Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Nolh.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
Speaker 3: are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
Speaker 3: they don't want you to know. In a rare two
Speaker 3: part episode, we are diving into the darkly disturbing, the
Speaker 3: frankly terrifying story of something called the Ludlow massacre. And
Speaker 3: when we're talking off air, you know, we realized that
Speaker 3: this had to be a two part episode because there
Speaker 3: was so much to get to, especially the aftermath and implications.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a ton of details here. What we recorded
Speaker 2: for like an hour forty or something overall on this episode. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was. It's a long conversation.
Speaker 3: It goes in a lot of directions. We all have
Speaker 3: a lot to say about this. We also please, we
Speaker 3: I always said, exhort, We plead with you, fellow conspiracy
Speaker 3: realist to check out episode one or part one of
Speaker 3: this episode before you dive into episode two.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because the context is everything, and then applying
Speaker 2: that context and these specific things that occurred back in
Speaker 2: nineteen fourteen to two twenty twenty four and just what
Speaker 2: we're going through now, this is important stuff.
Speaker 4: One hundred percent. So let's jump right back into this
Speaker 4: episode on the Ledlow massacre already in progress.
Speaker 3: Look, the bullwood Feltz folks got up to some pretty
Speaker 3: nasty stuff, especially in the tent colonies, including Ludlow, but
Speaker 3: including other ten colonies because there were multiple. They would
Speaker 3: have these big search lights and they would wait until
Speaker 3: late at night and they would just roam the search
Speaker 3: lights around the tents. Again, these are canvas tents, so
Speaker 3: the whole tent lights up. They would also they built
Speaker 3: a special evil car, an armored car called the Death
Speaker 3: Special that had a machine gun mounted on it, and
Speaker 3: they would drive by the edges of the cap and
Speaker 3: just rat through the windows or through the tent.
Speaker 4: I don't think it's this exact agency that's depicted, but
Speaker 4: a lot of this kind of behavior is very well,
Speaker 4: kind of dramatized in that Woody Got three movie.
Speaker 3: I was talking about Bound from Glory m Yeah, and
Speaker 3: I can see it in that from you know, these
Speaker 3: very real events. They were also detaining people, they were
Speaker 3: doing sniper attacks, sometimes some folks who might be union leadership,
Speaker 3: and at the whole the.
Speaker 4: Whole time, assassinations.
Speaker 2: I mean, most of this is intimidation, like that's you
Speaker 2: can see that, that's what they're doing. But some of
Speaker 2: it is, like I'm assuming, going after lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah, people died. And then at the same time, you know,
Speaker 3: the so called scab workers. We have to give them
Speaker 3: a moment. They're like anybody else, They're just trying to
Speaker 3: have a job, and they've probably already traversed hundreds of miles,
Speaker 3: probably in an immigration situation or leaving, you know, a
Speaker 3: very dangerous rural situation. They're they're saying, I'm not the enemy,
Speaker 3: but the union is saying, if you're not with us,
Speaker 3: then you're against us. And so there are also fatal
Speaker 3: confrontations between union workers on strike and the so called scabs.
Speaker 3: So this is very dirty business all around. This is
Speaker 3: the dawn of something that is much larger in scope.
Speaker 3: It's called the Colorado Whole Field War. Again, not in
Speaker 3: your history textbooks at least in grade school or if
Speaker 3: you had I don't know if you somehow had Howard
Speaker 3: Zen at your career day. Yeah, do you think he
Speaker 3: does or did career days? Sure, that'd be cool. I
Speaker 3: would do. I missed doing career days. I used to
Speaker 3: do them all the time. Have you guys ever done one?
Speaker 4: I haven't. I mean I've participated in one on the
Speaker 4: you know, student end of it when I was a kid.
Speaker 4: But that'd be a lot of fun. I would love
Speaker 4: to go and talk about the wonderful world of podcast.
Speaker 3: You guys can come with me next time if you want.
Speaker 3: Why do you do this?
Speaker 2: I've done like single days out of school, like a
Speaker 2: career talk, like, hey, let's talk to this guy. Tell
Speaker 2: us about your job.
Speaker 5: Dad.
Speaker 3: That's in me.
Speaker 5: Damn.
Speaker 3: I do those things. I've been doing those for a
Speaker 3: long time. And you know, once you accept that you
Speaker 3: are never going to be the most popular career Day guest,
Speaker 3: then it's a wonderful opportunity. It's really cool. Hang. The
Speaker 3: most popular guest is always the guy with the fire
Speaker 3: truck boom the fire truck. He runs the game. He
Speaker 3: is the Rockefeller of career day.
Speaker 2: Do you make like a poster of three? A trifle?
Speaker 2: Poster board says like podcasts the Future of Radio.
