Author of Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre, Zeese Papanikolas is also a creative writing professor at the San Francisco Art Institute.






Describe how Louis Tikus represented the typical immigrant in terms of coming to America and then finding work in the coal camps.

Well, Tikus was typical and atypical at once. He came from a little village in Crete called Lutra and we have photographs of his house and it's a typical little village house. It's a completely agricultural area and of course most immigrants who were working in the coal mines up here had come from agriculture work in Europe. And this industrial world was very new to him. In the basement of Tikus' little house there's an olive press and it's a stone wheel that a donkey or a mule would drag around to press the oil out of olives. This kind of machine hadn't changed since Biblical times and even earlier. And to me it's a kind of image of what most of the immigrant workers knew about machines, about industrial work before they came to this country. So this United States with the smoke stacks and with electricity and steel coming out in great red hot bars and coal mines, this whole thing was new to most of the workers who were working in coal mines in this area.

So the immigrants come from these small towns and they see all of this industrialization, how did they react to it?

Well, it was culture shock. They also came from parts of the world really where where history for them had to do with oral legends and songs past down from mouth to mouth. And so, the tools that they had to work with for confronting industrial life were really out of sync with what they found here. Most of them hadn't even heard of labor unions. Let me tell you a story that maybe sums up the immigrant experience. When the Italians came over they discovered three things immediately. First, the streets were not paved with gold, second, most of the streets weren't paved at all, and third, they were going to do the paving. They were throw into a world of tremendous conflict. Remember these are people from an agricultural environment where work was seasonal--it had to do with the land, it had to do with kind of timeless cycles. Suddenly, there in a world where clocks keep track of your labor, where you work by the ton as you did in the coal mines, up in these hills. And so it was a radical adjustment for them.

Continuing with Louis Tikas' story, how did he end up in the Colorado Coal fields as a union organizer?

Well, that's kind of an interesting and complicated story. We don't know what Louie did when he first came to the United States. There's some legends about him possibly forming a syndicate of boot blacks in Denver. At one time he applied to be a Denver Police Officer. He was in some respects not a typical immigrant. He caught on to American ways quicker than many of the immigrants did. He probably learned how to speak English a little faster, a little easier. He was a bright guy. He was a clever guy. Where we first really find him, is he has a little coffee house in Denver. And in the coffee house, these were sort of centers of information and culture for these Greeks who at that time were almost entirely young men without families and they'd wander from place to place looking for work. And Louie ran a coffee house and translating their these complicated English documents that occasionally they'd be served with, help them send money back to the old country. Even help them with their love affairs with the American girls.

There was a strike in the northern coal fields shortly before the strike in the southern fields and a bunch of Greeks had gone up there as scabs. And they wrote to Louie, they sent word to him, come up and help us. So, he entered the mines as many immigrant workers did as a scab. And very soon, he discovered that the conditions were horrible and he led those Greeks out of the mine and straight to United Mine Workers Office where they joined the Union as a group. And at that point he becomes a Union man and he becomes a translator and he becomes a Union organizer.

You say Tikas probably became an organizer because of the horrible working conditions he saw. Describe those conditions.

Well, the work was terrible. Miners were paid by the ton in those days. So all of the extra work that they had to do to prepare the rooms for digging; the timbering, the moving of rock, etc., they weren't paid for that. They were paid by the ton. The cars were taken up to a weigh station. The weigh master was hired by the company and the miners were always complaining that they were short-weighted on the cars. The work was very, very dangerous. Because the miners were paid by the ton it wasn't in their interest to spend a lot of time timbering the rooms. Mother Jones, the great union organizer, once went into a mine in West Virginia or Kentucky, and she asked the pit boss why the mines weren't properly timbered. He replied, ‘Well you know, Daygos are cheaper than props.' That was the attitude of many the pit bosses and mine superintendents in this country. You had to buy the timber, but the immigrant workers replaced themselves. They flooded here because they needed the money.

It's a misconception that immigrants came to this country in order to live here. They came at first for the money, for the dollars, for the opportunity that wasn't in their, in their native countries. Their expectations were to work in a mine or on a railroad and to send money back home. This is certainly what the Greeks were doing, paying off mortgages, getting dowries for their sisters. They all intended to return. And if you look at the immigration statistics, you'll find that the return to Europe by immigrants from central and southern Europe was tremendous. So, originally immigrants felt that they were here on a temporary basis. They loved their countries. And part of the trauma of coming to the United States was being uprooted for the things they knew. And from the culture that they knew.

What was life like in the coal fields, in the camps themselves -- the company towns?

