The Lattimer Massacre: Nineteen Dead, Nobody Charged

On the morning of September tenth, eighteen ninety-seven, several hundred men were walking along a road outside Hazleton, Pennsylvania, toward the Lattimer mine. They were not armed. They were carrying an American flag. They were immigrant workers, most of them Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian men who had come to the anthracite coal region in the previous decade, drawn by the same recruitment agents who had promised their fathers steady wages and a foothold in a new country.

What they found instead was a system designed to keep them in debt. The mining companies paid by the ton, not by the hour, which meant that a man could spend a full shift underground and be credited almost nothing if the coal he dug was deemed too small or too dirty by the company weighman. The companies owned the housing. They owned the store where the men were effectively required to buy food and equipment. A new miner often spent his first months working off the cost of his tools, his rent, and his family's provisions, emerging from each pay period deeper in arrears than he had entered it.

The march to Lattimer was a protest march. The workers wanted to bring other miners out on strike. They had no union, no legal protection, no institutional backing. The United Mine Workers had not yet organized this part of Pennsylvania.

Luzerne County Sheriff James Martin met the marchers on the road with a deputized posse of about one hundred fifty men. Accounts differ on what was said. What is documented is what followed: the deputies opened fire. Most of the marchers were shot in the back. Nineteen men died. Thirty-nine were wounded.

Sheriff Martin and his deputies were tried for murder. An all-white jury acquitted them after deliberating for three hours. The verdict was reported in Scranton newspapers alongside testimony characterizing the march as an unlawful riot. The marchers had been carrying an American flag.

The massacre did not end labor organizing in the anthracite fields. It accelerated it. Within five years, the United Mine Workers had organized the region and called the strike that forced the first presidential intervention in American labor history. The men who died at Lattimer in eighteen ninety-seven are among the reasons that American workers have weekends.