In 1915 officers of the United Mine Workers of America purchased forty acres of land north of the Ludlow, Colorado train depot on land where a tent colony had sheltered coal miners and their families during the 1913–1914 southern Colorado coal strike. Three years later, the union dedicated a memorial of Vermont granite on the site in memory of those who died there April 20, 1914, in the Ludlow Massacre.
The crime occurred in the midst of a massive coal miners' strike against southern Colorado coal companies. The Rockefellers controlled the largest company, Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I). During the strike, company guards and hired guns were mustered into the National Guard. When these troops fired on the Ludlow tent colony, many fled to take shelter in nearby arroyos. Some women and children hid in a well; others took refuge in underground pits the strikers had dug under the tents for protection from just such violence. In the early hours of shooting, soldiers assassinated union organizer Louis Tikas and two other strikers and killed two other union men and an eleven-year-old boy. Then they set fire to the tents. When the fires burned out, camp residents made the grim discovery of the bodies of two women and eleven children who suffocated and died in one pit: Patricia Valdez and her four children, the pregnant Cedilano Costa and her two children, as well as three of Mary Petrucci's children, and Alcarita Pedregon's Cloriva, aged four, and her son Roderlo, aged six.Footnote 1
When the news got out, it sparked fury all through the strikers' camps. Armed with 30–30 carbines, a small army of one thousand strikers launched “a coordinated attack” on the National Guard. Fighting raged on a forty-mile front for several days until the US Army intervened.Footnote 2
Of all the murderous assaults on workers that took place during the “age of industrial violence,” none shocked the nation, or troubled its collective conscience, more than the Ludlow massacre. The deaths of immigrant workingmen—for example, the killing of nineteen Slovenian miners by a sheriff's posse in Lattimer, Pennsylvania, in 1897—aroused little public concern, but the deaths of innocent women and children provoked outrage that extended far beyond labor, socialist, and progressive circles. (The union movement labeled the women and children as victims murdered by capitalist forces but seldom referred to them by their own names—names that would have called attention to their Hispanic and Italian heritages.) In 1915 the massacre became the most important event probed by the US Commission on Industrial Relations whose members called upon John D. Rockefeller, Jr., himself to face a public inquiry into causes of the tragic violence directed at his striking workers.Footnote 3
On May 30, 1918, UMWA officials dedicated the granite monument next to the site of the lethal pit as a memorial to the women and children who were murdered there. The stone cenotaph represented a coal miner, sleeves rolled up, standing near a woman holding a child in her arms. The names of the union dead—those shot by the soldiers and the women and children who died in the pit—are inscribed on the granite structure dedicated “to those who gave their lives for freedom at Ludlow.”Footnote 4
Every spring the United Mine Workers organized a memorial ceremony at the massacre site during which wreaths were placed on the granite figures and in the pit where the innocents perished on that dreadful day in April 1914. The union later preserved the pit with cement walls and ceiling, and built a picnic structure nearby to house the annual services. A register at the site recorded the names, comments, and memories of visitors. And so the massacre site and the monument became a site of memory for a relatively small number of visitors who happened to pass by as well as for pilgrims from near and far who knew the story. For years, the only direction to the site just off Interstate 25 was a sign the union erected; not until the 1990s was a highway marker placed to locate Ludlow for visitors.
On May 8, 2003, Mike Romero, caretaker of the site, drove out to clean up the area for the annual memorial gathering. When he arrived, he was horrified to see that the heads of both figures on the statue had been severed from their torsos along with the left arm of the female figure. Romero immediately notified local UMWA officials and they contacted the Sheriff of Las Animas County. The union representatives 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 of America and Oregon Steel, a firm that operated a mill that was once part of the Rockefellers' Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Labor unions in the area raised a fund of five thousand dollars as a reward for information leading to the arrest of the criminals responsible for the desecration.Footnote 5
Gary Cox, a Colorado labor historian and a “guardian” of the state's labor monuments, described his reaction in a lament he called “Ludlow—Our Twin Towers Beheaded.” When he visited the site the black shrouds covering the figures were removed so that Cox could take pictures of the damage. “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 forethought. 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 [because the heads were cleanly severed].” 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 had no answers and no suspects.Footnote 6
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.”Footnote 7
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.Footnote 8
Speculation swirled about who had committed the crime and why. The president of the Steel Workers Union local in nearby Pueblo, whose members had been locked in the long struggle with Oregon Steel, suspected that it was the scabs who cut the figures down, to get back at the union, whose members were preparing to join in the annual memorial service at the massacre site on June 29.Footnote 9
This tribute to the victims of the Ludlow assault was an event usually attended by a small band of people; still, UMWA leaders maintained the ceremony to offer homage to the innocents who lost their lives for the workers' causes, and to remind their members that, while they mourned the union dead, they still had to “fight like hell for the living,” as Mother Jones had put it. But in 2003 this annual ceremony in rural Colorado promised to become something quite different.
