the old Colorado and Southern Railroad tracks that once carried coal mined in the canyons. He was headed to the site of the Ludlow Massacre to check on the monument and the grounds around it.
The United Mine Workers union had for many years employed members of the Fatur family as caretakers of the forty acres of land the union purchased in 1917, three years after the terrifying massacre in which National Guard troops fired on a strikers’ tent colony, forcing women and children to hide in underground pits. After assassinating union organizer Louis Tikas and two other strikers, the troopers set fire to the tents. Two women and eleven children were suffocated and died: Patricia Valdez and her four children, the pregnant
Cedilano Costa and her two children, as well as three of Mary Petrucci’s children along with Alcarita Pendragon’s Gloria, aged four, and her son Roderlo, aged six. When the news got out, it sparked fury all through the strikers’ camps in the Black Hills. What happened next was “a coordinated attack” on the National Guard by over 1000 armed strikers on a forty-mile front—a civil war that ended only after the U.S. Army intervened.
Four years later the union erected a monument on the site of the lethal pit to memorialize the women and children who were murdered there. The stone cenotaph represents a coal miner, sleeves rolled up, standing near a woman who his holding a child in her arms. The names of women and children who died in pit are inscribed on the granite structure dedicated “to those who gave their lives for freedom at Ludlow.
It was this monument the caretaker John Fatur approached on that afternoon of May 8. What he saw was not the monument he had seen the day before. As he got closer he was horrified to see that the heads of both figures had been severed from their torsos along with the left arm of the female figure. The caretaker immediately notified Bob Butero, the director of the UMWA Region 4 in the West, and he called Mike Romero, President of the Trinidad Local of the UMWA, a union that traces it roots directly to the great coal field war of 1913-14. They contacted the Sheriff of Los Animas County and demanded an investigation, fearing that the desecration of the monument was connected to a long and bitter struggle in the area between the United Steel Workers union and Oregon Steel, a firm that operated a mill a factory that was once part John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Almost immediately union sin the area raised up a fund of $5000 for a reward for information leading to the arrest of the criminals responsible for the desecration.
Romero drove out the site and put black plastic bags over the two headless statues. The next day he made the trip again with Gary Cox, a Colorado labor historian and a “guardian” of the state’s labor monuments, who described his reaction to site in a lament he called “Ludlow—Our Twin Towers—Beheaded.” After they arrived Romero removed the black shrouds so from the figures so that Cox could take pictures of the damage. Cox was prepared for but shocked by what he saw. “The handsomely sculptured heads of the miner and his wife were gone,” he reported, as was the woman’s arm. The statues were composed of solid granite, so the act of desecration must have been planned and executed with some aforethought. The breaks were “straight and clean almost as if sawn” and showed no chisel marks, Cox recalled. He “got the feeling that whoever did this either knew a good deal about working with granite or were very lucky with sledge hammer.” Romero told Cox the “vandals” took only the two heads, one arm and a small vase from a corner of the monument. Why only these select pieces? Cox asked officers in the county sheriff’s department these questions but they who had no answers, and no suspects.
As the word of the outrage spread through western labor circles, it caught the attention of the Colorado press. On May 31 the Denver Post published an editorial calling the desecration an “outrageous act.” “Those who died at the site of the miners’ tent camp on April 20, 1914, sanctified this patch of southern Colorado as hallowed ground for the American labor movement,” the editorial continued. “For Coloradans, the tears shed over Ludlow have never quite dried and they never should.”
In way that underlines in more ways than one the distance between the west and the rest (of us), it took time for the story to get beyond the Rocky Mountains. I didn’t learn about the event until June 6 when Jack Womack, who teaches history at Harvard, called me to see if I knew about the desecration. He asked if we could do something more to spread the word among historians and activists and, at the same time, raise some hell about it. “The outrage was already four weeks old when I heard about,” Womack said. “And still no body knows about it.”
Within a few days, the news was out on H-LABOR and many people wrote of their anger and their determination to do something to help restore the memorial. The word also went out that contributions for a restoration were being sought by the United Mine Workers of America.
