There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday March 3, 1907
From the Appeal to Reason: Eugene Debs on Government by “Mob”
Note: The events described below, took place January-March of 1904.
AT the time of the late labor war in Colorado Governor Peabody, of unsavory memory, called upon President Ruzvle for federal troops to help the state militia that was helping the mine owners defeat the miners and destroy their union. The result was that President Ruzvlt dispatched Carroll D. Wright, then national labor commissioner, to Colorado to investigate thoroughly and report fully on the situation in that state. The investigation was duly made and the report, a volume of 365 pages, has been issued by the government.
This report is filled with detailed accounts of the most terrible outrages perpetrated by the mine owners and their murderous minions upon perfectly innocent men, women and children, for no other reason than that they were in sympathy with the miners.
On page 200 is recited the revolting story, familiar to all who follow the progress of labor events, of the seizing of five miners, at Telluride, by thugs in the employ of the mine owners and the forcing of them into a horrid cesspool to shovel its contents into an excavation. This outrageous indignity of the alleged “authorities” upon wholly unoffending men, quite sufficient to provoke murder, was expected to serve as a lesson to miners to submit without protest to the iron rule as well as to the exploitation of their masters.
One of the men, Harry Maki [also known as Henry Maki in some accounts], a union miner, refused to work in the cesspool and was handcuffed by the thugs “in the service,” and, at the command of the mine owners, was chained to a telephone pole on a public street. The report says that he was thus pilloried from 11:20 a. m. to 12:45 p. m [of March 2, 1904].
An outrage so brutal as this would precipitate and armed revolt if workingmen were not the most patient and submissive creatures on earth.
Suppose five rich mine owners were seized by union miners and forced into a public privy vault and ordered to shovel out its contents simply to outrage their manhood, and that one of them balked and was then chained to a telephone pole in a public street, what would happen? The whole country would roar with rage, the press would thunder its denunciation, the soldiers, state and federal, would rush to the scene, and, from President Ruzvlt to the last governor, the powers of government would be freely used to avenge the crime and punish its perpetrators. But, the victims being merely workingmen, the matter is so trifling that it does not even cause a ripple on the surface.