The officers and some board members of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) discussed the desecration via email and agreed that it would be worthwhile to send a representative of the association to the event. Vice President Jim Green asked Julie Greene, a LAWCHA board member, who taught at the University of Colorado, to speak for the association at the event and offer LAWCHA's help with the campaign to restore the monument. Green also suggested that she raise the idea that LAWCHA could take on the task of seeking National Landmark status for the Ludlow Memorial.
Julie Greene described the scene at the 2003 Ludlow memorial service:
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 formal ceremony was highlighted by an inspiring speech from UMWA International President Cecil Roberts, who had the audience on its feet and cheering during much of his talk. “This is our Vietnam Veterans Memorial, our Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, our Lincoln Memorial,” Roberts declared. “There is no question whatsoever that … this monument will be restored.”Footnote 10 Greene spoke about the massacre, historical memory, and attempts then and now to suppress the memory of the strike. She also shared with the audience a message of support and solidarity from the Labor and Working-Class History Association. The loudest applause she received came when she said that LAWCHA wanted to help make the site a national landmark so that it would receive some national recognition.
And so began the work of getting National Historic Landmark (NHL) status for the Ludlow site. NHL's are historic places designated by the Secretary of the Interior because they are exceptional in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States. Ownership of the property does not change; if the Ludlow site became a landmark it would remain the property of the UMWA. NHL status is not easily achieved: Fewer than 2500 sites have made it through the nomination process and been designated as National Historic Landmarks, and only a handful of these are labor history sites.
Despite these challenges, Jim Green, when he became the new president of LAWHCA, asked and received the Board of Directors' approval to appoint a committee to pursue the national land marking of the Ludlow site. Meeting at the North American Labor History Conference in Detroit in 2003, the LAWCHA Board voted to support the project after a discussion that swung around the politics of commemoration—an arena that scholars of history have often been reluctant to enter because this memorial work is naturally elegiac and ceremonial, if not celebratory, in nature. Furthermore, “monumental history” usually relies far more on received memory than analytical history.
Indeed, scholars of labor history have tended to ignore the significance of memorials, leaving the work of caring for them and interpreting their importance to local union people and preservationists, folklorists, and professionals who work 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 happened to the Ludlow monument served as a wake-up call for historians.
The crime against memory committed at the Ludlow monument and the response to it reminded historians just how important these “places of memory” can be. As Pierre Nora wrote of such “lieux de memorie” in France, where physical sites like monuments are appreciated and even venerated, these places of memory often serve to “maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies through ritual events”—all ways of defending sacred memories that “without commemorative vigilance” would be swept away by the forces of history.Footnote 11
According to the scholar of labor lore, Archie Green, the Ludlow site and others like it compress “historical experience for countless workers who recall or relate narratives of occupational conflict and death.”Footnote 12 These unofficial memorial sites can move and inspire visitors as do war memorials constructed to recall battles, venerate fallen soldiers, kindle patriotism, and enhance national unity. Sites of conflict in labor history also evoke, however, a discordant memory of what social reality really felt like, “the kind of memory that by its very existence threatens the sacred and timeless nature of official expressions,” writes John Bodnar.Footnote 13 For this reason, perhaps, few labor sites had received landmark designation: for example, the well-preserved homes of national leaders like Terence Powderly, Samuel Gompers, Eugene Debs and Frances Perkins. However, with the exception of the Botto House in Haledon, New Jersey, which served as a headquarters for the striking Paterson silk workers in 1913, and the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, none of these official landmarks evoked the violent conflicts and human sacrifices so characteristic of US labor history. It was not as though unofficial labor history memorials were scarce, however. The Labor Heritage Foundation had compiled a list of 170 such sites of working-class memory across the nation (http://www.laborheritage.org/landmark.htm).
