Company Government National Guard Events Locations Commemorations Frank J. Hayes (May 4, 1882 – June 10, 1948) was an American miner and president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) from 1917 to 1919.

[1] He joined the United Mine Workers and held a number of local union offices before being elected secretary-treasurer of District 13 in 1904.

The Paint Creek Miners' Union with the help of Hayes, serving as the UMWA International Vice President, declared a strike with eight demands.

In retaliation for Ludlow, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of antiunion establishments over the next ten days, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 40-mile front from Trinidad to Walsenburg.

Thomas G. Andrews described it as the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States", commonly referred to as the Colorado Coalfield War.

Historian Howard Zinn described the Ludlow Massacre as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history".

The massacre site is owned by the United Mine Workers of America, which erected a granite monument in memory of the miners and their families who died that day.

The Ludlow Tent Colony Site was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009, and dedicated on June 28, 2009.Modern archeological investigation largely supports the strikers' reports of the event.

Frank J. Hayes, then international vice-president, twice invited the operators to a joint conference, as did the miners assembled in convention at Trinidad on Sep 15, 1913.

When the strike in southern Colorado finally went into effect on September 23, over eleven thousand mine workers, 95 per cent of the total, left the pits.

The Baldwin–Felts organization promptly took over the sheriffs' offices in Las Animas and Huerfano counties ... and staffed them with several hundred barrel-house bums and professional gunmen imported from the cities ...

On the last day of October 1913, with banners flying, the singing men, women and children marched behind their band down the road to meet the militia ... [[3]3] "Frank J. Hayes, International Vice President of the Union, the man who had charge of the Colorado situation, and colleague of Lawson, was then introduced.

He told how he and Lawson and other leaders went to Colorado in 1913, how they sought a hearing with the mine owners but met with refusal, because the operators had determined to eliminate the union.

Then Mr. Hayes told how the mine owners imported 700 gun-men to break the strike, of how they started the trouble by shooting into the tent colonies established by the strikers who had been evicted from company houses.

He told dramatically of the shooting or murdering of thirty-eight men, women and children, and not one indictment had been brought against the mine owners.

"[4] During his tenure on the UMWA executive council, he unsuccessfully ran for governor of Illinois on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America.

Your conscience acquits you-but how make reply And speak now of justice, with eyes to the sky, When there in the ashes their torn bodies lie, The women and children of Ludlow?

How look on their faces, their blood-matted hair, Their charred, blackened bodies all swollen and bare, And the babes on their bosoms thy fiends murdered there, The women and children of Ludlow?

They sought but a chance for their husbands and sons, A future more kindly for their little ones- Your conscience acquits you-yet slaughtered with guns The women and children of Ludlow.

Your conscience acquits you-go look where they died; Go look where they perished, ay, pleaded and cried- The mothers, the children, the babes crucified.