Hellraisers Journal – Monday August 25, 1913
Cleve Woodrum, Martyred Union Miner by Cabin Creek Striker
From the Shawnee County Socialist of August 23, 1913:
CLEVE WOODRUM AN HUMBLE MARTYR
TO THE CAUSE OF LABOR.
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The Washington Herald July 26, 1913
There are some who would wish us to believe that the West Virginia outrages have ceased since the Senate Committee and the Socialist Party Committee have made their report, but they still go on.
Cleve Woodrum was picking berries for his sick wife, but had with him his rifle, when two hired murderers of the mine owners attacked him. Woodrum killed both of them, and was himself wounded.The other hired assassins, finding the two did not return from their murder, hunted and found one of the guards mortally wounded and the other dead.The wounded guard, Don Slater, they sent to the Hospital where he died, but, [finding] Woodrum, these [gunthugs] tortured the wounded man and then mutilated his body and left it in the bush where it was afterward found by his friends.
This was a cowardly assassination and then a brutal savagery of which only [gunthugs] are capable, and yet no paper but a few labor papers will mention it.
Read this letter from a Cabin Creek striker and remember that the mine owners, whose money hires these [gunthugs] are mostly pious church members, and they pay some of this blood money to the preachers to preach as they the mine owners demand.
This may be Christianity, but it has nothing to do with the gentle and loving Jesus.
Our Comrade, Cleve Woodrum. Eskdale, West Virginia.
Cleve Woodrum, the martyr to the cause of human liberty, born October 12, 1884, killed July 24, 1913, entered the coal mines at the early age of 11, denied an education by the same class that hired the gunman to kill him. The departed comrade leaves a father, mother and eight brothers and sisters, an invalid wife with six little children, the eldest being eight years old and Mrs. Woodrum soon to become a mother. Cleve met his death while just out of hearing from home and was picking berries for his sick wife who had just returned from the hospital after undergoing surgical treatment. A plot between the coal operators and the military thugs to put Slater out of the way as Slater knew too much about the dirty work, murders and sluggings the coal operators had ordered and which had been carried out to the letter and the operators taking the advantage of the jealousy existing between the old line of Baldwins and the military Baldwins and Slater was ambushed by his own crowd.
Comrade Woodrum immortalized this great fight for the cause of justice and the freedom of his class from wage slavery, as much so as the John Brown martyrdom immortalized the scaffold for his opposition to chattel slavery.
I knew the deceased when he was a little trapper boy in the mines years ago. Standing in water cold as ice up to his knees while the young bones were trying to develop and powder smoke so thick you could hardly see. Long weary hours of toil, and food that was kept in a dinner pail closed in tight for several hours which was not nutritious or fit to eat. Even at that Cleve was manly, honest, upright, square, hard working man.
He had been in the Socialist movement about two years when he saw the light, his honest heart just responded to the working class’s philosophy of reason that the worker should receive the full product of his labor just like the rose to a spring shower.
This was his creed, this was his religion. He professed the religion of humanity, the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and to attain that end he had the highest of motives first taught by a union carpenter and Social Revolutionist by the name of Jesus, put to death by the ruling class for his radical teachings and would not recant one iota.
The union miners of this field should place suitable shaft over his tomb and ae well provide for his widow and little helpless children. Why not? The capitalist class pension their uniformed hired murderers for shooting down their own class and calling them heroes. So it is to the Socialist and union miners to provide for these widows and keep the grave green of working class heroes, as the coal barons forgot Slater as soon as the last breath went out.
A CABIN CREEK STRIKER.
This is the class war. Comrade Woodrum’s tortured and mutilated body is the dumb witness to the class war, and should rouse us slaves to class consciousness.
We should resolve over the mutilated body of this humble and faithful comrade to unite, organize and resolve that this class war shall end in the coming Co-Operative Commonwealth.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday December 23, 1912
American Flag Stands Tall Over Miners’ Tent Colony at Eskdale, West Virginia
From The Coming Nation of December 7, 1912:
Winning the Fight at Eskdale ———-
By Alfred Segal
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THERE was a tremendous excitement in the little village of Eskdale, W. Va.
An American flag waves over the main street of Eskdale (perhaps to give assurance that Eskdale is really in America and not in Russia); but on the same street you see little children barefoot, now in November, because they haven’t any shoes, and you see the families of striking miners, evicted and driven into the highways by the Coal Dukes, living under tents because they have no homes. You are ashamed to enjoy the meager comforts of your hotel room after you have lived a day with the misery of Eskdale.
Two rods from the tents stand the coal hills with their fabulous wealth-the fine tables set by nature for all her children and yet within sight of the feast they are starving.
Well, the heart of Eskdale was beating like a trip-hammer. Word had come down through the hills that the governor had declared martial law over the strike district and that the soldiers were coming.
The echoes of gun-shots were rolling down into the valley. They came into Eskdale like the rumble of cannon. Somewhere up in the hills there was another battle on between miners and mine guards-one of those fights that make the quickly-dug, rude graves that you can find in lonely places in the coal hills.
Oh, yes, it’s lawlessness all right. But you can see it and hear it and some people can understand it. For years and years West Virginia has been ruled by respectable, invisible lawlessness which controlled courts, ran the legislatures and elected United States senators and is now responsible for the barefoot little children and the homeless exiles in the tents.
The soldiers were coming.
It runs through Eskdale’s mind that what it wants is a living wage, justice and fair-dealing and here the governor was sending the soldiers.
The shot echoes crashed without pause down the valley, waking sleeping babies under the tents and arousing strange stirrings in the hearts of the men and women of Eskdale, needing bread, but hungering only for freedom.
And then the distant toot of the engine which was pulling the martial law special and the soldiers, broke upon the village. Eskdale crowded to the railroad track. The train rumbled past toward the depot.
In the first car were the soldiers, guns held firmly in front of them, ready for work.
And in the second car-
“Scab, scab,” cried a boy, shrill-voiced.
He pointed at a window in the second car-at a face, soiled, weary-eyed, unshaven, crowned with a battered hat. And behind this face there was another and another-a whole car-load of such faces.
“Scab, scab”-the men and women took up the cry. They could not understand that these men were like themselves the dupes of the system.
Martial law had come into the strike zone with a shipment of strike-breakers whom it was protecting, with orders to shoot to kill if one of them was molested. The state of West Virginia had become a strike-breaking agency.
And to the inhabitants of its hills, the state had given so little protection through all these years. They had asked for laws that would emancipate them from the tyranny of the mine guard system-and had been denied. They had asked for compensation laws that would protect their families against the consequences of fatal accident in the mines-and had been denied.
And here were the strike-breakers come to take their jobs and to live upon their hills under protection of their militia.
“Scab, scab,” they jeered.
[Hunger Squad Pitched Against Hunger Squad]
I was there and spoke to the strike-breakers-men and boys recruited from the hunger squads of the East Side of New York, none of them miners, weary with the futile search for work at their trades, and desperate enough to throw themselves at adventure as strike-breakers for the sake of a job.
The despair of hunger, you see, knows no state lines. It recruits the strike-breaker in New York. It scourges to violence the striking miner of West Virginia. Hunger squad is pitched against hunger squad.
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