There was also a great deal of speculation about who committed the crime and why. Jack Womack talked the president of the Steel Workers Union local in Pueblo, whose members had been locked in the long struggle with Oregon Steel, and the president “said he himself suspected that it was the scabs who cut the thing down, mad at the union which was preparing to join in the annual June 29 memorial at the monument.”
When I called Bob Butero and asked him about the crime, he said that, yes, most union people suspected the scabs, and doubted that “wild kids” would have driven out into the dry lands and committed an act of vandalism with such precision. But he also wondered why no one hadn’t claimed “credit” for the assault. He said some people even imagined that the act of destruction may have had some strange connection to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Bagdhad a few days before. He wasn’t sure who committed the crime or why, but because of its planning and precision, he thought it was “meant to be.” That is, it was not some random act of vandalism.
On the day of the memorial service on June 29 a long front page story appeared in the Mexican newspaper La Cronica de Hoy by Raul Trejo Delabre who had no doubts about why the act of desecration occurred; it was stroke of lightening produced by the stormy climate of intolerance and xenophobia extending to many sectors of American society in the past two years. As Trejo Delabre wrote:
“Esta vez la ceremonia en Ludlow sera distinta. Ademas del recuerdo de aquella huelga que se encuentra enentre las mas importantes en la historia de sindcalismo en Estadoes Unidos, ahora el homeneje a los maritires de 1914 estara tenido por una dosis adicional de irritacion y molestia. Hace varias semanas el monumento construdio en Luldow para honrar a aquellas victimas fue atacado por vandalos que decapritaron a sus dos figuras principales- un minero y una mujer que carga a su hijio. La destrucccion de esas efigies puede ser entendida como parte del clima de intolerancia y xenofopia que se ha extendido en siginifactivos sectotores de la socieidad estaunidense.”
Usually the spring service to the victims of the Ludlow assault was an event attended by a small band of pilgrims, but this the ceremony promised to become something quite different . I suggested to Bob Butero, the UMWA officer in charge, that LAWCHA could help with the campaign to restore the monument and also take on the task of seeking National Landmark Status for the Ludlow Memorial, a designation which would provide some degree of federal protection for the monument when it is made whole again. I also asked him if someone from LAWCHA could speak at the June 29th event and extend a message of solidarity from all labor historians. He responded positively to these suggestions.
Julie Greene, who agreed to speak for LAWCHA, headed down from Boulder with her family to spend the night in Trinidad and to participate in the service the next day on a Sunday morning. She described the scene this way:
“Already a few hundred people had gathered by the time we arrived, half an hour before the service was to begin. Soon after that the steelworkers came marching in en masse, about 100 of them, chanting "Remember! Ludlow!" That was an inspiring sight. As they waited for the ceremony to start, folks chatted or examined the desecrated monument, its two decapitated statues making the annual day of remembrance more sorrowful than usual.”
“Amidst the mourning, though, a strong spirit of struggle and resistance expressed itself as well. The crowd of 400-500 people listened to about eight speakers. Local union leaders spoke, as did a state representative and someone from the office of Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell.”
Julie then spoke about the massacre, historical memory, and attempts both then and now to suppress the memory of the strike. She read out loud some comments made by Mary Petrucci, one of the mothers who lost several children in the fire of April 20, 1914, and then ended by sharing with the audience a message of support and solidarity from Joe Trotter and Jim Green, president and vice president respectively of the Labor and Working-Class History Association.
“The formal ceremony,” her report continued, “ended with a very inspiring speech by UMW International President Cecil Roberts, who had the audience on its feet and cheering during much of his talk. Roberts declared: ‘This is our Vietnam Veterans Memorial, our Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, our Lincoln Memorial. There is no question whatsoever that ... this monument will be restored…’.”
In her conclusion, Julie wrote: “It is clear that a great deal of money needs to be raised to restore the monument (the union estimates it will cost $250,000), but as to what else should be done the UMW is still strategizing. The loudest applause during my speech came when I said the site should be put on the list of national landmarks so that it receives federal protection. I hope that LAWCHA can help push for that --and my sense, from talking with local and national union leaders yesterday, is that they would be very happy to see that happen.”