Speaker 3: The first time I did it, I played some videos
Speaker 3: that we have worked on and I gave out a
Speaker 3: bunch of house stuff works swag. Nice or the first
Speaker 3: time I did it for this occupation. And you know,
Speaker 3: if you got the swag, then you got the crowd
Speaker 3: in grade school at least it probably works in college too, right,
Speaker 3: Who doesn't want a free T shirt.
Speaker 2: Shot glasses that just say listen to the cast, like
Speaker 2: and subscribe shotglasses. Yeah for the college kids.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, you know, if we get a price break
Speaker 3: on the shot glasses, maybe we can get away with
Speaker 3: it in grade school, like give this to your parents.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: What could go wrong? That's the question Colorado Governor Elias
Speaker 3: m Ammon's asked when this violence is continuing to escalate.
Speaker 3: And again, you know, the story is often explained in
Speaker 3: terms of the men who are working as miners or
Speaker 3: working for this detective agency or these local guards. But
Speaker 3: we have to remember there were many more women and children. Right.
Speaker 3: The population is much bigger than it sounds when you
Speaker 3: hear some of these round numbers. The governor calls in
Speaker 3: the Colorado National Guard, yes, a militia. On October twenty
Speaker 3: eighth and at first the Guard seemed kind of calm,
Speaker 3: but later evidence would show that the Guard troopers were,
Speaker 3: in fact a lot of them being paid the under
Speaker 3: the table by Colorado Fuel and Iron.
Speaker 2: Gee, that's it's weird. How could that happen?
Speaker 3: I mean, think of it this way, like the Dave
Speaker 3: and Busters example. So we're in that daven Buster's company town,
Speaker 3: we strike, and we say pay us dollars, and then
Speaker 3: the Atlanta Police Department comes in, or the Georgia Troopers
Speaker 3: come in, as a better example, and they crack down
Speaker 3: on us, and it turns out that they're getting paid
Speaker 3: by Dave and Busters.
Speaker 2: Dave, why Buster?
Speaker 3: No? Your name is so fun. An example of this
Speaker 3: would be the adjutant there we go General for the
Speaker 3: National Guard on the case, John Chase. John Chase has,
Speaker 3: similar to Baldwin Felt, he has a reputation for breaking strikes.
Speaker 3: About a decade earlier, he was involved during the Cripple
Speaker 3: Creek strike, which is its own own back of badgers.
Speaker 3: And there are a couple of inciting events, right, and
Speaker 3: these kind of things you always look for what the
Speaker 3: pivotal moment is, right, what is the cause of belly
Speaker 3: or belly. On March tenth, nineteen fourteen, one of the
Speaker 3: scab worker bodies is found on the railroad tracks near Forbes, Colorado,
Speaker 3: and Forbes also has a tent colony a little smaller
Speaker 3: than Ludlow. What happens when they find the body.
Speaker 4: So the guard blamed the strikers, which, Matt, you made
Speaker 4: a point off, Mike, that certainly would be an obvious,
Speaker 4: first choice, first line of questioning, given the controversy and
Speaker 4: the fact that there's a lot of there's no love
Speaker 4: loss between the union members and these quote unquote scabs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so they decide to retaliate, and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they go in and they just talk to people right, calmly.
Speaker 3: Well they would have if they were worried about what
Speaker 3: we call proportional response, but they're not. Instead, they completely
Speaker 3: destroy the nearby tent colony. Oh over in Forbes. The
Speaker 3: strikers are just further galvanized by this, because usually in
Speaker 3: these situations you'll see a growth in unity and commitment
Speaker 3: to a cause before you break the back, right, and
Speaker 3: so the violence escalates. It's nineteen fourteen and Colorado Fuel
Speaker 3: and Iron is starting to run their numbers. You know,
Speaker 3: they're Q two or Q three numbers, and they say
Speaker 3: it's actually getting too expensive for us to maintain these troops,
Speaker 3: and so in step with the politicians the governor, they
Speaker 3: decrease the amount of National Guard on the ground and
Speaker 3: this results in an increase in violence because now more
Speaker 3: of those fatal conflicts can occur.
Speaker 2: YEP. And then on Sunday, April nineteenth, so that's like
Speaker 2: just a month and change afterwards, in nineteen fourteen, the
Speaker 2: National Guard creates a big circle around the camp, so
Speaker 2: they're stationed all around the camp. Basic there's no way
Speaker 2: to run, no direction out of the camp. You can
Speaker 2: run without running past some National guardsmen. And they also
Speaker 2: install a machine gun, so we're talking like military grade
Speaker 2: weapons on a bluff above the camp, so overlooking the camp. Basically,
Speaker 2: if anything happens down there, this machine gun can probably
Speaker 2: reach you with.
Speaker 3: Its bullets higher elevation. So yeah, let's step back a
Speaker 3: little because I like that we're pointing out there's a
Speaker 3: murkiness to it. The climax of this part of the
Speaker 3: war is at that Ludlow ten colony. It's April nineteenth
Speaker 3: when they install the machine gun. Wee hours almost April twentieth.