LAWCHA Board members favored undertaking the Ludlow landmarking project because the association had, from its inception, been dedicated to making labor and working-class history more accessible to the public. But in its first years, the organization had struggled to establish itself as a viable organization of labor historians. It was difficult to organize public projects because the members came together just once or twice a year at the North American Labor History Conference or at the Organization of American Historians meeting. Green argued that the Ludlow landmarking project offered an excellent chance for the association members to work together on a public history project and to be of service to local stakeholders in Colorado and to a renowned national labor union. He also explained that working through the federal system would be challenging and perhaps even compromising. Green reviewed these problems in a detailed report on the progress made since 1993 when the Newberry Library prepared a “Labor History Theme Study” for the Park Service—a study intended to aid in the selection of labor history sites suitable for listing as part of the National Historic Landmarks Program. The study revealed a significant degree of local interest in the site selection process. Over 200 individuals and organizations submitted a total of 297 nominations of labor history sites that deserved government recognition. But the process of landmarking that should have followed the theme study had not proceeded due to disagreements between the Newberry Library team and the Landmarks program director, so no other nominations were moving forward.Footnote 14
As of 2003 only one of the newly nominated sites—the Haymarket Martyrs Monument at Waldheim Cemetery—had been officially marked, even though nine new sites nominated by the Newberry historians had not. These included sites of conflict like the Bost Building (union headquarters in the Homestead lockout) and the Matewan historical district in West Virginia, as well as a few places that represented the history of labor radicalism: the grave site memorial to the Haymarket anarchists, the Socialist Labor Party Hall in Barre, Vermont (where the granite to sculpt the Ludlow memorial statue was cut), and Union Square in New York. The Ludlow tent colony site and memorial was one of thirteen other places recommended for further study.Footnote 15 If other nominations were to move forward, the process would require the painstaking scholarly work that had been invested in making the Waldheim gravesite a national landmark. And this required meeting certain federal criteria.
In 1935, the Historic Sites Act democratized the national landmarking process by allowing citizens to make nominations. However, so many suggestions flowed in during the New Deal years 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 indicate further that the following sites are “ordinarily not eligible” for designation: cemeteries, birthplaces, graves of historical figures, and religious buildings. A gravesite could be considered for landmark status only if it was “of a historical figure of transcendent importance in the nation's history.”Footnote 16
The landmarks program represented a serious intervention by the federal government into the creation of public memory. Local groups frequently proposed sites for landmarking, but the power and authority of National Park Service history programs regulated the expression of public memory in various settings. According to John Bodnar, the class backgrounds of Park Service professionals reinforced the practice of promoting “progress and patriotism” as the dominant themes in national memory. In his view, the state not only consolidated power in the discourse over memory, “but it advanced the class interests of those who were intimately tied to that power for over a century.”Footnote 17
As a result, landmarking criteria presented serious obstacles to designating many significant labor history sites. Few structures with architectural integrity remain on the national landscape to remind the public of the contributions of workers and unions. In many cases, workers, especially in extractive industries, passed through the minefields and forests without leaving a physical trace of their presence. Eventually, their wanderings ended when they died and were buried in graves on bleak hillsides, their resting places marked humbly, if at all. Of course, workers' graves, however marked, would not have qualified under the criteria of the National Landmarks Program.Footnote 18
The Ludlow memorial was a special case because it was not a cemetery, but a killing field, one marked by a haunting monument. Although there were no structures of architectural integrity at the site, it qualified under landmarks criteria as a memorial, one far better known than most monuments erected to labor's dead. The tent colony site itself, however, retained integrity because the ground on which it rested had not been seriously disturbed since the strike. And though the monument had been damaged, it retained integrity as a site of memory, as did the disturbing death pit where the women and children died. The case for the historical importance of the Ludlow massacre seemed self-evident to labor historians and unionists. However, NHL guidelines required that the case be made in terms of mandated standards for “national significance.”
The massacre itself remained a largely forgotten episode in history until the period after the Second World War when events in labor history began to receive more attention in textbooks. By the late twentieth century, the Ludlow massacre was mentioned in most accounts of the Progressive Era and its significance is indisputable in the minds of most historians. Furthermore, since National Historical Landmark status could be awarded to some archeological sites, the tent colony area qualified because it had become one of two labor conflict sites investigated by the Colorado Coalfield War Archeological Project, funded by the Colorado Historical Society, State Historical Fund. The archeological exploration was directed by Dean Saitta, University of Denver; Philip Duke, Fort Lewis College; and Randall McGuire, Binghamton University.Footnote 19 Therefore, the site was a strong candidate for national landmark status.
In January 2004, LAWCHA President Jim Green appointed Elizabeth Jameson, University of Calgary, and Zaragosa Vargas, University of California, Santa Barbara as co-chairs of the Ad Hoc Committee on Labor History Landmarks (known as “the Ludlow Committee”). Jameson, who had been active in the responses to the desecration of the monument and in fundraising for its restoration, had already heard from other labor historians eager to participate. Vargas and Jameson invited labor historians to join the Committee and chose a group of experts to assist them. The Committee members were Alan Derickson, Pennsylvania State University; Anthony DeStefanis, University of South Florida; Camille Guerín-Gonzales, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Randall McGuire, Binghamton University; and Jonathan Rees, Colorado State University, Pueblo. Each Committee member brought particular expertise to the project. Jameson and Derickson had both worked extensively on the Western Federation of Miners and Jameson's research has focused on Colorado mining labor. Vargas and Guerín-Gonzales were both experts in Latino/a labor history; Guerín-Gonzales had written on women in coal mining communities, including those in southern Colorado. Anthony DeStefanis had researched the role of state militia troops in mining strikes; Jonathan Rees, who taught just north of the Ludlow site, wrote one of the first accounts of the desecration of the Ludlow monument and was well informed on local developments. Holly Syrakkos, of the AFL-CIO and the Labor Heritage Foundation, assisted the Committee, as did Martin Blatt, National Park Service, and Tobias Higbie, Newberry Library, who consulted in the planning stages. The Committee also contacted Bob Butero, the UMWA regional representative, and Mike Romero, president of the Trinidad, Colorado, UMWA local, to enlist union input and support.
