Re-interpreting Ludlow

For all intents and purposes, the nation’s age of industrial violence ended with the Memorial Day massacre in South Chicago in 1937. During the previous fifty-year period, seven hundred deaths were recorded in industrial conflicts, though the actual body count was probably much higher. These grim facts mean that the United State experienced the bloodiest, most violent labor history of any industrial national in the world. During the past seventy years fatalities from other forms of workplace violence have continued to be all too common—more than 28,000 dead from workplace injuries between 2002 and 2007. But because violent strikes and shootings have been rare in recent times, the living memory of bloody labor repression is dying, along with the generation of workers who fought the bitter battles of the 1930s. It is now up to labor historians, union educators, preservationists, anthropologists, and filmmakers to keep those memories alive.