```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
Wednesday June 3, 1914
New York, New York - Judge Lindsey Testifies Before the Industrial Commission
Last Thursday Judge Lindsey of Colorado appeared before the Commission on Industrial Relations. Just the week before, Judge Lindsey had escorted miners' wives, survivors of the Ludlow Massacre, to the White House for an interview with President Wilson. Judge
In his testimony before the Commission, the Judge spoke about the plight of women and children when their husbands and fathers die on the job. He describe how the "industrial government" of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company dictates to every branch of the state and county governments in Colorado, and, that that "industrial government" is dictated to from the federal "industrial government" in New York City.
Judge Lindsey testified during the afternoon session of May 28th. Present were Chairman Walsh, and Commissioners Ballard, O'Connell, Lennon, Garretson, and Harriman. We present the first part of the testimony below, and will publish the rest of the testimony tomorrow.
TESTIMONY OF JUDGE BEN B. LINDSEY.
Mr. Thompson. Now, just for the purpose of making our record, l will ask you a few
preliminary questions. Your name?
Judge Lindsey. My name is Ben B. Lindsey.
Mr. Thompson. Your address?
Judge Lindsey. Denver, Colo.
Mr. Thompson. And your profession or-
Judge Lindsey. l am a lawyer, a judge on the bench, and have been for 15 years or
thereabouts, in the city of Denver.
Mr. Thompson. Now, you may go on with your story.
Judge Lindsey. l will try, Mr. Chairman, to make my story as connected as possible; but
unless l should be misunderstood, l first wish to make a statement as to the
statement made by the gentleman who has preceded me, which l think is a good
illustration of much of the misunderstanding which grows out of an unfortunate
situation like that which you are asked to hear some evidence about. He read from a
newspaper saying that a Mr. Lord, representing the miners, had stated that there
were 2.000 men, miners, and if necessary there would be 50,000 more ready to resist
the militia. The gentleman did not state what Mr. Lord said, neither did the
newspapers that he read from state what Mr. Lord said. Mr. Lord said, for l was
present when he said, that if the tactics pursued by certain men in the militia that
brought about the murders, as he expressed it and claimed, of women and children
were repeated in Colorado that there were in that case 2,000 men who had red blood
enough in their veins to resist that sort of encroachment under whatever name it
might be called, and that there were 50,000 men in this country who were willing to
join.
Now, that is an entirely different statement from that which the gentleman read
and the statement which he would have this commission to believe is true. l merely
mention it as a good illustration of how Mr. Lawson could have been misquoted and
misrepresented by the paper from which he [the witness BoughtonJ read.
l have talked personally with Mr. Lawson within the last fortnight or so, just before l
left Denver. l have talked with Mr. Lawson in the presence of men of the most radical
type, who proposed or suggested things that l have heard Mr. Lawson fight against
and talk against, and the statements made to me by Mr. Lawson are quite
contradictory of the statement the gentleman read from the newspaper purporting to
be made by Mr. Lawson. Since l left Denver and since l have been in this city l have
found myself misquoted on several different occasions and things put into my mouth
that l never said, things put into my mouth that l could not have said; and l wish to
state to this commission, because of this fact of which l am a witness, having heard
Mr. Lord, that it go very slow in accepting statements made in the newspapers. l
have a statement in the Pueblo Chieftain of May 3 that l could offer to this
commission, two or three columns, in which it is stated that a certain prominent
citizen, of Colorado said that the thing to be done with men like myself was that they
should be killed—k-i-l-l-e-d-. l am not going to claim that those men who are making
inflammatory statements of that kind are trying to stir up a sentiment among certain
individuals that will bring about my own murder, yet that will be found in the Pueblo
Chieftain of May 3, which is supposed to be the official organ, in so far as they have
any official organ, of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. Now, so much for that.
l would like to state, or make some general statements, about the situation down
there, or about my mission here. l came to Colorado when l was a small boy about 10
or 11 years of age. l have lived there for 30 years. l know the politics of our State. l
know something of the industrial conditions of our State. l know the struggles in the
legislature in our State, and l want to say this question in Colorado is a bigger
question than a mere question of a strike. It has got beyond that. It is a great
political and industrial struggle. It is not local; it is national. The symptoms may be
local, like a boll which comes from the humor of the blood, working out that poison. It
has broken out in Colorado at one time; it has broken out in Michigan at another
time; in West Virginia at another time; in Pennsylvania at another time. It is going to
keep on breaking out as long as we continue to put salve on the sore and do, nothing
to cure the humor in the blood. By that l mean you have got to go deeply into
fundamental questions concerning rights of property and the rights of humanity. And l
would like to give a few concrete illustrations, if l may with your permission, to
explain to you why l am interested as a citizen in these questions and why l think l
have a right to come to this commission from the people of Colorado and to the
President of the United States and the people of the East
In the first place, l have been judge of the children's court anyway 15 years. l have
helped to establish those courts in this city and in nearly every city in this country.
