Pueblo, Colorado, a dusty western high-prairie town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, has a historic and symbolic attachment to the East Coast. To illustrate this connection, in May 1902, Pueblo opened its own Coney Island—Lake Minnequa—with a grand opening that included a band concert, balloon races, fireworks, an opera, fishing, and boat races. Sarah Bernhardt performed at Lake Minnequa, in 1906, and stated that this was the “only time in her career when she ‘played’ an amusement park.” Pueblo’s “Coney Island” included a ten-cent gate admission, a roller coaster, shooting gallery, hall of mirrors, roller-skating rink,...

In fall 2009 I was honored to participate in the conference that generated the papers for this volume. In this setting, where so much exciting new work was being presented, I was tasked with assessing the state of the field to date. The state of the field was buoyant. We were witnessing a sort of Ludlow Renaissance. That spring it seemed every time I turned on my computer, Amazon. com was inviting me to check out some new volume on Ludlow. And there is other work still in the pipeline, for example, Fawn Montoya’s work on Rockefeller’s disciplining of workers’...

The Pueblo Hall of Fame is housed in College Hall on the campus of Pueblo Community College. One of its inductees is Dr. Richard Warren Corwin, the former chief surgeon of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), the largest private employer in the state at the time he died in 1930. The plaque under Corwin’s picture calls him “an ideal physician, an exemplary community advocate, and a marvelous combination of genius, energy, generosity and executive ability.” A local middle school and the St. Mary–Corwin Regional Medical Center are named for him. “Many of his innovative concepts made a big...

On November 7, 1913, Roady Kenehan, the state auditor of Colorado, left Denver on a train bound for Seattle where the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was holding its annual convention. Kenehan went to the convention as a labor supporter, but getting out of town served another purpose. Kenehan was trying to stymie efforts to raise the funds needed to pay the expenses of the Colorado National Guard. Ten days earlier, Governor Elias Ammons had called the Guard to police a strike by approximately nine thousand coal miners in southern Colorado. The state, however, did not have the money to...

The tumultuous events of the winter and early spring of 1913–14 transformed the coalfields and company towns of southern Colorado and marked a new episode in relations between labor and management. In the aftermath of the largest and deadliest strike in US history, no one could know the changes that lay ahead for all parties involved. As the shock of the events wore away, tears turned to anger and miners’ families, as well as many Americans, wondered how a mining strike could result in the death of thirty-three men, women, and children. For those Americans who had never felt...

On a spring morning in April 1914, Colorado National Guard troops and striking coal miners in Ludlow, a small community in southeastern Colorado, engaged in gunfire that left strikers, strikers’ wives, strikers’ children, and troops dead. This massacre and the Coalfield War in southern Colorado from 1913 to 1914 left a mark on labor relations in southern Colorado and in the United States; in the aftermath, relationships were characterized by the belief that East Coast corporate management would willingly harm its employees to stop strikes. The Ludlow Massacre gained public attention when the local and national media emphasized the fact...

Employee Representation Plans (ERPs) were a major feature of labor relations in Canada and the United States between the World Wars.¹ A major impetus for developing these ERPs was the “Colorado Industrial Plan” or the “Rockefeller Plan.” The Rockefeller family had a substantial number of shares in the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), which owned coal mines and the Pueblo steel plant in Colorado. John D. Rockefeller Jr. (JDR Jr.) developed the plan following a strike at the company’s coal mines and the adverse publicity surrounding the Ludlow Massacre. The company established the plan at its mines in October...

In the not-too-distant past, my maternal family was irrevocably altered after a workplace incident that permanently disabled my late maternal grandfather, Theodore Herrera. The Herrera family had followed the migrant trail, after being displaced from their land near Gallup, New Mexico, to work sugar beets in Central Wyoming. Far, far from home, the Herreras were one of several Mexican American families that left northern New Mexico during the Depression as land speculators and Anglo squatters used a legal system, fully designed with Anglo interests in mind, to wrest control over land and resources. Census records confirm that the Herrera family...

Is Ludlow unique in the lexicon of US labor history and strife? Certainly, the horrific vision of women and children lying dead amidst the rubble of the burnt-over and decimated tent colony shocked Americans, who were used to labor violence but not to the image of dead women and children. Ludlow also incited an intense public response that wholeheartedly sided with workers to the point that striker-provoked violence and death were almost virtually ignored by the press.¹ Rarely had the American public been so anticapitalist and proworker. During earlier strikes, such as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, public opinion...