Speaker 3: The next day, the National Guard does attack to that
Speaker 3: earlier point. No one sure exactly what instigated the violence,
Speaker 3: but the most popular account you can find in historical
Speaker 3: records says that the day after some members of the
Speaker 3: colony celebrated the Orthodox Easter, three guardsmen approached the camp,
Speaker 3: so there's no firing yet, and they say, hey, you're
Speaker 3: holding someone against their will. Let them go. Go fish,
Speaker 3: We don't have the person you're looking for. The leader
Speaker 3: of the camp is a guy named Louis Tikas Tikas,
Speaker 3: and he gets an offer from these guardsmen. At the
Speaker 3: same time, they say, hey, come meet us about a
Speaker 3: half mile away in Ludlow Village. This is getting out
Speaker 3: of control, right, just for the good of the families,
Speaker 3: let's talk true. So come meet our leader, Major Patrick J.
Speaker 3: Hamrock dumb last name, it's his real last name.
Speaker 4: Maybe a little nominate determinism there too, And they meet
Speaker 4: at a train station in Ludlow Village, about a half
Speaker 4: mile from the colony. And while this meeting was going down,
Speaker 4: two separate militias, the ones running that machine gun, take
Speaker 4: positions strategic positions along a rail route about half a
Speaker 4: mile south of blood Log and it's not almost like
Speaker 4: they're laying the groundwork for an ambush, right.
Speaker 3: So at the same time, simultaneously, concurrently there are miners
Speaker 3: Union miners who are armed Greek miners, and they begin
Speaker 3: flanking this other arroyo. And when two of the militia
Speaker 3: forces explosions occur later we'll learn outside of the fog war.
Speaker 3: These are detonated to draw support from National Guard units,
Speaker 3: and these explosions alert the Ludlow tenth colony. Most of
Speaker 3: the people have heard, you know, three National Guards are here,
Speaker 3: right and have seen someone trying to make that siege perimeter,
Speaker 3: but they don't really know what's happening, so they hear
Speaker 3: the explosions. The miners at this point are pretty well
Speaker 3: militarized themselves. They take up positions at the bottom of
Speaker 3: the hill right, So again the elevation here is a
Speaker 3: big factor. The militia opens fire and then hundreds of
Speaker 3: miners their families they run for cover. Chaos is raining.
Speaker 3: Three of the strike leaders, including Tikas, are captured and
Speaker 3: killed by the Guard. It very much does seem like
Speaker 3: the Guard lied to him. They conspired to lure tik
Speaker 3: Us out and never intended to make a truce.
Speaker 2: There's reccounts that just say they're shot and left to
Speaker 2: their left where they died. Right, They just left their
Speaker 2: bodies there. They didn't do anything ceremoniously. They didn't pick
Speaker 2: up their bodies and take them to you know, whatever
Speaker 2: hospital or you know, whatever medical assistance they were there.
Speaker 2: They just shot them and their bodies fell.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the bodies hit the floor. The strikers are out
Speaker 3: gunned and they're you know, they're exercising gutty tactics, but
Speaker 3: they run out of ammo with that.
Speaker 2: Let's take a quick break here a word from our sponsors,
Speaker 2: and return with more on the Ludlow massacre. And we're back.
Speaker 3: And so a lot of people retreat to the countryside
Speaker 3: right to gather forces and figure out their next step.
Speaker 3: A lot of women and children, because they've already had
Speaker 3: this siege mentality. A lot of women and children hide
Speaker 3: in cellars that have been dug beneath these canvas tents.
Speaker 2: Because they're bullets flying right.
Speaker 3: Right, and these are not the fancy pants cellars of
Speaker 3: old New England. These are holes in the ground. The
Speaker 3: guard responds by dousing the tents and kerosene and setting
Speaker 3: them a flame.
Speaker 2: And the big question for history here is how yeah,
Speaker 2: how awhere were they that most of these tents had
Speaker 2: something dug beneath them Because of the cold that we
Speaker 2: talked about, one of the main ways to get away
Speaker 2: from that cold is to go a bit underground. And like,
Speaker 2: did any of those National guards men know? It seems
Speaker 2: like one person could have raised their hand and said, hey, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 2: But again, this is a big movement. These are a
Speaker 2: lot of National guardsmen doing this is not one or
Speaker 2: two dowsing with kerosene and then setting fires. It's going
Speaker 2: through and systematically clearing this tent.
Speaker 3: The banality of evil which we discussed earlier, I was
Speaker 3: just following orders. Yeah, we have to remember the National
Speaker 3: Guard here is pulled from people who are loosely familiar
Speaker 3: with the area. It was not an uncommon practice, especially
Speaker 3: in inclement weather, to dig into the ground like that. So
Speaker 3: it is possible that they didn't know or didn't think
Speaker 3: about it in the heat of the heat of the conflict,
Speaker 3: but it is it begs probability right to say that
Speaker 3: it didn't occur once. I mean, especially in just one
Speaker 3: cellar alone. There were eleven children and two women found
Speaker 3: burned and suffocated to death, body so mangled that it's
Speaker 3: impossible to know which of these tortures events actually killed them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's likely that just the flames above them,
Speaker 2: filling that cellar with smoke got to them.