But l know how futile and absurd that sort of work is if it stopped there. For an
example, this court deals with dependent children as well as delinquent children.
Numbers of dependent children come to those courts every year—increasing numbers
—and we are not going to help them by sitting on a bench and trying these cases.
For instance, in Colorado the official report issued by the secretary of the board of
charities and corrections, taken from the coal-mine inspectors' reports, showing that
in the space of about four years, limited to three or four counties in the State of
Colorado where coal is mined, nearly 700 little children were made orphans or
fatherless and dependents because of explosions in these coal mines, a large number
of which, if indeed not the greater number of which, might have been avoided had
the ordinary safety appliances been employed that are employed in other countries,
where such accidents are as 1 to 3 as compared with the number in this country.
The testimony seems to be undisputed, as I understand, and there is much evidence
to prove it if it is disputed, that about three times as many men are blown up in the
coal mines of Colorado as are blown up in the coal mines in other States, and the
claim of the men is that it is due largely to incompetence; that it is due largely to
carelessness; that it is due largely to unwillingness to use the dividends, or rather to
use the money, to purchase and install the safety appliances that ought to be
installed and to the control of public officials or the refusal to permit public officials to
inspect these mines.
l have talked with labor inspectors in Colorado. l have read their testimony, and l can
say to you that they have been refused, and indignantly refused, the right to inspect
some of these mines and that accidents have occurred and the fathers of children
have been hurled into eternity because of this lawlessness on the part of the
Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. And l want to say here publicly, knowing whereof l speak,
and being familiar with the political conditions in Colorado, that there are no more
lawless public-service corporations in the history of States than those in the State of
Colorado, first fighting to the death every measure designed to aid social and
industrial justice by every method within their power, seeking to blind the people to
the necessity of these measures, if you please, by such men as E. A. Colburn,
president of this miners' association, who is also president of the children's aid
society, if you please, and president of the State board for child and animal
protection, and who had been for many years. And the State board of child and
animal protection, through its agents have fought to the death a child-labor law to
take little children out of those mines and coke ovens, when at the same time they
have arrested men in those mines for beating a mule. It is a mighty spectacular
thing to arrest a man for cruelty to a mule, and everybody approves and applauds
that, but it is a different thing when Mr. Colburn's society for the protection of
children and animals from cruelty does everything it possibly can through agents, as
confessed in their own magazines, to defeat a law to take the little children out of
the coke ovens and the mines in Colorado. That l assert and that l am prepared to
prove. That is only one of the many, many facts that caused these men to have no
respect for the men who prate about religion and philanthropy and charity and who
are using that as a blind to cover up their fight against real constructive programs to
get rid eventually of the kind of struggle we are having in Colorado. The situation in
Colorado is not fully understood throughout the country. l could give you many
illustrations from my own court records.
Here is a poor woman who is pounced on by the Slate bureau of child and animal
protection and brought into my court in an effort to take away her children, and l find
that her husband is killed in the mills, if you please, and she is supposed to live in a
two-room house, and she takes a boarder, and because of these conditions they say
it is an immoral condition, for she is not married to the boarder, and they must take
the children away. It would be very nice for me to sit on the bench and aid in a plan
to take away her children and send them off to a children's home, where they can be
adopted out the next day and she will never know what became of them—no more
right to know than a dog, a condition as bad as any in slavery times, when they took
the children away from their mothers and sold them into slavery.
l say you have got to go deep, and l went deep into that case, sir, and the
testimony taken at that time in my court shows that the railroad company paid that
mother a few hundred dollars after her husband was killed in the smelter mill. And I
wanted to know why the railroad company paid her these few hundred dollars, and l
found out that her husband had worked in the smelter mills and worked there 16
years for 11 or 12 hours a day during the days when they had the eight-hour law.
And l said, "How is it that the railroad company can pay you any money?" And up
steps a man from the smelter mills and says in my court that is very simple. Under
the eight-hour law, when that was passed it applied only to men working in mills and
mines. It did not apply to a man working on a railroad. So we changed the pay roll of
the men working on the slag piles from the smelter company to the railroad company,
where they could work 12 hours, if you please, without violating the law. Do you
think, my friends and gentlemen of this commission, that that sort of violence on the
part of these companies, that has been going on there for years—and l have
mentioned only a few specific instances of concrete details—is not going to arouse
feeling? l stayed in the little home of one of these miners one night, and he turned to
me and he said, "When l came to this State 25 years ago there was practically no
development in those hills. l worked in those hills. My son worked in those hills. He
lost his life in those hills, and l have been maimed in those hills, and all the wealth
that comes from those hills, the energy that makes transportation and life and the
comforts we have possible come out through my labor, and l bought me a little home,
and l have lived here. And now the people of New York, who have the legal title
under the Constitution and the laws to these mines, want to reduce my pay or want
to refuse to give us certain demands that we think fair or want to control the public
officials who want to bring about an inspection law so as to protect our lives that l
may not lose another son or my own life in those mines. And they tell us that if we
protest we can no longer work there, but have got to go out and work at something
else. "Now," he says, "under the Constitution and the laws of property that seems to
be a right, but," he says, "is it just and is it fair?" These men will point out to you the
solidarity of capital and their rights under the Constitution, and they can come down
on them like that, and they have no rights except in opposing solidarity that they call
the union, if you please.