On February 3, Jameson contacted the National Park Service historian, Lysa Wegman-French, at the NPS Intermountain Support Office in Denver. Fortuitously, Wegman-French was the coordinator for National Historic Landmarks in Colorado. She responded that she was “delighted that the Labor and Working-Class History Association is interested in pursuing NHL designation for the Ludlow site.” The NPS had been interested in the nomination, she reported, since its inclusion in the Labor Theme Study. In Spring 2000 Wegman-French had explored nominating the site as an NHL but had heard informally that the UMWA had concerns about such a federal designation. She reported that the NPS remained interested and would be happy to coordinate efforts with the LAWCHA Ludlow Committee.Footnote 20 Wegman-French provided the guidelines for NHL nominations and other sources to Committee members and helped familiarize the co-chairs with the criteria and process for NHL nominations. She emphasized that the NHL process could be difficult, and that some successful nominations could “take years and years of on-again off-again work.” This advice turned out to be excellent preparation for the complex task ahead.Footnote 21
From the outset, LAWCHA's Ludlow Committee had to balance the stakeholders' various interests and priorities. It was important to ensure UMWA support and ownership of the project, to honor obligations to political and public supporters of the nomination, and to address Park Service requirements by gathering information and documentation that would meet the federal criteria on the rather complex nomination form. The time and care required often competed with the understandable eagerness of the NPS, the UMWA, and the Committee members themselves to complete the job as quickly as possible.
In addition, the Committee's work was sometimes slowed by the fact that all members had day jobs. At one point Randy McGuire was out of the country for fieldwork, for instance, without access to his Colorado Coalfield War Archeological Project files. And then there were the inevitable delays of professional and family obligations, illnesses, and other unforeseen interruptions.Footnote 22 Primarily, however, the work took time because the nomination process is complicated. After the extensive nomination materials were completed, they had to be reviewed by NHL staff of the NPS Intermountain Regional Offices in Denver and Santa Fe, as well as the NHL Survey at the NPS in Washington. Following these reviews, revisions had to be made, and owners and elected officials notified and their comments invited. (Owners of property can concur in the nomination or object. The Secretary of Interior can determine that a property is eligible for NHL status but not designate it if owners object). The nomination would then be forwarded to the National Park Service Advisory Board at one of its two annual meetings and must be placed on the agenda six months in advance. The NPS Advisory Board reviews nominations and recommends to the Secretary of the Interior, who makes the final determination about NHL designation.
The Committee was aware that it was undertaking the first sustained LAWCHA effort at outreach beyond the profession. All members were also passionately committed to the work of historical memory—of reconnecting the history of Ludlow with public memories of the creation of industrial America, just as the union undertook to re-member the broken figures on the Ludlow Monument. Committee members' own interpretations of the Ludlow Massacre and their feelings about the importance of that history sometimes had to be reconciled with NHL significance criteria, and with the politics of achieving NHL designation.
Jameson reported the Committee's progress to the LAWCHA Board when it met at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting in Boston March 25–28, 2004. She explained that eight months after the monument was vandalized the two damaged statues had been removed for restoration to the studios of Griswold Conservation Associates in Beverly Hills, California, with whom the UMWA had contracted to restore the Ludlow Monument. Eighty thousand dollars in donations had come in from all over the world to pay for the restoration, and the Memorial would be rededicated at the June 2005 annual commemoration.
In the ensuing months the primary task was to establish communication and cooperation with UMWA representatives. Jameson worked with UMWA Regional Representative Bob Butero, who confirmed union support for the project and agreed to consult with the Ludlow Committee. The union, while supportive of NHL status, had a number of reasonable questions, including, for instance, the assurance that the union would retain ownership of the Ludlow site, and that it could withdraw from the NHL designation if it had qualms about federal interpretation of the history. LAWCHA President Jim Green secured official support from UMWA President Cecil Roberts.
The committee's first challenge involved plotting the physical dimensions of the site. Committee member Randy McGuire was familiar with the area and with who owned the surrounding land from his experience with the archeological dig there. The battle following the burning of the tent colony raged over at least a square mile. The UMWA owns forty acres that include most of the tent colony site, but a small part of the tent colony site belongs to another owner. The smallest potential nomination might include only the monument and the death pit site. The consensus decision was to nominate the tent colony site at least (if not the whole battleground), as in terms of national significance it is more appropriate than the monument alone. Randy McGuire offered to provide a map of the site(s), the names of owners and what he knew about them, and information about the second owner of the sliver of the tent colony site. After this information was available, the decision about exactly what area to nominate would be addressed.
