By early April 1914, Colorado Governor Elias Ammons thought the violence in his state’s strike-bound southern coal district had eased enough that he could begin withdrawing the Colorado National Guard, deployed six months earlier as military occupiers. But Ammons misread the signals, and on April 20, 1914, a full-scale battle erupted between the remaining militiamen and armed strikers living in a tent colony at the small railroad town of Ludlow. Eight men were killed in the fighting, which culminated in the burning of the colony. The next day, the bodies of two women and eleven children were found suffocated in a below-ground shelter. The “Ludlow Massacre,” as it quickly became known, launched a national call-to-arms for union supporters to join a ten-day guerrilla war along more than two hundred miles of the eastern Rockies. The convulsion of arson and violence killed more than thirty people and didn’t end until President Woodrow Wilson sent in the U.S. Army. Overall at least seventy-five men, women, and children were killed in seven months, likely the nation’s deadliest labor struggle.

In Blood Passion, journalist Scott Martelle explores this little-noted tale of political corruption and repression and immigrants’ struggles against dominant social codes of race, ethnicity, and class. More than a simple labor dispute, the events surrounding Ludlow embraced some of the most volatile social movements of the early twentieth century, pitting labor activists, socialists, and anarchists against the era’s powerful business class, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and helped give rise to the modern twins of corporate public relations and political “spin.” But at its heart, Blood Passion is the dramatic story of small lives merging into a movement for change and of the human struggle for freedom and dignity.

Scott Martelle, is a Los Angeles Times staff writer, and a veteran of the 1995 Detroit Newspaper Strike. A native of Maine who grew up in rural western New York, he lives with his wife and their two sons in Irvine, California. Visit Scott's website at www.scottmartelle.com

"Blood Passion is the definitive account of a major landmark in the American struggle for social justice. And the way Scott Martelle tells the story is splendid proof that history can both be written as vividly as a novel and also be documented with scrupulous care."

"We must welcome this carefully-researched study of one of the most dramatic, violent, and important episodes in the history of labor struggles in this country."

"Martelle's excellent book captures [the Ludlow Massacre] with a journalist's flair for narrative and a historian's penchant for making the necessary inferences where they belong: on the page for all to see."

"...a lively journalistic account"

"Some of the bloodiest events in the U.S. labor movement took place in the 1890s and beyond in Western mines, as labor, management, government, and political philosophies clashed. Martelle...brings the era alive in his 'blend of journalism and historic inquiry' focusing on the conflict in the Ludlow, Colo., mines in 1914, which left 75 dead. Engrossing."

"Scott Martelle's account of the 1914 Ludlow Mssacre and the surrounding events is perhaps the most gripping and readable account of these times."

"Blood Passion is a fine contribution to the history and spatiality of conflict in the mining industry."

"Blood Passion is a fine contribution to the history and spatiality of conflict in the mining industry."

"...a lively journalistic account"

"We must welcome this carefully-researched study of one of the most dramatic, violent, and important episodes in the history of labor struggles in this country."

"Blood Passion is the definitive account of a major landmark in the American struggle for social justice. And the way Scott Martelle tells the story is splendid proof that history can both be written as vividly as a novel and also be documented with scrupulous care."

"Scott Martelle's account of the 1914 Ludlow Mssacre and the surrounding events is perhaps the most gripping and readable account of these times."

"Martelle's excellent book captures [the Ludlow Massacre] with a journalist's flair for narrative and a historian's penchant for making the necessary inferences where they belong: on the page for all to see."

"Some of the bloodiest events in the U.S. labor movement took place in the 1890s and beyond in Western mines, as labor, management, government, and political philosophies clashed. Martelle...brings the era alive in his 'blend of journalism and historic inquiry' focusing on the conflict in the Ludlow, Colo., mines in 1914, which left 75 dead. Engrossing."