Now. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen and Mrs. Harriman of this committee, this thing is
deep down, and this sore is the result of long years of lawlessness and oppression on
the part of the utility corporations. l know whereof l speak, when l say to you that
they have owned judges on the bench as they have owned their office boys; that
they have owned judges on the supreme bench as they have owned their office
boys; that they have controlled those judges; that they have controlled district
attorneys; that they have controlled governors; that they have been in the most
perfidious deals to control the agencies and officers of the law time and time and
again, so that they not only make the law to suit their own wishes, primarily—though
it does not always do it—to protect property and stand against the rights of
humanity; but when occasionally, as happens after a long struggle against every step
of the way—for there is terrific opposition to get a law through for the protection of
human rights—they control through the bipartisan machine in Colorado the agencies
of the law and prevent the enforcement of those laws.
And now, members of this commission, what is that? It is violence. It is the most
terrific violence in the world. It is the kind of action that raises the coal dust all over
this country, and that thing is going to be exploded, if we don't correct it. That is our
contention. Now we don't want it to be, but they are doing the thing, as much as
the other people. And l am not saying that there is not fault on both sides, but my
contention is this, that violence produces violence every time. That is the law of
nature—as hate produces hate; and when through these conditions—not so bad, l am
glad to say as they have been in the past, but l would not have you understand that
our officers are all controlled by these forces. There are honorable men on the
bench; there are honorable district attorneys; there are fearless district attorneys;
there have been some fearless governors as there have been fearless judges. But
those men have been fearless at terrific sacrifices as a rule, knowing all the time that
they were doomed for slaughter, political or otherwise, if they attempted to call their
souls their own. This has been the condition of terror which the industrial government
of Colorado, backed by the industrial government of this country with its seat in New
York City, has ever shown against the political government in Colorado, and, for that
matter in this Nation, in a measure.
Now that, in the large, is the situation out there; and because of that condition, sir,
they have permitted men to be recruited in this militia who are not the kind of men to
be in any militia; they have permitted to be recruited in the militia mine guards, men
employed and paid by the mine operators, if you please. They have permitted to be
recruited irresponsible types of men, the men who are their own employees. l
understand the gentleman who testified for you is an employee of the mine owners'
association. It is the old game out there. It is the scientific method of corrupting, if
your honors please, so that they do not dare call their souls their own. And l want to
tell you, as much as l sympathize with them, that there is not a one of them can
come down here and tell you an impartial, fair, and just story about this situation—l
don't care who they are, unless there is a new kind of human nature working out in
them. These men are human. The young lawyer knows he won't get business unless
he stands in with these people. The young business man knows the banks he has to
deal with
Chairman Walsh (interrupting). You should know that this man did not testify that he
was the attorney for that association where the trouble was had, but for the
metalliferous miners of Cripple Creek.
Judge Lindsey. However that may be, Mr. Chairman of the commission, if he is the
attorney for men like Mr. Coleman, representing the mine owners, that way must be
his sympathy. l can not blame him for that. That is the human nature in this case
that you can not leave out of consideration, and these men represent, however
much they may deny it, the solidarity of capital Everybody knows that that has lived
in that State, and that uses their brains and minds at all in thinking about the thing.
Now, Mr. Chairman, l have talked to many of these witnesses of the Ludlow horror, to
come back to that, as one of the moving causes that produces hate. l have read the
affidavits, and l have the testimony here before the coroner's jury. l have affidavits
here that l have read and pored over and gone over, and in those affidavits and in
that testimony, it is shown here, an indifference, with a brutality, with a cruelty, the
like of which l never heard of outside of savage warfare, militiamen, officers or men,
gave the orders to destroy and burn up this tent colony. And l am here on the
strength of this testimony, assuming it to be true, and assuming also there may be
testimony to the contrary, to say that a case to that effect, a prima facie case, has
been made out, that certainly demands some very strong testimony to refute.
