70 ChaPter 2
years before the women who toiled there got better wages and working
conditions.
At the end of 1913, copper miners in Calumet, Michigan, about 9,000 of
whom were members of the WFM, went on strike to demand that their union
be recognized and they be given better wages and conditions. On Christmas
Eve, as the miners were having a party, the so-called Italian Hall Massacre took
place. One of the agents hired by the copper mine owners allegedly ran into
the hall and yelled “Fire,” causing a stampede that led to the deaths of 73 men,
women, and children. Years later, the famous folk singer Woody Guthrie
wrote about the event, “The 1913 Massacre.” He described the plight of the
workers—“You ask about work and you ask about pay/They’ll tell you they
make less than a dollar a day/Working the copper claims, risking their lives/
So it’s fun to spend Christmas with children and wives.” After they were
alarmed “A man grabbed his daughter and carried her down/But the thugs
held the door and he could not get out/ And then others followed, a hundred
or more/but most everybody remained on the floor/The gun thugs they
laughed at their murderous joke/While the children were smothered on the
stairs by the door.” As in the Shirtwaist Fire, Bread and Roses strike, and
Rochester garment strike, the workers suffered and even died, while the
bosses were not held accountable.
One of the most horrid, and best-known, labor conflicts in US history took
place in that era as well. Miners in Ludlow, Colorado and elsewhere in the
West had been trying to join the United Mine Workers of America [UMWA]
Union and had gone on strike for some years before 1914. The coalmine
owners, known as operators, had done all they could to prevent the unions
from organizing their workers, and the confrontation became increasingly bit-
ter. Eventually, the miners went on strike for the right to join the union. At
that point, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, one of John D. Rockefeller’s
properties, forced the miners and their families to move out of the houses that
the company owned and rented to the workers. The miners, their wives and
children thus set up a “colony” of tents on public land. On April 20th, all hell
broke loose. The company had hired private “security” forces from the
Baldwin Felts Detective Agency [like the Pinkerton thugs at Homestead] to
come into Ludlow to stop the strike and force the miners back to work. They
planned an attack on the miners that began while many of them were cele-
brating Greek Easter. Some Baldwin Felts agents poured kerosene on the