I will propose at the next LAWCHA Board meeting to take place at the North American Labor History Conference in Detroit this October that a committee be appointed to take the steps necessary to designating the Ludlow Memorial a National Landmark. Obviously, the restoration of the sculptures is the first priority. The good news is that donations have come in from all over U.S. and the world, mostly from union people, reaching a total of $40,000 as of Labor Day. At first the union thought the entire monument would have to be replaced, at an estimated cost of $200,000, but no there is hope that a restoration specialist can reshape and reattach the severed parts at a lower cost. Mike Romero thinks that if the checks keep coming in, the necessary sums will be available. In the meantime, he encouraged us to use our expertise as historians to begin the process of seeking landmark status for the monument.
Why do we care about this monument in a remote part of Southern Colorado? Why do we think other citizens should share our concern? Why should we join with the unions in seeking to restore the Ludlow memorial and to protect it from other attacks? The answers to these questions may be self evident to the readers of LABOR, but we who are dedicated to practicing labor history could nevertheless pause to consider anew our answers to these questions—for two reasons, at least.
First, scholars of labor history have tended to ignore the significance of memorials, leaving the work of caring for them and interpreting importance to local union people and preservationists, to folklorists, and professionals in our state and national parks. It is easy to see monuments as markers of the dead hand of the past, not as part of living history. But what’s happened to the Ludlow monument has certainly been a wake up call for scholars. The crime committed there and the response to it reminds us of how important “places of memory” like the Ludlow memorial can be.
My awakening began when I participated in a Labor History Theme Study for the National Landmarks Program, which I have described elsewhere.
Mandated by Congress in 1993, the study was intended to aid in the selection of labor history sites suitable for listing as part of the National Landmarks Program. The 1935 Historic Sites Act democratized national landmarking by allowing citizens to make nominations. However, so many suggestions flowed in during the New Deal that the Park Service set up more restrictive procedures based on standards of “national significance.” The Landmarks Program now aims to recognize sites of national significance “associated with events that have made a significant contribution to and are identified with . . . the broad patterns of United States history” or that are associated “with the lives of “nationally significant” persons or that “represent some great idea or ideal of the American people” or that “embody characteristics of an architectural-type specimen exceptionally valuable for the study of a period…” and so on. These criteria indicated further that the following sites were “ordinarily not eligible” for designation: cemeteries, birthplaces, graves of historical figures and religious buildings.
When the Newberry Library was awarded the contract to complete the study, the director James Grossman asked me to write the introduction. I was asked to summarize the findings of other historians who identified important themes in labor history research that should guide the selection of sites. I also decided to mine the results of a national survey conducted by the Newberry that asked unions, community groups and individuals to nominate local sites for consideration. The first thing that occurred to me as a poured over the local and institutional nominations is that so many of them—too many of them—represented death. There were numerous sites of industrial accidents and mine explosions and even more sites where workers had been killed while protesting peacefully—actually an alarming number of sites where massacres took place. At the Ludllow site and others like it are what Archie Green calls “man-made” memorials that compress “historical experience for countless workers who recall or relate narratives of occupational conflict and death.”
Local working people also nominated many gravesites and memorial monuments sites that might be excluded by the criteria of the Landmarks Program, sites like the one where in 1897, near Lattimer, Pennsylvania, nineteen immigrant miners were slain by a posse of gunmen-- “one of number of well-known episodes in American history in which,” according to Perry K. Blatz, “law enforcement officials overreacted pathologically to reasonably peaceful labor protest.” The monument to these victims, like the one to the innocents of Ludlow, not only records a shameful tragedy, it also recalls an outrage that produced wave of worker militancy and that led to the unionization of the hard coal fields-- and to a measure of protection from more homicidal attacks by the industry’s gunmen.
So, in a positive way, this survey of meaningful sites conducted by the Newberry made me realize how much local people care about these sites, especially the tragic ones. These public responses suggested that the labor landmarks project might break out of the dilemma: that the creation of heritage environments does not involve “strong publics,” but rather reactive expressions of opinion from “weak publics” after the planning and conceptual work is finished by experts. The restoration of the Ludlow memorial is already a different case with strong labor public backed up by supportive experts.
