Customer Reviews

Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre

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How do you go about writing a biography about someone who lived almost 100 years ago and left almost no trace except for a spectacular obituary? Louis Tikas was an early casualty of one the largest labor dispute in Western history: the Ludlow Massacre. This book weaves a portrait of the man based partly on conjecture and on the fragments of information that have survived, and the remembrances of the last of his contemporaries who were interviewed for this book. The result is something of a tour de force: but so little has been written about the Greek immigration to America, this book should merit a space on the bookshelves of anyone either intrigued by the struggles of Labor in the early 20th Century, and especially anyone of Greek ancestry.

An eclectic book with a big heart that evocatively tells the story of the 1913-14 southern Colorado coal strike that led to the Ludlow Massacre. Zeese Papanikolas uses members of his family as stand-ins as he traces the life of Louis Tikas, A Greek immigrant who became an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America and an important figure in organizing and maintaining the Ludlow tent colony. Tikas was killed at Ludlow by the Colorado National Guard and became a martyr for unionism in the U.S. Papanikolas tells a story that places ethnicity as its center, but he also successfully captures the world of the rapidly industrializing American West. Students will have a difficult time following the story if they don't already know something about the 1913-14 strike. I would recommend pairing this book with Scott Martelle's Blood Passion, which they would read first, to give students a good grounding in what happened before, during, and after the strike.