The Committee then discussed the second challenge: the question of historical significance. Wegman-French emphasized that the Committee did not need to write an academic treatise but needed only to address what established the national significance of the site and provide supporting evidence of national significance. Some Committee members felt strongly that the statement of significance should not be limited to a “battles, dates, and outcomes” history of industrial conflict, but that social histories that included the processes of class formation and the social organization of the tent colony should be included. Extensive discussion of how to build social history themes into this statement along with event-driven and battle-sequence descriptions followed. The Committee decided that these fit logically in a description of the formation of the tent colony and how it functioned as a multiracial community that included women and families.
The committee had produced a wealth of ideas about historical significance; the challenge would be to make these focused and easily understandable to readers who were not professional historians, specializing in labor history. To that end, the Committee agreed to work on a two-page statement of the national significance of the site as a starting point. Randy McGuire thought that it would be easy to establish the archaeological significance of the site as well and agreed to work on a short statement of the archaeological significance.
The nomination also required a physical description of the monument as well as a description of its creation and its history. Bob Butero and Holly Syrrakos agreed to compile this documentation.Footnote 23
On June 5, 2005, four hundred people gathered at Ludlow to rededicate a restored monument to the women and children who died there in 1914. The entire Executive Board of the United Mine Workers was present at the event, which began with a Navajo prayer offered by a mine union official and ended with a stem-winding Baptist revival sermon by the UMWA's charismatic president, Cecil Roberts. Bob Butero, the UMW district representative who organized the event and the restoration of the statues, asked Jim Green to speak for LAWCHA about the association's efforts to make the Ludlow site a National Landmark. All of the other speakers who followed took up the cause enthusiastically and promised (unrealistically as it turned out) that within a year the site would be a national landmark.Footnote 24
Representatives of the then newly-elected US Senator from Colorado, Ken Salazar, and his brother, Congressman John Salazar from the Pueblo district, emphasized that the Senator and Congressman would provide whatever support would be needed in Washington. Senator Salazar's staff assistant, John Rodriguez, indicated that achieving landmark status for the Ludlow site would open up possibilities for other federal and state grants that could be used to enhance the area as an educational site devoted to the history of immigrants in western industrial development.
With this inspiring news, the Ludlow Committee pursued its work with renewed zeal. Within a few weeks Jameson had received the materials she needed from committee members to produce a report on the national significance question. On July 15, Jameson summarized the Committee's statements under four topic areas. The first addressed the place of Ludlow in a long history of labor relations. Ludlow was significant as the apex of a long series of western mining strikes that pitted employers, workers, and the state against one another. The end of the strike, which killed women and children, provided the context for checks on uses of state force, and from the perspective of employers and the state, for finding new ways to manage industrial relations and contain unions.
The second topic concerned how Ludlow informed industrial and social policy. The need to find new solutions led John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to consult future Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who devised the plan for a company union. The development of the company union model was one important industrial outcome of Ludlow; it was later outlawed under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.
Third, Committee members underlined the significance of the strike itself and its importance as an organized response to the dangers, low pay, community-focused social control, and ethnic discrimination in coal mining. The union's strategy was unique. The UMWA leased the tent colony site to house workers thrown out of company housing; the strike organization included the leadership and participation of all represented language groups and women and managed domestic arrangements, community needs, and union strategy. The strike climaxed the class conflict in the West (but did not end it by any means). Camille Guerín-Gonzales made the most forcible case for the strike's significance; both she and Zaragosa Vargas emphasized its enduring significance in memory.
Finally, the Committee emphasized the cultural significance of the strike and the site. Their report emphasized its importance as a catalyst for memory and identification among contemporary workers and Mexican Americans in particular. It also generated a wider cultural impact, as well, for example in cotemporary newspaper coverage and “muckraking” reports. Upton Sinclair organized protest pickets and wrote two novels about the strike, the well-known King Coal and the more historically accurate The Coal War.Footnote 25
Randall McGuire summarized the archaeological significance of the site:
In many ways the Ludlow Massacre site is the perfect archaeological site, a short-term occupation destroyed by fire. The catastrophic abandonment of the tent colony and subsequent burning create a “Pompeii”-like situation. Objects that would normally have been taken with a family when they moved were left behind in the rush to escape the violence and fire.
McGuire described the archaeological integrity of the site, confirmed the data potential of the remains and identified important research questions that can be answered there. McGuire enumerated potential sites for future excavation: latrine pits, trash pits, and tent cellars filled with artifacts that recorded families' lives and customs and offered a highly unusual view of the everyday lives of early-twentieth-century working-class families. In addition, he provided the ownership data on the land around the forty acres of the tent colony site that was owned by the UMWA.Footnote 26
Not all Committee members agreed with all the areas of significance identified or assigned them equal value. Further conversation occurred online about significance, emphasis, and the exact physical site to nominate.