Speaker 3: First, the oxygen out as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So are you saying they thought the tents were
Speaker 4: empty because they weren't aware of the dugout cellars or
Speaker 4: it's by design, like I mean, they were they were
Speaker 4: intending to burn.
Speaker 6: People alive, basically, right, it's highly It is cartoonishly unlikely
Speaker 6: that they would not have thought about people having cellars
Speaker 6: dug under the tents.
Speaker 3: It is incredibly unlikely.
Speaker 4: Where do they think they were? Like, I mean it,
Speaker 4: don't you know?
Speaker 2: I mean, I agree with you. It's it's hard for
Speaker 2: me to come to grips with knowing how bad of
Speaker 2: a situation it would be for the company, Right, that's
Speaker 2: once gets out that women and children were burn their
Speaker 2: lives like that, So it's hard for me to grasp like, well,
Speaker 2: was it on purpose? Was it an accident or was
Speaker 2: it just oversight? Or I mean, are they trying to
Speaker 2: send a message to the striking miners will kill your family.
Speaker 3: At least some of at least some of them had
Speaker 3: to know because this has burned the village to save
Speaker 3: the village type stuff. This is insidious kind of total
Speaker 3: war because you're removing any infrastructure. I mean. In total,
Speaker 3: the massacre resulted in twenty five deaths, three of whom
Speaker 3: were National Guard troops, and there was media on the
Speaker 3: scene and photographs of the ten colonies because this tension
Speaker 3: had been rising for a while in the Colorado Coalfield War.
Speaker 3: There are reports you could see on the ground about
Speaker 3: this from a New York Times reporter talking about that
Speaker 3: a bit off air, so the deaths were a matter
Speaker 3: of national interest. The rest of the country knew about this,
Speaker 3: and most people blamed John D. Rockefeller Junior, because you know,
Speaker 3: for years, this guy has not really cared about where
Speaker 3: his money's coming from. He's out in some fancy pants
Speaker 3: part of New York and he's just saying, mall col
Speaker 3: bring me more cold, and that's actually pretty close to
Speaker 3: what he was doing.
Speaker 4: And to your point, Matt, at this point it becomes
Speaker 4: a major optics problem, like a major PR disaster, and
Speaker 4: that's more the issue than the actual lives lost. You know,
Speaker 4: as far as the company is concerned, I would argue,
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, of course they're gonna, in their
Speaker 4: pr response probably address the egregious oversights and the over
Speaker 4: zealousness of National guardsmen, and how you know their hearts
Speaker 4: are with the families. But you know, it's all kind of.
Speaker 3: Smoking mirrors if you haves in prayers, right, are you guys? Okay?
Speaker 3: If I read just one short excerpt from this New
Speaker 3: York Times article, of course.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 3: April twenty first, the day after the massacre nineteen fourteen. Quote.
Speaker 3: Just get a sense. Imagine you're a member of the public, right,
Speaker 3: you've never been to Colorado. This is how you're learning
Speaker 3: about this. The lud Blow Camp is a massive charred
Speaker 3: debris and buried beneath it is a story of horror
Speaker 3: imparalleled in the history of industrial warfare. In the holes
Speaker 3: which have been dug for their protection against the rifles fire,
Speaker 3: the women and children died like trapped rats when the
Speaker 3: flames swept over them. Now you're just somebody in Florida
Speaker 3: reading this, right, You're just somebody on the West coast
Speaker 3: or in Chicago or something. This is how you're learning
Speaker 3: about the disastrous, heartbreaking result here that comes entirely from
Speaker 3: corporate corruption and stuff.
Speaker 4: Like this that really demonstrates the power of the press
Speaker 4: and like how important it is for that poetic description
Speaker 4: to go around painfully poetic description where it really starts
Speaker 4: to make people understand the stakes and almost for the
Speaker 4: first time, perhaps see the evil of the situation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to call out our source here, just
Speaker 2: because we're talking about how the internet archive is down
Speaker 2: and it's really hard to locate that actual New York
Speaker 2: Times article unless you're going to a place to find it.
Speaker 3: You can see a great compilation from PBS, right American Experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, So you can look up PBS American Experience, Rockefellers,
Speaker 2: the Ludlow Massacre, and you can find that specific excerpt
Speaker 2: that we just read. But there's also all kinds of
Speaker 2: other interesting stuff in there in a couple of New
Speaker 2: York Times articles from nineteen fourteen that you can find,
Speaker 2: but they are mostly a part of the aftermath with
Speaker 2: like the Rockefellers coming through and trying to I guess
Speaker 2: spin this a little bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a pr stuff I was talking about earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a different conspiracy, right, And you can see in
Speaker 3: there also Rockefeller's timeline, where he appears to be rethinking things,
Speaker 3: also speaks with Congress. The America is watching this in rage,
Speaker 3: in astonishment. And you don't have to be pro union, right,
Speaker 3: there were not everybody was pro union back then? Right then?
