Hellraisers Journal: U. M. W. establishes fund “to build a monument to our martyred dead, on the field of Ludlow.”

Quote re Ludlow Monument, UMWJ June 21, 1917

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Hellraisers Journal, Friday June 22, 1917
United Mine Workers of America to Honor Ludlow Martyrs

From the United Mine Workers Journal of June 21, 1917:

The Ludlow Monument
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While it is fully recognized that there would be only words of commendation if the International Executive Board had appropriated sufficient money to build a monument to our martyred dead, on the field of Ludlow, there is a sentimental value in the recommendation adopted instead that, no doubt, will be appreciated by the membership.

We wish to perpetuate the memory of those who died that the organization might live in Colorado and in the entire country.

Let us place that memorial upon every minute book of every local in the jurisdiction of the miners’ union. In subscribing a small sum to be expended in the erection of a fitting monument we recognize anew the bitter cost some were called upon to pay.

So many of us have fallen heir to the benefits that are derived from unionism. We have never learned to appreciate the cost of its up building and some of us may hold them lightly, and even so, the organization gained with sacrifice, struggle and pain, even unto death.

In subscribing our mite toward the perpetuation of the memory of those who made the final great sacrifice, let us dedicate ourselves anew to the purpose of maintaining the principles of our great movement for the elevation of our kind. Let us so devote ourselves to the principles of our organization; to its extension into the fields where men are still bound down because of their ignorance of the great benefits that come with intelligent organization, that these, the martyrs of Ludlow, of Virden, and of a thousand other unnamed fields of sacrifice, shall not have died in vain.

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[Drawing by Morris Hall Pancoast added.]