In the midst of the discussion of significance, the National Park Service weighed in, deciding that since the Ludlow Massacre site had such an important archeological character that it would be best to have an archeologist be the NPS contact person for the region. So Charles (Charlie) Haecker, the archeologist for the National Historic Landmarks Program intermountain region, replaced Lysa Wegman-French as point person for the project. Haecker is an historical archeologist, and the Committee was assured that the historical significance would not be slighted. Wegman-French supported the change in coordination because Ludlow was unusual in having both historical and archeological significance and because the archeological portion of the nomination would be the more difficult to demonstrate. She remained involved for some months.Footnote 27
In August 2005, Haecker wrote that he and Wegman-French had discussed the Committee's work and would offer guidance for formulating the significance statements. He emphasized the importance of making certain that the correct criteria were used for the all-important significance statement. Haecker and Wegman-French thought that two criteria were appropriate for the Ludlow nomination: Criteria 1 (sites “associated with events that have made a significant contribution to, and are identified with, or that outstandingly represent, the broad national pattern of United States history and from which an understanding and appreciation of those patterns may be gained”) and Criteria 6 (sites that “have yielded or may be likely to yield information of major scientific importance by revealing new cultures, or by shedding light upon periods of occupation of large areas of the United States. Such sites are those which have yielded, or which may reasonably be expected to yield, data affecting theories, concepts, and ideas to a major degree”). Others of the six possible significance criteria could apply to the Ludlow site, so the advice to limit the nomination to two criteria focused the Committee's work, though it frustrated some members who argued for the importance of other criteria.Footnote 28
The project achieved geographic focus as well, with the decision to limit the initial nomination to the forty-acre site that the UMWA owned. Adjacent property might be added in the future, after the NHL designation was achieved.
In November 2005, Haecker made a further suggestion. Since all committee members had academic responsibilities, he suggested that it might be useful to acquire the services of someone with experience in producing NHL nominations, who could assemble draft textual contributions from committee members, ensure that the text followed NHL guidelines, and assist in guiding the nomination through the process. The Park Service committed funds to hire the services of such a person, and, in March 2006, hired Tom and Laurie Simmons to prepare the nomination and fit the Committee's write-ups into the appropriate format. The Committee provided the NPS with a copy of Cecil Roberts' letter of support, and the NPS guaranteed that the Ludlow Committee would review the nomination before it was submitted, recognizing that “the committee has a professional responsibility of reviewing the nomination since your names will be on it—and you all have a personal interest that the presented information gets your ideas, interpretations across.”Footnote 29
In addition to preparing text for the significance statement on the NHL nomination, during 2005–2006 the Committee was increasingly called upon for diplomatic communication with supportive politicians and stakeholders who were frustrated with the lengthy nomination process, particularly after the unrealistic expectation of a one-year completion was voiced at the 2005 commemoration.
The UMWA invited Jameson to speak at the annual Ludlow commemoration on June 11, 2006, which gave her the opportunity to meet with UMWA officials, Colorado politicians, as well as Charlie Haecker and Tom and Laurie Simmons. Other speakers included Colorado State Representative Buffie McFayden, Dean Saitta of the Colorado Coalfield War Archeological Project, Pam DiFatta of Congressman John Salazar's office, and UMWA Secretary-Treasurer Dan Kane.
Jameson spoke about the process of making memory, of keeping memory alive, and compared the desecration of the Ludlow monument statues to the ways that the memory of Ludlow had been severed from national history and collective memory. She recounted the history of the strike and the simple demands for which the union miners struck. Locating Ludlow in the history of industrial violence in the United States, she said, was not unique, but it was special because of what the miners knowingly risked; because it was a pivotal chapter in that much longer history of labor's struggles for control of work and community; because the organizing was so smart, as the union hired ethnic organizers, organized by ethnic groups to form a multiethnic cooperative movement in the tent colonies, and anticipated the need to house workers evicted from company housing, and included women in camp governance. One significant difference, she said, was who died at Ludlow, because “never before had the actions of the state led directly to the deaths of women and children.” She emphasized the importance of the site because it linked the “public arenas of unions and strikes with the daily lives of miners and their families, with the material needs that motivated the men to organize and strike in the first place.” And it was important as a site of memory of the difficult and brave struggle for justice for the miners and their families. The attempt to dismember the monument, she concluded, was eloquent testimony to how powerful the history remains, because there is no need to attack monuments that don't inspire vital living memories. She concluded with the story of Mary Petrucci, born in the shadow of the Victor-American mine tipple at Hastings, raised in a company house, married at sixteen to man who loaded boxcars for the coal company in Walsenberg, a woman who, at age twenty-four lost all of her children during the strike but who hoped “when everybody knows about them, something will be done to make the world a better place for babies.”Footnote 30 Jameson promised that LAWCHA would keep faith with Mary Petrucci by seeing the process of establishing Ludlow as a National Historic Landmark to successful completion.
