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Hellraisers Journal – Friday June 5, 1914
Excerpts from “Class War in Colorado” by Max Eastman
From The Masses of June 1914:
CLASS WAR IN COLORADO
Max Eastman
[Illustrated by M. H. Pancoast, John Sloan, and Art Young]
“FOR EIGHT DAYS it was a reign of terror. Armed miners swarmed into the city like soldiers of a revolution. They tramped the streets with rifles, and the red handkerchiefs around their necks, singing their war-songs. The Mayor and the sheriff fled, and we simply cowered in our houses waiting No one was injured here-they policed the streets day and night. But destruction swept like a flame over the mines.” These are the words of a Catholic priest of Trinidad.
“But, father” I said, “where is it all going to end?”
He sat forward with a radiant smile.”War!” he answered. “Civil war between labor and capital!” His gesture was beatific.
“And the church-will the church do nothing to save us from this?”
“Yes, this is Colorado,” he said. “Colorado is ‘disgraced in the eyes of the nation’-but soon it will be the Nation!“
I have thought often of that opinion. And I have felt that soon it will, indeed, unless men of strength and understanding, seeing this fight is to be fought, determine it shall be fought by the principals with economic and political arms, and not by professional gunmen and detectives.
Many reproaches will fall on the heads of the Rockefeller interests for acts of tyranny, exploitation, and contempt of the labor laws of Colorado-acts which are only human at human’s worst. They have gone out to drive back their cattle with a lash. For them that is natural. But I think the cool collecting for this purpose of hundreds of degenerate adventurers in blood from all the slums and vice camps of the earth, arming them with high power rifles, explosive and soft-nosed bullets, and putting them beyond the law in uniforms of the national army, is not natural. It is not human. It is lower, because colder, than the blood-lust of the gunmen themselves.
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