Speaker 3: Is now you don't have to be pro union to
Speaker 3: object to the indiscriminate murder of civilians. And these folks
Speaker 3: aren't doing anything wrong. They're not a threat to the
Speaker 3: law enforcement of the militia. They're literally hiding in the
Speaker 3: ground and try not to die.
Speaker 4: And again to see something to see it's so starkly
Speaker 4: that something is very, very broken in this system and
Speaker 4: that something has to.
Speaker 3: Change, right, that's the idea. Something must be done, and
Speaker 3: it continues. The aftermath of this massacre, even though the
Speaker 3: public already knows about it, is even worse. This is
Speaker 3: followed by something called the Ten Day War, which is
Speaker 3: again part of the larger Colorado Coalfield War. So miners
Speaker 3: are retaliating for this massacre. Lies. People have lost family members, right,
Speaker 3: friends that barely survived, and they say, look, it's now,
Speaker 3: it's on site. Right, the time for speaking has passed.
Speaker 3: We are attacking anti union town officials. We're attacking strike breakers,
Speaker 3: the overseers, the people are running the mines. They take
Speaker 3: control of an area about fifty miles long five miles wide.
Speaker 3: All in all, fifty people die during this ten day war,
Speaker 3: and ultimately it reaches a guy named Woodrow Wilson who
Speaker 3: did a couple other things, but one time he was
Speaker 3: US president.
Speaker 4: Not particularly popular when it comes to super producer Max
Speaker 4: Williams of.
Speaker 3: The Ningians History podcast.
Speaker 4: Yeah, guy was kind of a pill.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I like the name Woodrow, but which ruined it
Speaker 3: for everybody.
Speaker 4: Funny. His boyhood home is actually in my hometown of Augusta, Georgia,
Speaker 4: and I once lived on the corner of Woodrow and Wilson.
Speaker 3: Yea who That's one of those things where every so
Speaker 3: much stuff in the neighborhood gets named after the guy.
Speaker 3: Like there's a small town in Tennessee where I want
Speaker 3: to say it was it was Johnson or Jackson. But
Speaker 3: there's there's a town. We'll follow up on this later.
Speaker 3: There's a town where everything is named after that guy.
Speaker 3: It's a small town. I only know about it because
Speaker 3: I have family living there, and if you ask the
Speaker 3: people who live there, like, hey, yeh sure, like this
Speaker 3: president they all say no, the only town is now
Speaker 3: so he's unpopular.
Speaker 2: But there's a street right out right around where I
Speaker 2: live called generally.
Speaker 3: Eventually, well, as we were talking about it earlier, they
Speaker 3: don't specify which generally that it could be, you know,
Speaker 3: like a law about a Russian president, just that a
Speaker 3: general general is.
Speaker 6: Named after generally the name Lee, yes, yes, yeah, specifically
Speaker 6: is a different cul de sac, but the.
Speaker 4: Perhaps Lady Gaga's character from the New Joker film.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna skip it, I think. But okay, So the
Speaker 3: President Woodrow Wilson makes the decision to send in federal troops. Luckily,
Speaker 3: these troops are paid by the US government actually, and
Speaker 3: not by a corporate mining interest, so they're able to
Speaker 3: somewhat well. The disaster and strike negotiations reach an ending point.
Speaker 3: They end peacefully on December tenth of that same year.
Speaker 3: But the strikers don't really get any of those seven again,
Speaker 3: very reasonable demands they made in the first place. A
Speaker 3: lot of them go to get arrested.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and four hundred of them go to trials which
Speaker 4: last until nineteen twenty, though none were convicted.
Speaker 2: That's so crazy to me, all this strife, all this
Speaker 2: loss of life all of the I didn't mean to
Speaker 2: rhyme that, you guys, but all of this terrible stuff happened,
Speaker 2: and the strikers don't get anything, and then the state
Speaker 2: in the country attempt to take all these people to
Speaker 2: court and nobody gets convicted. Just what was it for?
Speaker 3: I mean, absolutely nothing, right, geous it Also we also
Speaker 3: see that there was one guy, a fellow leader of
Speaker 3: the strike called John Art Lawson. He's convicted of murder,
Speaker 3: but eventually, once the story moves from the headlines, his
Speaker 3: conviction is overturned. There were some like twenty twenty two
Speaker 3: National guardsmen originally in trouble. They were going to be
Speaker 3: court martialed, they got exonerated. Congress held a bunch of
Speaker 3: hearings and didn't do anything.
Speaker 4: Jeez, what were the charges against some of these miners.
Speaker 4: They were like being accused of inciting a riot or
Speaker 4: of like you know, openly firing on the people who
Speaker 4: firing on them, which I would argue is self defense.
