Howard Zinn on the Ludlow Massacre

[marmar]

[leftstreet]

1. "which no textbook had ever mentioned"

DURec

The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Some two dozen people, including women and children, were killed. The chief owner of the mine, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was widely criticized for the incident.

The massacre, the culmination of a bloody widespread strike against Colorado coal mines, resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 26 people; reported death tolls vary but include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent.[1] The deaths occurred after a daylong fight between militia and camp guards against striking workers. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, lasting from September 1913 through December 1914. The strike was organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against coal mining companies in Colorado. The three largest companies involved were the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMF), and the Victor-American Fuel Company (VAF).

In retaliation for Ludlow, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of mines over the next ten days, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 40-mile front from Trinidad to Walsenburg.[2] The entire strike would cost between 69 and 199 lives. Thomas G. Andrews described it as the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States".[3]

The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Historian Howard Zinn described the Ludlow Massacre as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history".[4] Congress responded to public outcry by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the incident.[5] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

[rurallib]

2. Congress responded to public outcry

seems like fiction today

[leftstreet]

3. No kidding

It's like sci-fi or something

Two days later, Congress convened to discuss the events at Ludlow, and to consider how the government might check martial power wielded by private industrialists. One senator, Iowa’s “radical Republican,” William Kenyon, decried the government’s ties to the violence, noting that “the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, or the company controlling it, has certain of its bonds on deposit with the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, with which the Department of Agriculture of our Government seems to have been in partnership for some little time.” Another senator expressed a broader concern: “I fear that unless society can in some manner reconcile these troubled conditions as between capital and labor, Mexico is not the only country that will be torn by internecine strife.”
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-ludlow-massacre-still-matters

[truedelphi]

4. Yes because both parties had candidates who continually talked about the

Working class.

These days, during the Big And All Improtant Corporate Spokesperson Elections (Ooops, I meant Presidential Elections!) neither parties' candidates even mention the middle class more than twice or maybe three times.

And it was Howard Zinn who explains this, of course. His history book records how during the Haymarket strikes during the 1890's, the Repulican Party took out quarter page and half page ads in local Chciago newspapers defending the workers.

Has anyone here ever seen even a single Democratic Organization with ad space proclaiming the necessity for workers (and all of the 99%) for the promotion of the
"Occupy Movement" ? And these days, the Republican Party is more about hatred for those who' re "different" than any support for anyone with a job.