Curiously, and poignantly, the history of the Ludlow Memorial speaks to our present preoccupation with morning those who have died in their work places--the federal workers in Oklahoma City, and their children and of course the thousands of workers who perished on September 11, 2001. Journalist Mary Leonard reported that the “death sites” involved—the kind places that once evoked only pain and shame and were therefore unmarked—are now “undergoing an unexpectedly rapid conversion into permanent memorials honoring the dead.” It is a trend propelled by “strong” publics “with families leading the charge to quickly designate killing fields as memorials to victims instead of sites of shame….” Scholars told Leonard that this “protest against the anonymity of mass death…is fueled by intense media coverage that connects people to the victims and tells their poignant stories.” They also told her this trend is “relatively new in American life.” Obviously, these scholars were not familiar with our labor history, particularly the history of miners and their families, who, it would seem, have something to tell the rest of us about grief and loss, and the duty to remember.
Thus far, the Labor History Theme Study has resulted in only a few sites being officially nominated (a serious scholarly site study and proposal is required). Nine sites have been approved thus far. One of the sites officially landmarked is the Haymarket martyrs’ memorial in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, a nomination which, thanks to the excellent scholarship of historian Robin Bachin of the University of Miami, overcame the Landmarks Program’s reservations about grave stones and memorials. The Ludlow Memorial is listed as one of those sites still “under consideration,” but this status is meaningless, unless historians and local activists collaborate in a serious site study and proposal, which will, without question, have the support of the United Mine Workers and a strong public of labor unionists and their allies.
The second reason we should to reconsider the importance of these places of memory is that we need to make a case for their significance to an unaware and largely unsympathetic public, and to government officials for whom nothing is sacred as far as labor history is concerned. The following points might be made to start with, points I raised in an editorial submitted to the Denver Post. It read like this:
“We care about the Ludlow monument, first of all because it stands in respect for the dead, and therefore deserves the protection we would accord any kind of symbol of respect for the dead. But such a marker, such a place of memory, has added significance because it helps us understand our past.
Historians who conducted a study for the National Landmarks Program nominated Ludlow for marking as one of the most important sites of its kind in the nation, because it represents so much of importance in our history. It is a crusade that cost many workers their lives, and reminds us of the central role immigrants played in building industrial America, and of the shocking violence that accompanied that process in many places.
There are a few memorials to workers who have died in the nation’s countless mine disasters and numerous strikes and lockouts, but the Ludlow marker reminds us of two forgotten groups: the innocent children and the brave women who found themselves tied together in harsh mining towns in ways that remind us, as novelist Wallace Stegner wrote, of what “real injustice looked like.”
The Ludlow marker also recalls the titanic struggle for social justice, the fight to extend the Bill of Rights to the workplace—a crusade that led to reforms that American workers take for granted today. These are some of the reasons why the events at Ludlow are described in the nation’s best history textbooks.
It is of course painful to revisit such sites and the memories they evoke.
Some people may feel those violent episodes of worker-employer struggle in our past are better forgotten. We believe they should be revisited for many of the same reasons thousands visit Civil War battle fields and why many more will come to the federal government’s newly designated Sand Creek Massacre National Historical Site in Colorado.
The women and children of Ludlow were victims in another kind of civil war, one which also changed our nation by addressing terrible abuses suffered by laboring people.
Bloody conflict, as painful as it is to recall, is part of our national heritage. Let’s learn from it.
There are those who want Americans to forget the violence, to forget the innocent lives lost, to wipe immigrant workers off the pages of history. The Ludlow memorial’s destruction is therefore a crime against memory. It is a blow struck for the powerful against the powerless, those whose memories give meaning to their presence in the United States. As the Denver Post concluded in its call to restore the Ludlow monument: ‘To forget this shameful episode in Colorado history’ would be wrong, for ‘To forget Ludlow is to forget the that every human being is entitled to be treated with respect and dignity.’” |
