Following today’s speedy work, the committee decided to divide up the inquiry tomorrow, allowing Senator Borah to proceed alone with the peonage investigation, and probably requiring Senator Kenyon to begin an individual inquiry into general conditions in the strike zone, while the remainder of the committee take up other branches of the inquiry.
NEW YORK, Feb. 3.--Mrs. Mary Petrucci, a coal miner’s wife, today told the federal industrial commission how her three small children met death at her side in the Ludlow strike massacre of 1914.
Women wept and tense faced men bent forward eagerly, as the bareheaded, black clad woman, in low, passive tones, reflecting the deep melancholy of her face, recited the dramatic events of the night of April 20, when fire and machine guns swept the strikers’ camp in the southern Colorado hills, collecting a toll of twelve children, two women and five men. It was a remarkable recital and a memorable scene.
Mrs. Petrucci is 24 years old. She was born of Italian parents in a Colorado mining camp. She was married at the age of 16 and had four children when the strike of the Colorado Fuel & Iron company employes was declared in 1913. She lost one child in March of the following year as a result of privations occasioned by the strike. With the grief of that loss still upon her she went to live in the tent colony at Ludlow after the strikers had been driven from the company settlement. There the final tragedy of her life was enacted.
She took the witness stand today with listless manner and haunted eyes. Throughout her testimony she alternately bit at her finger nails and twisted in her frail hands a cotton handkerchief.
Her sweet voice at no time rose above a conversational tone, and the matter of fact manner in which she told the story of her grief served only to bring out with more striking force its tragic import.
“Yes,” she said in answer to Chairman Walsh’s questions, “we had good times in the tent colony. I liked it there better than in the company camp. Over there the militia came up every day and insulted us. The Sunday before the fire was the Greek Easter. The men in the camp celebrated it. We had a baseball game, and that night there was singing, and the boys came with banjos and we had a good time.”