Speaker 3: Murder, assault, vandalism, destruction of property, maybe theft in some cases.
Speaker 4: But similar to the Leonard Peltzier story we were talking about,
Speaker 4: where it's like you just because you have a government
Speaker 4: agency descending on you and firing on you does not
Speaker 4: make their cause legitimate. And it's at a certain point
Speaker 4: they are coming for your life and you have to
Speaker 4: defend yourself and not think about the fact that it's
Speaker 4: a government subsidized or perhaps even part of the government.
Speaker 3: This is a national Guard we're talking about here, right,
Speaker 3: the Colorado.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, let's take a quick pause here hear
Speaker 4: a word from our sponsor, and then come back to
Speaker 4: the Ludlow massacre and we have return.
Speaker 3: Let's jump right back in. Okay, now we know there's
Speaker 3: one big thing that's on all of our minds. Fellow
Speaker 3: conspiracy realist, Whatever happened to this poor Rockefeller guy? You
Speaker 3: know what I mean? Yeah, he went through so much
Speaker 3: he had to write letters. Take a letter he talks
Speaker 3: to Congress, right, dictated but not read by Rockefeller Junior.
Speaker 3: He does make some tangible improvements. Ultimately, though, he decides
Speaker 3: to make his own company sponsored union. Is that alternative
Speaker 3: mean classic capitalism?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 4: But like I mean, it's just it's just kind of
Speaker 4: lip service, right, I mean, it evolves understood.
Speaker 3: A better form, but in the beginning, I'm just it
Speaker 3: makes me think of one of my favorite lines about capitalism.
Speaker 3: Capitalism is the one ideology that figured out. If you
Speaker 3: see someone say screw capitalism, you can print it on
Speaker 3: a T shirt and sell that T shirt to them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and here you go. I want to read this
Speaker 2: statement before we get to this last thing that we're
Speaker 2: going to say. Hear about John D.
Speaker 3: Rockefeller.
Speaker 2: This is a statement that he made in June of
Speaker 2: nineteen fourteen. So massacre occurs in April. This is in
Speaker 2: June of nineteen fourteen. This is what Rockefeller stated happened.
Speaker 2: He says there was no Ludlow massacre. The entanglement started
Speaker 2: as a desperate fight for life by two small squads
Speaker 2: of militia against the entire tent colony. There were no
Speaker 2: women or children shot by the authorities of the state
Speaker 2: or representatives of the operators. While this loss of life
Speaker 2: is profoundly to be regretted, it is unjust in the
Speaker 2: extreme to lay it at the door of the defenders
Speaker 2: of law and property, who were in no slightest way
Speaker 2: responsible for it. That thought of the defenders of law
Speaker 2: and property isn't that doesn't that strike you, guys as
Speaker 2: like representing what police forces are. The American dream be
Speaker 2: defenders of law and property.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've spoken about this before, sort of the the
Speaker 3: legal standing or prioritization of law enforcement. Right, it comes
Speaker 3: up pretty often in protest and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well the good guys are the landowners and the
Speaker 2: company owners, right, I mean in the at least in
Speaker 2: this worldview that he puts out there in June of
Speaker 2: nineteen fourteen.
Speaker 3: And it comes back again in just like in that
Speaker 3: time and in this time, and in recent years, it
Speaker 3: will always come up because it is a dilemma of
Speaker 3: philosophic perspective. Right, everybody wants to be the main character.
Speaker 3: Nobody wants to be the bad guy, right, And that
Speaker 3: is that is an argument Rockefeller makes, and he realizes
Speaker 3: that there is another war afoot, another conflict that a
Speaker 3: lot of people aren't thinking about in terms of what
Speaker 3: it is, which is an optics war, a war of
Speaker 3: information and narrative. And this is where we see a
Speaker 3: very strange era in public relations. Our buddy Johnny Dee
Speaker 3: brings in a PR expert. He's in, Oh the peasants,
Speaker 3: hey to me, not only in Colorado, but broad and
Speaker 3: the contacts is really innovative. Boober and Shaker, I'm not
Speaker 3: being sarcastic, very smart person named Ivy Lee, and Ivy
Speaker 3: Lee says, look, we need an optics campaign, Johnny. You
Speaker 3: need to go to Colorado yourself, and I need media there.
Speaker 3: I need them to take pictures of you shaking the hands,
Speaker 3: kissing the babies, hanging out at a church social.
Speaker 4: Shaking the babies, kissing the hands.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we need to we need don't shake them too heart.
Speaker 3: We need to also have some peopil right, a glowing
Speaker 3: kind of homespun exploration of your time, and you know,
Speaker 3: a picture you hearing grievances and responding to those. If
Speaker 3: we could get you on a home tour, we'll find
Speaker 3: you some Rockefeller friendly families. Do you walk with and
Speaker 3: go through the facilities? The media loved it, Look said
Speaker 3: America the dead so quickly forgotten Old Johnny. De's just
Speaker 3: like us. We're not so different you and I. Geez
Speaker 3: it worked.
Speaker 2: Should we read another excerpt from the visit that we've
Speaker 2: got from September twentieth, nineteen fifteen, when Rockefeller's out there
Speaker 2: talking to the men and women who run his iron
Speaker 2: and coal company. We are all partners in a way
Speaker 2: that we were like alluding to, Yeah, do you want
Speaker 2: to do. Would you mind doing that? I think you
Speaker 2: do awesome.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you, Bett, I'm honored bless us with your
Speaker 3: reading to play that to a type, to play the
Speaker 3: villain here who didn't see himself as a villain. We
Speaker 3: are all.
Speaker 5: Partners in a way. Capital can't get along without you Min,
Speaker 5: and you min can't get along without capital. When anybody
Speaker 5: comes along and tells you that capital and labor can't
Speaker 5: get along together, that man is your worst enemy. We
Speaker 5: are getting along friendly enough here in his mind right now,
Speaker 5: and there's no reason why you men cannot get along
Speaker 5: with the managers of my company.
Speaker 3: But I am back in New.
Speaker 7: York migration just petrician that it was just like the
Speaker 7: corporate the corporate structury of it too, the baking.
Speaker 3: It answers the question, you know, like I'm not going
Speaker 3: to be here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but look look how great we're getting along when
Speaker 2: daddy's here, When Daddy goes home, and you guys could
Speaker 2: get along and play just fine.
Speaker 3: It does have that energy, right. It does seem to
Speaker 3: the people thought, although we're cracking on him and he
Speaker 3: deserves it, it does seem that people thought he was
Speaker 3: making good faith efforts, you know, what do you guys think?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean there were there were improvements made. The
Speaker 2: only counterpoint to it is that I and you kind
Speaker 2: of alluded to this earlier ben the way it functions
Speaker 2: in capitalism with something like this occurs, there are slight improvements.
Speaker 2: You you push the needle just enough right now, the
Speaker 2: new standard is there, but it's only moved slightly.
Speaker 4: And something of this magnitude to even get that slight movement,
Speaker 4: which is just so frustrating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you need an Act of Congress, You need a
Speaker 2: major event. You need something to occur where everybody can
Speaker 2: look at it and say, oh, well, we need at
Speaker 2: least that, right, And it's always at least that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the Overton windows shifts again, right, and not
Speaker 3: for nothing?
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Well, some of the more cynical of us in the
Speaker 3: crowd say, isn't this like the old story about the
Speaker 3: trees who kept voting for the axe to be president
Speaker 3: of the forest. You know, the forest got smaller and smaller,
Speaker 3: but the trees would get together and they would say,
Speaker 3: you know, the axe isn't perfect, but that handles wouldn't.
Speaker 3: He's kind of like us. Oh god, it's an antique
Speaker 3: that one hurts. Okay, Yeah, And I guess we have
Speaker 3: to ask to like, obviously, folks, we've made this in
Speaker 3: two parter. We know it's it's a little longer than usual,
Speaker 3: but we hope you find it worth your time. It's
Speaker 3: it's obviously very important to us as well, and we
Speaker 3: have to ask what this tells us about the modern day.
Speaker 3: I hope I haven't over salted the soup. That doesn't
Speaker 3: make sense, all right, nobody likes the salty soup, but
Speaker 3: we might might have mentioned it too much. But do
Speaker 3: we see some parallels here or some potential parallels?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 3: How could you?
Speaker 4: Of course, it sums the whole thing up, and it's
Speaker 4: just continued. The struggle continues. We mentioned the sugar industry
Speaker 4: and how very very very similarly dangerous conditions and labor
Speaker 4: camp type scenarios still exist to this day. So that
Speaker 4: micro movement that you're talking about, Matt, I mean, it's
Speaker 4: still slow even to this day. And also I was
Speaker 4: gonna mention and earlier like it is technically illegal for
Speaker 4: companies to retaliate against you know, unionizing workers on paper,
Speaker 4: but you know, I have a dear friend who was
Speaker 4: recently on strike, you know, in the legal profession in
Speaker 4: New York City, and when he returned from strike, there
Speaker 4: is very clear retaliatory action taking place, because it's easy
Speaker 4: to hide it behind other actions, you know, and it's
Speaker 4: just it's hard to prove, and the advantage remains on
Speaker 4: the side of the companies, I think for full argument.