There is the testimony of the stenographer before the military commission, who says
that he heard the order given to burn up this tent colony, and it was given by one or
two—one or two of these officers whom he knows, and here is the testimony of an
unbiased, unprejudiced man who drove an automobile, who was held up on the road
by the soldiers and compelled to deliver over his automobile, in which there was a
machine gun that mounted a hill overlooking Ludlow, and that that machine gun, with
a brutality and cruelty, the like of which has never been equaled, so far as l know,
was turned on these defenseless women and children, their tents, that are their
houses and their habitations—residence, if you please—so that it was either an
alternative of these women and children going into these pits that had been prepared
for them through a foresight for which l think they are to be commended, or else
being stricken down by the bullets of these men who could not have been
responsible, for it is not an act of civilized warfare, if you please, to turn machine
guns and rifles upon a tent colony in which it is known by those who are responsible
and those who do the deed that there are defenseless women and children.
l have heard the stories of some of the people who were there. l have read the
testimony of men who were on the railroad train, who say that they saw militiamen—
l have read the testimony of other who say they saw militiamen put the torch to the
homes of these people. That is here, sworn to and taken down, and can be supplied
to this committee if you wish it supplied.
Now, my point is this: That they are irresponsible. It is practically confessed and
shown by the governor of the State, when he had to call on the President and send
for the Federal troops, confessing his impotence to control the situation. It has
created a terrific hatred in our State, and it has put it in the minds and hearts of
these men and women down there in Ludlow to believe that they need not have any
respect for that sort of authority, and if they had not respect for authority, don't
forget this, please, members of this commission, that it is not altogether their fault,
however much they may be to blame. We have to have charity, l am frank to say, for
both sides in this controversy. l believe the whole thing is due to certain conditions
that concern our laws of property that are all wrong but when you attempt to
change those laws, as has been the history of Colorado for 20 years, it is met by the
defiance through graft, through bribery, through all the means and methods known to
power that comes from possessing money and property, and in the end, time after
time, defeated, and when you get the laws on the statute books, that the same
thing continues so far as it can with the occasional exception of honest men doing
their duty, to defeat the law that is passed. So that my point is, and l wish to make
it clear, that that is not a matter merely of the present strife. It is bigger than the
question of the present strife. For, however important it is, Mr. Chairman, to settle
that strike, and it is important, and l was sent here by a great number of citizens of
Colorado to help bring about the settlement—it is only temporary; it is only one of
the lulls to the storm that is ahead in this country, unless the men who benefit
through these laws of property and who are gradually gaining to themselves the
natural resources of this country, are willing to see that they have certain duties and
responsibilities that are not altogether impersonal, and are willing to share with these
men. But that they have not done. They have recurrently refused to treat with them.
They have said there was not anything to arbitrate; but in saying there wasn't
anything to arbitrate, they are falsifying, for there is much to arbitrate, and l think
that will be shown by the congressional investigation that has been going on in our
State for some time.
It is well for the people of this country to know the violence of capital, the violence
of corporations, that is silent, if you please, and not noisy like the violence they
promote. l think, therefore, that they owe it to our people to consent to the
appointment by the President of a board of arbitration, who will go out there and
investigate those conditions and listen to both sides, and both sides being willing,
assuming, of course, the board is fair and just and acceptable to both sides, to abide
by the decision they may come to. And l think a great mistake is being made by the
powers that control the industrial government of this country, the seat of which is
here in New York, and ls as superior to the President of the United States, unless he
is willing to exert himself in spite of it, as the boss over the employee in a factory.
That is my view of it. And being in that position, knowing that they have said, or
claimed, to have the Constitution back of them, certain laws back of them that were
primarily designed for property, they owe it to our people to concede, to give, if you
please, some of this terrific power by consenting to this board, and letting them, so
far as it is possible, at least, for temporary purposes, to adjust the difficulties up
there and to relieve our people of the passion into which they have been plunged,
but the fact that when these Federal troops were withdrawn, if they are, because of
this condition that has grown up for years and years, beginning with the corporations
themselves, their own lawlessness, will be too much, and there is a possibility of the
repetition of Ludlow unless the President will keep the Federal troops there, and to
bring about any sort of settlement, go a step further and appoint this industrial
commission, and if both sides do not consent to this arbitration, then it is our
contention, in the interests of peace, because of the military necessities of the case,
because a republican form of government, with the confession of the governor of the
State, has broken down in Colorado and the Constitution says the Federal
Government shall guarantee us a republican form of government, that he would be
justified in taking some means, even though they be forcible, to compel those who
refuse to arbitrate to consent to arbitration.
United States. Commission on Industrial Relations,
-Frank P. Walsh, Basil Maxwell Manly
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1916 -
``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
Workers of the World Awaken
Such a great version of this song! Wish I had more info on the performers, they are great. Any info on who they are would be much appreciated.
``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````