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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday September 4, 1909
“The Strikes in Pennsylvania” by Louis Duchez, Part II
From the International Socialist Review of September 1909:
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[Steel Trust Bulls and Pennsylvania Cossacks]
The steel trust “bulls” and “Pennsylvania Cossacks” were rushed in by the hundreds to club the laborers to death. One poor Hungarian while on the run was shot twenty-four times in the back. Comrade J. W. Slayton has the coat and every bullet hole shows up. The victim is lying in the hospital at the point of death. Another one, an Italian, looked through a knot hole in the fence surrounding the company’s property and two “bulls” ran out with drawn revolvers. One of them kept him covered while the other beat him so badly that he had to be dragged away by his fellow strikers and carried to the hospital. It would take volumes to relate in all its detail the brutality and boldness and lawlessness of the Pressed Steel Car Company.
It is no wonder that the country was aroused over the matter. No one with human feeling and a cent to give could refrain from offering it to the poor, starving men and children and sick women, who were treated a thousands times worse than the serfs of the Middle Ages or the black chattel slaves of the South.
In Butler the strikers were treated about the same as in McKees Rocks. Before the “Cossacks” came all was quiet, aside from the fact that the company “bulls” did everything to start a riot.
When the “Cossacks” came into town, naturally, the striking men and their families would crowd along the main streets. Hundreds of them got out in the middle of the streets of the little village of Lyndora, the Standard Steel Car Company’s town, and the mounted constabulary rushed into them without warning.
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The strike of the workers at the Pressed Steel Car plant, and at McKees Rocks, New Castle and Butler, Pa., near Pittsburg, is being fought by the employers and their troops with all the brutally and outrage which remind one of Homestead and the other slaughter pens of America. In addition to numerous outrages on the part of the employers’ troops, on August 22, 10 strikers were killed buy the militia, who opened a volley fire on the crowd of men, women and children. Four of the bloodthirsty soldiers were killed in the fight. They, at least, will never kill any more strikers. The account of the affair, while distressing, is a reminder that the fighting spirit of the workers is not dead, and that the working people are realizing that they have no rights to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, unless they have the power themselves to enforce those rights. It is not for the parlor, kidglove revolutionist to preach meekness and “peaceful methods” to these brave workers who are fighting for their lives and to protect the honor of their families, nor for other working people to lay down hard and fast rules for those who are goaded and stung by tyranny and oppression……
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