HOME

E-MAIL

One chapter of the history of early-century industrial conflicts involved John D. Rockefeller, the first tycoon of the age of energy and the creator of the Standard Oil complex of corporations.

Rockefeller controlled the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, whose coal miners went on strike in 1914. With their families, they were promptly evicted from company-owned homes in Ludlow, Colorado.

They moved into a cluster of tents, around which National Guard soldiers took positions and at night occasionally fired their rifles into the colony. To protect the children, the miners dug a cave under the largest tent. But on Easter night 1914, company-hired gunmen and some of the National Guard poured oil over the strikers' tents and set them on fire.

As the frantic miners and their families ran for safety in the night, they were machine-gunned.  Some escaped, some were wounded and thirteen children and a pregnant woman in the recently dug cave all died-some with gun wounds, some from suffocation.

The nationwide protest against the killings on Rockefeller property were immediate and long sustained. Eventually, it led Rockefeller, the nation's first billionaire, to hire Ivy Lee, an early public relations man, to repair John D.'s sullied reputation.

Even as an old man, Rockefeller continued to hand out shiny new dimes to little children in the effort to erase the Ludlow image-but among the miners and workers in many other unions, the memory of Ludlow persists like an endless bad dream.

Back to Top

[Home] [373 Officers] [Upcoming Events] [Links to Other Unions]
[Local 373 E-mail] [Webmaster E-mail] [373 Members E-mail Directory]
[Ironworkers' Prayer] [History of American Labor]
[Sign Guestbook] [View Guestbook]