Well, the company towns were owned lock, stock and barrel by the companies. They hired the minister if there was a minister. If there was a little reading room or a club house, they would choose what books and magazines were in the clubhouse. They hired the school master. And the school teacher. They hired the police. They ran the towns to suit themselves. The towns were often ran by a combination of the mine boss and the town marshal. And between them, they wanted to win, they wanted to run a tight ship. Camps were closed. You couldn't come into the town just as you would in any other town. The camps were closed. You essentially had to have permission to move into the town and the reason for that, the big reason for that was they wanted to keep union organizers and agitators out of those camps. Union people had been trying to organize unions in Colorado secretly for years. Southern Colorado was almost a feudal empire, and union organizers had come into the towns. They'd been caught by marshals, they'd been taken into the salons taken into the back and beaten. Some had been killed. Mine meetings were held in secret. The towns themselves were a symbol to the miners to the fact that they did not own their lives.

Why did the miners in the Southern Colorado coal fields strike? What did they want?

Well, they were striking first of all to have a union. And to have that union recognized by the mine owners. I think that was the key issue. They wanted an increase in the rate of tonnage. They wanted to be able to trade anywhere they wanted and not at the company store. They wanted an end to the camp marshal system. They were striking for better safety conditions, in the mines. Those were the big reasons behind the strike.

So the strike is underway, and the miners move out of company housing into tent colonies. With all of the ethnic diversity, describe what life was like in the tent colonies.

Life in the colony. Well, what interests me about the tent colonies and Ludlow is that you have all of these different ethnic groups with the jealousies and rivalries that they've brought over from the old country. All of them seeing themselves, or they have seen themselves, as competing for jobs. Now they're all on strike with one goal, and they're living next to each other and they're living in tents. And they've got to get together, they've got to pull it together or the strike will be lost. So, a number of things happen that are important. These ethnic tensions have to be diminished. They have to get them under control. Louie Tikus was elected mayor of the tent colony because he had those kind of skills. In the old country, one of the things that he did as a kid would, be to take birds and cats and train them to live together. Well, you know maybe it was a little easier to train birds and cats to live together, than to train northern and southern Italians to live together or Greeks to live together with any other ethnic group, but somehow they pulled it off.

Another important thing about the strike, and this is true of many strikes, is the women came to the fore. In a strike situation, the men aren't working. If the strike is going to be won, it's going to be won because the women can make their strike benefits stretch. They're going to keep that family together, and they're going keep the kids fed. They're going to be able to patch those overalls-two, three, four times. Somehow the women become tremendously economically important. Now, many of these women came from southern Europe, from eastern Europe and they'd been used to falling in their husbands footsteps.Suddenly, they were going to meetings, their opinions were worth something. One of the great people in this strike was Mary Thomas. She was a, a very young Welsh immigrant. She had two little daughters. And she'd come over here chasing a husband who'd run out of her. All of the way from Wales, she found out he was in Colorado so she followed him. She became the singer of the Ludlow camp.

In Wales they have a long tradition of choral singing and, and the human voice is tremendously important. And in these mining camps in Wales, they all had choral society and so Mary with her beautiful voice would be one that would be called up to the podium to sing the Union songs to lead the singing. Old Mother Jones, would say, ‘Now let's get started with the singing, Mary.' And Mary would start it. But this was a new experience for many of these women to have this kind of importance. Another reason why women were extremely important is because the worse violence that the strikers had visited on them, the beatings, the jailings, the women were in a sense immune from that, and so when the men were in jail the women could take over the picket duty. And they became tremendously important they were so visible with their kids marching, singing, standing in front of the jail.

In a sentence, how were women transformed, how did they become politically aware?

Well, I think that any strike is revolutionary as far as the role of men and women. Suddenly they felt a power in them that they'd never known that they had.

One thing I'm curious about is, considering the length of the strike and the hardships they faced, why did the strikers stay in Southern Colorado? Why didn't they just try and find work elsewhere?

Some of the strikers did go away and try to find work elsewhere but I think most of them felt that this was a strike that was worth winning and they had staked their claim on Southern Colorado. They were gonna win it here or lose it.

I want to get a sense of the events leading to the first military occupation. And a big catalyst for that was the attack on the Forbes tent colony. What was the psychological effect of that attack on the strikers?

Well, strikers had moved to little tent colonies at the beginning of the strike. They knew they be kicked out of their company houses. And so, tent colonies were set up at strategic places at the foot of the hills that held the mines. The mine owners had beefed up the camps guards they'd gone to Denver, they gone to east St. Louis, they'd found some pretty tough guys. Over in the CF&I plant in Pueblo, they'd taken a fort, well they'd taken a touring car and stripped it down and put plate steel around it, mounted a machine gun in back and a spotlight in front. And the miners quickly christened that the ‘death special'. And the death special would race up and down these roads through the tent colonies shining that light through the walls of the tent at night just to let the miners know that they were watching them. The miners knew that a tent wall is pretty thin and it's not much protection from a machine gun bullet.