After the official commemoration, Jameson met with Bob Butero, Mike Romero, and Dan Kane of the UMWA; Pam DiFatta, representing Congressman John Salazar; John Rodriguez, representing Senator Ken Salazar; Charles Haecker, and Tom and Laurie Simmons. Haecker outlined the NHL nomination and designation process, and he and Jameson answered questions. Everyone present strongly supported the effort; Jameson promised to keep everyone informed. She spent the following day with Mike and Yolanda Romero in Trinidad, going through the registers kept at the monument site, selecting representative entries that demonstrated how the site created an archive for the future and that represented the diversity of national and international visitors and their reactions to the site.
While in Washington in late June on professional business, Jameson met with Matt Lee-Ashley, of Senator Ken Salazar's staff, to discuss the Senator's interest in introducing legislation to achieve NHL status for the Ludlow site. She conveyed NPS concerns that this would set a precedent for designations based on political influence and would establish landmarks without appropriate historical documentation. Lee-Ashley, who wrote a BA thesis on the 1903–1904 southern Colorado coal strike, and was impressively knowledgeable about Ludlow and its historical significance, agreed to convey NPS process concerns to the Senator. The Senator ultimately agreed not to submit legislation until the nomination was completed.Footnote 31
The Committee sent all its reports to Tom and Laurie Simmons of Front Range Research Associates, Inc., as well as longer narratives by Camille Guerín-Gonzales and Elizabeth Jameson that covered the background and the significance of the site. The Simmonses drafted the extensive nomination that ultimately totaled over sixty pages single-spaced plus maps, figures, and photographs. All the Committee members reviewed the first draft document, offered extensive comments and corrections, and continued to answer queries from the Simmonses through the final preparation process. While it is likely that any single person involved in the process would have written a slightly different narrative, LAWCHA could enthusiastically endorse the final document.
After reviewing the revised draft, Jameson notified Congressman Salazar, Senator Salazar, and LAWCHA on October 21, 2007, that the document was “impressive” and that the time had come to write letters of support for the nomination of the Ludlow site as a National Historical Landmark. At this point, dozens of UMWA local officers wrote letters of support to the Park Service, at the request of International President Cecil Roberts. During the peer review process Committee members answered a few final queries from the Simmonses. The nomination packet was submitted December 12, 2007.Footnote 32
After the nomination was submitted, Senator Ken Salazar wrote a strong letter of support to the National Historic Landmarks Program. He concluded: “I strongly believe that the Ludlow Tent Colony should be designated a National Historic Landmark and that the National Park Service should play a greater role in assisting with the protection and interpretation of this vital chapter in our nation's history. I stand ready to assist in the landmark designation, which is strongly supported in the local communities, by championing legislation in the US Senate to create the Ludlow National Historic Landmark.”Footnote 33 In late January, while in Washington for a research trip, Jameson met with Matt Lee-Ashley and discussed the proposed bill.
On April 18, 2008, in commemoration of the ninety-fourth anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre, Senator Salazar submitted, for himself and Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, “A Bill To Designate the Ludlow Massacre National Historic Landmark in the State of Colorado.” Salazar stated:
The events that occurred during the Ludlow Massacre, and the site that memorializes the conflict, are central to our nation's story. The history is still significant to the Coloradans who live and work in the region. Residents of Las Animas, Huerfano and Pueblo counties, along with many people across America, rightly see the 1913–14 coal strike and the Ludlow Massacre as a defining moment in our shared history and integral to the region's identity. I am proud to introduce the bill in the Senate and will continue to work to ensure it is designated as a national landmark, so that we can better remember the struggles and sacrifices our nation endured on the path to safer and fairer labor conditions.Footnote 34
Senator Salazar's statements of support resonated powerfully for members of the LAWCHA team, who had located the strike's significance in the longer history of class and ethnic relations in southern Colorado. Senator Rockefeller's co-sponsorship was a moving acknowledgment of his family's part in that history. A bill cosponsored by Senator Rockefeller and Senator Salazar, whose family history traces the roots of many Ludlow miners, offered powerful symbolic acknowledgment of Ludlow's significance for the history of industrial America.
