Hellraisers Journal: Artists of The Masses Portray the Ludlow Massacre; Max Eastman Describes “Class War in Colorado”

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Quote Mother Jones Babes of Ludlow, Speech at Trinidad CO UMW District 15 Special Convention, ES1 p154 (176 of 360)—————

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]

Ludlow Real Insult to Flag b;y MH Pancoast, Masses p6, June 1914

“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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Hellraisers Journal: From the International Socialist Review: “On the Paterson Picket Line” by William D. Haywood, Part I

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Quote BBH, IU Socialism w Working Clothes On, NYC Cooper Union Debate w Hillquit, Jan 11, 1912—————

Hellraisers Journal – Thursday June 12, 1913
Paterson, New Jersey – Silk Workers on Picket Line, Braving Death, Standing Firm

From the International Socialist Review of June 1913:

ISR p847June 1913Paterson Children in Wagon, ISR p847, June 1913

On the Paterson Picket Line

By William D. Haywood

[Part I of II]

FIVE o’clock every morning finds thousands of Paterson silk workers on the picket line with spirits as dauntless as ever despite the fact that after twelve weeks of struggle, starvation is staring them in the face. Some of them have been out in front of the battle for sixteen weeks.

The picket line is the modern barricade. It is there that the strike will be either lost or won. It is the picket line that has taught the Paterson silk workers the meaning of the class struggle. Here men and women daily meet the guns of hired thugs and the clubs of policemen. Braving death, suffering indignity and humiliation, nearly 800 strikers have been arrested on trumped-up charges and thrown into jail. Some of them have been jailed a number of times.

It takes courage to face a term in the Paterson bastile. It was built in 1854, before the era of alleged prison reform began. In the cellhouse where most of the strikers have been thrown the cells are narrow, with two bunks, one above the other. The ventilation is bad and the sanitation worse. The food is on a par with the usual prison fare.

Before being transferred to this county jail, the prisoners are, as a rule, compelled to spend a night in the city jail before appearing before Recorder Carroll’s court. The conditions that have been imposed on the strikers in the city jail are beyond description, reminding one of accounts of the hell-holes of Russia. Here seven and eight men have been crowded into a single cell intended to be occupied by one. No bedding of any kind is provided and no food is furnished. One group of strikers reported they were held for nineteen hours without even water.

EGF BBH w Paterson Children, ISR p848, June 1913

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From the International Socialist Review: “On the Paterson Picket Line” by William D. Haywood, Part I”