Fighting broke out at Forbes, the death special was there. Forbes really broke things into the open. The miners were armed, and took up positions. They felt so vulnerable against the might of the mine guards and their machine guns. After Forbes, I think they knew that this strike had a potential for great violence. The National guard was called out by Governor Ammons of Colorado to ostensibly keep peace between the miners and the mine guards. And although the National Guard had a few dedicated officers who really took seriously their charge to be neutral, nevertheless the Guard was infiltrated by mine guards professional soldiers of fortune like Carl Linderfelt who had served in the Philippines Insurrection. As the strike developed, the Guard became a kind of tool that allowed the tax payers of Colorado to pay for policing the strike and breaking that strike. There was tremendous bitterness between miners and the National Guard when that developed. The Guard had originally been welcomed to Ludlow, but that quickly changed.

I get the sense that both sides were armed, and both sides contributed to the tension.

Both sides were armed, and it was a situation of great tension. When you talk about violence in strikes, you have to look at the conditions out of which coal miners and other industrial workers came from around the turn of the century. Their lives were filled with violence.The camps were filled with brutality, they were bossed around by camp marshals, and the brutality of their daily lives in the coal mines that weren't properly timbered. This is violence, too. So yes, there is violence in a mine strike, but I think it's a kind of extension of the violence that already exists in these industrial conditions from which people came from.

Let's move onto the actual day of the massacre. Set the scene for me. There was this sense of tension in the camp, they knew something was going to happen.

Well, the strikers had held out in Ludlow through a bitter, bitter winter. One of the worst that Colorado had seen. They'd been living in tents, the tents had been snowed on and then dried out and had been snowed on again. They were tinder dry. Spring had come, many of the National Guard Companies had been pulled out, because the State was nearly bankrupt. A few of the companies were still here and unfortunately one of those companies was lead by Carl Linderfelt, who was a solider of Fortune, kind of brutal man.

Easter came and the families in Ludlow put together what kind of Easter celebration they could. The Greeks had pulled their resources and they'd bought a barrel or two of beer. They had procured a lamb. I asked an old timer, ‘did you buy a lamb?' He said, ‘ well, let's put it this way we got a lamb.' So, some how or other they had a lamb or two. And they wanted to show the camp a good time. They bought out their instruments from the old country and put on their black pantaloons and sashes and their black turbans and did some of the dances of Crete. But then quite a wonderful thing happened.

The Greeks were just amazed at the freedom that American women had. Of course they came from a country that was medieval in it's ideas of the separation of the sexes. These American women were really something. They had found somewhere that American girls were wearing gin bloomers and so they got hold a catalogue, I don't know a Sears Catalog or Montgomery Ward Catalog, and they sent away for gin bloomers and dressed the young camp women in these gin bloomers. And they proceeded to have a series of baseball games, much to everyone's delight. That evening, this was the nineteenth of April, that evening some of the mine guards came over they were drunk. They bullied the miners. they made some remarks that were pretty ominous in light of what happened. They said, ‘Well, you have your fun today, tomorrow we'll have the roast.' Of course this kind of bullying had been going on since the beginning of the strike.

The next day Monday, April 20th, one of the many kinds of incidences that had happened all through the strike, occurred. Major Pat Hamrock called Louie Tikus up on the phone and said I've got to talk to you, there a woman here who claims you're holding her husband against his will in your camp. He did not want to go to the militia camp to talk to Hamrock, so they agreed to meet half way in between the colony and the militia camp. A little railroad building. While they were there discussing the situation something happened that really terrified the strikers. The militia started dragging two of their machine guns down from the hills and putting them in position to cover the camp. Why this happened, no one knows. Was it an exercise? Was it a drill? Were they trying to intimidate the strikers? No one knows.

But at any rate, seeing this, the strikers grabbed their guns and started heading out of the colony to try and flank those machine guns. If something was going to start, they wanted the fire drawn away from the tents where their women and children were. Hamrock and Tikus are in this railroad shack, someone comes running and says the men are leaving the camp and they're armed. Hamrock says, "Well you better try and stop it." Tikus runs out of the little railroad shack, with a white handkerchief trying to pull the men back, but he doesn't make it to camp before a bomb goes off. Is it a signal bomb? No one knows, and the shooting starts. And it continues all day long. Now, the women and children many of them escape from the camp and they go running down a little raven. The men have taken positions in that raven, and out in the field beyond the camp, and they're shooting between them and the National Guard.

