Joshua Zaffos

Howard Zinn

Among the many recorded moments of American history impacted by Howard Zinn, who died at age 87 in late January, one of the most significant is the Ludlow Massacre, a 1914 labor skirmish between Colorado’s militia and the families of striking coal miners.

Calling Ludlow a skirmish is putting it gently: In April 1914, the Colorado National Guard, called in by the mining companies, opened fire on women and children at the Ludlow tent camp, killing fourteen, and then set fire to the settlement. The incident ignited seven months of gunfights and bombings around southern Colorado’s coal fields, but the history of Ludlow remained in the shadows, partly because neither embittered families nor mining executives much wanted to remember the massacre, albeit for different reasons.

Zinn first heard about Ludlow through a Woody Guthrie song, which inspired him to learn more about the labor wars in Colorado. Here is Zinn, in his own words, talking about Guthrie’s influence and Ludlow:

Zinn later included his own telling of Ludlow in his seminal work, A People’s History of the United States (Disclosure: I’ve never read the complete tome, but have read his section on the coal labor struggle).

Before Zinn’s scholarship, the labor struggles surrounding Ludlow were “taboo,” according to Thomas G. Andrews, a history professor at University of Colorado, Denver. Andrews wrote an environmental history of the Colorado coalfield wars, Killing for Coal, America’s Deadliest Labor War, which I reviewed for Earth Magazine in July 2009.

Andrews spoke to Denver Post columnist Susan Greene for her January 31 column, remembering Zinn and Ludlow. In the column, Greene offers her take on Zinn and the positive consequences for history students in Colorado and everywhere:

…Zinn’s many writings about Ludlow brought broader awareness. In several essays since the 1970s, he made it known how deep the corruption of wealth and power ran.

“The mining camps were feudal kingdoms run by the coal corporations, which made the laws; curfews were imposed, suspicious strangers were not allowed to visit the homes, the company store must be patronized, the company doctor used. The laws were enforced by company-appointed marshals. The teachers and preachers were picked by the company. By 1914, Colorado Fuel and Iron owned twenty-seven mining camps, and all the land, the houses, the saloons, the schools, the churches, the stores,” he wrote.

…

Zinn put Ludlow on the map. Not just as a place, in all its gruesome details, but as a concept. He popularized the struggle so that the name of the railroad town has become synonymous with corruption — “the firm connection between entrenched wealth and political power, manifested in the decisions of government, and in the machinery of law and justice.”

Ludlow’s uncomfortable history now is taught widely in college courses and K-12 classes. Textbooks cover it. Students take field trips to the shadowed ground that’s finally a national historic landmark.

To hear more from Andrews about his research and background with the Colorado coal wars and Ludlow, check out this video: