The Ludlow Series – 1 KGNU-Boulder, Colorado “It’s The Economy” Interview with Bob Butero – United Mine Workers of America Representative and Jonathan Rees, Author of “The Rockefeller Plan At Colorado Fuel and Iron Company: 1914-1942

CF&I Steel Mill – February 1976

Link to the Interview

On March 27, 2014 – the weekly program “It’s The Economy” on KGNU-Boulder interviews Bob Butero, United Mine Workers of America representative – and a former coal miner – along with Colorado State University prof and author Jonathan Rees, author of The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company: 1914-1942. The interview runs about an hour.

In a few weeks, the 100th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre will be marked by events all over the Front Range of Colorado. Most of them will take place south of Denver – in the Pueblo-Walsenburg-Trinidad region. Like the Triangle Fire Tragedy in New York City (March 25, 1911), the Ludlow Massacre of miners’ families working for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) to provide coal and iron for the Pueblo, Colorado steel mill was a “watershed event” in the history of both the state and the nation. I will be posting a series of articles and writing up commentaries to commemorate this event and go into its implications over the course of the next few months.

The CF&I Steel Mill still exists. For a time it was the largest producer of steel between St. Louis and California. It has changed hands many, many times. The photo on the left is of the mill in the mid 1970s when it still employed – if I remember correctly – more than 6000 workers, then as in 1914 when the Ludlow Massacre took place, these workers coming from all over the world, with diverse backgrounds.