Speaker 3: Well, also, you know to that point this acquaintance of
Speaker 3: mine as well, and you're talking about proving retaliation means
Speaker 3: proving intent, and intent is very difficult to prove, especially
Speaker 3: when there are so many other things you could throw
Speaker 3: up at the screen as the reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, in the news as we're recording this, on October third,
Speaker 2: the International Longshoreman's Association came to terms, and that's forty
Speaker 2: five thousand human beings who work in ports, like all
Speaker 2: along the Gulf Coast and the East Coast of the
Speaker 2: United States. They were going to strike, and that was
Speaker 2: gonna be a massive deal for the United States of America. Like,
Speaker 2: and we were talking about this offline a lot. We
Speaker 2: mentioned it, I think in a strange news but we
Speaker 2: were just mentioning the effects that would have on little
Speaker 2: things like our ability to get paper towels right and
Speaker 2: fresh fruit and things like that, and it would have
Speaker 2: massive effects on the lives of everybody, these forty five
Speaker 2: thousand people who were represented by this one union. But
Speaker 2: thankfully they came to a deal negotiated that basically said
Speaker 2: we're gonna postpone our strike until ear I think mid
Speaker 2: January of twenty twenty five. So let's get this deal
Speaker 2: done or you guys, the United States basically is in trouble.
Speaker 3: Right at least go to the negotiating team. And that
Speaker 3: is that leads us to other question. You know, has
Speaker 3: the era of the Pinkerton past.
Speaker 4: That I think that I think so, yeah, you can't
Speaker 4: crack skulls anymore.
Speaker 3: It's just in this obtree.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the optics of it are just too damaging, you know,
Speaker 4: maybe because of the public opinion and all that stuff.
Speaker 3: So, I mean, they have to tread more lightly.
Speaker 4: And a lot of these anti union, anti labor practices,
Speaker 4: I think the most egregious and outward ones we see
Speaker 4: are by companies like Amazon and their warehouse employees and
Speaker 4: things like that. But my point is they have to
Speaker 4: be a little more sneaky about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that was my question. Is the age of
Speaker 3: the pinkered in past or has it simply evolved? And
Speaker 3: if it has passed to your point, then for how
Speaker 3: long is it a permanent passage or is it another
Speaker 3: cyclical iteration? Because I think we see that these things
Speaker 3: come and go over time. You know, I don't think.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's impossible that these kinds of tactics
Speaker 3: might return. We know they still happen in other parts
Speaker 3: of the world, in other countries. You know, you don't
Speaker 3: have to look far to see the merk squads that
Speaker 3: certain energy interest will hire up to and including overthrowing
Speaker 3: a duly elected government, you know.
Speaker 4: And then we also know that as the individuals and
Speaker 4: parties and what have you who hold power kind of shift,
Speaker 4: it's possible to roll that stuff back, you know, whether
Speaker 4: it be oversights of industry, regulations and things like that
Speaker 4: that can be rolled back. You're not wrong, man, But
Speaker 4: I do see a future, given an a radical enough shift,
Speaker 4: maybe not even that radical, where things like this sort
Speaker 4: of labor protection could shift as well.
Speaker 2: Guys, we need a new version of the Wire looking
Speaker 2: at you, David Simon, We need a new version that
Speaker 2: shows all this stuff from the longshoreman to the tycoons
Speaker 2: in New York city to write just this shows all
Speaker 2: of this stuff working again.
Speaker 4: One season of The Wire though, was the first time
Speaker 4: I really understood the inner workings of long shoremen and
Speaker 4: a lot of that kind of stuff for the dock
Speaker 4: workers there in Baltimore. It's a really good point, as
Speaker 4: Simon is really great at kind of explaining the intricacies
Speaker 4: of these kinds of relationships and then where the power
Speaker 4: structures and all the different you know, involved parties kind
Speaker 4: of lie.
Speaker 3: It's a really really smart guy.
Speaker 2: Well what does it look like now? And Ben, to
Speaker 2: your point, what does that look like when there are
Speaker 2: android law enforcement officers patrolling the docks, you know, and
Speaker 2: that kind of thing like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and what does it look like in a surveillance state? Yeah?
Speaker 3: This is this is something that made this in our
Speaker 3: minds more than worthy of a two part episode. It
Speaker 3: seems this conspiracy and the Ludlow massacre tells us a
Speaker 3: lot about the modern day, and we want to hear
Speaker 3: your stories of similar off obscured history. One thing is
Speaker 3: for certain, from Haffa to Colorado, from longshoremen to the
Speaker 3: Pinkerton's history is chock full of the stuff they don't
Speaker 3: want you to know. So hit us up with your
Speaker 3: stories from the u, US, from other countries, from any
Speaker 3: time in history. We try to be easy to find online.
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Speaker 2: Hey, do you want to call us and tell us
Speaker 2: your thoughts? Like this thought from John Lawson, who was
Speaker 2: head of the United mind Workers in nineteen fifteen. Here
Speaker 2: we go quote, mister Rockefeller has missed the fundamental trouble
Speaker 2: in the coal camps. Democracy has never existed among the
Speaker 2: men who toil under the ground. The coal companies have
Speaker 2: stamped it out. Now, mister Rockefeller is not restoring democracy,
Speaker 2: He's trying to substitute paternalism for it. I just thought
Speaker 2: that was a really interesting thought, an interesting quote. Do
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