Lattimer Massacre Song – WE NEVER FORGET

Beneath the starry banner
Though they came from foreign lands,
They died the death of martyrs
For the noble rights of man.
-Anonymous

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Hellraisers Journal, Sunday April 24, 1898
Lattimer, Pennsylvania – Jury Finds Massacre of Miners Was Not Murder

The miners of Pennsylvania were marching peacefully when Sheriff Martin and his army of deputized gunthugs opened fire upon them at Lattimer on September 10, 1897; and yet the miners were not murdered according to the verdict of the jury as reported by The New Time magazine of April 1898:

Plutocrats’ Hero Acquitted-

THE ACQUITTAL OF SHERIFF MARTIN.

The acquittal of Sheriff Martin, the plutocratic hero of Hazleton, was to have been expected. Never yet in the history of the United States, or for that matter any other country, have the hired murderers of workingmen been brought to justice when arraigned before a court. The slaughter of the men at Hazleton was the most infamous act ever committed under forms of law. It has its parallel in the judicial farce which resulted in the acquittal of Martin and his cowardly and blood-thirsty deputies.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From The New Time Magazine: Sheriff Martin Acquitted of Murder for Massacre at Lattimer” →

You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones

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Hellraisers Journal, Saturday January 26, 1907
From Chicago, Illinois – Mother Jones Writes to Mrs. Palmer

The following letter, from Mother Jones to Mrs. Potter Palmer, Chicago socialite, was published in the January 24th edition of the Miners Magazine, official organ of the Western Federation of Miners.

43 Welton Place, Chicago, Ill.,
January 12, 1907

Mrs. Potter Palmer,
100 Lake Shore Drive,
Chicago, Ill.
Dear Madam:

By the announcement of the daily press I learn that you are to entertain a number of persons who are to be present as representatives of two recognized classes of American citizens-the working class and the capitalist class, and that the purpose of this gathering is to choose a common ground on which the conflicting interests of these two classes may be harmonized and the present strife between the organized forces of these two classes may be brought to a peaceful and satisfactory end.

I credit you with perfect sincerity in this matter, but being fully aware that your environment and whole life has prevented you from seeing and understanding the true relationship of these two classes in this republic and the nature of the conflict which you think can be ended by such means as you are so prominently associated with, and with a desire that you may see and understand it in all its grim reality, I respectfully submit these few personal experiences for your kind consideration.

I am a workman’s daughter, by occupation a dress-maker and school teacher, and during this last twenty-five years an active worker in the organized labor movement. During the past seventy years of my life I have been subject to the authority of the capitalist class and for the last thirty-five years I have been conscious of this fact. With the years’ personal experience-the roughest kind best of all teachers-I have learned that there is an irrepressible conflict that will never end between the working-class and the capitalist-class, until these two classes disappear and the worker alone remains the producer and owner of the capital produced.

In this fight I wept at the grave of nineteen workers shot on the highways of Latterman [Lattimer], Pennsylvania in 1897. In the same place I marched with 5,000 women eighteen miles in the night seeking bread for their children, and halted with the bayonets of the Coal and Iron police who had orders to shoot to kill.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones to Mrs. Palmer, Remembers Lattimer: “In this fight I wept at the grave of nineteen workers…”” →