Before the bill received a committee hearing, however, the NHL nomination was scheduled to be presented at the October 28–29, 2008, meeting of the National Park Service Advisory Board. Interested parties were invited to send letters in support of the NHL nomination. Former LAWCHA Presidents Jim Green and Alice Kessler-Harris and President Michael Honey sent a letter on behalf of the organization. Senator Salazar updated his letter of support, stating that the site “is central to our nation's understanding and memory of the labor struggles of the early twentieth century, to the region's identity, and to the descendants of all those involved in the 1913–1914 strike and other labor conflicts of the era.” Jameson wrote on behalf of the Ludlow Committee, stressing the combined expertise in ethnic, labor, industrial, and social history and archaeology that the members brought to the project. “The breadth of their expertise,” she wrote, “reflects the broad significance of the site for American history.” She continued:
Ludlow was pivotal in the history of US industrial relations as a dramatic example of the limits of the use of force in industrial struggles, and of the need to find new accommodations between labor and management. It was also unusual in the organization of the strike, and in the effectiveness of the strikers in forging a multi-ethnic community that worked cooperatively across barriers of culture and language. It was particularly significant for the effective organization of domestic life and the involvement of miners' wives and children in the daily functioning of the strikers' community. The tragic end of the strike dramatized their involvement, and the archaeological remains of their community allow us to link the daily lives of working families with the more dramatic public events of strikes and industrial conflict that are more commonly represented in history books. Most simply, the site links what the strikers were sacrificing for with the public events of industrial conflict.Footnote 35
Authors Green (l.) and Jameson holding the plaque that designates the Ludlow site a National Historic Landmark. Courtesy of James Green.
On November 3, 2008, Jameson received word from Charles Haecker that the NPS Advisory Board had unanimously and enthusiastically recommended that the Ludlow site be designated a National Historic Landmark. And then, on December 17, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama announced his nomination of Senator Ken Salazar to become the Secretary of Interior, thus virtually assuring that Ludlow would become an NHL. But on January 16, 2009, before Salazar took office, the outgoing Secretary of the Interior announced the official designation of the Ludlow site as a National Landmark.
The National Landmark at Ludlow was dedicated on June 28 before a diverse and joyous crowd of 700 people. Once again UMW President Cecil Roberts rose to the occasion with a passionate sermon about the meaning of the Ludlow story for today's workers. (A segment is available on YouTube.) Attendees included Frank Patrucci, the 90-year old son of Mary Petrucci, who lost three of her younger children in the pit, which has been preserved at the site. (For a newspaper report on the event see: http://www.chieftain.com/articles/2009/06/28/news/local/doc4a48436d08877736939346.)
This positive and yet unpredictable outcome invites reflection on the role that LAWCHA's Ludlow Committee played in this complex process. It provided essential historical and archeological expertise to supportive National Park Service personnel and insured that the perspectives of the union and of the strike participants were reflected in the nomination. Committee members negotiated among their own professional assessments of the history, the practical demands of the nomination process, and the particular urgencies of supportive politicians, of NPS requirements and deadlines, and of the union itself. In the end, the landmark nomination required the cooperation and expertise of all these organizations. It proved difficult to coordinate writing a nomination by a committee of overcommitted academics operating at a distance, and the NPS solution of hiring professionals to compile the final nomination certainly simplified the process. Committee members can be justly proud that their work and words animate the report while appreciating the valuable support of Senator Salazar and the commitment and the talent of Charles Haecker, Lysa Wegman-French, and Tom and Laurie Simmons, which brought the process to conclusion.
The coalition of the UMWA, elected officials, local union members and Colorado residents, and LAWCHA was a vital collaboration that demonstrated the living significance of Ludlow to American history and collective memory. It is possible that an effort to landmark the Ludlow site would have developed without LAWCHA's initiative, but, at the very least, the association's initiative put the project on a calendar and mobilized the partnerships needed to move it forward. It has been our hope that LAWCHA, now larger and stronger than ever, will take the initiative in proposing further collaborations that will make other labor history sites national landmarks. The LAWCHA Board voted in June 2008 to continue the commitment to the work of public memory, and President Mike Honey appointed Jim Green to chair a committee to take that work forward.
In sum, the Ludlow Committee's work shows that projects of this kind make it possible for university-based, professionally-trained historians to engage in public history that matters to workers and their unions. Labor historians are needed out there in the public sphere. There is useful work for us to do, though it does not allow for the same degree of academic freedom we enjoy in our individual scholarly projects. Working with federal guidelines and problematic standards requires difficult adaptation of the knowledge we have to bureaucratic imperatives. Working with other scholars, Park Service professionals, union and public advocates, and supportive politicians required historians to “share the authority” for interpreting the Ludlow site and its significance. These kinds of collaborative undertakings are at the center of most important public history endeavors. After all, public history, at its best, is interactive and, therefore, most succinctly defined as “a joint endeavor in which historians and their various publics collaborate in trying to make the past useful and valuable to the wider society.”Footnote 36 Surely, such an approach is congenial to labor and working-class historians who research and write, not only for their peers and their students, but for the working-class people whose lives and labors they study.