Tikus and a few other union men and a very courageous union woman named Pearl Jolly stay in the camp. They're trying to get water and food to women and children who are still trapped in pits that have been dug under the tents for storage and for protection. These women and children are trapped because of the heavy gunfire that's coming into the camp. Just riddling the tents, turning them into rags. About dusk, the tent city catches on fire. There are claims that the militia deliberately entered the tent city and started setting the tent on fire. Counterclaims were that ammunition stored in one of the tents exploded. I think it's fairly credible that some of the militia men actually started to burn the tent city. After all it was a kind of symbol, of the people who they'd been virtually in stalemate with all winter long and these people by and large foreigners and they considered them inferiors.

The tent city starts to burn and about dusk, Louie Tikus leaves the camp with white flags trying to arrange a truce to put out the fire because he knows women and kids are still trapped in the city. He is captured, and turned over to Carl Linderfelt, Lieutenant Linderfelt, who breaks the stock of his rifle across Louie's head. And then turns him and two other Union men who'd been captured over to three of the militia men. And the militia men really knew what they had to do, they told these three men to run and then they shot them in the back. The tent city burnt to the ground.

When people were finally able to come into the city, what had been Ludlow, they discovered charred remains of tent frames, baby carriages, stoves, bullet shells, the bodies of Louie Tikus, and two other men lay unburied by the railroad tracks where they'd dropped. And under a pit in one of the tent, they discovered two women and eleven children had been suffocated under that tent. And that is what's known as the Ludlow Massacre.

What was the impact of the Massacre on the nation?

Well, the nation was horrified but you have to remember that at the same time we were having a little dust up with Mexico in Veracruz. And this was one of a number of violent strikes, and very soon it let the headlines because of our larger war with Mexico and our sending of troops down to insert ourselves in their business.

So, it really didn't have much of an impact?

It had an impact really later on through Congress, through the investigations. There had been an industrial commission that had been working all through this period, several commissions. And the testimony that came out about Ludlow really, I think, did have an effect. Immediately after Ludlow, the miners in Southern Colorado, they went wild. They went on a rampage of destruction, of dynamiting, of burning. They literally held Southern Colorado for ten days. They wore red neckerchiefs, they called themselves red necks to distinguish themselves from the militia men and the mine guards. So, they went on a rampage and finally federal troops were sent to the strike zone. And that effectively ended the miners' resistance and that ended the strike. The strike was lost, it was over. The miners had lost.

What happened to the miners?

Many of them were black balled. They went from mine to mine looking for work. Many of them left the southern fields trying to find work elsewhere. The Union was bankrupt. The local Colorado branch of the Union was bankrupt. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.-- the Rockefeller's owned the majority of the mines down here-- of course, as a good Christian gentlemen, was horrified at the events. And his approach was kind of interesting and symptomatic. He hired Mackenzie King who would become Prime Minister of Canada, and was a sociologist and he hired a damn good publicity agent named, Ivy (Lee). And they came down to the southern field and developed a system of paternalistic industrial relations. Company unions, more clubhouses, really, created a kind of shell of benevolence under which it was the same old story. Company unions of course had no power. Power was still paternalistically in the hands of the mine owners.

You mention Rockefeller's attitude, you talked in your book about the notion of Colonialism- Imperialistic Colonialism, you know how the miners couldn't take care of themselves. Describe what that's about.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s father had once said, ‘God gave me my money.' And it wasn't a defiant statement. What he meant by that is God in his wisdom had given me stewardship over these millions. And this was the kind of paternalistic attitude that a lot of industrialist had. That they with their superior wisdom could distribute the money. That they could take care of these poor ignorant foreigners better than the workers could take care of themselves. And it's the same attitude that animated our really Colonial policy in the Philippines, in Portico, in this era. It was a kind of moral superiority that they were inflicting on workers and on colonized people. It's all part of the same ball of wax. Ownership and mind set that says we know better than you do what wages you should have and what kind of conditions you should work under.

As I sit here, a modern person facing the turn of a new century, I have to wonder what's the significance of what happened at Ludlow for me today?

Well, you know, the French have an expression, "The more things change, the more the remain the same." Of course many things have changed in Industrial life since Ludlow. But essentially, I think that you still have the same kinds of collisions between capital and labor. Now of course the theater is shifting to a global economy. Although we have steel workers locked out and on strike just down the road here in Pueblo for over a year and a half. Strikes going on in this country, perhaps the people who most resemble the immigrant in the Ludlow tent colony are workers in South East Asia making gym shoes and stitching up sweatshirts for college campuses. These are the new colonized workers. It's had a tremendous effect on the economy of our country and on working class life and promise in this country. When we remember Ludlow, we really have to remember it into the present. That's what history's all about, history doesn't hermetically seal off one event from another. History is a flow, it's a process. It's about processes and patterns and tensions and sometimes you get resolution, and sometimes you don't.